PEACE IN KOSOVO REVEALS THE ABSENCE OF PEACE IN ALBANIA

AIM TIRANA, July 9, 1999

It may well seem paradoxical that the Albanians of Kosovo, who had for 51 long years dreamed of having open borders with Albania and crossing them freely, and who achieved it with the establishment of peace and the introduction of NATO troops in Kosovo, have now begun to feel the need of police crossing points on precisely that border. Not to protect them from the Serbs, but from robbers and criminals coming from Albania. The return of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Albania to Kosovo is being accompanied by a rising wave of crime, as often happens in post-war confusion. The complete absence of any police control or state structure in Kosovo, but also the lack of state institutions in the northern part of Albania, has given rise to a situation very favourable for the large-scale activities of criminals based in Albania. According to some statistics, 80 percent of the criminals and robbers arrested by KFOR forces over three weeks since the entry of NATO forces in Kosovo are of Albanian origin. As in the case of all war statistics, it cannot claim to be complete, but still it throws some light on certain phenomena. Indeed, as soon as they are arrested by KFOR forces, many criminals, who have crossed the border from Albania, are all too ready to admit it, in the hope of being sent back to Albania, where they can elude the law more easily. After arresting about 60 criminals, most of them declaring themselves Albanian citizens, the German KFOR forces found that none of them possessed identification documents. Slowly but surely crime is creating problems which can not fail to have consequences for the relations between the Albanians of Albania and those of Kosovo. Now in Kosovo the same charges are being heard against the Albanians of Albania as in the beginning of the nineties used to be levelled against those of Kosovo, when the impoverished post-communist ¾mother¾ country was flooded by a multitude of Kosovars. All varieties of criminal activity, ranging from masked robbery, to car stealing, prostitution, drug traffic and other illicit activities, are on the rise concomitantly with the return of the refugees to their homes. As any other country, Kosovo experienced those activities even before, but what is new now is that criminals are coming from Albania. Gangs from North Albania have not hesitated to attack and rob columns of refugees returning to their homes as well as abandoned homes in the villages and towns across the border. The UCK-appointed prefect of Prizren, Kadri Kryeziu, declared for the Albanian press that ¾crime coming from Albania is a cause of great concern¾ and called on the Albanian police to take measures to prevent ¾the influx of crime to Kosovo¾. Along with the requests of KFOR forces, Kosovo officials are also demanding the establishment of border crossing points. The trail of crime towards Kosovo passes through North Albania. The Majko Government, which in the course of the Kosovo crisis gained much political capital among the Albanians of both Albania and Kosovo, is helpless and unable to take any measure to prevent the spillover of crime, for it is just as impotent within Albania, especially in its northern part. According to the opposition in Tirana, the crime situation in Albania is more alarming than in Kosovo itself and that since the day the NATO troops entered Kosovo there have been 50-60 percent more murders in Albania than in Kosovo. For more than two years now North Albania lies outside government control, and any foreigner visiting Tropoja or Kukes can easily see that there is no such thing as a state there. However, Majko¾s Left-wing coalition government is no less concerned about the situation in the southern part of the country, where the Socialist Party, which heads the coalition, is supposed to enjoy its strongest political support. It is significant that on June 29 the socialists celebrated the biennial of their electoral victory in Vlora, which, as is known, is a town that belongs to the Albanian State only officially, having been turned into a Kalashnikov-ruled mini- state. It is hard to find a single town in Albania of which one can surely say that the police and the government have the situation under control. Last week, four major incidents with spectacular murders took place in four Albanian towns: Shkodra, Vlora, Tirana and Durres, in broad daylight, which convinced the citizens, if need be, that the State does not exist. The more so as the protagonists of these crimes were members of notorious gangs the Tirana tribunal had released ¾for lack of evidence¾ only some weeks before. A national conference on the struggle against organised crime, held in Tirana in the beginning of July, revealed scandalous figures of crime activities in various fields, ranging from 30,000 prostitutes and one thousand disappeared children to three thousand barbarously exploited teenagers, large-scale smuggling and corruption in customs offices. The extension of criminal activities seems so large that it has aroused even NATO¾s concern, which, as Prime Minister Majko has had to admit on 11 June this year, had informed him that Mafia structures were active in Albanian customs offices. The Tirana Government, which signed up for the Pact of Stability and claimed to assume a primary role in the plans of the international community for the reconstruction of South-eastern Europe, is now understanding that the fight for the establishment of order may be more difficult than the war in Kosovo. In his declaration of July 3rd, Carlos Elbirt, chief of the World Bank Office in Albania, said that but for lack of stability in Albania one billion dollars would have been invested in various projects. The absence of order and stability may cost Albania even more dearly now if the so-called Marshall Plan for South-eastern Europe side-steps it. In many Albanian circles precisely the lack of public order is being given as an explanation for the Rio de Janeiro 29 June Summit of the European Union deciding that the centre of the European Union for the co-ordination of work for the re-construction of Kosovo in the context of the Pact of Stability should be Thesaloniki of Greece, not Tirana. Two weeks before this decision was taken the OSCE closed its office at Tropoja after two of its officials were assassinated and others were robbed or threatened. The establishment of peace in Albania brought again to the fore the absence of peace in Albania. After the solution of the Kosovo crisis, in the course of which Prime Minister Majko enjoyed strong support from internal opinion, the international factor and even the opposition, the government must do something to solve the problem of public order, which, unsolved, may force it to leave the political scene. In two years of socialist leadership four ministers of internal affairs have been successively replaced, without mentioning the removal of hundreds of police commissaries. As the new minister of public order, Spartak Poci, puts it, the police has done nothing or very little against organised crime up to now. The police, not only have not protected the citizens, but have not even been able to defend themselves. In the course of the last two years 112 police were killed, and so far nobody was brought to justice for these crimes. The disillusioned Albanians are seeing that after peace in Kosovo and the extraordinary sacrifices they made in sheltering about half a million refugees, large international investments and economic projects are not coming to their country. Even more disquieteing for them is to hear from spokesmen of the NATO troops in Albania that they may leave their country, because, among other things, common people here see NATO also as a protection against crime. And people now seem to be ready to accept any sort of government provided it ensures them the lost order and peace.

SHABAN MURATI (AIM)