Montenegrin police arrested today Naim Prelvukaj, who has been leading the fight against a new waste collector site near the village of Martinaj, in Plava municipality.
It has been a year now that Prevlukaj is facing mounting pressures from the Montenegrin police, which is assisting the municipality with its plan for an open-air waste disposal site, which would be located only 300 meters (less than 1,000 feet) from homes of the local ethnic-Albanians and a little more than 100 meters from the catchment area and drinking water supplies.
Furthermore, this waste disposal site would be situated in Kodra Jerina (Jerina Hill) covering the remains of the ancient city of the Illyrian Empress Jerina.
Naim Prevlukaj is the coordinator of the Council for the Prevention of the Waste Site, an organization of citizens, who are fighting the project and have asked for the help of the European Environmental Bureau in Brussels.
The authorities have chosen to ignore the resistance and have resorted to intimidation, local reports from the terrain tell us.
This is not the first time that Prelvukaj stands up to the authorities denouncing the complete lack of sensitivity towards local ethnic Albanians. He has been a dedicated human rights activist since the 80s.
Montenegro has applied to become a member of NATO and has the ambition to join the European Union too, however, it continues to put extreme pressure on the daily lives of many in small Albanian minority, which has been abandoning en-masse the lands where their ancestors have lived for centuries. While the laws have changed to reflect those of the EU member countries, local policies and decisions have only worsened the lives of ethnic Albanians.
This is also not the first time that Prelvukaj is arrested by the police. It happened also last year in May and in November, prompting the public support of Jevrem Brković, a Montenegrin writer, historian and cultural activist./illyriapress/- Oculus News