By Çapajev Gjokutaj
What is being done like this? Quarrel, gunfire and blood… As if we have entered the war and not the heart of the tourist season!
This is what the neighbor of the tent next to me told me yesterday after day. A light breeze was blowing that after noon the noon sounded even more caressing. The flat sea seemed to sleepily whisper ‘come’.
We started remembering the incidents that happened on the beaches in the span of ten days. Over 20 shots in a bar in Saranda, at dawn when two more shots look like a battle. Two injured were not enough, one of whom was a tourist who happened to be passing by, but the next day someone tried to set fire to the bar where the exchange of fire took place.
A few days later, four people were killed and many shots were fired in Velipoja, after a banal quarrel between the owners of the two hotels over who owned a deck chair area. Among those killed was a 20-year-old boy, a waiter who had just closed the first day of work, poorly speaking.
A day later, again at night, in Drimadhe, 60 deck chairs were set on fire. ‘Competition’ Albanian flag. Dozens of sunbeds that burn through the night and smoke and flames engulf tourists. Pretty grueling ad for others.
Together with the neighbor of the tent next door we try to find out why all this unhappiness happened in the span of 10 days and not everywhere but on the beaches, places where tranquility and safety are paramount.
Perhaps it is general stress accumulated by prolonged pandemic bans. For hotel and beach owners, this stress seems to come in handy when combined with impatience to make money, impatience increased by last summer’s losses, loans to be repaid, and other worries of this kind.
It is rumored in various media that the authorities have delayed the permits for the use of the beaches this year. Work of bureaucrats or, where you know, push for bribes. If these permits had been given in time, the two sides of the owners in Velipoja would probably not have been bloodied and killed.
It is possible that the African heat of these days has given its help, no matter how modest, just as the mentalities of ‘earth and xanun’, ‘the law makes the strong’ and other mentalities of this transition have given substantial help.
Yes perceptions can also be a problem. Thousands upon thousands of good and beautiful things that have happened on our beaches over the course of 10 days are fading away from the raging flow of news about quarrels, gunfire and bloodshed.
My neighbor and I can guess these and other causes from the sunbeds where we are lying, but those who undertake to analyze them for the public, I do not believe they can do this work from the table in the air conditioning by putting to work only their logic, however bright it may be.
