The sociologist and intellectual Shkëlzen Gashi, author of “Massacres in Kosovo 1998–1999”, has long been aware of the price to be paid for challenging the dominant narrative of those in power. 

According to the Special Prosecutor’s Office of Kosovo, his offence is “distorting the truth about the Kosovo War of Liberation”. Gashi, however, believes that the reason for the persecution is that he has written “the first book on this subject that avoids hate speech and addresses all victims on all sides, regardless of their ethnicity, religion or political ideology”. 

Gashi’s book lists names, numbers and locations, totalling 10,333 bodies across 83 massacres, arranged in chronological order. “In total I counted 105, but there are 22 about which nothing is known,” he says as he turns the pages featuring photographs of piles of bodies, funerals and mass graves, “and the most significant thing is that, for the majority of these killings, no one has been convicted. 90% of the massacres I recount in the book end with this sentence: to date, no one has been tried or convicted for these crimes.” 

Regarding the identity of the victims, he explains that “90% are Albanians killed by Serbian police, military or paramilitaries. Crimes committed by Albanians account for only 10%; they took place after the war, as acts of unorganised revenge, and were not carried out by Albanian military or police.”

Gashi dared to break the taboo surrounding the war crimes committed by Kosovo Albanians against Serbian communities; at the same time, he honours the memory of other ethnic and religious groups—Roma, Ashkali or Catholics—who have been marginalised from the official narrative and are difficult for both Serbian and Albanian nationalism to come to terms with.

The Albanian writer and dissident Fatos Lubonja has written a scathing article in which he argues that “this lynching speaks volumes about the kind of state that is in danger of being built in Kosovo (…) History teaches us that tragedy, in the form of war or dictatorship, begins when the parties identify with the truth and seek to impose it on everyone by any means”. 

For their part, representatives of the veterans’ associations of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK), the guerrilla group that fought the Serbs, are calling for “a law to be enacted to protect the history of the UCK, and for anyone wishing to write on the subject to obtain evidence from the relevant authorities”. Or, in other words, from those who do not question their version of events. 

“Peacebuilding also involves establishing the truth and creating shared narratives about what happened, as well as reconciliation and letting go. In Kosovo, we haven’t had that, and it’s a serious problem. The Albanian and Serbian communities continue to live within their own constructions of reality, so there are competing narratives about the past,” laments Ramadan Ilazi, head of research at the Kosovar Centre for Security Studies.

Whilst this was happening in Pristina, thousands of kilometres away, in a cell at The Hague prison, Hasim Thaci, the former leader of the UCK and the West’s main ally in NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia, awaits sentencing following the trial that concluded last February. 

The Prosecution at the Special Court for Kosovo is seeking 45 years’ imprisonment for Thaci and three other guerrilla commanders for war crimes, crimes against humanity, kidnapping, torture, cruel treatment of prisoners and murder in 102 cases. 

Whatever the jury’s verdict, which is expected by the end of July 2026 it will have a major impact on Kosovo’s politics: “If he is convicted, it will have consequences for the UCK and would give Serbia a weapon to use against Kosovo and oppose its independence. If they are found not guilty, I believe it would have a major impact on domestic politics, because they would return as heroes,” explains analyst Emir Abrashi. 

Disinformation and Hybrid Warfare

On 24 April, a court in Pristina found three Kosovo Serbs guilty of terrorism and “serious acts against the constitutional order and security of Kosovo” for their involvement in an attack carried out by a Serbian-backed group of armed men in the Kosovo village of Banjska in September 2023, which resulted in the death of a Kosovo police officer.

According to the judge’s verdict, this was a “well-trained” group that “in an organised manner, entered the Republic of Kosovo illegally from the Republic of Serbia with dozens of vehicles, some armoured”. “The aim was to destabilise and destroy the basic political, constitutional, economic, and social structures of the Republic of Kosovo, through a well-organised plan. They attempted to secede parts of the territory in northern Kosovo, which have a majority Serbian population, and join them with Serbia”, the judge argued. 

Furthermore, it claims that the attackers were trained at a military camp in Serbia, and that Serbia provided all the military and logistical infrastructure needed to carry out the attack, in which up to 44 people are implicated. According to a journalistic investigation by BIRN, the grenade launchers seized by the Kosovar police had passed through Serbian state maintenance centres; and the ammunition used by the attackers matches that manufactured in 2022 by a Serbian state arms producer. 

“Serbia continues to harbour hegemonic ambitions over Kosovo,” says Arben Fetoshi, a professor at the University of Pristina and director of the Octopus Institute for Hybrid Warfare Studies, “but it is waiting for a favourable geopolitical context to reclaim Kosovo. Right now they cannot invade Kosovo, which is why they are resorting to hybrid warfare: disinformation, propaganda and acts of aggression to destabilise Kosovo as an independent country.”

“In the months leading up to the attack in September 2023, we detected a large amount of disinformation originating from Serbia and focused on northern Kosovo,” confirms Fitim Gashi, executive director of SBunker, a media organisation dedicated to monitoring and combating disinformation in Kosovo, “and the main argument behind all that disinformation is that the Kosovo government wants to expel the Serbs. The message conveyed by these campaigns, many orchestrated by the Serbian government, is that Serbs are not safe in Kosovo and must take action to defend themselves.” 

According to Ilazi, this is a misguided view of the nature of Kosovo’s political system. “Kosovo wasn’t designed to be a state of a single ethnic group,” he argues, “but I think social media is amplifying these kinds of messages that seek to perpetuate this sense of permanent conflict because certain politicians stand to gain from it. You can win elections by selling dreams or selling nightmares, and I think politics has a lot to do with maintaining this atmosphere of fear and hatred.”

To Question the Narrative is to Question the Elites 

Jeton Neziraj has devoted much of his literary work and his role as a public intellectual to the very opposite: to breaking down taboos, bringing people of different backgrounds together, and telling stories that overcome fear and hatred. This playwright knows well the feeling of being the one who challenges the prejudices of the majority and the demands of the powerful. 

He was one of the promoters of POLIP, the first literary festival to bring together Serbian and Albanian authors. Furthermore, his plays explore the most uncomfortable aspects and blind spots of his country’s culture, politics and society: corruption, the LGBT community, the role of guerrilla veterans, relations with Europe and post-war reconciliation. 

For his plays, he has been branded ‘unpatriotic’, ‘Yugonostalgic’ and a ‘traitor to national interests’. His latest play is “Under the Shade of a Tree I Sat and Wept”, a co-production with a South African theatre company exploring forgiveness between communities.

“I don’t know if I’ve been very stupid or very brave,” says Neziraj as he looks back on all the times his words have proved controversial or divisive. “But I believe that is the role of an artist, to be critical. And I think it’s been useful. I believe there is now more freedom of expression in Kosovo than there was fifteen years ago. There are still problems, of course, but I think that now we wouldn’t have to call the police at a theatre premiere because there are people protesting outside, as happened to us on one occasion, or because veterans wanted to boycott the play which, allegedly, defamed the UCK.” 

It is precisely this problem with veterans that has placed Gashi at the centre of the storm in recent weeks. Gashi, like Neziraj, knew that questioning the heroic narrative of the war was ultimately tantamount to questioning the system of power that has governed the country ever since. 

The former guerrilla leaders and affiliated organisations, explains the sociologist, took control of all spheres of public life: “The university, the judiciary, television, the administration, the political parties and the media are under the control of this so-called elite that has ruled Kosovo for two decades.” In these circumstances, “the UCK has manipulated the war and its memory to stay in power. Since they supposedly liberated the country, they claim the right to rule it and justify their corruption through terror”.

In 2020, Gashi received threats and lost his job as an adviser to President Kurti for stating on television that “some senior officials in the UCK committed war crimes and should be punished for them”. The focus of his historiographical work centres on civilian victims and on the peaceful resistance against Serbian oppression, which, in his view, has been overlooked by official historians intent on highlighting the role of the guerrillas. 

“My aim with this book was to clarify what had happened in each of the massacres. A book like this should be written about every single violation of humanitarian law that took place during the war. First we must know exactly what happened, then there must be reparations, and it is very important that the history textbooks used in schools are revised.” 

The Views of Veterans

Gazmend Syla joined the UCK at the age of 16 and today, at 45, he is the vice-president of the National Veterans’ Association, an organisation with branches in virtually every municipality in the country. Syla speaks with pride of the sacrifices made by his comrades, which, in his view, have not been sufficiently recognised by his compatriots.

We are at the organisation’s headquarters in Peja, one of the main guerrilla strongholds during the conflict, and the walls are covered with flags, emblems and photographs of the martyrs. “Nobody likes war. But you have to go if someone wants to kill you,” he explains after recounting the exploits of some of the “3,000 martyrs” recognised by the organisation.

Syla explains that the organisation’s mission is, at its core, like that of an NGO: “We help veterans when they have a need and mediate with the government to convey their demands.” And what about its influence in politics? “We don’t have a party of our own, but we do have relations with many different parties,” he replies. 

Asked about the trial in The Hague against Thaci and other guerrilla leaders, Syla replies indignantly: it is a set-up against innocent men, the witnesses have been bribed to testify against the UCK and it all boils down, in essence, to “a political issue”. 

The veterans’ association has organised mass demonstrations in Pristina, Tirana and The Hague to demand the acquittal of the accused. He does not wish to conclude the matter without pointing the finger at Western nations: “We fought alongside the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. They helped create the UCK, fought with us and supplied us with weapons. If we are guilty, then NATO is too.”

Syla is unwavering in his defence of the UCK’s political and military role in Kosovo’s independence, and regards the guerrilla movement as one of the pillars of national life. “We are free now and my children go to school,” he explains, “before, in Yugoslavia, we had nothing and the police and the military would beat us for speaking our own language. We had to fight to be free, and now we are doing well. Perhaps we’re not like Switzerland or Spain, but this is our country and we’re happy here.” 

However, his view on relations with Serbia and the Serbs of Kosovo is not what one might expect from a former guerrilla fighter. “The Serbs are citizens of Kosovo just like anyone else. They’re not to blame. They are my neighbours and I get on with them just fine. Their freedoms and political rights are recognised by the Constitution, and that is how it should be.” 

Syla is highly critical of Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s attempts to exclude Lista Sprska, the main Serbian political party in Kosovo, from the elections or to outlaw it: “They should be left in peace.” 

“The things I think and am telling you now, I can’t say them at meetings with the veterans,” Syla laments, sadly, “there, they only want strong, more aggressive rhetoric. And it’s a shame.”

The post To Question Memory is to Question Power: The Narrative of Violence is Shaking up Political Life in Kosovo appeared first on Untold.

And this is precisely where the problem begins.

Because Jared Kushner didn’t arrive in Albania with a shovel in his hand. He didn’t  personally put up wire fences. He didn’t personally declare himself a strategic investor. He didn’t  personally change the logic of protected areas. He didn’t personally place the Albanian state at the service of luxury tourism. Kushner may be the international symbol of the arrogance of money. But the door to Albania is not opened from Manhattan. It is opened from Tirana.

And in Tirana, for more than a decade, the political key has been called Edi Rama.

Ypi’s article clearly sees the danger: Albanian nature is being turned into a luxury commodity, the coastline into an investment catalogue, the islands into yacht dreams, while the people remain spectators on their own land. 

But where it should strike by name, the article begins to speak through fog. It speaks of the “Albanian government”, of “global capitalism”, of “oligarchy”, of “the rules of the system”. All of these are true. But the system does not sign documents by itself. Oligarchy does not vote laws by itself. Global capitalism does not command the Albanian police by itself. And “transition” does not appear at press conferences to defend the resort.

This is done by the government. This is done by power. This is done by Rama.

The Absent Seller

In this sense, Ypi’s article is critical, even though it feels somewhat as if it has been guided by someone, but it is not severe. It is elegant, but not sufficiently fair. It carries a certain hypocrisy of sensitivity toward the protesters, while remaining soft toward the political architect of the model those protesters are opposing. It understands the revolt, but it does not fully name the blame.

The title itself is meaningful: “Look at the protests Jared Kushner has caused in Albania”. But no, the protests are caused by Edi Rama. The protests are caused by a captured state. The protests are caused by a governing model that has turned Albania into a workshop of permits, towers, concessions, and strategic investors. 

But in Ypi’s article, the blame is placed on Kushner. The foreigner is a convenient villain. He is easier to hit. He is safer to mock. Especially for a British or European audience that knows the Trump family as a symbol of arrogant wealth and narcissism.

But for Albanians, the problem does not begin with Ivanka “discovering” an island from a yacht. The problem begins with a Prime Minister who behaves as if Albania were private property to be presented at investors’ tables. The problem begins with a state that bows before billionaires and rises against its own citizens. The problem begins when the government says “there is no final agreement”, while on the ground fences, private guards, machinery, and mass violence already appear.

This is the moment where the article should have become sharper. It should have asked: who allowed this? Who defended it? Who normalised it? Who used European integration as a cover for the privatisation of public assets? Who has turned “development” into the most beautiful word for the disappearance of Albanian nature and property?

Ypi says beautifully that Albania is not for sale. But she does not go all the way in saying who is behaving like the seller.

A Theoretical Fog

The article also carries an old habit of academic left-wing thought: whenever the blame becomes too concrete, it is dispersed into abstractions. It is not Rama, it is capitalism. It is not the government, it is globalisation. It is not laws made for clients, it is ‘the rules of the game’. It is not power, it is ‘the system’.

This is comfortable. In fact, very comfortable. It is like sleeping peacefully in the large bed of theory, where the ideological ghosts of the 20th century whisper that individuals do not matter, only structures matter. Somewhere in that theoretical calm, even the shadow of Joseph Stalin (with whom Ypi has personal experiences) through history and memory  may appear as the distant echo of a world where everything was explained through system, class, and history, while personal responsibility disappeared into the fog of dialectics.

But Albanians do not have the luxury of living in theoretical fog. They live in a country where decisions have names, signatures have dates, companies have owners, permits have institutions, police have orders, and the government has a prime minister.

Therefore, when we speak about Narta, Sazan, Zvërnec, Rrjoll, and the Albanian coastline, it is not enough to speak about a “development model”. We must speak about a model of governance. And Rama’s model of governance is clear: Albania as a luxury showcase for foreigners, as a construction site for the connected, as a tourist postcard for propaganda, and as a country of emigration for its own citizens.

Albania 2030

The greatest irony is that Rama sells this as modernisation. Whenever a major project appears, we are asked to see it as a step toward Europe. As if Europe were a private resort. As if European integration were measured by the number of luxury hotels. As if flamingos, lagoons, monasteries, public property, local communities, history, and national culture were provincial obstacles to the grand dream of “Albania 2030”.

In reality, this is not Europe. It is a new orientalism with a European façade. It is the idea that a small country must accept anything, as long as the investor is big enough. It is the philosophy of submission with a smile: give the land, give the sea, give the island, give the law, give the silence, and in return receive the promise that one day you will look modern in tourism brochures.

Here Ypi’s article has one great merit: it understands that the protest is not simply about the environment. It is about dignity. It is about public property. It is about the fundamental question: to whom does Albania belong?

But again, she stops before the next question: who is treating Albania as if it no longer belongs to Albanians?

The answer is not only Jared Kushner. The answer is not only Ivanka Trump. The answer is not only global capitalism. The answer is also the Albanian power structure that opens the door to this model, publicly defends it, calls it development, sells it as vision, and then accuses citizens of being old-fashioned, politicised, or enemies of progress.

At this point, the article is softer than it should be. It criticises the socialist government, but it does not dismantle Rama as a political figure. It does not place him at the centre of responsibility. It does not treat him as the architect of a system where the strategic investor is more important than the strategic citizen, where public property is weaker than private capital, where the police often appear more careful with power than with the people.

The Ugliness of Power

Ypi writes beautifully about the young people, the protest, the songs, the flowers, the cleaning of the streets. This part is humane and fair. The Albanian protest deserves to be seen as civic, peaceful, and dignified. But the beauty of the protest must not soften the ugliness of power. 

A people who give flowers to the police do not absolve the state when the state remains silent before violence. A protest that cleans the square should not be used as moral decoration for an analysis that does not fully clean up political responsibility.

The article also strikes at the old opposition, and here it is right. The Albanian opposition has for years failed to build moral trust. It has often been part of the same theatre, the same bargains, the same culture of transition. 

That is why the protest is strong precisely because it is not its property. The protest is cleaner than the parties. More credible than exhausted leaderships. More alive than the television studios where the same people are recycled, people who have commented on every crisis and helped produce them.

But if the opposition is captured by the past, the government is captured by the present. And the present has a name, power, mandate, and responsibility.

In the end, Ypi calls Albania a light for Europe. This is a beautiful idea. But Albania cannot be a light for Europe if, inside the country, the state behaves like a real estate agency. It cannot be a light if the government sells nature and public property as promotional assets. It cannot be a light if the people must take to the streets to remind the prime minister that the country is not his property.

Albania can become a light only when protest does not remain poetry for European newspapers, but turns into concrete accountability: suspension of projects lacking transparency, a full investigation of decision-making with arrests and imprisonment, including of PM Edi Rama, real protection of protected areas, judicial oversight, publication of the project documents, an end to private violence, and the end of laws made for select investors.

Therefore, Ypi’s article should be read, but also challenged. It is valuable because it carries the voice of the Albanian protest into an international newspaper whether suggested by someone or not, we will not enter into that story, because we know it. But it is insufficient because it leaves Rama more protected than he should be. It attacks the system, but not enough the man who has built, decorated, and sold this system as “Renaissance”.

In Albania, the problem is not only that Jared Kushner wants a resort.

The problem is that Edi Rama behaves as if Albania was born to offer that resort to someone.

And this is why the protest must not stop at the slogan “Albania is not for sale”.

It must go further:

Albania is not for sale, because Albania is not the property of the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister must be investigated and arrested immediately if he does not resign.

*This article was originally published in Albanian in AlbaniaHistory on June 12. This English translation is published with permission. 

The post A Convenient Villain: How Blaming Kushner for Albania’s Protests Stops at Edi Rama’s Gate – A Response to Lea Ypi’s Article in The Guardian appeared first on Untold.

“You know, Diana, we are in Germany. We can’t use words like genocide or apartheid. We don’t know who will be in the audience, and I want to protect you. If an extreme right person interrupts, I’ll have to interfere and control the conversation. I am totally with you, I understand you, but you know the history here, the culture of memory. Someone might be offended, or not understand you.”

With these words, a German scholar, well established and working in a reputable institute, tried to convince me to choose my words.

It was October 2024, one year into Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Lebanon was also under attack.

And I had just realized that the panel I was invited to, addressing Beirut’s history, would talk about the city without addressing the war Israel was waging against it. So I told him it made no sense for me to speak only about history or music while ignoring the ongoing destruction, erasure, and genocide in Palestine and Lebanon.

He then invited me for a coffee to “discuss” my intervention.

The panel was meant to celebrate Beirut as a city always on the edge, a city that loses itself year after year. The city of intellectuals and culture, the city of cafés and books. A city worth mourning, but only in its metaphors.

Not the suburbs. Not the South. Not the Bekaa. Not that Lebanon.

Not the people whose histories disturb. Their ways of mourning, their rituals of grief, their resistance, are not worthy of their attention, nor part of this story. Maybe they are too mournful, too religious, not refined enough for their taste, for this imagined Beirut, cleaned, curated and made to fit a certain language.

So of course, better to leave aside the ongoing destruction by Israel, the ethnic cleansing, the dehumanization of an entire community. The stories of entire villages in the south being erased. The noise of the histories and memories I would bring into the conversation.

On that same day, a rocket hit Ras el-Nabaa, less than 200 meters from my parents’ home, where my aunts and their families were staying. Just meters away, seconds away… yet a million lifetimes away from me. Bombs, erasure, families gone, memories shattered.

The silence goes on, relentless.

And yet, here I was, sitting there, safe in Berlin, listening to him asking me to watch my words. To be careful with my language, not to disturb the fragility of German history.

He kept reassuring me that he would “protect” me, in case some “extreme right wing” guy, the usual monster everyone fears, would interrupt the panel. Because my words would offend him. Would offend them.

Our words scare them. Our history still unsettles them.

But for him, there was no problem using this fear. No problem disciplining me through his own imagined violence. His history, his memory, was something I was expected to accept. To carry.

***

Since October 7, I have heard so many European scholars, people who built their careers on our region, tell me quietly, in private, that they are “with Palestine”, or that they are ashamed of their government.

Quietly. Always so quietly.

But when it comes to speaking publicly, to standing against what is happening in their own institutions, their silence is so loud. They speak about freedom of expression. They love that phrase. But when it comes to Israel, or to questioning German memory and the structural racism it created in their institutions, suddenly it disappears.

Since I became German, some even laugh about it. They come to me, joking, almost hysterically, creepily: “Now you are part of it. Our German guilt. Our memory.”

They laugh and laugh. And my world turns upside down. They laugh while my memories shatter, piece by piece. They laugh while everything around me loses meaning. They laugh while I live this constant dissonance. Here, in Berlin, everything is calm, yet so disturbing. There, everything is collapsing, yet it makes so much sense.

They laugh and laugh, in silence, living their everyday lives, convinced they are safe in their own small, individual worlds. As if safety was natural. As if it was not built on distance. On silence. On what is not said.

***

It is 9am. A peaceful, sunny day in Berlin. March 2026.

I am sitting in the office. I hear a sound.

Drones.

I feel it in my body. I move in my chair, and I look around. Does anyone else hear it? No one reacts. I look again. I am in Berlin.

I have told myself, with a lot of guilt, that the sound of drones is something new to me. That I wasn’t used to it, nor internalized it. Not yet. Not like my family and friends there. They had become hunted by that sound. I kept telling myself this was not my trauma.

But my body tells me otherwise.

It reminds me that it has already absorbed this fear, the fear of something hunting us from above. It didn’t forget the shiver it creates. Fear travels with us. It does not stay there, nor respect borders. It sits in the body, quiet sometimes, then suddenly very loud.

My body has carried this for years. The fear of planes haunting the sky. We used to call it umm kāmel. It watched us. Today they call it zanāni. Now it hunts, speaks, erases you like a bug.

My heart starts beating fast. I look outside. I am still in Berlin. It’s just the neighbor cutting the grass in this nice, fancy and quiet neighborhood. But in my body, it is a drone. Following me here. Into this calm, safe life.

I ask my colleague: do you feel something?

She says yes.

For a second, I think maybe she feels it too. Maybe she understands something of this. Maybe I am not that hunted.

Then she says: yes, this weather… this long winter in Berlin. It’s so depressing.

Yes, I say. The winter.

***

It always comes back to the same moment. The same questions. The same hunted memories.

February 2024. Sitting at a table with German scholars. More than 20,000 people already killed in Gaza.

One of them, a specialist of the region, was speaking loudly, almost proudly. He was talking about the Israeli war on Gaza, its repercussions in Europe, and the pro-Israel stance of universities. He criticized those who expected more from German scholars.

Then I said: “But German scholars are not really fighting back, nor willing to take a clear stand. Maybe this is the moment to give something back to the places you build your carriers on. Even a little.”

Something changed.

His eyes turned red, his face tightened. He looked straight at me and asked me:

“But do you condemn Hamas?”

The post “Now You Are Part of It. Our German Guilt. Our Memory” appeared first on Untold.

Following the controversial agreement between Italian PM Giorgia Meloni and Albanian PM Edi Rama to process asylum seekers outside the EU, two detention centres in the port of Shengjin and the village of Gjader were opened in October 2024. 

Despite being located in northern Albania, the camps are completely under Italian control and have shifted to serving as ‘deportation hubs.’ 

Shrouded in secrecy, little is known about the deal. Albanian and Italian authorities rarely answer Freedom of Information Requests about it. The public only knows what officials announce sparingly to the press. The number of migrants behind the grey walls of the detention centre is ever-changing, and no official records are made public. 

Currently, 90 people are held in Gjader. Usually picked directly at sea and dumped in cells, but called “guests” in the official forms. 

Access to the centres is extremely restricted for human rights observers. Through the few testimonies of survivors, Italian and European MEPs who visited, it was revealed that detainees face isolation and languish without communal or recreational spaces.

For Fioralba Duma, an Italo-Albanian activist and member of the grassroots migrant and civil rights collective Mesdhe Collective in Albania, detention centres are impossible to be humane. “This is a ‘black hole’ site invented for this occasion. The environment in detention centres is extremely pathogenic,” she adds, recalling the case of an Albanian man committing suicide in migration detention in the UK. 

Whilst no deaths have been recorded so far, former detainee Younouse Kone revealed to journalists that he witnessed two suicide attempts in the short time he spent in Gjader. Likewise, the facility’s ‘Critical Incidents’ sheet, shown only to MEPs, listed multiple incidents of self-harm. 

Albania’s Complicated Journey with Democracy 

After a successful tourism campaign, rebranding Albania’s image from a poverty-ridden, isolated country of emigration to an idyllic getaway, drawing investment by the likes of the Kushner and Trump families, Prime Minister Edi Rama has been on a fervent crusade to raise Albania’s status as a ‘success case’ in a region often marred by political and economic instability. 

Tracing back to Albania’s troubled past, the agreement is problematic. According to Sidorela Vatnikaj, a Tirana-based activist with Mesdhe, “if Albania were really a fully democratic state, the deal wouldn’t have happened. Albanian citizens only got to find out about the deal once it was signed by Rama, and Italian media started to report on it.” 

“This is a worrisome sign for the state of public transparency and an indicator of how the Albanian government could be acting in other issues. It shows that anything can happen without the public’s consent. The Rama-Meloni deal is the most visible violation of democracy and the state of law,” Vatnikaj explains.  

Indeed, the campaign hasn’t gone unchallenged. For Vatnikaj, one of the most acute problems was how mainstream Albanian media reported on their movement. “Albanian media framed our march as ‘anti-immigrant’ mobilisations trying to create a false narrative that these are ‘racist’ protests.”

Ranking 83rd on the World Press Freedom Index, media independence in the country is compromised by conflicts of interest between the business and political worlds and inadequate legal frameworks. 

Duma also notes that the group has suffered intimidation, directly affecting local organisers, one of whom, based in Lezhe, had their mother fired from her civil service position due to her activism – later reinstated after a complaint. 

Two other Albanian activists were detained for going to the opening ceremony of the Shengjin detention centre when Meloni was present, and hanging a protest banner from the rooftop of a building and using a sound system to play the announcement of the occupation of Albania by Italian troops during WWII. “We have the right to protest this, and we did so peacefully without causing any damage, yet our comrades were still detained”, Duma explains.

Activists believe that the deal is enforcing neocolonial dynamics, with Vatnikaj pointing out that the arrangement breaches Albania’s sovereignty for the sake of its ‘special relationship’ with Italy: “In essence, we handed over parts of our land to a completely Italian-run, Italian-funded administration. Are we actually an equal and respected part of the European community when we are being used as a “dumping ground” for migrants?”

For Duma the deal is a form of blackmail: “It implies that we have to accept things like that because of the financial or political support we have received from Italy regarding EU accession talks” or the supposed ‘welcome’ Albanians received in the 1990s as migrants in Italy, which in Duma’s words had nothing to do with the government and all to do with mutual aid groups, local communities, churches and individuals helping out of kindness.

How Activists Fight Back

“These camps were built for our parents in Europe,” one of the Mesdhe activists explains whilst giving a speech during a protest. The agreement now forces Albania to confront the fact that most of its citizens remain a target for ‘fortress Europe’. 

From violent pushbacks to detention, exploitation and criminalisation, the generations of Albanians who experienced the aftermath of regime collapse and mass displacement have had their life trajectories changed by such restrictions. The society they left behind was also deeply changed by their absence, with whole villages being almost emptied. 

For Albanian activists, this reality fuels their incentives to protest regressive government policies that do not represent the country’s historical experience. 

Duma says that for the Albanian activists, the agreement is viewed through the lens of whether it adheres to Albania’s historical memory as a displaced people and to Albanian values of hospitality. Vatnikaj adds that the deal goes against Albania’s very core as a nation, where “every family has a story to tell about the hardships Albanian immigrants have faced abroad”. 

Activists mobilised quite quickly in response despite the novelty of the situation. When the first ship arrived, they “welcomed” it with a banner reading “The European dream ends here.”

However, it took hard work before the group managed to get outside the walls of the Gjader detention camp in November 2025. Vatnikaj recalls that when they first started organising, they needed to figure out many things, as immigration in that context hadn’t been an issue in Albania before: “We mobilised around the unifying message of standing for human and migrant rights”. 

Solidarity beyond borders has been essential for the movement. Vatnikaj explains that Albanian activists are working with collectives in Italy and Europe, marching together, and organising assemblies: “We need knowledge, and we need people to fight with. Cross-border solidarity is essential.” 

In Duma’s experience as an Albanian migrant in Italy, striving to connect Albanian and Italian activist circles has been a lifelong aspiration. This goal has powered her resolve to create a shared space where activists can make meaningful exchanges. “Italian activists have helped us a lot with capacity-building and information-sharing. Now we have been building these platforms to join forces and create solidarity networks, with second-generation migrants in Italy being a crucial link between Italian and Albanian-based activists. Having them by our side is giving us hope. It is a really powerful gesture that they have joined us, and now we can say we are friends in the truest sense,” she adds. 

As a result of one of those assemblies, the idea for the collective march was born, which is now set to become an annual action for as long as the detention centres remain. . 

Activism has also been happening on an institutional level through advocating as a coalition with Italian parliamentary deputies and producing research on the topic. Activists have also been pursuing a legal challenge to the agreement, despite an underwhelming response from EU legal circles. 

Some wins on individual cases have also been scored when Italian courts or the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled against their deportation to Albania, and it has been proven a fruitful avenue, as many of the detainees sent to Albania have been returned. 

The Way Ahead 

With economic development resulting from tourism and construction, the issue of migration, that has always preoccupied public discourse, is now shifting from Albanians as migrants themselves to the country slowly becoming a destination for seasonal and manual labour, as workers from as far as the Philippines or Colombia come to the country in hopes of making a living.

Vatnikaj with her collective have been assisting Nigerian migrants coming to Albania to work highlighting a small shift towards Albania becoming a destination for foreign workers: “It is not uncommon to have their rights violated, so now immigration becomes a more visible phenomenon and for us we can demonstrate how exploitation and abuse can manifest in the Balkans”. 

Whilst activists prepare for further mobilisations, Duma says that it is paramount for them to expose the suffering of those in the migration routes who are often trivialised: “The far right has done a lot of damage by infiltrating people’s minds and making them accept this situation as a positive thing that needs to be done.” 

Vatnikaj adds, ”Between Albanian, Italian and European officials, this agreement is talked about as a success, but to us, activists and ordinary people alike, this is a moral failure.”

Vatnikaj now finds herself disillusioned with the ideals she was raised with. Growing up hearing that in Europe, states respect human rights and civic freedoms, many of these beliefs don’t hold anymore. “As migrants, we have experienced abuse, discrimination and racism abroad, and it is hard for me to believe that our country is now doing the same,” says Vatnikaj. 

Emerging from a decades-long dictatorship, many grew up hearing phrases such as “Albania needs to be part of Europe because Europe is a Utopia. Europe is the dream,” because of the presumed respect for democracy, prosperity and freedom. “Now that we see how those in the margins are treated, we don’t really have any state to look up to as the blueprint for all those freedoms. It feels like we lost our dream,” Vatnikaj explains.

With Western countries looking to expand and emulate this model, this is an uphill battle. The deal between Italy and Albania is not the first attempt by an EU government to use a third country as a return hub. In attempts to externalise asylum and create offshore processing centres, after a short-lived arrangement with Rwanda, the UK is courting Macedonia, after being rejected by Albania for a similar arrangement. In that dim backdrop, activists continue their fight. 

The post “These Camps Were Built for our Parents”: Albanian Activists Resist Italy’s Offshore Detention Experiment appeared first on Untold.

The building does not just display history; it selects which histories can remain visible, and which must be softened, abstracted, or forgotten.

This is where the stakes emerge. The museum’s beauty carries political work: it naturalizes a version of the country in which conflict, inequality, and rupture are treated as noise rather than memory. By monumentalizing continuity, the institution implies consensus. By designing awe, it designs obedience. The danger is not that the museum tells a story—every museum does—but that it presents its story as the only one with the right to fill space.

The Grand Egyptian Museum is both architecture and argument. Its material language, spatial choreography, and territorial placement operate like a voice: articulating what the state wants to be believed about the past, and what it hopes the public will no longer remember about the present.

Architecture and the Performance of Sovereignty

The Grand Egyptian Museum acknowledges that architecture is a performance of authority, a stage on which the state rehearses its preferred version of Egypt. Its size, symmetry, and alignment with the desert plateau are not only aesthetic performances; they are choices that speak in the state’s voice. Through these gestures, the structure suggests that the nation is continuous, cohesive, and immune to rupture. What appears to be a museum of the past is, in practice, a projection of the present—a carefully built argument about who owns history and who is permitted to stand inside it.

Official discourse reinforces this message. The museum is presented as a “national gift to the world” and a testament to an eternal civilizational identity, as though a single architectural form could gather every fragment of Egypt into one unbroken narrative. The effect is deliberate: to make political discontinuity feel like historical continuity; to transform instability into destiny. In this framework, the museum does not claim legitimacy; it manufactures it. The visitor is invited to marvel not only at antiquity, but at the modern state’s ability to summon antiquity as proof of its right to rule.

Inside, form becomes instruction. The procession from forecourt to atrium to monumental staircase guides visitors through a spatial lesson in belonging. Awe is not incidental—it is engineered. By directing the gaze upward, outward, and forward, the museum implies that the state is both heir to the ancient past and guarantor of the national future. The body learns by moving. The eye learns by being guided. Authority is absorbed not as argument but as atmosphere.

This is where the strings attached become visible. The question is not whether the museum is beautiful; it is what this beauty is doing. Architecture performs sovereignty not by describing power, but by making it feel natural, inevitable—like the only possible order. In the Grand Egyptian Museum, design becomes a form of speech. The building does not say the state is permanent; it teaches permanence. And in that lesson, certain histories—revolutionary, contested, or inconvenient—must be quiet enough to fade beneath the alabaster light.

Site, Form, and Design

The Grand Egyptian Museum does not sit neutrally on the edge of Cairo; it occupies the city like a statement. Its site, drawn between the density of the urban plain and the rising desert plateau, stages a threshold where the state can curate what Egypt looks like before one even enters the building. The approach—highways, forecourts, controlled access points—prepares the visitor to see the museum not as a public institution but as a destination that has already decided how it should be seen.

The building’s triangulated geometry, derived from the visual lines to the Giza pyramids, is more than an architectural concept; it is a strategy of affiliation. By joining itself to the horizon of antiquity, the museum anchors the present regime to the authority of the ancient past. Material choices reinforce the logic: alabaster, historically used in temples and tombs, glows at dawn and dusk in a way that suggests reverence, authenticity, and inevitability. It is a calculated softness—an aesthetic of welcome that conceals the precision of control behind it.

Inside, the museum’s interior volumes are organized as if they were a landscape of ascent. Wide halls, controlled perspectives, and the long pull of the monumental staircase train the body to read space as progress. The building is not merely walked; it is climbed, ascended, and internalized. Architecture becomes choreography, and choreography becomes instruction. Even the generous sightlines toward the pyramids are not simply vistas; they are confirmations: this is where the story comes from, and this is where the state claims the right to continue it.

At this scale, design produces a political effect. The museum does not demand belief; it designs the conditions under which belief becomes the easiest response. It organizes the city’s edge into a controlled frontier, turning territory into narrative and access into agreement. The message embedded in the site is clear: Egypt can be seen from here—but only in the way the state prefers it to be seen.

Materiality, Light, and the Aesthetic of the Sublime State

Light does a particular kind of political work in the Grand Egyptian Museum. The alabaster façade, glowing at dawn and radiant from within at night, softens the building’s edges just enough to make authority feel gentle. It produces an atmosphere of invitation, but one in which the terms of entry are already decided. Transparency is suggested, not granted; openness is performed, not lived. What looks like light is also a kind of veil.

Inside, illumination becomes a form of direction. Daylight enters through triangulated skylights and alabaster fins that scatter brightness across statues and vitrines, creating a visual field where artifacts appear suspended in reverence. The visitor is not simply observing objects; they are being positioned in relation to them. Light gathers the eye, concentrates it, tutors it. The museum does not tell the visitor what to think—its spatial glow teaches them how to see.

This aesthetic is not accidental. By producing awe, the museum produces agreement. The softness of the alabaster, the slow bloom of light across stone surfaces, the calibrated passage from shadow to radiance—they are emotional cues that smooth over rupture. The technique is subtle: instead of commanding, it persuades; instead of asserting power, it normalizes it. Authority arrives not as an order, but as ambience.

What emerges is a choreography of perception. Light does not simply reveal the architecture; it completes its argument. It ensures that the emotional register of the museum—wonder, pride, belonging—leans toward acceptance rather than interruption. And in that emotional current, alternative narratives lose volume. Under the alabaster glow, disagreement dims, critique quiets, and the idea of a single, unbroken national story becomes easier to believe.

Spatial Choreography and State Pedagogy

The Grand Egyptian Museum is not only a sequence of rooms; it is a sequence of lessons. The spatial journey—from the forecourt to the atrium, to the monumental staircase, to the galleries, and finally to the terrace facing the pyramids—produces a controlled progression in which movement becomes meaning. Each transition feels natural, but it is choreographed with intent. The visitor is ushered from anticipation to reverence to confirmation, as if the architecture were guiding thought through the body rather than through language.

The forecourt acts like a threshold of discipline. It separates the turbulence of Cairo from the curated calm of the museum, signaling that one is crossing from the city’s contested present into a state-managed version of the past. The atrium, dominated by monumental figures, shifts the scale of the body: the visitor becomes smaller, and the state—architecturally speaking—becomes larger. The monumental staircase then performs the emotional climax. Ascending it feels like rising into the national narrative itself, as if the visitor were being placed inside the timeline the state prefers.

Pedagogy happens through design. The galleries are arranged to unfold history as an inevitability: a straight line from antiquity to modern authority, uninterrupted, unbroken, unquestioned. Rooms do not simply display objects; they display a worldview. The architecture directs pacing, determines sightlines, and maintains focus, allowing little room for hesitation or doubt. Even when the visitor pauses, the building continues narrating around them, as if the story could not be stopped.

This choreography carries a political charge. The museum does not instruct through argument or didactic panels; it teaches by shaping how the visitor moves, sees, and remembers. It performs the state’s preferred logic: that belonging is simple, that continuity is self-evident, that the nation has always been whole. The effect is persuasive not because it demands consent, but because it makes consent feel like the most intuitive response. In this sense, the museum behaves less like a cultural institution and more like a training ground for a particular way of imagining Egypt—one where disagreement has no spatial equivalent and where dissent finds no place to stand.

Urbanism, Mobility, and Territorial Control

The Grand Egyptian Museum does not stand alone; it is the anchor of a redesigned territory. The highways, landscaped approaches, security perimeters, and dedicated access routes are not supporting infrastructure—they are part of the project’s architecture. Before the visitor reaches the building, the city has already been edited. Mobility is directed, visibility is managed, and arrival is staged as proof that the museum exists at the center of an orderly national landscape. The edge of Cairo becomes a frontier where the state can choreograph what the capital looks like, and who gets to approach it.

This territorial framing reimagines the western periphery of the city as a controlled zone of presentation. The new roads bypass neighborhoods that once surrounded the plateau, replacing the improvisation of informal life with a curated route that leads directly to the museum’s entrance. What appears as efficiency is also isolation; what appears as access is also filtration. The surrounding communities, markets, and everyday noise of the area are quieted by distance. The museum reads as if it rises out of empty land, even though it does not. The silence is engineered.

Tourism infrastructure intensifies this effect. Airports, arterials, and hotel corridors link into the museum like arteries feeding an image. The state gains not only visitors but vantage points. The approach offers views that feel cinematic—framed horizons, measured distances, controlled skylines that hide the city’s contradictions. This is not about hiding Cairo; it is about selecting which Cairo will be seen. The result is a geography where the museum becomes both destination and filter: a place that promises access to the nation while deciding what the nation looks like on the way in.

In this configuration, territory becomes narrative. Space is made to speak. The controlled approach routes tell the visitor that the city is coherent, the nation is continuous, and the state is the author of both. And because this coherence is experienced physically—driven, walked, entered—it becomes easier to believe. The choreography of arrival, movement, and containment performs a political claim long before architecture comes into view: that modern Egypt can be understood from here, and that the legitimacy of the present depends on the disappearance of what surrounds it.

Authoritarian Monumentality in Historical Perspective

The Grand Egyptian Museum joins a longer tradition in which states build at scales that exceed function in order to exceed doubt. Monumentality here is not an architectural genre, but a political method: a way for governments to materialize certainty where consensus is fragile, and to project continuity where history has been fractured. Across different contexts and eras, monumental projects have served the same purpose—to turn authority into something that looks like geology, something too large to argue with.

Seen in this light, the museum inherits more than its alignment with the pyramids; it inherits the logic of monuments that stabilize regimes by stabilizing narrative. Just as earlier authoritarian and developmentalist states built to outlast the criticism of the present, the museum builds to outlast the memory of rupture. The gesture is familiar: when politics is unsettled, architecture is asked to appear immovable; when identity is contested, stone is asked to speak more loudly than people. The building functions as reassurance, not evidence.

But unlike older monumental projects, the Grand Egyptian Museum operates under conditions shaped by global capital and transnational cultural networks. Loans, consultants, partnerships, and international museological standards do not weaken the national message; they amplify it. They allow the state to present its narrative as globally verified, technically endorsed, and culturally neutral—when it is, in fact, a deeply situated political argument. The museum becomes not just a monument to heritage, but a monument to the credibility of the state itself.

This continuity with past monumentalism is less about imitation than adaptation. Ancient complexes sacralized divine rule; twentieth-century megaprojects dramatized ideological futures; the museum sacralizes heritage as proof of modern authority. In each case, scale stands in for consensus, and spectacle stands in for negotiation. The architectural language changes, but the political instinct does not. The building does not ask the public to believe; it asks them to stand in front of something that makes belief feel unnecessary.

The result is a paradox: a project that appears inclusive by virtue of cultural pride, yet exclusive by virtue of the narrative it enforces. It remembers too much of one history and too little of another. It claims to gather the nation, but it gathers only the version of the nation that can fit inside its myth. What is absent is not forgotten by accident; it is forgotten by design.

The Authoritarian Sublime and the State Machine

The Grand Egyptian Museum presents itself as a place of preservation, yet its power lies in what it constructs rather than what it protects. It uses alignment, scale, and the softness of light to turn architecture into a statement of endurance. The building does not argue for the state’s permanence; it rehearses it. It makes authority feel architectural—quiet, inevitable, already decided.

This is what gives the project its force. By organizing sightlines, controlling approach routes, and scripting movement, the museum draws a boundary around which futures are imaginable and which histories are permitted to matter. The narrative it offers is coherent and compelling, but it is a coherence built on selection. What exceeds the story is allowed to fall away. What disrupts continuity remains outside the frame of alabaster and glass.

None of this negates the museum’s achievements as a work of design. It is visually extraordinary, technically sophisticated, and unmistakably ambitious. But ambition is not neutral, and beauty is not without consequence. If the museum succeeds, it is because it persuades—not because it proves. It gathers visitors into a vision of Egypt that feels seamless enough to stand, and silent enough to hold.

The question that remains is not whether the museum will endure, but what it will ask the public to forget in order to endure. In this sense, the building’s most powerful exhibition is not its collection, but the story it makes possible—and the stories it leaves in the dark.

The post Building Belief: The Grand Egyptian Museum and the Architecture of State Power appeared first on Untold.

“I only worry about my child,” she said, unfolding medical records worn soft from handling respiratory problems. “The doctor told me I had to move. But we don’t have any place to go.”

Morocco’s government has issued 416 permits authorising the import of European waste — clothes, rubber tires, industrial byproducts — burned as fuel in cement kilns across the Casablanca-Settat region, including within 15 kilometers of her home. In 2024 alone, actual imports reached 821,500 tonnes, nearly triple the annual average of the previous three years, a surge consistent with companies racing to ship before the approaching EU export ban. European corporations save over $52 million every year by shipping their waste here instead of processing it at home. 

Fatima doesn’t know all of that, what she does know is that her son can’t breathe, and that some nights the smell reaches dozens of kilometers from the landfill.

An investigation, based on exclusive trade data from the Basel Action Network, customs records, and Freedom of Information responses, found that European countries shipped at least 36,611 tons of waste to Morocco in a single year — 93 percent of it classified as “reusable” despite declared values as low as €0.10 per kilogram, a price that suggests disposal, not resale. 

The Economics of Dumping

Understanding why European waste ends up in Moroccan communities requires following the money. The arithmetic is brutally simple.

Treating waste properly in Europe costs estimated conservatively about $100 per ton. Shipping it to Morocco and burning it in cement kilns costs approximately $36 to $39. For a company processing 100,000 tons annually, the savings exceed $6 million a year. Across the entire waste trade, European corporations pocket more than $52 million annually — calculated from the roughly $62 gap between European treatment costs and Moroccan processing costs, applied across the 821,500 tonnes imported in 2024.

Data obtained from the Basel Action Network (BAN) covering September 2024 through September 2025, reveals how the pipeline operates. In that 12 month period alone, European countries shipped 36,611 tons of documented waste to Morocco, including clothing, plastics, paper, and electronics. The real volume is likely higher; this figure represents only what was officially recorded under waste codes. Shipments reclassified as “secondary raw materials,” “reusable goods,” or “alternative fuel” before leaving Europe drop out of waste tracking entirely.

Spain emerges as Europe’s primary waste gateway to Morocco, handling nearly 80 percent of clothing exports and two-thirds of plastic waste, 73 tons of worn clothing shipped daily from a single country. Spanish waste management companies profit from both low transport costs across the Mediterranean and Morocco’s minimal environmental oversight.

The declared values tell their own story. Romania declares clothing at €0.10 per kilogram. Poland declares identical goods at €1.02, a tenfold difference for the same customs code. Industry sale prices for sorted reusable clothing run between €0.50 and €1.50 per kilogram; Poland’s declaration sits inside that band, Romania’s far below it. 

The gap suggests not just different markets but different goods—genuinely reusable clothing commands higher prices, while low declared values indicate material destined for disposal rather than resale.

According to the European Environment Agency, the fate of used textiles exported from the EU is “highly uncertain,” with material unfit for reuse mostly ending up in open landfills and informal waste streams. 

Ninety-three percent of waste in the Basel data is classified as “worn clothing.” But industry estimates suggest only half or less of such shipments actually reach secondhand markets. The rest becomes Morocco’s problem—feeding the cement kilns at Jorf Lasfar, Morocco’s largest industrial port zone 120 kilometers south of Casablanca, entering industrial facilities across the Casablanca-Settat region, disappearing into a system with no transparency about what happens next.

Major corporate players are embedded in this supply chain. The French firm CHIMIREC established a Moroccan subsidiary in 2020 to produce “Energy Substitution Fuel” (ESF) for cement manufacturers. When contacted, CHIMIREC Maroc denied any involvement in European waste imports and exports, stating it processes exclusively domestic waste. LafargeHolcim’s Ecoval subsidiary is the country’s primary industrial waste treatment provider. Ciments du Maroc, owned by Germany’s Heidelberg Materials, operates a grinding center near the Jorf Lasfar port, a documented entry point for European waste shipments. LafargeHolcim and Ciments du Maroc did not respond to requests for comment.

Since 2016, the Ministry of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development has issued 416 permits for waste imports, authorizing more than 2.5 million tons of European waste to enter the country. In 2024 alone, imports reached 821,500 tons—nearly a third of the entire decade’s total in a single year, a surge consistent with the approaching EU ban deadline. 

The Moroccan total is larger than the 36,611 tonnes recorded by BAN because the two datasets measure different stages of the same pipeline: BAN tracks European shipments still declared under waste codes — clothing, plastics, paper, electronics — while Morocco’s ministry counts everything that arrives as “recyclable raw materials”. 

The gap between the two figures is essentially the volume reclassified out of the waste category before it leaves Europe. The ministry has described the program as a strategic pillar of Morocco’s circular economy, projecting 60,000 jobs by 2030. The government frames waste as a valuable resource essential for industrial energy, a narrative that obscures the health costs borne by communities like those in Mediouna.

The Loopholes

International law nominally restricts wealthy nations from dumping hazardous waste on poorer ones. The Basel Convention, ratified by over 190 countries, requires “Prior Informed Consent” for transboundary movements of hazardous materials. But that consent, as the convention is written, operates between governments — not between governments and residents who live downwind.

In practice, the regulations contain loopholes large enough to drive a container ship through. 

Reclassified materials require none of these protections. A single word change on a customs form,  from “waste” to “secondary raw material”, transforms a regulated substance into an unregulated commodity.

Trade records obtained for this investigation reveal the scale of the fiction. 93 percent of waste shipped to Morocco is classified as “reusable clothing” or “secondary materials,” but declared values of €0.10 per kilogram suggest these shipments are waste destined for disposal, not genuine merchandise.

According to data collected through a Freedom of Information Request, the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) told us that between 2020 and 2023, no Italian waste was registered as having been sent to Morocco “for disposal purposes” — but, in the same response, acknowledged that “small quantities” were shipped during 2021, 2022 and 2023 “for the purpose of material recovery.” 

UN Comtrade records for 2023 show approximately 817 tonnes of Italian rubber waste reaching Morocco that year, worth around $427,000. The following year, in August 2024 alone, Morocco’s Ministry of Energy Transition authorised the import of 20,000 tonnes of waste specifically from Italy. 

This glaring contradiction could be the result of a regulatory loophole in how Europe counts what leaves its ports: under EU law, burning waste in a cement kiln is officially classified as “energy recovery” rather than “disposal” .

Through labeling their exported garbage as alternative fuel for Moroccan kilns or misclassifying it as reusable merchandise at customs, European countries can legally erase millions of tons of waste from their disposal ledgers, outsourcing their pollution while keeping their domestic recycling statistics pristine. 

Cristina Guarda, Italian MPE from the Greens/EFA, confirms that the topic is on the European agenda. “The goal is to reduce the areas where opacity can take root, clarify responsibilities throughout the supply chain, and establish the principle that exports are acceptable only if companies can genuinely demonstrate environmentally sound management, with equivalent and verifiable standards”

The Human Cost

One hundred twenty kilometers south of Casablanca, the industrial zone at Jorf Lasfar stretches along Morocco’s Atlantic coast. Container ships dock at a port with 37-million-ton annual capacity. Cement plants rise in silhouette against the sky. Trucks move constantly between the port and processing facilities, carrying material that began its journey in European cities and will end it in Moroccan furnaces.

The health impacts accumulate invisibly. Communities living near Moroccan cement plants face an excess risk of respiratory disease, cancer incidence and mortality, predominantly affecting the respiratory tract in both children and adults. 

Research consistently finds that people living near cement plants are up to nearly five times more likely to report respiratory symptoms than those with no such exposure. In Morocco specifically, occupational cement exposure has been directly linked to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, one of the leading causes of respiratory mortality.

When rubber tires burn in cement kilns without adequate emission controls, they release dioxins and furans, among the most toxic substances known to science, along with heavy metals including lead, mercury, and cadmium. A peer-reviewed study measuring emissions from cement kilns burning hazardous waste found dioxin levels more than four times higher than baseline (1.57 vs. 6.49 nanograms per cubic metre) — and rising further as more hazardous waste was added to the fuel mix, with emissions rising further as the co-processing ratio increases.

A synthesis by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has documented that where emissions controls on such kilns are inadequate, surrounding communities show elevated rates of respiratory, skin, and gastrointestinal illness.

Morocco cannot yet manage its own domestic waste crisis. The Mediouna landfill alone receives 1.2 million tonnes a year and is approaching saturation. In November 2024, the World Bank approved a $250 million programme to upgrade the country’s landfills — a tacit acknowledgement that existing capacity is inadequate before any additional burden from imports. Casablanca cannot absorb more pollution, let alone safely process hundreds of thousands of tons shipped from Europe each year. 

When the government approved more than two million tons of new waste imports from various European countries in August 2024, activist Mohamed Benata of the Environmental Assembly of Northern Morocco called it “incompatible with the spirit of citizenship” and unconstitutional. In 2016, similar outrage over Italian waste imports sparked widespread protests and social media campaigns, forcing the government to suspend the imports. Yet despite this resistance, the waste continues to arrive.

European corporate accountability law, for its part, does not reach far enough to catch what happens after the shipments leave port. The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, adopted by the EU in 2024 to oblige large companies to police human rights and environmental harms across their supply chains, stops at the point of sale. 

“CSDDD ends with handing over the goods more or less,” Miriam Saage-Maaß, legal director at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, said of the directive’s reach. Whether European exporters bear any legal responsibility for what happens to their waste inside Moroccan cement kilns, she added, “depends on how direct EU exporters are connected to the waste burning.”

“The EU is strengthening controls and obligations,” says Guarda, while mentioning the new 2024 Waste Shipment Regulation that sets out stricter rules on the export of waste to non-EU countries. “But the real leap forward must be cultural and industrial,” she adds. “Circularity cannot become an elegant way to outsource health and environmental impacts to other communities. We need a pathway that reduces the problem at the source, increases producer responsibility and leads to waste management that is consistent with climate and health protection objectives, without creating ‘sacrifice zones’ outside Europe.”

Time is running out, but not for the reasons Fatima might hope. From 21 November 2026, the EU will ban all plastic waste exports to non-OECD countries like Morocco, with no approved-list escape route for plastics. For other non-hazardous waste such as metals and paper, exports will be banned from May 2027 unless a country is on an approved list; Morocco submitted its application to be included by the 21 February 2025 deadline.

Whether that ban will actually stop the flow, or simply push it through new classification channels, is contested. When the regulation was adopted in 2024, the Environmental Investigation Agency, an international environmental NGO, warned that its real effect on waste exports would depend on how strictly EU member states transpose and enforce it, and on whether the remaining loopholes are closed. 

One such channel is already emerging inside EU policy itself, in December 2025, the European Commission proposed Union-wide end-of-waste criteria for mechanically recycled plastics, which would allow such materials to circulate across the bloc without being classified as waste at all.

“The longer the chain of parties involved, the shorter the chain of enforcement: controls on thousands of containers travelling through ports are extremely complex. The official data we have on Morocco could be not everything that it’s actually exported, but unofficial flows are undetectable”, says Paola Ficco, environmental lawyer and director of the magazine Rivista Rifiuti.

Back in Mediouna, Fatima remains caught in the middle. While Europe celebrates its recycling milestones and Morocco counts the jobs and greens its image, she and families like hers in Casablanca are plagued by air and soil pollution from domestic and exported waste.

This story was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe

The post Toxic Trade: How Europe Exports Its Waste to Morocco and Calls It Recycling appeared first on Untold.

Growing up in a leftist household, I looked at this change in diet as a way in which companies and neoliberal governments were erasing parts of our cultural identity and social cohesion, so I became obsessed with reading the brand names, places of origin, and lists of ingredients of food in the supermarket.

One thing I started noticing in my teens, and has worsened over time, is the limited variety of options. Don’t get me wrong, long supermarket corridors are colorful and filled with over 50 kinds each of bread, cereals, canned soups, chocolate, peanut butter, cookies, ice cream, potato chips, dog food, cheese analogs, frozen meals, and infant formula, but producers are usually no more than three, and ingredients often include things I wouldn’t be able to place in nature. 

From those ingredients that sound natural, there’s one that troubles me and is present in all the food items mentioned above: palm oil, a main product from the plant called Elais guineensis Jacq.

Beyond the Package

Oil palm derived ingredients are found in food under many names: vegetable oil, vegetable fat, palmate, palmitate, palm stearine, or stearate acid. In cleaning products, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, ingredients like sodium lauryl sulfate, glyceryl, cetyl palmitate, stearic acid, or palmitoyl are often derived from it too.

Healthwise, oil palm derived products aren’t bad, and are used to create nice textures in many items. Even more, palm oil is usually recognized as a renewable alternative to fossil fuels. 

So you might wonder, why does this ingredient make you so angry? Are you simply an angry woman? Well, sure, and the world really needs more of us, but I’d also say we have to take all magical ingredients with a pinch of doubt.

That’s why I decided to dig deeper. Beyond my gut feeling or political instinct, I wanted to understand who actually stands to gain from this ingredient taking over our supermarket shelves, and at what cost. Was it improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers? Was it driving local development, or merely feeding a system of industrial agriculture that thrives on cheap land, cheap labor, and even cheaper ecosystems? Those questions led me to look beyond the pretty packaging and start piecing together a bigger, messier picture that connected oil palms to deforestation and land grabbing.

Around 2018, in the spirit of making something powerful out of my anger towards the industrialization of agriculture and food production, and understanding the full chain of actors benefiting from this, I joined a group of people investigating oil palm in Mexico, on the ground and from space, using satellite imagery.

Hidden Costs

Around the world, oil palm’s high productivity and versatility have led to its rapid and consistent increase in demand and production. Plantations are productive for several decades, so they can be understood as long periods of steady, year-long income by farmers. However, this crop is also associated with high rates of deforestation, biodiversity loss, and significant social, environmental and health impacts to smallholder farmers due to the intensive use of agrochemicals and polluting oil extraction processes. 

In addition, if you’re growing oil palm and at some point decide not to do it anymore, removing the plants is quite expensive – a 2012 study on Malaysian plantations estimated the cost of removing a hectare of oil palm at RM 34,500 (over USD 10,000 at that time).

Furthermore, when we talk about biofuels we usually forget to say that soil is not a renewable resource and, for this purpose, oil palm would most likely be produced as a monocrop in an industrialized way, a practice that does not regenerate the soil.

Initiatives like the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) have been trying to regulate production and reduce these impacts, but many organizations have questioned their efficacy and standards.

In Mexico, the first attempts to establish oil palm plantations began in the 1950s, but production and demand only took off in the late 1990s, when the government classified it as a strategic crop–a crop that’s highly competitive in the market and/or important for food security–and a series of policies were designed to promote its cultivation and commerce at the federal or state levels. 

In 2017, the Secretariat of Agriculture and Rural Development (SADER) published the National Agricultural Plan for the Period of 2017 to 2030, where they included the recommended market strategies to increase production and satisfy domestic needs, and maps indicating which regions were agro-ecologically suitable for each of the 38 strategic crops. 

In the case of oil palm, the suitability map indicated that 14.2 million hectares of the national territory were suitable for oil palm cultivation, an area almost the size of Nepal.

Unequal Maps

The SADER’s suitability maps were based on maps from other institutions, like the Secretariat of Agriculture and Rural Development (SAGARPA), the National Institute of Forestry, Agricultural and Livestock Research (INIFAP), and the Institute for Productive Reconversion and Tropical Agriculture (IRPAT). Such maps are typically publicly available at very low resolutions and use different mixes of data climatic and topographic data (obtained from meteorological stations), edaphic characteristics (obtained from local studies), and cultivation areas (obtained from satellite data).

Observations of the Earth from satellite data, aka remote sensing data, have been used for the identification and analysis of crops of strategic importance, with the purpose of estimating their yields, preventing risks associated with climate change, and identifying socio-environmental impacts. At the moment, commercial satellites can return imagery with a resolution of around 30 cm per pixel every few hours, and software for satellite imagery management, like EarthExplorer or Google Earth have been accessible since the early 2000s, but high-resolution data is typically very costly and affordable only to large institutions and governments. 

Although subscriptions and pay-as-you-go options are more affordable, publicly available data–more likely to be accessible to smallholder farmers–is usually provided at lower resolution, typically 5-500 m per pixel, updated from daily to every few weeks. Also, feature identification and classification can be done manually by humans or with data-driven algorithms to cover larger areas, but results should always be verified against on-the-ground data to avoid confusion between crops and ecosystems. 

For example, distinguishing primary forest from oil palm data plantations is not a simple task. Manual methodologies are typically highly accurate, but unsustainable for large studies, which might explain why SADER gathered data from multiple institutions using different methodologies.

In any case, when agricultural policies rely heavily on remote sensing data, many issues on the ground are obscured, like the full breadth of environmental impacts of a crop’s cultivation, or the desired futures of those working the land. Even more, the lack of, or unequal access to, high-resolution data, raises questions about the adequacy and power imbalances promoted by those policies.

Follow the Data

In 2019, trying to understand the impacts of SADER’s recommendation of turning such a large amount of land into oil palm cropland, we decided to dig deeper into this topic. Afterall, we were city people and maybe farmers were very happy with their job prospects, or using palm oil derived products was the least impactful thing on the environment.

We contacted people involved in oil palm production, like the women farmer organizations “Agua y Vida, Mujeres, Derechos y Ambiente” and “Casa de la Mujer Ixim Antsetic”, and people in academia and the government, and we started looking at all publicly available information about oil palm production in Mexico. Despite abundant governmental data and scientific literature, it was hard to say who was benefiting the most out of oil palm production in the country. 

We didn’t find any publicly available interactive map of oil palm plantations at the national level, which we thought crucial for smallholder farmers and other non-governmental policy-makers to contribute to the design of agricultural policies. 

So we decided to create it.

It took us two years of gathering and analyzing publicly available data on oil palm’s socio-environmental impacts, production and cropland from 2014 to 2019. We followed a semi-automatic remote sensing analysis methodology running Python scripts over publicly available Google Earth satellite images to create our publicly available high-resolution oil palm plantations map, and a report explaining our findings. 

Considering the potential of these mappings, we decided to call ourselves the Observatorio Agroindustrial en México, or OBSAM with the aim of expanding this study to all the strategic crops in the country. 

Our map showed the distribution and expansion of oil palm at the national level. The data had the potential for identifying spatial relationships with transportation and other infrastructure projects, other agricultural programs, or the coverage of governmental sustainable rural development programs.

Expansion and Deforestation

We identified 62,057 hectares (ha) of oil palm plantations, usually close to transportation infrastructure and areas of scrubland, rainfed agriculture, pastureland and secondary vegetation. 

From these, 4,022ha were inside natural protected areas, mainly in the Palenque National Park, and the Encrucijada Biosphere Reserve (EBR) both in the Southern state of Chiapas–researchers, civil society actors, farmers, and media, had long reported this and asked for controlling the crop’s expansion in these areas, but no official response had been given to these concerns. 

In addition, oil palm plantations were found in five terrestrial and seven hydrological regions of importance for biodiversity conservation, as defined by the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO). Finally, comparisons against official data for forest cover from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) for 2017 and 2018, identified a link between oil palm and deforestation in more than 5,400 ha of forests and jungle.

Our literature review also showed that there were indeed multiple opinions about oil palm’s benefits and impacts around the world, depending usually on the level of access to technology and subsidies, labor force, land ownership, social organizing, and decision-making power of those who grow it. 

In Mexico, technological requirements for its cultivation have led to the replacement of itinerant traditional agricultural methods, like roza-tumba-quema –an itinerary agricultural technique practiced in tropical regions for around 10,000 years where land is cleared (roza-tumba), burnt (quema) and then let to rest for a prolonged period of time, recently modernised to roza-tumba-pica (clear-burn-add organic matter) to prevent wildfires. 

In addition, hard labor requirements have pushed women to do less specialized and lower income jobs, and the lack of a local market has led to economic dependency on gathering and extraction centers, which are not always easily accessible and typically private. 

Even more, around half of oil palm production in the country was carried out by smallholder farmers in communal land, or ejidos, of less than 50 ha, which often exposed them to other impacts observed around the world: land concentration, foreignization and grabbing.

In 2018, the estimated revenue per hectare of oil palm was around MXN 38 (less than USD 2), but production was relatively profitable in places like southern Chiapas, where smallholder farmers are typically landowners and have created cooperatives and organizations that help them access governmental financial incentives.

Food Insecurity

So what kind of information, governmental policies and mechanisms would benefit smallholder oil palm producers, improve production, and limit social and environmental impacts?

Turns out that this was not a revolutionary question, and around the same time, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) was also trying to understand this. In 2022, FAO found that around 37% of the world’s land was dedicated to agriculture and over 80% of farms around the world were under two hectares (20,000m2) in size. Such smallholder farmers produced around 35% of the entire world’s food, despite occupying only around 12% of all agricultural land. 

The FAO highlighted the need for detailed data–Earth observations included– that helped understand regional differences in agricultural practices and production, so that policy-makers could design agricultural plans that aligned to the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). These goals have the stated aim of bringing “peace and prosperity for people and the planet” by promoting sustainable production, improving the productivity and livelihood of smallholder farmers, addressing inequalities, and guaranteeing food security worldwide. 

The FAO’s data means that 35% of food was being grown in around 4.5% of the world’s land by 2022. Although this might sound like our dreams of food security are easy to achieve, we have to be careful with our steps ahead because there’s a limit to how much of the world’s land is suitable for agriculture. Developing some suitable land might carry severe social and environmental impacts, and not all current agricultural land will remain productive in the future due to climate change and impactful land use.

Elusive Answers

As our findings proved the importance of carrying out the independent monitoring of this crop’s expansion, we decided to continue gathering and analyzing data to verify some impacts reported by multiple independent organizations. This way, in 2023, OBSAM published a second mapping with data from 2016 to 2022 and created a publicly available visualizing tool.

Our improved methodology detected 7,559 ha inside natural protected areas, mainly in the EBR and the Tuxtlas Biosphere Reserve in Veracruz, something that had already been reported by peasant organizations but not evidenced in existing mappings. 

This time, to address the lack of verification in situ, the mapping was compared against publicly available data for the Lacandón Jungle in Chiapas, prepared by the General Coordination of Corridors and Biological Resources (CGCRB) and oil palm producers in the municipalities of Benemérito de las Américas and Marqués de Comillas, showing a large number of errors in the CGCRB archive. Comparisons against official data on forest cover now showed oil palm driven deforestation in 7,317 ha.

OBSAM is now expecting to release a third mapping with data until 2023, to enable the comparison between the three different mappings and identify new, growing and abandoned plantations, which would allow us to understand the paths of deforestation and land use changes. 

We’ve also gathered infrastructure maps and contacted people investigating the corporate side of oil palm commercialization, so we hope to get closer to understanding its relationship with important infrastructure projects and which policies are benefiting which actors the most.

However, many questions remained unsolved and to analyze all strategic crops and offer alternatives to oil palm production we would need to develop closer ties with people in communities located in the vicinity of oil palm plantations, to understand agricultural practices and challenges, develop participatory mapping tools for verification of satellite analysis and identify other datasets to capture what is meaningful and desirable by people on the ground. 

It is still unclear which existing agricultural practices and policies are benefiting smallholder farmers the most, but supermarkets continue to have more and more products containing palm oil derived products, so somebody must be making big profits and we would prefer it if it was them.

*If you want to support our work, or if you’re doing something similar and you want to share your struggles with someone in the same boat, full access to OBSAM mappings is granted under request. We are a group of people addressing data-access inequalities, and supporting smallholder farmers, academic research, and non-commercial enterprises. You can think of this as positive action in land observations and policy-making.

The post Deforestation, Data Gaps, and Small Farmers: Mapping the True Costs of Mexico’s Palm Oil appeared first on Untold.

That silence has enveloped south Lebanon, and it is becoming yet another moral failure of an era defined by live streamed genocides, the death of international law, and pride in war crimes.

What is happening in south Lebanon is not, by any serious measure, a proportionate military campaign. It is the systematic hollowing out of a people from their ancestral land, and an eradication of life from that land itself.

To date, Israeli attacks on Lebanon since October 2023 have killed more than 7,000 people and injured more than 24,000, according to conservative numbers by the Lebanese Health Ministry, with the majority civilians. More than one million people – a fifth of the population – are displaced, while medical workers, journalists, and civilian infrastructure have been systematically targeted.

This mass displacement is not a byproduct of the war. It is its stated objective. Israeli officials explicitly stated in late March 2026 that they were demolishing south Lebanon houses and villages “in accordance with the model as Gaza,” and that 600,000 displaced people would not be allowed to return “until the safety of Israel’s northern residents is guaranteed.”

Despite a ceasefire agreed in November 2024, over 15,000 Israeli violations were recorded by UNIFIL, with Amnesty International documenting near-daily Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon throughout the 15 months period, until March 2, 2026, when Israel formally resumed full-scale war.

A Civilizational Wound

South Lebanon is not simply territory. It is among the most layered, historically dense regions in West Asia. The villages of Jabal Amel carry centuries of Islamic scholarship, poetry, and legal tradition. This is a land that has outlasted empires. Tyre (Sour) is one of the oldest continuously populated cities on earth, an ancient Phoenician port that gave the world its purple dye and the alphabet’s early spread. It has been sacked, rebuilt, and survived Alexander the Great, the Crusaders, and every empire that passed through. On October 23, 2024, Israeli airstrikes destroyed large swathes of the city, with one strike landing 50 metres from the ancient ruins, today the city is under evacuation orders by the Israeli army. 

Then there is Nabatieh,  the beating heart of Jabal Amel, and another city under evacuation orders. Its name is tied to the Nabataean traders who moved between Sidon and Damascus. For centuries it has connected the mountains to the coast, the inland villages to the sea, a crossroads where the whole of the south converged. 

At its centre, the Monday Market stretches back 500 years, a weekly ritual that survived Ottoman rule, civil war, and years of Israeli occupation. By late 2024, roughly 85 percent of the city’s buildings had been damaged or destroyed, along with some 300 businesses. Israel did not stop at the ceasefire, what remained was struck again when fighting resumed. A UNDP assessment found that “58 percent of agricultural assets in the Nabatieh district had been destroyed”, the highest proportion anywhere in the south. 

Nabatieh, like other towns and villages in the South, has been destroyed before, in 1978, in 1982, and in 2006. People rebuilt each time. 

What Israeli airstrikes and ground incursions are doing to this landscape is beyond the mass murder of people. It is destroying a world, systematically flattening architecture that predates the state of Israel itself, obliterating millennial olive groves and family homes, forcing the flight of entire communities whose roots run deeper than most nations. When heritage sites, mosques, and village squares are reduced to powder, something is lost that no reconstruction can return.

This is ethnic cleansing: the forced displacement of a population from its ancestral land through systematic terror.

Killing the Land Itself

But Israel’s war on Lebanon does not stop at human communities. It extends into the soil, the forests, the water, the animals, and the very biological substrate of the south. This is not collateral damage. It is a deliberate strategy, and it is documented.

During the 2024 Israeli war, Lebanon lost around 1,910 hectares of prime farmland, 47,000 olive trees, and roughly 1,200 hectares of oak forests, some of the last remaining native woodland in the region. Among the casualties was Harj al-Raheb, the Monk Forest, on the southern edge of Ayta ash-Shaab, a 16-hectare woodland of ecological and cultural richness that had endured for centuries. Satellite images now show white craters where green canopy once stood, alongside extensive bulldozing that stripped the terrain bare. Fire and phosphorus erased in months what has lived there for millennia.

The weapon of choice for much of this destruction is white phosphorus, a chemical substance that ignites on contact with oxygen, burns at up to 800 degrees Celsius, and releases thick toxic smoke. Human Rights Watch verified its use in at least 17 municipalities across south Lebanon. In at least five of those, the munitions were used in populated areas, landing on the roofs of residential buildings. The stated rationale is to burn down fields for visibility. Trees, in other words, are a threat. Forests must be destroyed. Nature itself is the enemy, just as the US military had done in Vietnam using napalm to burn life during their murderous imperial campaign against the country’s national liberation movement. 

More than 918 hectares were hit in 191 documented white phosphorus attacks from October 2023 until the 2024 ceasefire alone, according to data collected by Lebanese researcher Ahmad Baydoun and the environmental group Green Southerners. The long-term consequences remain unknown, but easy to predict. 

Even though Israel shelled Lebanon with white phosphorus repeatedly between 1982 and 2006 in its various wars of aggression, there have been no local studies on its long-term environmental impact, due to lack of resources, political inaction, or the difficulty in accessing samples. The poison persists in the soil; but the science to measure it has been mostly unused.

Then, as if to ensure that whatever survived the bombs and fire could not sustain life, came the herbicides. In early February 2026, Israeli planes sprayed toxic chemical substances across Lebanon’s southern border, covering approximately 8.5 square kilometres of agricultural land, forests, and livestock grazing areas with glyphosate at concentrations up to 50 times higher than standard agricultural use. Lebanon’s agriculture and environmental ministries found glyphosate levels 20 to 30 times above average in soil samples from the affected area. Glyphosate is banned in Lebanon and classified by the World Health Organization as potentially carcinogenic to humans.

The targeted area contained ancient oak, terebinth, and laurel forests that provide habitat for wildlife, alongside olive groves that produce oil and soap, tobacco plantations, and grazing land. As environmental researcher Hisham Younes, founder and president of Lebanese environmental group Green Southerners, puts it: “This spraying does not take place over an intact ecosystem or healthy soil. It occurs over land already severely stressed and degraded by the intensive use of white phosphorus, incendiary munitions, and the accumulation of heavy-metal residues from sustained bombardment.” 

The glyphosate is not the beginning of the destruction. It is the finishing blow, applied to a landscape already burned, bombed, and poisoned, ensuring that even if people are allowed to return, there is nothing left to return to. That life will no longer be possible, for humans, plants, and animals alike.

Lebanon’s agriculture minister described the spraying as “consistent with known practices along the border, where such substances are used to create vegetation-free zones, effectively resulting in systematic desertification.” Lebanon’s government-backed environmental report has gone further, formally accusing Israel of ecocide and documenting damage to forests, agricultural lands, marine ecosystems, water resources, and atmospheric quality, concluding that the scale and intentionality of the destruction “constitute what must be recognized as an act of ecocide.”

Israel’s war, as is the case with previous colonial wars across the world, is one on the land as a living system, on the biological heritage of a civilization, on the ecosystems that sustain human and non-human life alike, waged with chemical weapons, incendiary munitions, and bulldozers, in full view of the world.

The US War Machine

The south of Lebanon is home to communities that have lived in this region for over a thousand years. Entire villages have been evacuated by force and erased. Families have been killed in their homes, in their cars, on roads marked for civilian evacuation.

This is not incidental. Striking the predominantly Shia population of south Lebanon, and Lebanon in general is the goal. When a religious community becomes a military target in the eyes of the aggressor, and in the narratives of much of the regional and international media, we have crossed into the now too common space of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

None of this happens in a vacuum. The bombs falling on Lebanese villages are, in a direct and documented sense, US bombs. The aircraft delivering them are US aircraft. The intelligence enabling the targeting has, by multiple credible accounts, has US fingerprints.

The United States has not merely failed to restrain Israel, it has actively armed, funded, and provided diplomatic cover for a campaign that has drawn condemnation from human rights organizations, UN officials, and international legal bodies, both in Palestine and in Lebanon. Each time a resolution calling for accountability has come before international bodies, the US position has been to obstruct, or sanction international judges, rapporteurs, and any organization that dares speak the truth.

This makes the United States not a neutral broker or a concerned ally urging restraint, but a co-belligerent (together with various other Western and Arab countries). When cluster munitions, bunker-busting bombs, and incendiary weapons are supplied to a military deploying them in densely populated civilian areas and ecologically sensitive forests, the supplier shares responsibility for what follows, including the genocide, ethnic cleansing, and ecocide.

One Unhinged Logic

It is impossible to understand Lebanon in isolation from Gaza. What we are witnessing is a single operational and ideological logic playing out across two theaters. In Gaza, the world has watched the near-total destruction of a civilian population with hospitals bombed, aid blocked, famine used as a weapon, with mounting horror and mounting futility. The patterns have become undeniable: this is not warfare constrained by the laws of armed conflict. It is warfare that has discarded those laws entirely and proudly.

Lebanon is the expansion of that logic northward. The same targeting of civilian, medical, and vital infrastructure. The same displacement of hundreds of thousands. The same deliberate erasure of agricultural and ecological life. The same impunity. Having encountered no meaningful international consequences in Gaza, the methods were exported. Why wouldn’t they be? The world demonstrated, repeatedly, that there would be no price.

This is what unchecked military power looks like when it is also diplomatically shielded: it grows, and it finds new applications for the same tools, from bombs to bulldozers to crop-killing herbicides.

The Silence of States and People

What is most disorienting and perhaps most dangerous about this moment is not just the actions of Israel and the United States. It is the silence of everyone else.

For Gaza, Arab states have issued statements of concern that function as moral performance without consequence while they maintained trade and security cooperation as the genocide was ongoing. For Lebanon, it was mostly silence. Most Arab governments offered barely even the performance.

European governments, with a handful of exceptions, oscillated between performative concern and active complicity over Gaza, and extended that into near-total silence on Lebanon. 

Solidarity movements outside the region have fractured along political, sectarian, and national lines. The Shia identity of the majority of the victims has meant limited solidarity in the sectarian environment plaguing the Arab world. Hezbollah’s violent role in Syria has complicated it further. But these are not explanations. Across the globe, Palestine solidarity networks have been almost entirely absent in opposing the ethnic cleansing of south Lebanon. Very few, if any, have mobilized.

Apparently this is not an important story, not compared to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. International media has been comfortable looking away while an entire civilian ecosystem is chemically sterilized and an ancient people are expelled from their land.

The principle that civilians deserve protection from collective punishment does not carry an asterisk that reads “unless their politics or sectarian identity are disagreeable.” 

Beyond Lebanon.

We are watching, in real time, the collapse of the international legal order – with all its deficiencies – that was constructed after 1945 precisely to prevent this kind of impunity. The Geneva Conventions, the Responsibility to Protect, the International Criminal Court, these institutions exist because the world looked at the ruins of the Second World War and said: never again, and we will build structures to ensure it. Those structures are not being eroded. They are being actively demolished, with US and Western diplomatic tools serving as the wrecking ball.

If a nuclear-armed, Western-backed state can conduct what legal scholars describe as ethnic cleansing and genocide, with full documentation, in real time, broadcast on every platform, and face no meaningful consequences, then the message is clear: the rules do not apply to the powerful. They never did, perhaps. But the pretense that they did was itself a form of protection, however limited, for the vulnerable. That pretense is gone now.

For Lebanon specifically, the consequences may be generational. The displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from the south creates demographic and psychological wounds that will shape Lebanese politics for decades. A country already broken by corruption, economic collapse, and sectarian divisions is being further hollowed out. The question is not only whether south Lebanon can be liberated and rebuilt, but whether the Lebanese state, such as it is, can survive another existential blow.

What is being asked of the world is not complicated. It requires the application of consistent principles: that civilians may not be collectively punished, that ancient communities may not be erased from their land, that the laws of war apply to all parties equally, and that silence in the face of documented atrocity is itself a moral choice.

The south of Lebanon is burning. Its people are scattered and left alone to face a ruthless war machine. Its forests are ash. Its soil is poisoned.

The world knows. And the world, for the most part, has decided to look away.

History will not be kind to this moment. The question is whether we wait for history’s verdict, or whether some of us, states, institutions, ordinary people with a voice, choose to act before there is nothing left to save.

The post Bombed, Poisoned, and Ignored: Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of South Lebanon appeared first on Untold.

Since 2013, Albania has been governed by the Socialist Party under Rama, who secured a fourth consecutive term in 2025. His leadership has been marked by strong executive power and centralized decision-making. At the same time, civil society groups and international organizations have raised concerns about democratic standards, including pressure on independent media and political influence over state institutions. According to Transparency International, Albania continues to struggle with corruption, ranking 91st globally in 2025 and relatively low compared to other European countries.

Against the tide

More than two years have passed since the genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza began. This first live-streamed genocide has sparked widespread popular support for Gaza, particularly in Western European countries. While academic, cultural, and tourist engagements with Israel are increasingly viewed as ethically and morally corrupt, the Albanian government has pursued the opposite trajectory. Instead of distancing itself from Israel, Albania has deepened its ties. 

Albania is cultivating closer political and economic relations, signing new bilateral agreements, and aligning itself with Israeli interests across a wide spectrum, including defense, cybersecurity, culture, and finance. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Edi Rama, now in his fourth consecutive term, this trajectory appears undeterred and indifferent to both the immense civilian suffering in Gaza and the growing pro-Palestinian sentiment within Albania.

Against the backdrop of the International Court of Justice’s assessment that a plausible case for genocide exists in Gaza, many governments have grown increasingly cautious about the optics and ethics of (openly) deepening ties with Israel. Some have recalled ambassadors, suspended arms exports, or quietly shelved bilateral agreements. Others, such as Ireland, Norway, Spain, Canada, UK, Australia and France issued formal recognitions for the state of Palestine. 

Albania has charted a strikingly different course. Not only has it continued to expand cooperation with Israel across multiple domains, but it has done so openly and without hesitation. Moreover, it has treated these partnerships as achievements to be celebrated rather than associations with a state apparatus suspected on charges of genocide with its most senior leader warranted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. 

To understand Albania’s current relations with Israel and Palestine, it is helpful to consider the long history of Albanian foreign policy. As a small, economically weak country, Albania has often aligned itself with more powerful states to protect its interests.

Making sense of an unusually close relationship 

Albania gained independence in 1912 after five centuries of Ottoman rule. From 1925 to 1939, the country was ruled by President, later King, Zog. During this time, the country became an unexpected refuge for Jews. This period has even been described as “a golden era” for Jews in Albania. Beginning in 1933, Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany and Austria began arriving, many using Albania as a temporary stop on their way to the United States or Latin America. 

The Albanian Embassy in Berlin continued to issue visas until late 1938, and King Zog personally supported efforts to protect Jewish refugees. As a result, hundreds, possibly thousands, of Jews passed through Albania before 1939.

The situation changed when Italy invaded Albania in 1939. Emigration became difficult, leaving many Jews unable to leave the country. They remained relatively safe under Italian rule until 1943, when Nazi Germany took control. Even then, Albanian authorities refused the Germans’ demands for lists of Jews. Many Jews were sheltered by officials and ordinary citizens alike. 

Albania was the only European country that had more Jews after World War II than before it. After the war, about half of the Jewish population—around 300 people—left for Israel or other countries. The rest were not permitted to leave and remained in Albania until the communist regime collapsed in 1991. 

When Albania stood with Palestine

In 1949, Albania officially recognized Israel, partly because it agreed with the Soviet view that Israel could weaken British influence in West Asia. However, this did not lead to full diplomatic relations. From 1955 to 1967, Albania ignored Israel’s repeated attempts to establish diplomatic relations, though it maintained contact with the Israeli Communist Party (MAKI). 

Following events such as the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the Six-Day War in 1967, Albania adopted an anti-Israel stance. The country’s leaders portrayed Israel as a tool of imperialist Western powers, particularly the United States.

At the same time, Albania’s communist leader, Enver Hoxha, aligned the country with the Palestinian cause, viewing it as part of a broader anti-imperialist struggle. Albanian leaders viewed Palestine as resisting what they saw as an “imperialist proxy” in Israel. In turn, the PLO’s alliance with Albania was based on anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics. 

Relations between Albania and Palestinian groups began in 1967 and were influenced in part by shared ties with China. Albania eventually recognized Fatah, partly because of its international profile and its critical stance toward both the United States and the Soviet Union.

However, relations became strained after the 1972 Munich Olympic attack, which Albania condemned as detrimental to the Palestinian cause. As Fatah developed closer ties with the Soviet Union, Albania became suspicious of the Soviet influence within the Palestinian movement. Although the PLO continued to seek closer ties, including opening an office in Tirana, Albania remained cautious. 

In the early 1980s, relations depended largely on Albania’s broader West Asia strategy and the PLO’s relationship with the Soviet Union. Following Hoxha’s death in 1985, his successor, Ramiz Alia, introduced a more flexible foreign policy, enabling closer international engagement. During this period, a PLO embassy was finally established in Tirana.

A wall fallen, a map redrawn

A few years later, following the collapse of communism, Albania shifted its focus toward the West and established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1991. That same year, most of the remaining Jewish population moved to Israel. 

Under the new Democratic Party government, Albania initially reduced its ties with the PLO. However, after joining the Organization of the Islamic Conference, now known as the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation, in 1994, Albania renewed relations with Arab countries. In 1996, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat visited Albania, even as it continued to strengthen its relationship with Israel. In 1998, Albania opened its embassy in Tel Aviv.

Today, Albania recognizes the Palestinian Authority and supports a two-state solution. However, in 2011, Prime Minister Sali Berisha opposed Palestine’s bid for full UN membership, arguing that a negotiated agreement with Israel was preferable.

During his visit to Israel that same year, Berisha emphasized the historical connections between Albanians and Jews, and voiced his concerns about regional security, especially regarding Iran’s nuclear program. Israel opened its embassy in Tirana in 2012.

Deals, drones, and abstentions

Over the past two years, Albania and Israel have signed numerous agreements, covering sectors such as agriculture, education, energy, culture, tourism, defense, and drone technology. Trade between the two countries has also grown quickly. According to Albania’s Institute of Statistics, Israeli exports to Albania increased by over 150% between May 2023 and May 2024.

Israeli investment in Albania is expanding, especially in finance. In early 2025, reports indicated that investors associated with Israel’s One Zero Digital Bank were considering entering the Albanian banking market. Later that year, JET Bank, the country’s first fully digital bank, was established and is owned by British-Israeli businessman Idan Avishai. Other figures of Israeli origin in its leadership include Oliver Hemmer and Rami Solomon.

Meanwhile, Albania has come under scrutiny from human rights researchers. Reports tracking global fuel shipments to Israel during the war in Gaza list Albania as one of 11 countries supplying fuel. These exports are officially presented as commercial, not military. 

However, critics point out that fuel is essential for military operations, including for vehicles and aircraft. According to international humanitarian and criminal law, states and private actors are expected to ensure that their activities do not directly or indirectly contribute, to serious human rights violations, including genocide.

There has also been an increase in military cooperation between Albania and Israel. In late 2025, Albania signed a multimillion-euro arms deal with Israeli defense companies, including Elbit Systems. The agreement includes artillery systems, mortars, and tactical drones, as well as plans to develop domestic production in partnership with KAYO, Albania’s state-owned company. 

Since June 2023, the two countries have officially cooperated in cybersecurity and training, building on the assistance Israel offered Albania following the Iranian cyberattack in July 2022, which targeted Albanian government digital services and websites. 

On 12 May 2026 the Albania-Israel Summit was held in Tirana, for ‘strengthening cooperation in innovation, technology and cybersecurity’ and brought together 40 Israeli companies. Also in May 2026, Elbit registered its Albanian branch with the National Business Center, which will carry out the same activity as in Israel. Earlier in 2025, Elbit and KAYO agreed to reopen the Albanian aviation academy to train military and civilian pilots. 

Political ties have deepened as well. In November 2025, Albania established an “Israel Allies Caucus” in its parliament as part of an international network linked to the Israel Allies Foundation. The group is co-chaired by representatives from both major parties, reflecting broad political support for closer relations with Israel. Israeli sources described the initiative as an example of “faith-based diplomacy,” citing Albania’s history of protecting Jews during World War II as the basis for this relationship.

Between 2022 and 2023, Albania served as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. During this period, Albania’s position on Gaza received significant attention. In October and December of 2023, the UN General Assembly voted on resolutions calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. Albania abstained from voting on both resolutions. 

This pattern continued into 2024 and 2025. Albania abstained from several key votes, including those on ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, advancing Palestine’s status at the UN, and a French-Saudi initiative outlining a pathway to Palestinian statehood.

The price of belonging

Albania’s growing alignment with Israel is part of a broader foreign policy pattern. Since the fall of communism in 1991, Albania has positioned itself as a close ally of Western powers. The country has sought NATO membership, achieved in 2009, as well as European Union integration and strong ties with the United States. Closer relations with Israel fit within this strategy. Some analysts argue that strengthening ties with Israel is also a way of strengthening connections with Washington.

This approach was further illustrated in February 2026 when Albania joined four other countries in committing troops to an international security force for Gaza. The initiative is part of a new organization, the “Board of Peace,” which is backed by U.S. President Donald Trump. The organization focuses on post-war governance in Gaza. Its charter was signed at the World Economic Forum in Davos and was later tied to the UN Security Council Resolution 2803 as part of the Gaza Plan. However, its structure has raised questions. Trump holds a lifetime leadership role with veto power, and permanent membership requires a $1 billion contribution. Critics argue that this “pay-to-play” model is unusual for a peace initiative and reflects U.S. political and economic interests.

Prime Minister Rama’s policies highlight a long-standing feature of Albanian foreign policy: close alignment with powerful Western states, sometimes at the expense of independent decision-making or consistent application of international law. High-profile economic deals reinforce concerns about this approach. For example, Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Donald Trump, is leading a $1.4 billion luxury resort project on Sazan Island. Approved with limited public debate, the project aims to transform a former military base into a high-end tourism destination, according to reporting by The New York Times. Critics argue that such projects, coupled with Albania’s pro-Israel stance as a predominantly Muslim country, serve to whitewash and boost Israel’s international image while obscuring its domestic governance issues.

Rewarded for loyalty

In September 2024, Israeli President Isaac Herzog became the first Israeli head of state to visit Albania. He was warmly welcomed by Prime Minister Edi Rama and senior officials. The visit marked a clear step forward in strengthening ties between the two countries. Some analysts argue that such visits also serve Israel’s broader goal of achieving international legitimacy, particularly in regions like Southeast Europe. According to Rexhepi “[t]he Israeli president is travelling to Europe’s peripheries to exert legitimacy, showcasing at home that their leaders can still travel abroad.” Others note that engaging with a Muslim-majority country like Albania helps Israel project a more favorable image in the wider Muslim world.

Albania’s diplomatic positioning at the UN has coincided with closer political ties to Israel. In April 2025, Prime Minister Edi Rama received Israel’s Presidential Medal of Honor. He was praised for his “moral clarity” and steadfast support of Israel during what President Isaac Herzog called “our darkest hour.” This was a reference to the October 7 Hamas attack and the ensuing war. Rama has repeatedly condemned Hamas in public statements, at times comparing the group to the Nazis, and arguing that peace is not possible while Hamas remains active.

Cooperation has also expanded at the ministerial level. In October 2025, Albania’s foreign minister visited Israel, and both countries signed agreements to strengthen cooperation in diplomacy and culture. These agreements include training opportunities for young Albanian diplomats. The visit received significant publicity on social and mainstream media platforms, including stops at Holocaust memorial sites and locations associated with the October 2023 attacks. However, critics point out the absence of public statements addressing the high number of Palestinian civilians killed by Israel.

On the road to Brussels

For countries like Albania, whose EU membership bid remains contingent on goodwill from Brussels and Washington, endorsing, or at minimum not challenging Israeli actions serves as a form of political currency. Albania’s economic, political, and diplomatic moves point to a wider foreign policy strategy characterized by coloniality by proxy. 

This is most clearly manifested through Albania’s absurd participation in the deeply problematic “Board of Peace,” which reflects its willingness to engage in frameworks shaped by larger powers. It also reflects a deeper, often implicit expectation embedded in the architecture of European integration: that aspiring members on the periphery must demonstrate their worthiness through institutional reforms, economic benchmarks, and geopolitical alignment with core Western powers. 

Scholars such as Piro Rexhepi argue that countries in the Balkans, shaped by a history of external imperial domination — from the Ottoman Empire to European colonial interventions — often seek security and recognition by aligning with dominant powers and navigating contemporary global hierarchies. For countries on the political fringes of the “core West,” access to the Western-backed liberal order is also conditioned by silence, oblivion, or, at worst, complicity in the genocide in Gaza. 

In this context, Albania is not merely an eager partner of Israel. It is also performing the role that Western geopolitical expectations have prescribed for it. In this role, Palestinian suffering is not treated as a moral emergency demanding a response. Rather, it is treated as an inconvenient variable to be managed, minimized, and ultimately ignored on the road to Brussels.

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Episode 3: “Prove you Are Human”

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