Admirina Peci Shkodra, Ulcinj BIRN
In the final years of Albania’s communist dictatorship, the authorities shot dozens of citizens trying to flee the country – and most of the attempts to bring the killers to justice have met obstruction and incompetence.
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The Buna River, in Shkodra, northern Albania, flows quietly beside the Catholic cemetery in Shen Koll, a border village about 15 kilometres from the city of Ulcinj, in Montenegro.
On December 19, 1990, this place became the scene of a crime committed by the Albanian state.
Albanian border guards killed five people – Pal Palna, Zade Palna, Ernest Daragjati, Olsi Lorja and Liljana Palna, an 11-year-old girl – whose bodies fell from the boat they were sailing in and disappeared into the waters of the Buna.
They were among a group, most of them with family ties, who were trying to escape Albania, which was then under harsh Communist rule.
A relative of the Palna family, Gjergj Ashta, has reconstructed what happened that night from the memories of those who survived.
According to Ashta, eight to 10 people were in the wooden boat, four of whom were killed.
These were Pali, Zade (Pal’s mother), Liljana, Pal’s daughter, and his brother-in-law, Ernest Daragjati. Olsi Lorja was killed in another wooden boat that they were in.
“All of them came from the Daragjati area of Shkodra and went out on the Buna by boat, and, after a few minutes they were confronted by Albanian police and were killed. Some were killed and some were captured by the Montenegrin army and taken to a detention camp,” Ashta said.
The incident shocked people in Shkodra but also in the small village of Shen Koll, across the border in Montenegro.
Anton Hoti, from Shen Koll, where the bodies were brought for burial, still has fresh memories. “They killed them somewhere in Pentar [a village near Shkodra] … They even said that they had severed half one of their heads with the blades of a motorboat,” he said.
Many crimes committed by the Communist regime of Enver Hoxha, led after his death by Ramiz Alia, remain unpunished.
A report dated November 20, 1990, signed by then Interior Minister Hekuran Isai, reveals the extent of the killings of would-be escapees on the borders of Albania, which had been transformed into a de facto giant prison.
“From 1944 to 1990, 9,220 people and 4,472 of their relatives, women and children, fled across the Albanian border, of whom 988 died,” the archival document states.
The collapse of Albania’s Communist regime was set in motion in December 1990, when student demonstrations erupted in major cities. But the ruling Communist party, the Party of Labour, remained in power until March 1992.
In the absence of accurate official statistics, data assembled by the Institute of Political Studies, an independent research centre in Tirana, indicates that the highest number of deaths on the border occurred precisely when the Communist regime was in its final stages.
“The highest number of murders occurred in December 1990, with 12 cases, followed by June 1990, with 9 cases, May, with 8 cases, August and November, with 5 cases each, etc.,” the institutes’ report says.
Continued proof of these crimes are the graves in the cemetery at Shen Koll, which is where a number of Albanians killed on the border with Montenegro were buried.
‘We will kill you when you reach the shore’
Gjergj Ashta shows the cemetery in Montenegro where he found the bodies of his relatives who were killed at the Albanian border. Photo: Pandeli Ceco.
A few kilometres from the Shen Kolli cemetery, on Velipoja beach in Shkodra, two brothers, Gjeke and Vate Beqi, set out to swim to Montenegro on May 18, 1990, aiming for the island of Ada at the estuary of the Buna River.
A speech by new Communist president Ramiz Alia on May 7 that year, in which he announced that crossing the border would no longer be deemed “high treason”, and would not be punishable by death, had encouraged them. Thousands of others also had attempted to flee in anticipation of the impending fall of the regime.
But after the brothers were spotted in the darkness by the border guard’s searchlights, they were hit by a burst of automatic gunfire followed. Gjeke Beqi, one of the brothers, recalls the story of that night, when he was seriously wounded by a bullet that went through his jaw, while his brother was killed.
“The commander was a cruel, sadistic man, he killed us for nothing,” he said.
“He shot as soon as he approached us in a boat. I was wounded. I sank in the water. My brother pulled me out. My brother told them; ‘We are locals here’ and tried to talk to them. ‘Hold him, hold him’ – they told him not to drown because, ‘we will kill you as soon as you reach the shore’. And he really killed my brother on the shore,” Gjeke Beqi added.
Their mother, now 92, who lives a few kilometres from the place where her sons were shot, is still waiting for justice for the killing of her son who was only 25 at the time. As a Christian believer, she also says she has left justice to God.
“He shouldn’t have killed him … he shouldn’t have killed him because on May 7, Ramiz Alia said the border was free [to cross],” she said.
The person who shot her son dead was Bino Binaj, commander of the Velipoja border post.
In the mid-1990s, Gjeke Beqi began a legal battle. It was one of the few cases in which Albanian courts handed down a verdict for the crimes of the totalitarian regime that had lasted almost half-a-century.
“When I got out of prison, I was traumatised and maybe even thought about taking revenge. But my father said ‘no’. The state killed you, you follow the legal path. So I brought him [Binaj] to justice within the rules,” he says.
At the trial before the Shkodra Judicial District Court, Judge Admir Thanxa sentenced Binaj to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity.
The Tirana District Court of Appeal upheld the first-instance sentence, dismissing an appeal filed by Binaj’s lawyers.
Binaj, in an attempt to evade justice, had meantime changed his name in the civil registry.
An order for the execution of the sentence, issued in 2009 by the Shkodra Prosecutor’s Office, specified that Binaj was the same person as Besnik Ali Zykaj. However, the order for execution was never implemented; Zykaj (alias Binaj) had fled the country.
Declared internationally wanted under his new name, he was arrested in 2012 in Florence, Italy. But Albania failed to extradite him.
Quite how the Italian authorities were convinced by Albanian institutions that Zykaj/Binaj should be sent to Albania to serve his sentence remain unclear. Neither the Shkodra Prosecutor’s Office nor the Ministry of Justice has ever made the complete documentation available.
The Albanian police say Zykaj/Binaj is still internationally wanted.
Beqi blames the Albanian state for this failure. “The state had the opportunity to find him, but the state itself helped him not to be extradited,” he said.
Afrim Krasniqi, director of the Institute of Political Studies, says after the fall of the Communist regime there was no attempt to punish the people who had committed such crimes.
“When we tried to establish investigative processes, it was extremely late and the individuals were no longer in Albania, or there was no documentation supporting the judicial investigations,” Krasniqi said.
He links the increase in murders in 1990 to the fact that Communist leader Ramiz Alia’s pledges were never implemented by the border guards.
Moreover, despite his public promises, Alia seemingly encouraged such killings, as shown by records of a Politburo meeting on December 4, 1990, where Alija justified the shooting of those attempting to escape from border guards.
As President of Albania for several months after the formal demise of Communist rule, he used this time to grant political immunity to many of those who had served the totalitarian state in its final moments.
On January 5, 1991, he awarded high presidential decorations to all the officers responsible for border killings, including Binaj, killer of Vate Beqi.
According to Afrim Krasniqi, “this was a message to the border security forces that they have high-level protection from the President, parliament and the top political structures of the country”.
Families spurned by the state
Dila Beqi, 92, the mother of Vate Beqi, who was killed in 1990 at the Albania-Montenegro border. Photo. Pandeli Ceco.
The relatives of victims killed on the border attempting to escape faced closed doors when they tried to learn the truth and find their loved ones’ bodies.
The Communist state had killed them. The new democratic state spurned their efforts to obtain justice.
Gjergj Ashta dedicated years of his life to finding and bringing back the remains of his murdered relatives who died crossing the Buna River. Their bodies had remained in Montenegro.
Ashta says he made all those efforts himself; the only official assistance he received was from the Montenegrin authorities in Ulcinj.
Ashta was helped by Nikola Elezovic, a local from the village of Shen Koll, across the river in Montenegro.
Elezovic recalled: “A friend of mine told me that some Catholics had come and were interested in some of the dead people who were killed at the border and brought to the church [in Shen Koll] and buried.”
The authorities in Ulcinj assisted Ashta in retrieving the bodies of his relatives.
“I met the then Mayor of Ulcinj, Mehmet Bardhi, who … helped me find the place where they were buried. But it took five years of procedures to retrieve the remains, exhume them and take them to Albania,” Ashta said.
Through Ashta’s efforts, the Palna family have now buried some of their dead. But justice is still far from being done.
The Files Authority, AIDSSH, an institution established in 2015 with the aim of opening up the files of the much-feared communist-era Sigurimi state security service, is ready to help.
In its archive, AIDSSH has abundant information about the murders on the border that can shed light on the extent of the crimes, but also assist family members in their search for their loved ones’ remains.
Gentiana Sula, the head of AIDSSH, said that the files related to the killings on the south-eastern and northern borders are now accessible and those for the borders with Kosovo and the south will soon be open too. Sala explained that the files contain documents from various sources that could be helpful: “One source could be border registers, one source could be the [border authorities’] daily communiqués, one source could be the personal files [of those involved,” she said.
As for the deaths on the Buna River that night in December 1990, no one has yet been brought to justice. The body of 11-year-old Liljana, the Palna family’s youngest daughter, is still missing.
This article was originally published in Albanian by Kujto.al.