Zvërnec: The State Caught Its Own Error in a Single Afternoon

A demonstrator was beaten and dragged across a fence line by masked men on Saturday. Before the day was out a police chief had been suspended, a guard arrested, and an official account withdrawn. The test of an institution is not whether abuse occurs on its watch, but how fast it names the abuse and acts.

TIRANA EXAMINER | Vlorë

A protest against a tourism development on the edge of the Narta lagoon turned violent on Saturday, 30 May, when masked private security guards dragged a demonstrator inside the fenced site and beat him. By the end of the same day the police had reversed their own first account of events, the General Director of the State Police had suspended the regional police chief, and one of the security guards had been arrested. The developer, for its part, had publicly apologised and cut its contract with the security firm. The violence was the kind Albanians have learned to expect. The correction was not.

The dispute itself is older than Saturday. A large stretch of coastline at a place known as Portonovë, beside the Narta lagoon and inside a protected ecosystem, has been ringed with barbed wire by the developer behind a planned luxury resort. Residents of Zvërnec and environmental organisations have objected for weeks that the enclosure threatens a fragile natural area. They returned to the site on Saturday to demand a halt to the works.

What followed is documented on video that circulated widely the same afternoon. Demonstrators moved toward the perimeter. Private security personnel, several of them masked, used pepper spray against the crowd and, according to witnesses, against uniformed officers as well. A woman lost consciousness. One demonstrator was pulled bodily across the fence line and held inside an area reserved for the guards until State Police officers intervened and removed him. The image of a citizen being dragged along the ground became the defining record of the day.

The first official version came from the Vlorë Local Police Directorate a few hours later. It described a gathering that escalated, a group of protesters acting to break the site fence, and a demonstrator who, in its telling, had forced his way inside the enclosure and was injured while being escorted out by the private guards. The directorate said it had placed two security employees under investigation and had also referred fifteen protesters to the Vlorë prosecutor, citing unlawful assembly, destruction of property, and intentional minor injury. On its own, that communiqué read as a routine public order report, with the protesters cast as the principal offenders.

The correction did not wait for the next news cycle. The General Directorate of the State Police issued a public apology for the Vlorë directorate’s account, stating plainly that the citizen had not forced his way into the site, contrary to what had been reported. Calling public trust the most important value the institution holds, and one whose damage cannot be justified, the General Director ordered the immediate suspension of the Vlorë police chief, Elidon Çela. The national directorate held its line on the property question, noting that the fenced land carries valid mortgage documentation and lawful authorisation for the enclosure, and that any claim over private property or its development belongs in court. But on the conduct of the afternoon, it conceded the error and acted on it in the same breath.

The accountability did not stop at a correction on paper. That evening, after the footage of the assault spread, the police arrested one of the security guards in flagrante on suspicion of unlawful deprivation of liberty and intentional minor injury, with two further employees of the firm under investigation. The man who had been dragged was no longer the accused. He was the complainant.

Into this sequence arrived the developer’s own statement, which the company distributed to newsrooms on Sunday and which has since been carried across the Albanian press. The Examiner reproduces it in full below, as a public document issued by a party to the events, not as an account this newspaper endorses. It is worth reading closely, because it marks the point at which the private party aligned itself with the institutional verdict rather than against it.

Having reviewed with full responsibility the material made public regarding the unjustifiable conduct of the security firm, the company “Zvërnec South Adriatic Development” informs the press and the public as follows:

To guarantee the security of the development zone, which is wholly private property, a security company was contracted that held the relevant permits and licences from state institutions and possessed experience in this field.

But examination of the material makes it absolutely unacceptable to continue the contractual relationship with this firm. At no moment did the contracted security company have instructions from us to act contrary to its legal authorisations or in violation of the rights guaranteed to Albanian citizens.

The intervention against a citizen who was within his full right to protest outside the property line, and his being pulled inside it so that force could be used against him, is not only morally unacceptable but also criminally punishable. For this reason we have terminated, with immediate effect, the contractual relationship with the security firm.

We apologise for this needless incident and we call on the competent authorities to carry out a full and impartial investigation of the event and to punish those responsible according to the law. “Zvërnec South Adriatic Development” remains fully available to the authorities and to all other interested parties, with full readiness and transparency.

We reaffirm that the relationship with the community is essential for the investors, and we remain committed to cooperating with all the residents of the area. In the coming weeks we will increase our efforts toward a more substantive communication with the respected community of the area.

We likewise regret that yesterday’s ugly episode is being exploited to circulate on social media entirely fabricated images of the project, with the aim of promoting the mistaken idea that the development will destroy nature.

The international value of the project lies precisely in its maximum commitment to harmonise the project with nature, according to the highest standards ever applied, in protection of the area’s distinctive ecosystems, as an unquestionable value of Albania’s natural heritage.

The final project will be presented to the public in due course as proof beyond any doubt of an excellent example of harmony with nature.

The statement does two things that matter for the public record. It accepts that the force used against the demonstrator was both morally unacceptable and criminally punishable, and it terminates the security contract with immediate effect. A developer is not obliged to concede either point, and many in its position would have hidden behind the property line and the prosecutor’s charges against the protesters. This one did not.

None of this dissolves the underlying conflict, and the angle has a fair objection to answer. The correction was reactive. The arrest came after the footage spread, the suspension after the public reaction it provoked, and a state that moves only once the cameras are rolling has not yet proven it would move in the dark. That much should be conceded. What it does not erase is that the correction came at all, and came fast, with a commander’s post and a guard’s liberty spent on it within the day. Many systems, including ones that boast louder than Albania’s, never reach even that.

The unfinished business sits in the same prosecutor’s file. When the Vlorë directorate first told the story, it referred fifteen protesters to the Vlorë prosecutor for unlawful assembly and destruction of property, on the same factual premise that the State Police has now disowned. If the citizen was not the aggressor the first communiqué claimed, the case against those fifteen rests on a version of events the institution itself has retracted. Whether the prosecutor now drops or pursues them is the real measure of whether Saturday’s correction was a reflex or a principle. That test runs past yesterday, and the Examiner will follow it.

The ownership of parts of the land has been contested, the area sits within a protected ecosystem, and residents together with civil society organisations continue to argue that the works endanger the coastline. Those are real questions, and the State Police were right to say that the place to resolve a property claim is a courtroom rather than a fence line. The political temperature around strategic investment law will not cool because of one good Saturday. But the questions raised by protesters are distinct from the one Saturday actually posed, which was whether the state would protect a citizen beaten by masked private men, or protect the men who beat him.

It answered. A false report was retracted in public, with an apology attached. A regional commander lost his post the same day for signing his name to that report. A guard was in a cell by nightfall, and the citizen he assaulted was recorded as the injured party rather than the suspect. The developer aligned itself with the law instead of against it. The correction was late, prompted by a camera, and incomplete while those fifteen names still sit with the prosecutor. It was also real, and it was fast, and in this part of the world that is rare enough to be the story.