In Albania, some people never really faced their history. Time passed, the regime fell, the files were filed away, the victims grew old or fled without receiving justice, while some of those who were once part of the apparatus of repression quietly returned to public life. Today, they come out on the studio, give their thoughts on the law, talk about justice, comment on investigations, the court and the procedure, as if the past were a biographical detail and not a dark part of their public responsibility.
One of these names is Qemal Lame. In the documents of the late 1980s, he does not appear as a sideline observer of the system, nor as a weightless official in the administration of the time. He appears as the head of the General Investigation and as a member of the Central Commission for Internment and Deportation, one of the coldest mechanisms of the communist state, where the fate of people was decided not by a fair trial, but by an administrative procedure based on the logic of biography, political punishment and social control.
On December 22, 1986, the Council of Ministers of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania officially addressed “comrade Qemal Lame”, in his capacity as the head of the General Investigation. The secret letter stated that, based on the decree of the Presidium of the People’s Assembly No. 7071, dated September 15, 1986, “On internment and deportation as an administrative measure”, he had been appointed a member of the Central Commission for Internment and Deportation. A few dry lines, a common office language, a signature at the bottom of the page. But behind those words lay a mechanism that for years had uprooted people from their homes, had sentenced families without trial and had turned the lives of citizens into files.
Three years later, on February 27, 1989, another document of the Council of Ministers approved the composition of the Central Commission for Internment and Deportation. It was headed by Deputy Prime Minister Manush Myftiu, the deputy chairman was Simon Stefani, while members included Arianit Çela, the president of the Supreme Court, and Qemal Lame, the president of the General Investigation. This was the institutional face of the communist state at its end: the government, the court, and the investigation sitting in the same structure to administer the internment and deportation of citizens.
Other documents show that this mechanism was not a late invention of the 1980s. As early as 1960, the Council of Ministers ordered changes to the Special Commission for Administrative Internments and Expulsions. Even earlier, in 1954, the Presidium of the People's Assembly issued a decree on internment as an administrative measure. The names on the commissions might have changed, but the logic remained the same: the state had set up a system where internment was not called a crime, but a procedure; expulsion was not called a political punishment, but an administrative measure; the destruction of a family was not described as a tragedy, but as a decision.
This is the greatest cruelty of communist documents. They do not scream. They do not curse. They do not describe pain. They speak in pure bureaucratic language: article, decree, commission, member, secret, signature. But in real life, this language translated into branded children, women thrown into internment villages, men taken from their homes, families separated, lives put on hold, and people who paid not for what they had done, but for what the regime decided they represented.
Therefore, the name of Qemal Lame in these documents cannot be treated as an archival detail. In a system where internment was a political instrument, participation in the commissions that administered it is a matter of public responsibility. Even more so when today the same name appears on screen as a commentator on justice and the rule of law. The question is not only what Qemal Lame thinks about justice today. The question is what he ever said about his role in a commission that dealt with the internment and expulsion of citizens.
Has it ever publicly explained what decisions were made in that commission? How many families were affected? How did the mechanism work? What responsibility did the General Investigation have in a structure that produced punishment without trial? Has there ever been a reflection, an apology, an explanation for the people who were affected by that system?
Albania does not only suffer from the crimes of communism. It also suffers from the lack of confronting them. From the fact that many of those who were part of the regime's mechanisms managed to go through the transition without being held accountable, without being questioned, without being confronted with the documents on which their names appeared. The victims were left with scars, while the functionaries often took on the role of experts, commentators and authorized witnesses of history.
