Kosovo to Transform Jail for Political Prisoners into Museum

But last week, Kosovo's government decided to reopen it for visitors and to begin transforming it into a museum. The government tasked a team of officials from Ministry of Culture, including cultural heritage experts, to analyse what is needed and prepare the building for reopening.

Yll Rugova, Kosovo's outgoing deputy culture minister, told BIRN that the museum, when it is finished, will preserve the memories of thousands of political prisoners.

"The prison in its current condition will be formally open to the public on June 12, the day when Kosovo was liberated in 1999. Then over a year, we plan to prepare all the groundwork for the museum," he said.

"The prison was built by and is a relic of the brutality of Yugoslav-era interior minister and chief of secret police Aleksandar Rankovic, a person notorious for oppressing Albanians - brutality that continued until 1999 and Slobodan Milosevic's time," Rugova added.

Rankovic was head of Yugoslavia's security agency between 1944 and 1946 and then served as interior minister and vice-president until 1966. He was accused of persecuting people and wrongfully imprisoning them without trial, as well as being responsible for thousands of executions.

Various reports have detailed the ill-treatment of Kosovo Albanians who were being held at Pristina Prison.

In a report issued in 1997, Amnesty International said that Besnik Restelica, a 30-year-old who was arrested on terrorism charges for allegedly being a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army, died in a cell at the prison in February 1997. Yugoslav officials said he committed suicide but ethnic Albanian sources rejected this explanation, claiming he died as a result of torture or was induced to kill himself by the physical abuse that he...

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