SEEU Review vol. 6 Nr. 2 (pdf) - South East European University

Luljeta Ikonomi, PhD Candidateb.Promotion of Diaspora to invest in the country and channelling remittancesinto investments in the country of origin. (NSM, 2004: Chapter 2).Before briefly analyzing the measures of the NSM for strengthening theDiaspora, it is important to mention also one observation regarding theAlbanian communities formed after 1991 in the host societies. They arecharacterized by a strong feeling of belonging to the home country, whichhas been associated with efforts to establish organizations focused on thenational interests. One specific feature of such organizations is that themajority of them are not sustainable, have difficulties in fund-raising tomaintain themselves. Their work focuses mostly on short term objectivessuch as celebrations of national independence dates and sporadic communitysocializing rather than having a long-term vision such as projected actiontowards protection of rights of emigrants, informative campaigns for theAlbanian newcomer emigrants, improving the image of Albanian emigrantsin the host society etc. These activities are of importance in particular Greeceand Italy where Albanians are portrayed by media in several cases ascriminals. In practice their work is very fragmented and they do notcooperate with each other, thus, their efforts do not have the same results asif they organized their activities in a concerted way (Devole, 2010 andVeliaj, 2010). The reasons behind such lack of cooperation with each otherare not very clear. One reason is the vast separation of political affiliations,which indicates that post-socialist political identity actually transcendsnationalism; the latter became the core Albanian identity under thecommunist regime, and which was presented as ‘traditional’. Other reasonsare related to different levels of settlement or of interests. Struggle to getfunding by the emigrants (they are mainly funded by emigrant members) canbe also another factor. The organizations have not been supported at anytime by the Governments of Albania. The Constitutional Principle ofsupporting the Albanian communities abroad has remained mostly of adeclarative nature rather than juridical.Taking in consideration this state of Art of the Albanian communitiesabroad, the working group drafting the National Strategy on Migrationenvisaged a specific chapter on unifying the Albanian communities abroadand their respective organisations under a single Diaspora and mobilizingsuch Diaspora towards the development the country, through, inter alia, thefollowing measures: Creation and regular update of a database reflecting all the Albanianassociations abroad with all their contact details.48