Albanians Turning to Lethal Fishing Tackle

Lavdosh Halili is going fishing, but without a rod and reel or nets and lines--just a sun-bleached canvas bag slung over his shoulder and a sly smile on his weather-beaten face.

“Come with me. I’ll show you fish where you’ve never seen them before: 50 feet in the air,” Halili boasts.

Then he empties out his fishing tackle--a stick of black-market dynamite. He lights the fuse with the tip of his cigarette before lobbing it into the Ionian Sea.

For a few suspenseful seconds, the only sounds are the bells of the scrawny goats scavenging the rocky shoreline and the gentle breaking of the waves on the beach. Suddenly the cobalt water convulses. A great plume of spray fills the air, followed by an underwater mushroom cloud of sand and muck. Then come the fish: cod, red snapper, mackerel, all stunned by the shock of the blast. Halili scoops them into a basket and heads for town.

Dynamite fishing is a daily-- and sometimes deadly--illegal ritual for dozens of villagers in the tiny hamlets like Jal that dot the craggy southern Albania coastline.

Most shrug off the obvious dangers to themselves and the marine environment. The sea, they insist, can do what the post-communist Albanian government cannot: Give them jobs and put food on the table.

“There’s not much else I can do here to make a living,” says Halili, 37, an otherwise unemployed married father of two. “In the morning, we have a coffee and make the sign of the cross before we go out to fish. You focus on feeding your family. You don’t worry about what might happen.”

The authorities don’t seem to care much. Police are preoccupied with trying to intercept the speedboats that carry illegal immigrants and drugs to nearby Italy or Greece.

But as Albania gradually sheds the chaos that followed the end of communism, Halili figures a crackdown is just a matter of time.

“I’ll do it for as long as I can get away with it,” he says. “Albanians will throw dynamite in a well if that’s the only place to fish.”

Some Albanian men have fished this way for decades, their unorthodox tackle including homemade explosives, hand grenades, even anti-tank mines.

But dynamite became the fishing method of choice in 1997, when Albanians--already among the poorest of Europeans--watched their life savings vanish overnight in the collapse of get-rich-quick pyramid investment schemes. Enraged, people took to the streets in widespread looting.

Among the locks they chiseled off were those protecting the army’s arms depots. A million guns vanished. So did tens of thousands of sticks of dynamite.

The stuff is the size and shape of a bar of soap, but each stick contains 200 grams of TNT--on land, enough to blow through a 3-foot concrete pillar or flip a Fiat sedan.

It sells on the black market for 150 lekes a bar, the equivalent of $1.25. A year’s supply costs a fisherman just $150.

Stefan Koka, 31, recalls his finest catch: 880 pounds of fish from a single school using eight separate detonations. But Koka, who started dynamite fishing at age 11, stopped abruptly nine years ago.

He’d already seen older men missing fingers, hands or entire arms. Then one sunny day in 1992, his fishing buddy, Ilir Kazo, was winding up baseball style to throw a stick of dynamite when it exploded and blew off the back of Kazo’s head.

Tucked among olive trees the wild onions, a simple cross overlooks the spot where Kazo died.

Koka now fishes like the ancients, using hand lines and hooks.

“My friend was a better fisherman than I am,” he says. “If it could happen to him, it could happen to me.”

Halili laughs off the risks, even though fishermen are killed by dynamite every year.

“When you go fishing with dynamite, it’s the same as if you go to war. My wife looks angrily at me every morning,” he says, and begins chuckling. “Listen, over in the next town, three men have lost their arms. You should see them trying to light a cigarette or drink a beer.”