Although the communist regime was dissolved between 19 and the government is now controlled by the Democratic Party of Sali Berisha, civil rights are not yet well established, and there are continuing abuses - harassment of the political opposition, a restricted press, police and judicial corruption. In any case, all potentially dissident Albanians suffered. Whether or not special sanctions were applied to ethnic Greeks under Hoxha is a point of dispute, as a recent Human Rights Watch/Helsinki report notes. The dictatorship of Enver Hoxha brutally suppressed all political opposition, and in 1967 it made religious expression illegal. Since 1991, a cluster of incidents involving ethnic Greeks and the Albanian state have drawn attention to the issue of human and minority rights in Albania and have revived an older question of Greek interests in Northern Epiros.įrom the end of World War II until 1990, Albania was perhaps the most repressive, as well as the poorest, state in Eastern Europe. The two "minority" - issues - that of the status and security of the ethnic Greeks of southern Albania and that of Albanian immigrants in Greece - have been tightly linked since early 1991. As a consequence of this mutual involvement and more than half a century of political alienation, the relationship between Greece and Albania is ambivalent and volatile. Reciprocally, Greek investment is crucial to the emerging free-market Albanian economy. Albanian workers, however vilified in Greece (popular opinion holds them responsible for waves of rural banditry and urban theft), provide cheap labor for Greek farms and businesses.
A Minority Rights Groups Report from 1994 noted an increase in small arms purchases in the rural areas.Īt the same time, with the Albanian economy in "transition" - the highly centralized system of the communist years having collapsed - Greece was the only source of income for many Albanian - "Northern Epirot" and otherwise - families: unemployment in Albanian cities has reached 60%. The migrants into Greece included Albanian citizens identified in news reports as "ethnic Greeks" - or "North Epirots," residents of that zone of Southern Albania referred to by Greeks as "Northern Epiros." Emigration from this zone in particular was so massive that by April 1994, the Economist would report that "most North Epirots no longer live in Albania." The effect was to heighten tensions in southern Albania itself between "ethnic Greeks" and their Albanian co-citizens: land was left uncultivated, villages depopulated, and, in the general instability of the times, claims to property (in the hands of women, children, and the elderly) were felt to be insecure.
By 1994, conservative estimates of the number of illegal Albanian migrants in Greece alone reached 150,000 - 200,000.
As a result of the collapse of the Albanian economy, as well as the loosening of border restrictions, by early 1991 tens of thousands of young, male, mostly unskilled Albanians were emigrating illegally and hazardously by boat to Italy and on foot over the mountains into Greece.
Albanian security police blocked access to the embassies but did not begin to stem what quickly became a flood of emigration. Five thousand Albanian citizens, inspired by televised dissidence elsewhere in Eastern Europe, stormed the foreign embassies in Tirana and requested asylum and emigration. After decades of political isolation, Albania burst suddenly onto the international scene in the summer of 1990.
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