Tuesday, June 17th 2014

Police and drug traffickers in the notorious village of Lazarat are slugging it out as the forces of law and order try to reassert control over this gun-toting, lawless community.
A half-finished two-storey building near the village church in Dervican, close to the southern border with Greece, is the last barrier between Albanian special forces and the gunfire coming by the nearby outlaw village of Lazarat.

“The battle has just started but we will win the war,” a commander of the special forces said at the makeshift base. “Better a tragic end than an endless strategy,” he added, referring to a possible bloody confrontation between the villagers and security forces.

Since Sunday, nearly 800 police officers have been laying siege to the village, which straggles down the slopes of a mountain six kilometers from the museum city of Gjirokastra – which produced an estimated 900 metric tons of marijuana last year alone.

The street value of the drugs produced in Lazarat is as much as €4.5 billion, nearly half of Albania’s GDP.

For the best part of a decade, the village has been off-limits to police. On Monday, as police launched their raid on the village, they targeted the plantation of a suspected drug baron named Rezip Mahmutaj.

They met heavy machinegun fire, rocket propelled grenades and mortars.

At noon, after the traffickers had retreated higher up the mountain, special forces using armoured vehicles reached Mahmutaj’s plantation, in the lower part of the village. They destroyed 10,000 cannabis plants, and 1,000 saplings ready to be cultivated.

Mahmutaj, 46, has a long criminal record. In 2000, he opened fire on a police patrol on the highway near Gjirokstra, wounding an officer.

Media reports say he is also the main suspect behind the machine-gun attack on an Italian helicopter that was monitoring the drug fields in Lazarat in August 2004.

After being arrested that September, he was jailed for 22 years for the attack on the police patrol. But he only served only two years in prison after President Alfred Moisiu pardoned him in 2006.

On Monday, the general directorate of police published a list of two dozen suspects believed to be members of Mahmutaj’s gang and suspected of taking part in the firefight with police.

At a press conference given at the special forces barracks in Tirana, the Interior Minister, Saimir Tahiri, warned the culprits of harsh retribution if they did not surrender. “Those who opened fire on the police have made a terrible miscalculation,” Tahiri said.

“Drop your weapons and leave the police do their job, or the force of the law will act like never before,” he added.

However, the traffickers in Lazarat seem to have no intention to surrender.

As the special forces took a breather outside their armoured cars in the neighbouring village of Dervican in the afternoon, Mahmutaj appeared on a local TV station to dismiss the government’s accusations.

“I was with my livestock in the mountain last night and have nothing to do with the shootout,” he told News 24 TV. “I have never cultivated cannabis and am only a victim of the politicians who have used me,” he added.

As the commander of the special forces gazed in disbelief at Mahmutaj’s statement, news came that a TV crew from A1 Report TV had been attacked in the village and their car set on fire.

The crew of four, a reporter, a cameraman and two technicians, were held hostage for 15 minutes by masked armed man before being released. One of the technicians was slightly injured by broken glass when the assailants shot at the car with AK-47s.

It was unclear whether the operation on Monday was aimed only at Mahmutaj’s plantation, or whether the police plan to sweep the whole village and destroy all the cannabis fields in Lazarat.

Dritan Germi, a day labourer from the city of Fier, who over the past decade has found work digging ditches for cannabis plants in Lazarat, told BIRN that work in other fields had continued as usual on Monday. He had a pocket full of cash to show it.

“I dug more ditches today than usual,” he said, reaching for the money. “I am used to the shooting and it does not impress me any longer,” he added.

During the cannabis-planting season, from June to September, the villagers routinely shoot into the air to warn off any approaching outsiders. Stray bullets fired from Lazarat have even wounded people in nearby Gjirokastra in the past. The bursts of gunfire that fill the summer nights are a nightmare for the city’s residents.

“We here shots fired every night but last night’s shootout was scary,” said Zenepe Vogli, a teacher who lives in the part of Gjirokastra that is closest to the village.

Rigers Hoxha, a coffee trader in the 17 September neighbourhood shared the frustration. He awoke on Monday morning to find a large bullet hole, possibly fired from a heavy machine gun, in the shutter of his shop. “We are tired of Lazarat and of failed police operations against it,” Hoxha said. “Let’s hope this is the final one,” he added.

Police chief Artan Didi told a press conference on Monday evening that the police would not finish in Lazarat until they had arrested the traffickers who shot at the police and until “every cannabis plant is eradicated”.

Despite the massive size of the police operation, one villager in Lazarat who did not give his name remained defiant. He said he would continue growing cannabis no matter what. “We will resist the siege no matter what the cost,” he vowed.

Recognizing that the traffickers in Lazarat were armed to their teeth, and possibly better equipped than the police, the special forces commander at his makeshift base admitted that taking the village would not be easy.

“Until now there have been no arrests but rather a battle of nerves,” he said. “In such a battle, he who resists and endures most will ultimately emerge the winner,” he predicted./balkaninsight/

Etiketa: Police Lay Siege to Albania’s Marijuana Capital