I saw Kushner’s Albania resort up close — it is an environmental disaster

The destruction of Albania’s Vjosa-Narta ecosystem is not the fake news that Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama claims. It is reality. I know, because I was there when it started.

On May 7, the streets of Tirana were quiet. Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania (PPNEA), a partner of BirdLife International, was hosting 19 conservation experts from European BirdLife Partners for our annual conference. We took our colleagues to the Vjosa delta, the last free-flowing river delta in the Mediterranean, and a refuge for more than 200 bird species, including flamingos and Dalmatian pelicans, nesting loggerhead sea turtles and the critically endangered Mediterranean monk seal. We thought we had come to inspect an airport built in open defiance of the law in the middle of the marshes.

To our horror, we walked straight into a vast new construction site in the very heart of the protected area. We saw excavators tearing up the beach. Lorries dumping gravel and cutting roads through ancient dunes and pine forest. A drill at work on the hillside. No licences posted, no companies named, no environmental permit of any kind.

We acted at once. I wrote to the prime minister and his environment minister the next morning, on May 8, warning of serious and partly irreversible damage. We alerted the European Commission, the EU delegations in Tirana and the press.

PPNEA, the country’s oldest environmental NGO, now in its 35th year, led from the front. First with protests on the site on May 15, then outside the Ministry of Environment on May 26, then back on site again with local residents on May 30. By the time of that third protest, the site was ringed with barbed wire and guards were aggressively manhandling demonstrators. A video of a man dragged away spread online. Within days, the story had gone global, and when the media connected the desecration to a massive real estate scheme backed by US President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, the scale of the potential corruption snapped into focus.

This is bigger than birds. A protected wetland belongs to everyone. It is not an asset a government can sell to a foreign billionaire in the dark. What is happening at Vjosa-Narta is a test of something more fundamental: whether Albania’s institutions exist to serve its people, or to serve its deals. Albania wants to join the European Union, a club with rules, built on the premise that governments are accountable to citizens and the law means something. Vjosa-Narta is a stress test of exactly that premise.

Now with hundreds of thousands of protesters filling Tirana’s streets, the world is watching. The bulldozers have pulled back, the fencing has come down and the Narta lagoon was reconnected to the sea. Good. But flattened dunes, felled forest and gravel poured over sand do not heal on their own. A tactical retreat, which would allow vandalism to resume once the cameras are off, is not good enough.

The damage must be undone and the site’s future secured for this saga to truly be over.