After Amato’s visit to Tirana, the Italian press announced a strange agreement: the Italian police would be able to seize speedboats just like the Albanian police... Controversy erupts... Meidani: Enough slandering Albanians On pages 2-3

the editorial Arian Çani Whenever the word Otranto returns to the Albanian-Italian stage, a great commotion is systematically heard from both sides of our shores, but especially from the other shore. The latest incident in the Adriatic, in which two Italian Guardia di Finanza servicemen were killed by an Albanian speedboat operator, has once again provoked exchanges of accusations, exaggerated diplomatic statements and an unrestrained, irresponsible media campaign by our Western colleagues. The day before yesterday, after Prime Minister Amato’s visit to Tirana, the Italian press and TV stations “went wild.” And we have in mind the best-known newspapers and TV stations of our neighbor, such as “Corriere della Sera”, “La Repubblica”, “Il Giorno”, “TG1”, “Canale 5”, which, in a surprising uniformity, have done nothing but get things wrong and misrepresent them. They have fallen back on their traditional cliché: “Albania, the country where problems never end.” What haven’t they made up to tell their thousands of readers that “Albania is threatening Italy...”, that “a speedboat operator named Toto from Vlora says speedboat operators have a military base with missiles pointed at Puglia...”, that “during Berisha’s time the trafficking of clandestine migrants did not operate...”, that “Meta is threatening the Italian opposition, saying they should be careful because if they come to power they will have to deal with us...”, and so the comments go on, as naive as they are laughable. (Our colleagues, who live and report in a world more modern than ours, make us think once again that we are not the only ones who make mistakes.) Naturally, such a media campaign, with the information and conclusions it presented, had nothing whatsoever to do with what was actually said during the Meta-Amato meeting, and it has its own understandable reasons. The Italian journalists, who... Continued on page 3

PROFILE/ Besnik Mustafaj recounts his adventures On page 4