Leaving Albania at Any Cost

Just before 11 each night, a convoy of police vans with flashing blue lights rolls into the Italian port of Brindisi and unloads a human cargo onto the gangplank of this triple-decker ferry. One by one, the outcasts board for the dreaded overnight voyage.

They are Albanians forced homeward in an effort to reverse one of post-Cold War Europe’s most desperate, volatile and troublesome migrations.

“Why not just throw them all in the sea?” muttered an Italian police officer in a dockside parting shot at 72 clandestini, undocumented migrants rounded up across Italy on a recent evening.

They were, instead, dispatched to their formerly Communist land. From Brindisi’s inky harbor across a moonlit Adriatic, the Illyria was trailed that night by five police vessels and a helicopter--a final warning that Italy has run out of hospitality for these ragged boat people from Europe’s poorest nation.

“Don’t waste your time!” yelled one of the clandestini, glaring into a police boat’s headlight and starting a defiant collective chant on board. “We’ll be back!”

Since Italy’s crackdown began last month, the Illyria has become as much a vessel of despair as one of hope. Long a means for job-seeking Albanians to reach Italy with false entry visas, it has hauled away most of the nearly 1,000 clandestini expelled so far. Sailing into the Albanian ports of Durres and Vlore, the hulking white Greek-owned ferry looms as a temptation for anyone daring to try again.

Afrim Muhameti, 28, has made the voyage in both directions. Twice deported from Italy aboard the Illyria, he once dived off its upper deck in a futile getaway attempt.

Muhameti’s odyssey sheds light on the Albanians’ grim determination to flee, their dependence on criminals to do so, and their shrinking odds of making it in an Italy now equally determined to keep them out.

“Life is too dangerous to hope for a future in my country,” said Muhameti, a former police officer and bodyguard from an Albanian village. “I see people who have made a lot of money leaving for good. I am a poor man. Why shouldn’t I get out too?”

Six years after emerging from Stalinist isolation, Albania exploded in armed rebellion and banditry last winter after thousands of people lost their life’s savings in fraudulent investment schemes. Even before the uprising crippled Albania’s economy, official figures showed 40% of its rural population and a third of those in cities and towns were too poor to lead normal lives.

As many as 1 million people are believed to have abandoned the country in the 1990s, leaving behind a population of 3.2 million. While most have moved quietly overland to Greece to provide needed farm labor, as many as 250,000 others have washed up on Italy’s Adriatic coast in rafts, speedboats, stolen police craft, tugboats, barges, ferries and even wayward warships.

About 40,000 Albanians stormed ashore in two mass landings in mid-1991, followed by 17,000 in March. The first arrivals were lured by images of la dolce vita beamed across the Adriatic by Italian television; those in March fled the anarchy that consumed Albania when the armed forces collapsed and looters stripped their arsenals.

Most of the migrants--those who have arrived in other years and since last winter--are drawn to undocumented work as dishwashers, maids, construction workers and tomato pickers at the bottom of the world’s fifth-richest economy. In this way, the steady Albanian exodus resembles the flow of Haitians to Florida and Mexicans to the southwestern United States, and puts similar burdens on local governments.

But Italian authorities say some Albanians have been smuggling hashish, cocaine and assault weapons in recent months and setting up prostitution and theft rings in scattered Italian cities. One prosecutor estimates that 100 Albanians entered Italy illegally each night during the summer and that about 40% were involved in criminal activity.

Riding With Drugs

Once Muhameti made up his mind in June, it was easy to find the right man in Vlore. The Albanian trafficker promised to get him to Italy in a speedboat for $1,000--or slightly more if he were deported within 24 hours and wanted to try again.

An intense, thoughtful and somber man who dresses in black, Muhameti finally got the big picture: The real cargo was drugs; he and other passengers were an expendable sideline. But by then he was already in the boat.

“Just before we set off, four armed Albanian men got in with 200 kilograms [440 pounds] of hashish. . . . Three hours later, we landed [in Italy] on a dark, deserted beach, but the coast guard spotted us. The gunmen ordered us to take the hashish to a hiding place and do it quickly. We were terrified, but we had no choice.”

Eluding the coast guard, the 24 migrants found their way to Brindisi, about 200 miles east of Naples, and boarded a train. At Monopoli, about 40 miles up the coast from Brindisi, they hit a police checkpoint. Twelve darted off the train in time, but Muhameti and the others were handcuffed and sent home on the Illyria.

Fifteen days later, he was back on the ferry for a conventional voyage to Italy--with a fake visa from the same trafficker. Immigration agents in Brindisi were not fooled.

Nor was Muhameti defeated. Facing deportation again, he leaped off the ferry into the darkened harbor. “I wasn’t the first Albanian to try that,” he said, recalling the effort with a smile. “Before I could swim 15 strokes, a police boat caught me.”

Back in Albania, he thought again about why he was doing this. A heartbreaking divorce had separated him from his 3-year-old son; a future in Italy, he figured, was the only way to persuade the boy’s mother to give him custody.

“There was no turning back for me,” he said. “I had borrowed all that money, given up my job, staked everything on this one chance.”

He waited six weeks for another shot--on another drug boat. The voyage, in early September, was even more harrowing than the first.

For starters, the coast guard chased the boat from Italian waters. Then, back at the dock in Vlore, the angry trafficker “was waiting with 10 armed men, screaming at us to get to Italy at any cost,” Muhameti said.

A new pilot took over, raced across the Adriatic and dumped the 24 clandestini a few yards offshore as a diversion. As the sun rose and the coast guard homed in on them, the speedboat safely dropped its drug cargo farther up the coast.

On the pier where the Illyria docks is a plaque from the United Nations to the generous citizens of Brindisi. It was nailed there in 1991 when Albanians, spilling through the Italian port city by the thousands, could find bread, tea and hot food in nearly every doorway.

No More Compassion

The compassion is gone now. After an Italian-led Multinational Protection Force returned from Albania this year, having restored a semblance of order, Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi’s government ordered more than 10,000 boat people who were given temporary entry permits last spring to go home by November.

Mayors across Italy, alarmed by a summer wave of crimes by immigrants, demanded and got the emergency police sweeps now being directed from Rome.

Parliament began debating a bill to give police more power to detain and deport clandestini, bringing Italy’s border controls into line with those of stricter neighbors in an increasingly harmonized Western Europe. The bill would allow quotas for legal immigrants from Albania and other specified countries--a system used by the United States and in much of Europe but not yet in Italy.

Worse for the immigrants, these measures are being driven by a hostile public mood.

No other wealthy industrialized nation besides Japan has as few immigrants per native as Italy. Conspicuous by their darker complexions and distinct language, Albanians are often taunted on the street with demands to “go home.” One Italian mayor branded the newcomers, many of whom are Muslim, as “ugly, dirty and ferocious by nature.”

Mindful of their long history as a fount of poor migrants who overcame hostility in the United States, some Italians are disturbed by the invective. But some compassionate voices of 1991 now are telling the Albanians, gently but firmly, that it is time to go.

“We expect them to understand that their future is in their own country,” said Bruno Mitrugno, head of the Roman Catholic relief agency Caritas in Brindisi. “Let them go home and slowly pull themselves up, as we did after World War II. Of course, we had American aid, but they will do it with Italian aid.”

Hiking for 16 Hours

Muhameti had no illusion of a warm welcome when he swam ashore from the drug boat that September dawn. Hoping to avoid detection, he split from the other migrants and hiked 16 hours down back roads to the Brindisi rail station.

Alarmed to see his boat mates waiting for the same northbound train, he spun around and ran for a different car. He chose a compartment occupied by an Italian family.

“When we reached the checkpoint at Monopoli, my heart was pounding,” he recalled. From the window, he saw police enter the train and haul off his boat mates. “I don’t know how to pray, but I asked God for help.

“Then I did something risky. There were two small children in the compartment, maybe 4 and 5 years old, and I started tickling them, to make the police think I was part of the family.

“A policeman stopped outside the compartment. He stood in the doorway for about 30 seconds, but it seemed like hours. Then he moved on. I could swear it was the same cop who arrested me on the same train before.”

More heart-stopping drama was to come. Muhameti made it to Pisa in northern Italy, hoping to be sheltered by an Albanian friend legally residing in Italy. Police overheard him make his call from a pay phone and demanded his documents. After a glance at his visa, a fake, they let him go.

But the friend rebuffed him, warning him through intermediaries to keep away. Fearful and alone, Muhameti wandered the streets until he found another Albanian, who agreed to share his lodgings in an abandoned boxcar.

As he hid there in darkness, police began sweeping through Milan, Turin, Florence and other northern cities, rounding up his compatriots for a ride on the Illyria.

End of Steady Job

One of those arrested was Agim Shkjau, 28, who made belt buckles in a Florence metal shop for more than a year. On Sept. 1, his boss announced that, because of a government threat to jail anyone employing clandestini, Shkjau and three other Albanians had to go. Police found them later.

The 72 clandestini who sailed back to Albania one recent evening on the Illyria, including three prostitutes, had been seized from home or work and whisked away with only the clothes on their backs. One man rousted from his sleep was sent home in mismatching shoes. Some, raising calloused hands to prove the honesty of their labor, claimed to be owed months in back wages. They vowed to return if only to collect.

Others, however, said they were ready to throw their savings and new knowledge of capitalism into starting up businesses at home.

“Italy could not be my country, but it taught me valuable lessons,” Shkjau said without bitterness, watching the sun rise as the ferry neared his homeland after the all-night ride. “We now know enough to make Albania like the rest of Europe.”

But a reversal of the migration is expected to take years. Albania’s recently elected government is starting to gain control of highways from armed gangs. And cities like Durres have calmed down some--although a car chase punctuated by gunfire had people on edge the morning the Illyria landed.

Albania’s economy is beginning to rebound, but the World Bank’s Carlos Elbirt cautioned: “If Albanians expect to earn [at home] anything similar to what they’ve been getting in Italy, they’ll have to wait a decade.”

For now, tighter controls on both sides have cut the movement of clandestini. When the Illyria sailed back to Italy from Durres the next morning, eight Albanians were left on the dock because police had ruled their documents out of order.

The speedboat runs from Albania have diminished in recent weeks because of the higher risk of getting caught, according to an Albanian involved in the trafficking. “Of course, there are still those determined enough to swim against the tide,” he added.

Fear and Meditation

Muhameti is still determined to elude the Italian police, but the effort limits him to a prison-like routine.

Each morning, he washes in an abandoned passenger car that still has running water. At midday he sets tables at a soup kitchen in exchange for a meal. Then he goes to his favorite bridge for 30 minutes of meditation--a solitary figure in black.

He spends the rest of the day in the dark boxcar, no longer speaking to the other Albanian, whom he suspects is a thief and nothing but trouble.

Some day, when he works up the courage, he plans to confess to the people who run the soup kitchen that he’s one of the clandestini and beg for help finding a paying job. Though out of money, he senses the time is not right.

“I am still halfway between Albania and Italy,” he said, staring from the bridge into the Arno River. “If the police come for me, I’d be happier to die. But if they force me to go home, my mind will work full time to get back here.”

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Albanian Influx

Italy has a population of nearly 57 million. About 1.1 million are foreigners legally residing in the country. Of these resident foreigners, Moroccans make up the largest group at119,481. Albanians. are second, with their numbers soaring from 625 in 1998 to about 32,000 in 1994 to the 64,000 now registered.

Sources: Caritas, the Roman Catholic relief agency, and the Italian Interior Ministry.