Unpunished Crimes Lie Behind Albania’s Present Crisis

The crisis of democracy in Albania these days should be seen also as part of the same serious crisis taking place in Europe and worldwide. In Albania, a still fragile democracy, the global crisis of democracy is perhaps reflected in its sorest consequences.

Aside from the purely political dimension to this crisis, however, Albania has to face a deep moral and existential problem linked to the concepts of justice and memory.

For the last 80 years, either under totalitarianism or under pluralism, the political life of Albania can be told as the painful story of a continuous crime without punishment. This, in turn, has engendered a prevailing moral nihilism and cynicism that is eating away at the soul of the nation.

It is remarkable that in Albania the victims of the totalitarian regime - some of whom are still searching for the graves of loved ones executed by the former regime - never took revenge on their persecutors.

If bloodshed was avoided in Albania, it was because of a transcendent act of forgiveness. But at the same time there was not what the French call Le devoir de mémoire - the moral duty to remember the past in order to draw political and moral lessons for the future.

The dominating narrative after the fall of the regime, that "we were all both persecutors and persecuted", paved the way to equalizing perpetrators and victims and, as a consequence, to moral nihilism.

The post-totalitarian political bodies that were meant to address the crimes of the regime were often led by people who had been part of that same system. While they often unleashed campaigns of hysterical and ludicrous anti-communism, they showed no real interest in seriously dealing with a complex and painful past.

Albanian citizens today...