TIRANA, Feb. 6 – The construction of a copper ore enrichment plant near the notorious former Spaৠprison for the politically persecuted under communism has angered some of the personalities who were imprisoned in the forced labor camp for about two decades until the early 1990s.
Fatos Lubonja, a writer and media analyst who spent 11 years of imprisonment in the notorious Spaৠprison camp, a remote site in northeastern Albania, describes the investment “criminal violence against remembrance.”
“Building a white factory that is twice or three times bigger than those buildings is criminal violence against the remembrance. It is the same like going to Auschwitz and building a plant there because there is free space,” Lubonja told a local TV this week.
His comments came as Prime Minister Edi Rama visited Spaৠin the past few days to examine a $25 million investment by a Turkish company that is building a copper ore enrichment plant.
According to Lubonja, the site where the factory has been built next to the protected area is even more important than the main complex of buildings.
“The site used to be surrounded by barbed wire, it’s the second area. The building itself is not the most important thing, but the whole area surrounded by barbed wire. It was a memorial that should have been left untouched, even the mine itself,” says Lubonja, a TV commentator and one of the leading critical voices in the country.
“We have spoken up and asked the ministry of culture to extend the so-called protected area,” he adds.
In his visit to Spaà§, Prime Minister Rama described the copper ore enrichment plant, an investment by Turkey’s Tete Mining, as very important for the country’s mining industry and increasing the value-added at home.
The plant currently employs some 200 people and investors plan to increase its staff by another 100 with professionals from a mining vocational education training school in Bulqiza, a northern Albanian town which relies on chrome mining.
Albania has a bigger copper plant in the northeastern district of Puka, operated by a Turkish-Chinese concessionaire where Tete Albania, the Albanian subsidiary of Turkey’s Tete Mining, was a shareholder for five years until 2006.
Oil and mining is one of the country’s top industries, producing the country’s second largest exports, but has been suffering following the mid-2014 slump in commodity prices.
Spaৠlabour camp
Back in 2016, New York-based World Monuments Fund declared the former Spaৠprison as one of the world’s 50 at-risk cultural heritage sites.
A notorious labour camp in communist Albania, the organization described the forgotten site as a powerful place of memory that deserves to be preserved for future generations.
“SpaৠPrison, the notorious labor camp, is in an extremely advanced state of deterioration, and deserves to be transformed into a modern place of remembrance,” said the organization in its 2016 World Monuments Watch.
Sweden-based Cultural Heritage without Borders, which is implementing an emergency conservation project in Spaà§, says preserving Spaৠprison means protecting fundamental rights and democracy.
“Sites of memory like Spaৠenable society to seek justice, acknowledgement and honor for the victims of communist persecution and serve as places of witness and education for the younger generations,” says the CHwB.
Spaৠprison was a notorious labor camp established in 1968 by the communist government of Albania at the site of a copper and pyrite mine, in a remote and mountainous area in the center of the country. While only one of many such sites, the political prisoners held at Spaৠincluded some of the most prominent Albanian intellectuals of the twentieth century, granting it a special place in the collective memory of that era, says U.S.-based World Monuments Fund.
“The site of the labor camp, on a terraced slope below the tunnel entrances to the mine, was so remote and unforgiving that no perimeter wall was needed to secure the complex, only barbed wire fencing punctuated by occasional guard posts and a front gate.”
In May 1973, SpaৠPrison became the site of a famed prisoners’ revolt, one of the first moments of resistance to the oppression of the regime. Nevertheless, Spaৠcontinued to operate as a labor camp until the fall of the communist party from power in the early 1990s. It was completely abandoned several years later.
A protected monument of culture, Spaৠis located in northern Albania, about 8 km off Reps village along the Milot-Kukes highway.
