Inside Jared Kushner’s Albanian adventure

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1:00at Kohler.com Hello and welcome back to the Americano Show. My name is Freddie Gray. I am the deputy editor of The Spectator and the US editor. And I'm pleased to tell you that this is the 10th year of the Americano podcast. And I think it's fair to say it's been a fairly fascinating time in American politics, life and culture. And that's what we talk about every episode on this podcast. So please keep listening and provide as much feedback as you like. Today I am delighted to be joined by Ian Thompson, who is a long-standing spectator contributor and a great writer. And he has written a brilliant piece about Albania, Jared Kushner, and the Flamingo Revolution. Ian, for listeners and viewers that haven't already read your piece,

2:04can you give a little outline about what the Flamingo Revolution is and the extent to which it relates to Jared Kushner, who is of course Donald Trump's son-in-law, the husband of Ivanka Trump? Yes. So the Flamingo Revolution takes his name from the protected wildlife, which includes Flamingos, on the coast of protected land, which Kushner has bought for his real estate portfolio. The Flamingo Revolution is now in its 100th day. And just yesterday, the protesters met with violent clashes in the police. So I think actually things are hotting up again in Albania. Really, my impression with this whole story is that Kushner's real estate interest in Albania has sort of meant that the Trump Kushner sort of show has kind of come to the end of the road in some ways in Albania. This tiny, Balkan outpost has become a flashpoint in issues to do with sovereignty and the environment in quite an extraordinary way.

3:05And to what extent is, I mean, from reading your piece, it seems like a direct response to Kushner, but you do also say that it's about political corruption in Albania more broadly, which is obviously a massive issue. To what extent is the Flamingo Revolution a direct response to Jared Kushner's business interest there? And to what extent is it more of a just a protest about the political class in Albania? Yes, I mean, I think that the riots have now become as much a protest against Kushner's property interests as they have against Albania's socialist Prime Minister, Eddie Rana, who actually is a close associate of Kushner's. And really the riots, I think, the protests are as much to do with the lack of transparency as it's perceived in government's dealings with Kushner. The property dealings were only made public to the Albanian people. Once Kushner had published his architectural renderings

4:05via social media a couple of years ago. So until that point, the Albanian people were just kept in the dark about the deals and they're very understanding, annoyed about this, aggrieved. And you spoke to Rana over the phone for your piece, didn't you? Yes, I would have liked to spoke to him over the phone. At the moment, he is not speaking to Western journalists anymore. I think partly because of the catastrophic interview he conducted with CNN and another catastrophic interview with the UK Channel 4 news, where he came across as extremely aggressive. But what he did instead was to answer my written questions by email. And he answered them well enough, I think. Well, I think the most interesting part, and again, I can't emphasize enough how much I think people should have read your piece because it's so good. It's so interesting. I think what you get into very well is the nature of property and the tension over properties that exist in post-colonist Albania.

5:07You talk about the fact that there is this huge fight in Albania over property, the nature of property who actually owns what, which is of course a very fundamental question in any country, in any state. And Kushner has just sort of come along, and it seems struck up a deal with this man called Shehu, again, to give me a fun pronouncing him wrong. Maybe anybody could have tried. Who is suspicious? He's a suspicious figure. He's been accused of lots of things. He's denied everything we should say. But he certainly has a very colorful past. And he's sold a large plot of land to Kushner. And there's a big debate in Albania about whether that land was actually his to sell. Is that their summation of what's happened? Yes. As I wrote in the article, this Shehu character is a drug trafficker and is known to be as such. And he fled to Miami after a gunfight in his uncle's bar

6:09in Albania. And it's alleged that Shehu used fraudulent land records that dated back to the times of the Ottoman Empire to claim great tracts of coastal property for himself, which he then went on to sell to Kushner. And you're absolutely right. There's no issue that's more contentious in post-Communist Albania than land. With the collapse of communism in the early 90s, the old cooperatives and collectivized land often didn't devolve to its ancestral owners. And there were fearsome squabbles over who owned what. And where the state failed to regulate the boundaries of land, this thing in Albania called the Canun, which is a sort of oral code, which was codified in the 15th century, that conducts things like marriages, land boundaries, or came into force. And there were a lot of very bloody sort of revenge feuds,

7:10which they call an Albanian Jack Maria, revenge killings. And as a result of these lands squabbles over land, and my impression is that Kushner sort of unaware has a complete ignorance of Albanian history, has got himself into rather deep water, with these difficult issues over land, which can become really very, very violent in the Balkans. And in that particular comparison might be me, as an American developer in the 1980s, I buy large parts of Sicily thinking that they're mine. And I don't understand that there is a sort of oner code bound up within the land itself, and that people will start getting killed quite quickly as a result, because that has actually already been happening, hasn't it? Yes, I mean, that's a very good comparison. And Albania is only 50 miles off the Italian shores. And it's not a coincidence, perhaps, that one of the great real estate interests of Kushner's is this island called Sazan, which you can see from southern Italy on a clear day.

8:11You can see the lights winking on this island, which was formerly under Enverhojja, the Communist leader, sort of out of bounds, military, a resort for military officials who was highly hush-hush. Yeah. And you know, Ivanka Trump visited this island in 2021, I think it was, and claimed to have walked to the peak barefoot. And I spoke to an Albanian captain, retired naval captain, who was stationed on the island in the 70s, and he said he thought that she'd got the wrong island, because you know, it's full of unexploded ordnance and viper's, and you simply can't walk anywhere in bare feet there, as I found out myself, because I visited the island. I found that a very funny part of your piece. It was this idea of Sazan as this sort of amazing luxury island that's going to be developed. And it's actually a kind of military base, isn't it? That is still, or has up until quite recently, been used by NATO for various exercises. And so it's covered in sort of shells and military detritus,

9:13and then these old communist faults. And yet the Kushner ambition is to turn it into a kind of paradise for holiday makers. Yeah, I mean, in a way, good luck to him, because there are 36,000 pillboxes and bunkers on the island, which Enverhojja and his paranoid mind had built to guard against the likelihood of a NATO invasion. And I don't know where the Kushner's plans is to convert these bunkers into sort of wine cellars or what, but it really is a very strange haunting kind of place that is just full, as you said, of spent ornament and cartridge shells, viper's. The guide I went with banged the walls of the buildings with his water bottle before we entered, because he said the viper's consensus of vibrations, so they would have left before we went in. But it is all kind of pretty toxic environment, I have to say. And what do you think might happen? First of all, with Tzazan Island,

10:14and then with this other, the coastal resort, that Kushner has bought, do you expect it will end up as a sort of ghost project that will be completely forgetting about by affinity partners, which is Kushner's fund and the Cotari backers behind it? Or do you think they will plow on and they will turn it into some sort of ghastly, raviere? I think so. I think it probably will happen. So I don't know about Tzazan. That really seems stretched too far, but I think that the coastal area along Zvenetch and Insila is already under development. And the Prime Minister of Albania, Eddie Rammer, has vowed to see it through to completion in spite of all the protests. So my feeling is that the Tzazan project probably won't go ahead, but the Zvenetch one almost certainly will. So Albania will become much more like Greece or Italy, this sort of resort full of hotels, sea pitch and yacht marinas, and why have you? Yes. Well, an airport is under construction,

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12:17on gold price appreciation. They've become monetary metals clients to accumulate more ounces of gold. Learn how to earn yield on gold paid in gold at monetaryhyphenmetals.com forward slash Americano. Yes, there's an airport in a place called Vlore, which is near Vlore Resort, which is a sort of rather high-end Albanian Riviera. And the airport there has construction as ground to a halt because of fights between the shareholders. But that too has been built on protected territories. So when I visited, it was a very strange surrealist landscape of goat herders and errant mules and unyote oxen trotting all over this sort of salt-dune landscape, like something out of a science fiction by the British writer, J.G. Ballard, a very strange abandoned place

13:19with an airport in the middle of it, all protected territories. So the Albanians are very cross about that as well. Yes, and a magnesium blue sky, under a magnesium blue sky as I remember you put it. That's right, yes, all of that. Very, very unforgettable landscape, but whether it'll ever open as an airport is another matter. And it's particularly interesting for me as a Brit, really about it, because we know about Albania and we're a little bit in Britain, because in the last five, 10 years we've had quite a large influx of immigration from Albania. And it's very connected to criminal activity. There's a large number of Albanians in British jails. This is not to cost dispersions on Albanians at all. They do happen to have a large community of criminals, shall we say. And I think what's interesting about to me is that Albania is now a bit like Poland was, maybe in terms of investment and property prices going up, it's becoming an attractive tourist destination, so on. It could be about sort of enter the international arena

14:23as a nation state, but it does have this history of, as discussed, these ancient criminal codes, this very old-fashioned Ottoman way of doing things. Yes, I mean, Albania only came into existence after 1912 with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. And there were lots of contenders for the Albanian crown. One of them was the Scottish shipping magnate, Lord Inchcake, who gave the embarrassed reply, where is Albania? And of course, then there was King Zog, who was famously ousted by Mussolini, when Mussolini invaded in the 30s. But I think Albania is, well, I don't think I mean, I know Albania is now the fastest growing tourist destination in Europe. And so this serious money to be made out of real estate. And for the British people, it's become very much, I think, a destination particularly among young British people

15:23for cheap sort of Mediterranean beach holidays in the south and in the north for these extraordinary walking holidays, you can go on through the highlands of Albania. And I suppose the Trump connection to bring back to, this is supposed to be the Americano podcast, the Trump connection is, do you remember last year, Trump talked about the Riviera of the Middle East, Gaza being the Riviera of the Middle East. And it's thought that he said that after talking to Jared Kushner, who clearly has big plans for places. And there is obviously a Trump Kushner kind of understanding of the world as long as you build nice, resourcey type places where people can spend lots of money. Then the world will improve as a result. And it's the same thing in Albania, is it not? I think so. And Eddie Rama, the Albanian Prime Minister, is rather close to Netanyahu. And there is an aspect of the Flamingo revolution, which is anti-Semitic. It's a tiny part of it.

16:23But I think that that is something to be deplored. Kushner being himself, Jewish, of course. So there's that aspect of it. And it's particularly grievous for a country like Albania, which is the only country in Europe whose Jewish population actually grew under the German occupation rather than diminished. Because the Albanians, apart of this code, I mentioned the Kanun, is very hot on the importance of welcoming strangers into your home and giving them shelter. So Jewish people were sheltered by the Albanian people, not because they were Jewish, but because they were refugees under threat. So under the German occupation of Albania, the Jewish community, a paradoxically increased because the Albanians were giving shelter, so successfully, to the Jewish people there. So the aspect of the Flamingo revolution, which has an anti-Semitic edge to it, I'm not saying it's by any means all of the movement, but it is a part of it. It does connect to the Gaza, Trump, Tanyaahu,

17:25Eddie Rama, Axis, slightly. Yes. And I wonder, when you talk about that welcoming sort of creed among Albanians, is that a pre-Christian thing? Is that we hear a lot of talk with the Odyssey about Zeno? There's a Greek idea of always welcoming strangers. Is that a pre-Christian thing? And where does religion play into the way Albania looks at the world? I suspect it is pre-Christian. I've just finished reading a book by the Albanian novelist Ishmael Kadale, called The File on Age, where two Irishmen strike off into the Albanian Highlands, convinced that Homer's the Odyssey had its roots in Albanian folk legends. There is a school of thought that really believes this. There are a lot of Greek ruins in Albania. The whole city near one of the areas that Kushner wants to develop called Apalonia, which is full of Greek ruins, an amphitheatre is more happy. But this custom, I think, of welcoming people into your homes is beyond any religion. Religion doesn't really play a huge part in Albania.

18:26It's majority Muslim. It's more Catholic influx. And in Vloris, city, a tiny Jewish community. But I think that these customs of hospitality are lost in the midst of pre-autumn antiquity. They're very, very ancient. And Albania is the oldest settled European people in the world, the Illyrians, these to be called. Yes. And in 12th-night, there's a line about Illyria. It's very, very ancient. And their language is extremely old. Well, as I say, if anybody wants to know about this, I really can't stress enough how much they should read in brilliant piece, which is about Trump world clashing with this extremely old world. And it's very beautifully written, and it's very interesting. And we're very proud to put it on art covers. So thank you very much Ian, and thank you for coming onto this podcast. Not at all. Thank you. That's all for this episode of The Americano Show. I hope you enjoyed listening. I would like to solicit your feedback.

19:28So please contact us at americanoatspecta.co.uk. As frequently as you like. Please keep the comments as polite as possible. But I don't mind criticism. I'll leave this not much. Thank you to my brilliant production team. Keep listening and keep on trucking. Hi, this is Brooke Tavard from Naked Beauty.

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