The Zvërnec Title Was Written Before Rama, and Written by the PD

by Albatros Rexhaj (Tirana)

Belind Këlliçi went on A Show on Syri TV and did something specific. He placed the Zvërnec affair at the door of the Prime Minister, charged the government with favouring private interests against the public good, and demanded full transparency on ownership, permits and procedure. He folded the whole case into the language of heritage and sovereignty, where it is hardest to argue and easiest to avoid evidence. The performance was clean. The accusation has one weakness. It requires the land at Zvërnec to be public property that this government handed to investors, or a title this government created. It is neither.

The title at Zvërnec was made years before Edi Rama formed a government, and it was made under the party Këlliçi now represents.

The restoration runs through the institutions of the previous decade. In 2006 the Agency for the Restitution and Compensation of Property recognised ownership in favour of Seit Shehu. Across the years that followed, between 2006 and 2009, the agency returned 278.505 hectares to Ramiz Seit Shehu, with Artur Shehu as the direct heir. Behind that sits an earlier ruling, a 1997 decision of the Vlora court returning a hundred hectares of forest to the same family line. The parcels were entered into the mortgage books on the strength of those decisions. Every one of those acts carries a date that falls under a Democratic Party government. Rama took office in the autumn of 2013. By then the title Këlliçi now interrogates had already been written, stamped and filed.

The state’s only stake on that coastline lies across the water at Sazan, where the public interest is still under negotiation. On the Zvërnec parcels themselves the state held nothing to give. A government cannot donate what it does not own, and the record shows it did not own this.

Here the accusation turns on the man making it. The restitution that manufactured this private title is not a Socialist file. It is a Democratic Party file. The decisions issued from an agency operating under a PD government. The villagers of Zvërnec, who insist the land is their inheritance recovered under the land law, have denounced those decisions for two decades as a fraud built on falsified paper. The courts have since convicted three officials of that same agency in Vlora for document falsification and abuse of office. The lawyer at the centre of the alienation, Pëllumb Petritaj, has been prosecuted and arrested. The appellate judge who once restored the title to the family, Alaudin Malaj, was dismissed from the justice system by vetting. If there is a file in Zvërnec that deserves the transparency Këlliçi demands, it is the restitution file of 2006 to 2009, and that file belongs to his own party.

This is not to cast the present government as a bystander to the project. It granted the development strategic investor status, and it holds the permits, which it has tied to environmental clearance. That is a regulatory role, and it is a fair target for argument. Whether a protected lagoon and a coastal forest should carry a resort of this scale is a real question, and the residents who fear for the coastline are raising it in good faith. The force used against a citizen at the site, later admitted by the State Police itself when it suspended the Vlora director and apologised, was real and indefensible. None of that is in dispute here. None of it is what Këlliçi argued. He did not argue the environment. He did not argue the protected zone. He argued that Rama gave away the land. That claim fails on the dates.

A transparency demand is only as honest as the address it is sent to. Këlliçi has sent his to the wrong government and the wrong decade. The title he wants opened was opened long ago, by hands closer to his own bench than to the one he points at. The coastline at Zvërnec may yet be saved or lost on its merits. The question of who gave it away was answered by the calendar before this government had a single signature on the file.