The other exodus
Thousands of the migrants streaming into the EU are from Kosovo and Albania. Why their journey to hope is doomed to fail
With asylum seekers flooding Europe, continental leaders are struggling to divide the masses into two groups: refugees fleeing war and those seeking economic opportunity.
The distinction is not neat or simple. Endemic poverty and corruption can be as punishing as war.
This is the plight of people from the former Yugoslavia, a region now known as the Western Balkans. Of the 196,000 people who had filed an initial application for asylum in Germany by the end of July, 42 per cent were from the former Yugoslavia, principally Kosovo, Albania and Serbia.
At a European Union meeting this month, leaders are expected to draft an EU-wide list of “safe countries of origin.” This would make it easier to quickly send people back to places like Kosovo and Albania and leave more resources for people fleeing Iraq and Syria.
It sounds like a terrific plan — unless you’re penniless and hopeless in a town like Vucitrn, Kosovo.
Kosovo: An exit stampede Vucitrn is a small city north of Pristina that holds a sad record: Almost a tenth of its of 70,000 people have left for — or have already returned from — Germany. The city’s largest employer, a galvanization plant, shut down last year and the exodus began soon thereafter. Some residents sold their houses or jewelry to pay for the trip; all went into debt. Suddenly no one wanted to stay in Vucitrn anymore.
The migrants took buses to Subotica on the SerbianHungarian border. Then a trafficker took groups of 60 to 70 people at a time on an eight-hour trek through the forest into Hungary, circumventing the border post. “It felt like all of Kosovo was there,” says Teuta Kelmende, 30.
Wiping away a tear, she describes how she pulled her daughter along with her in the coldness of February. She scrolls through photos on her smartphone: of the hotel in Serbia, the train ride to Austria, the family sitting on a bus in the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg, bound for a migrant reception camp.
Kelmende and her husband live in the house of her husband’s parents in a village near Vucitrn. They own one cow. She dreams of learning to become a hairdresser and he dreams of making more than the € 15 a day ($22 Canadian) he takes in driving an illegal taxi.
In January, they heard the news on television that Germany was seeking foreign workers and accepting refugees. They borrowed € 3,000 from relatives and left.
Their dream ended a few weeks ago, and Kelmende and her husband, like so many others, are back in Vucitrn. “We deceived ourselves,” says Kelmende, referring to their trip to Germany.
But perhaps that is unsurprising in this small country with a population of only 1.8 million, where one in four people lives on less than € 1.20 a day. Two-thirds of Kosovars are younger than 30, and 70 per cent of them are unemployed. Many families could hardly survive without the € 600 million that is sent back annually to family members by the Kosovar diaspora. The payments represent half of the country’s gross domestic product.
Those who are not part of the system in Kosovo hardly stand a chance to rise out of poverty, despite the fact that Kosovo receives more foreign aid per capita than any other country. The EU pays € 250 million alone for the EULEX police and justice mission, which has failed to develop constitutional institutions and to fight corruption. The same group of corrupt politicians occupies all top government positions. This has led to the development of a bloated administrative apparatus of about 100,000 employees. The jobs typically go to relatives and supporters of those holding political positions. Court proceedings drag on forever, with 500,000 cases still awaiting processing.
The country has never investigated what happened to 13,000 people who died in the wars that broke up Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and former officers of the Kosovo Libera- tion Army (KLA) are now in positions of power. It was only at the beginning of August that parliament approved the establishment of a special tribunal to investigate war crimes.
Kosovars have been liberated from their Serbian oppression since the war ended 16 years ago, and yet they still live in a cage. Kosovo is the only country in the Balkans whose citizens are denied access to Europe and who require a visa for the EU. Kosovo is not a member of the United Nations, nor is it recognized by all EU countries. It is not even permitted to compete in the World Cup.
Such was the situation in Vucitrn, and no one was particularly interested in finding out whether the news about Germany seeking foreign workers was actually true. No one investigated rumours that traffickers might have put out the information to create false hopes.
This, at any rate, is what the mayor of Vucitrn claims. Bajram Mulaku, 66, a former mathematics professor, is a whitehaired giant of a man with a piercing gaze. Sitting at a large conference table in the town hall, he says that drivers, traffickers and hotel owners must have earned more than € 10 million from the exodus out of Kosovo.
In spring, Mulaku called upon his citizens to stay home. He spoke of opportunities, of subsidies for potato farmers and of bee- keeping. People merely had to be willing to work hard, he said. But no one wanted hear that. The number of people leaving the city and the number of traffickers kept increasing, and prices declined by the day. In the end, traffickers were charging only € 200 to take people to Hungary. Now everyone wanted to try his luck, if only to see Europe once. More than 100,000 Kosovars have left the country in the last 12 months, including 48,000 in the first three months of this year alone. Most went to Germany and France Only 13,000 have thus far returned.
Albania: A withering town Mali Tafaj is standing in a field, threshing rye, five kilometres from the border with Kosovo. He gathers the dried sheaves, jerks the ears up to the cloudless sky and then slams them against a wooden block to detach the grains.
Gathering, jerking and slamming the grain onto the wooden block — this is the rhythm of Tafaj’s days. He has been working in the field since 8 a.m., alongside his sister, Baid, his father, Bayran, and his mother, Nadira. They are producing feed for their three cows. The threshing will take eight hours. There isn’t much else to do in Novosej, anyway
Novosej is a hamlet in northeastern Albania, with unpaved streets and huts made of fieldstone. Chickens scratch in the dirt, old men ride by on their donkeys and children tend the sheep. Many years ago, the village had a population of more than 2,000, but now there are only 300 people left. “They are all in Germany,” says Tafaj.
A slender, 23-year-old man, he wipes the sweat from his brow. When he enrolled at the university, he listed his top choices of the subjects to study:1. Finance, 2. Journalism, 3. Forestry. The government chose forestry for him. Now Tafaj knows the Latin names of all types of local trees, but he doesn’t have a job. Albania has a 30-percent unemployment rate.
There are about three million Albanians still living in the country, about the same number as have already left. Albania is ninth in the World Bank’s ranking of the ratio of a country’s emigrants to its population.
In first seven months of this year, 29,353
Albanians applied for asylum in Germany, including 7,500 in July alone. Only about 8,000 applications were filed during all of last year.
Albania is a country of constant transformation: from a communist regime to unrest bordering on civil war to a parliamentary democracy. Albania became a candidate for EU accession a year ago, but it is also a country where human trafficking and organized crime are rampant.
Some 72 bombs, linked to criminal, private or political feuds, have exploded there since 2014. Entire families are trapped in their homes because of threats of blood revenge. Albania ranks 110th in Transparency International’s corruption list.
Albania is also the poorest of the 37 European countries for which Eurostat collects statistics. After 1990, agricultural co-operatives were closed and the country’s industry was in shambles. About half of all scientists and academics left the country and roughly one in two Albanians still work in agriculture today. Annual per capita GDP is
€ 3,486 ($5,100 Canadian.), one-eighth of the EU average.
But no one is persecuted for criticizing the government. There is no war, the Sinti and the Roma are not hunted down, and gays and lesbians are safe. If Albania is soon classified as a “safe country of origin,” it will become easier to deport its citizens. But would that solve the problem?
In the afternoon, we are invited into the home of Mali Tafaj and his family. They live in a simple stone hut, with the parents sharing a room with the little brother, and Tafaj sleeping next to his sister. At night, they talk a lot about emigrating. His sister Badi says: “As a woman, I have to stay. But I want my brother to leave soon.” The Tafajs have an annual income of € 3,500. They earn 20 cents from a kilogram of potatoes and € 2.50 from a kilogram of veal. “It troubles us that we cannot offer the children a future,” says the mother.
The day before, Tafaj spoke with emigrants who live in London and are home on vacation. They are well dressed and have brought money. Transfers from abroad make up one-tenth of the country’s GDP. “I will have to support my parents when they get old,” says Tafaj. “But how?”
In a video posted by the German police that he saw on Facebook, a voice says that there are no prospects for asylum in Germany. Tafaj would actually like to stay in Albania. “But I will probably go,” he says. “For my parents’ sake.”
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has a message for young men like Tafaj.
“I know that Germany is tempting,” says Rama. “The € 11 a day. The temporary work permit. The ability to save a little money in those three months (that they can stay in the EU as tourists). All of that is worthwhile for many people.”
Rama is a tall, jovial man who was once an art professor and used to be the mayor of the Albanian capital city of Tirana. His office in Tirana, which doubles as his studio, is a three-hour drive from Tafaj’s village. Rama wants to be the one to bring Albania into the EU.
For decades, the country’s economy was based on a construction boom and transfers from emigrants. Now it has been diversified to include a textile industry, mining, telecommunications, energy and tourism. “But palpable results take a long time,” says Rama.
The reform process has come to a standstill. Tens of thousands protested when the government raised taxes on cigarettes and gasoline, and announced plans for a higher income tax. People are leaving Albania because change is taking too long.
To prevent more and more people from emigrating, the prime minister is urging the EU to classify his country as “safe” as quickly as possible.
He knows that EU accession negotiations will not begin as long as large numbers of Albanians continue to seek asylum in countries to the north.
Rama also has a dream, one that he discussed with German Chancellor Angela Merkel when she visited Tirana in July. He wants Germany to enter into co-operative programs with Albanian trade schools. The schools would deliberately prepare Albanians for the kind of work that no one in Germany wants to do. He calls the idea “a game changer,” and adds: “Fifty trade schools, and in three years everything here would be different.”
Serbia: Escape of the Roma Most Balkans immigrants originate from Albania and Kosovo, but one in five is from Serbia or Macedonia, two countries that have been considered “safe countries of origin” since 2014. Despite this, the number of asylum applications for Serbian citizens has increased by 45 per cent compared with the first seven months of 2014. Only 0.1 per cent of Serbians have so far been permitted to stay in 2015. So why do they keep coming?
During the first three months of this year, 91per cent of the Serbian asylum seekers in Germany were Roma, even though there is less discrimination against Roma in Serbia than in Hungary, the Czech Republic or Slovakia. What drives them is need.
“We also want to get a piece of German prosperity — that’s why many are going,” says Vitomir Mihajlovic, president of the Roma National Council, which, he says, represents 600,000 Roma.
He says all the talk in Europe of “asylum cheats” is misleading. What his people are actually looking for is “economic asylum. That means that we aren’t fleeing for political reasons, but that we are nonetheless threatened.”
Mihajlovic says that 80 per cent of Serbian Roma haven’t even completed primary school and that discrimination creates a vicious cycle of suffering.
Halkilk Hasani is among those planning to make the journey to Western Europe. The 42-year-old spent nine years working for the garbage collection company, but he’s been out of work for a long time. He lives with his wife and six children in a 12-square-metre (130-square-foot) space in Makis 1, an impoverished container settlement at the edge of Belgrade that is surrounded by trash, stray dogs and children who play on the bare earth. At least, he lives here for the time being. The city wants to evict the family because they left for Germany in 2011 and, by doing so, forfeited their right to live here.
Their 2011 trip took them by bus from Belgrade to Essen, where they applied for asylum. A year later, officials rejected their applications, but they stayed anyway, for another 15 months. “It was like living in America,” says Hasani. “We got an allowance of € 900 a month as well as food and toiletries.”
But then, they were cut off. The police showed up one morning at 3 a.m. and drove them to the airport. They were flown back home from Frankfurt on Feb. 25, 2014. Hasani dug out his ID, which the German federal police stamped with the word “deported.” It didn’t scare him.
“I was told that it is only valid for two years,” he explains. He will be permitted to enter Germany again in February and he says his family plans to go again.
“It troubles us that we cannot offer the
children a future.”
AN ALBANIAN MOTHER WHOSE FAMILY HAS AN ANNUAL INCOME OF € 3,500