The Italian authorities turned back a wave of refugees from Albania on Friday, ordering thousands who fled here Thursday to return home on military flights and on requisitioned ferries.
The Albanians resisted the order.
Penniless, shirtless and even shoeless, the refugees forced their way into this southern port on Thursday aboard a commandeered freighter.
Many said they were seeking a new start away from the economic deprivations of their own land.
When they arrived, thousands were rounded up and held in the Victory soccer stadium.
In desperation and rage that translated quickly into violence, the refugees, mainly young men, sought twice Thursday night and Friday to break out of the stadium in an industrial wasteland on the outskirts of Bari.
The authorities responded with gunfire over their heads late Thursday night, baton charges Friday and helicopters clattering over the city to guide police and army units to escapees from the stadium. Most were reported rounded up again by nightfall. Others had already been sent home.
The authorities said Friday night that 1,500 of the estimated 10,000 who arrived Thursday had been sent back by military airplane and requisitioned ferry to their own country. Albania, Europe`s poorest land, is slowly emerging from decades of iron-fisted Stalinist rule that had also made it Europe`s most isolated land.
Throughout the day, Italian air force transport planes droned over Bari every half hour or so, carrying Albanians back to Albania, and officials in Bari said a ferry had taken 600 more across the Adriatic.
The arrival of Albanians on Thursday was the first of major proportions since March, when more than 20,000 fled to southern Italy. At that time, many were offered temporary shelter.
Since then, Italy`s attitude toward new arrivals from Albania has hardened, even as the authorities in Rome have sent aid to the Albanians to try to ease their economic woes.
”The Tirana government has taken us for a ride,” Interior Minister Vincenzo Scotti said in a radio interview in Rome on Friday, inferring that Albania had allowed the refugees to leave so as to press Italy for more money. The refugees, some swarming and clustering on the dockside, others at the Victory stadium, received a bare minimum of bread and water and were pushed and shoved into line by soldiers.
Albanian radio reported Friday night that the southern port of Durres, where most of the refugees departed, was under the control of security forces.
