In memoriam for April 2, 1991 and the "Broken Aprils" of Albania

Prehjen nuk e gjetën kurrë as shpirtrat e viktimave të komunizmit, por kam shumë frikë se nuk do ta gjejnë kurrë as viktimat e demokracisë

2026-04-02 18:03:00, Opinione Ardi Stefa

There are countries where the dead are honored.
There are nations where victims become consciences.
And there is Albania, where the dead are used.

There are wounds that Albania never closes. Not because time does not pass, but because politics ensures that they always remain open.
This is our greatest political and moral drama: neither communism let the victims rest, nor did democracy have the courage to free them from the captivity of politics.

The souls of the victims of communism still wander among nameless graves, closed files, unmarked graves and the truncated truth of a political class that never had the courage to apologize with deeds. They are the victims of shootings, deportations, prisons, disappearances without a trace. An entire state killed them and then stole from them the right to a grave, to a prayer, to a rest.

But more serious than this is that our transition produced its own victims and handed them over to the same macabre ritual: oblivion, manipulation, and electoral use.

But the Albanian tragedy did not end with the fall of the dictatorship. Democracy was supposed to be our historical healing, but...
It is enough to remember April 2, 1991 in Shkodra, when four young people were killed in the name of a government that was giving up its spirit, while justice for that massacre remained hostage to political narratives even after 35 years.

1997 where the state fell along with the moral values ??of Albanians.

Gërdeci was the most brutal face of the corruption of democracy: 26 killed, hundreds injured, families torn apart and a state that exploded along with the warehouses of death.
January 21 finally sealed the idea that the Albanian government, when it feels threatened, still knows how to respond with bullets: four citizens killed in the middle of the boulevard; a justice that is still late and the false illusion that Albanian democracy has learned the value of human life.

But our problem is not only that these victims exist.
The problem is worse: politics does not want these souls to find rest.

Because a soul that wants to rest seeks the truth.
The truth seeks the guilty.
The guilty touch the power.
And the power in Albania, left or right, has invested more in erasing memory than in doing justice.

Victims are used as flags at anniversaries, as crocodile tears on podiums, as statuses on social media, and as weapons against the opponent. But as soon as the ceremony is over, as soon as the cameras turn off, as soon as the applause dies down, everything returns to silence. Families are left alone with the pain, while politics continues its bargaining.

This is the greatest cynicism of the Albanian transition: the victims are not respected; they are recycled.

The souls of the victims of April 2, 1997, Gërdec, January 21, and thousands of those persecuted by communism find no peace, because political commerce continues to be done with them. Those souls are not allowed to find peace, or to become national memory, because each political side needs them as evidence against the other, but neither has the will to give them full justice.

And that is why I fear that the victims of democracy, like those of communism, will never find the rest they deserve.
Not because of a lack of time.
Not because of a lack of evidence.
But because of a lack of will on the part of a political class that has fed on their pain for decades.

That rest comes only when truth triumphs.
Truth requires names.
Names require responsibility.
Responsibility implicates power.
This is the moral necrophagy of our political class: it does not build justice on blood, but a career on memory and from the lack of remorse.

In Albania, it seems that even the dead have the same fate as the living: they are not left alone, because the government feeds on their unrest.

A political class that does not let the dead rest will never let the living live in peace.