IN THE bleak village of Mali i Jushit in northwest Albania, a teenager’s crowded family home has become his prison. Mojo Muriqi has been confined to his sparse living quarters for nearly four years. If he ventures into the potholed street beyond his front door, he could be killed.

Mojo is despondent about his future. At 19, he should be socialising in the historic near-by city of Shkodra and planning for student life and a career. Instead he spends his time playing cards or indoor football, sometimes doing the “women’s work” of cleaning.

Despite Albania’s macho culture, it is the women in this family who work the fields and pay the household bills. Mojo, who with 60 other male relatives is compelled to remain in a compound of family homes, is a victim of the ancient tradition of blood feuds.

In 2003 Mojo’s uncle killed a young man from the Mirashe family, who live in a village two miles away. It was a senseless murder that took place when the two argued while tending their sheep.

Although the perpetrator is in jail, members of his extended family face a death sentence. The blood-feud code requires that the victim’s family take revenge on any of the killer’s male relatives. The sole proviso is that the boundaries of family homes must not be breached.

As a fit young man, Mojo is a prime target for revenge and he is candid about his fear. Botched attempts have been made on the lives of relatives. “I’m very afraid,” he said. “Before, I led a normal life. I went to the city, I played football and hung out in bars with my friends. I was finishing school and deciding what profession I wanted to follow.

“Now it’s just like being in jail. I really wish I could go to school or work. I’m thinking about going abroad but it’s difficult to get a visa.”

While emigration seems the only escape route for him and his 20-year-old cousin Resmi, the feud is more like a game for the younger children. Six-year-old Xhevahir should have started school this year but instead he merely plays with the other boys in the household. The prospect of letting their sons attend school fills the mothers with terror.

Aid organisations helping the families say that in recent years the rule that children are safe from revenge killings has been broken.

According to the National Reconciliation Committee, more than 1,200 children are without schooling because of feuds. Figures gathered by the committee – which tries to reconcile warring families – show that since the end of the communist dictatorship in 1990, more than 20,000 families have been affected by blood feuds and 6,000 lives have been lost.

The tradition, which dates back to the 15th century, was banned by Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist dictator, but took hold again in the chaos after the collapse of communism.

Gjin Marku, chairman of the reconciliation committee, accused the government of neglecting the problem. “The political parties do not have a strategy,” he said.

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