Prime Minister Edi Rama’s remarks at ceremony commemorating two Radio Tirana journalists Fadil Kokomani and Vangjel Lezho executed 40 years ago:
Most honourable family members of Fadil Kokomani and Vangjel Lezho,
Dear Spartak,
Dear friends participating in this extremely special ceremony,
We are almost three weeks away from commemorating the 40th anniversary of the execution of two Radio Tirana journalists, Fadil Kokomani and Vangjel Lezho. Two young men who, as once Renaissance authors wrote, were sacrificed on behalf of their idea and ideal.
During the one-minute silence observation, the ceremony attendees, or majority of the attendees, saw perhaps for the first time today the faces of two journalists. A minute of silence on the example of dozens of defence pages that Fadil Kokomani and Vangjel Lezho turned into one of the most powerful indictments against the dictatorial regime when the latter was there whole and in full power. They are both the graceful and painful embodiment and if many of you saw for first time today what remains from the embodiment of these two men following their execution, the threaten to the memory that was characteristic of a dark regime, none of us, as soon as one of your relatives stated, has not yet seen a resting place, an inscription, a tomb, or even a single memory.
Fadil Kokomani and Vangjel Lezho, at a very young age when sentenced for first time, developed bravery and an attitude worthy of a man, just like Spaç prison either made the most distinguished characters courageous or forced them to succumb. To the astonishment of a sinister and ominous regime that attempted to disintegrate up to the last piece of their being, these two journalists turned into two sandy grains that confused the whole gear into two particles of salt that give soil the taste of that time resembling a wilderness and the force of an example with the consciousness of freedom as its prize and reward.
Ismail Kadare in his little known book “the Four Translators” writes that Enver Hoxha used to solve the hardest dilemmas quickly, by either using temptation or destruction. But he failed to do so with Fadil Kokomani and Vangjel Lezho, neither by performing the first, nor by sowing fear and horror and it would be pointless to search through a biographical course and I imagine that much less it can be understood through the episodes of arrest, imprisonment, letters sent from Spaç to the main leader and the subordinate leaders or the death penalty.
Brilliant though discrete, humbly proud, open minded and extremely passionate both for their open wounded hearth and home from the dictatorship’s deluge, and for the ideas they embodied and for the homeland that gave flesh and bones to their whole utopia.
Two journalists madly in love with their profession, who committed themselves to promoting a breath of freedom and emancipation quality that for first time and paradoxically, although temporary, blew Easterly to Albania at that time. It was the time of big thaw, as Ilya Ehrenburg names it. It was time when Ismail Kadare was about to publish “Twilight of the Eastern Gods,” a book, which from the shadowy description of the process sentencing Boris Pasternak, proclaimed the latter a lonely hero against a monster state.
It was a time of paradoxes, as Fernandez Rekatala writes, right at the heart of the most secluded communist country, in the country where Fadil Kokomani would write on his defence arguments 40 years ago it had become the universe of prison maniac, a novel that rehabilitated the author of Doctor Zhivago. It is amazing indeed how the two radio journalists turned into one of the human, intellectual, and almost Hamletian challenges to the communist dictatorship, not because they conspired, neither had they the ambition of a self-sacrificing heroism, nor for the sake of snob protagonism, or to destroy through a revolutionary terrorism or guerrilla a state terrorism. Their challenge they embody today too with the physical lack of their grave, was a challenge as impossible, as simple from a coherence that was unthreatened to the end due to the eagerness for a free speech that was seen as a sacred personal responsibility thanks to a culture shaped from the most diverse world heritage sources.
It is an interesting, or better to say an important fact that they are children stemming from families that had given everything to the National Liberation War and that blindly believed in the country’s recovery under the partisan star whom they had given their word and granted them all the confidence for emancipation and development, emerging as the messengers of a very sincere, non-exclusive, non-punishing but peaceful and renewable progress and I believe that the titanic power of these two fragile people can be recalled both during arrests and detention as well as in the moment in front of the firing squad, an absolutely extraordinary moment in terms of confidence in justice.
It is not a coincidence that even after the impressive defence that unfolded in that farce trial 40 years ago, the other defendants were encouraged and finally said the word: we only seek justice.
In this respect, these two people are literally a kind of challenge in antithesis to the Freudian opinion that every society is founded with a common crime. In their complexity as individuals, as intellectual communists and undeniably idealists, so passionate for the life, Fadil Kokomani and Vangjel Lezho are undoubtedly the embodiment of a both radical and democratic left, which personifies both the utopia and impossibility in them.
At the same time, they joint a long line of activists and humanists who, albeit not here but globally, saw the alienation of the left because of a dictatorship drive, transfiguration, and crime as a new suffering in the neck of mankind. The two were intransigent communists, but they both were also free people in search of freedom for everyone in its fullest sense and as such they are true martyrs.
Elie Wiesel once had said: “There is one simple thing distinguishing a hero and martyr from the terrorist and the kamikaze. A martyr does not shun death if this is a supreme testimony to the salvation of many. While the quite opposite happens to the terrorist, the inverted mirror of the martyr, who sows death to many, in a contempt even to his own life and human life as such, and if you meditate on the fate of the martyrs and on the thread of history linking Vangjel Lezho and Fadil Kokomani with the roots associated with the national liberation war and transferring the utopia of that war to the impossible terrain of transforming communism from a dream to a nightmare, then we have to do with two missing martyrs. In one way or another, they are not two of the many persecuted and political convicts and then the executed people by the dictatorship, but they are the last martyrs among tens of thousands of partisan fighters killed during the war, among hundreds of hundreds of martyrs who fought against the enemy of the homeland with a rifle but having a structured communist ideal.
In a way, the story of their life seems as if handmade to design in the eyes of everyone the tragic finale of a story that began with the national liberation war and then everyone knows how it ended.
What the glory of the fallen in the battlefield of honour descended into heartbreak sorrow, disappointment and possible into life deprivation of these martyrs, who so much loved free and emancipated Albania, the official victors and the late beneficiaries, did not actually spared these two boy, who were the radio voice of the testament to the aspirations of that war. Therefore, I believe that by executing Fadil Kokomani and Vangjel Lezho, Enver Hoxha and his system killed the last martyrs, annihilated the voice that continued to echo through the radio waves of what was the epic of a great utopia and in fact this can be considered a second murder of martyrs and a final crucifixion of their free speech hope. “A great and deep, painful and tragic disappointment,” Liri Belishova, a warrior and co-sufferer of the two martyrs, would later write, but with the letter sent to the Central Committee in 1979, Fadil Kokomani and Vangjel Lezho went farther.
Tirana’s Olympus has turned the ancient Eschilean tragedies into the National Front Epopee-like comedies! This our “Olympus” has doted Albania with prisons, whose number exceeds the Fascism prisons … The lie of majesty and greatness gained since the National Liberation War … In the socialist Albania the child, as soon as he is delivered from the mother’s womb, is given the rifle and this they only do it because of the very same ‘humanitarian’ purpose that he, when he grows up, kills himself! Instead of welfare they are offered patriotic slogans …
For the ideal society, for which the First Secretary has been bending the Albanian people’s ears for 35 consecutive years. You have created a new religion of the gods of Tirana, created the new God in the person of Enver Hoxha, whom all fear and are terrorized, since he has become God of the family, of divorces and marriages, of the actions and tiresome military training campaigns, bread bite and – most shocking – he is the primary and permanent capitalist and employer of this Albanian land.
“Both war victors and the later beneficiaries became the flagbearers of a moral, whose principles are violated by shunning, betraying, killing and mutilating people,” Ismail Kadare writes, “true moral brings about unfaithfulness whenever taken to be used as a shield by the morally wrongs people.”
Today, Albania’s soil still hides somewhere in an unknown corner the remains of these last two martyrs. I do not absolutely want to touch this very deep human feeling for the family, but by offering my due apology, let me tell you that it could not be different if we were all to see through their entire history.
It seems as if the presence of absence is what they could not but leave it behind. Undoubtedly, wiping out their remains is a barbaric choice of their killers but at the end of the day, it seems that it is through the presence of the absence that Fadil Kokomani and Vangjel Lezho are more than any grave would have been today and therefore, it might be the right thing to do that in the absence of the grave we celebrate the presence of their absence in this green space, devoting it precisely to their absence and offering their commemoration a space that, I don’t know why but let me say it to the end, I believe they themselves would have loved much more than a grave. This is a space to show more respect and gratitude for the indelible treasury the left in the memory of this nation and by showing deep respect and honour for their family members, I would like that we all together lay wraths at this modest plaque in a tribute to the journalists, who loved so much this country and loved so much their profession that they believed in culture and free speech to finally remain just an echo for all of those with ears wishing to listen to the extraordinary story of the two last martyrs.
Many thanks and eternal remembrance of these two distinct creatures in our history! Thank you very much and eternal memory of these two completely special beings of our history!
