Italy Sends Back Last Albanians Seeking Asylum

ROME —  Italy on Sunday completed the forced repatriation of more than 3,000 Albanian asylum-seekers, the Interior Ministry said. Reports said some were tricked into thinking that they were being sent to other parts of Italy.

Nine flights to send back about 500 Albanian army deserters, who were accompanied by Italian police, were the last stage of an operation that began with a roundup of refugees before dawn Saturday.

Italian media quoted one Albanian as saying Italian authorities told him that his Albania-bound flight was going to the Italian island of Sardinia. The government was “selling those poor souls a giant lie,” the Rome daily La Repubblica said in an editorial.

Interior Minister Vincenzo Scotti said a total of 3,315 Albanians were sent back over the weekend, the Italian news agency ANSA said.

That included about 2,000 asylum-seekers who were roused from their sleep by police Saturday and hustled off to airports for flights back to their homeland, Europe’s poorest nation.

Announcing the soldiers’ deportation, the Interior Ministry said it had a guarantee from Albania that returned soldiers would not be tried or imprisoned but merely sent back to their regiments.

But once the deserters had landed at Tirana’s Rinas Airport, a military police officer said: “These men will be put on trial on charges of desertion according to valid international laws on these charges.”

Albania had feared that allowing deserters to stay in Italy would set off a wave of mass desertions in the armed forces, according to the Italian Interior Ministry.

In all, 49 planeloads of Albanians were sent back across the Adriatic on military or commercial aircraft, the bulk of those from a wave of 18,000 refugees who sailed to Italian shores earlier this month.

Thousands of others had agreed to return on their own a few days earlier, when they realized that the Italian government was adamant on sending back economic refugees.

Italy insists that with the start of the democratic process in Albania last spring, very few of the arrivals would have been eligible for political asylum. It also says that economic aid to Tirana is the only way to solve the refugee problem.