The past, the East learns, is always present

Blame Game.
But people who was injured will ever remember the punisher.
Ever.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/02/08/news/east.php

The past, the East learns, is always present
By Judy Dempsey International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2006

BERLIN After Poland's new conservative government took office late last year, one of its first decisions was to recall 10 ambassadors because of their communist past.

Then last week, a Hungarian weekly magazine published charges that the film director Istvan Szabo was an informer during the late 1950s, a particularly depressing era after Soviet-led tanks crushed the 1956 Hungarian Uprising.

It also disclosed that the retired Catholic primate, Cardinal Laszlo Paskai, imprisoned by the communist regime from 1949 to 1956, had cooperated with the secret police by compiling reports on Catholic church activists in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The Polish and Hungarian cases show how the ghost of the communist past continues to haunt the countries of Eastern Europe 16 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Marianne Birthler, Germany's federal commissioner in charge of the files of the former East German Stasi secret police, said Wednesday that no one should be surprised over how the past keeps coming back or why countries find it so difficult to deal with it.

"Sixteen years may seem a long time, but it is a very short time after a dictatorship," Birthler said on German television.

"The past is always there. Sometimes it recedes from awareness. Sometimes it rushes to the front."

Szabo confirmed that he was an informer during his student days and had cooperated with the secret police "in order to save the life of a classmate." Paskai did not deny the allegations about him, but said he was not prepared to comment until he had seen all the details.

The former East Germany and the Czech Republic opened secret police files immediately after 1990, but Hungary started doing so only three years ago.

Istvan Eotvos, a historian, said Hungary has been slow in dealing with its past. "Maybe too many people who are still in public life were implicated," he said.

Other countries - including Poland, Slovakia and Romania - waited until the late 1990s or even last year to set up special institutes to deal with Nazi and communist informers and others who persecuted individuals. The Romanian government announced in December that it would set up an Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes between 1945 and 1989.

"It is hard to bring the truth to the fore in Romania," said Anneli Ute Gabanyi, an expert on Romania at Germany's Institute for Security Policy. "Much is covered by mud and disinformation."

Jan Langos, chairman of the Nation's Memory Institute of the Slovak Republic, which was established in 2002, said, "Without punishing the perpetrators of crimes which the communist regime committed against the civil society, justice and belief of the people in justice will never be restored in our country."

But it is in Poland, where there was consistent opposition to communist rule, that the fiercest struggle has been taking place between those who want the secret police files opened and those who want a line drawn under the past.

Despite its record of opposition to the communists before 1989, it was only in 1998 that Poland set up the Institute for National Remembrance, a commission "for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation." It took over the archives of the communist secret services in 2002.

Janusz Kurtyka, the president of the institute, said in an interview that there was still reluctance to confront the past.

"As in any other post-communist society, the communist past for Poland is a problem of mentality," he said. "There is resistance from groups or individuals who were involved in the system or who supported it and who now feel endangered."

Kurtyka said the communist Democratic Left Alliance founded by former President Aleksandar Kwasniewski, which was defeated last September by the conservative Party for Law and Justice, "was not interested in disclosing details of the past" even though he feels that "most of society was in favor of disclosing the names of collaborators."

What surprises Kurtyka, a former dissident, is that prominent activists in the democratic opposition during the 1970s and 1980s also want a line under the past.

This movement is led by Adam Michnik and the staff at the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.

In a recent interview, Michnik said he wanted reconciliation "because it is impossible to take a step forward when you are looking back."

"We campaigned for compromise and national reconciliation with neither reprisals nor winners and losers," he said.

Bronislaw Wildstein, a former dissident, said he became so frustrated with attempts by Michnik to curb access to the files that he personally went into the Institute of National Remembrance a year ago, copied the files of informers and victims of the communist secret police and distributed them among his journalist friends.

More than 240,000 names, without stating whether they had been informers or victims of persecution, were then posted on the Internet.

"I wanted to provoke a debate over the files," Wildstein said in an interview. "There is a kind of political correctness about dealing with the past. It is so contradictory. Opponents who want the files closed say the files of World War II should be opened but not those of the 1980s or before. Maybe they are afraid it would feed the right wing."

Kurtyka called Wildstein's decision to give the files to his colleagues "the turning point" in the debate over whether to disclose the collaborators with the communist secret police, "especially if they now hold very important positions, such as politicians, journalists, members of academia and lawyers, which are professions based on public trust."

Since their election last September, Poland's conservative government and president, led by the Kaczynski twins, Lech and Jaroslaw, have promised a full reckoning with the past.

Regardless of what measures the government takes, Jan Kavan, a former Czech dissident who was wrongly accused of collaborating with the secret police when the files were opened in 1990, said it would take "two or three generations for the democratic system to work."

"We are talking about changing a people's mindset," he said.

"I understand why some people want to draw the line under the past and look ahead. But some people are guilty of persecuting others. Let justice be seen to be done."