Concrete at Spaç prison, Agron Tufa revolts: How are the communist camps being destroyed, this is the goal

Writer Agron Tufa says that the work being done at Spaç prison, reportedly because a film will be shot there, is another example of efforts to erase the dark past.

"It is an alarm because the political powers in Albania, the political parties, have completely ignored the destruction of the painful assets, the topography of terror of the Communist Party. I also made a documentary film that no television station would allow me to broadcast, except abroad, where I document part of the prison camps, the internment camps, and what condition they are in. What I have noticed everywhere in Albania is that industrial projects or construction and agricultural projects have been superimposed on these places of suffering, making them disappear," Tufa said on "Off the Record" with Andrea Dangli on A2 CNN.

"We have camps with barbed wire, of the Auschwitz type, like Kruja or Kamza, that do not exist at all on the face of the earth. Tepelena also became like that, under the pretext of changing it, with lots of propaganda and initiatives, denaturing it. I see the same thing in Spaç. For the sake of shooting a film, the tendency was to change it, to soften it according to the film's requirements."

He says that these are attempts to diminish what the dictatorship did to its opponents in those dark years. "If you look closely, in essence, we have the attempt to amnesty, soften, fade, the pain and massacre of terror, through an aesthetic softening. If you look at it, the entire oppressive power of the ministries, the dictatorship, with its forms, is highlighted. By glorifying the former prophets of the Central Committee and the ministers of Enver Hoxha, they try to implicitly resurrect an epic, which paradoxically awakens an occult dimension in people," said Tufa.

Spaç Prison was a notorious forced labor camp in Albania during the communist regime, opened in 1968. It was located in an isolated mountainous area in the north of the country and served as a place of punishment for political prisoners. The convicts worked in inhumane conditions in a copper mine and suffered physical and psychological torture. Spaç is also known for the 1973 revolt, one of the most courageous acts of resistance against the communist dictatorship. Today, it is known as a symbol of suffering and anti-communist resistance in Albania. (A2 Televizion)