Italian Officials Move to Control Flood of Albanians

Alarmed and overwhelmed, the Italian government scrambled Friday to control and reverse an unruly influx of refugees fleeing the collapse of communism in destitute Albania.

Ragged and hungry Albanians stalked the streets of the southern ferry port of Brindisi. They sought food and shelter in the nearby Adriatic cities of Bari, Otranto and Monopoli, humbling efforts by an unprepared and slow-moving bureaucracy to care for them.

Dispatching food, medicine and police reinforcements to the Adriatic coast, Italian officials estimated that up to 20,000 hungry Albanians had come ashore by Friday in a weeklong flotilla of overloaded ships.

Angered by what they called Rome’s slow reaction to a crisis that has been building with every new boatload during the week, local officials said they would temporarily accommodate the refugees in schools and other public buildings.

The Cabinet ordered refugee camps in southern Italy that housed some 4,000 Albanians who fled into Italy last summer reopened for the new refugees, the overwhelming majority of them young men in their teens and 20s.

No new arrivals were reported Friday, but Italy told the Albanian government that it must halt the exodus and declared that it would return nearly all of the refugees to their homeland.

“First we turn off the tap, and then dry up the overflow,” said Deputy Prime Minister Claudio Martelli.

Directors of Italian state television were instructed to air “objective and honest news aimed at discouraging an exodus.” Italian television programs, seen in Albania for the past few years as part of a measured liberalization, have proved a powerful destabilizing force against the government in Tirana, diplomatic sources said, by providing Albanians their first glimpse of a glittering world beyond the frontiers of their horse-and-cart society.

At an emergency Cabinet meeting in Rome Friday, the government of Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti authorized $9 million in humanitarian aid for the refugees. It warned it would confiscate any further vessels arriving with refugees and arrest their captains.

Urging the Albanian government to release its remaining 200 political prisoners as a means of reducing tensions, Italy said it would repatriate to Albania those--practically all--who are economic and not political refugees.

Many of the young Albanians have said that they had come to Italy in search of work and in flight from the institutional chaos gripping their homeland, which after four decades in Stalinist isolation is Europe’s poorest country.

An Italian navy warship and coast guard vessels patrolled the wind-whipped Adriatic to discourage new arrivals and to search for an overloaded and leaking Albanian fishing boat that radioed for help early Friday.

About 14,000 of the refugees have overwhelmed Brindisi, a city of 72,000 in the heel of the Italian boot, which is a major tourist port for ferries to nearby Greece.

With food, shelter and sanitation facilities overcome at the port, disconsolate Albanians milled at dockside in hunger and confusion in a sapping sirocco (wind). Several thousand scrambled past makeshift barriers and outnumbered police to stalk through city streets in search of food, money and ways out of town.

Albania, a mining and agricultural nation of 3.2 million people, has scheduled its first multiparty election for March 31, but its prospects as an augur of change have been diminished by almost daily unrest--and by the flight of young Albanians voting with their feet.

The hard-pressed government of President Ramiz Alia ordered the Albanian armed forces to take command of Adriatic ports from which the refugees have been leaving--often in commandeered vessels--but Italian television showed pictures Friday night of thousands of people jammed aboard rusty ships in the Albanian port of Durres. Public gatherings have been forbidden in Durres and other coastal cities as well as in the capital of Tirana, the Alia government announced.

The Italian Cabinet appointed Minister of Civil Defense Vito Lattanzio to coordinate the relief effort, and he scheduled meetings today with relief and police officials in Brindisi, where hundreds of petty thefts by Albanians were reported Friday, most from food shops.

Last summer’s exodus began in disorder in Tirana when thousands flooded into European embassies there. By the time the refugees reached Brindisi under United Nations auspices, however, the Italians were prepared for them. Those who did not remain in Italy went immediately by train to France and Germany.

This time, the speed and size of the influx caught Italian coastal cities unaware and unprepared. What began as a trickle became a flood by mid-week, with listing, overladen coastal freighters, ferries and fishing boats depositing hundreds of refugees willy-nilly on the ferry dock in Brindisi and in other ports in Italy’s Puglia region.

Authorities in Brindisi were able to shelter about 6,000 of the Albanians, including one young woman who gave birth to a girl within hours of her arrival. The baby was named Italia.

The other refugees, however, were left to huddle miserably in the waiting room and warehouses at dockside. Thousands who brought only the rough clothes they were wearing slept in the open under plastic sheets.

The single, small medical unit at the port of Brindisi was swamped with ill refugees and those who had injured themselves clambering on and off the vessels that brought them from Albania.

Townsfolk chipped in with food and clothing, but it was hopelessly inadequate. Government efforts to supply the refugees bogged down in red tape, Brindisi Mayor Pino Marchionna charged, as a crowded dock area with limited sanitary facilities became a nightmare for refugees and relief workers alike. One doctor there said that the risk of epidemic was great.