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municipality this number reflects the discrepancy between the number of residents and the
number of inhabitants and shows the gaps filled with the municipal effort to encourage the reregistration
of the inhabitants by lessening the costs of re-registration. In terms of Sarah Green
this shows how the statistical accounts are the “outcome of negotiations, where one version of
how things seem wins out another version” 46 (Green 2005: 161). Green points out that “how
things are made to seem through statistical accounts can have a direct effect on how things are
made to be” (Green 2005: 161).
Various ways of counting also shape the numbers of members of the Greek minority in
Albania, which again include some people and places and not others. The Albanian law on
minorities acknowledges the rights of Greek minority to those people who live in the areas
which are recognised as minority zones according to the “latest” census of the Population and
Housing Census of the Statistic Department from 1989 (later renamed as the Institute of
Statistics INSTAT in 1993). The minority zones a that time conjoined 40 villages of the
district of Gjirokastër, 35 villages of Sarandë district, 16 villages of Delvinë district and 3
villages of Përmet district (see Minorities: The Present and the Future 2003: 11-12 and
Demographic Atlas of Albania 2003: 99). As the census was done in the period of
communism (four years after the death of the communist leader Enver Hoxha and during the
presidency of Ramiz Alia, 1985-1992), it included only the numbers on the officially
acknowledged Greek minority at that time. In 2001 the population census was repeated, but
questions on the nationality and religion were not included (see First report submitted by the
Republic of Albania, under article 25, paragraph 1, of the Council of Europe, 2001). There are
large discrepancies between minority population numbers estimated by the Albanian statistics
and the Greek organisations (Kondis and Manda 1994: 16-18, Bos and UNPO Mission 1994:
1-2, Pettifier 2001: 5-6, Minorities: The Present and the Future 2003: 12, partly also Green,
2005: 170, de Rapper & Sintès, 2006: 37). For example, while the general census of 1989
counted 58.758 inhabitants living in minority zones, the Greek organisation Omonia counted
about 150.000 to 200.000 minority members (Minorities: The Present and the Future 2003:
12, see also the CIA Factbook https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-worldfactbook/geos/al.html,
last viewed September 3, 2007). The reason for such differences is that
46 At this point Green adds that “there will always be other versions available, so whatever reality the accounts
currently show is inherently contested and could be overturned tomorrow” (ibid.). She continues that statistics is
often embedded by “nonstatistical elements” that once again constitute these accounts “as always already
embroiled with other things” (Green 2005: 162).
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