A three-year-old boy, hostage for his mother’s debts
Forced to get money to go to Italy
EDITORIAL by Cenci SORANI
What are we still waiting for?! The mother has left her child as a hostage for a few days while paying an amount of money in drams for her trip to Greece. Or have the vast sums of corruption never lost their sense of evil in Albania?! This kidnapping of the boy happened so naturally that public opinion as a whole, and the entire state, seem to be continuing to sleep in the mad lap of evil. This banal way of organizing groups that take hostage the children of those who go to Greece, for payment of money and bribes, in order to then cross to the Hellenic country, must be definitively stopped in Albania. This time, these traffickers are compromising the very meaning of motherhood. In an attempt to cross the green border with a three-year-old angel to secure the 1,000 dollars from emigration, the thief in the role of mother ‘abandons’ her son, her ‘chosen brother’. Criminals and officials are driven mad and make room for themselves, having under them the entire honest and struggling layer of this country. That is how a woman from Çorovoda acted with her son when she was taken by surprise by border guards at ‘Melesin’ in Kapshticë. To avoid arrest, she left the boy near the guards and fled to Greece. Since the child did not have an identity document, he was taken to the border police in Kapshticë to be identified by the person who had accompanied him. Yet what weight can a mother have, to send a child fleeing? Who will become the scale for this burden of shame? The border is becoming as impassable for emigration as it is depersonalized by the officials, the ministers being talked about, and even by today’s deputies of this majority. Must a mother pay with her child for the road to Greece, or is the suffering of this migration to be paid for in money? Or are these now categories of a system more degraded than anyone else? What are we still waiting for?!