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 3 of 3
Small fry caught in the fray
In 1999, a stridently anti-Russian Lithuanian government branded the entire KGB "a criminal organization," thus making any former operative guilty. (Files detailing operatives' level of involvement are in Russia's possession.)
Caught up in the fight were small fry like Dziautas, who, after his short stint as a KGB staffer, spent eight years working in the prosecutor general's office of the newly independent Lithuania. Fellow plaintiff Jonas Sidabras, a former KGB major, is now barred from working with children. "Ten years in jail would have been better than to live like this," he says.
But "the bigger fish were never caught," says Henrikas Mickevicius, executive director of the Human Rights Monitoring Institute in Vilnius, Lithuania's capital. "So it left a bad taste that it was definitely for revenge and not good for the moral health of society."
In 2005, the European Court awarded each of the four plaintiffs €7,000 in damages. This February, a Lithuanian court rejected Dziautas's plea for an additional €29,000 in compensation. Still, under European pressure, some Lithuanian lawmakers say it's inevitable that they'll amend the "KGB Law" before its 2009 expiration.
Julius Sabatauskas, chairman of the parliament's committee on legal affairs and whose own parents were deported to Siberia, says he'll try to end the legislative acts of vengeance. "It seems we're just creating new problems for ourselves instead of moving forward," he says.
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