Vlora (ship)
 The Vlora 1991 in the port of Bari
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The Vlora was a freighter of the Albanian state shipping company DrejtFlot . It entered service in Italy in 1960 . The ship became famous when over 10,000 people fled with it across the Adriatic to Bari in August 1991 .
Construction and operation
In the summer of 1959, construction of the cargo ship began in the Cantieri Navali Riuniti shipyard in Ancona . It was a cargo ship for various solid cargoes and containers. After being launched on May 4, 1960, the ship was commissioned by the Società Ligure di Armamento in June 1960 . The ship went under the name Ilice and had three sister ships: Ninny Figari , Sunpalermo and Fineo .
In 1961, the Ilice was sold to the state-controlled, Sino- Albanian transport company CHAL Ship Company for around four million US dollars . It was renamed after the Albanian port city of Vlora and ran under the Albanian flag with its home port of Durrës . In the same year Soviet-Albanian relations had broken off and Albania had signed several bilateral trade agreements with China.
The Vlora was one of the four largest cargo ships in the Albanian merchant fleet . The three freighters of the CHAL Ship Company included a Chinese ship and the Shkodra , which was almost the same size and age . The Tirana , built in Poland in 1972, was slightly smaller. The Arbëria , built in Sweden in 1975, was by far the largest ship in the fleet. With the vlora, rockets are said to have been secretly transported from China to Albania , hidden under normal trade goods .
Crossing to Bari in August 1991
Mass exodus
In 1990 Albania began to express displeasure with the communist regime of the Labor Party of Albania . After thousands of people sought refuge in foreign embassies in the summer and were thus able to leave the country, student protests broke out in Tirana in December, heralding the overthrow of the one-party regime. Despite the first multi-party elections in March 1991 , in which the communists won their last victory, the crisis in the country worsened. So there was a breakdown in supply and trade in 1991.
More and more Albanians fled their homeland. In March 1991 alone, over 20,000 Albanians reached southern Italian Adriatic ports such as Brindisi and Otranto . A second wave of refugees reached Italy in June. In Apulia , vague directives were then received from Rome to stop this influx. More and more media took up the topic. An entry ban was imposed in Italy. In Albania, the ports were controlled by the military . Nevertheless, thousands of Albanians crossed to Italy on old ships in August 1991, some of them as far as Sicily and Malta.
On August 7, 1991, the Vlora unloaded sugar from Cuba in the port of Durrës . Information spread among the population that the unguarded ship would offer a way to get to Italy across the Adriatic. More than ten thousand people spontaneously set off out of political frustration, poverty, hunger and the desire for a better life, overran the security forces in the port and occupied the vlora. Captain Halim Milaqi had no experience with passengers and his ship's propulsion system needed repair, but he was forced to go out on the overloaded ship with scarce drinking and cooling water. He wanted to avoid that inexperienced people could endanger the freighter and the people, and decided to set course for the port of Brindisi. The overloaded ship drove only with the auxiliary engines and was accordingly slow. Soon the vlora was asked to turn back by the Italian coast guard and helicopters of the financial police . In Brindisi, the ship was turned away in the early morning of August 8th. Finally, after around 36 hours without water, food and the blazing summer sun, it reached the port of Bari. The port entrance was blocked and the captain was asked to turn back, but he cited children and sick people on board and technical problems with the ship. First media reports reported 11,000 people on the ship, later sources said up to 20,000. The crowd was packed into every conceivable place on the Vlora.
Reception in Bari
After the ship docked in port, they were blocked on the pier. Many Albanians jumped off the ship and were able to go into hiding illegally in Italy. Riots broke out among the thousands of people in the port and the ship.
The local authorities were not prepared for the mass exodus. Basically, the local population and authorities were friendly towards the newcomers. Mayor Enrico Dalfino was only able to improvise insufficient care and support for the newcomers. The Interior Ministry wanted to bring the refugees back to Albania as quickly as possible, but this was not feasible. It was therefore decided to temporarily move the refugees to the unused old Stadio della Vittoria . From August 8-14, most of the migrants were detained in the stadium. The continued inadequate care and support led to riots. Organized gangs took control of the stadium so that it was hermetically sealed off by the police. The people were fed with helicopters and cranes from which food was dropped. Time and again, refugees tried to break the police cordon and flee the stadium.
return
President Francesco Cossiga , Interior Minister Vincenzo Scotti and Police Chief Parisi then visited Bari. They did not support the local humanitarian aid measures, but rather Cossiga demanded that the mayor be recalled. In addition to aid for Albania (see Operation Pelikan ), the Italian parliament decided to collectively reject the migrants without an individual hearing ( respingimento ), which was criticized by Amnesty International . The passengers of the Vlora and other Albanian migrants were brought back to Albania with military aircraft and confiscated ferries . Enrico Dalfino remained a very popular mayor of Bari afterwards, but Albanian migrants were no longer institutionally welcomed as refugees from a communist country, as they were in 1990, but - encouraged by the media - perceived as violent beggars who had to be fed and cleaned.
Further use and scrapping
The vlora was brought back to Albania from Bari 45 days later. Until 1995, the Vlora was still used as a cargo ship.
In 1996 it was removed from the register of ships. In August 1996, the dismantling of the ship began in Aliağa , Turkey .
reception
"Here in the north it was the television pictures of the overcrowded freighters in 1991 on the way to Brindisi and Bari, the hollow-eyed, silent masses at the quays that shaped the image of Albania for years."
Images in the wrong context
The recordings of the crowded vlora and the crowded pier have repeatedly been attributed to different contexts in the media. Right-wing anti-migration groups assigned the images to the refugee crisis in 2015, while migration-friendly groups referred to them as refugee images of the Second World War.
art
The events of 1991 and especially around the vlora inspired the Italian director Gianni Amelio to write his film Lamerica (1994). The cargo ship Partizani was used for filming. Other films were also dedicated to the topic:
- Short film Vlora 1991 by Roberto De Feo (2004)
- Documentary La Nave Dolce by Daniele Vicari (2012)
A sculpture by Ledi Shabani was erected in Bari to commemorate the events of August 1991.
Others
In 1965 an Albanian postage stamp (Michel catalog AL 1008) with a value of 50 Qindarkë with an image of the Vlora was published .
literature
- Maurizio Albahari: Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World's Deadliest Border . University of Pennsylvania Press 2015, ISBN 978-0-8122-4747-3 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Mark Brunga: “Anija Vlora” / Si silleshin në kushte sekreti absolut raketat nga Kina në Durrës. In: Shqiptarja.com. April 15, 2018, Retrieved October 19, 2019 (Albanian).
- ↑ a b La nave che entrò ed uscì dalla Storia. In: Quotidiano di Bari. May 23, 2014, accessed October 19, 2019 (Italian).
- ↑ Ilice. In: naviearmatori.net. Retrieved October 19, 2019 (Italian).
- ^ Owen Pearson: Albania as Dictatorship and Democracy: From Isolation to the Kosovo War 1946-1998 . Ed .: The Center for Albanian Studies (= Albania in the Twentieth Century: A History . Volume Three). IB Tauris, London 2006, ISBN 1-84511-105-2 , pp. 584 ff .
- ↑ Leonard Veizi: Shkëlqimi dhe shkatërrimi i flotës tregëtare shqiptare. In: Gazeta Dita. October 15, 2018; Retrieved October 19, 2019 (American English).
- ^ Raymond Hutchings: International Trade, Transportation, Supply and Communications . In: Klaus-Detlev Grothusen (Hrsg.): Albanien (= Südosteuropa-Handbuch . Volume VII ). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1993, ISBN 3-525-36207-2 , pp. 398 .
- ↑ a b Peter Bartl : Albania: from the Middle Ages to the present . Ed .: Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft (= East and Southeast Europe - History of Countries and Peoples ). Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 1995, ISBN 3-7917-1451-1 , p. 273 .
- ↑ Tomas Kacza: Between Feudalism and Stalinism. Albania's history in the 19th and 20th centuries . Trafo, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-89626-611-8 , p. 304 f .
- ^ Maurizio Albahari: Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World's Deadliest Border . University of Pennsylvania Press 2015, ISBN 978-0-8122-4747-3 , pp. 37 f.
- ↑ Besar Likmeta: When Albanian immigrants Ships tugged Malta's Heart. In: Balkan Insight. October 3, 2019, accessed October 19, 2019 .
- ^ Maurizio Albahari: Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World's Deadliest Border . P. 38 f.
- ↑ a b Antonella Gaeta: Vent'anni dallo sbarco dei ventimila il racconto del comandante della Vlora. In: Repubblica.it - Bari. March 5, 2011, accessed October 19, 2019 (Italian).
- ↑ 8 gusht 1991, kur shqiptarët “pushtuan” Barin. In: Koha Jone . August 8, 2018, accessed October 19, 2019 (Albanian).
- ↑ Kacza (2007, p. 305) writes of 16,317 people.
- ↑ a b c Rohan Smith: The real story behind an incredible photo. In: news.com.au. November 2, 2015, accessed October 19, 2019 .
- ↑ a b c d Andreas Reich: The rusty boat of hope . Neue Zürcher Zeitung August 8, 2016, accessed October 3, 2019.
- ^ Maurizio Albahari: Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World's Deadliest Border . P. 39 f.
- ↑ Les réfugiés, entassés dans le stade de football de Bari, entre colère et desespoir. Déjà l'heure du retour pour les Albanais. In: Le Soir. August 10, 1991, accessed October 19, 2019 (French).
- ^ Maurizio Albahari: Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World's Deadliest Border . P. 41 f.
- ↑ August 8, 1991 - Albanian refugee ship "Vlora" reaches Bari. In: WDR. August 8, 2011, accessed October 19, 2019 .
- ↑ Jörg Martin Dauscher: 111 reasons to love Albania . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-86265-786-5 , pp. 24 .
- ↑ Ruth Ben-Ghiat: The Cinema of Italy . Wallflower Press, London 2004, ISBN 1-903364-99-X , pp. 245 ff .
- ↑ Italy's Conflicted Responses to Albanian Immigration and Lamerica's Transitive Historical Consciouness. In: Pennsylvania State University. 1998, accessed October 19, 2019 .
- ↑ 8 gusht 1991 / Majko: Anija “Vlora” u kthye në një simbol të emigrantëve. In: lexo.al. August 8, 2018, accessed October 19, 2019 (Albanian).
- ^ Cargo Ship Vlora . colnect, accessed October 3, 2019.