Italy sent its first boat carrying migrants to Albania on Monday, part of a plan to send migrants who are rescued in the Mediterranean by Italian ships to detention centers in the Balkan nation, where their asylum claims will be assessed.
The plan, which is being heralded by the Italian government and some European Union leaders as an innovative model to manage and deter immigration to Italy, has been criticized by human rights officials and groups, who fear it would put the migrants at risk and expose them to rights violations.
Francesco Kamel, a spokesman for Italy’s interior ministry, said Italian officials would not immediately disclose the number or nationality of the migrants or details of their arrival time in Albania, since the Italian naval boat carrying them may still stop to gather more. He said the boat has been picking up migrants off the southern Italian coast.
I don’t know if anything’s changed in the last 10-20 years or so, but I was under the impression that Albania was country with a deeply entrenched culture of organized crime, the Albanian mafia if you will.
And isn’t one of their biggest businesses, aside from drug smuggling, human trafficking?
If I recall correctly, historically, Southern Italian and Albanian societies shared many of the same social conditions that enabled the rise of Italian and Sicilian organized crime, including a long history generational blood fueds, and something similar to Omertà, the Kanun.
Both of which were social customs and informal legal structures, predicated upon the belief that there were no legitimate or trustworthy authorities that could be relied upon. Whether through corruption, dysfunction, or prejudice in Italy, or the various colonial rulers who controlled what is now modern Albania.
I think I got most of that accurate, but someone can correct me if I’m mistaken anywhere. But, it was incredibly off topic and probably irrelevant, because I’m sure none of that will have any relationship or impact on what happens to the asylum seekers and migrants that Italy is going to be sending their way.
