22
March 2021
FEATURE
Communist-Era Disappearances Still Haunt Albania Thousands of families whose loved ones went missing under communist rule in Albania have been wronged again by the authorities’ failure to find their remains. FRED ABRAHAMS | BIRN | BERLIN
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hroughout the summer of 2010, a small group of friends, bonded by sorrow, spent their days not walking, swimming, or with family, but digging with a Chinese-made excavator in the wooded foothills of Mount Dajti, five kilometres from Tirana’s Skenderbeg Square and near the village where today’s Prime Minister Edi Rama later built his modern home. When they stopped in early autumn, the remains of 13 people lay in black plastic bags – the discarded bones of those who were secretly executed by gunshot during the dark years of communist rule. The Tirana prosecutor or other government officials were nowhere to be seen because this exhumation was a private campaign – the desperate effort of two men to find their fathers who had been wrongly convicted and killed many years before. Three decades since communism’s fall, thousands of Albanian families are still waiting to learn how and where their relatives were killed. The exact number remains unclear: post-communist governments of all stripes have not figured that out. Most estimates circle around 6,000 people who were killed or died in state custody between 1944 and 1991, their bodies never returned. Surviving victims of communist-era persecution have largely been recognised and compensated. But the families of missing persons must literally dig by themselves into the past. “The politicians just don’t care,” said Jovan Plaku, 46, the main organizer of the Mount Dajti dig, whose father Koco Plaku was executed in 1976 after a conviction for treason, sabotage and agitation and propaganda against the state. “They’re too busy making money.” Frustrated and ignored, Plaku and others have planned and financed their own investigations, collecting official docu-
ments and piecing together stories from former interrogators, prison guards and spies from the Sigurimi state security agency. Plaku gathered audio recordings of his father’s court proceedings and interrogations, which was the first time since early childhood that he heard his father’s voice. “Procedural reasons were given time and time again by the prosecutor’s office as to why orders for exhumations could not be given,” said Matthew Holliday, Western Balkans Director at the International Commission of Missing Persons, ICMP, which released a report this month on missing persons in Albania from communist times. The report acknowledges the various laws and institutions that exist to address communist-era crimes but laments the lack of cooperation and coordination that has resulted in “limited progress in addressing the missing persons issue”. The list of secret dumping grounds extends far beyond Mount Dajti. About 70 reported locations are sprinkled across the country, roughly 25 of them credible, and a dozen of them confirmed to have human remains. In addition to the Mount Dajti site, family members, the ICMP and Albania’s Institute for Integration of Formerly Politically Persecuted have repeatedly asked local prosecutors to exhume a site near the southern town of Ballsh. In response to questions, Albania’s General Prosecutor’s office said that district prosecutors can order exhumations for communist-era crimes that do not exceed the statute of limitations and referred questions about the Mount Dajti and Ballsh sites to the prosecutors of Tirana and Fier. In contrast to the state’s inaction, Prime Minster Rama responded to a request from the Italian government to find the remains of an Italian banker named Giussepe Terrusi, who was arrested after the war and executed in 1952. Without a
A list of Communist-era political prisoners at Tirana’s museum of secret surveillance, the House of Leaves. Photo: BIRN/Marija Ristic.
A privately funded and organised exhumation of a communist-era secret grave in summer 2010 on Mount Dajti, where the remains of 13 people were found. Photos courtesy of Jovan Plaku.
Koco Plaku during his trial for treason, sabotage and agitation and propaganda against the state in June 1976. Photo courtesy of Jovan Plaku.
court order or forensic expert, a team with a backhoe dug two trenches at Burrel prison in September 2020, finding nothing but dirt. The prime minister’s office did not respond to questions about Terrusi or its wider approach to communist-era secret graves, referring queries to the Albanian Authority for Access to Information on ex-Sigurimi Files, a body established in 2016 to manage the archive of the former secret police but without authority to conduct criminal investigations. The ICMP is not the first international body to examine the issue. The UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances visited Albania in December 2016 and published a critical report the following year, finding that “Albania has
yet to deal adequately with the gross human rights violations committed between 1944 and 1991”. “Ad hoc and fragmented” was how the UN Working Group described Albania’s search for the disappeared. The country’s obligations are clear. The European Convention for Human Rights, to which Albania is party, covers the right to life, and the state has a procedural obligation when that right is abused. Albania is also party to the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which requires investigations and prosecutions when people go missing from state custody. In May 2018, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances encouraged
