TIRANA, May 23- Nature conservationists and local inhabitants joined by hundreds of kayakers from all over Europe protested in front of government offices in Tirana against the projected damming of the Vjosa river, considered by many as Europe’s last untamed waterway.
The protesters chose an original way to present their requests to the Prime Minister. A kayak turned into a petition, decorated with the signatures of over 1,000 people, urging the government to drop plans for the construction of hydropower plants along the river and turn it into a national park instead was meant as a gift for Prime Minister Edi Rama, but a police cordon prevented the activists from handing it over.
“This kayak petition is meant to give the Vjosa valley residents a voice. We don’t want dams on the Vjosa, but a national park. The Albanian government has ignored our petition, but we will be back,” said Slovenian athlete Rok Rozman, who had specifically travelled to Albania to join the free flowing Vjosa cause.
Days earlier, the activists kayaked in the Vjosa river as the last stop of the Balkan Rivers Tour, a campaign organized to raise awareness regarding threats posed to rivers from hydropower development.
Over the course of a month, kayakers from several European countries paddled 23 rivers from Slovenia to Albania to draw attention to the destruction of Balkan rivers as a result of the so-called ‘dam tsunami’.
However, despite previous protests the Albanian government is pressing ahead with plans for the construction of a hydropower plant in Poà§em, which is expected to be one of the country’s largest HPPs.
The Energy Ministry announced earlier this month that a joint venture between Turkey’s à‡inar-San Hafriyat and Ayen Enerji Anonim Sirketi has been awarded a 35-year concession to build and operate a 99.5 MW hydropower plant.
The Turkish consortium, which had been awarded a bonus for its unsolicited bid in mid-2015, was the only bidder in the tender on the Poà§em HPP held last March.
According to environmentalists, the project’s dam threatens to destroy the river’s unique ecosystem.
“It is a miracle that a river like this still exists – it constitutes a huge chance for Albania and all of Europe. To block this river would be a crime on nature and evidence of the incapacity of European nature protection,” said Ulrich Eichelmann from Riverwatch.
Vjosa is one of Europe’s last intact waterways. It flows freely from the Pindus Mountains in Greece to the Adriatic Sea over a course of 270 kilometers. Scientifically, the river remains largely unexplored.
