Even the sky was weeping. An interview with Uljana Gazidede

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Uljana Gazidede was born in Albania e risiede in Italia da oltre trent’anni anni. Naturalizzata italiana, di professione avvocata, si occupa di difendere i diritti dei migranti in tutti i tribunali d’Italia. In questi giorni in cui l’Albania è sotto i riflettori per la cosiddetta “rivoluzione dei fenicotteri”, dialogare con lei sul rapporto fra Italia e Albania è tanto più interessante. L’intervista che segue, iniziata prima che scoppiassero le proteste e proseguita durante, può essere confrontata con l’articolo di approfondimento sulle attuali proteste “From Italy, it is not easy to understand the protests in Albania”by Alice Luta, to gauge similarities and differences in viewpoints.

L’intervista a Uljana Gazidede è parte di una rubrica di interviste curate da Asmae Dachan a personalità con storie di migrazione in Italia. Read Asmae Dachan's articles here.

Uljana, cHow would you present your homeland to the world? 

Well, Albania is a very beautiful, welcoming country, with decent, very humble, welcoming people who open their doors, and who, even if they have little, love to share it. There's also a saying, “When they knock on our door, we open it and say welcome,” as if to say, “At our table, even if there's only bread and salt, you are welcome.” The people are proud, attached to their roots, to their traditions, they are very tolerant of other cultures and nationalities. They don't have genuine prejudices. Having endured communism for so many years, they have learned to suffer in silence, not to be critical a priori. We can say that Albanians, in general, have a well-defined character, warm-blooded, yet they are willing to accept, sometimes in a very subdued way, what others tell them, especially when they are not in their own country, particularly towards Italians.   

Why?

Tra gli albanesi c’è un amore viscerale per tutto ciò che è italiano. Anche senza una conoscenza personale pregressa, gli italiani sono considerati a prescindere persone affidabili e vengono accolti a braccia aperte, come se fossero di casa.  Ci sono ragioni storiche. Innanzitutto, perché gli albanesi, a partire dal 1400, hanno fatto le prime migrations verso l’Italia. Già all’epoca di Skanderbeg (Giorgio Castriota, known as Skanderbeg, was an Albanian prince and general who led his countrymen in rebellion against the Ottoman Turkish occupation of Albania) the first mass emigration to Italy took place, where many were welcomed, giving rise to the first communities of Arbëresh (Albanians in Italy).

Durante la Seconda guerra mondiale l’Albania divenne protettorato italiano; c’era il re d’Italia e d’Albania, con grande vanto ovviamente, tanto che ancora oggi in Albania si vede tutto quello che gli italiani hanno costruito all’epoca. La città di Durazzo ha tutto il boulevard in stile neoclassico, mentre ci sono monumenti palesemente in stile fascista; anche a Tirana ciò è visibile, specialmente le sedi dei vari ministeri. C’è un’impronta chiara, evidente, del lavoro che hanno fatto gli italiani. Va ricordato che, durante l’occupazione, al contrario dei nazisti, gli italiani furono generalmente ben accolti; non vennero mai visti come invasori. Il popolo albanese ha salvato soldati italiani. Ho un ricordo legato a mio nonno, che faceva il cuoco; considerata la sua professione, i nazisti non gli fecero la perquisizione a casa e nel suo sottoscala ha potuto così salvare la vita a tre soldati napoletani. Grazie a loro ha poi imparato come cucinare all’italiana; c’è stato un interscambio culturale, culinario. All’epoca c’erano i piccoli balilla. Mio padre, che è del 1930, ha partecipato egli stesso alla formazione. Durante il protettorato italiano c’erano le suore che portavano i bambini albanesi a San Benedetto del Tronto per trasformarli in balilla. Quindi, per una ragione o per l’altra, c’è stato un interscambio con l’Italia in varie epoche, fino alla chiusura totale, con la definitiva interruzione dei rapporti. 

And so, we arrive at 1991, at Vlorë, at the great exodus. The younger ones might need to hear this story. 

Yes, this is a story that is at times moving, at times shocking. When I came to Italy, I was eighteen, straight after finishing secondary school. Up until a certain point, we were all sitting at our school desks, then I found myself in a classroom with just one other pupil. Suddenly, people seemed to have gone mad; they were storming the port of Durrës, the only one where merchant ships docked. The Vlora, arriving from the port of Brindisi, was stormed, whilst many people sought refuge in the embassies in Tirana. The panic and exodus were triggered by a speech by Ramiz Alia (a staunch loyalist and successor to the dictator Enver Hoxha, etc.), who declared that the country was bankrupt, that there was no longer food for anyone, and that everyone was free. It was a very difficult moment of political transition, where the protests of university students had a significant echo.

What do you remember about those days?

I have vivid memories of that time. A defining moment was undoubtedly the toppling of the statue of the dictator Enver Hoxha, right in the middle of Skanderbeg Square, by the students themselves, who sparked a full-blown revolution that at times descended into civil war. I will never forget how the streets of our cities were overrun by military vehicles, nor the images of defenceless people being shot simply for taking part in demonstrations. In Albania at the time, it was forbidden to demonstrate one’s dissent on the streets, and those were terrible times. The mass exodus began with the first state-organised flights arranged to evacuate the people who had gathered at the embassies.

The people were terrified, they didn't want to leave those premises and they just wanted to leave for abroad, and the states organised dedicated flights, but this encouraged more and more people to climb over the fences and invade the diplomatic premises, which at a certain point were closed. It was at that moment that, overcome by hunger and desperation, many Albanians rushed en masse to the port of Durrës. Some arrived barefoot, emaciated, and scrambled to get a spot on that famous ship, not knowing where it was going or if it would even depart. Mothers wept desperately, frightened for their children who hadn't eaten for days. Even the weather wept.

It was a kind of collective mourning among the people crammed onto the ships, with a great fear of the unknown. The desire for freedom, to escape a place where people were dying, had created a surreal situation, which I truly can't describe in words. I was a high school student and I remember it all with pain; that memory often comes back to me. It was raining, as if even the sky was crying.

There is undoubtedly a connection between the choice to become a woman of the law, a lawyer for migrants' rights, and that grey day, when even the sky was weeping..

I believe that my entire life path has effectively been shaped by those scenes, and I deeply believe in the choices I've made. I decided that I would dedicate myself to the Law, that I would go and study law in Tirana, but, even though the regime had fallen, there was still a restricted entry system, which was not only linked to merit but also to the party, to personal connections. As the daughter of a man who had fought the regime, from a family of opponents who had known imprisonment, who had been interned for religious reasons – my grandfather was the’imam in the country – all doors were closed to me. My uncles were all university graduates and lecturers: some in Mathematics, some in Philosophy, and others studying languages, from Persian to Arabic; educated people who opposed the regime. One of my uncles died in prison for defending his ideas and his freedom. I was therefore well aware that I had no hope of being able to study Law. The only option was to enrol on a distance-learning course at some university, but that was absolutely not what I wanted. The need for justice was growing within me, so I asked my parents to make a sacrifice and told them that I wanted to go and study in Italy. I had already been studying Italian at secondary school and spoke it very well. 

And so his new life in Puglia began.

In 1995, an Italian lady acted as my guarantor, paying five million of the old Lira to enrol me at the University of Bari. Without that help, I wouldn't have had a visa. I gratefully repaid that sum. It was tough at first, I felt alone, I was working and studying at the same time, and with great sacrifice, I managed to finish my exams and graduate in three and a half years. My thesis compared family law in the Italian and Albanian Constitutions. The professor Gaetano D’Ammacco it gave me the impetus to get involved in immigration law, knowing that I wanted to become a lawyer. It was an important suggestion; until then, I had always been very careful to say that I was Albanian.

Those were difficult years, and saying in Bari that you were Albanian meant being excluded and disparaged; some people held strongly racist views, even at university. There were people who wouldn’t sit next to you on the mere suspicion that you might be Albanian. As I had the physical features of a Slavic or Northern European woman, and spoke Italian well, nobody suspected I might be Albanian, but when I did reveal my origins, many would distance themselves from me, and I suffered greatly as a result.

Did you notice a form of discrimination in the gaze of others? 

Certainly, I felt that even when I handed over my student ID, when my name was called out, even by some professors. Once, a lecturer, upon discovering my origins, reprimanded me in front of everyone, saying that my compatriots had stolen her car, and then she listed news events that were full of stories in the papers. In those years, newspaper headlines in Bari, but I can also say across Italy, weren't very kind towards Albanians; we were splashed across the front pages with offensive headlines. It was enough for one person to commit a crime for the whole community to be offended and insulted.

All of us who, instead, worked hard, respected the rules, and stayed loyal to our duties, didn't make the news, quite the opposite. I remember that phone calls used to come to my house every time an Albanian committed a crime. “Did you hear what he did?” I would ask why they were calling me, what I had to do with it. This used to make me uncomfortable. I even had to change several groups of friends, because it often happened that someone would start, without any reason, listing the wrongdoings of some foreigner they'd read about in the papers, and I couldn't stand it. It was truly a daily torment.

Then, fortunately, things changed. I would say that in recent years there has been a significant shift in the narrative surrounding Albanians and Albania; now people go there for their holidays, they've discovered it's a wonderful country, they ask me for advice, what to see, where to eat.

In your opinion, what has brought about this new attitude?

Because the years have passed, and not in vain. There has also been an actual change in Albania, a boom economical and more, which has progressively led to a different narrative. Today it's common to hear people who have visited Albania for tourism and fallen in love with it, who have seen firsthand the reality of a welcoming, sunny people and a country that has suffered, yes, but has never lost its beauty and generosity. But it's also and above all because many Albanians who have become naturalised Italians have become doctors, lawyers, judges, and high-level professionals. Over the years, our generation, which has suffered greatly but has forged a constructive path, a truly active citizenship, has become an example that has changed perspectives, the narrative.

Today, Albania is once again in the spotlight regarding migration, particularly with the opening of so-called repatriation centres. As a lawyer defending the rights of migrants, how do you experience this reality? 

I immediately began to research this agreement between the Italian and Albanian states, and it strikes me as a truly unhealthy idea, in the name of “filthy lucre”. Because it's all down to that. Gjadër is a place where Albanians themselves didn't go because it was a military zone, a place effectively inaccessible, and to make it even more alien to the country, handing it over to another state, is madness. Gjadër is now Italian territory; it's as if it were a piece of Italy within Albania. This is because, legally, in order to then prosecute and detain people, an agreement of this nature was necessarily required, where Gjadër legally and procedurally became the exclusive jurisdiction of the Italian state. So much so that the proceedings are carried out in Italy, they are not carried out in Albania. All hearings are held in private chambers via online portals, exclusively with the Court of Appeal of Rome, which is the only competent court to judge asylum seekers, who are literally deported from Italy arbitrarily.

Working on various cases, we have discovered that people are often brought to Albania who actually have administrative, rather than criminal, problems. They do not have criminal records, as is claimed, and they are not even subjected to the psychophysical evaluation that should be carried out before introducing someone to detention and expelling them.

So they brought people with mental or psychiatric pathologies there, and people with serious health conditions, which absolutely cannot be cured, in defiance of the law. But in Italy, fortunately, the Law has value and there are those who enforce it. We have reached the point where what the government didn't do, the judiciary did, and fortunately, I must say, that there are judges in Rome. 

These agreements, incidentally, affect Albanian citizens themselves.

Yes, there's also this absurdity. That a state like Albania, whose citizens are still considered non-EU nationals, would agree to have its own citizens deprived of their liberty for administrative irregularities, subjecting them to detention in CPRs, is for me truly beyond the pale, beyond all human mercy and beyond all human decency.

I would have expected the Albanian authorities, who came up with this agreement with the Italian authorities, to at least protect their own citizens, excluding them from these mechanisms. Today we have people whose passports simply expire, who have never committed any crimes, but are being taken to a CPR.

Now that they have removed the possibility of getting a stamp in the passport, how can one prove they are legally in Italian territory? This is yet another absurdity of the system. The Albanian state has entered into an agreement against its own people; once again, the choices of the Albanian government prove to be anti-Albanian, anti-people, anti-democratic. I don't understand why.  

Let's return to the more beautiful aspects of the story about Albania. Today we know several artists of Albanian origin who sing and write in Italian. 

The contribution of intellectuals in this sense is very important. In addition to the professional categories that were mentioned earlier, those who, through their music, dance, and literature, present a slice of their country and tell its story in Italian also contribute to an important change in attitude. I appreciate these artists, but, personally, I have a soft spot for artists, so to speak, of the classic kind, such as Ismail Qadareh, a man of great courage, who even during the regime wrote wonderful texts, using symbolism, evading censorship and communist ideology.

He is a well-known poet, whose books have also been translated into Italian and help to understand how Albania has changed, and what it was like during the regime. What sets him apart for me is that he was a poet at a time when it was truly difficult to emerge, to write, and to be so refined in his storytelling without being discovered in expressing his thoughts and judgements. I am also linked to figures like Gjergj Fishta who wrote stories that help us understand the real Albania, its tradition, culture, language, the importance of our civil resistance carried out by artists of great value, before and during the regime, people who did not hesitate to give their lives for their ideals.

What do you think of the mobilisations in your country in recent weeks?

In recent days, public attention in Albania has been focused on two central issues: the heated environmental protests against the large tourism project linked to Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the political debate surrounding the controversial agreement with Italy for the management of migrants, which we discussed earlier. The protests against Kushner's mega-resort have seen thousands of demonstrators take to the streets in Tirana against the project by Jared Kushner's company, Affinity Partners, and the Vjosa-Narta lagoon, which are considered unique and vulnerable ecosystems. The plan involves the construction of luxury facilities in the protected area of Vjosa-Narta — the so-called “flamingo protest” — and on Sazan Island. The protesters accuse Prime Minister Edi Rama of property speculation at the expense of the environment and certain protected areas, while the government claims the project has not yet been approved.

Meno sotto i riflettori, anche il futuro dell’accordo con l’Italia sui migranti è oggi al centro di una mobilitazione senza precedenti. Il protocollo firmato con il governo Meloni, che prevede la gestione dei richiedenti asilo nei centri di Gjadër e Shëngjin, è al centro di un acceso confronto politico. Le dichiarazioni di alcuni funzionari di Tirana sul possibile mancato rinnovo dell’intesa oltre il 2030 — in vista della futura adesione all’UE — hanno provocato tensioni diplomatiche, poi rientrate dopo le rassicurazioni del premier albanese. I manifestanti chiedono trasparenza e fine della corruzione, denunciando una gestione del territorio che favorirebbe investitori stranieri e grandi capitali a scapito dei cittadini.   Le proteste hanno spinto anche la Commissione Europea a intervenire, chiedendo all’Albania di allinearsi alle normative ambientali dell’Unione. Oggi, l’Albania appare più unita che negli ultimi trentacinque anni. Il popolo è stanco di essere privato di tutto: della sanità, dei beni essenziali, della proprietà privata, dell’ambiente. Non sopporta più soprusi, corruzione dilagante, mancanza di prospettive, una narrazione filogovernativa distante dalla realtà, la progressiva erosione dei diritti fondamentali. Gli albanesi sembrano essersi finalmente risvegliati dal torpore. Da ogni parte del mondo stanno tornando a Tirana per unirsi alle manifestazioni e gridare: “Rama dimettiti! Rama vattene! Rama in galera!”.

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