Built during the Communist era to house workers at a new oil refinery, Cerrik is a charming town of pastel-colored houses located one hour south of the Albanian capital, Tirana.
The past weekend marked its 70th anniversary, but no one I spoke with in this desolate, rapidly-shrinking rural community of 27,000 had any interest in the planned civic celebrations.
In many Albanian towns, life revolves around a square bearing the name of the country’s national heroine, Mother Teresa, whose parents were born there.
This gathering place was bustling with activity decades ago, when the refinery provided hundreds of jobs and the surrounding fields were full of orange groves.
It was especially popular with teenagers, who gathered here in the late afternoon after their work shifts and classes had concluded.
After the fall of the Communist regime in 1991, the refinery quickly followed. With minimal or no government investment, Cerrik no longer has any industry.
The few faces I saw when I arrived in the square at dusk were elderly and despondent.
Bukurie Hamiti, 63, who lives with her husband and five family members in a two-room apartment, was attempting to supplement her £55-a-month state pension by selling sunflower seeds for 5p per bag, but no one was interested.
“This time of day used to be so busy, but now everyone has left,” she shrugged. All of the children have moved in with you in England.
Bejaze Dine, 70, paused during her evening stroll to inform me that every member of her family — six children and eleven grandchildren — had relocated abroad, though in her case to Germany, Greece, and Italy (the route to England being too hazardous, and the jobs of too low a station).
I miss everyone, but I cannot fault them for leaving. There is nothing here for them. During the Communist era, life was one hundred times better,’ she snarled. ‘In the past, everyone worked, and money was not everything’
She marched away proclaiming, “God save Enver Hoxha!” after becoming sufficiently disillusioned to mourn Albania’s despotic dictator, whose death in 1985 signaled the beginning of the end of the Communist era.
As there was no one in the square to hear her, she might as well have howled at the moon. Even the nearby coffee shops and pubs were deserted.
It was as if the town’s youth had been eradicated by an age-selective disease. In a sense, it has. Migration is the plague afflicting Cerrik and so many other Albanian municipalities.
Spending time here reveals, however, that the tale behind this unprecedented exodus is not nearly as easy as it appears from the United Kingdom.
For it is no longer just the poorly educated, unskilled (and, yes, in some cases, criminal) sections of Albania who are fleeing to the illusory golden coasts of England. Now, many of the brightest young people in Albania are also fleeing.
The educated middle classes who could transform Albania from a failing kleptocracy into a nation whose residents would rather stay and create their futures than risk their lives on rubber dinghies include doctors, teachers, bankers, attorneys, and entrepreneurs.
Albania’s brightest young people are fleeing in droves, dejected by the corruption and nepotism that stymie their dreams, as well as the poor earnings.
According to Endrit Shabani, 37, an Oxford-educated Albanian professor who completed a PhD dissertation on his country’s brain-drain, the exodus is comparable to the mid-1990s, when law and order completely collapsed.
This week, while traveling across the country, I have witnessed this spectral truth at every turn.
Cerrik resembles a post-gold-rush Klondike settlement. There are no customers in the stores, no occupants in the residences, and so few students in the schools that barely a handful of classrooms are occupied.
Dr. Mirela Mucaj, the local director of education, informed me that the number of students has decreased by 272 in the past year, and that two schools have lately closed.
“It’s primarily due to emigration, primarily to England but also to Germany,” she added, adding that she hopes her computer engineering-graduate daughter would find work in Britain.
Outside the Tomorr Sinani high school, which can hold 430 students but only has 150, 16-year-old Krisld Tabaku told me that living in London was his “big dream.” Typically, he understood little about the realities of life there, save from a romanticized image from films.
A neighboring institution that specializes in veterinary studies and agriculture should have 650 students, but only has 126.
Even the janitor hopes to reside in Yorkshire, just like his brother-in-law, who operates a successful property business in Leeds. He cannot comprehend why, at age 51 and with no abilities, he was denied a visa.
Paid a pittance and disillusioned by a system that obstructs their path to the top of their profession, a large number of young teachers are also migrating to England.
Before departing for Albania, I chatted with Ervini Kumaraku, 29, who left his position as an English teacher at a high school in Ura Vajgurore, a tiny village south of Tirana, last summer in order to manage a restaurant in Weston-super-Mare.
Now sharing a basement apartment near the beach with other Albanians, he ‘hates’ living in Britain because he is homesick, misses his wife, and detests the weather and food. However, he stays since he has increased his monthly teaching compensation from $500 to $2,000.
Back in Tirana, with its stunning new projects — apartment buildings, offices and hotels, fashionable restaurants and designer stores (many of which are said to have been financed by the laundered proceeds of international crime), the brain drain is less apparent.
Undergraduates with a serious demeanor buzz about university campuses. Yet even here, nothing is as it seems.
The prestigious physics department at the University of Tirana once produced world-renowned scientists. This year, however, only ten undergraduates have graduated because of apathy.
On the steps of the nearby polytechnic, where he has just attended a lecture on mechanical engineering, I meet Xheson, a 22-year-old master’s student (for reasons that will become obvious, he declines to give his real name). As he begins to tell his story, this young man appears to be the type of individual Albania requires. A person who went against the migration trend.
Though he admitted entering Britain illegally at 17 — working all hours to pay traffickers £7,500 to ferry him across the Channel — he lasted only a few months before concluding he had made a grievous mistake and chose to return home.
But when living with a relative, in North London, he fell in thrall to an Albanian ‘drug lord’ who marketed him to the police, then promised to help him — a ruse sometimes employed to acquire control of underlings, he claims.
Unlike some countrymen, Xheson had the means to escape back to Tirana, where he enrolled at the university.
However, he believes he couldn’t afford the lifestyle to which he aspires on an engineer’s salary: roughly £450 a month. He is doing the degree just to obtain ‘respect’.
His current enterprise is significantly more lucrative. Having opened a bitcoin account, he has become a banker for his London underworld contacts.
He continues with a grin, “They bring me their money, I safeguard it, and I take some “tax” for myself.”
This was not what politicians and academics had in mind when they told me this week that incentives were required to help Albania retain its aspiring entrepreneurs.
How can Albania’s power brokers expect young people to live exemplary lives when they have built a society replete with corruption and so many of them have their noses in the trough?
The Albanian media is notoriously docile when it comes to official corruption, as it is largely controlled by loyalists of the ruling socialist party and the populist Prime Minister Edi Rama (a 6’6″ former professional basketball player).
Lindita Cela, a courageous Albanian investigative journalist, informs me that twelve politicians, including mayors and members of parliament, have lately been convicted or investigated for crimes ranging from drug trafficking to murder.
She states that there have never been so many criminals in the Albanian parliament. In the past, they remained inconspicuous. Now they are in the spotlight.
The competing political parties invariably assign blame to one another. During my 90-minute conversation with 74-year-old opposition leader Sali Berisha, he leveled a slew of accusations against Rama, who removed him as prime minister in 2013.
The chairman of the Democratic Party warned of a £400 million government waste-disposal project in which incinerators were never constructed, as well as new schools and roads that cost Albanian taxpayers significantly more than equivalent projects in the EU since millions are lost.
“Edi Rama is robbing the nation through corruption, and that is catastrophic,” he stated. I’ve read in the British press that [mass emigration from Albania] is a result of poverty. However, poverty is solely caused by the theft of government revenues. Tirana has become a corruption incubator.
Consequently, he stated that immigration was destroying Albania.
According to reports, Mr. Rama flew by private chartered jet 137 times last year, at a cost of £22 million to Albania.
He claims that the prime minister has amassed a £200 million fortune and built a massive villa outside of Tirana, claiming to have paid for it by selling artwork and a book he authored, or by using funds provided by his banker wife, Linda.
However, as government lawmakers are keen to point out, Mr. Berisha has his own baggage. Although he was already barred from entering the United States due to his alleged association with organized crime, the prohibition was recently extended to the United Kingdom.
The leader of the Democrats asserts that the accusations are politically motivated fabrications.
Regardless of the facts, Lavdrim Krashi, a member of parliament, is profoundly concerned about the questionable standards of conduct he has experienced since returning home to enter parliament last year, after working for Brent Council in North London for 20 years as a senior housing manager.
“The primary reason I decided to return to the United Kingdom was to inject some “Britishness” into the Albanian political system,” he explained. ‘ I imply transparency, openness, and integrity by this. Regarding public officials, Albania lacks all of the aforementioned qualities. People believe that, if you are a politician, you have the right to do whatever you want.
There is a feeling that if you are in power — and this includes the opposition — you have the right to drive a Range Rover with a 2022 license plate and wear fancy clothing. I’m wearing a £199 suit from Marks & Spencer, making me one of the least expensively dressed members of parliament.
According to him, these expectations include owning luxury residences and enterprises.
Then, where does the money originate? It does not come from their monthly earnings, which are approximately £1,000 after taxes.
Mr. Krashi finds new employment. The best posts in both the public and commercial sectors are rarely filled on the basis of merit.
Everything depends on who you know, your political connections, and your ability to pay bribes.
The system saps the hope of young people. Destroys their spirit. A large number of ambitious young people are migrating to the United Kingdom, not just on boats but also with student and skilled migrant labor visas.
Families often remove bright 14- to 16-year-old boys from school and transfer them to Britain alone, despite the fact that the law prohibits the deportation of minors, he added. While working for the Brent council, he witnessed how they evaded the criminal justice system.
When I questioned Mr. Krashi whether the prime minister he serves was justified in blaming failed British refugee policy for the Albanian migration crisis, as he did last week, he said categorically: ‘No. We are the biggest source of failure. We are failing our children.’
The Rama administration is at least putting on a show of combating the corruption at the heart of Albanian society.
Despite how unbelievable it may sound, teachers in this country have not been required to possess professional credentials in order to work in schools. It appears things will alter in the future.
In the meantime, there has been a noticeable crackdown on pervasive corruption in the public health industry. Since the fall of Communism, and possibly before, it has been common practice for doctors to collect ‘tips,’ or bribes under any other name, in exchange for favorable care.
By slipping a few thousand Lek into the pocket of a specialist’s white coat, it is possible to bypass surgery waiting lists and receive superior care.
Two months ago, however, the authorities conducted a sting operation to demonstrate that this would no longer be tolerated. As anesthesiologist Fitim Marku took a bribe, his “patient” exposed himself to be an undercover police officer, and he was subsequently arrested.
Doctors around the nation are supporting him, outraged that one of their poorly compensated colleagues (Marku likely earned approximately £500 per month) has been used as an example while politicians rake in millions with impunity.
And at Tirana’s medical university, the case has strengthened the will of the next generation of Albanian physicians to practice overseas. Indeed, more than 3,000 Albanian physicians and other health professionals have been hired in Germany under a fast-track recruitment program, and if the NHS relaxed its rules, the same could occur here.
If that were to occur, Britain would benefit from Albania’s loss. Many of the intelligent, entrepreneurial, and dependably kind young men and women I met fit the same description.
They are a far cry from the cliched picture of Albanian migrants produced by the small proportion of undesirables who pack into those sagging dinghies.
Nonetheless, the loss of talent must undoubtedly be halted. If not, there will be no one left with the will or intelligence to reconstruct our magnificent country, and Mother Teresa squares will reverberate with the sound of Albania’s demise.