Three decades after the fall of communism, the notorious Albanian secret police’s files on “enemies of the state” are slowly revealing their secrets.

But some of the victims of the paranoid dictator Enver Hoxha, whose feared Sigurimi had more than 10,000 informants and even more collaborators, can’t bear to look.

Since 2017, the small Balkan country has allowed people to inspect files.

But some fear that friends or neighbors have betrayed them.

“I don’t want to see my file,” Cerziz Loloci, a 62-year-old journalist, told AFP.

“I’m scared to find out I’ve been cheated on by a close friend and it would break my heart.”

But thousands of Albanians and dozens of foreigners have dared to face the dark past when Albania was one of the most repressive countries in the world.

The file on Luc Bouniol-Laffont, who was cultural attaché at the French embassy in Tirana from 1988 to 1990, has 774 pages.

“It’s fascinating and also terrifying to see how they turned the then 25-year-old young man that I was – just curious and open to others – into a dangerous spy who threatens the security of the regime,” he said.

The Sigurimi mobilized dozens of people to “create an entirely imaginary scenario worthy of a spy movie or a tragi-comic novel,” said Bouniol-Laffont, now an executive at the Louvre in Paris.

The Sigurimi archive, containing more than 20 million documents, is kept in a basement on a secure compound of the Albanian Defense Ministry.

Records are stored in four rooms filled to the brim with documents, photographs and microfilm, carefully stored in iron coffin-like cases, waiting to be opened.

The archive’s director, Gentiana Sula, said its content testified to the brutality of the regime.

“If you compare the files with those of some other ex-communist countries, political violence in Albania was extreme,” she said.

In a country of fewer than three million people, more than 100,000 were interned in camps, 20,000 imprisoned and 6,000 killed or disappeared between 1944 and 1991.

The Sigurimi spied on “internal enemies”, foreigners working in Albania and even tourists. Some of their informants were volunteers, others were forced to work for them.

During Hoxha’s four-decade rule, Albania at odds with the entire world, including other communist nations such as the Soviet Union, China and neighboring Yugoslavia.

All foreigners, including Albanians from Kosovo, then part of Yugoslavia, were seen as a potential threat. Even Ibrahim Rugova, the leader of the struggle for Kosovo’s independence, had a file.

Countries were classified by nicknames – the “shark” referred to the United States, the “viper” to the former Yugoslavia, and the “branch” to Kosovo.

Canadian journalist Nadi Mobarak found that his late father Melhem – a Lebanese-born researcher with a passion for Albanian history – had also been under surveillance.

“I believe that his coming to Albania has nothing to do with tourism,” said a police officer. “Rather, he is trying to find out more about our country for foreign interests. He could have been commissioned by the Americans or the Yugoslavs.”

“My father would have enjoyed going through the pages of this file,” Mobarak said.

But the issue remains highly sensitive in Albania, where even unfounded allegations of collaboration with the Sigurimi carry a heavy stigma.

Sula said many informants were forced to cooperate under torture, psychological pressure or threats against their loved ones.

Long gone, the Sigurimi continue to poison public life, with rumors of ties to the hated secret police often used to blacken political rivals.

The agency that oversees the archives is calling for a law change that would allow it to screen candidates for public office — even if they’ve previously passed background checks because records have historically been incomplete.

Albania’s best-known writer, Ismail Kadare, was the first to request public access to his Sigurimi surveillance file. He said it was important to face history.

“Continuing to remain silent about the past means continuing to obey the morals of the dictatorship, continuing to lose moral orientation,” Kadare told the AFP news agency.