International help on communism victims

TIRANA, March 31 – The International Commission of Missing People, ICMP, has offered help the Albanian government find and identify the people executed by its former communist regime.
It remains unclear if the Albanian government, who recently approved the creation of a task force to retrieve the remains, will accept the offer of ICPM, said the Balkan Insight.
The ICMP has been created by former US President Bill Clinton in the aftermath of the conflicts in ex-Yugoslavia. It has a wide range of expertise in forensics that could help identify thousands of communist victims still unaccounted for, an expertise Albania lacks.
The task force created in Tirana will be headed by the deputy minister of the interior and will include the heads of the archive of the Ministry of the Interior, the head of the archives of the secret service, the deputy director of the state police and representatives of other relevant institutions.
The ICMP has made a total of 13,000 DNA-assisted identifications of persons missing from the conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina since its creation.
Albania has not opened the archives of its communist-era security services and consequently precise data on the number of political prisoners killed by the regime is not available.
However, the country’s association of former political prisoners believes that 5,577 men and 450 women were executed under communist rule from 1946 to 1991, and many of those bodies are still to be found.