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35 years later/ Why the monstrous crimes of communism in Albania were never punished

2025-11-02 16:47:00, Opinione Ardi Stefa

35 years later/ Why the monstrous crimes of communism in Albania were never

During these 35 years, no justice was done for the crimes of communism in Albania. Unlike other former communist countries, where dictators were tried and victims were rehabilitated, Albania chose oblivion, made silent compromises and a “transition without division”. Here, communism did not collapse, it was softened. It was not condemned, it was reincarnated in pluralism.
The Albanian transition never had a separation from the past, but was its continuation in other guises.

When the system collapsed in 1991, the great hope was that a new era of freedom and justice would come. But what happened was quite different: the legacy of the dictatorship passed from one hand to another as family property.

Communism fell, fell without being overthrown. It fell without accountability, without trials, without moral and legal punishment. It fell only as a facade, not as a system. Even today, television shows films from that period that are completely indoctrinated, continuing to sow poison.

In other former communist countries, dictators faced justice, files were opened, victims had a voice and recognized justice even after death, while in Albania the opposite happened: former rulers became democrats, while the victims were forgotten.

Fatos Nano, overnight, inherited the Party of Labor of Albania. Apart from the name he changed, from PLSH to PSSH, nothing else was affected: the people and mentality remained the same, the structures the same, the spirit and organization as well. Even in the language, in the political vocabulary, he preserved the term "comrade". And, above all, there was no moral separation with Enver Hoxha.

Instead of drawing the line between dictatorship and pluralism, Nano softened, diminished, and relativized the crime of the communist dictatorship with a sentence that would remain an emblem of an eternal mentality: “Good, bad, he is our father!”
Unfortunately, this was the seal of reconciliation with the crime.

On the other hand, Sali Berisha, who came to power as the hope of anti-communism, never broke away from his roots, his past, and his ideological convictions. He camouflaged the communism rooted in him with a more insidious form: crypto-communism.

His infamous statement: “We are all co-sufferers and co-guilty” was the first grave of Albanian democracy, an act of moral amnesty for the executioners and an even more deadly second blow to the victims. With that expression, he equated the victims with the persecutors; he erased the difference between those who suffered and those who killed them. He erased moral boundaries, killed justice, buried the truth and removed the future...

The equality of the victim with the executioner was a severe blow to the very foundations of democracy.

Law 7501 and other laws of those years, which Sali Berisha approved “under duress”, were a legal seal on injustice, a way to keep alive the status quo of property, mentality and hierarchy that the dictatorship had established.
Properties were held hostage, the families of the victims were left to their fate, while former exponents of the regime began to talk about the “values ??of socialism”.

Albania never decommunized, neither in institutions, nor in education, nor in culture. Even in politics, to this day, both camps preserve the DNA of the old system: blind hierarchy, the cult of the leader, the propaganda of fear and the lack of moral punishment.
Thus, instead of being condemned, communism was rehabilitated under the guise of democracy. The crimes were not judged, because their perpetrators never left the stage, they only changed costumes, titles and chairs.

Today, 35 years later, Albania still has not closed that chapter, because it has never read it properly.
The graves of those executed still demand justice, the files must be opened and brought to light, while the past still rules politics, killing morality and collective conscience.

In Albania, there was no clear separation between the crime of dictatorship and the dictatorship itself. And without that separation, any system, no matter how new, is born rotten; a democracy that rises above the silence of the victims is simply a dictatorship by another name.