Fadil Daja was 21 years old when he was sent to Spac prison after being convicted of treason.
The young soldier escaped to Yugoslavia in 1975 and lived in a refugee camp in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana for six months, dreaming of political asylum in Canada. But his dreams turned sour when the Yugoslav authorities deported him back to Albania and he was sentenced to death.
However, because of his young age, his sentence was commuted to 25 years and he was sent to Spac prison.
Daja knew that the political prison, built in 1968 in a remote area of Albania, was infamous for the hard labour that its inmates were forced to do in its copper and pyrite mines.
But he soon also realised that keeping up with the workload target set for the captive miners was almost impossible for him.
“We had to fill four wagons of minerals every day, around 1.8 tons each. I was constantly ill. I couldn’t meet the target and as result, I was beaten, tied to pillars in extreme cold, and very often left for weeks in solitary confinement,” Daja told BIRN.
But when Daja and other former inmates tried to get miners’ pensions from the state, they were rejected – the authorities said that although there were records of their imprisonment, there were no details of the work they had done while in the Spac jail.
Digging for dictator’s birthday
The Spac mine, situated in a deep valley in northern Albania, is the second biggest in the country for copper extraction, and is still operational today.
It was built in 1954 by the Communists, who then came up with the idea of using it as a labour camp and forcing the prisoners to extract the minerals.
This took a toll on the lives of over 1,000 people who were imprisoned there, including Agim Hakcani, who is now 65.
“We would work for eight hours underground in temperatures of 40 degrees Centigrade, get wet from the acid from the pyrite and go out to face temperatures of minus 15 degrees Centigrade. My clothes would immediately get frozen,” Hakcani told BIRN.
Hakcani was a young veterinarian at one of Tirana’s collective farms when he was arrested on charges of ‘economic sabotage’ after some cows on the farm died.
“I have seen with my eyes at least 16 prisoners killed in the [Spac mine’s underground] gallery as result of a lack of safety, or throwing themselves at the electric fences surrounding the prison because they couldn’t bear working as slaves anymore,” he recalled.
Spac was not the only political prison in Albania where inmates were forced to labour in extreme conditions.
The situation was almost identical for around 500 prisoners working in copper and pyrite mines at Qafe Bari, in the mountains around 60 kilometres north of Spac.
Ali Leka, a former army officer who was imprisoned at Qafe Bari in 1977 for trying to escape from the country, recalled how the prison was notorious for the violence used against inmates.
“At Qafe Bari, we were usually asked to fill four wagons of minerals per day, while on special Communist dates they would ask for higher yields. On the birthday of [Albanian Communist leader] Enver Hoxha on October 16, we had to fill eight wagons,” Leka told BIRN.
According to the Albanian Institute for Formerly Persecuted People, during the Communist regime’s 45-year rule, around 16,000 people were imprisoned on political charges and almost 1,000 died while in jail.
Forcing them to do hard labour was a very common practice. As well as working in the mines, they were forced to drain swamps, work agricultural land, and build massive infrastructure and industrial projects for the state.
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