Extinctions from communism in Albania sought in Day

The European Union-funded project will start with identifying the remains of 13 troops shot by dictatorships on Dajti Mountain, found eight years ago, as well as other searches in Day and Ballshi's forced labor camp.

Top political official near I CMP, Luigi Ndocu, says this is an important step towards Albania's obligations to international human rights instruments and the family's right to have an effective investigation of individual cases of forced disappearances.

“The ICMP is extremely encouraged by the agreement reached with the Albanian government, which paves the way for an extremely timely process and has to do with identifying victims of the communist regime in 1944-91. The EU financed the project and, along with financial support, has also given us political support”, says Ndocu.

Initially, it will be worked on remains of bodies that have remained for eight years at the Law Medicine Institute, new research on Dajti Mountain, where they were found and many other executions have been conducted.

The 13 troops shot by the communist regime were found in 2010 and have since remained at the Law Medicine Institute without making any identification with the prosecution. That fact makes activists, who are trying to illuminate the crimes of communism”, says Jonila Godole, leader of the Institute for Democracy, Media and Culture.

Based on the authorities' records of several locations with firing troops, I The CMP is expected to verify areas along with Albanian officials for possible exhumations before excavations begin.

ICMP experts claim that because of DNA tests, they find the victim's identity at nearly 100 percent and hand it over to family members for a dignified burial.

“Crahas search for bodies and identification of victims, I The CMP has also committed to helping build a national registry for all missing persons during the communist regime”, Ndocu said.

Institute for Democracy, Media and Culture director Jonila Godole says that “so far the Albanian prosecution body has no experience in whiteling communism's crimes or previous cases that have been dealt with IDs of rifles and missing from dictatorship”.

Experts, in turn, require the cooperation of the entire society to bring as many facts and evidence of communist crime events and whereabouts as possible.

But activists' mistrust gets bigger when they think it's about a large number of burial sites in many decades.

The ICMP is the only organization in the world dealing with missing persons. It is working on all continents, where there are missing persons as a result of armed conflicts such as Syria, Iraq, Libya, etc.

In the Balkans, the ICMP has discovered over 70 percent of persons missing from the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.

This is an extraordinary record thanks to scientific methods and adn evidence.