Thirty-five years after the arrival of the Vlora ship in Bari, the Albanian diaspora in Italy, the community of Albanian origin that grew up in the country especially after the migrations of the 1990s, is making the opposite journey. On August 20, three boats will leave Brindisi headed towards the island of Sazan to join what in Albania is called the “Flamingo Revolution”: three months of protests against the transfer of protected coastal areas to luxury tourism projects.
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The initiative is organized by the Italian-Albanian collectives Mesdhe and Palestina and Lire with the Global Sumud Flotilla Italy, created to break the naval blockade on Gaza. The three boats used, according to the organizers, are the same ones recovered after the damage suffered during the last mission towards the Strip.
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A 1.4 billion resort on a protected island
At the center of the story is Sazan, a former military base in the Otranto Canal with around 3,600 bunkers from the communist era, the only nesting site for the pink flamingo in Albania and a stopover for over 200 migratory species. Since January 2025, a law by Edi Rama’s government allows construction projects in ecologically sensitive areas: on this basis the sale of the island to Affinity Partners, the fund of Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US President Donald Trump, began for a 1.4 billion dollar resort.
A second project linked to Kushner concerns Zvërnec, in the protected Vjosa-Narta lagoon, which gives its name to the mobilization. The protests erupted on May 16, after the island was fenced off with barbed wire and a construction guard attacked a resident during a peaceful protest. Since then the protest has spread to Tirana, intertwining environmentalist demands with the denunciation of irregularities in public procurement. The Albanian government defends the investment as compatible with environmental protection; the EU also called Tirana to respect environmental standards in the accession process.
The memory of the ship Vlora
The date and port are not random. On 8 August 1991 the Vlora docked in Bari with around 20 thousand Albanians on board, in the largest landing operation in Italian republican history: a forced repatriation of over 17 thousand people followed, after days of detention without food or water at the Vittoria stadium. “The same corruption that forced so many to leave is now selling off our coasts, our islands and our future,” wrote the Mesdhe collective in the launch statement.
A broader front on the Adriatic
The organizers link the Albanian affair to other contested projects on the Italian coast, such as the $115 million resort proposed by Four Seasons near Ostuni with the Israeli company Omnam, opposed by local committees and the Puglia region, and the similar case of Tavolara, in Sardinia. For Tony La Piccirella, organizer of the Global Sumud Flotilla Italy, it is the same logic of tourist transformation on both sides of the Adriatic. The Brindisi-Valona route thus becomes, in the words of the organizers, an attempt to reconnect two parallel territorial struggles, thirty-five years after the same sea was crossed in the opposite direction.
