P. 3

P. 3

Albania receives only 7 percent of the funds allocated for the Stability Pact P. 3 The outskirts of Tirana between intoxication and environmental destruction

These are the few words that would come to the minds of all poor Albanians as they learned the tragic news of the sinking of a speedboat carrying 30 people, who wanted to reach the Italian shores by the only means offered by the state’s indifference: clandestine trafficking. Before the tears over the tragedy that occurred on 31 December last year had even dried, many mothers, wives and children will mourn their children, husbands or even parents, whom they will never again have any chance to meet. P. 7

Yesterday in Mitrovica, in northern Kosovo, the UN unveiled plans to ensure the return to their homes of Albanians and Serbs who have had to leave because of intercommunal violence. The UN wants to make it possible, in cooperation with the NATO-led multinational force (KFOR), for Albanians who have had to leave the north of the city, where most residents are Serbs, and Serbs to return to their homes... P. 4

The Albanian hospital remains a catastrophe that “will catch up with it one day.” Patients suffer not only from the illness that unwillingly brought them to a hospital bed; they complain that you have to be very well-off to hope for treatment. “Here you have to pay even for a syringe.” When patients tell the staff in white about their complaints, they shrug their shoulders. The only words they utter are: “Who told you?” It is precisely this question that leaves many patients too intimidated to say more. P. 11

The Textile Combine, a small town on the outskirts of the Albanian capital, established in 1951, has spent 50 years living with the anxiety and insecurity of environmental destruction and daily intoxication. For a long time, this town has been at risk of massive pollution because of the thermal power plant, as well as the systematic chaos of burning the capital’s garbage, which is dumped in this area. How did the environmental destruction begin? Before the construction of the thermal power plant, the small town of the Textile Combine, which was then called Yzberisht, had a clean natural environment, and many people came there to spend the weekend beneath the greenery of its many trees, beside the meadows. But in 1951, and especially after the thermal power plant began operating at full capacity, the town’s environment began to suffer considerable and systematic damage. The first thing that caught the local residents’ attention was that all the vegetation around the thermal power plant’s chimney began to turn yellow as a result of ecological damage. Later, almost all the fertile fields near this power plant saw a significant decline in the quantity and quality of their production. Ironically, this power plant was built 300 metres from the cemetery and just as far from the water reservoir. But the greatest tragedy affected people’s health: without even realizing it, they began to suffer from respiratory and circulatory diseases, as well as other dangerous syndromes recorded in the medical files at this town’s hospital. P. 15