‘The right to stay’: Albania’s Italian diaspora sails back to support the Flamingo Revolution
From the Italian port of Brindisi, activists from Italy’s Albanian diaspora and from Global Sumud Flotilla Italy will set sail for Albania on 20 August, travelling across the Adriatic to join the Flamingo Revolution, the protest movement against luxury developments backed by US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The mission is organised by the Italian-Albanian collective Mesdhe (“Mediterranean” in Albanian) and the Albanian pro-Palestine collective Palestina e Lire (“Free Palestine” in Albanian), together with the Italian branch of the Global Sumud Flotilla, an international civil society initiative aimed at breaking Israel's naval blockade of Gaza and delivering humanitarian aid to the enclave.
It will link the two Adriatic shores with a three‑boat flotilla at a moment when activists in Albania are challenging the privatisation of protected land and the growing influence of foreign investors over the country.
The action was launched on social media on 8 August, and the choice of date and departure point in Brindisi, in the southern region of Puglia, is deeply symbolic for the organisers.
In the 1990s, Puglia became the arrival point for one of the largest mass migrations in recent European history, following the collapse of Albania’s communist regime. On 8 August 1991, the merchant ship Vlora docked in Bari, Puglia’s administrative centre, carrying an estimated 20,000 Albanians in a single journey.
The episode led to one of the most extensive and rapid repatriation operations in Italian history, with more than 17,400 Albanians deported. Migrants in Bari’s Stadio della Vittoria were left without adequate food, water or medical care, hundreds were hospitalised for dehydration, and clashes with police culminated in officers firing shots at refugees trying to escape.
That year, tens of thousands more Albanians arrived across southern Italy by sea, particularly in Puglia.
‘The same corruption that forced so many to leave [in 1991] is today selling off our coasts, islands, lagoons and future’
- Mesdhe, flotilla organiser group
Now, activists from the Italian-Albanian community say they want to make the journey in reverse.
“In 2026, while the Albanian people have been in revolt for 68 days, from Bari we want to leave for Vlora as an organised diaspora,” Mesdhe said in a statement.
“Because the same corruption that forced so many to leave [in 1991] is today selling off our coasts, islands, lagoons and future.”
The activists will travel towards Vlora, where protests have formed around the so-called “Flamingo Revolution”, a protest opposing controversial luxury tourism developments along Albania’s southern coast.
At the centre of the dispute is Sazan, a former military island where Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, is backing plans for a luxury resort valued at around $1.4bn. A separate development linked to Kushner and his partners is planned near Zvernec, within the protected Vjosa-Narta landscape.
“The Flamingo Revolution is named after the Narta lagoon, where they want to build a resort,” said the Mesdhe collective and Global Sumud Flotilla Italy on social media. “It is not simply a tourist destination. It is a living ecosystem, home to more than 200 species of migratory birds, including pink flamingos, as well as communities that have lived there for generations.”
‘We want to come back’
For activists, the cause also resonates with the history of migration between the two countries.
“I am part of the Albanian diaspora in Italy. And our memory is also made of the sea,” Clara Osma, an Italian-Albanian activist with Mesdhe and Palestina e Lire who organised the mission, told Middle East Eye.
“It is the memory of the ships of the 1990s, of the stadiums where Albanians were locked up when they arrived, of deportations and the first systems of administrative detention.”
“The diaspora preserves that history,” she said. “And this is where, for me, memory meets what is happening today with the Flamingo Revolution and why we decided to sail.
“Because 30 years later, we see another generation of Albanians asking, essentially, for the right to stay, and we want to come back.”
For Enton Nazeraj, an Italian-Albanian artist taking part in the mobilisation, the protests have also provided a way of reconnecting with an identity that he says had been fragmented by migration.
“As the son of immigrants, I feel at home within the revolution. That is why I am taking part in this action. In the revolution I found my identity,” he told MEE.
“As a Puglian, I see the Albanian community, which is the community I grew up with,” said Tony La Piccirella, a Global Sumud Flotilla activist organising the mission. “I was born just before the arrival of the Vlora, so I have never known a Puglia without an Albanian presence.
“They are precisely the friends I grew up with.”
A common struggle
The organisers see the campaign as a protest against land and luxury tourism across the Mediterranean - including in southern Italy.
In Puglia, environmental groups and local activists have opposed a planned Four Seasons resort near Ostuni, a project involving the Israeli real-estate company Omnam.
‘The fact that a piece of the Albanian diaspora is returning in support of the Flamingo Revolution, using boats born from solidarity with Palestine, is very powerful’
- Tony La Piccirella, organiser
The $115m development plan has faced legal challenges from environmental organisations, while the Puglia regional government has joined the legal proceedings against it, in a case echoing the disputed resort project near Tavolara in Sardinia, opposed on environmental grounds.
Italian-Albanian and Global Sumud Flotilla activists say these struggles are connected to the broader question of who controls Mediterranean land and resources.
“From Puglia, we see what is happening in Albania and recognise something very close to us,” La Piccirella told MEE.
“Touristification and resortisation are already transforming our territory. We want to connect these struggles.”
The activists also frame the journey through Palestine as part of a global struggle against the dispossession of peoples.
“The same people who finance the oppression of the Palestinian people, planning to build a tourist hub on the rubble of Gaza, are the ones who aim to bury the ecosystems of Sazan Island under a luxury resort,” Mesdhe said in the launch statement.
Kushner has played a controversial role in post-war Gaza reconstruction projects, promoting a $25bn plan to redevelop the enclave as a commercial and technology hub. Critics argue the project would facilitate population displacement and erase Palestinian culture.
La Piccirella said the three boats used for the mission were recovered after being damaged and abandoned following Israeli forces’ attacks on the Global Sumud Flotilla in spring, during which activists were captured.
For La Piccirella, their reuse in the journey to Albania gives the boats an additional meaning: vessels of international solidarity, linking the Palestinian cause with the Albanian protest movement.
“The fact that a piece of the Albanian diaspora is returning in support of the Flamingo Revolution, using boats born from solidarity with Palestine, is very powerful,” La Piccirella added.
For Mesdhe, the journey is ultimately about reversing a historic movement across the Adriatic.
“We are returning not as tourists or investors, but as a diaspora organised around the right of people to remain on their land,” the collective said.