TIRANA, Sept. 25 – Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama said this week that there was no merit to concerns about the 150 families whose homes are being demolished in a Tirana suburb to make way for an urban development project
He made the comments during a Voice of America interview from New York, where he was attending the UN General Assembly meeting.
Albania’s National Territory Protection Inspectorate continued to demolish homes this week despite residents’ protests in Tirana’s Shkoza neighbourhood.
“Shkoza does not represent anything and does not deserve a comment from Washington. It is a process like many other processes. It is necessary to demolish illegal constructions for the common good. Those who have built without permission does not deserve to be pampered, compensated or expropriated,” Rama said.
He said that such concerns would from time to time voiced by “tiny minorities” compared to the huge majority that would benefit from the major infrastructure projects.
However, the Albanian Helsinki Committee issued a statement on the same day, denouncing the eviction of more than 150 families as unlawful. The human rights organization said the move was in violation of UN conventions that Albania has ratified that ban making people homeless regardless whether homes were legal or not.
Last week, the country’s ombudsman said it had found irregularities in the way the process was being handled and was mulling a lawsuit on behalf of the residents.
Residents say some of the homes were legal and dated back to the 1960s, while other say they had filed papers long ago to get them legalized. They said they were angry with the government for not giving them a longer period to prepare to move and for making them homeless and broke after they invested all their money into their homes.
Representatives of the affected community say they will take their case for full market-value compensation all the way to the the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights if necessary.
The residents have been offered one year’s rent and soft loans to buy new homes by the municipality.
Tirana Mayor Erion Veliaj says told a television show that the infrastructure project affecting the Shkoza neighbourhood and the capital’s outer ring highway had been approved by the Albanian government as early as 1989.
As such, he said, the citizens should have known that the project would be built one day and should have refrained from engaging in unlawful constructions in the affected area.
The fall of communism saw a massive influx into Tirana and the country was surrounded by neighbourhoods built without permits and without proper planning. The government has legalized many of these buildings, but not in areas where public works projects are planned.
