Omonia starts own census

03/07/2012 00:00

The OMONIA organization declared that they will hold their own
population registration for the Greek Community in Albania, because they
do not recognize the Census results of 2011 for the minorities,
although they were not made public by INSTAT.

The General Council of this organization gathered this Saturday in Saranda, decided to start the registration and approved the form that will be used. The form that was also secured by Top Channel will be distributed to the minorities, while the registration will start on July 23rd and will end by Christmas.

The head of this organization, Vasil Bollano, declared that the population registration process had problems in 2001 as in 2011, and that they are aiming to hold a reliable one.

Bollano says that the same stance was presented by the other minorities and ethnic-linguistic-religious groups. He adds that the European Council relation considers the process as failed and unreliable. Bollano says that Omonia doesn’t believe the results.

“It is not true that we do not recognize the institutions, but we criticized the process and we cannot accept the way how it was realized. Our efforts were to have a good process with the Albanian institutions and the international organizations that economically support the democratic development of the country, but the respective institutions had no positive reaction”, Bollano declared.

For Bollano, OMONIA has the legal rights to hold a parallel registration that doesn’t affect the interests of the individuals.

But can it be reliable?

“It is our right as a known political organization that works with an approved status and program. We waited for the realization of the population registration in a national scale, and since it was impossible to have a normal one, we believe that in the future there will be a righteous process that will resolve all problems with our community”, Bollano declared.

This process will open strong polemics in the country.

Top Channel was looking for an official reaction from the Albaniana government, which declared that the only sources that the Albanian state recognizes are those realized in 2011. For the Albanian government, every other registration is merely, because in a democratic country, every individual is free to realize every verification process that he seems as reasonable, but that will not be recognized as official data.

Top Channel