Every time it seems that the crimes of communism have been told to the end, another document comes out and pushes the limits of cruelty even further.
One such evidence is the letter that Muharrem Xhakani sent to the Central Committee of the Albanian People's Liberation Army on January 20, 1963, from Burrel Prison. In it, he describes the torture, inhumane conditions, lack of medical care, and deaths of political prisoners, left to the mercy of the prison guards and staff.
He mentions five names.
Xhevat Korça, former Minister of Education, professor, historian and one of the renowned intellectuals of the time, was sentenced by the communist regime to life imprisonment after the Special Trial of 1945. He died in Burrel Prison on July 27, 1959, after a hunger strike, becoming a symbol of silent resistance to communist humiliation.
Gjergj Kokoshi, former Minister of Education, teacher, MP and intellectual educated in the West, had been part of the anti-fascist resistance, but then clashed with the communist regime. He was convicted as a political opponent and died after years of imprisonment, ravaged by suffering and illness.
Estref Muftiu is mentioned by Xhakani as another political prisoner who lost his life in Burrel due to harsh conditions, neglect and lack of medical care. For him, as for many others, the document preserves death more than life: a testament to the way the regime erased people even from public memory.
Arqile Tasi is another name on Xhakan's list. He appears on paper as a victim of the same mechanism: prison, mistreatment, lack of medical care, and state indifference. Not all of Burrel's victims had biographies preserved in books; some remained only in such papers, as proof that real people died there, not abstract "enemies."
Ismail Qazim is also mentioned among those who died from prison conditions. His name also appears in this document as an indictment of a system that turned illness into punishment, negligence into a method, and death into a predictable end.
Xhakan's letter is a cry for help. He asks for medical treatment, an end to violence, an investigation into the deaths, and minimal conditions for prisoners. In essence, he asks that the state not let people die at its hands.
But the Central Committee's response is even more serious than the letter.
On February 23, 1963, Rita Marko calls the complaint “slander” and “fiction.” According to him, the prisoners who complained about torture and death were people who had made plans against the party. And then comes the sentence that strips the regime of every mask: the prison rules are “determined and necessary for these enemies.”
That was the government's response to the five deaths.
In Burrel, the prisoners demanded not to die without medical treatment. In Tirana, the leadership responded that they were enemies. And this is precisely where the horror of the document lies: not only in the violence of the captors, but in the coldness of the state that knew, read and justified it.
