Tag Archives: Albania

Albania Offers Safe Haven to Afghan Refugees

August 20, 2021 By in 71st Secretary of State, Blinken, EUR|Europe, Evacuations, Refugees, State Department, Trends, U.S. Missions Tags: , , , ,

 

 

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Senate Confirmation by Crisis Continues: Hoza (Cameroon), Polaschik (Algeria), Andre (Mauritania),

July 29, 2014 By in Ambassadors, Confirmations, Congress, Foreign Service, FSOs, Realities of the FS, Staffing the FS, State Department, U.S. Missions Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

— Domani Spero
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The U.S. Senate appears to continue its trend of headline-triggered confirmations. Today, the Senate confirmed by voice votes the following ambassador to three African posts.

If you missed it, on July 27, WaPo reported that Nigerian Boko Haram militants kidnapped the wife of Cameroon’s vice prime minister. Premium Times citing BBC Hausa reported today that Security Forces in the Cameroun Republic have rescued the wife of the country’s Deputy Prime Minister, Amadou Ali, who was abducted on Sunday by suspected members of the extremist Boko Haram sect.  If that’s not enough bad news, VOA also reported that an outbreak of Cholera has killed 200 in Northern Cameroon and that there are fears that this may be a repeat of the 2010 epidemic, when the country had to deal with 10,000 cases.

Ambassador-Designate Hoza also made the news recently when he was featured and quoted in WaPo’s piece, At Falls Church apartments, would-be ambassadors and families live in limbo. The three other nominees cited in that article, Donald Lu (Albania), Eric Schultz (Zambia), and Amy Hyatt (Palau) are not currently scheduled for a Senate vote.

We have previously blogged about Ambassador-Designate Polaschik when she was the deputy chief of mission who ran the Embassy Libya after Ambassador Cretz left the country due to Wikileaks.  She also led the evacuation of personnel/American citizens in February 2011 and lead the team back into Tripoli when it reopened in September 2011. A few days ago, Algeria was in the news.  Its national airline Air Algerie on a flight from Burkina Faso’s capital of Ouagadougou to Algiers had crashed in Mali. Did that prompt the confirmation?

What about Mauritania, what’s going on there?  Issues of interest include al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and Mali refugees. Mauritania just had its presidential election last June. The United States “looks forward to continuing to work with President-elect Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz and the Government of Mauritania to promote prosperity and regional security” but that’s going to be difficult without an ambassador there.  Oops! The U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit is coming up next week, perhaps the U.S. Senate did note Mauritania’s Chairmanship of the African Union, and so we’ve got Ambassador-Designate Larry Andre ready to beam over to Nouakchott, so he could beam back to D.C. for the Summit next week.

Three days to go before Congress breaks for the summer!

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Albania Awards Highest Honor to DS Agent Barry Hale For Distinguished Service

November 13, 2013 By in Awards, Diplomatic Security, Foreign Service, Functional Bureaus, State Department, Trafficking, U.S. Missions Tags: , , , , , , , ,

— By Domani Spero

This is kind of old news since this award occurred back on April 2013, but we have only recently learned that the Government of Albania had bestowed on Diplomatic Security Special Agent Barry Hale its Medal of Honor for distinguished service in support of the Albanian State Police.

The award is the highest honor that the Albanian government can confer upon a foreign official, and it also marks the first time that the Albanian government has so honored a U.S. Embassy employee.

During the April 23, 2013 presentation at the Ministry of the Interior in the capital of Tirana, Albanian Minister of the Interior Flamur Noka praised Special Agent Hale for his contribution to strengthening the professional capacity of the Albanian State Police as well as cooperation between U.S. and Albanian law enforcement agencies.

During his 2010 to 2013 tenure as the U.S. Embassy’s Regional Security Officer in Tirana, Special Agent Hale was responsible for managing security for U.S. diplomatic personnel and facilities in Albania. During his assignment in Tirana, Special Agent Hale managed nine extraditions, including that of Hektor Kelmendi, named as one of five most-wanted human trafficking suspects by the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Special Agent Hale joined the U.S. Department of State in 1999 as a special agent with the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, Diplomatic Security Service.  Prior to Special Agent Hales’ assignment in Tirana, he served in the Diplomatic Security Service offices in Denver and Los Angeles, and in the Regional Security Offices at U.S. embassies in Baghdad, Iraq and Bogotá, Columbia. He is currently serving in the Regional Security Office at Embassy Kabul, Afghanistan.

Read more here.

According to USDOJ, Hektor Kelmendi is one one of the various aliases used by Deme Nikqi, of Peje, Kosovo who was extradited to the United States from Albania in January 2012 to face charges related to his leadership of an international human smuggling network. ” The January 2012 indictment “allege that from at least January 2006 through February 2010, Nikqi was the leader and organizer of an international criminal network dedicated to smuggling Kosovars from the Balkans into the United States via Latin America. Nikqi, who resided in Brooklyn in the 1990s and was previously denied permanent residence status in the United States, allegedly operated this smuggling enterprise from his home in Peje, Kosovo. According to court documents, Nikqi and his co-conspirators are estimated to have smuggled hundreds of individuals across the Mexican border and into the United States each year. One of Nikqi’s smuggling operations allegedly resulted in the death of a Kosovar in Texas in 2010.”

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