Albania’s lost youth fuel drug gang violence on UK streets
Dispatch
The yellow-painted school in Krume’s town centre will probably close in five years. Two years ago it had 100 pupils but now there are just 60. “Every year there’s a decrease, and now even primary age children are leaving,” says Elis Dibra, the area’s head of education.
Thousands of young men have deserted this town in the mountains of northern Albania in recent years for the UK, and now even school-age children are joining them.
Many of them are recruited to work in Britain’s drug trade, increasingly captured by Albanian gangs.
“The guys from Krume are the bosses of the cannabis industry,” Andi, who connects people wanting to go to the UK with traffickers, told the Sunday Telegraph. “It’s really easy to get this work.”
Over the past 10 years, around 5,000 men out of a total population of 25,000 have left the region of Has, where Krume is located. It’s part of the state of Kukes, the poorest part of Europe with a GDP just 18 per cent of the continent’s average.
With their options for the future limited, many see UK gangs as their only route to wealth and success.
Between 60 and 70 per cent of Albanian inmates in UK jails are from Kukes and its two neighbouring states,
Shkodra and Diber, despite them making up only 15 per cent of Albania’s overall population.
Many of those in prison in the UK are from the ‘Hellbanianz’ gang thought to rule the east London cocaine trade with an iron fist.
Towns like Krume have become hotspots for gang recruitment, and the number of schoolchildren in the state has shrunk from 15,800 to just 5,200 in the last 10 years.
“There were 26 people in my high school class and at least 17 are now in England,” says 30-year-old Mr Dibra.
As young people disappear buildings are springing up, constructed with money sent back home. “All those houses on the hill are new,” he says. Their huge gates, long driveways and ornate fences stand in stark contrast with the Communist-era apartment blocks in the town centre.
One large house under construction displays a Union flag and Albanian flag side by side. On the streets, around one in every 10 cars that passes is a sparkling new Mercedes or Audi with British number plates.
Most of the people Andi, who declined to give his real name, connects with traffickers are his childhood friends, who pay up to €18,000 for a place on a lorry.
Andi says up until around 2007 most migrants worked in building and carwashing. “After that, it became the business of cannabis,” he says.
“The guys from Has are really capable in what they do … Some have been imprisoned and deported, and then returned to the UK.”
He laughs when asked whether families know what their children are doing. “100 per cent,” he says. “These people are investing there, bringing money, people are buying real estate.”
Back in Krume, Mr Dibra says he is frustrated with the “lack of vision” in how money is being spent.
“Nobody has invested in tourism or agriculture, just houses,” he says, adding that he believes more people would stay close to their families if there was work for them.
Mr Dibra adds that many people in the town are “fanatical” about the British monarchy. “It’s the monarchy that gives the impression the UK is this strong, developed country,” he says.
Arranged marriages are widespread in Has, with families keen for their daughters to be matched with men in Britain: “Families ask if your son is living in the UK … If he is, they let him take the girl there,” Andi says.
The British Embassy in Albania is now funding and developing programmes aimed at tackling the root causes of organised crime.
“We hope to be able to show those people that there can be a different route for them,” a British diplomatic source told The Sunday Telegraph.
Central to gang culture is the concept of Besa, which means “to keep the promise” and can be exploited by gangs to keep young recruits indebted to them, says Dr Fabian Zhilla, an expert in Albanian organised crime.
Britain has been cracking down, as evidenced by the increase in Albanian inmates in UK jails from 212 in 2013 to 760 by the end of last year.
“But you can’t just have the stick, you need a carrot as well, and I don’t really see a carrot at the moment,” said Dr Zhilla.