All too often, ordinary Albanians found `the State "disappeared" when there was trouble'
Life here in Albania can be ridiculous at the best of times, but even those inured to its absurdities were surprised at the revelation that the National Treasury had been robbed of almost $3 million in gold coins, that the heist took place three years ago, and that for all that time the police, who stood guard, had failed to notice the loss.
After five months of denials, the government admitted at the beginning of the month that the gold was gone, but said it had happened while the opposition was in power. The opposition strenuously denied the charge, saying it had been stolen by the government, which it insisted was now staging a "phoney" investigation.
Welcome to Albania, the wild card of Europe. On Skenderbeg Square, the centre of the capital, Tirana, the locals stand in groups discussing the latest ignominy. Old men on upturned milk crates offer a shoe-shine service, others have ancient-looking weighing scales where you can weigh yourself for 20 pence. They sit beside open manholes or mounds of fetid rubbish that are tipping off the pavement onto roads with crater-like potholes.
To step from the pavement and attempt to cross the road is to take a great risk. Albanians drive like lunatics, using the horn with such abandon as to render it meaningless. The only comfort about the prospect of being knocked down is that it is likely to be by a Mercedes or BMW. Albania may be the poorest country in Europe but you wouldn't know it from its vehicles, the majority of them courtesy of German and Italian motorists, from whom they were stolen. To buy an almost new car would set you back US$5,000. It used to be cheaper but the import duties at the border have pushed the price up. Nonetheless, in the space of one minute, 27 Mercedes zoom past the majestic statue of the national hero, Skenderbeg.
Driving among the stolen limos are white four-wheel drives, representing what appears to be every non-governmental organisation on the planet. To understand Albania, you have to understand its past. On one side of the square, there is a large plinth with a set of steps leading up to it. The top of it stands empty. It used to be home to a large statue of Enver Hoxha who, for almost five decades, oversaw one of the most cruel and absolutist communist dictatorships. Under Hoxha, virtually all forms of private property were eliminated and the citizens were virtually cut off from outside influences. Nobody, bar a few party officials, drove (which explains the nation's poor driving skills). To be caught watching Italian television or listening to the BBC World Service would mean at least 10 years in prison. If you managed to escape the country, your family would all be imprisoned.
A recently released movie, Colonel Bunker, tells the story of the man who designed the ugly concrete bunkers that litter the pretty Albanian countryside. They look like small space pods, with a ledge on one side to look out. Some are big enough to house a family - and in some cases they do. Hoxha ordered their construction for the day when Albania would need to repel invaders (although it was never clear who they would be). The movie tells of how the man who designed them was ordered to stay inside the prototype while they "tested" his creation. Luckily, it was as good as he claimed. The man wrote to Hoxha saying he wondered at the necessity of building them, considering that each cost the same as an apartment. For his trouble, he was jailed for 15 years. The plinth in Skenderbeg Square has remained statueless since Hoxha was pulled down after the fall of his regime in 1990, but it is an indication of how bad things are today in Albania that there are many who look back with nostalgia - because, ironically, they felt far safer back then.
When Albania emerged from communism, it was the poorest, most backward and isolated country in Europe. Rapid progress was made - until it was convulsed by the collapse of pyramid schemes in 1996 and 1997. At their peak, the nominal value of the pyramid schemes' liabilities amounted to almost half of the country's GDP, with about two-thirds of the population having invested in them. According to one Tirana resident, the capital smelled like a slaughterhouse as people rushed to kill their animals and invest the proceeds.
After the crisis, the country descended into anarchy with uncontained rioting and a near civil war in which about 2,000 people were killed and many buildings were looted and destroyed: inevitably, the government collapsed. The already suffering population was traumatised, and Albania now seems like a country without hope. Each day, citizens queue at embassies hoping for a visa to get out. Leaving Albania, however, is a difficult business - it is ironic that for 50 years Albanians were forbidden to travel, and now that they are free to go but nobody wants to let them in. Most prized is the US green card. If the US government announced in the morning that all Albanians were welcome, it would be a case of last one out turn off the light.
Twenty-six-year-old Alma seems to be one of the very few who wishes to stay but feels she has to go. Her family sold their house to invest in the pyramid schemes and lost all their money: "I have no choice but to try to get out." Like so many others, all Alma's family has left now is the sense of family, the clan. Most of the 500,000 Kosovans who crossed the border to seek refuge in Albania last year have got out too - returning home to their own troubles. "Who would want to stay here?" asks Mirela, a middle-aged Tiranan woman whose two children now live in the US, but she adds: "It was important for us to be the ones giving help for a change and to receive recognition for that from foreigners." Indeed, despite their impoverishment (the average wage is about $90 a month) Albanians are exceptionally hospitable people. Foreign visitors still have a cachet and people are terrified they will have a bad experience. "Watch your handbag, don't get into a taxi," are constant warning refrains.
They point in despair to their brokendown, battered and bruised country and speak of how there is no sense of community or awareness of the duties of being a citizen. Everyone assumes that everyone else is corrupt, the only disagreement is about how corrupt. The newspapers are filled with politicians accusing each other of dodgy dealings, nepotism and gross corruption. The citizens, meanwhile, have no doubt there was some political involvement in the robbery of the Treasury. Albanian politics is a bear pit. According to one diplomat, it is a political system with "no left and no right, no basic groupings, no consensus on minimum principles concerning a functioning democracy, no adversaries, only enemies and the principal aim is to destroy the enemy. This country is fascinating for the best and worst reasons."
Albanians are known for having a fondness for arms. Nobody quite knows how, but during the 1997 disturbance some 600,000 weapons from the state armouries were distributed to the population, (the police had simply joined the melee,) arming practically all households. "On too many occasions, as far as ordinary Albanians are concerned, the State `disappeared' when there was trouble - , during the second World War, the regime of King Zog and in 1997. It is a pragmatic thing and not that we love arms," explains Prof Neritan Ceka, chairman of the Parliamentary Commission for Public Order. Ceka estimates that 400,000 of those arms have been collected but others, on the ground, see this as a gross overestimation.
Each month, according to Ceka, 45 people are killed in Albania - although the number is falling. A degree of order has certainly been restored but a continuing sense of lawlessness keeps the population unnerved. "Three days ago, a man of 70 shot dead his neighbour of the same age in a dispute over a fence," says Ceka. "We have done a lot of work with improving the police in recent years but the justice system is still very corrupt and if someone kills someone they could pay $5,000 and get off. Then the other family will get involved in a vendetta to get justice themselves." Certainly the vendetta still thrives outside Tirana, where the countryside is beautiful, lush, green, dominated in the north by mountains: southerners reckon their northern counterparts are a breed unto themselves.
Ermira, who recently travelled north as part of her work for an NGO, describes it as a frightening experience: "They are crazy. I met a nun and she told me that they are wild like the mountains, and that they concentrate their efforts on the children to try to make some difference." In some remote villages, the people are given marijuana seeds by the Albanian mafia and paid to cultivate them. In April, an 80-year-old man questioned by police said he believed they were tobacco plants.
Life in the north is governed by the kanun, the ancient written social law outlining most aspects of social behaviour, including the treatment of guests. However, a blood feud can be sparked by the simplest thing. In the recent past, even to lift the lid from a cooking pot in someone else's house was seen as a serious dishonour. This feudalism was suppressed during Hoxha's time but has re-emerged.
Life may be a little more sophisticated in the south but in places it is equally lawless. In the coastal city of Vlora, 50 people were killed in feuds between rival groups in over two months last year. Everywhere, people are poor. A measure of their desperation is shown in an arrangement between some parents and the mafia where children from the south-eastern Korca region are "rented out" and taken to Greece to beg at traffic lights. Parents are paid a percentage of the takings. What hope for Albania? It is easy to feel hopeless, as so many Albanians do. Tirana-based diplomats point out that a decade is a short time for the country to recover from its most recent history, but right now heightened political tensions between the ruling Socialists and the opposition Democrats and the prospect of local elections in the autumn are making many nervous. Few want a repeat of 1997.
"As a friend of mine describes it, we have to be tragically optimistic. We are punished to hope," explains Edi Rama, the Albanian Minister for Culture. "We need a government able to harness all the energy that Albanians have and I think this government can do that. If you see Albania from very near you have every reason to be pessimistic but if you have a certain distance and can see how things have changed since 1990, you have reasons to be optimistic, tragically optimistic."
They had almost reached the other side when their speed-boat smashed into a police vessel pursuing them. The 30 illegal immigrants attempting to get from Albania to the southern Italian shoreline were thrown from the boat into the Adriatic Sea. Three died, one woman miscarried and a number were hospitalised. Police reported that two packages of marijuana were plucked from the water, having floated from the vessel.
It's not an unusual story. This boat was just one of a number making the crossing most nights to the southern Italian coast carrying their human cargo, known as clandestini. Some of the passengers are Albanian, while others have travelled for up to a month from as far as Iraq, Kurdistan and China. They walk by night, sleep rough by day, travelling through Bulgaria, Greece and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Montenegro. It is a journey that is exhausting, expensive and fraught with danger.
On the Albanian end, an entire industry has built up around smuggling such people. The coastal communities by the cities of Durres and Vlora have become dependent on it. After reaching the coast, the groups are accommodated in local houses or old factories. At night, they are collected and taken to the shoreline where they are ferried in inflatable boats on a journey that takes between two and three hours.
Earlier this year a crackdown began, mainly in response to the Albanian government's requests for money from Brussels. The EU's response was to point towards the illegal trafficking and direct that it stop. The traffickers responded to the crackdown by diverting operations to Greece, ending the nightly arrivals at the Italian port of Bari. However, according to locals "normal business" is resuming.
A law has been passed in Albania allowing for the seizure of boats with powerful engines. According to Franco Papi of the Italian Guardia di Finanza, which has teams based in Albania to help stop the smuggling, there have been recent successes - 63 boats have been seized, and only 100 people a week are getting through now, compared to 100 a day last year, he says. However, he describes as "a bit problematic" that while the "skafisti" (the name given to people who organise the smuggling) are arrested, the immigrants often simply turn around and try again. There is only one detention centre in Albania, which holds 120 people. Those who make it across either stay in Italy or travel on to Northern Europe, a handful even ending up in Ireland. According to one "skafisti", who is in partnership in a boat with four others, the trafficking is continuing. Although the interruptions are becoming more frequent, when the police want to show force they usually warn them in advance. Sometimes, he says, smugglers have no choice but to put people overboard when they are being pursued by police vessels.
The Albanian mafia, underestimated in the past, is a fully fledged criminal organisation controlling prostitution, illegal immigration and a large slice of the drug trade, according to the Italians. Rather than cause conflict with the Italian mafia, they have sought to co-operate and capitalise on the fortune to be made ferrying people across the Adriatic.
According to some estimates, almost 60,000 people made the journey last year, earning the organisers £28-£55 million. The mafia's move into the lucrative area of prostitution has happened over the past few years - they lure, or in some cases kidnap, young girls and force them to work in Italy. As well as carrying people, the boats also bring drugs and are a crucial link in the trafficking of arms and explosives from the Balkans.