After the Committee of Experts decided today two weeks of quarantine for all the citizens coming to Albania from Greece and North Macedonia, the opposition accused the government of taking measures that aim to blocks the vote of emigrants. “This is an open act of violation of human rights and a sabotage scheme from the government against the emigrants,” said Vangjel Tavo, who is running for MP as a candidate of the SMI party in Gjirokastra. According to Tavo, the new measures introduced today by the “Political Committee” were taken “to stop the Albanian emigrants to take part in the voting process.”
Tavo called the institutions and human rights organizations to react against this “big scandal,” accusing also the Committee of Experts of having political reasons behind their decision. On the same line was also the DP candidate for MP in Gjirokastra, Tritan Shehu, who considered the decision “an act to stop the emigrants to vote in Albania […] An antidemocratic element, which shows the fear of the participation,” said Shehu. According to BIRN, the Minister of Interior Affairs, Bledi Çuçi, who runs for the SP in Gjirokastra, said that the decision has nothing to do with the elections. “This is a matter of science […] It is well-known fact that the emigrants vote in absolute majority for the Socialist Party,” said Çuçi. The Vice Minister of Health Mira Rakacolli did not respond to the accusation of the opposition, claimed BIRN.
More than 700,000 thousand Albanians live in Greece, and during the elections, thousands of them enter Albania to vote. For BIRN, the decision of the Committee of Experts to ask two weeks of quarantine for the citizens that will enter Albania from Greece or North Macedonia prohibits the possibility to vote for the emigrants living in the region. BIRN continues its analysis by saying that it is unclear why the decision is limited only to Greece and North Macedonia, while the data shows that the pandemic numbers are the same or even worst in Montenegro, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia. According to the epidemiologist Ilir Alihmemeti, the new measures “did not make sense,” as reported by BIRN. “To be coherent, the measures should have been introduced while the cases started to grow not while their decreasing,” said the epidemiologist.
