Italy and the Albanians
THE current crisis in Albania is a terrible confirmation of the
September 16, 1991 • #212 Internationa/ Viewpoint
ALBANIA Welcome to Bari
THE past few weeks have seen a significant hardening of the already inhuman treatment by the Italian authorities of Albanian refugees arriving in the country. On August 8, impossibility of "socialism in one country". The postwar leadership of Europe's poorest country, a fragment of the
Afro-Asian world inserted in the Balkans, decided on a completely unrealistic policy of political isolation and economic self-sufficiency.
But the consequence of this has been an even more extreme subordination to the world capitalist system. The "socialism"
imposed by the Albanian Party of Labour, on a territory which has much in common with poor regions of Italy such as
Sardinia or Basilicata, has exposed the country to the risk of a profound dependence. After escaping from direct dependence on Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, and after the failure of the link with China, Albania faced a stark choice:
either an impossible return to a purely subsistence pastoral economy or the development of relations with the capitalist
West.
ANTONIO MOSCATO
HE very modest opening made in
T this direction has been sufficient to worsen the situation.
The machines and products bought on the international market (especially in Italy) have proved to be very expensive.
Unequal exchange widened the gap that was supposed to be being overcome.
In 1989 Albania had one vehicle, including trucks, for every 230 inhabitants (compared to one per 2.4 in Italy, one per 6 in Greece and one per 33 in Turkey). Every statistic reveals the same enormous gap between Albania and its neighbours where there is one vehicle for every 7 inhabitants. The only area where the gap is not so vast is in televisions (one per 14 people in Albania compared to 1/4 in Italy, 1/5 in Yugoslavia, 1/6 in Greece and 1/
8 in Greece). This opium of the poor was very widely distributed. Since local productions were both rare and poor, most
Albanians with a TV stayed glued to the transmissions of the Italian stations, both the state channels and the poor-quality efforts of the private channels in Apulia.
Intoxication with the televised image of
Italy thus provided was not of course the basic cause of the mass emigration, which is simply poverty, but it probably had something to do with the choice made by this wave of emigrants, among whom were many lumpen and marginal elements who saw an opportunity to get rich quick.
After initially encouraging the exodus the Italian authorities were gripped by panic. Everyone has seen the photographs which reveal a shameful lack of any assistance. All the work to feed, clothe, care for and house the first wave of Albanians was done by private citizens, first of all by charitable organizations, and lay, and then by ordinary citizens, or of political organizations, including Democrazia Proletaria, Rifondazione Comunista, the PDS (the ex-PCI), the parishes and even by some circles tied to the local mafia. Everybody, in short, except the state, which was represented by confused and unprepared carabinieri, by soldiers who were not up to the job and by police units charged with keeping order in where the Albanians were placed and where tension rapidly mount-
There are several reasons for the state's total inefficiency. The simplest and most generally applicable is the following: as in other regions of the south of Italy, the state is absent (latitante) in Bari, while the Mafia in its various local forms has an omnipresent and efficient network. A further reason was the decision to treat the Albanians like animals in order to discourage further emigration. They were herded together in dormitories and no proposals were made about finding them work, although some young Albanians were recruited by the mafia, who control cigarette smuggling.
Some hotel and restaurant owners and small agricultural business people gave work to Albanians — cight to ten hours a day for a meal and 30,000 lire ($25). But these did not amount to real perspectives. This exasperated the refugees, who protested and launched hunger strikes, or escaped and hid, or even accepted their for the third time in 1991, thousands of Albanians stormed ships in harbors and sailed to southern Italy.
Italian authorities refused to let them land, but the freighter Vlora ran the blockade and some people tried to swim ashore. Every inch of the ship was packed, with some refugees even hanging onto the masts. The Albanian government responded by putting four ports under military control, whilst the Italian authorities began the immediate deportation, by plane and boat, of over 10,000 Albanians who had arrived in the southern Italian port of
Bari and elsewhere in the previous week. Prior to deportation refugees were kept enclosed at the dockside or in Bari's soccer stadium, under the hot August sun with little food and no toilets. On August 11 clashes broke out between the refugees and Italian police; the police responded to the sticks and stones thrown by the exhausted and emaciated refugees with gunfire, tear gas and baton charges. In an implicit rebuke to the authorities, Pope John Paul II said that "no one can remain indifferent"
to the refugees' suffering. Meanwhile, those refugees deported to the Albanian port of Durres were being scrutinized by uniformed
Albanian troops on the look out for
On August 13 Italian President
Cossiga offered food aid to Albania in an attempt to defuse the crisis, but more significantly offered the services of the Italian navy to assist
Albania in patrolling its waters for
On August 14 Italian authorities decided to allow some Albanians who had refused repatriation to stay. 1,000 refugees were transferred from Bari to northern Italy, and will stay there while immigration officials review their applications for disappointment and asked to be sent home.
Under these conditions, a few refugees - whose importance was massively inflated by the Italian media in order to undermine the expressions of support from the local population for the emiour; there were clashes between rival 27 rants — took refuge in primitive behavi-
International Viewpoint #212 • September 16, 1991
ALBANIA gangs and rapes of the few women in the camps, as well as of some Italian women. These episodes were used to mark a whole people as criminals.
This was not only done by the capitalist press: l'Unità, the PDS daily, made use of a rape by seven Albanians to denounce the "passivity" of minister Boniver. Mixing this attack up with a legitimate protest by 23 Albanians destined for Rocca Pia, a village of several hundreds near to L'Aquila, become intolerable. The Albanians ravish and rape. In Pescara six were arrested during a dispute." Such reporting laid the groundwork for the "finding" that 81% of the paper's readers were in favour of sending the Albanians back.
Some of these readers made explicit reference to the fate of the many Italians who were obliged to emigrate in the past, drawing the bizarre conclusion that the Albanians should suffer the same privations as those old Italian emigrants and expressing their support for the government doing nothing to render the arrival of the Albani-
Economic and political
As is becoming the fashion, the argument that these were economic rather than political refugees was deployed as if it removed any consideration of human solidarity. There were also, no doubt, some who could not overcome their rancour against people who had failed to appreciate the qualities of socialist austerity and had allowed themselves to be seduced by the sirens of the consumer society.
And just about nobody recalled the contribution made by Italy to Albania's backwardness, although Italy exercised semi-colonial hegemony over that country from and occupied it outright after April 7, 1939.
In fact the period of semi-dependence was just as destructive as that of the union, which was followed by the coronation of Italy's King Vittorio Emanuele III as King of Albania - at the same time as another member of the king's Savoja family took the head of the Croatian puppet regime.
After 1939 the Italian presence in Albania (and, after 1941, in Slovenia and Croatia) took the form of pillage, violence and participation in the deportation of the
Jews. However its negative impact dates from the preceding period. First of all, there was the corruption of the functionaries of the gangster-king Zog, who was ready enough to accept Italian "loans"
The heads of the country's three religious communities, the Muslims (mainly Sunni)
and Catholic and Orthodox Christians were also bought off by Italy. But "the economic concessions and the network of interests created by the Italians in Albania were not translated by a parallel augmentation of political influence and strategic • control over this little Balkan country".
On the contrary, on the financial plane Italy's intervention in Albania was a lossmaking enterprise, particularly during the period prior to the 1939 invasion.'
The same goes for the economic and political penetration by Italian imperialism of a whole series of other Balkan or central European countries, as also for Italy's colonial conquests, all of which cost more than what they brought in. It did not amount to charity. They cost the finances dear above all because of a plethora of intermediaries, of merchants, of lumpen capitalists, of con men and bordel proprietors who took all they could for themselves and left the crumbs for the indigenous clients.
### Royal parasites
The activities encouraged by Italian funding were — apart from the exploitation of very modest mineral resources — largely parasitic. The bulk of the profits stemming from the exploitation of silver and the multiplication of Italian interests were appropriated by the king (even if this policy finally cost him the throne). "Through gifts and Italian concessions, he could pay the wagcs of the employees of guards, maintain the court and satisfy the caprices of the royal family".2
The debts accumulated by Italy through this policy led to the consensus of the state apparatus in its totality in favour of the 1939 aggression against Albania. Naturally, the fundamental cause of this was a thirst for glory on the part of Mussolini, obsessed by the success of his colleague/ ally/rival Hitler — but it also appeared as a good measure of rationalization. This did not turn out to be the case. Firstly because, in order to gain support, the of employees of the Albanian state (from 6,000 to 18,000, following the example of the measures already adopted by fascism in Italy). Morcover, corruption, already very widespread, increased
The number of Italians resident in Albania went from 1,200 in 1938 to 70,000 during the war with Greece (12,000 permanent residents, more than 58,000 workers engaged in public works linked to the war). The majority of these workers were paid salaries which, while fantastic in relation to those of the Albanians, were nonetheless insufficient to satisfy their needs, which explains the weak productivity of the workers and the limited duration of their Albanian stay.
While bringing no significant benefits either to the state coffers or the occupied workers, the presence in Albania of several hundred Italian firms, particularly from
1940 onwards, was enough to damage the artisanal sector of the Albanian economy and to engender a high rate of inflation.
Already, before 1939, the numerous
Albanian clients of the Italian coffers had shown no particular gratitude, largely because they understood that the donations were not disinterested; after the occupation manifestations of open hostility (before the beginning of a genuine resistance) multiplied at every level. Even the Catholic church, which in the past acted as almost regime, became more intransigent, suspecting the governor, Jacomoni, of being pro-Muslim" financed the other confessions in a proportional manner, and thus gave priority to the Islamic faith to which 70% of the pop-
The Italian defeat (caused first by the Greek campaign, where the Italian armies, in spite of their numerical and military superiority, were pushed back to the heart of Albania by the Greek resistance, and then by the decay of the Italian army following the armistice of September 8, 1943) impelled Nazi Germany to occupy Albania, important in the context of the war as much for its modest oil resources as for its much more considerable reserves of chrome. Contrary to the legend of the "good Italians", the Germans were given almost a favourable welcome, at least by the conservative forces. Very many patriots (with the exception, obviously, of the Communists) who were fiercely Italianophobe, nourished initial illusions in the new occupants, who conceded more significant margins of autonomy than those granted by the Italians, and permitted reunification with the Albanians of Koso-
Albania and Nazism
Moreover, Nazi Germany was more effective than Italian fascism in its efforts to seduce the Muslims (the Italians were already exposed because of their behaviour in Libya, colonized in 1912) and a politicians proclaimed their adherence to an "Aryan race of Illyrian stock".
The resistance would soon strip away the mask of the occupiers. In any case, Italy abandoned the country leaving terrible memories and a completely dislocated Albanian economy, weakened still further by the depredations of the war (for which the inhabitants were in no way responsiole, and which lett permanent scars on
It is, then, not totally absurd that a part of the Albanian population (usually the least politicized and the least cultivated elements, who are thus easy prey to the modern myths carried by the media) now thinks it can resolve its problems by demanding aid from a "rich" Italy, which owes such a heavy moral debt to their 1. Roberto Morozzo Della Rocca, "Nazione e religione in Albania (1920-1944)", Il Mulino, Bologna, 1990, p.