Illegal immigrants use blood feuds as cover stories

Illegal emigrants from Albania use articles from newspapers back home to show that back home they are unsafe as victims of blood feuds.

Posted on December 22nd, 2009

By Artan Bizhga, Tirana and Lezha, Albania

What they do not say is that the articles have been ordered by them and are either distorted or false, serving only to convince immigration judges to give them political asylum in the host country.
Many such cases occur with emigrants in Belgium and the United Kingdom.
Much has been talked about the still surviving vendetta tradition of Albania, which carry the exotic name of the Code of Lek, and have been mythologized as medieval laws surviving modernity.
But the handling of blood feuds, which reemerged in Albania with the collapse of Communism in the early 90s, has been tricky . The organization that deals with it has been stricken by problems. A former chairman of one of them left the country for Canada suspected of having wheedled its funds, another was murdered in the mid-90s. Those two committees, too, assign certificates of ‘blood feuds’ to those who request them, used in western courts where Albanians seek political asylum.
The publication of false stories has turned into a system. One newspaper does this regularly, while others may do it occasionally. Sentences that could save your case: “The police and negotiating groups find it impossible to intervene in such a grave conflict.”

This article was published in Tirana-based newspaper Zeri i Popullit on August 5 2009.

To read the whole story in Albanian, please click here and here.

To read the whole story in English, please click here.