A new book tells the rarely-heard stories of Kosovo Albanians who were detained in grim conditions on the Croatian island of Goli Otok (Barren Island), a prison camp for political dissidents in the former Yugoslavia.
“When I arrived there, it was a very cold day and I was taken immediately to solitary confinement in a dark and frozen cell,” said Fadil Bajraktari, recalling the day in 1984 when he was sent to a detention camp on an isolated island off the coast of Croatia.
Goli Otok (Barren Island) is, as its name suggests, a desolate, uninhabited island in the Adriatic Sea that was used to detain political prisoners between 1949 and 1988, when Croatia was part of Yugoslavia.
“After one month in isolation, I was forced to work as a carpenter. The working conditions were very hard. There was a deep snow, ice and freezing temperatures,” said Bajraktari.
“Most of us had no blankets. Some had a blanket of [size] one metre by one metre. The windows had no glass and my cell filled up with snow. The food was disgusting.”
Bajraktari has since died, and his words come from a new book called ‘Distorted Shadows’, which is published in English and Albanian and is being launched in Pristina on Wednesday.
The book, published by a Pristina-based NGO called Integra, whose work focuses on peace, reconciliation and human rights contain interviews with Bajraktari and 11 other former political prisoners who spent years in the notorious Goli Otok detention camp.
Bajraktari was not a member of any organised ethnic Albanian group resisting the Yugoslav Communist regime in Kosovo. He was arrested after he took part in a demonstration in Pristina in April 1981, when Kosovo Albanian students took to the streets to demand more autonomy within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
After being tortured in various prisons in Kosovo, Bjaraktari was sent to Goli Otok in February 1984, and put straight into solitary confinement. He was eventually released in April 1987.
‘Can I endure this torture or not?’
The dominant narrative about Goli Otok is that it was a detention centre for political dissidents who expressed pro-Stalin ideas at a time when Yugoslavia was severing ties with the Soviet Union.
From 1949-56, it was used as a hard labour camp for real and alleged Stalinists and from 1956-89 it was a less harsh prison for young offenders, regular criminals and some political prisoners.
However, the dominant narrative does not seem to do justice to the story of the ethnic Albanians who were held on Goli Otok. Although they were imprisoned because of their political beliefs, they were not supporters of Stalin or the Soviet Union, but opposed the unjust treatment to which Albanians were subjected under Yugoslav rule.
Kushtrim Koliqi, the head of Integra, said that the book aims to highlight some of the terrible experiences of those who spent years imprisoned on the island, and that it “confirms that Albanian political prisoners were mistreated the most”.
“Apart from the suffering and disturbing stories of people who experienced Goli Otok, it is also a document of the past. First and foremost, it is a call for public institutions to not let people die without testifying,” Koliqi told BIRN.
The book also exposes the brutal methods used by the Yugoslav regime after it broke with the Soviet Union and Yugoslav officials feared that their state was under threat from Stalinist ‘enemies within’. Inmates on Goli Otok were made to do hard labour, breaking rocks or making tiles.
Pajazit Jashari, another political prisoner, recalls the moment when he started to doubt if he could survive such harsh treatment.
“Can I endure this torture or not?” he asked himself. “I decided then to commit suicide, saying to myself, ‘As soon as I go to the office [of the investigator], I’ll commit suicide immediately,’” Jashari says in the book.
Another ex-prisoner, Masar Shporta, reveals in the book that some of the other inmates were also complicit in the abuses at Goli Otok.
Shporta recalls that the worst incident for him was arriving in Goli Otok, when other prisoners lined up to abuse the newcomers. “It was terrible,” he says in the book. “They spat on us and peed on us…”
Koliqi explained that the stories in the book reflect the desperate situation endured by Kosovo Albanians under Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito’s rule, particularly because of the hardline policies of much-feared Interior Minister Alexander Rankovic, who was in office in the period from after World War II until 1966, and regarded Albanians as a security threat.
During the repression unleashed by Rankovic, many were killed, expelled or imprisoned. “The first 20 years at Goli Otok were the most brutal,” Koliqi said.
He argued that the book shows that there were widespread human rights abuses by the Yugoslav Communist regime after 1945 – a phenomenon that Integra intends to explore further in future.
“We decided to deal with the ‘past before the past’, as we call the period of time before the 1990s. We needed a place that was a symbol of these grave abuses and Goli Otok was a starting point,” he said.
“We aim to expose the massive abuses against political prisoners. This book is only a prologue.”