Albanian beach cleared of bunkers

SEMAN, July 22 – Summer time is a good resource for income for the tiny Balkan country. It is making many efforts to attract as many tourists as possible.
The government on its side is making, though delayed, efforts to improve the infrastructure with new roads and water supply systems.
Albania has some 400 kilometers of coastline but many of its beaches are still dotted by bunkers left over from the communist regime. They were placed there due to a paranoid fear of being attacked by NATO or the Warsaw Pact; a fear never realized.
The Seman commune in Fier managed to convince the prefecture to get help from the defense ministry to get rid of some 60 of the bunkers dotting the beaches.
In previous years people were drowned or injured because some of the bunkers were at sea. At least five holiday-makers, including two children and a 25-year-old woman, drowned last summer in whirlpools created by streams around the bunkers which are covered by slime, cracked and damaged by erosion.
“In such conditions, they are a big danger to tourists. There have often been accidents,” Zarka told AFP.
Since early July a Chinese-made T-59 tank has been removing the very heavy fortifications, according to Sotir Zarka, head of the commune, speaking to an international news agency.
The bunkers, once a symbol of power, nowadays are only a testament to lost pride.
Removing them is a heavy cost and a difficult process which the army does not do. The ministry only offered its tank to help local authorities get rid of some 60 bunkers there.
The difficulty of the task is clear.
Groups of men shout instructions at each other over the din of a T-59 engine, using gloves to attach cables for hauling the bunkers up from the shoreline.
The rusty tanks have been adapted for the operation, with their 12.7-millimetre barrels removed. They let off a thick cloud of smoke and groan under the strain.
Because of the water and sand, the weight of a bunker is doubled, and cables are often broken, jeopardizing the workers’ lives.
Once they are pulled out of the water, the bunkers are broken up so that their transportation is easier.
The first model of the bunkers was built in 1968 under the strict supervision of Hoxha. Eight years later, Albania’s landscape was covered by some 700,000 bunkers connected by a network of thousands of tunnels.
The bunkers, constructed when Albania was obsessed about an attack by NATO or the Warsaw Pact, were designed to resist an invasion by an army of several million, according to officials.
Following the fall of communism in the early 1990s, Albanians were forced to live with them, as their destruction was very expensive at around 800 Euros (1,130 dollars) each.
Almost 20 years later, the Balkan country formally joined the NATO military alliance in April.
Some Albanians have tried to remove them on their own, but their efforts usually end in vain, leaving them resigned to living with the structures they refer to as “mushrooms”.
Some have converted them into sheds, toilets or even “zero-star hotels” for lovers, as they sometimes call the bunkers.