ALBANIA: Connecting Itself to the World

By Zoltán Dujisin Reprint | | Print |

Zoltán Dujisin

TIRANA, Feb 27 2008 (IPS) - Albania’s government is engaged in a massive programme to improve transport infrastructure in a move that will integrate the country into the trade and travel routes of the Balkans. But it won’t be cheap, or without controversy.

The country of 3.2 million hopes to become more accessible from its southern, northern and eastern borders as travel times will shrink for the benefit of both traders and tourists who have so far preferred more comfortably accessible coastal destinations such as Croatia or Montenegro.

Tirana is also confident that its plans to build 4,000km of rural roads will help bring development to the most isolated and depressed corners of the country.

“During the communist period our infrastructure was very poor, especially in the road and railway sector, and now we are trying to catch up,” Albanian Transport Minister Sokol Olldashi told IPS.

“Comparing to 2004 we are investing six times more in road infrastructure. In 2004 we spent 65 million euro, and in 2008 we will invest 470 million,” the minister said.

After World War II, Albania’s communist government went to great lengths to improve the country’s roads and rail lines, and the length of the country’s highways grew twofold in the first 30 years of the regime.

By the 1980s most of the country had access to at least a dirt road leading to capital Tirana, but as the regime grew isolated, little was done to connect the country’s infrastructure with the surrounding region.

Under the regime’s laws, citizen mobility was reduced by the need for special passes to visit distant districts. Private automobile ownership was banned, and mass transit was used mostly to take workers to their jobs and back home.

The transition to liberal democracy in 1991 brought many changes: government funding for badly needed road maintenance was eliminated at the same time as private car ownership began to pick up.

Roads were quickly invaded by inexperienced and reckless drivers. With hardly anyone in Albania owning cars under communism earlier, road accidents became a menace to public health due to both the bad quality of driving and poor transport infrastructure.

Railways are still far from being able to provide an alternative to road transportation. With the only international link to Montenegro closed to passengers, the railway system is in bad need of investment. There has been some recent expression of interest by Czech, Italian and Swiss investors.

Demand for better transport infrastructure, from more traffic lights to new highways, has rapidly risen in recent decades, but the country’s poverty and the mountainous terrain make road investments painfully costly.

Albania has undertaken construction of three regional transportation corridors.

European corridor 8 will connect Tirana to Macedonia and Greece. The north-south axis, also known as the Adriatic-Ionian highway, will connect Croatia in the north to Greece in the south along the coast. These projects are being assisted by the European Union and the World Bank, who are keen on building a reliable north-south route bypassing Serbia.

But the biggest and most controversial project will connect Tirana and major coastal towns to Pristina, capital of Kosovo, the long disputed southern province of Serbia that has newly proclaimed independence. The bulk of Kosovo’s population of two million is ethnic Albanian.

“They started working without a project let alone a feasibility study, they approved the starting of construction without a final number for the costs, and less than a month ago its real cost was announced at 620 million euro,” Ervin Qafmolla, an activist with Mjaft (Enough), a youth civic movement, told IPS.

“Most people agree a highway to Kosovo is a very important investment that will do good to trade and human relations on both sides, but the government protects itself by accusing those who oppose the procedures of being unpatriotic,” he said. “We are not against the road, just against a procedure that violated all rules.”

The man now at the helm of the ministry denies the accusations levelled against his predecessor, the former transport minister and current foreign minister Lulzim Pasha.

“It was a fully transparent project. Everything was done in consultation with different foreign institutions, international bodies evaluated the offers, and five big companies from abroad were part of the tender, with none of them having even a single remark against the process.” Olldashi told IPS.