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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Albanians turn spotlight on sites of dark communist past

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Rachel O’Brien, Briseida Mema -


From his office in the shadowy ‘House of Leaves’, Nesti Vako would listen to the private conversations of his fellow Albanians, spying for the state during the country’s communist era.


“I had a table, a strong coffee and some equipment,” the 74 year-old said, as he escorted AFP around the feared former secret service headquarters in Tirana, which opened in May as a museum.


Named after the ivy that once crept up its walls, the House of Leaves shows the methods and tools of the all-pervading secret surveillance conducted under communist rule, which lasted for nearly half a century until the early 1990s.


“We put listening equipment in hotels, embassies, and so on... The microphones were placed under tables, under chairs, in picture frames, inside gas lamps,” said Vako, a former chief of surveillance.


One room displays dozens of recording devices — made in Albania and Germany, Japan and China — that were deployed to catch any whiff of criticism of the state or other banned activities.


A laboratory remains where duplicate keys were forged for illegal searches and where foreign letters to the leadership of dictator Enver Hoxha were tested for biological weaponry.


The consequences of this constant and invasive monitoring “remain an open wound” in the Balkan country of 2.9 million people, according to museum director Etleva Demollari.


According to the Albanian association of former political prisoners, 5,577 men and 450 women were executed by the paranoid regime, while tens of thousands more were sent to prisons or camps for forced labour or internment.


The opening of the House of Leaves is seen as a step towards confronting that dark chapter of history.


None of the major sites where persecution took place have been turned into memorial sites for the victims. But there are signs of that changing at Spac, once the country’s most notorious labour camp.


Hundreds of “enemies of the state” are believed to have died in the camp’s dusty copper and pyrite mines.


In some of the galleries “the temperature rose to 40 degrees Celsius”, said former prisoner Saimir Maloku, as he revisited the crumbling prison buildings. The 71-year-old spent six years at the camp and three at another jail, accused of being a British agent.


Spac was abandoned after communism fell.


“I lived in Dante’s Inferno and thanked God I came out alive.”


— AFP


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