35 years ago on December 9, 1990, in the morning, I was going to the Faculty where I studied when I saw a protest for the first time.
There were about 200 students who had come down from the dormitories in Tirana and blocked the road to Elbasan.
We stood at the Lyceum intersection for several hours without moving, until someone fired a gun into the air and we scattered, running without knowing where we were going.
It had rained non-stop those days, and many of those who ran to escape the police got their shoes stuck in the mud between the Italian and American embassies.
This is the most painful metaphor of Albania at that time.
Communist Albania was a mudflat in the middle of the West.
The mud was the symbol of immersion, while the shoes were the symbol of freedom to escape immersion.
Luckily, I managed to save my crooked shoes, which led me to an unknown house where I remained until the police left and the road opened.
The next day I went to Student City like hundreds of students who, in 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 their families wouldn't let them go because of fear.
I didn't have much reason to be there either.
My family was communist.
My maternal grandfather had come from France to fight against fascism in 1942.
His brother was killed in a demonstration and today is in the Elbasan martyrs' cemetery.
My grandmother had joined the partisans at the age of 18.
They came from middle-class families.
They became communists, believing that this order would protect Albania from foreign invasions and misery.
My paternal grandfather was a driver with six children.
He drove an Italian car that communism replaced with a rickety truck with which he distributed sweet fruits to Korçë while he had power.
He never became a communist and never said that the old car was better than the new car.
He loved us too much to put our lives at risk for a car gear.
My father came to Tirana as a student as the first son among six children.
He became a communist as a man to whom that system had given something he didn't have.
Communism gave him a house in Tirana where he wrote books and made wonderful films.
We were not a privileged family, just as we were not a persecuted family.
Communism had not taken any of our property because we had none, and no one had put us in prison.
Like all systems that govern through subjugation, communism divided people into two categories.
In those who eat well and those who eat badly.
My family was among the latter.
When I was ten years old, I would get up at 4 a.m. to buy half a pack of butter that I loved so much and a bottle of milk that I didn't drink.
In the afternoon, I stood in line to buy the fish-smelling kerosene that lit the stoves where clothes were dried, along with the moisture from the shoes that were caught with nails.
I would go to the beach by train and for three months I lived with my grandparents in Korça with seven people in one room and one kitchen.
The greatest privilege I had was being able to read banned books that were in abundance in my house.
I had all my teenage vices in abundance, and the pleasure I derived from not punishing them seemed to me like the highest degree of dissidence.
I didn't live well, but I didn't live badly.
For all these reasons, I didn't have much reason to go to Student City on December 9, 1990.
The biggest surprise is that no one from my family told me why I was going to a country where the system they had believed in was being overthrown.
If a political party were created today, after the riots on the streets of Elbasan, as happened in December 1990, I don't know how calm I would be about leaving my children there.
My father never did.
Not only when I went to Student City to overthrow the party he was a member of, but also when I went to work at the first opposition newspaper in Albania.
From the eyes of the people I met those days, I realized that I had three unacceptable flaws.
I was born in Tirana and came from a communist family from the south.
For many of the students and journalists of that time, I was the perfect enemy.
I was the type of person who needed to be defeated.
A few months later, I graduated from university and the last communist government appointed me as a teacher in the harshest village in Albania, in Iballe, Puka.
Iballa is blocked by snow for six months.
Migjeni went there to be treated for tuberculosis, but of course I never went because communism fell.
If that barbaric system had continued, I would probably have returned from there drunk or in prison.
In this way, I benefited from the fall of Communism.
I did not become a teacher but a free man.
Since then, I have been convinced that communism died in December 1990.
There may be communists, but communism is dead.
That's why I'm surprised today how many people curse those they don't like as communists.
Telling someone you're a communist is like telling someone rich they're a kulak.
Albania's problem today is neither the communists nor the democrats.
Albania's problem is idiots.
And idiots can be both communists and democrats because they are idiots.
