[ALBSA-Info] Tirana-on-Thames

[Kreshnik Bejko]

Tirana-on-Thames

>From The Economist print edition

A quirk in the asylum laws explains why London is suddenly full of Albanians

AT THE turn of the century Faik Konica, an Albanian writer, observed that 
there were ten Albanians living in London. One ran a restaurant in King’s 
Cross, another was a pimp. By 1989 the Albanian community in Britain still 
numbered barely 30 souls. Now that figure probably stands as high as 30,000. 
Britain, or rather London (hardly any Albanians live outside the capital), 
has a brand new community.

So many newly arrived young Albanian men now stroll the streets of Barking 
in east London that it has almost become the capital’s very own 
Tirana-on-Thames. The Lisi restaurant in Maida Vale is another gathering 
point. In the evenings Albanians can tune into satellite broadcasts from 
Tirana to keep up with the news.

At the Home Office’s refugee registration centre at Lunar House in Croydon, 
new Albanian asylum-seekers are fingerprinted every day. Each one tells the 
interviewer that he spent £2,000 for a six-day ride in the back of a lorry 
to escape Serb repression in Kosovo. Yet, in the past three months, almost 
every one of those stories will have been untrue.

Between 1989 and the beginning of 1997, the vast majority of Albanians 
claiming asylum in Britain were indeed Kosovars from Serbia’s overwhelmingly 
ethnic-Albanian southern province. These refugees tended to be 
English-speaking professionals or students. (Their less-educated compatriots 
were inclined to head for factories or building sites in Germany.) At first 
their numbers were not great, but when war broke out in Kosovo last 
February, sisters, cousins and others with family already established in 
Britain began to arrive.

In the spring of 1997 Albania itself imploded, sending tens of thousands of 
its citizens fleeing in search of security and, above all, work. At first, 
Britain was regarded as an impossibly remote place about which they knew 
little. This has changed. Traffickers have now begun to channel ever more 
young Albanians to Britain telling them, rightly, that if they claim to be 
Kosovars fleeing war, they will be well looked after. They know that the 
British courts have determined that ethnic Albanians from Kosovo are the 
only substantial group of asylum-seekers in Britain eligible for refugee 
status by virtue of their ethnicity and where they come from—rather than 
because of any individual experience of torture or repression.

A quirk in the way the Home Office monitors new arrivals means that nobody 
knows exactly how many Albanians have arrived. Albanian asylum-seekers are 
listed, as they have always been, as coming from the former Yugoslavia. 
Statistically there is no difference between an Albanian fleeing Serbs, or a 
Serb fleeing Croats. To make matters even more complicated, the Home Office 
lists only applications for asylum, so a single man or a family of ten each 
counts as one application.

According to Albanians who translate in Home Office asylum cases, the number 
of genuine Kosovar refugees arriving in Britain has dropped off in the last 
couple of months, while the proportion of Albanians from Albania has risen 
dramatically. In 1998, up to the end of October, the number of 
asylum-seekers claiming to be from former Yugoslavia (almost all Albanians 
or Kosovars) was 6,335. During 1992, the worst year of the war in Bosnia, 
the total number of asylum-seekers in Britain from former Yugoslavia stood 
at 5,635. Albanian community leaders say that these figures mask the true 
numbers of Kosovars and Albanians living here and that there are now at 
least 30,000 of them.

The influx of so many young and mostly uneducated young men from Albania has 
begun to cause ructions with the (slightly) longer-established Kosovo 
Albanians. While the Albanians from Albania have no organisations to fall 
back on, the Kosovars have strong family networks and community 
organisations, and often contribute money to the struggle back home. They 
grumble that the Albanians who are arriving here generally have little to do 
and often fall into petty crime—so giving all Albanians a bad name and 
making them targets of tabloid venom.

Their concern is shared by Agim Fagu, the Albanian ambassador. He says that 
he is surprised that neither the Home Office nor the Foreign Office has 
contacted him to discuss the problem. He is worried that unless some sort of 
action is taken these young men will become easy prey for the Albanian 
mafia, which runs drugs and prostitution rackets in Germany, Italy and 
Switzerland.

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