In the summer of 1949, at the height of the consolidation of the communist dictatorship, an 85-year-old father from Saranda addressed the Central Committee of the Communist Party with a formally simple but politically shocking request. The letter did not denounce ideology and did not demand criminal justice. It recorded a fact: the arrest of a citizen, his death from torture and the burial of the body within the territory of the State Security.
The document showed how the communist state arrested without trial, tortured to death, and then administered the body of the deceased as institutional property, denying the family the basic right to burial. The father did not demand an investigation or punishment.
He only asked for the body to be handed over for burial in a public cemetery. This minimal request made the letter a direct testimony to the macabre nature of the regime, written in real time and addressed to the very structures that perpetrated the violence.
Below, the full letter.
Saranda, July 3, 1949
Central Committee of the Communist Party
of Tirana
Fellow Members,
On May 31, 1949, my son, Foto Nini, was arrested by the Saranda Security organs as a person suspected of agitation.
I remembered, as did his father, his wife, his mother, his brother, and all the family members, that the boy was in the hands of the Sigurimi, isolated somewhere in a prison, but without any news or sign, as a popular proverb says.
After the turn that things took, as well as after the words spoken by the Ministry of Internal Affairs regarding the unprincipled Trotskyist Koçi Xoxe, and after the discussions and explanations that were given to the people by the people in power in this province, it was openly declared to us by the Saranda Security organs that Foto Nini, from numerous tortures, died and was buried in the garden of the Saranda Security Section.
I did not want to expand or interfere in the affairs of the Sigurimi, but I was forced to point out to you that I did not dare to go home, because his mother and wife asked me for his body so they could mourn and bury him, which they were right to do.
I contacted the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but since I received no response, I took the courage to contact you and begged you:
If there were no obstacles, the Saranda Security Section should be ordered to hand over his body to us, to be buried in the public cemetery.
Otherwise, I asked you to notify the Executive Committee here, so that we could gather our wits and stop searching for his body.
Death to fascism – Freedom for the people
From the village of Nivicë–Bubari, resident of Saranda,
Father of Photo Nini, 85 years old
