Ex-communist purge bumps up against EU values
A Lithuanian law serves as a litmus test for what punishments Europe will tolerate against former collaborators.
from the May 1, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Concern about EU values
With the independence of former communist states came payback, but also a need to adhere to European norms and act according to accepted laws, even when dealing with the past. Lithuania's response to the Strasbourg verdicts – to which it's bound as an EU member – serves as a litmus test for what punishments Europe will tolerate against former collaborators.
Fellow Baltic countries Latvia and Estonia require public-sector workers to declare an "oath of conscience" about whether they collaborated with the KGB, or risk exposure.
The brightest spotlight, however, is on Poland, the largest of all new EU members. Convulsed in January by revelations that the Archbishop of Warsaw had long been an informant, Poland passed a law requiring some 700,000 Poles – including many in the private sector – to come clean about past ties to the secret police. If the new law unleashes a purge, some may challenge its legality.
"There is a certain scare that Poland just may act in a way that would be injurious to EU values," says Hugo Brady, a research fellow at the Center for European Reform in London.
The East "can act like real Westerners, but they still have this brutal Soviet mentality, where nobody trusts anybody and everybody was guilty," says Nikolai Meinert, managing editor of New Horizons, a magazine about the Baltics based in Helsinki, Finland.
Dziautas and other ex-KGB agents garner little sympathy at home, accused by some of having gamed the system by exploiting the levers of democracy and taking the state to court.
"Even if they were only a cog in the machinery, this is about moral responsibility for their actions," says Arvydas Anasauskas, director of the state Genocide and Resistance Research Department. He asserts that anyone who was accepted to the prestigious KGB college had to prove loyalty, such as informing on friends or colleagues.
Moreover, the issue is typically used as a weapon – in Lithuania as elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe – by a nationalist right-wing pandering to its base by pummeling the left-wing, the historic heir to the Communist Party.
"I think this issue will come up again and again, as long as former communists of any seniority are still around," says Anatol Lieven, senior research fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington and author of "The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence."
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