Report from Tirana

Novel on cigarette papers

Morelle Smith on the political
prisoners of Albania

The Albanian writer Fatos Lubonja gave the PEN lecture at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August to mark the publication of his book 'Second Sentence' which had just been translated into English. It describes his experiences in the Albanian gulag as a political prisoner (sentenced for 'agitation and propaganda') including his second trial. For, while still in prison, you could be put on trial and given a second sentence, to be added on to the current one being served. False evidence, hearsay, coerced and terrified witnesses, and an outcome that was very probably decided in advance, made a mockery of truth. Just as mosques and churches were defaced and destroyed during this regime, so truth and justice were distorted into ugly caricatures of themselves.
     Fatos narrowly avoided the death sentence, but two of his fellow journalists, Fadil and Vangjel, did not. In Albania he said the past has not really been confronted. None of the former regime have been held accountable for what they did, never mind put on trial. No-one has looked for the bodies of Fadil and Vangjel and given them a proper grave.
     He said that the Albanian people during the communist era were not allowed to take responsibility, they were infantilised by the regime. With the fall of communism, everyone now has to try and fend for themselves. Some people have become extremely rich, while others struggle in the direst poverty. Of course the Albanian people knew nothing of capitalism or how to deal with it. This was why the pyramid schemes failed so dramatically, leading to a period of street rioting and anarchy. The people in political power now are the same as the ones who were in power during the communist regime.
    
On my recent visit to Albania, I walked through the streets of Tirana which I first encountered at the turn of the century, when I lived and worked there. There are various changes, the volume and noise of traffic has increased, many of the roads and pavements have improved, but the vibrant energy is the same. There are the brightly painted façades of buildings, the fountains playing by the parasol-shaded tables of the Piazza café, the grassy, tree-planted banks of the river Lana, everything bathed in late summer sunshine. There are plenty of shops stuffed with the latest Italian fashions in clothes and shoes. But as I walk past them, there's rarely any potential customers inside. And I doubt that, away from the busy, dusty, loud city centre, the street sellers sitting in front of a few bunches of bananas, a few bottles of olive oil, a few packets of cigarettes, cobs of corn roasting over a makeshift brazier, few have ever ventured inside them.
     You could say that affluence and poverty co-exist in all cities. But Tirana's rapidly growing population (one third of the country's population of three million live in the capital) is a direct result of history; many of the rural population can no longer survive on their agricultural smallholdings and have come to the city to look for better opportunities there. Small boys who should be in school walk between café tables selling cigarettes, sunglasses, mobile phone accessories. Beggars sitting in the streets are sometimes old people, some with mutilated limbs, often women with children in their arms.
     When I meet Fatos and his wife Debora in the town centre at the Piazza café, I say that I am enjoying being back in Tirana and that Albanian people are as friendly and hospitable as ever. He says yes, they are friendly to foreigners but not always to each other. He spent 17 years in Communist prisons and knows what he is talking about.
     The piazza café is right in the heart of the city's centre, but the worst of the traffic noise is blocked by the large building that houses the museum. I visited the museum shortly after I arrived in Tirana in 2000. The lower floors have plenty of historical information and unearthed treasures and artefacts, but the top floor contains a terrifying array of names, wall after wall, list after list, of all who had been killed and 'disappeared' during the communist regime. There was also a reconstruction of a prison cell, its walls covered with dark stains and with manacles hanging outside. One glance inside was enough. I sped back downstairs, and out into the cloudless blue sky of a spring day.
     Unimaginable to us perhaps, to spend years in such cells, but that was precisely the experience of Fatos and many others like him. He has seen the darker side of human nature, seen beyond the bright superficialities. Far from bitter, he is a warm person who smiles and laughs easily, but just as he cares about the importance of being open about the past rather than trying to hide it, he also cares about what is happening in Albania today.
     He deplores the ruining of the city's architecture, where the few remaining old buildings are being pulled down and replaced by new ugly concrete high-rises. Many of these, he says, are built with laundered money – people who make the money don't know what to do with it, so they build these apartment blocks. Yet many are standing empty, no-one has bought them.
     Fatos explains that rights to build cement factories along the coast, north of Durres, and to build a windfarm on the coast near Vlora, have been granted to foreign companies. This will ruin Albania's natural beautiful coastline and in the case of the cement factories, will also cause a huge amount of pollution. The laws in their own countries minimising pollution and building windmills away from natural beauty spots prevent them being built there but because Albania does not yet have such laws, they can do it here. When I ask why this is being allowed, he shrugs – there's immediate money to be gained from granting these rights, but the long term effects – and these rights are for 99 years – will be continuous pollution and the ruin of the natural beauty of the countryside.
     The foreign companies will reap the profits, while Albania's landscape will be torn up and the sea views will be ruined by the windfarm on the coastline. And the money that the government has received from these foreign companies? It does not seem that it's being used for the general good. In fact many Albanian citizens (and they're not alone in this) seem to be disenchanted with politicians, and suspect that they line their own pockets rather than genuinely working for the benefit of the country.
     Albania's patrimony of beautiful old buildings which are being pulled down, the ruining of the countryside, the pollution levels and the profits going to foreign companies, are what Fatos feels the media should be vociferous about in their protest. In his weekly column in one of Tirana's newspapers, he does his best to bring these things to people's attention. But – and he gestures to an article on the front page of that day's paper – this is the kind of thing that makes headlines. The article denounces the recently published Macedonian Encyclopaedia.
     Apparently the description of Albanians has caused offence. Look how it is worded – and he translates the headline for me – A State Without a Name (i.e. Macedonia) Denies Albanian history. Apparently the encyclopaedia described Albanians as mountain people and settlers. But we all came from the mountains originally, he laughs.
     Of course there is a lot of historical argy-bargy in the Balkans basically about who was there first, and which people were the original inhabitants, with the underlying suggestion of who then has the most right to be there, however irrelevant that is to the fact that everyone, whatever their ethnicity, currently lives there and so has to be accommodated. But this very human jostling and easily ignited indignation is precisely what Fatos sees as an irrelevance compared to the unwillingness to face the atrocities of the recent past under the communist regime, and the current plundering of the country's natural resources and patrimony, which is happening right now.
     In their apartment, Fatos shows me the wooden sculptures he made in prison, using just a small knife. The first smoothing of the wood was done on the rough prison walls, then he used sandpaper. They are polished to a shine. Cigarette holders – a mixture of wood and polished peach stones. Bracelets – small pieces of wood, loosely pinned together and decorated with even smaller pieces of slightly darker polished peach kernels. They're exquisitely lovely. He shows me too the cigarette papers onto which he copied the novel he wrote while in prison, in case his notebooks were found and taken away from him. The writing is unbelievably tiny. Where did he hide them I ask. At the back of a large dictionary, he says. The guards were not interested in dictionaries so they didn't look there.