I’m sorry for the stress I caused you. I deserve a slap in the face, a big slap, one of those that resound seven generations. Or or, better a bit of C4, so that I really feel it, that I take it so seriously that even just looking at a bottle of water will make my legs shake, will make me forget my mother tongue, and that I forget the bridge of Lekli, Dragot, the inimitable stream of the Këlcyra and especially the Vjosa, the magnificent Vjosa.
Because the Vjosa is more than a river, she is more than a story, more than a region and a state. Who hasn’t seen her, I cannot describe her, I would make her ugly. When I approached this valley many years ago, I kept my pace, I felt alone, because that’s she made me feel. It was a multidimensional panorama, surrounded by high mountains stretched out alongside me and under me feet the green water like nowhere else of the Vjosa. And to complete this mystical panorama onto the high riverbeds of the Vjosa flowed, as they have done for thousands of years, small streams that brought water to their mother Vjosa.
In that valley your vision is without limits, just like your breath and soul. But these very personal feelings that I experienced every time the road took me to Përmet have now been pierced with a knife that is stuck in every Albanian with two grams of spirit and two grams of national dignity. Hari Lena has now pierced the riverbed of the Vjosa with columns of concrete for a bridge of pipes, pipes that he has stuck into the heart of the water sources, which for centuries only ran down to the Vjosa. And this beastly theft of natural resources is flowing mockingly into his water bottle business, cutting through the air like the knife in Vjosa’s riverbed, not only violating this national heritage and this majestic panorama but even doing so without permit, without any permit whatsoever.
Not only that, but considering that this issue attracted the full attention of many activists and other investigators, it turned out that Hari Lena already for three years doesn’t have a permit for the first part, a bottling station of Trebeshina, where he will direct his tubes to. His requests to receive a permit on December 12, 2015 and January 25, 2016 were both rejected by the Albanian state, while during 2017 he didn’t make any request. In other words, just like his first business, he is establishing his second one through violence, theft, and silence of the Albanian state. They are completely illegal as well as a genuine crime against national resources.
Yesterday the Building Inspectorate and the Albanian police approached this massacre, but didn’t touch anything, even though they were aware of the environmental crime that happened in front of their eyes. Even the fish of Vjosa knew that that moster was the work of Hari Lena, but the state institutions didn’t! They didn’t touch it or arrested Hari. Because Hari stands above them, and his building, without environmental, building, engineering, archeological permit is beyond any law or regulation.
This state has two standards, one that pampers oligarchs and another one that is criminal toward citizens. Exactly where Hari place his concrete columns Rama told a villager who wanted to put a tin roof on his stable after the first had been blown away by the wind, “No, there’s no covering the stable for you, or you’ll end up in jail.”
Rama has two standards, not only in case of the Këlcyra gorge, but also in Elbasan, Durrës, and all of Albania. There is a pampering standard, subjected and silent before crime, and a criminal standard against ordinary Albanians. Also, at the first moment that Rama understands that one of the ordinary people follows that road of the two standard, he openly sides with the oligarch thus bringing his subjection to him to completion.
The centers of abandoned cities may be renovated and filled with concrete, there may be silence about the Biblical emigration of Albanians from their country, but an illegal and abusive oligarch can never undo, disfigure, degrade that which for centuries has been granted to Albania, the Vjosa. And like the Vjosa the many other beauties. And for as long as there are still Albanian with a voice, spirit, and Fatherland this cannot happen.
I’m sorry Hari Lena, I’m sorry Edi Rama, for this noise that disturbed your rest, and for the order of your names. But I thought I would just respect the actual hierarchy.
