Sad Saga of Albanians in Italy Limping to a Close : Europe: The repatriation of desperate refugees continues. But the future could bring more trouble.

Act 3 in the heart-rending saga of Albanian refugees desperate for a better life limped to a climax in pathos, heat and violence at the southern Italian port of Bari on Sunday. But the curtain remains explosively open.

Once again Sunday a flotilla of planes and ferries under police and military escort forcibly sent thousands of mostly young Albanian men back across the placid Adriatic Sea, and across a warp in time--to a yesterday land that squandered decades on an ultimately empty search for Communist purity.

Today, Italian officials hope to send home the remainder of the perhaps 13,000 Albanians who forced their way ashore last week from Europe’s poorest nation to one of its richest.

And once again, there was sporadic violence Sunday in Bari. Police used clubs, tear gas and high-pressure water hoses against stone-throwing Albanians fighting for food--and to escape.

Many of the refugees, barefoot, grimy and hungry, had been penned for days at a dock area or in a soccer stadium in squalor that, like the lightning repatriations, was a message to Albanians from the Italian government.

The Italians glumly understand that Albania’s have-not clock ticks loudly. Even as police in Bari rousted the last hard-core Albanians--many of them army deserters--there came warnings of more to come.

“I am very pessimistic,” Immigration Minister Margherita Boniver told Italian reporters. This is plugging the hole . . . a Band-Aid. Without a gigantic effort to make Albania take off, these exoduses will continue. This time there were 10,000. The next time there’ll be 50,000.”

In 13 months, the trauma of escaping citizens from so-long backward and isolated Albania has degenerated, in the Italian view, from welcome novelty to nuisance to menace.

In July, 1990, 4,000 Albanians who had fled to foreign embassies in the still hard-line capital of Tirana arrived in Italy to open arms, victims of communism. In March of this year, as Albania moved toward elections and reform, about 24,000 hungry Albanians voted with their feet, washing ashore in southern Italy. The Italian government vowed to send them back, but about 20,000 remain.

Then last Tuesday, for reasons that remain obscure, the Albanian government apparently lost control of ports it had placed under military control last spring. Wednesday evening, a freighter was taken over, filled to overflowing with up to 10,000 people and pointed toward Italy.

On Thursday, it brushed past Italian attempts to stop it and docked at Bari. There were other escapes: About 1,000 Albanians landed in Brindisi, site of the March arrivals, and another 300 found their way to Sicily. They were returned home peacefully Saturday.

This time, the Italian view of the arrivals, who are looking for work, not fleeing tyranny, was unbending.

“We absolutely will not tolerate a new clandestine immigration from Albania,” snapped Deputy Prime Minister Claudio Martelli.

The hard line of no sympathy, scant sustenance and quick return outraged some Italians. A local bishop in Bari denounced the “inhuman treatment” of the refugees.

At his midday blessing Sunday from his summer palace, Pope John Paul II pleaded for “concrete solidarity” by the international community with the Albanian people. “No one can remain indifferent before the dramatic scenes of men, women and entire families,” the Pope said.

Opposition politicians criticized the government for sending young police officers and conscript soldiers to harvest a whirlwind, and La Repubblica newspaper columnist Barbara Palombelli underlined national ambivalence about the Albanians’ plight: “Truncheons and water. Slaps and sandwiches. Kicks and Gatorade. What kind of country is this?”

About 30 refugees and police officers were injured Sunday, most of them slightly. About 1,000 Albanians were thought to have eluded police, but many of them were caught wandering the streets of Bari, which, like all other Italian cities, is almost deserted now at the peak of the summer holidays.

What is painfully apparent in Rome is that the tranquility of Italy’s Adriatic ports is hostage not only to fledgling political reform in Albania but also the revival of a moribund economy in a horse-drawn mining and agricultural nation of 3.2 million. One early consequence of the collapse of communism is that its governmental heirs have lost the ability to coerce their fellow citizens to stay at home.

Italian Interior Minister Vincenzo Scotti blamed the latest exodus on “chaos” inside Albania. Said Martelli, the deputy prime minister, “This is a country that is breaking up.”

Military and civilian repatriation flights were limited to one an hour at one point Sunday because there was only one flight controller on duty at Tirana, where it was 96 degrees in the shade at midafternoon.

Ferry captains carrying refugees and strong detachments of police inched carefully into Albanian ports, not certain who was in charge there.

Foreign Minister Gianni De Michelis journeys to Tirana today for urgent talks with Albanian authorities as part of an Italian plan to short-circuit further mass flight.

A weekend meeting of Italian ministers emerged with a stick-and-carrot program. The immediate and total repatriation of Albanians reaching Italy would be supplemented with efforts to dissuade further flights. Italian state television, widely seen in Albania, would be the principal vehicle.

At the same time, Italy promised sharply increased aid in an attempt to jump-start the Albanian economy on the theory that people who have work at home will be less tempted to try their luck illegally aboard.

In this, the Italians, with German support, will attempt to engage the entire European Community. Current community assistance of about $2.5 million, said Martelli, is “a drop in an ocean of infinite need.”

“Beyond the drama, we must transform a problem of catastrophic mass migration into a program of help and solidarity to a neighbor,” he said.