Remarks made by the Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi during a meeting with his Albanian counterpart last Friday in Rome have stirred protests and provoked an apology request from Tirana. The Italian leader said that his country would accept only pretty Albanian girls as immigrants.
The 73-year-old Berlusconi, who is renowned for making jokes with questionable taste, praised Albania’s moratorium on speedboats on the Adriatic Sea, which aims to clamp down on human trafficking in particular from Albania to Italy, but said that his country would make an exception for “beautiful girls”.
He then went on to joke with Albanian women reporters who were covering the joint press conference with Albanian PM Sali Berisha, adding: “You know that I'm single now.”
Albania has banned speedboats on its coast since 2006 in an effort to hamper human trafficking and convince the EU to grant visa liberalisation to the 3.6 million inhabitants of the Balkan country.
Although Berisha has tried to downplay Berlusconi’s comments by arguing that they were compliments for the pretty Albanian reporters present at the conference, the Italian premier's words have drawn strong criticism, particularly in light of the deep wounds that human trafficking has left in Albania.
In a protest held on Wednesday in Tirana, activists from the civil society group Mjaft offered a life-size blowup doll as a gift for Berlusconi in return for what they said was his "desire for Albanian girls."
“We don’t have beautiful girls for Berlusconi, so we are asking our prime minister to share this gift with him,” Aldo Merkoci of Mjaft said, adding that Berisha’s defence of his Italian counterpart’s “erotic fixation was shameful and a moral failure that hurts the whole country.”
Thousands of Albanian girls have been trafficked on speedboats into Italy over the past two decades and forced into prostitution by criminal groups.
“Most of these girls were lured from poor rural areas using fake engagements, actual marriages, and job offers,” explained Brikena Puka in an earlier interview. Puka is the director of an NGO based in Vlora called Vatra, which tries to help victims of this trade regain a normal life. “A number of women were kidnapped, while some of the victims were sold by their own families,” she added.
According to Puka, little was known about human trafficking in Albania only a decade ago. Since then the traffickers have moved in, taking advantage of people’s ignorance and “often preying on the most vulnerable families in a community.”
Recruited by traffickers at a young age from poor families, for most of these girls rebuilding a life after years of physical and psychological abuse has proved an uphill struggle.
Thousands of people joined a Facebook group seeking an apology from Berlusconi over his comments from last week, initiated by group of Albanian artists and journalists living in Italy.
Responding in an open letter to Berlusconi’s comments in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, expatriate Albania writer and journalist Elvira Dones accused the Italian premier of being insensitive to the suffering of those young girls trafficked for prostitution.
“Albania does not have patience and understanding for gratuitous humiliation,” Dones wrote. “If you stopped using real human drama as material for bar jokes, it would only be to your benefit,” she added.
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