The CIA - Pentagon arm business, with the Albanian Mafia: Part II

19.4.2008 by CrniLabudovi.

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April 19, 2008
After Munitions Explosion, Albanians Ask Why Danger Was Placed So Near
By NICHOLAS KULISH
GERDEC, Albania — Accidents happen. But when a factory has inexperienced villagers prying apart thousands of artillery shells a day with metal rods and their bare hands, it is hard to call the deadly catastrophe that follows simply an accident.The explosion of a plant in Albania last month carved out three yawning craters, the deepest over 100 feet, and killed 26 people. Witnesses likened it and the powerful shock wave that followed to the detonation of a nuclear bomb. “It felt like you were flying,” said Razije Telhai, 48, who said she had been thrown 60 feet by the force of the blast.

Munitions littered the site of the factory that was destroyed, where workers once dismantled old ammunition cartridges.

Albanians are now asking how the country, which was invited this month to join the NATO alliance, could have allowed such a dangerous plant to operate right off a major highway, a short drive from the capital’s main airport, which was damaged by the shock wave.

Outside the site on Friday, former workers began the first of what they said would be daily demonstrations demanding further compensation for lost wages, injuries and suffering. So far they have received about $1,300 each.

Victims’ families complain that the government did not do enough to keep their loved ones safe. “We have no protection; there is no justice,” said Gezim Cani, 23, who rushed home after the explosion from a construction job in Italy, fearing for his father’s life, only to learn that his mother had been working at the factory as well. She had not told him so he would not worry. Both were killed.

In the wake of the tragedy, the defense minister has resigned and Prime Minister Sali Berisha has come under significant pressure from victims’ groups and the political opposition.

It has also raised a host of questions among Albanians about their government and the entrenched corruption in this Southern Balkan nation, a problem long documented but perhaps never so vividly or so horribly illustrated.

The blast also highlighted a more general, if little noticed, problem, the frequency of deadly explosions of conventional munitions stockpiles. According to the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based research group, there have been more than a dozen explosions at ammunition depots worldwide in each of the last seven years.

The group documented 153 such explosions between 1995 and 2007, and said in a January report that more unreported ones were “very likely.” The known explosions killed at least 2,575 people, though a blast in Nigeria in 2002 accounted for more than half of the fatalities.

What happened in Albania in March was not a simple mishap at a government storage facility. Workers hired by private contractors were dismantling the ammunition so its components, like brass and gunpowder, could be sold, an increasingly lucrative enterprise in a period of sky-high commodity prices.

Highly militarized under its longtime Stalinist dictator, Enver Hoxha, who died in 1985, the country is saddled with enormous stockpiles of cold war munitions. The United States government, now a staunch supporter of Albania — which has returned the favor by sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan — has helped underwrite the destruction of the arsenal.

Last July, with more than $50 million in American assistance, Albania finished destroying 16 tons of chemical weapons. The State Department said it was the first to do so among the signatories to the Chemical Weapons Convention, which went into effect in 1997 and obliged member countries to destroy stockpiles.
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http://www.nytimes.com

After Munitions Explosion, Albanians Ask Why Danger Was Placed So Near

Published: April 19, 2008

(Page 2 of 2)

The first contract between the state arms export agency and Southern Ammunition was for dismantling of small-arms ammunition, mostly 7.62 millimeter cartridges. Another contract was signed in December, for much larger ammunition, including 152-millimeter howitzer shells.

The CIA - Pentagon arm business, with the Albanian Mafia

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