Albania Moves Ahead With Disputed Census

As parliament's legal committee approves a bill preparing the framework for the 2011 census, nationalist groups object to the proposed query regarding people's ethnicity and religion.

Besar Likmeta

Tirana

Protester carrying Albanian flag | Photo by : OpenDemocracy/Flickr

Albania's Minister of Technology and Innovation, Genc Poll, defended the survey as vital for the country’s institutions, while arguing that the query about ethnicity and religion was only a matter of statistics.

“Our current collection of data does not give a clear picture of Albania today and the census will provide an answer,” Pollo told parliament on Tuesday, while noting that the last such survey was done a decade ago.

The census, which was scheduled to start on April 1, has been postponed to September after it became the target of outrage from an amalgam of civil society groups and politicians, all concerned about the question concerning respondents' ethnicity in the form.

Some of the critics say putting such a question in the census may end up artificially boosting the reported size of the ethnic Greek minority in southern Albania.

They say this is because Athens has been offering pensions and travel benefits to Albanians in the south who identify as Greeks in a bid to augment the size of the Greek minority and so further Greek territorial claims to the region.

Greek minority politicians and activists have argued that the ethnicity question in the census is the only way to measure the real size of their community.