Open the Communism Files, Especially for the Persecutors

By Jonila Godole | Albanian Daily News, 10 June 22

Today, the Albanian Parliament approves the candidacies for the Board of the Files Authority. In the first term, the Board was elected without political consensus between the government and the opposition. The same thing is very likely to happen tomorrow and that is a disaster.

This public institution, which is financed by the taxes of Albanian citizens, must be independent and uncontrolled by any political force, in order to properly carry out its mission. And the main mission is to open the files of the communist regime.

Files cannot stay closed. They should be open not only for the victims, but above all to their persecutors. Personally, I have been and remain for their total opening, online publication on a dedicated portal and accessible for everyone, wherever they are, free of charge like the Czech model.

The strategy of keeping them closed serves the political class to use them at will, as a compromising and blackmailing tool as it has been done for these 30 years.

Everyone should understand that in those files, regardless of what is written there, there is no absolute truth about the surveyed individuals, but only that version of the distorted “truth” that the Security wanted to give through its denouncing network of “Party workers”, from the simplest collaborator to the officer.

Awareness of the crimes of the communist regime and its repressive organs is provided by civil society or those public institutions that have legal status such as the Institute for the Study of the Crimes and Consequences
of Communism – ISKK. The file authority must open the files, this is its duty under the law. And when it has completed this task then it has completed his mission, just as has happened with similar authorities in Germany
and elsewhere.

All amendments made to the 2015 law outside this focus are for the non-opening of the files, nothing more.