Social Science Research Council

INSECURITY, ILLEGALITY, ILLEGITIMACY: ETHNOGRAPHIC NOTES ON DEMOLITION AND CONSTRUCTION IN ALBANIA
By Erind Pajo
Photographs by Erind Pajo

These ethnographic notes tackle the condition of insecurity in Albania by exploring the ongoing construction of apartment buildings and the demolition of illegal constructions. An exhibition of fear in a side street leads to an account of a prominent construction/demolition dispute, which in turn leads to the view that the roots of insecurity in Albania may lie with the oppositions between legitimate social drives and the rendering of them illegal. All flavored by the media echoes of the terrorist acts in the United States.

Sunset with boys playing with a toy Kalashnikov at the site of the demolition of a kiosk alongside the river of Lana, in Tirana, Albania’s capital city. An interviewee remarked wryly that it is the children of the poor who play with the real Kalashnikovs, for the parents cannot afford them the toy ones. For some in Albania, a real Kalashnikov may indeed be among a rapidly shrinking list of affordables. An excess supply of weaponry and ammunition produced here during state socialism was removed from the books of the army after a few of the army depots were looted during the chaos of 1997. Part of this supply is thought to still remain in the country, awaiting demand. Many in Albania fear that such demand would arise if the municipality of Tirana goes ahead with its plans to demolish two high-rise apartment buildings constructed without proper licenses.

Fire and Fear

Din arose from the center of Tirana, Albania's capital, in the evening of the 28th of November 2002. In a street paralleling the little river of Lana that permeates the city, reluctant strangers were perforce drawn to terse instances of communication. "Shellfire?" "I do not know." "A Kalashnikov does not sound like this!" "This way, quick!" "No, these are hand-grenades." "Who knows?" "Better go home."

One indistinct young man, perhaps one of the night guards at either the construction site nearby, or at the demolition site next to it, took pleasure in the fear that allowed him to be heard. Mocking the 28th of November, Albania's Independence Day, he loudly historicized the present: "This is the Day of Independence! The inhabitants of Hawaii are proclaiming the independence!"

As the explosions intensified, all souls vanished from the street. A small fire at the construction site continued to consume a pile of pallet scraps, out of which the meanwhile-disappeared night guards had intended to extract warmth for the night. The flames lit dimly Tirana's characteristic dunk of simultaneous demolition and construction: shards of red hollow bricks mingled with shards of cracked concrete, curls of rusted iron and dark straight steel bars, gravel, sand, spilled cement, and mud.

The fear that armed conflict may erupt in the streets at any moment prevails in Albania even though there has been no urban fighting here since the 1997 chaos of the so-called 'pyramid' investment schemes. The killings between 'those involved' with trafficking drugs, prostitutes or arms do not count, for they have become by now a normalcy of Albania's peace. To some they are even a welcome form of the restoration of justice, the 'self-cleansing' of society.

People appear similarly unmoved by headlines about heads and limbs of wives, children and mistresses that are hacked off with hatchets or axes by promiscuous and drunkard husbands, and by maddened heartless fathers, and by desperate jilted wives. Vulgar disputes, these are considered by the mainstream to be instances of 'the degeneration of the family,' effects exclusive to the lives of 'the degenerate.'

Most also flatly ignore the threats of terrorism from the outside. 'Newspaper fill.'

In a telling case, amidst advertising an international conference it was going to hold in Tirana, a forum called the Transnational Radical Party made public that threats of Islamist terrorist attacks against their gathering had been received. Then they went ahead with the conference anyway.

No one of those who I talked to during those days knew about this "transnational or international" party; "And what threats?"

As it eventually became clear later in the night of the 28th of November, the explosions in the center of Tirana had not come from firearms. They had been fireworks, issued most likely by the armed forces of the government to honor the 90th anniversary of the state. Why then did they beget fear, rather than celebration?

The Hollow Bricks of Insecurity

Many in the mainstream fear that the seeds of a situation not unlike that of 1997 may lie with the recent exacerbation of the disputes about the illegal construction projects in the city of Tirana. The most volatile of such disputes is that revolving around two eleven-story apartment buildings constructed through the Hawaii scheme.

Having appeared at the end of state socialism, the construction schemes have become the most widespread way of building apartment homes in Albania. They are run by construction companies which collect substantial down payments as well as monthly installments over one to two years in exchange of promised ownership of an apartment in an apartment building that is to be built.

The legal framework and the social agreements in place define the purchasers of the future apartments, who are in fact the investors in the construction scheme, as 'customers' of the construction firm. The construction firm, de facto a contractor, assumes the position of the 'investor' and even 'owner' until the ownership is transferred to 'the inhabitants' upon an object's completion.

What do the firms invest, given their entire operation is financed by the customer-inhabitants? The shorter a firm can cut through the tortuous paths to licenses, the more successful and powerful it is. The more desirable the location for which it can procure licenses, the more it can charge for the apartments that it will build.

People feel there are reasons to believe that obtaining the clearances required by the law, let alone licenses for constructing in the more desirable locations, necessitates advanced bribing skills. Success becomes a question of degree: who would end up at the Office of Property Registration quicker and less soiled. The firms range in performance from those that possess all paperwork before any soil has been scraped, to those firms that are still negotiating their way through the papers while the paint of a twelve-story edifice wears off.

Of such construction schemes, Hawaii is both the most notorious and the most popular. Construction through Hawaii takes much longer than through virtually all other schemes, and the apartments have become proverbial for their water leakages, falling mortar plaster, unsanitary stairways, and numerous other failings that lend further credibility to the widespread doubts about these buildings' resistance to the seismic waves, which are known to periodically hit the region.

All Hawaii buildings are constructed according to the same blueprint: eleven to twelve floors each, and each floor consisting of eight 2+1 apartments. All floors are clay-red tiles; all exteriors are painted in a worn blue-and-white. They differ somewhat from each other though, in that they are hand-made: of the major construction firms in Tirana, Hawaii is known for not even possessing cranes.

And on top of everything, the customers-inhabitants complain, the procurement of the ownership titles and legal documentation through Hawaii becomes often an open-ended trial.

Some doubt that the firm bribes the government officials enough for only keeping the construction running, so that more customers-inhabitants would be attracted to purchase the apartments still to come.

The firm does not bribe enough, they fear, for giving matters the seal of the law.

The Hawaii Arch in Selitë, an area transformed over the last decade from a barren hilly outskirt of Tirana into a densely populated satellite to the ‘district 8,’ the space of Albania’s privileged both during state socialism and after. One interviewee described the Hawaii scheme as “the unending road of the poor.” “To where?” I enacted my turtle-innocent anthropologist. “It’s an unending road,” she said, “it does not end.”

But it is the Hawaii scheme only, however, which makes settlement in Tirana possible for many a one-time middle class family. At $22,500 for a 2+1 apartment, it transforms the entire material wealth of such a family into status. The revenues from the sale of an apartment in a city or town outside of Tirana, which was built under state socialism, rented for years, and privatized by the time it started to fall apart in the early 1990s, are pooled together with a decade's worth of remittances from a son who migrated illegally to Italy or Germany in the early 1990s, but who apparently did not get involved in criminal activity. Through the Hawaii scheme these financial means become an owned location in the capital city. The surest sign, to those towards whom it is articulated, of the proper status. And may those whose sons migrated to Greece covet, as well as those whose sons did not migrate too.

Small surprise, thus, that the efforts of the municipality of Tirana to justify the removal of two Hawaii towers in one of the most rapidly growing residential areas struck out.

"The potential prospect of an earthquake is just a lie," one investor said to me. "It is so ridiculous! The government showing concern for our lives! Our towers will stand any earthquake. They may be high, but they are still light. They are made with hollow bricks."

The two apartment buildings constructed through the Hawaii scheme that have been slated for demolition by the municipality of Tirana. In a gruesome mix of irony and hopelessness, they are being referred to as ‘the twin towers of Albania’, and as ‘awaiting their September 11.’ Seized and guarded by the police, they are seen from an edge of a site where apartment construction continues.

The members of the over 150 families, for each of which one eighth of one of the eleven floors of one of these buildings is all they own, protest almost daily in front of various government instances for the decree of demolition to be annulled.

As the matter is pending a court decision, the investors/owners of the Hawaii apartments, whom the media refers to as ‘the inhabitants of Hawaii,’ write letters to the American Embassy, to the German Embassy, to the British Embassy, to the new bride of the prime minister, to the rest of the diplomatic core, and to the president of Albania.

They have also raised two flags in the left building, one white shirt and one red, tied by the sleeves to the balcony railings.

'The Twin Towers' of the Illegal Legitimate

Sometime in November 2002, the municipality of Tirana decided nonetheless to demolish the buildings. This time the reason was simple but undisputable: they had been erected illegally. An order for their removal was speedily passed to the new and increasingly publicized 'Construction Police,' which, in an air of entr'acte, seized the two high-rises and surrounded them with one single line of red-and-white caution tape.

Pronouncing the construction activity of the Hawaii scheme illegal, the municipal government would be re-establishing the rule of law through demolishing its eleven-story products. But if the two Hawaii towers were to go down, between five and eight hundred people would lose all they own together with the hope forever having a home.

If the Hawaii towers go down, at least a few other buildings would also have to follow. It is estimated that over 700 edifices in the city of Tirana, several high-rise apartment buildings among them, have been built without proper licenses and remain in this sense illegal.

"It's scary, just like it was in 1996, right before the war began."

The timing of action on the part of the municipality suggests a start of the sequence with the demolition of the kiosks, advancement with the first most vulnerable apartment buildings, continuance with other buildings, and a distant-future conclusion in a state described in after-socialist-speak as 'the rule of law.'

Thus, setting the municipal government on the side of the legal, the prospect of the demolition of the twin towers puts the investors of the Hawaii scheme on the side of the legitimate. Illegal and legitimate at the same time, the twin towers of Albania objectify a point in the space of after-socialism where the legal and the legitimate are opposed.

What embitters the opposition between the legal and the legitimate, and gives it an easily perceptible rationale, is that while all the kiosks alongside the river of Lana had been removed by January 2003, and the high-rises of the poor are threatened with removal, the construction of the apartment buildings continues as frantically as ever. The more expensive apartment homes built through the more powerful construction schemes do posses the proper licenses. Legality, in other words, becomes a feature of money.

Unlike ownership of the now-demolished small kiosks alongside the river of Lana, often stemming in one way or another from participation in small to medium scale criminality, and often described as an illegitimate jump from low to high, ownership of a Hawaii apartment expresses in most cases the pursuance of family status after the jumble of the social structures in the first decade following the end of state socialism.

The move out of 'the province' and settlement in the capital city is typically only a fresh claim of the status held previously under state socialism. The Hawaii apartments are generally financed from legitimate sources too: sales of apartments that were built under state socialism and later privatized to those who are now moving out of the rural areas to the cities, and relatively meager, because hard earned, migrant remittances.

Pronouncing thus illegal the pursuance of status through legitimate means, the municipal government assigns legality to the illegitimate means out of which the luxurious and licensed apartments of Tirana's district 8 are believed to arise: embezzled foreign aid in the major sectors of the economy, partnership in mafia-like monopolies of wholesale through the centralized distribution of various operation licenses, large scale traffic in arms and narcotics, money that disappeared in the 'pyramid' schemes.

'The Bin Laden of Albania'

The families who had invested all they owned in the Hawaii scheme took the construction police and its red-and-white caution tape for real. About twenty of the investors in the scheme, owners of their nearly-finished homes, entered a hunger strike inside one apartment in one of the buildings, and warned that they had mined it. They would blow themselves up together with their towers if the police were to intervene. Some children had been taken by the parents into the strike as well, and exposed to the television cameras from a balcony.

The police burst into the building the very midnight that the hunger strike was started and threw everyone out.

Around the open-air fire where the bulk of their supporters were gathered to pass the night, those removed strikers who did not need hospitalization repeated to the television cameras that they would fight to the last drop of blood for their homes. A man in his mid-forties could not be stopped from incessantly crying out "these are the fascists," and from tearfully wishing all Albanian politicians death before the coming of the new year 2003.

A few days after the strike was interrupted, I attempted to join a group conversation of a few of the owners who were gathered in one of the cafés nearby the towers by asking when the decision to remove the buildings was taken.

"Undefined do all things appear in Albania," said the owner of one of the apartments in the painted building, "there are no sharp lines, there aren't even any dividing lines. There are no dates. All is a huge mess. One never knows when something happens, when it does actually happen."

"The newspapers lie and the government lies even more," added another.

"They have sentenced us to death," continued the first one, "Do you know what it means to lose the home?"

"We do not know when they decided, but what does it matter when!?" said a third elderly gentleman, joining the conversation from another table. "We do not know why. We do not know why they want to destroy our homes. Have the right bribes not been paid? Or does someone else need this plot of land to build his apartments?"

"This government is the Bin Laden of Albania," said the first, "they want to bring down our towers."

Erind Pajo is a doctoral candidate in anthropology, and a Social Science Merit Fellow, at the University of California, Irvine. His research interest on the Albanian migrations to Greece and Italy focuses on the transformations of cultural and educational capital into labor and financial capital, on the nature of the social space to which these transformations give rise, and on the impact of the Albanian migrations on the condition of instability in the region. He has presented and published a few preliminary papers on these, and has recently conducted field research among the Albanian migrants in Greece. He received education at the Catholic University of America, Utrecht University, and the University of Tirana. Erind Pajo is recipient of the 2002-2004 SSRC-GSC Dissertation Fellowship. He is researching and training at the Center for Migration Studies (CSER), Rome, and at the Education Program of the Catholic Relief Services, Tirana, for his research project entitled "Worldviews, Belonging, and Capital Transformations: Ethnographic Refractions of the Albanian Migrations to Greece and Italy."