TRICARICO (Italy): Aghim arrived in Italy four years ago aged 14, leaving behind the family farm in southern Albania in search of a better future. His verdict on his gamble? Mission accomplished, he says.

Now 18 and awaiting an adult residence permit to allow his continued employment, he works on a fruit farm in this southern Italian community.

But he remains cautious. Aghim is not his real name, and he does not care to divulge his true identity.

“My parents didn’t want me to leave,” he recalled: “They were afraid.”

He too was scared of the sea crossing from Albania to Italy.

“These people,” he said in a covert reference to the smugglers who brought him over as a clandestine immigrant: “If they’ve think they’ve got the police on their trail, they’re quite capable of throwing a kid overboard to force the police boat to heave to.”

Just who are “these people”? In a word, they are an Albanian mafia. It was they Aghim had to get in touch with to get across the Strait of Otranto and into Italy four years ago. There is one in every Albanian village touting for trade, he explained.

Everything occurred in secrecy and darkness, with 30 to 40 immigrants to a rubber dinghy for the four-hour 30 kms night crossing. Price: one million Italian lire or 500 euros.

The number of unaccompanied children arriving in Italy has increased since the beginning of the year. Some 60 per cent of what the Italian press calls the baby clandestine immigrants come from Albania and are aged between 12 and 17. Others come from Morocco and Romania.

Numbering some 9,000 last year, the child arrivals seek work in Italy. And as minors they cannot be expelled. One in five are girls.

Today many are to be seen working the strawberry and tomato growing plantations of the south.

But not every unaccompanied child arrival has had such a happy ending as Aghim.

The Italian Carabinieri or paramilitary police are only too well aware of the Albanian Mafia role in smuggling clandestine youngsters into the country — and getting some of them involved in prostitution.—AFP