Wednesday, June 13, 2001

Ruml case revives 'lustration' disputes Influence of former communists ruffles political feathers By James Pitkin In his dissident days, Jan Ruml knew all about the tactics of the StB, the communist secret police. They denied him a university education, forced him to work a menial job and even jailed him. Now, more than a decade after its official demise, the StB is again disturbing Ruml's life. On June 1, Interior Minister Stanislav Gross charged that more than 100 former StB agents were allowed to continue holding government jobs in the early post-communist 1990s after receiving fake clearances. Ruml, a senator for the center-right Freedom Union (US), was deputy interior minister at the time of the approvals. The suggestion that Ruml stood by while Cold War leftovers frolicked is part of an ongoing debate over the continuing influence of communist officials in government and the effectiveness of a law specifically designed to keep them out. The law, known as lustrace, or lustration, forbids StB agents and their informers, as well as senior Communist Party officials, members of paramilitary units and intelligence agents, from holding high government posts. Gross said that as a result of the most recent StB discovery, about 150,000 of the roughly 400,000 lustration clearances would be reviewed. Ruml, who says the approvals were not in his jurisdiction, calls the allegations that he was an accomplice to the employment of former StB agents "crazy." Lustration has been the subject of bitter and repeated debate since its 1991 adoption. The law's proponents say it exists to prevent members of the old regime from regaining influence. Yet critics insist the legislation is ineffective at best -- and at worst fosters a modern-day witch hunt. "There are many people who were in the Communist Party because they wanted to live up to some true ideals," says Radim Turek, a Social Democratic (CSSD) deputy. "I would not judge them all equally." Interestingly, one of lustration's harshest critics is President Vaclav Havel, a former dissident and a committed anti-communist. Havel, who has twice attempted to veto extensions to the law, sees a fundamental flaw in the law's reliance on the StB's own records -- which many claim are unreliable -- to identify informers. Havel said that while the law might uncover "really evil informants," it also risked sullying the reputations of people "who did not cause totalitarian conditions" but were forced "through blackmail and threats to sign some paper." Marian Calfa, a ranking pre-1989 Communist Party member who served in the governmental presidium office, was prime minister immediately after the Velvet Revolution and has occasionally served as an adviser to Havel. Influence still strong For those imprisoned under communism -- like Cestmir Cejka, a member of the Federation of Political Prisoners -- lustration doesn't go far enough. Cejka, jailed for 12 years, recalls the inhuman conditions in the uranium mines where he was forced to work -- 16-hour days, poor hygiene, food shortages. At one point, he says, his weight dropped to 44 kilograms (97 pounds). The StB-files Vlastimil Tlusty Then: Active Communist Party member. Now: President of ODS parliamentary club and ODS shadow minister of finance. Jan Krivanek Then: Active Communist Party member. Studied "methodology of political agitation," earned Badge for Socialist Education. Now: A state's attorney in Prague, he was active in the "Clean Hands" anti-corruption team organized by the Social Democrats (CSSD). Jiri Komorous Then: Top secret police informer, code name "Prazan." Trained as an elite agent to be sent to France. Now: Chief of the National Anti-Drug Squad. Pavel Minarik Then: Top Interior Ministry agent and secret police collaborator, code name "Ulyxes." In 1969, infiltrated Radio Free Europe (RFE) in Munich. In 1993, was tried for attempting a bomb attack on RFE. High Court stopped the trial. Now: Active in Invest commercial consulting firm and EVCK-CZ and IGSL-CZ trade companies. Vaclav Junek Then: Joined Communist Party at age 22, rose to the Central Committee. StB collaborator from 1980 to 1991. Now: Post-1989 general director of the now-bankrupt industrial giant Chemapol group, currently active in companies including Forest Group, Aliachem, Spolana and Lesni spolecnost Trhanov. "The lustration law is insufficient," he says. "It only restricts access [to government posts] in a limited set of instances and doesn't hold anyone really responsible for what they did." Some senior government officials acknowledge that the influence of former communist officials is endemic. "They have been present in every government since 1989," says government spokesman Libor Roucek. "They're in every party in this country. It's the price every post-communist nation has to pay." While lustration screens would-be elected officials, it does not affect party advisers -- or even chiefs of staff, as with CSSD's Miroslav Slouf, a former member of the Communist Party's national board. Others, including Foreign Minister Jan Kavan -- who according to StB files denounced his university colleagues during the "normalization" purges -- claimed they weren't aware the people with whom they had contact were actually StB agents. Kavan was fully cleared. A CSSD spokesmen refused to discuss the role of former Communists in government. Ruml himself had recently made pointed remarks about the presence of such officials, naming several high-ranking CSSD advisers. The comments came just before Gross' announcement of the fake screenings, prompting some to question the motives behind the revelation. "In Czech politics, you never know," says Jiri Pehe, a political analyst and former adviser to Havel. "It could be a game or perhaps something that really was just recently discovered." Ruml himself had no doubts, calling the information a "political attack." At the time, said Ruml, he was in charge only of state police, while then-Defense Minister Lubos Dobrovsky provided all information for the clearances, which were processed by Jan Langos, who was interior minister. But Ruml took responsibility slyly -- "just as I was responsible for every stolen car and every dirty look from the occasional corrupt policeman." Civic Democrat (ODS) leader Vaclav Klaus, a strong lustration supporter, rejects the idea that the recent revelations signal fundamental flaws in the process. "I think this could have been a failure of an individual," he says. "Now it is necessary to find out whether this happened by mistake or on purpose. This has nothing to do with the law itself." For Pehe, however, problems with lustration run deeper. "Post-communist society cannot simply deal with its past by selecting a group of people and branding them," he says, "making them culprits while everyone else washes their hands. It's wrong, and everyone knows deep in their souls that [communism] worked in a different way." James Pitkin's e-mail address is jpitkin@praguepost.cz