Wednesday, June 27, 2001

For General Pika, justice comes far too late Cold War-era prosecutor Vas gets prison time for fabricating evidence By James Pitkin The day General Heliodor Pika was hanged by the communist regime on charges of treason, Milan Pika visited his father's prison cell. "My final wish is for the nation to stay united," Pika recalls his father saying. "For everyone to work without exception for ... unity." Pika, who had served Czechoslo-vakia in both world wars, was executed June 21, 1949, after a court -- convened during a period of Cold War witch hunts -- found him guilty of espionage against both Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. Now, the man who prosecuted Pika, 85-year-old Karel Vas, has been sentenced to a seven-year jail term for fabricating the evidence that led to the hanging. The Vas case represents a unique legal victory -- it is the first conviction of a communist judicial official. But if the restoring of Pika's reputation renewed calls to bring other communist-era criminals to trial, it also highlighted wavering resolve among legal officials to do so. Following the Vas trial, Pika finally received full military honors in a ceremony outside Army headquarters in Prague 6 on June 21. As a brass band played a solemn march and soldiers laid wreaths from President Vaclav Havel and others below a plaque, Army General Frantisek Brett urged renewed efforts to convict those guilty of crimes under the communist regime. "We cannot punish the entire [communist] system. All we can do is point to a few individuals," he says. "In cases where those offenders are still alive, they must be prosecuted." Such convictions are rare. To date, only a handful of former Czechoslovak communist officials have been sentenced for Cold War-era crimes. Impossible mission? Cestmir Cejka, a political prisoner for 12 years under communism, laments that young Czechs care little about avenging ideological crimes. "We are too far away from that time," says Cejka, who spent seven years of his imprisonment as a forced laborer in the Jachymov uranium mines. "It's too difficult to make a 20- or 30-year-old care about these problems." Jiri Pehe, a political analyst who fled the communist regime in 1981, says that a decade of capitalism has divided the country between the indignant and the indifferent. THE PIKA FILE General Heliodor Pika Born July 3, 1897. Began his military career in 1915 as a domestic guard in Opava, north Moravia. Joined Czechoslovak legions against the Austro-Hungarian empire in World War I the next year. Studied at a French military academy after the war, where he graduated in 1920 to join the Czechoslovak Defense Ministry. Appointed military attache to Romania and Turkey, returning to the Defense Ministry in 1938. Fought with clandestine units against Hitler's 1938 occupation of Czechoslovakia. Sent to the Balkans by Czechoslovak president-in-exile Edvard Benes in 1939 to help Czech and Hungarian refugees. Promoted to chief of the Czechoslovak army's mission to the Soviet Union in 1941, where he ran afoul of communist authorities by pushing the policies of the democratic Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Served as deputy chief of staff in the Czechoslovak Army after the war, until communist hard-liners accused him of treason following the 1948 putsch. Hanged on June 21, 1949. "There is a group of people, and not a very small one, who simply do not care," he says. "But there are vocal groups, such as the former political prisoners, who are very interested and deserve to feel some sense of justice." Pika's trial, just a year after the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, was one of the first in a rash of hundreds of political show trials that marked the Stalinist purges of the 1950s. Though Vas's conviction was hailed as a landmark, officials at the Office for the Investigation of Communist Crimes (UDV) say the case is unlikely to signal a new wave of legal action. "In some ways this was a breakthrough," says Pavel Bret, deputy director of UDV. "But all of these cases [involving crimes under communism] are extremely difficult to prove." Investigators and prosecutors alike are hamstrung by time. Many of the culprits, as well as the witnesses to their crimes, are dead. Most of the documents that could prove their guilt were destroyed as the country changed hands in 1989. And suspects can only be tried under the laws that were in place at the time -- many of which gave vague and wide-ranging powers to high officials. The difficulty in proving such cases, Pehe says, leads prosecutors and judges alike to overlook them. "They often simply do not want to be bothered," he says. "There are many cases that were simply dropped because they didn't feel they had enough evidence. They don't seem to be keenly interested in completing them." Martin Omelka, press spokesman for the Prague Municipal Court, where Vas was convicted, denies that the low conviction rate is a result of judiciary shortcomings. Bret, meanwhile, acknowledges that the UDV office faces a gargantuan task. "To a great extent, our job is Sisyphus' labor," he says with a grim chuckle. The metaphor rings true for Pehe as well. "We are a society that has tried to rebuild the rule of law," he says. "It's important to deal with these cases, even if the perpetrator doesn't go to prison in the end, for symbolic reasons. Otherwise, we may as well be back where we started." --Yekaterina Zapletnyuka and Martina Sedlakova contributed to this story. James Pitkin's e-mail address is jpitkin@praguepost.cz