Part I
 |
|
| KGB stripe |
|
Some experts claim that the troubles with lustration in Lithuania actually resulted from the fact that the process had started too late. As the research on lustration carried out by the Polish Center of Eastern Studies reveals, all the ex-communist countries tried to "purge the foundations of society" of ex-KGB agents or give them a chance to pay to come out and get cleared, for cooperation with the Soviet secret services was not always a voluntary activity. As the Center notes, the earlier the cleansing process started the better it went. The official reasons for starting the process differed from country to country. Some states were really harsh, claiming to fight the evil rooted by the Soviets, and take their revenge; the others just wanted to get rid of the past in order to continue into the democratic future. But these were mere pretexts, for the main engine of the process was fear of possible threats to security.
Poland was the first one to start the lustration in 1989. Poland screened some 20,000 jobs, but barred only people who lied about past collaboration, thus encouraging most to come clean. The Poles were lucky for they had most of the files left from the Communist regime times. But the local authorities were really harsh only on those secret services employees who participated in persecution of the opposition. They lost their jobs, together with those who wished not to go through the lustration. Most of them found another spot in the local police. Everything seemed to be quiet and forgotten until mid-January, 2005, when the local Rzeczpospolita's journalist, Bronislaw Wildstein, published in the Internet a list of people who may have collaborated with the Polish security service during the communist years. Nearly 240,000 surnames of people whose files are kept in Poland's Institute of National Remembrance, which is in charge of the archives of the country's security service, were published. The list includes staffers, informers, and people they planned to recruit. The publication alarmed the Polish special services, for along with the names of former agents the names of currently active spies were published. Wildstein was fired from his job at the newspaper for misconduct. Interestingly enough this action coincided in time with the disclosure mentioned in the previous article of the information about Lithuanian Prime Minister Antanas Valionis' connection to the Soviet KGB. The scandal was hushed, but recently, after the last parliamentary elections, the winner - Law and Justice Party decided to restart the lustration process. Poland's new Interior Minister, Ludwik Dorn, promised at the beginning of November to rid the police force of former communist-era security agents and said he would appoint new national and regional police chiefs. He said that according to studies about 10 percent of police officers in senior posts were active in the pre-1989 communist security apparatus, which often brutally persecuted pro-democracy activists. The conservative minority government led by Law and Justice's Prime Minister, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, is also seeking to reorganize the secret services, which have been implicated in several high-profile scandals unearthed under the rule of the center-left Democratic Left Alliance. Separately, Marcinkiewicz said he would seek cross-party support for the planned dissolving of the military intelligence. "All scandals in Poland over the last 16 years ... included the intelligence services and that is precisely why they must be fixed," Marcinkiewicz said. What he didn't add was that the military intelligence chiefs on different levels never passed through the lustration process! So, 16 years after the beginning of the process one of the major secret services of Poland is still infested with ex-KGB sidekicks. And it is really a good time to take care of that, for relations with Russia are far from being sound.
The Czech republic was also one of the first to go through the lustration.
| |
|
| |
.gif) |
| |
Warsaw pact countries |
Lustration is one of the things that set the Czech transition to democracy apart from that in other states. While most other countries have sought political justice through criminal proceedings in the courts, with very few convictions, the Czech Republic has taken a distinctly non-judicial approach. The lustration law was passed in October, 1991 and was aimed at excluding from public office former Party functionaries and officers, and collaborators with the Communist secret police (StB). It was presented as a kind of defense mechanism to prevent a repetition of the Communist coup of February 1948, and not to help the country come to terms with the past, or criminalize activities that were legal at the time.
However it was as faulty as the Polish or Lithuanian process. From 1991 to 1997, counting the lustrations required by the law on police service, a total of 303,504 screenings took place, of which 15,166 (5 per cent) resulted in positive certificates, Jan Frolik, the director of the Czech Interior Ministry's Section for the Protection of Official Secrets claimed. The overwhelming majority of applicants, therefore, were found not to be listed as informers or employees of the StB. But the most interesting part is that while the law was protecting the upper reaches of the civil service, the judiciary and procuracy, the security service (BIS), army positions requiring the rank of colonel and general, the management of state-owned enterprises, the central bank, the railways, high academic positions, and the public electronic media, ironically, candidates for the legislature did not have to be lustrated, and ministers in Communist-era governments were not on the blacklist! Only recently, since September, a series of small scandals shook the country. A member of the ruling Social Democratic Party's executive committee Marian Kus turned out to be a former elite communist spy who infiltrated church circles in Czechoslovakia and Poland before 1989. He forged his lustration certificate. Kus had to resign the party.
But he was obviously not the last StB agent. A bit later it became known that the Czech Interior Ministry circumvented the law to keep the data secret on former Communist secret police (StB) officers. Under the law on archives, all StB documents must be accessible to the public, however, the ministry says that the law does not apply to StB personnel documents as they are not archive material, the paper adds. The paper also states that though the public can learn everything about the StB victims, including very personal information, the data on their persecutors are still classified. Some historians and researchers point out that the ministry clerks interpret the law expediently. The deputy head of the Interior Ministry section for archives and files, Pavel Brunnhofer, said that the personnel files are not archive documents since they were not registered as such! Who could be behind such a trick if not the StB agents, trying to hide their past? Only under public pressure did the Ministry agree to open certain files.
Probably the quickest and easiest lustration process took place in Hungary. The lustration law was introduced in 1994 and since 2000 it has been prolonged. But the trouble with this law is its total weakness. The Hungarians created an independent lustration court, which, having access to the secret services files should have investigated the high-ranking officials. The main targets were those who had connections with the dreaded Directorate on Protection of the State from Reactionary Forces in the Communist Interior Ministry. The names of those who were working with it, but refused to quit their current posts after the investigation were supposed to be published in the official press-Hungarian Gazette. The problem was that it has so few readers that this threat was empty. Relying too much on moral pressure, the system had no real tools. "So what?" said Gyula Horn, who was elected Prime Minister of the Republic of Hungary in 1994 and later was discovered to be connected with the Directorate. And he was right. Only 500 jobs were banned for the ex-collaborators. And opinion polls even in distant 2002 showed that 75% of Hungarians thought the investigation of the Communist era secret service should end, and 49% of its citizens were not interested in finding out which politicians collaborated with the communist era secret service. So, the lustration process there was swift but senseless, for the citizens didn't even care when another Prime Minister, Peter Medgyessy, also was discovered to be a former communist secret agent in 2002.
But turning back to the Baltics, it must be noted that their citizens do care and do fear ex-KGB staff presence at the highest levels. It must be understood that there was a great difference between the Warsaw bloc states, where local secret services acted, and the Baltic Soviet republics, where the KGB itself reigned. Of course, East German, Polish, Hungarian and other secret services were under the KGB's wing, but the distinction was huge, for in these countries the Soviet secret services were mostly busy with foreign intelligence data gathering. In the Baltics the KGB also was collecting data but mostly dealt with local anti-communist opposition, pressuring its members and destroying its structures. That is why lustration processes in Estonia and Latvia were difficult. When the KGB quit these satellite republics it took with it what it could. In Estonia almost no files were left, so the process was purely voluntary. In 1995 a law was adopted according to which all the Communist ex-functionaries and secret services employees were obliged to report. But only 1153 of them did it, and from 1997 till 2004 only 250 names of those who tried to hide their connection to the oppressive regime, were published. No other options were tried besides this voluntary confession based system.
In Latvia it was even worse. The KGB left only 5,000 file cards, which are now kept in the Center for the Documentation of the Consequences of Totalitarianism. But the trouble is that the files contain only the names of the agents and informants, but not what they had done.
As the KGB files are patchy, anyone listed may have been a regular collaborator; or a scientist obliged to report on some overseas conference; or even a potential informer who was never used. But the most active agents may not be named at all, since the files of any apparatchik who reached a certain rank were normally destroyed. Despite the urgency of the people to get even with the oppressors they couldn't achieve it as publishing the files could cause an unwarranted witch-hunt, implicating some innocents and sparing some of the guilty. So it was decided to ban jobs and posts. The election laws from May, 1994 both for the Parliament - Saeima and the municipal elections barred persons from standing for elections who had been on the staff of the USSR or Latvian SSR security services or security services of other countries or intelligence or counterintelligence staff (article 5.5. and article 9.6., respectively). Articles 5.6 and 9.5 of the Saeima Election Law stated that anyone who was a member of the USSR or Latvian SSR Communist Party after January 13, 1991 (the day when the clashes with the Soviet Army started, before gaining Independence) was barred from standing for election. But the effect was scanty. Several glaring cases were initiated but quickly ended for there was not enough evidence.
In January, 2003 Parliament passed the European Parliament Election Law in its final reading. Parliament rejected restrictive proposals, so persons who remained KGB officers and Communist Party members after January 13, 1991 became eligible to participate in the European Parliament elections.
When, in 2004, the Parliament passed an amendment prolonging the jobs ban, the President vetoed it and pushed for a prolongation of the law on keeping the KGB files unpublished until 2014… The locals say that the EU officials were behind the veto and the law.
Maybe the Europeans were right and the Latvians are too paranoid? Why can't they be like the Hungarians, who don’t really care? The answer is simple. Besides the abovementioned difference between the local security services in Hungary and the KGB in the Baltics, there is a whole bunch of reasons to be worried. Hungary has no huge huge Russian speaking minority, like the Baltics have, which acts as the fifth colomn in the recent confrontation with Russia. It is enough to remind just the Latvian left-wing radical Russian-speaking movement "Equality"("Lîdztiesîbas") headed by Zdanok Tatjana, a member of the European Parliament, which is constantly slandering Latvia in the EU. Hungary has no common border with Russia and no threat of being devoured by Russia, which cherishes its revanchist moods. Hungary has no history of Soviet occupation like Baltic countries have. A history, which has already shaped a national factor of anxiety and a valid fear of becoming again, as happened half a century ago, a part of the Russian-Soviet Empire. The people who survived the Soviet repressions, or lost their relatives, are still alive in the Baltics. And they see a very disturbing deja-vu in the European attempts to quell their worries about ex-Soviet agents and Russian expansionist policy. If the Hungarians don't care about ex-KGB spies ruling them, it is okay for the Hungarians, but not for the Latvians and Estonians. Ex-KGB spies in high posts in the other countries of the EU may try to shape the Union's policy to meet Russia's needs against the Baltics. And that is what makes many Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians worry even more than the insipid lustration processes in their own states. For they still remember not only Soviet repressions and occupation, but also the previous betrayal by the European states prior to WW II.
Related items:
Purging Eastern Europe of Evil - Lustration from KGB Continues (Part I - 13.11.05)
Warsaw Consolidates the Countries of Eastern and Central Europe (21.09.05)
On the Threshold of a Right-Centrist Revolution (03.09.05)
Russia Threatens Latvia with Economic Sanctions (18.08.2005)
The Russian Air Force Threatens the Baltic Region (14.08.2005)
From Communist Leader to Opponent of Moscow (08.08.2005)
Russia Prepares for Economic Conquest of the Baltic Countries (07.08.2005 )
"Proletarians of All Lands, Unite!"- The Revised Version? (20.05.2005)
The Great Game for Poland (15.05.05)
Main Page | News Page | 007 News | Print
|
