To prevent the unauthorized entry of migrants into Italy, the Italian Navy set up a procedure to board Albanian vessels whenever encountered, implementing a de facto blockade.

In proceeding to carry out a boarding, the Italian vessel Sibilla collided with Kateri i Radës and capsized it, resulting in the Albanian deaths.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees criticized the Italian blockade as illegal since it had been established solely through an intergovernmental agreement with Albania.

After years of enforced isolation and a ban on international travel, with shoot-to-kill orders on the border, thousands of Albanians began migrating to Italy and Greece in late 1990, when communism in Albania started to fall.

The first wave was sparked by a rumor that Italy was giving visas, and thousands of people commandeered boats of all sizes at the port of Durrës.

An imposition of a curfew and a state of emergency on 2 March provoked a popular rebellion, causing concern in Italy, which feared another large-scale migration flow.

A military Operation White Flags was established in the international waters of the Strait and implemented a de facto naval blockade.

[10] On 29 and 30 March 1997, news of the disaster made it to the first page of major Italian newspapers, relating the sense of the gravity of the incident, which reported it as either a collision or a ramming.

On 28 March, the United Nations Security Council adopted resolution 1101, which established a multinational protection force in Albania to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance.

[2] The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees criticized the Italian blockade as "illegal"[7] since Italy established it only through a bilateral, intergovernmental agreement with Albania.

The leading figures of this practice were local intellectuals called rapsods related the mythistory of kurbet before World War II with the migration.

They use metaphors and performance devices taken from oral folk poetry and death laments, which react to the migrations to fix them in the community's memory.