Albanian – German cooperation to honor victims of former communist regime
TIRANA, March 26 – Albania on Tuesday inaugurated a memorial containing a fragment of the Berlin Wall, a typical Albanian bunker and a gate from Albania’s most notorious communist prison. The installation aims to commemorate the victims of Albania’s former communist regime.
A 2.6-tonne concrete graffiti-covered fragment, donated by the City of Berlin, was inserted in a memorial together with a bunker and some concrete supports from the northern mine of Spac where many of communism opponents were submitted to forced labor and died. Symbolically, the memorial was placed at the entrance of the Bllok, an area of Tirana that housed regime officials and was sealed off to the rest of the population.
“We shouldn’t forget our past,” said Fatos Lubonja, one of the artists who created the memorial and who spent more than 10 years in communist prisons.
More than 100,000 Albanians were killed, imprisoned or sent into working camps under a communist regime that lasted from 1944 to 1991. “I would like to dedicate [the artwork] to all those who did not live to cross over the Berlin Wall, who remained in isolation and were executed. They were the best of us all because they dared do what we dared not,” Lubonja said.
“We hope this memorial will urge everyone to remember the past and face up to it,” said Anna Kaminsky, the director of Germany’s Federal Foundation of the Reappraisal of the East German Dictatorship.
The memorial was unveiled in Albania to honor former political prisoners who suffered under the late dictator Enver Hoxha’s communist regime.
The bunker, like others that still litter the country, was built during the late 1960s, when Albania cut ties with the Soviet Union and feared that could lead to an attack.
”We Albanians have many reasons to remember the past on our road to building our future,” Prime Minister Sali Berisha said.
The memorial was placed below Hoxha’s former office that now serves as Parliament headquarters, at the entrance of the Bllok, which has been transformed into one of Tirana’s best places for business and nightlife.
But many former political prisoners remain dissatisfied with unfulfilled pledges of compensation and reintegration into Albanian society. Police took away two such protesters at Tuesday’s ceremony. They represent a group of former prisoners who last year held a one-month hunger strike calling for the speedy disbursement of compensation funds.
Two of the hunger strikers set themselves on fire, and one of them later died.
The next day the association of the former political prisoners held a roundtable, where western diplomats were also present. There was no one from the governing Democratic Party while a representative from the opposition Socialist also presented the plan her party had made to compensate the communism victims if they come to power after the June 23 parliamentary elections.
The former political prisoners also asked for a new draft law on their compensation.
