Residents of the village of Imshte in Lushnje in the southwest of Albania are protesting after hundreds of hectares of land alonf tha banks of Seman River have now been given an owner.
According to them, the property is inside the embankment and the laws foresee it as “state property”. However, an individual went to them with papers and cadastral documents to fence it and develop it. The new owner, Elton Çekrezi, said he bought it “with state documents”.
So, on the one hand, the state determines that the land between two embankments is state-owned, and on the other hand, it certifies and grants such property to an owner!
“This land used to be our village, now they are taking it from us. These lands are inside the embankment that was built in the 60s. The law stipulates that the land within these embankments is state land. We don’t understand how the owner managed it. Dozens of owners who claim it have come here. We drove some of them away. They did not privatize this land with Law 7501”, says the resident, referring to the privatization law after the dictatorship, by which the state granted the workers the land and the shops where they worked.
“We don’t even know them. I don’t know how they made the documents. These register hundreds of hectares for themselves. As a village, we have not registered our properties. How did these documents came about, when it is the banks of the river? Why don’t they make us these documents?” asks one of the residents.
Law number 111 of 2012 on “integrated management of water resources” defines that “the space of land up to the embankment is the property of the state, inalienable and indescribable”.
Fiks Fare also talked with Mr. Elton Çekrezi, who says he bought the land. According to him, there have been several trials for the land and that it belongs to the Xindoli family. To the question that it is within the embankments, he tells us that “the embankment was built in the 60s and that the family obtained the land in 1999 with a restitution-compensation decision.”
So, the same property for which the owner and the buyer have received a certificate from KADASTRA and from the property agency ATP, the law prohibits it from being privatized. The fact is that hundreds of residents are in conflict with owners and buyers for this property, where the only ones who are not investigated are the state officials who have certified it.
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