Secrets and Lies: Victims of Albanian Communism Denied Closure

Former political prisoners want truth and compensation – but their quest has become entangled in the country’s murky politics.

Aleksandra Bogdani

BIRN

Tirana, Bucharest and Madrid

Fatos Lubonja revisits the site of the Spac prison camp -- his home until the downfall of communism. (Photo: Barbara Haussmann)

A free man after 17 years in a prison camp, Fatos Lubonja tried to retrace his past.
He wanted to discover how, at the age of 23, he had ended up on communist Albania’s vast register of incarcerated citizenry, a political prisoner reduced to a name and a number.
His search for the truth led him from the secret police archives to the local phone directory, where he found another name and a number that held the promise of an answer.
“You know what I am looking for,” Lubonja said, after dialling the number. “I want to meet you.”
At first, the man at the other end of the line seemed hesitant. He was the former secret police agent who had prepared the file that helped convict Lubonja. His name was Lambi Kote, and he knew Lubonja better than Lubonja knew him.
The two eventually met in 2010 in the dimly lit basement of a Tirana bar – the former prisoner in his early sixties, and the man who had helped jail him, by then in his seventies.
Among the communist dictatorships of eastern Europe, Albania’s was the poorest and quirkiest. As well as suppressing dissent, the paranoid leader, Enver Hoxha, banned almost all contact with other countries. Few foreigners ever visited Albania, and hardly any Albanians were allowed abroad.

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