Freedom, transformation … and spies

by Alison Carter

photos courtesy the author

Freedom and Transformation Festival, Durrës

In her prize-winning memoir, "Free: Coming of Age at the End of History", Lea Ypi gives us her 11-year-old self’s view of the changes that happened in Albania in 1990. “I’d always thought there was nothing better than communism. Every morning of my life I woke up wanting to do something to make it happen faster. But in December 1990, the same human beings who had been marching to celebrate socialism and the advance towards communism took to the streets to demand its end. The representatives of the people declared that the only things they had ever known under socialism were not freedom and democracy but tyranny and coercion.”

The exploration of the meanings of freedom continued from a variety of perspectives during the weekend cultural and ideas festival, “Freedom and Transformation” (Liri dhe Transformim). The event was curated by Lea Ypi, who is now a Professor in Political Theory at the London School of Economics, and produced in association with Suffolk-based East Anglia (EA) Festival. (Lea spoke about her book at an AAA meeting in May 2022.) The festival was part of “British Week” and was advertised by unmissable yellow banners fluttering along both sides of Bulevardi Dëshmorët e Kombit.

The festival was described variously as “a vibrant celebration of literature, art, and their transformative power with some of the world’s top thinkers”; “a venue for provoking thought, challenging assumptions, and inspiring action”; and conversations that “aim to create a space where diverse voices can come together to reflect on the past and reimagine the future”. Ambitious, certainly. But as it turned out, all that was for later in the weekend … First there was a visit which gave me a visceral experience of both freedom and transformation.

The festival was described variously as “a vibrant celebration of literature, art, and their transformative power with some of the world’s top thinkers”; “a venue for provoking thought, challenging assumptions, and inspiring action”; and conversations that “aim to create a space where diverse voices can come together to reflect on the past and reimagine the future”. Ambitious, certainly. But as it turned out, all that was for later in the weekend … First there was a visit which gave me a visceral experience of both freedom and transformation.

Just a week earlier, we’d been notified of an addition to the schedule - a visit to the Sigurimi archive in the Ministry of Defence at ten o’clock sharp on the Friday morning. The organiser had described the Sigurimi as “the notorious security service which spied upon, interrogated and imprisoned thousands of Albanian citizens during the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha”. After a longish, fastish walk up Rruga e Dibrës, past a huge piece of street art with the slogan “born free”, I arrived at the Ministry of Defence. Once through the tightly-controlled entrance procedure - we’d previously provided passport scans - about fifteen of us gathered in the foyer and were welcomed by Dr Gentiana Sula, the Director of the Authority for Information on Former State Security Documents (Autoriteti për Informimin mbi Dokumentet e ish-Sigurimit të Shtetit - AIDSSH).

A law had been passed in 2015 to open up secret police files, and in 2016 AIDSSH was established to declassify information and to provide those who had been victims of the regime, and their relatives, with access to their files. The ongoing project, “We remember in order to heal and prevent”, supported by UNDP Albania (United Nations Development Programme) and the Government of Italy, has been recording and publishing the testimonies of the survivors held in the many locations of torture, imprisonment and forced labour under the dictatorship.

Elona Baçi, a specialist at the Directorate of Image Verification, told us about the foyer exhibition on Porto Palermo, the Venetian castle used as a prison by the Hoxha regime between 1949 and 1950. As she described some of the almost impossibly difficult personal histories - some survivors had been imprisoned since childhood - we looked at maps with lists of prisoners, short testimonies and drawings.

The captions were only in Albanian, but our Editor has translated one of the stories featured on the poster. Vasil Kokali was born in 1921 into an anti-communist family. The family’s assets were seized in 1945 and Vasil was interned at various camps - Krujë, Sukth, Valias, Lozhan - before being transferred to Porto Palermo. Conditions there were very harsh: salty water to drink, nowhere to wash and food rationed to 400 grams of dry bread a day and bean soup. Kokali’s eyesight was damaged. He was interned for 46 years, from 1945-1990.

Cast into horrified sadness, we were then taken down to the basement, musty with the smell of old paper. Here we gathered, slightly anxiously, surrounded by well-thumbed index cards in wooden files and tall steel shelving laden with cardboard boxes labelled Kunderzbulimi (Counterintelligence). The archive staff wore those thin white rubber gloves, the kind for handling precious old documents, not the kind for cleaning out drains. Though of course they are doing both. The gloves felt like a metaphor for the careful handling of the dead and the preservation of truth and memory - in contradistinction to the disregard for the sanctity of human life in evidence all around us.

Betim Gjaci, Specialist, Fund Collection and Storage Sector, and Irma Bataj, Evidence and Records Sector, outlined the chillingly organised systems used to spy on people and showed us files of reports and evidence. “We followed the Stalinist model”, explained a young legal expert on the team. A 2018 Balkan Insight article on transitional justice in Albania noted that the dictatorship imprisoned 18,000 people and executed 6,000, while 4,000 were still listed as missing. The Sigurimi surveillance network had around 15,000 collaborators, with 1,000 agents and 11,000 informers - among whom could well have been the victims’ friends and relatives.

As we looked at an illustrated 1950s how-to manual for spies, with sketches of smart-suited young operatives shown concealing information in the text of small ads or passing secret messages, there was a moment of light relief as fascination with the techniques of espionage got the better of some of us. But the overall feeling was one of dismay and sadness. And appreciation of the vital work being done in the archive to help people move on from Albania’s past tragedy.

Before leaving, we spent some time with Dr Ornela Arapi, the Director of Scientific Support and Civic Education, who was on hand to answer questions while we browsed the range of impressive, carefully produced publications (many in English), which were available to take home. I came away with the testimonies from the Tepelenë Internment Camp (in use 1949-53) with interviews conducted by Kristale Ivezaj Rama and Mira Tuci. At that stage I had no idea that the festival weekend would be quite so full of opportunities to see new transparency about previous secrecy.

But now to the festival itself. We were fulsomely welcomed on Saturday - after a delicious lunch - by the mayor of Durrës, Emiriana Sako, and British ambassador Nick Abbott. (It was very nice to be greeted personally by the outgoing Ambassador Alastair King-Smith and Carolyn Perry, the AAA’s membership secretary.)

Lea Ypi kicked things off with an emotional introduction, saying how much it meant to her to have arranged the event and to see so many familiar faces in the audience, including some of her former teachers. She added that the last time she had appeared at the cultural centre in Durrës was as an eight-year-old “pioneer” under the communist regime, dressed as a rabbit.

And then it was straight into a fascinating conversation about Albanian and Ottoman history with Sir Noel Malcolm, with reference to his revelatory book Agents of Empire which explores life around the Mediterranean through the history of members of the Bruni and Bruti families - showing us “the all-too-neglected Albanian thread that is woven into the history of 16th-century Europe”.

Sir Noel Malcom in conversation with Lea Ypi

Other speakers and topics were Shami Chakrabarti (Human rights), Peter Frankopan (History and environment), Misha Glenny (Organised crime, cybercrime and geopolitics), Sally Hayden (Migration), Christina Lamb (Women and War), William Sieghart (Poetry) and Olivia Sudjic (Contemporary fiction). They were in conversation with interlocutors including Lea Ypi, freshly appointed British ambassador Nick Abbott, deputy head of mission Mia Marzouk, former ambassador Alastair King-Smith, Albanian ambassador to the UK Uran Ferizi and Joanne Ooi, the producer of the festival.

The topics covered were all relevant and important, and the speakers were outstanding, but the density limited the effectiveness of this ambitious event. On the first day, the four speakers were run back-to-back, for 50 minutes each, with scant time for questions, barely time for a loo break, let alone a coffee or a chance to chat or (even) to buy a book. But there were no books on sale! And some of us whose phones were not remotely able to deliver the web-based briefings about the speakers and their books felt rather deprived of basic information. I had the impression that many of the overseas visitors - mainly first-time visitors - would have appreciated a general introduction to the history of Albania at an early point.

Proceedings concluded in Tirana on Sunday with an inspiring and emotional concert by Alda Dizdari and harpist Camilla Pay, including The Words of the Candle, (Fjalët e Qiririt), a poem by Naim Frashëri set to music by Alda’s father Limoz Dizdari, which brought everyone together.

I noticed on Monday morning that those yellow banners in Tirana had been replaced overnight by red banners of the Peoples Republic of China for the next “special week”. But the memory of my reconnection with Albania and the vital importance of sharing ideas and talking together freely will remain.

street art on Rruga e Dibrës, Tirana