Runaways
ITALY, Spring 1999 -- MEDINA ADZOVIC SWEARS that, if she had known what the trip to Italy would be like, she never would have paid Albanian traffickers $1,700 to be smuggled along with her family out of Albania. The journey, she says, was even more terrifying than the gun-toting Serb who threatened to kill her if she did not abandon her home in the town of Pec, Kosovo, some two weeks earlier. It began at four o'clock in the morning, when the traffickers directed Medina, her husband, and their two girls, ages two and four, to kneel in the bottom of a flimsy, inflatable, rubber dinghy, outfitted with two powerful outboard motors. They obediently packed themselves in, knocking elbows with 36 other crouching passengers-mostly women, children, and the elderly.
Kosovar refugees
The skipper then steered them at full throttle for two and a half hours, in the dark, on the high seas. As their little dinghy pounded against the breakers of the Adriatic, wave after wave of frigid water splashed inside the boat. Upon reaching the Italian shore, they were spotted by a policeman, who yelled at the skipper to beach the dinghy. Instead, the skipper ordered his charges to get out of the boat. The Adzovics jumped into the water and waded to the shore-their two duffel bags and two toddlers in tow. The policeman then fired several shots at the trafficker, who sped away into the dawn.
Still, however harrowing their journey, the Adzovics should consider themselves lucky. Just two weeks ago, six Kosovars following the same route drowned when their dinghy crashed into rocks on the Albanian shore. Such accidents will likely become even more frequent as more and more Kosovar Albanians attempt to sneak into Italy. Already, Italian authorities have caught more than 3,000 migrants along the stretch of coast on Italy's heel between Bari and Otranto. Italian police say they have driven another couple thousand back to the Albanian coast. Almost all of the migrants are-or at least claim to be-Kosovar refugees.
MANY OF THE refugees are trying to join relatives who live in Western European countries or the United States. The Adzovic family, for example, went directly to the U.S. Embassy in Rome to seek refuge with Medina's mother in America. But the embassy rejected that request. Medina was surprised. After all, she had lived in New York for five years, and her oldest daughter, who was born there, is a U.S. citizen. What's more, she adds, "The U.S. said they would accept twenty thousand (Kosovar refugees), so why not us?"
Well, because, at least in theory, the United States and other Western countries have committed to accepting only those refugees based in Macedonia-whom the Macedonian government has refused to absorb, largely to avoid disrupting that nation's delicate ethnic balance.
By contrast, the 440,000 Kosovar refugees who are currently in Albania have little chance of obtaining asylum in the West through official channels. But, if these same refugees can somehow make it into the West illegally, deportation back to Albania is indeed unlikely. Germany and Italy have even made it official: Kosovars who reach their borders are automatically allowed to stay and apply for legal asylum. Kosovar refugees who get to Switzerland will even be housed, fed, and given pocket money until their legal status is resolved. When Kosovars win legal status as refugees, the benefits continue until they are successfully repatriated.
By closing nearly all legal avenues through which the refugees can leave Albania and by rewarding those who undertake the perilous illegal journey, Western nations have unwittingly exacerbated the humanitarian crisis afflicting Kosovars. Albania has welcomed Kosovar refugees with open arms, but it is a nation of meager resources; and those refugees with relatives elsewhere are increasingly anxious to leave-so anxious that they will gladly fork over thousands of dollars to criminal migrant traffickers often more concerned with earning a buck than ensuring their clients' safety.
Tori, a scruffy-haired, beer-bellied, self-described dinghy owner in his mid-thirties, whom I met in Vlore, confirmed that business is good. NATO air strikes shut down Rinas Airport, where he once picked up illegal Kurdish refugees allowed into the country by corrupt Albanian airline and police officials-by the carload. Now Kosovars have filled the gap. Tori offers them discount prices because they are easier to deliver to Italy than Albanians are. A 23-year-old trafficker, who would not give his name, told me that Kosovar children were the best passengers of all because they are treated with kid gloves by Italian government has long feared a situation like the present one and regards the Kosovar refugee problem as a national security threat. Crises in Albania have spilled over in the past, flooding Italy with refugees and infecting the country with additional organized crime. At a March conference in Milan, Italian prosecutor Francesco Borelli and Italy's top Mafia prosecutor, Piero Luigi Vigna, both blamed Albanian criminals for their involvement in drugs, arms, sex workers, and a burgeoning transnational trade in illegal migrants, including not just Kosovars and Albanians but Kurds, Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Chinese, and Afghans. Meanwhile, Germany and the other European Union members have long held Italy responsible for failing to prevent the illegal migrants, including asylum-seekers, from continuing north, slipping past borders that, under the EU's Schengen treaty, have been cleared of most controls.
NOT SURPRISINGLY, THEN, then Italians responded like firemen running to an inferno when, at the end of March, thousands of Kosovars began arriving at the Morini border crossing in northern Albania-sometimes at a rate of 2,000 an hour. Within 48 hours of the first arrivals, Italy's minister of the interior, Rosa Russo Jervolino, embarded for Morini to assess the situation. For several years now, Jervolino has helped cultivate strong bilateral ties with Albania in the hopes of containing illegal immigration. As part of this effort, the Interior Ministry had already installed 400 Italian police and navy troops along the Albanian coast. In theory, the police are supposed to assist, equip, and train the Albanian police. In practice, though, the Italians perform most of the work themselves often playing cat and mouse with the traffickers in highpowered speed boats, trying to outmaneuver their dinghies and drive them back to shore. A navy ship stationed in the Strait of Otranto serves as an intelligence post, listening and dispatching information to forces along the Italian coast. There, between Otranto and Bari, four types of police and the coast guard patrol the land, sea, and air, ready to respond to any sign of the traffickers.
These measures have been only partly successful. Most nights, the traffickers leave from isolated beaches in small groups of two or three dinghies, their departures erratic enough to elude detection. On occasion, traffickers have launched flotillas of 70 dinghies or more. Forty were able to charge past the Italians on the night of April 27, delivering about 1,000 refugees to the Italian coast.
But the program's mere existence put the Italians in a good position to deliver security and aid to Albania once the Kosovo crisis started. The Italians called it Operation Rainbow. Within two days of the first arrivals in Kukes, the Italians were packing a navy ship, the San Marco, full of tents, trucks, hospital supplies, sleeping bags, mattresses, firebrigade tankers, field kitchens, fuel, food, and hundreds of volunteers. Three weeks into the crisis, when the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees still had only 45 international staff members in all of Albania, the Italians had 900 people on the ground, operating Italian-made field hospitals and refugee camps and providing ground and air transport. And that was just the beginning. The Italians now have about 4,200 people in Albania, including 2,300 army troops, to which they will soon add a few hundred more. In the first month of the crisis, the Italians had far more people helping refugees in Albania than any other international body.
Without a doubt, Italy's collective effort has saved many lives, provided great comfort, and, to a large extent, preserved civil order in Albania. Still, the best refugee camp or Albanian host family cannot compete with the prospect of settling in the home of one's own kin and reestablishing a life that bears some semblance of normality. Even as she recalls the horrors of her journey into Italy, Medina Adzovic is quick to add that "even if someone were to shoot me, I wouldn't live in Albania." As long as other refugees share her sentiments, the trafficking crisis will continue.