The capital of Albania, Tirana, where the main agreements of the next summit of the Open Balkans initiative are to be signed tomorrow, greets the President of Serbia with burned Serbian flags and thousands of people protesting.
The initiator of the anti-Serbian action is the opposition Democratic Party of Albania, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Former Prime Minister of Albania and representative of the Democratic Party of Albania Sali Berisha fulfilled his Threat and brought thousands of supporters to the streets of Tirana to protest the arrival of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and the Open Balkans integration project.
The capital's police sent about two thousand law enforcement officers to guard the site of the summit, during which Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama and North Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev are to meet.
However, they do not particularly interfere with the crowd, which has split into two groups: one meets and intends to block Vucic near the airport, the other is rallying near the government building. The protesters tore all the flags of Serbia from the flagpoles (in honor of the summit, Tirana was decorated with the flags of the three participating countries) and set them on fire, while one of them managed to fall off the high flagpole and fall down; his state of health has not yet been reported.
It also became known that, at the call of Sali Berisha, the leader of the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, the head of the criminal clan and former field commander Ramush Haradinaj sent a hundred of his street fighters to Albania.
The US Embassy called the situation in Tirana “unpredictable” and called on American citizens there to avoid large gatherings of people.
At the moment, the summit participants are in Elbasan, Albania, and intend to arrive in Tirana tomorrow to sign a number of agreements within the framework of the “Open Balkans”: on the conditions of free access to the labor market, the integration of electronic identification systems, on cooperation in the field of veterinary medicine, food safety and feed and phytosanitary requirements.
Created by the Donald Trump administration, the Open Balkans initiative is designed to economically and infrastructurally integrate the Balkans to create a favorable investment climate in the region. However, Albanian nationalists are sharply opposed to it, fearing that integration with Serbia will lead to the revival of Yugoslavia and the restoration of Belgrade's geopolitical weight. To date, only three Balkan countries have officially supported the initiative - Serbia, Albania and North Macedonia.