The danger linked to crime from the Balkans is Europe increasingly on alert. The development of these criminal networks becomes a real problem for European countries.

The studies and analysis on crime, whether from the Balkans or from the media and Western officials, most often refer to Albanian organized crime. This issue is regularly in discussions on security in Europe and is a major element of crime in the Balkan economies.

To describe the Albanian criminal networks, the words as varied as crime, delinquency, illicit trafficking, and corruption are often used together, which takes us away from a precise definition of this phenomenon in Albania. Thus, the look on the term “Albanian mafia” often associated structures “classic mafia”.

These criminal activities relate in fact drugs, smuggling, illegal migration, trafficking in human beings and reveal the shortcomings of the Albanian economy. The share of the criminal economy in the country’s economy is important, but not precisely quantify, however.

Albanian crime pre-economic and social transition?

It finds that the majority of publications in the Albanian press are currently focused on trafficking, violence, and on assessments of the situation by various European and international institutions.

The extension to the international network of drug trafficking (see the latest UN report on Albania, June 2004), plantations of cannabis and the recent emergence of opium plantations in the territory Albania, on the one hand and, on the other hand, the prospect of a new law authorizing the seizure of assets of traffickers, are now on the agenda of Albanian media.

The criminal is highly variable from one country to another case of Albania; it is essentially in the use of drugs, the regulations of the accounts at the exhortation of “jealousy family and trafficking of all kinds. Another aspect characteristic of Albania on the structure of Albanian organized crime (or at least a portion thereof) that lies between gangs and networks, because their activities are such prosaic.

As each company which provides its own standards for its values and interests, Albanian society has gone through several changes after long years of isolation.

During the communist era, a political fragmentation, economic and social development was embedded in the Albanian society. Collective ownership, the common conscience dictated by the Party, solidarity, all imposed and protected by the dictatorship, stifling individual and the mixed crowd to a homogeneous. In this ideological context, fear, stagnation and the rule of status quo maintained by the regime, left no room for the crime, no more than ordinary crimes and misdemeanors. Also, leave the country, never to return at that time was not only a political crime, but also a “blasphemy” addressed the nation.

The crime is arriving late, after the fall of the totalitarian regime in 1990, with the appearance of prostitution networks (including children) and drug trafficking. The violent and varied Albanian crime can be explained by the late appearance.

Thus it seems that the Albanian crime has developed rapidly after the transition.

The publication in the Albanian press confessions of a young trader, at that time involved in illegal emigration, is an example revelator. Thus, we note the ease with which young Albanians, who made his studies in England, was spending his compatriots in the United States. He served as an accompanist to

illegal route to Europe or the United States. The price of the trip was one thousand five hundred dollars for a European country and up to five or seven thousand dollars for the United States. A center of traffic stood at Tirana airport, a downtown restaurant served as a point of trafficking false documents. The trafficker proves to have accompanied the United States by eight months, and the number of illegal immigrants would have increased after the collapse of financial pyramid in 1997.

As regards the phenomenon of prostitution, including that of Albanian women, it has increased in recent years in England, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium.

To explain these criminal phenomena, it could refer to the theory of anomie (loss rules of conduct) developed by the French sociologist Durkheim. Instability in the economy or in the family, he said, involves reducing the binding force of social norms, making obsolete the traditional norms following the economic recession, trade, widowhood and divorce compared to the family. Thus crime is the result of a malfunction of the company due to the failure of social norms: they are no longer able to hinder the amplification of the crime.

Indeed, the social order in Albania is shaken by a crisis of economic growth. Economic liberalization, through privatization, has revealed the individualistic mentality pushed to the extreme as opposed to the “spirit of solidarity” advocated by the dictatorial regime. Social and economic issues are considered and decided in a couple (of survival, enrichment, honor flouted), and social and economic ambitions know no bounds.

It seems that the Albanian case “could be seen from another angle, compared to the analysis of Western sociologists, particularly with regard to the approach of conflict of culture and subculture – transmitted from normative behavior generation to generation and so institutionalized.

The attention of Western analysts and the broader European public holds particularly the notion of vendetta in Albania.

The references are frequent in “Code of Honor” (the Kanun) of Leke Dukagjini and its provisions relating to sang2 revenge. However, the idea of increased crime due to the Kanun must be viewed with caution and requires a diachronic study comparing periods ante and post – 1990. If, in fact, murders committed in northern Albania correspond to the spirit of the Kanun, it would be difficult to accept the reality of the Kanun’s influence over the Albanian crime in the north .

This conviction is based on the recognition of the increasing number of crimes from 1990. If the behavior of perpetrators and victims corresponds to the principles of the Kanun, their mechanisms, the grounds and the forces that drive are different.

To explain these reasons and these mechanisms could convey notions of inequality “just and true” Max Weber. The perception of good and evil referring to the crime through a trial individual indicates a trend that is egocentric to report on itself, often in the context of Albania. The absence of a true sense of values and civic morality, coupled with extreme poverty in parts of northern Albania, would be responsible for these crimes of vengeance and settling of accounts.

A significant number of crimes are in fact based on the violation of the principle of honor, but by returning to the “code of honor” and the Bessa (word), it must be stressed that this is rituals but not a legal structure that already regulated social life in the fifteenth century. Thus the current crimes should not be involved in the vendetta (the donated blood must be replaced by blood taken, “according to the Kanun), because they are caused, most by poverty and the need for economic survival.

Compared with the criminal situation in other countries (including Afghanistan, Turkey and Colombia), the nature of Albanian crime is fundamentally different. If we can say that Colombia, for example, institutional, economic and social coexists with criminal violence and crime that enjoys the protection of power, the Albanian excluded such a relationship between power and crime. In contrast to the order of Colombia, Albania has a disorder and economic and social instability. In Albania, the political and socio-economic influences on the economics of crime, and not vice versa.

Indeed, the current political situation remains unstable. The Albanian political scene is dominated by two main parties, one socialist and one Democrat. The activity of various clans which together around these political aims first meet their own interests.

The actors are particularly weak in terms of lack of social regulations, weak institutions of law, failure of the legal system, and they are not able to intervene in the economic and social. Political instability which, inter alia, by frequent succession of governments, creates “closed cycle” and hampers the establishment of a social and economic fabric that could supplant the criminal networks. In addition to these factors, hyperbolic generates the resurgence of violence.

Typology of Albanian criminal networks

It seems appropriate that before any recourse to an analysis in terms of networks. The relationship of the protagonists of various trades is built around direct and indirect, but also around practices gangs in the unstructured groups. As a result, the network concept is not applicable in the situation of Albania as a limited, particularly on trafficking of illegal immigrants, prostitutes and drugs.

The direct relationship between the networks members are based on the complicity of crime. The network tends to spread, through indirect links with individuals who are not directly involved in criminal activity, including segments of the police or other actors. Thus the “friends of friends” can indirect reporting them.

It would, in the case of Albania, a set of criminal groupings reports fluids rather than structured groups and sustainable. These networks are present in most cities, and especially in the capital Tirana, thank no doubt to have maintained links with international networks.

The organizational networks based on territorial boundaries. The case of an international network of drug trafficking, dismantled in July 2004, is a telling example. The network involved, according to the Albanian Ministry of the Order, countries like Turkey, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania and Italy. This channel broken in Albania demonstrates a lack of control of poles by the Albanian segment. The reports within the Albanian groups (a clique of close friends and other individuals united by family ties) is not sufficiently hidden, the network is dismantled.

It should be noted that Albanian criminal networks are characterized today by the average age of its members who are between 20 and 30 years.

Some specific networks Albanian, presented below, to better understand the criminal phenomenon.

- Unlike the mafia “classic” (Italian or Russian), the Albanian criminal networks are not a model between the regulator and criminal groups and therefore does not replace the State;

- The Albanian network structure is horizontal, not vertical, which limits their hierarchy;

- Zones of influence are not strictly defined, allowing a tacit coexistence of several groups on the same territory;

- The causes of violence are heterogeneous, and the results vary between ordinary crimes and crimes settling of accounts in the business;

- In most cases transactions are made in cash and not through bank;

- Albanian criminal groups abroad meet people from the same region Albanian;

- Among the conspiratorial practices, however limited (which would explain their successful decommissioning), we noted the use of pseudonyms;

- Albanian networks abroad offset by violence the lack of institutionalization, as evidenced in particular PL Vinje, the Anti-Mafia prosecutor italienne3.

As for measures against crime originating in the Balkans, cooperation at the bilateral level (as the agreement between Albania and Italy) is more successful than at the multilateral level.

However, the Albanian crime has its roots in an economy of scarcity. Under the conditions where financial aid from Europe to the Balkan region is shrinking and the legal framework for migration is not defined, the economic and social renewal remains stagnant and the risk of amplification of crime rises.