ALBANIAN SECURITY WORLD ANALYSIS

COMMENT BY "NEW YORK TIMES" .........FOR THE THIRD TIMES

After Munitions Explosion, Albanians Ask Why Danger Was Placed

By NICHOLAS KULISH
Published: April 19, 2008

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.

Homes were destroyed last month and 26 people were killed when an ammunition factory near Albania's capital exploded. The disaster brought political fallout. Munitions littered the site of the factory that was destroyed, where workers once dismantled old ammunition cartridges.


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.

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.

The United States spent $2 million more destroying small-caliber weapons and ammunition in Albania through 2007. But Albania’s Ministry of Defense said last week that even after months of work here at Gerdec, there were still 100,000 tons of ammunition, of which only around 10 percent was needed for the armed forces. The rest is slated to be decommissioned.
Before the Gerdec factory was established, there were already two state factories devoted to destroying ammunition. But their work was frustratingly slow.

“We wanted to demolish as soon as possible this stock,” said Gazmend Oketa, formerly a deputy prime minister and now defense minister, in an interview in his cavernous office, a blue NATO flag hanging behind his desk. “Working with these two factories, which capabilities are quite limited, was going to take us a very long period.” To speed the process, the Albanian government awarded contracts to a South Carolina-based company, Southern Ammunition Co., which worked with a local company known as Albademil.

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.

In an e-mail message, the president of Southern Ammunition, Patrick Henry, acknowledged that the company had signed the contracts. But he said that its involvement at the site ended in December, and that it was “not involved in any aspect of the large-caliber demil.”
He said both contracts were “immediately transferred to Albademil.” He acknowledged that company employees had been questioned by the F.B.I., but said that Southern Ammunition was not under investigation, which the United States Embassy in Tirana, Albania’s capital, confirmed.
Villagers who lived near the factory said they were well aware of the dangers, and feared an explosion. But Albania, a nation of 3.6 million, is one of the poorest in Europe. Despite their concerns, many local people felt the jobs were too good to pass up.

Hekuran and Zelie Kaca, parents of a 4-year-old son and a 2-year-old daughter, began working at the factory in February. Hekuran Kaca said he and his wife worked on a four-person crew responsible for muscling open aged Soviet and Chinese shells manually, about 900 a day, and scooping out the gunpowder. For this they each received the equivalent of $26 a day, if they reached their target.

Around midday on March 15, a typical workday thus far, the factory director told Mr. Kaca he could not take his lunch break until he had moved bags of gunpowder taken from the shells to nearby storage containers. As he took the first load, a fire sprang up in the excess gunpowder on the ground, cutting him off from his wife. “Zelie, it’s a fire, get out quickly,” he recalled yelling to her, before running from the explosion he knew was coming. Mr. Kaca hoped that his wife had made it out the main entrance, which he could not reach through the flames.

The fire poured a column of smoke high into the sky, sending villagers scrambling for the woods or nearby underground bunkers. Without that warning, several said, the death toll would have been much higher. Last week, approaching the factory site on the road from Tirana, the first evidence of the explosion was the metal skeleton of a billboard, sitting high on a hilltop, stripped clean down to its frame. The blast blew out windows on cars and houses for miles around. Closer to where the factory stood are houses with most of the tiles blown off their roofs, like so many brittle fall leaves.

The site of the explosion is an expanse of roiled mud, spiked with the jutting noses of countless howitzer shells and dotted with chunks of concrete and bricks. The youngest victim, Flavio Deliu, was 4 years old, one of the five members of the Deliu family who were killed. The Delius’ house stood across the road from the plant; now it is just an eerie concrete frame in a field littered with artillery shells. The latest victim was a 19-year-old woman who died of her injuries this month.

Three men have been arrested, two from Albademil and the other the head of the state arms export agency. Arben Prifti, the lawyer for the Albademil defendants, said through a translator that Albademil was not involved in dismantling the ammunition. “The activities of Albademil just have to do with scrap, just after they did the dismantling,” he said in an interview at his office in Tirana. Mr. Prifti said that Southern Ammunition was responsible for everything from training and security to breaking down the ammunition.

In his e-mail message, Mr. Henry said, “Since our formation in 1974 we have only worked with small-caliber” ammunition. Albania’s prosecutor general, Ina Rama, said through a translator in an interview that the group of investigators looking into the explosion at Gerdec was also examining accusations of potentially illegal munitions trading.
The New York Times reported last month that decades-old Albanian cartridges of the same types as those slated for destruction at Gerdec had been sold to the Afghan Army and police forces instead, after repackaging hid the cartridges’ origins.

A subcontractor involved in preparing the munitions for Afghanistan said he suspected that money was being diverted to Albanian officials. The president of the company that bought the ammunition, Efraim E. Diveroli of AEY Inc., mentioned Prime Minister Berisha and his son in a recorded conversation. There has been no public evidence that AEY’s activities were related to the explosion.

The opposition Socialist Party continues to call for Mr. Berisha to step down.
“This is necessary in order to open the way for the attorney’s office to investigate,” said Valentina Leskaj, chairwoman of the party’s parliamentary group. Mr. Berisha has denied any involvement in the ammunition deals or the Gerdec factory. Through a spokeswoman, the prime minister said last week that he was ready to face a vote of confidence on the floor of Parliament, which even opposition politicians say he would win. All of which leaves the survivors angry and frustrated. “Nobody is taking responsibility for what happened,” Mr. Kaca said.

With no news about his wife’s fate, after searching morgues and hospitals, he finally returned to the site. Two days after the explosion, he sneaked back to the closed-off site. He found four bodies at the spot where he used to work, all burned beyond recognition. DNA evidence confirmed a week later that his wife had been killed. “In the end, we are the ones who pay for it,” Mr. Kaca said. “We are the ones who suffer.”