Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Imprisoned on the whim of Enver Hoxha

Fatos Lubonja describes how he and countless others were condemned, on the flimsiest of pretexts, to languish for years in Albanian prisons

Enver Hoxha at the ballot box in Albania’s national elections in 1967. [Getty Images]

Nowhere in this extraordinary prison memoir do we find out why Fatos Lubonja was sentenced to imprisonment in Spaç, the Albanian jail where some inmates worked the copper mines. He’s written about it elsewhere. His first seven years there were for ‘agitation and propaganda’, after police found his diaries, with criticisms of the Albanian tyrant Enver Hoxha, in his uncle’s attic. While he was in prison he was re-sentenced to a further 25 years for involvement in a counter-revolutionary organisation. The dictator didn’t last as long as that. Fatos served 17 years, partly in Spaç, partly in other camps. 

It wasn’t difficult to get on the wrong side of the paranoid Hoxha. One man, Zef, was incarcerated because he made the mistake of wearing a derby hat in Tirana at a time when the dictator favoured this article; when Hoxha saw him, he decided that the hat wearer thought he was losing power. The prison had a number of political bigwigs who had fallen from grace through some deviation in ideology. Other inmates had been caught trying to leave Albania by swimming towards a foreign ship or across Lake Ohrid, or escaping over the Greek border. Spaç was a prison within a far bigger one.

Chapter by chapter we meet a selection of Lubonja’s comrades. The author himself is rarely centre stage, except at the beginning, when he arrived in February 1975 and saw ‘that repellent human whirlpool’ of prisoners assembled in an open space:

I found myself staring at a strange mass of human creatures, of a kind I had never seen in my life. I had seen larger crowds… but it was the way these people moved that made this swarm of humanity so unusual… the prisoners anxiously paced to and fro, back and forth, within that confined space.

It reminded him of a documentary about caged wolves.

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