The Albanian women facing transition
Merita Ndreko
The opening of Albania to the world has revealed the painful vision of its economic poverty, of the restrictions on the individual freedom, which the world could not imagine. At the same time its wonder emerged, a Pleiad of women with various scientific specializations, who introduce themselves to the world with a richness of professional dignity and respectability, and with big aspirations.
If seen within the historical contest, this vision is even more interesting.
In the half of this century, the end of the Second World War found that 99% of the Albanian women were illiterate, since the patriarchal tradition of our country had made them a social category with no dignity. On the contrary, today we have personalities in the world of science, in culture and art, as Mula Inva, who has amazed the art world with her voice.
1990 marked the passage to a new world, the entry into the democratic and pluralistic society and, no doubt, also the Albanian women have strongly fought and have given their dreams, their physical activity and, mostly, their children to the movement for democracy.
But after all this, what has this period of transition brought to the Albanian women?
Most of them are now without work. If in 1989 80,1% worked, in 1995 this figure dropped to less than 50%. Though they are 44% of the intelligentsia of the country - this means that they have a high qualification level - only 20% of the personnel working in the various governmental areas are women, 5,7% of the MPs (in 1990 they were 30%), there is only one woman minister out of twenty, no women are among the local administrative authorities.
Unemployment is total, the lack of job perspectives, the raise of the cost of life have driven the majority of the active population to find in emigration better life conditions. Officially they are 300 thousand, but the Albanians who emigrated to the near countries, the USA, Australia, South Africa, can be reckoned as half million.
Emigration has slowly assumed new characteristics, with the numerous presence of women, who, under the urgency of the growing economic difficulties and influenced by the false governmental promises of an organized emigration, have crossed the seas at all costs, even losing their life, to go towards hope.
All the emigrants, tired of the chattering of incapable politicians, leave in order to make a living far from our country, but keeping the hope that on their return they will find Albania as they want it and dream. For the Albanian women who have remained at home, without their husband and children, life is more difficult, because to the grief for the absence of the loved ones they are also afraid that their family goes to ruin (there are quite a few cases of divorce). Thus, more and more often, also women emigrate and the Albanian public opinion accepts as a necessity the fact that so many intellectual, artist, doctor, etc., women go to work as servants, in order to improve the economic conditions of their families.
Through the foreign mass-media and also through the Albanian ones, another problem emerges, prostitution. A shameful fact and everybody wonders why all this happens.
Why do Albanian women have to do it, for what reasons?
First of all, I must say that an Albanian woman's honour is very important, but the opening to the world has uncovered an evil that exists everywhere and has reached also Albania. These women are the victims of a Mafia network of criminals and traffickers. I want also to say that it is a real shame that our government does nothing about this humiliation and is tranquil while these criminals take, with deception and violence, our women on the Italian, Greek and other countries roads.
These young women bind the two Adriatic shores with their tears; the pain of their parents and loved ones in Albania is an appeal to us all, so that these girls be freed from their slavery.
Too often emigration has made the Albanian mothers wear mourning, because too often it has happened that their husbands or children have come back dead. And our people is again living a history of emigration and pain, as in the past.
Thousands of peasant women, treated like animals, look for the hope of an honest and more human life. On the contrary, in the north of Albania their life has become even harder, with the return of old, agelong traditions. It is reckoned that at least three thousand people live shut up in their houses waiting for someone else's revenge, and it is the women's duty to bear the burden of the house, to protect their children from the enemies who want to kill their husbands.
The state does nothing to stop this gruesome tradition, but in doing this it opens the way to judging itself.
The Albanian women's life is really very difficult, but not for all of them. There are also those who have a good life, who are in fashion, who work. They also have the possibility - in the new conditions created by pluralism - to constitute into various associations and women organizations, which can have an important role in acquiring a new consciousness of oneself and in improving the conditions of one's life.
