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Twenty-seven years ago, in February 1991, Gentiana Sula was standing in a crowd of thousands of Albanians who toppled a statute of the country’s dictator Enver Hoxha in the central square of the capital Tirana.

In the early 1990s, she was part of the student movement that wanted to end the 45-year-long isolation imposed on the country by Hoxha’s Stalinist-style regime – and its protests led to countrywide demonstrations and the collapse of the Communist regime.

But although Albania broke with Communist rule almost three decades ago, the process of dealing with the abuses of the past is still in its early days.

Sula now runs the Albanian Authority for Access to Information on Ex-Sigurimi Files, a state agency established in 2016 to collect the archive of the notorious Communist-era Sigurimi secret service, declassify information and provide those who were victims of the regime, or their relatives, with access to their files.

“We need to take time to know the truth,” Sula said. “For decades we lived in an abusive system.

“My daughter also asks me, ‘Mum, is it worth it going that deep?’, and I tell her that we need to know what happened,” she explained.

The Authority was established after the Albanian parliament passed a law in May 2015 to open up the Communist-era secret police files. The Authority was also given the power to run checks on political party officials and holders of public office to see if they were police collaborators during the period.

By September last year, the Authority had responded to more than 600 requests.

“We are the organisation that provides access to information. But what we noticed is that there is still fear. Everybody had someone [who was persecuted] and people feel itchy as they don’t know what they will found out,” Sula explained.

The spy next door

A memorial for Communist political prisoners. Photo: EPA, ARMANDO BABANI.

Albanians lived under constant surveillance for almost five decades. Just a few kilometres from Sula’s office is the house of former Communist leader Hoxha, who headed a brutal regime that took thousands of lives. Some 4,000 people are still listed as missing, including Sula’s grandfather.

Hoxha’s villa, now half-abandoned, is located in the Blloku district, which under his rule was guarded by soldiers and Sigurimi operatives, and only top party members were allowed to live there.

Today Blloku is home to cafes, modern shops and bars, symbolising the new Tirana, but before it was a symbol of Hoxha’s totalitarian state, with its closed borders and almost no chance of escape. Under his dictatorship, around 18,000 people were imprisoned for political reasons; some 6,000 were executed.

Hoxha’s main mechanism for controlling Albanians’ lives was the Sigurimi and its surveillance network. The Sigurimi had around 15,000 collaborators, among them 1,000 agents and 11,000 informants all over Albania. Its spies were scattered across Tirana – in hotels, embassies, post offices and even grocery stores.

Friends and relatives were also engaged as informers, as Maks Velo, a renowned Albanian architect and painter, discovered recently.

Velo was informed upon by his friend, another painter, as he found out when he saw his Sigurimi files.

“It was shocking to me to learn that he was even reporting our conversation about Picasso to the Sigurimi. I would never have imagined that I was going to jail based on talks like this,” he told BIRN.

Velo, who designed hotels, schools and parks during Hohxa’s era, was jailed in 1978 after he was accused by Communist officials of expressing ‘modern tendencies’.

He was sentenced to ten years in prison and hard labour after being convicted of agitation and propaganda against the system. Velo was released in 1986 and then forced to work in a factory until the fall of Communism.

This month, the Authority provided him with a 250-page folder of the files that the Sigurimi had on him, after which he decided to name most of the people who informed on him.

“I have mentioned around 20 of them, the real architects of the destruction not only of my life but the lives of my family too. To my surprise, so far none of them has come to me saying: ‘I’m sorry,’” he said.

The Museum of Secret Surveillance

The House of Leaves now houses the Museum of Secret Surveillance. Photo: BIRN.

Although most of the files remain closed and only the targets of the covert surveillance and their families are allowed to see them, the authorities have in recent years decided to mark the most notorious locations of Communist crime and have made some of the files available there – such as the former Sigurimi HQ.

The building, called the House of Leaves, now houses the Museum of Secret Surveillance, which commemorates the victims of the totalitarian regime and showcases the brutal strategies used for decades by the Sigurimi.

“This museum is dedicated to those innocent people who were spied on, arrested, prosecuted, convicted and executed during the Communist regime,” a sign at the museum reads.

Its collection includes the surveillance devices that the secret service used – radios, phones and special bugs that were placed in clothes, bags and closets. Sigurimi agents were called ‘living microphones’ because they would carry bugs with them all the time as they picked up intelligence anywhere from grocery stores to post offices, hotels and embassies.

The museum also features displays about enemies of the regime – meaning anyone in Albania who was in any way opposed to the Communists’ agenda.

The Museum of Secret Surveillance is trying to compile a list of those who were killed and prosecuted during the 50 years of Communist rule.

But many people in Albania claim that all the efforts that the government is currently making have come too late and are not sincere.

Celo Hoxha, a historian and vice-director of the Institute for the Studies of Communist Crimes, said that although the 2015 legislation enabled the opening-up of the secret service files, it did not go far enough.

“The law benefits only families of people who were persecuted because they are the only ones who can see the files, but not the general public,” he said.

His institute, which has been at the forefront of Albanian efforts to deal with the Communist legacy, has advocated the adoption of lustration legislation, so the impact of the opening of the files “could be more meaningful for the whole of society”.

It proposed that people involved with the Sigurimi could be removed from official positions and taken to trial. The idea has been around since the beginning of the 1990s but never made law.

Hoxha argues that although the Communist regime was dismantled in the early 1990s, the people working with the Sigurmi remained in state institutions for a long time afterwards, preventing the country from moving forward with efforts to ensure accountability for the crimes of the past.

A handful of people have been put on trial for Communist-era crimes, but most of them were acquitted or released after serving part of the sentence.

As there appears to be no official readiness to mount successful prosecutions, Hoxha’s institute is focusing on registering victims of the regime, although it hasn’t given up on efforts to bring in lustration.

However institutions that commemorate and memorialise victims of the Communist regime have limited capacities and resources. As so much time has now passed, they also face problems because witnesses are dying, while many victims didn’t live long enough to get recognition or compensation.

Prisons that were scattered across the country still remain mostly unmarked, while many families are still search for relatives who disappeared.

Many hope that the new technology and DNA testing, which was not available in the early 1990s, as well as the efforts of the International Commission for Missing Persons, which started recently working in Albania, will offer a breakthrough.

Facing the ‘ugly truth’

A pyramid built in honour of Enver Hoxha. Photo: EPA, ARMANDO BABANI.

The Authority for Secret Files plans new premises to hold the collected archives of the Sigurimi. But historians like Hoxha warn that many of these documents were destroyed by the regime itself long ago.

Both Hoxha and Sula hope that working with young people may change the situation. In recent years, their organisations have held lectures, run summer schools and organised study tours for students who have little knowledge about the abuses of the past.

“This society still needs to open up,” Sula argued. “There is constant denial and society is divided, but we need to know the truth, even if it takes time and it is painful.”

Velo, whose painter friend informed on him, said that the process of facing the truth about the past is also important for younger Albanians.

“A youngster should understand that if you do wrong, there will come a day when you are going to be held accountable. They have also need to learn that the miseries of Communism were real, and see the true criminal features of the regime,” he explained.

He added that he believes that he did the right thing by asking to see his file and then making the names of the Sigurimi’s informers public.

“Our society needs to face this ugly truth. We need to keep things open and not hide anymore,” he said.