Have Albanians "faced," "closed accounts," or "made peace" with their communist past? These are questions that I have often heard or read from journalists, researchers, and even foreign visitors, while they are almost completely absent from Albanian society.

From: Fatos Lubonja

Whether from the terms “confrontation”, “settling accounts”, “peace”, or from the languages ​​used, but also from the experience of the countries from which the foreigners come, they contain different semantic and emotional nuances. However, beyond these nuances, the idea they suggest, as I listed them, is that “confrontation” is considered the first phase, the condition for the beginning of a process that would lead us to the subsequent phases: of “settling accounts” and achieving “peace”.

Seeking to answer questions about the relationship between Albanians and their communist past, the first idea that came to my mind was in the form of the question: why have Albanians asked themselves these questions little or not at all, and what is the meaning of the fact that foreigners ask them? So, my reflection is based on the need to understand and explain the reasons for society's silence towards these questions. A silence that also carries within its belly the causes of the failure to generate a debate on the issues that these questions raise.

In the editorial of this double issue of Effort dedicated to the relationship of Albanians with the communist past, joining its many authors, I will try to make some reflections that aim to understand the state of the first phase to date: that of confronting the past, how it was done, and further: insofar as what has been done, has it been started with the intention of leading us towards "closing accounts" and "peace", or has it led us in other, wrong directions - as it turns out for me. I will also try to investigate the causes of taking these wrong directions, and, finally, to suggest what should be done and how a turn should be made towards a confrontation/debate on the past, which would truly lead us to closing accounts and social peace, all without considering these two as final achievements, but as orienting goals of society towards truth and freedom, conceived as products of continuous dialogue between people.

Commentary on a study as a first look

It is undeniable that in the Albanian world, several important topics have circulated and continue to circulate that evoke the confrontation with the past, such as: the moral and political condemnation of the crimes of communism, the legal punishment of the perpetrators of these crimes, the role of the people and the role of intelligence in promoting that regime, the role of the historical past, the apology, forgiveness, the integration of victims into society, the opening of State Security files, lustration, finding the graves of the dead in prisons and of those sentenced to death, commemoration and memorials of that time, moral and material compensation for the victims, etc.

These are topics that are mentioned here and there by politics, the media, civil society or various individuals, mostly being instrumentalized for political purposes by touching on the emotional aspects of the problem, but without being treated in depth in the name of raising awareness about the need to confront the past. By this depth I understand a combination of objective and subjective study methods, where by the former I mean the search for data that can be measured with numbers or figures, such as the number of those convicted of crimes of that time, the number of graves found, of those who have apologized, of those who have forgiven, of the figures of compensation, of museum objects or memorials that invite reflection, and others; and with the second, interviews with people on the topics in question or on the more general question of to what extent they feel that there has been a confrontation with the past in the name of closing society's accounts with it, whether they have made peace with it, or how much they feel that the past weighs on their present - whether this is for the victims or for the persecutors.

As I said, there is no shortage of attempts here and there to touch on these topics, but they have remained as dead ends, unable to lead to a space for public dialogue between different parties, by which I mean both the different generations and their different choices and destinies at that time.

One of these trials left in the middle of the road is a study conducted by the non-profit organization IDRA in 2015 with the title: “Public knowledge and perceptions of the communist past” and subtitle: “in the framework of building a national dialogue platform on human rights violations during the former communist regime in Albania” (conducted with the initiative and sponsorship of the OSCE and the German Embassy.)

Here I once again draw attention to a phenomenon that I will return to on other occasions: the fact that it is foreigners who are stirring up this topic.

The IDRA study is based on a survey of three age groups: 16-35 years old, 35-55 years old and over 55 years old, divided by gender and by three geographical areas. The respondents (about 1000) were asked questions such as: is the communist past a problem for you?; how much do you know about it?; how interested are you in learning about it?; what is your perception of that regime? etc.

The general impression left by the study, whether through the answers or through some of the questions formulated by the researchers, is that Albanian society has remained in an infantile state in dealing with the past, which also explains why the process, which as can be seen from the subtitle, was conceived as a means of promoting a national dialogue on these topics: that is, to initiate the transition from confrontation to settling accounts and from this to social peace - has not continued, even though it was not started earlier by Albanian actors.

Let me comment on some moments of this study:

When asked how interested they are in learning about the communist past, only 8% of Albanians appear to be “very interested,” 20% “somewhat interested,” 21% “somewhat uninterested,” and 50% “not at all interested.” They consider education, healthcare, corruption/bad governance, impunity, the economy, environmental pollution, order and security to be more important than learning about the communist past.

When asked about the sources from which they obtain information about the communist past (without distinguishing whether it concerns positive or negative aspects of it), only 7% claim that they obtain this from school.

When asked to compare the communist past and the present (recall that the study was conducted in 2015), the vast majority either “completely agree” or “agree” (these are over 80%), with the answer provided by the pollsters according to which at that time there was “much greater life security, better quality education, greater employment opportunities, there was more job security, more political stability, less corruption.”

When asked about Enver Hoxha's role in the history of Albania, whether it was positive or negative, 45% responded that it was positive and 42% that it was negative.

When asked whether a private company should be allowed to reopen and operate a mine where political prisoners served their sentences in the form of forced labor (they seem to be referring to the Spaç mine, which served as a place of imprisonment from 1968 to 1990 and where a private foreign company currently operates), 24% said that “economic benefits are the country's priority, therefore the company should be allowed to work in the area of ​​the former camp, anywhere and without restrictions”; 58% said that “it should be allowed with some restrictions” and only 10% spoke in favor of preserving that site entirely as a memorial to the past.

Researchers' approach

Regarding the researchers' approach, I would like to highlight a moment when, after asking the question: "why do we need to know the communist past?", they formulated the following three answers, one of which each respondent must tick:

1. “There are some aspects of the communist past that need to be known by the younger generations.”

2. “The communist past should serve as an example of social equality, civic volunteerism, and a sense of community for younger generations.”

3. “The communist past is a terrible period that should be completely forgotten and not taught to the new generation.”

It is worth commenting on this moment of the study, in the context of all the answers given by the respondents, for two reasons:

First, due to the fact that 22% “completely agree” and 56% “agree” (together 78%) with the second answer: namely that the communist past should serve as an example for the younger generations of “social equality”, “civil volunteerism” and “sense of community”.

Secondly, since the formulation of the answers by the surveyors lacks the answer that the communist period should to be known And no to be forgotten because knowing and understanding the causes that produced that "terrible period" not only serves us to confront the trauma it caused us, starting from the idea of ​​curing it to achieve individual and social peace, but also because we need to know the evil to build institutional, mental and spiritual instruments to prevent its recurrence.

Let me try to make a categorization of Albanian society based on both the analysis of the respondents' responses and the lack of response that I formulated above, which in my opinion is extremely significant. I would like to point out that when we categorize, we always perform a simplification operation, reducing the complexity of individuals to some common characteristics, starting from the most important to the secondary ones.

The greatest commonality of the majority of Albanians interviewed - who are a template of Albanian society - is the fact that they treat these two periods as separate, with no organic connection to each other, almost as opposites. So, when they express that they consider education, health, corruption/bad governance, impunity, the economy, environmental pollution, order and security to be more important than knowledge of the communist past, they fail to consider that these also have any connection with the past and that awareness of this past can also help improve the present.

Within this category, let's call it "the unconscious", I would distinguish these subcategories:

The "unsuffering" unconscious

In this subcategory I would include individuals who have in common the fact that they have not suffered directly or through their families the persecution of the regime in the form of imprisonments, internments, deportations, bearing the stigma of “class enemy”. In the spectrum of this category, which I put the epithet “unsuffered” in quotation marks, I would include everything from the actors of this persecution and their families to that layer that is usually called the gray area, which also has its own varieties.

Within this subcategory I would distinguish three main divisions:

The first: those who are not aware of the trauma not only of those who suffered, but also of themselves, due to indoctrination, shallowness of thought, or because they have erased the evil of that time from their memory in order not to be responsible to themselves and others. Referring to the study, I have in mind those who appreciate the “achievements” of that regime, who consider the communist period as an “example of social equality”, “civil volunteerism”, “sense of community”, who consider the role of Enver Hoxha as positive. This category may also include a part of young people who did not live at that time, but who have been indoctrinated by this discourse.

Second: those who were mainly children or young people when the regime fell, or who were born after its fall, who appear uninterested in knowing the past because they have looked/are looking towards the future, unaware that the past is following them. In this division I would include not only those who came from privileged families at that time, as well as those who came from the gray area, but also a significant number of young people who, precisely because their family members were persecuted, have chosen to escape that past.

Third: those who, although aware of the traumas of that time, feel so disappointed with the present in terms of life security, the state of education, employment opportunities, corruption, inequality, that they prefer that time to this.

The unconscious and the suffering

In this subcategory I would include a significant number of persecuted people, or their family members, who see the two periods as a continuation of each other with the desperate justification that the heirs of their former persecutors have continued to remain in power. I insist on including these as a subcategory of the unconscious, that is, paradoxically, together with those who treat the communist past and the present as two opposing histories, since in the family-based continuity that these people see in the two periods I find something essential that unites them: the experience of the present without connecting it in its deepest sense to the past. This subcategory seems to continue experiencing the old trauma without clearly recognizing that it lives in another reality, which is reminiscent of an essay by Freud titled “Current Considerations…” (1915) where he speaks of two psychological times of man: the past time of the trauma, which does not pass but is always present and immobile in his life, and the time of the present. In this sense, both subcategories have in common the failure to elaborate on the trauma through the recognition/understanding of its essential cause, consequently the failure to overcome it.

Due to the dominance of the large category of the unconscious in politics and in socio-cultural life, Albanian society is characterized by the clash without dialogue and without synthesis of the discourses of these two emotionally opposed layers, where old categories such as "communist", "ballist", "traitor", "security", are commonly used to interpret the evil of today and, conversely, new categories such as "oligarch", "trafficker", "kleptocrat", "corrupt", are used to interpret yesterday in a jumble without any kind of conceptual order built through critical thought, which does not allow for a correct interpretation of either one time or the other. An indication of this misunderstanding is the reaction that accompanied the IDRA report in the media, where the headline prevailed: "Communism is no longer a problem for Albanians", which was politically interpreted as meaning that we no longer have to deal with it, and which was also proven by the fact that the report was not followed up with what its subtitle predicted: the building of a platform for national dialogue.

Missing or disappearing category

By this category I mean a minority of Albanians who do not see the past as opposed to the present or as a family continuity, but who think that post-communist Albania is a continuation of the past in many aspects, not because the sons of communists are in power, but because the human cultural matrix that was forged and forged at that time is still dominant. It is the category of those who seek to integrate the trauma of the past into the collective consciousness of the present through a self-reflection that would lead to the recognition of its deeper anthropological and cultural causes. For reasons that I will mention below, thirty years of post-communism have not helped the birth and growth of this category at all; on the contrary, I would say that the few individuals who belong to this category, to which the author of these reflections modestly belongs, are disappearing. The absence or disappearance of individuals in this category, which the study I analyzed also points out through the missing answer to the question of why we should recognize the communist past, is also one of the indirect indicators of Albanians' failure to confront the past or of the wrong direction of this confrontation.

Another method

Starting from the approach of those who see evil in the cultural matrix, we can also formulate the missing answer of the researchers of the IDRA association in the form: we must recognize the communist past so as not to repeat evil, or, more simply: so as not to behave towards each other as we behaved at that time.

Starting from this idea, I would build another method to assess how much and how Albanians have faced the past: researching the behavior of Albanians towards each other in the present. In other words: to what extent and in what way is the past repeated in the political, economic, social, and cultural structures that Albanians have built in the present due to their failure to face the past.

For this reason, let us make a comparison between the regime we lived in and the one we live in by listing some basic characteristics, already well-studied, of totalitarian regimes such as the Albanian one, to the extreme.

One-party state;

- A leader at its head who identifies with the party and the people;

- An ideology that must be embraced by the entire people, which is promoted through propaganda, art, literature, historiography, education, etc.;

- Complete control of this party/state over the mass media;

- Complete control of this party/state over the economy;

- A civil society called "mass organization" that serves as a mechanism connecting the people with the party/state;

- The system of intimidation or subjugation with prison camps and internment of those who oppose the policies of this party;

- Guaranteed elections with plebiscite victories that were not declared 100% to leave the idea that people were free to vote against.

In the Albanian case, these characteristics have appeared in the most radical way, as evidenced by three additional, extremely significant facts:

● Albania, unlike other former communist countries, remained Stalinist until the end;

● In '67 we have the prohibition of religion;

● The country lived in almost total isolation from the rest of the world.

The question arises: How much and how does the new regime we have built resemble the one of the past after over thirty years, which indirectly makes you think about how much and how Albanians have faced the past? It turns out that it is enough to replace the phrase all the people: with most of the people apo full control me majority control to ascertain the similarities. So today we can say that we have:

- A majority party led by an all-powerful leader at its head who identifies with the party and with most of the people and who controls majorities of all four branches of government (even part of the opposition);

- An ideology-vision for the world that is embraced by most of the people and which is promoted by most media outlets;

- Control of most of the media by the party state;

- Control of most economic activities and economic actors by this party-state;

- A civil society MOST whose organizations, today called NGOs, serve as the gear that connects most of the people with the party-state;

- A system of intimidation and subjugation that is not exercised through prisons and internments, but through the threat of food shortages, control of the economy, justice, administration, the patronage system, and organized crime;

- Elections with guaranteed victory with ever-increasing results in the face of a divided and bought opposition.

Referring to historical experiences, it can be said that today's Albania most resembles an authoritarian regime of the extreme right that suppresses freedoms and human rights in the name of an oligarchy closely linked to organized crime. But, if you delve deeper into the communist regime of the extreme left, in the essence of both regimes an essential similarity is noticed, of the extremes that come together: it too was nothing more than the power of a minority called the nomenclature, which oppressed and exploited the majority subjected to it. Both sides are characterized by the exploitation and alienation of man who is treated only as a means and not as an end. The place of yesterday's nomenclature has been taken by a minority of the rich (politicians + narco-oligarchs) disconnected from the people to the point of their closure in gated communities surrounded by walls and guards reminiscent of the infamous Bloc of the communist leadership.

Even regarding the isolation of yesterday's border in the face of today's opening, one can again speak of two extremes that converge because, while the first kept Albanians surrounded by barbed wire in a state of slavery, the second encourages their mass flight from the country to become second-class citizens in the countries where they emigrate. Essentially, in both cases they are without any influence or participation in the fate of the country, in both cases without an authentic life. They are two forms of destruction of the majority in the name of minority rule.

So, not only the analysis of the perception and assessment that Albanians give of the communist past, as we saw by analyzing the study of the IDRA association, but also the repetition of the phenomena of yesterday's power in today's authoritarian regime lead to the conclusion that Albanians have failed - by taking a wrong path - in confronting the communist past. /Editorial of the new issue of the magazine "Struggling"/

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