By GJON KAÇAJ
Memorie.al / The formerly persecuted and political prisoners of Albania have a standard of representation: Simon Miraka. Slightly frail but energetic, long-suffering, tolerant, yet always determined and full of faith that he will win the battle against the “red hydra,” thanks to the courage, honesty, intellect, and family tradition of a generation and a pure gene with the morality of nobility, which the party malefactors never managed to manipulate. The 15-year-old boy, the youngest of the Mirakaj family, while in internment, would respond every 12 hours to the guard at the roll call: “I am here!” And this was repeated for 45 years. Even in June 1989, they repeated his sentence with a subsequent 5-year term—five more years of internment, even though the decision of the Deportation-Internment Commission remained only on paper, because the communist dictatorship collapsed and broke its neck.
But why was this child punished, a boy who grew into manhood in internment camps? Because it was suspected that 10 years prior -meaning when he was only 5 years old – he had campaigned for the breakdown of Soviet-Albanian relations; meanwhile, those relations had long been severed and the “red” propaganda, and the members of the Central Committee of the PPSH and the Politburo themselves, were publicly insulting and accusing them.
Eh! Those “men” in short trousers suffered in the internment camps of Gjaza, Plug, Çerma, Grabian, Savra, and Gradishta in Lushnje, and from among them, the sons of Albanian nationalism were selected and arrested as dangerous.
When I think of the formerly persecuted, I stop and single out my fellow sufferer Simon Mirakaj, always stable and unmanipulatable by political intriguers who failed to “dribble” him politically; perhaps I can express myself freely as a former colleague after the 1990s, also as the only one un-infiltrated in the leadership of the institutions of former political prisoners. His figure resembles a drangue (legendary hero) in a confrontation with the kuçedra (hydra), just as Fishta describes it in the 16th Canto, “The Hydra.”
The Albanian people must not forget, but remember the crimes of communism. How many Albanians were killed at the border in search of freedom? The communist government even set traps and deceived, like the Amnesty of 1987, which supposedly restored their freedom, but this was another deceptive lie – they had set another trap – they had produced in their deceptive propaganda machine a special decree to stop killings at the border, labeling the escape as an illegal border crossing and not national treason, providing for a fine of up to 5,000 lek! How many were deceived by this decree?!
There were many who believed them and… Suffered for it! Anyone who has had the chance to read the book “I Come from Shkodra,” written by the Shkodran Luigj Çekaj, residing in New York, will easily understand why I wrote something about the black-scarved mothers. In that book, one finds many tragedies that occurred from border crossings. Condolences to all the mothers who lost their sons at the border, betrayed by the decree to stop killings at the border signed by the successor of the dictator Enver Hoxha, Ramiz Alia.
After the amnesty in 1987, seven young men from Tirana, released from Spaç and Qafë Bari, traveled by train from Tirana to Elbasan and then by bus to Prrenjas, toward the border at Rrajcë-Skënderbe, intending to cross the border at pyramid no. 40, divided into two groups.
Kujtim Xhaja and Ilir Serjani were the first, followed by the five others after the first two would cross; having breached the clon (security fence) after midnight by crawling on their bellies and hands, they unknowingly touched the grass-colored alarm wire that signaled the border rapid-response groups. The first unit with the border dog stopped Ilir Serjani in the darkness.
As soon as they aimed the muzzle of the automatic rifle – reddened from shots in the air – at him, they gave him two options. Would he die from bullets or did he want to die from the dog? “I want death by the dog,” Ilir shouted, so that his friends would gain time to escape.
The mixture of pieces of flesh with torn, blood-soaked rags added to screams of an unimaginable fury that reached the heavens. Kujtim Xhaja, huddled in the darkness, lunged with a small knife and pain in his soul upon the dog that was mauling his friend who lay dying. He too was shredded by bursts of gunfire, without sparing any bullets.
The voice of the mothers has remained walled up in each of their chests. They experienced the moment when hope was extinguished forever – the hope that one day they would be fortunate. From August 15, 1989, until September 16, 1990, in Shkodra and Malësia e Madhe, a macabre tragedy was being played out, installed by professionals with 45 years of experience from the State Security and the camouflaged dictator, Ramiz Alia.
As in all border zones of Albania, on the banks of the Buna, they executed Dodë Frani, 24 years old, and Gjon Kumbullaku, 26 years old! The headline was the moment when the two mangled corpses were displayed in front of the maternity hospital in Shkodra, as if warning mothers that the children they would give birth to would share this fate.
They say that from the horror their eyes saw, one of the mothers lost her child! Ndue Narkaj, 23 years old, after crossing the border in Stara, was shot with bursts of gunfire by the border guards, and after they dragged the corpse back from across the border, they stripped him and took his wristwatch, then set fire to the forest, burning one hectare, and as “humanitarians,” they handed over the wristwatch and the jacket to the family.
Two years later, one kilometer away from the burned forest between two rocks, some shepherds found half of the burned corpse wrapped in plastic, after the family had been informed that their son was living in the diaspora.
And Pllumb Pllumbaj, 19 years old, having left internment, was killed between the clon and the “soft strip” near the border post in Hot and was kept for three days tied with barbed wire in a drainage pit in the water, by order of the border post commander, who was later rewarded with the position of head of emergencies in Albania, just as the head of security at the Presidency achieved in the following government!
Sokol Vreshti, 21 years old, after being wounded in an attempt to cross the border, surrendered, but they executed him. The perpetrator was appointed as a Branch Chief in 2014! How forgetful are we Albanians?! Which state in the world or court can equate the victim with the criminal?! And in which state in the world is the criminal exalted and the victim despised?
This must not happen in democratic Albania, as an ally of the USA, integrated into NATO, and in a rush to join the European Union. No, at least listen to the voice of the poet Havzi Nela. Do you not feel the groan?:
“When you learn that I have died / when you say; May he rest in peace / Do you know what I have suffered / I, the fire-hearted poet… Say, he sought light / and he himself saw no light with his eyes…”
This is what Deputy Prosecutor F.D., the brave highlander, experienced when we congratulated him on his appointment as Deputy General Prosecutor: “I accepted the appointment with pain, just as I experienced the demotion as Chief Prosecutor in Kukës after we tried and sentenced the poet Havzi Nela to eight years of deprivation of liberty.
I felt insulted when we gave him an unmerited sentence, without legal support. After the monthly analysis, they gave me my dismissal and an appointment letter as deputy platoon commander at the border post in Pulaj, Velipoja. I did not feel bad about the demotion as much as I was indignant after the poet was retried. The death sentence by hanging, rushed…”!
Could it be that the prosecutor in question – since the hanging was public and the burial on a mountainside gave the Chairman of the Constitutional Court, comrade Fehmi Avdiu, the pleasure to sign the repeal of the law on death sentences, although forced by internationals?!
Could it be that he would confess to the internationals about all the oppositionists who in 1997 called on the poor to burn Albania for the pyramid schemes, after they personally financed first, withdrawing three times the amount they had submitted to the schemes after one month?!
Today they are all powerful; they have properties, newspapers, television channels, etc….! Today there is talk about opening the files, which are known to have been manipulated. Why open the fabricated files of the poor when the dossiers are fabricated in power. / Memorie.al
*The author is a former political prisoner, former Vice-President of the Association of Former Political Prisoners and Persecuted of Albania, and currently a member of the “Vatra” branch in Detroit.
