Albania’s government vows to continue ban on private boats, but is the radical solution just a way to hide inability to properly police the country’s seas?
TIRANA TIMES
TIRANA, April 5 – The center-right government of Prime Minister Sali Berisha says it will keep in place a ban on private-use engine-propelled boats in Albanian territorial waters, refusing an opposition request to review a 2006 law that makes it illegal for Albanian citizens to own a wide range of small vessels because they can potentially be used for illegal trafficking.
Mr. Berisha says the ban keeps illegal traffic across the Adriatic and the Ionian seas under control. The issue came to the forefront after the opposition Socialists had submitted a request in parliament calling on the government to lift the radical ban. The Socialists argue the ban is doing more damage to local tourism than providing assistance in the fight against illegal trafficking.
In 2009, the government extended a four-year-old ban it had set earlier on the use of most private boats and yachts, as part of efforts to fight previously widespread smuggling. The ban applies to the use of all small vessels, yachts and speedboats owned by Albanian citizens. Illegal boats can be confiscated. Boats owned by foreigners visiting Albania can still be used. There are also exceptions for crafts licensed for fishing and transport.
Albania has pledged to crack down on smugglers taking people, drugs and weapons into the European Union, as part of its efforts to join the bloc.
“Such an initiative [from the opposition] is absolutely unacceptable,” said Berisha speaking to his Democratic lawmakers last week.
He said removing the ban now would help illegal traffickers resume their “industry” and that would seriously damage the country’s prospects of tourism industry making the waters unsafe once more.
“The memorandum should continue to stay in place,” said Mr. Berisha.
Socialist member of parliament Artan Gaci pushed a proposition on behalf of the opposition to lift the ban before the start of the 2012 tourist season.
“It has been six years since a memorandum of engine-propelled boats, which although led to a decrease in drug trafficking, particularly when the ban was first implemented, it has also had destructive and paralyzing effects in sea tourism,” Mr. Gaci writes in his request.
“Despite theobviouslimitations the law placedonhuman rights, it could have been justified in the first three years – timethat should have servedto empowerand equipthe proper statestructuresto get the situation under control ŠThe renewal of three-yearmoratoriumforasecondtime is completely unjustified, takinginto accountthat we arenowtalking about a NATO member country,” the request noted.
Moreover,in thelasttwoyears, new methods of smuggling have made the moratoriumon speedboats virtually ineffective, the Socialists argue.
Can radical policing be used indefinitely?
The speedboat ban law was implemented immediately after the Democratic Party came to power, and most believed at the time the law would be a temporary solution to allow Mr. Berisha’s administration to gain full control of policing the country’s territory, including the western maritime border. And most agreed the ban made sense at the time. Powerful criminal groups used speedboats for trafficking drugs and people to Western Europe though the southern Italian shores.
The fact that Mr. Berisha’s government came up with such a radical solution to police the maritime border shows the situation under the Socialist government had degraded to the point the government did not have full control of the country’s territory. Second, it showed state institutions, especially those of law enforcement, were not entirely able to properly enforce the rule of law.
But analysts argue continuing the ban now amounts to a public acceptance by the current government that it can’t fully control the country’s borders.
Mr. Berisha’s primary argument for the ban is self-defeating and might not reflect the current situation in the ground, analysts warn.
The prime minister says if the moratorium is lifted, there will be a jump in trafficking from Albanian shores. However, in arguing his case Mr. Berisha is also publicly admitting state institutions have failed to build up proper law enforcement during the period of the ban – a full seven years after the government instituted the ban.
No international reaction
When Mr. Berisha passed the law it wanted to assure Italy and other concerned countries that Albania would stop trafficking through its shores. However, it was somewhat surprising that European countries and Brussels did not give any feedback as to the method used.
“A radical ban like this was undemocratic and an extreme measure that affects tourism and the lives of Albanians on the coast,” says a local analyst who has followed the ban since its inception. “If a Western government would have taken such an action, there is a strong chance it would not have been able to withstand the power of public opinion.”
He adds that it is problematic when two decades after the fall of the communist regime, the government is using a radical methods used in undemocratic societies.
Socialists lukewarm on issue
The Socialist Party’s opposition on the matter has been lukewarm. “I believe in the past they felt guilty about how bad things had gotten, but now they are waking up to the fact that there is an electoral issue to be made here,” says a political insider.
The government’s repeated extensions of the ban have been met with more and more opposition however by those who argue that a democratic country can not apply such radical methods on its citizens, adding the Albanian economy and tourism sector have suffered from the ban.
The current opposition action seems to be part of it new approach to battle the government on key issues.
Tourism loses
There is no clear data on how the ban has affected tourism. One thing is for certain, tourism experts say, the sector has changed radically in the past seven years and allowing for private boats to be used would definitely give a boost for the business of hotels and small tour operators.
The prime minister said that developing tourism was one of the main priorities of his cabinet, but the focus should be away from the boats and into cleaning rubbish from the coastline. After dismissing the idea of lifting the ban, Mr. Berisha urged all the local authorities along the shore to clean the area and make it ready for the tourist season. He said that by April 20, Environment Day, they should have cleaned all their areas or they would be held accountable.
Opposition leader Edi Rama said in his Twitter page that the government had already filled the country with rubbish and now it was trying to get it cleaned. That was a criticism on the government’s efforts passing a law on importing waste.
The government has set tourism as a main source of bringing money in the country and claims a significant increase of the number of tourists with each passing of the year.
But on Wednesday the country’s central bank issued figures showing that revenues from tourism in fell 4 percent last year.
