Tirana

Albania is reported to be about to give refuge to some 250 Afghan civilians over the course of the next few days, North Macedonia is expecting to take in around 390 and Kosovo is also preparing to receive an unnamed number of people fleeing Afghanistan after it fell to the Taliban at the weekend.

This wasn't the first mass escape from Albania. A few months before, on March 6, 1991, several thousand more Albanians reached Italy after seizing cargo ships in the ports.

A year earlier, on July 1990, some 5,000 others took refuge in foreign embassies in the capital, Tirana. Thousands more crossed the land border to Greece.

A report by the country's Institute of the Statistics said that pre-COVID, tourism employed about 64,000 people in 2019 and contributed some 3.23 per cent to the country's GDP.

However, tourism was hit hard in 2020 because of the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the year saw far fewer entries by Albanian or foreign visitors.

Russia's Foreign Ministry on Friday accused Albanian media of "fuelling hype around the criminal cases opened by local prosecutors against two Russians allegedly suspected of espionage", calling the whole affair "NATO propaganda".

After three sessions, the Constitutional Court in Tirana has suspended the legal initiatives that paved the way for construction of a new National Theatre undertaken by the government and the Municipality of Tirana until the court issues a final decision on the issue.

The old National Theatre was demolished in May 2020, after three years of protests by activists.

The International Monitoring Operation, created to oversee a vetting process in Albania launched under EU and US pressure in 2017, issued a decision saying Tirana chief prosecutor Elizabeta Imeraj "has significantly jeopardised public trust in the judicial system" and should be removed from the post.

Albania's parliament on Monday announced vacancies for four positions on the board of the country's Audio-visual Media Authority, AMA, without waiting for the new parliament elected in the April 25 elections to give its view, prompting concerns about the creation of a one-sided board supportive of Edi Rama's ruling Socialists.

This March marked the 30th anniversary of the first multiparty elections in Albania that followed the fall of the communist regime, which, according to Neil Kritz, researcher at the American Institute for Peace, was one of the most tightly closed regimes in the world.

Adriatik Llalla, 52, a former General Prosecutor of Albania, was found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison and his assets confiscated after being found guilty of not declaring his wealth and other irregularities on asset declarations. He becomes one of the highest officials in the country to be found guilty of such charges.

Activists and civil society groups gathered on Monday at the square of the National Theatre in Tirana to commemorate the controversial demolition of the building a year before, announcing another protest at 6pm.