Some Albanian Sigurimi Files May Have Vanished, Expert

Some of the files of Albania's once-feared Communist secret police, the Sigurimi, may have been destroyed or falsified, 25 years on from the fall of the Communist regime, a German expert told BIRN.

Hildigund Neubert, the deputy chair of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and a former commissioner for the East German "Stasi" secret police files in Thuringen, Germany, told BIRN that scientific methods must be applied to check the secret files once they are opened in Albania.

"The risk is high, since 25 years have passed and the files have been in the Interior Ministry's hands, and it might have happened that some have been eliminated or changed," she warned.

"Scientific methods must be used to verify how true those that have remained are, and whether possible falsification might have occurred," she said.

Neubert was participating in a conference in Albania, called "Opening Sigurimi Files - Sooner the better," organised by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and the Institute for the Studies of Communist Crimes and Consequences in Albania.

She emphasized that while the Communist systems were based on much the same rules all over Eastern Europe, Albania's was by far the harshest.

"All the Communist systems in Europe were the children of Soviet communism, so all were the same, albeit with their own differences," she observed.

"But the methods of persecution differed from country to country, and I can say that what happened in Albania was way bigger than in East Germany," she emphasized.

She believes that is one reason why the process of opening up the files has not yet started in Albania - at a time when all other former Communist countries, apart from Russia, have finished this process.

"The fact that...