COMMU NIZAM IS DEATH

It says: Ben Blushi

35 years ago on December 9, 1990, this morning I was going to the faculty where I studied when I first saw a protest.

There were about 200 students who had left Tirana's dormitories and had blocked Elbasan's road.

We stayed at the Lyceu intersection for a few hours without moving until someone fired a gun into the air and ran away without knowing where we were going.

In those days, it was continuous rain, and many of those who ran to flee the police were left on their shoes in the mud between the Italian and American Embassy.

This is Albania's most painful metaphor at the time.

Communist Albania was a muddy field in the middle of the West.

The mud was the symbol of immersion, and shoes the symbol of freedom to escape immersion.

Fortunately, I managed to save my crooked shoes, which took me to an unknown house where I remained until the police left and the road opened.

The next day I went to Student City as hundreds of students who for four days made possible something I had thought impossible.

It was decided that Albania would have more than one political party, and on the fourth day this party was created.

Many of my friends never came to Student City.

They had Communist parents or families who were not left because of fear.

I didn't have much reason to be there either.

My family was Communist.

My grandfather had come from France to fight fascism in 1942.

His brother was killed in a demonstration, and today he is in the tomb of the martyrs of Elbasan.

My grandmother was 18 years old.

They came from the middle family.

They became Communists believing that this order would protect Albania from foreign conquest and misery.

My grandfather was a driver with six children.

There was an Italian car that Communism replaced with a track truck that distributed sweet fruit Corche while there was power.

She never became a Communist and never said that the old car was better than the new car.

He loved us so much to put our lives at risk for a car invasion.

My father came to Tirana as the first boy among six children.

He became a Communist as a man to whom that system had given something that he did not have.

Communism gave him a home in Tirana where he wrote books and made wonderful films.

We were not a privileged family like we were not a persecuted family.

Communism had not taken any property because we had none and no one had put us in prison.

Like all systems that ruled through submission, Communism divided people into two categories.

And those who eat good things and those who eat evil.

My family was part of the second.

When I was ten years old, I got up at 4: 00 p.m. to buy a half-pack of butter that I so enjoyed and a bottle of milk I didn't drink.

In the afternoon, I held in line to buy fish - smelling oil that lit sobats with dry clothes, along with the moisture of shoes caught in nails.

I went to the beach by train, and three months I lived with my grandparents in Korca with seven people in a kitchen room.

The biggest privilege I've ever had was that I could read banned books that were abundant in my home.

Adolescence was all over me, and the satisfaction I received from their impunity seemed to me to be the highest degree of dissemination.

I didn't live well, but I didn't live bad.

For all these reasons I had little reason to go to Student City on December 9, 1990.

The biggest wonder is that no one in my family told me why I went to a place where the system they believed was going down.

If a political party were created today, after the turbulence on the street of Elbasan, as happened in December 1990, I don't know how quiet I would be to leave my children there.

My father never did.

Not only when I went to Student City to bring down the party he was a member of but also when I went to work in the first opposition newspaper in Albania.

From the eyes of the people I met those days, I realized that I had three unacceptable defects.

I was born in Tirana and came from a Communist family from the south.

For many of the students and journalists back then, I was the perfect enemy.

I was the type of man who had to be defeated.

A few months later I graduated from the university, and the last Communist government appointed me as a teacher in Albania's worst village in Iballa, Puka.

Iball's stuck six months in the snow.

That's where Migen went to be treated by tuberculosis and I naturally never went because Communism fell.

If that barbarous system were to continue, I would probably have gone back from there to alcohol or prison.

That's where I took advantage of the fall of Communism.

I didn't become a teacher but a free man.

Since then I have been convinced that Communism died in December 1990.

Communists may be, but Communism is dead.

So I am surprised today how many people curse those who do not love them as Communists.

Telling someone you're a communist is like telling a rich man you're a dork.

Albania's problem today is neither the communists nor the Democrats.

Albania's problem is idiots.

And idiots can be Communists and Democrats because they're idiots.