Word: sigurimi
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Dates: during 1961-1961
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...addition to men in uniform, Tirana swarms with plainclothes Sigurimi, Albania's secret police, whose "interrogation'' methods range from the use of poisonous snakes to an ingenious electric cage that shocks the prisoner when he tries to straighten up or sit down. According to a United Nations survey, 80,000 of Albania's 1,700,000 citizens were thrown into concentration camps between 1945 and 1956, and 16,000 died there. Last spring, a dozen Albanian army and navy officers were tried, in an improvised courtroom in Tirana's Partisan Cinema, as pro-Soviet conspirators...
...occasional tourist, the Sigurimi appear more comic than lethal. Whole platoons of gumshoes peel off two by two to shadow individual visitors. Any attempt to talk to an Albanian results in his being shouldered out of earshot by an agent. One tourist on the beach at Durres succeeded in evading his shadow by swimming out beyond the breakers to accost an Albanian girl in a bikini. The girl, treading water, said: "I would like to have a long talk with you, but you must know that in this country it is impossible...
Visitors seldom detect any Albanian tendency to criticize the government or the country's backwardness-and the Sigurimi are not the only reason. Traditionally proud, suspicious of foreigners, filled with a clannish loyalty, Albanians reply to complaints about their country with fierce anger. "That's the way it is," the average Albanian will splutter. "You just have to understand...