Albania Exhibition Puts Communist Secret Police Files on Display

An exhibition entitled 'Tirana in the Eyes of the Sigurimi' was held at the Palace of Congresses in the capital on Thursday, illustrating how people in the Albanian capital were spied upon and persecuted under the Communist regime that ruled the country until the early 1990s.

"Today we have exhibited about 43 different files, of course the volume of documents is many times larger, it exceeds thousands of pages of documents because special files have volumes of files inside," said Ardiana Topi, director of the archive at the Authority for Information on Former State Security Documents, which was one of the organisers of the exhibition.

"8,200 pages from dozens of security files that unravel the psychology of the regime and the oppression of the dictatorship have been declassified for the exhibition," she said.

Topi explained that the Sigurimi files contain surveillance reports on specific individuals, but also on more general topics such as the clergy or trade.

"The main goal is to convey a message to the community and to young people, and this message is: dictatorship must not happen again. Dictatorships are the worst thing that can happen to a society. Dictatorships bring the destruction of all aspects of humanity, of the individual, of culture, of economic developments and so on," she said.

Albanians lived under constant surveillance by the Sigurimi for almost five decades under the rule of Communist leader Enver Hoxha, who headed a brutal regime that took thousands of lives.