Shengjin, Albania – In the bathrooms of the Meloni restaurant the notes of Nino D’Angelo“Celebrities”: “Mom, you don’t know, no, you can’t know”. On the walls a terrible collection of irreverent trashy photomontages portraying all the greats of the Earth, including Pope Francis, sitting on the toilet. There is also a hammer and sickle, probably to indicate that this is the appropriate place for the once omnipresent symbol of the now distant regime of Enver Hoxha. Our prime minister, however, is celebrated in all her grimaces, taken from photos in Italian newspapers, certainly not in the bathroom but elsewhere, in the large open space of the restaurant, crowded with Albanian families for Sunday lunch outside.
“We are here also because we are intrigued by her, a woman who has become so powerful”, say three girls who arrived from Tirana. A few meters from the exit of the trendy “food factory” there is the port, where two bored guards manage the comings and goings of policemen and workers that liven it up. It is there that for months we have been waiting like a mirage for the first migrants mocked by the Italy-Albania agreement, which instead of making them arrive in Europe, diverts them to this international non-place of which no one assumes sovereignty.
“We have nothing to do with it, it’s Italian territory,” the prime minister continues to candidly distance himself Eddie Rama. In fact, above the recently completed bunker in the port – there is still a truck outside a construction company in Villanuova sul Clisi, in the province of Brescia – the Italian tricolor stands out. We ring the intercom and a Venetian agent opens the door. The head of the station is a state police official who refers us to the prefecture of Rome. A little further on, sitting on the ground, there is a lonely boy having his Sunday coffee sitting on the ground. In front, on the quay, a couple of Albanian workers intent on storing a fishing boat. In a kiosk, a few meters away, other Italian policemen are fraternizing with an Albanian colleague. Then they organize the shifts: “So, I’ll get on at seven, then it’s your turn… Here, instead of paying us more, they extend our hours…”.
Those who arrive here get a hundred euros an hour more than the basic salary, and many work hard. Until the first foreigners arrive (and everyone says it’s a matter of days) it’s not so bad to stay in Shengjin, a tourist resort which in Italian would be called (and was called, at the time of the Serenissima) San Giovanni Medua. general, where a mobile police station is parked, is a five-star executive hotel in the centre, partly populated by Afghan refugees by virtue of another international agreement signed with the United States by the enterprising Rama. So upon arrival the atmosphere is alienating: the chants of the muezzin, the blue Italian and Albanian cars coming and going and a reproduction of the Statue of Liberty in the center of the square. An Albanian journalist tries to enter, they tell him he can’t. An Italian customer, however, does. But a stiff local security guy with a headset microphone follows him to the reception, to verify that he really sleeps there.
Shenjin is all a tricolor festival. The hotels are called “Rafaelo” – the most important resort, which will double, thanks to a sort of agreement with the Ministry of the Interior, for the next few months – or “Mille Amici”, “Colombo”. Luxury structures next to decaying or abandoned houses, piles of rubbish and dirt roads, barefoot children and medical centres. And Italy as the future. A few weeks ago a group of activists climbed onto a terrace in the port and took down a banner. It was written: «7 April 1939 – Albania is Italian – 5 November 2023». Then they played on the speakers the audio recording of the announcement of the invasion of Albania by the fascist regime on 7 April 1939. «The myth of the “historical Italian-Albanian friendship” is nothing other than neocolonialism», says Alexia Malaj, trained in Florence and now an economic development researcher in Southahmpton.
Naturally, however, “Meloniland”, with its promise of incoming flows – it is not known how real, “given the limitations on admissions by the European Court of Justice”, observes Frano Kulli, editor of Lezhe – pleases Marinel Kuciai, who after having worked for three years on a farm in Abbiategrasso, a minimarket opened right near the port: «The police come every day because they feel comfortable with me speaking Italian. The immigrants who will arrive here? We understand them, we’ve been there too…” About twenty kilometers from Shengjiin, in an area of 70 thousand square meters on a hill, there is the center of Ghadaj, the enormous block of concrete, metal fences and barbed wire where asylum seekers will be held, for a number maximum of 880. The policemen are there as in the Bastiani fortress of Dino Buzzati’s Tartar Desert. “There is nothing here, to eat and for everything you have to go to Shengjin”, say the two agents at the gate. The rooms have showers and air conditioners, there is a canteen and an area where believers can pray. But the impression is of being in a prison. Anden, who worked there as a guard for forty-one days, also admits this: «They remind me of the cells where I was in Italy for five years», he says, sitting drinking beer with friends at the village table, one of the typically Albanian rites that The penitentiary police even included – “never drink coffee at the counter” because it is not customary there, just as women are not bothered – in a handbook distributed to forty-five officers who left in August for Ghadaj, where they are supposed to monitor migrants who commit crimes within the hundred. The actual detention facility is intended for them, designed for twenty migrants to be punished. If they arrive.
#affairs #Meloniland #Italian #Albania #waiting #migrants
–
