The Chairman of the Democratic Party, Sali Berisha, was this afternoon at a panel where the DP's program for the environment was unveiled.
During his speech, Berisha said that the environment today is dominated by mafia interests of government clientele.
"Today we are debating the program of those areas that are directly related to the life, health, and well-being of Albanian citizens.
In many aspects, of primary importance for human health, of primary importance for the environment, for forests, for pastures, for waters.
What stands out today in these 12 years, we can say that it is a major reversal. I don't want to use terms, but it is an ignorance, it is an invasion by the mafia of these fields.
The environment, to which human health is directly related, is more abandoned, more threatened than ever before in history.
The environment today is completely dominated, manipulated, and damaged by the completely mafia-like interests of the government clientele.
Albania, which under certain circumstances could have the most enviable environments in Europe, has its capital, one of the 10-12 most polluted cities on the planet.
Without any kind of monitoring, without any kind of control, with an unstoppable concretization of nothing, with an endless deception, these officials claim to have planted 1 million trees, at a time when they have cut down hundreds of thousands of them. This atrocity, this extraordinary pollution in our cities, this is the same in our waters.
Last summer we had almost no blue flags in our seas and lakes.
Although we, for the sake of truth, built 11 wastewater treatment plants and were actually moving towards completely blocking the discharge of wastewater into the sea, corruption has shut them down. Municipalities are not putting them into operation. They are not paying for the energy to operate them.
And they talk about pearls, they talk about the Maldives, they talk about all of this at a time when they are the most polluted coasts in Europe. They are more polluted because they have the plant built, but they turn it off because the municipalities don't want to pay for the electricity.
Extraordinary potential exists in the forests, pastures, hills, mountains, and Alps of Albania. Everything is in free fall. Almost every type of subsidy for afforestation, fruit growing, and medicinal plants was stopped. Hunting was also banned, lacking the most minimal concepts of balance.
The areas of highest biodiversity were attacked. The law was amended to open the doors to the clutches of the construction mafia in these areas. There is nothing protected anymore. Diseases from pollution are increasing rapidly, especially malignant diseases. Aromatic and essential oil plants, medicinal plants, which are a great wealth in all four corners of the country, from Çajup to Jezerce and the border with Plav, but they were brought to the ground by drugs.
I'm not just talking about cannabis plantations, I'm talking about narcoeuro. They don't export anymore. With the 30 or so percent drop in the euro, they no longer have any profit. And the government, instead of urgently creating a fund to support these exports, all these enterprises that employed thousands of residents in the poorest areas, is playing catch-up and giving traffickers access to build towers, to turn drug money into concrete.
The forests, Professor Hasani said, burned 40 thousand hectares in one year. They took 10 million, subscribed to satellite because they were supposed to see the fires, because they couldn't see them without satellite. But the fires last year were wilder than ever because there were no means to extinguish them.
"So, to tell the truth, the environment, forests and pastures constitute a national emergency," he said.