Special Services And Informants: Who Will Face Lustration In New Belarus?

In Germany, 90,000 former Stasi agents and 400,000 of their informants were lustrated.

Dictatorships can last for decades, and collapse in a few days — as recently as the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. But dictators don't rule alone. What to do with the thousands of functionaries who help authoritarian rulers persecute their citizens and wage wars against strangers? Lustration is the answer of many countries that have moved from dictatorship to democracy. Why do we need lustration and how to carry it out correctly? What happens if it is not carried out at all? Aliaksandr Papko, a journalist of the "Vat Tak" show, talked about this with Pavel Havlicek, a Czech political scientist, an employee of the Research Center of the Association for International Affairs.

— How would you define lustration? Who should be tested for possible participation in the crimes of an authoritarian regime?

— I consider lustration as an emergency legal tool that is used in special situations. This is a verification procedure for representatives of the previous administration and the previous undemocratic regime. In the countries of our region, it was about representatives of the communist regime. Lustration was used to, figuratively speaking, find out who was on which side of the barricades.

In our Czech case, we used this extraordinary legal tool to identify intelligence officers and informants. In communist Czechoslovakia, they were the most cruel and immoral, often acted against the citizens of their country, discriminated against them and cruelly, sometimes using torture, persecuted representatives of dissidents.

— The Council of Europe writes in one of its documents that lustration is necessary to remove from work those civil servants who, holding their posts, have not demonstrated commitment to democratic values. This means that if they stay in their seats, they will not demonstrate this commitment in the future. Thus, they pose a threat to democracy. Why do you think lustration is necessary?

— Thank you for mentioning this aspect from the conclusions of the Council of Europe. He explains in many ways how we should understand this tool. Of course, lustration does not mean that everyone needs to be suddenly put in jail. In our case, for example, it was a tool that is used from a moral and democratic point of view. We used it to draw attention to the actions of many people, sometimes thousands, who did not have the right to hold public office because they behaved contrary to democratic values and violated human rights.

It is very important to identify such people, but not to put them in prison and not to subject them to criminal prosecution. It is necessary to use other tools to deprive them of the opportunity to influence the life of society. It must be remembered that these people served in immoral institutions. In our case, such an institution was the State Security Service (SSS). Specialized units of this service were responsible for the brutal persecution of the opposition in communist Czechoslovakia.

The first law on lustration was adopted in 1991 in then Czechoslovakia — even before the collapse of the country in 1993. Later, already in the Czech Republic, another law was adopted. It was harsher and introduced criminal penalties for the actions of the communist regime.

Lustration should not be a tool in political battles. It is worth avoiding the politicization of this tool, as happened in post-communist Poland, where at some stage the situation became very tense.

Another important point is the period during which lustration is applied. For example, in the Baltic countries, lustration was applied only for a limited time. It operated for, say, five years, and after that people could return to public positions, including high political positions. In the Czech Republic, those who have not passed lustration lose access to public positions forever. Cooperation with the communist special services is not something that you can simply erase from your resume.

So, I mentioned two key points in lustration laws: the duration and the need to avoid politicizing the process. And if you ask me about other key questions that arise when democratic forces win, I will answer: “How far can we go?” Who should be included in the list of those to be checked should be decided during a broad political discussion. In the Czech Republic, we narrowed this circle to employees of the state security apparatus and their informants.

The people who reported on others, destroyed lives. They didn't necessarily have blood on their hands, but they played an extremely immoral role in society.

In our case, they were forbidden to run for parliament and become members of the government. They may not become high-level officials, but they still have the opportunity to work in the private sector and do business.

Many of the former state security officers began working in security agencies or founded their own enterprises. They guarded companies, offices and often received government contracts. So there were both positive and negative points in our practice.

— Did lustration help to strengthen and protect democracy in the Czech Republic?

— I can say with confidence that it helped. It helped to rid the state apparatus of the immoral part of society, in particular, of employees of the special services and their informants.

— Let's get back to the lustration process. Thousands of people — from servicemen, police officers to members of special services, election commissions and even teachers — had to go through this process. Based on your experience — the experience of the Czech Republic and other Central European countries, has this paralyzed the state apparatus?

— No, it was not paralyzed. And the reason why this did not paralyze the system is that lustration affected a relatively small part of officials. We did not carry out mass purges, we did not deprive people of their positions en masse. If you look, for example, at the lower levels of ministries or courts, the transformation was not so noticeable there.

In our case, the restoration of the state apparatus was helped by the presence of a fairly strong democratic tradition, and people who opposed the communist regime both within the country and in exile. These people returned after 1989 and began to carry out many reforms. The democratic transformation took place from the top down — from high positions to lower ones. This, for example, was one of the most successful reforms in the judicial system.

The Ministry of Justice was headed by a strong man with high competencies in the legal field. All the highest officials of the judicial system at the central and regional levels have been replaced. And then a relatively small number of democratically minded officials gradually reformed the system from top to bottom.

— In Eastern Germany, after unification, every civil servant, from a minister to a school teacher, had to apply for admission to the civil service of the Federal Republic of Germany. When applying, people had to fill out a declaration that they had not participated in the repression. As a result, 90,000 former Stasi agents and 400,000 of their informants were automatically deprived of the right to hold public office positions. But the most successful lustration was carried out in the Czech Republic. It was fast and massive. What has this looked like?

— Our lustration was very similar to the model of the former GDR. People filed declarations. And still, if people are going to occupy high public positions, they must submit such declarations. They are checked by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. To carry out the check, you need to have access to the archives of the communist times. Therefore, a special institution was created to store them. In Poland, a similar structure is called the Institute of National Remembrance. In our case, it is called ÚSTR — Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. It manages a large archive.

People can go to the database and check who was a communist collaborator and who was not.

Society asked questions about cooperation with the regime not only to people who had previously held public positions. They were asked, for example, by TV hosts. Society demanded an answer from public figures who did not belong to a narrow, legally defined category.

Talking about the Czech experience of lustration, I would like to mention some mistakes that are worth paying attention to. We focused very much on checking the civilian part of the state apparatus. We did not lustrate military intelligence and those who cooperated with it.

This was one of the compromises made during the transition from a communist past to a democratic future. This transition was largely the result of negotiations, because the Communists did not want to leave their posts so easily. They wanted something in return. This, like other compromises, was also part of the Velvet Revolution.

— The role of the Institutes of National Remembrance in the Czech Republic, Poland and, for example, Romania is to manage the archive, as well as to provide citizens with access to documents. Every citizen can apply to this institution and request a dossier collected on him by the repressive apparatus. Everyone can see all the denunciations made against him by colleagues and enemies. How did this opening of the secret service archives affect Czech society?

— Strongly, and thank you for reminding me of that. Our society had to go through a process of self-purification. This has led to many difficult conversations between colleagues, relatives, partners. Often, the special services forced people to report, some did it consciously, and some just wanted to get some benefit.

Now it is very important to look back, think about what happened, ask these people why they were on the wrong side of history, and also give them a chance to apologize. This is a very long process that is still ongoing.

— One of my last questions concerns the military. Communism in Czechoslovakia fell in 1989. Ten years later, the Czech Republic joined NATO with an army formed during communism. Did the Czech Republic manage to rid the army and police of the Soviet worldview?

— Security agencies, the army and the police are some of the most conservative parts of society. These are very rigid structures, they have hierarchical management. Therefore, changes in them are probably the longest.

I must say that the integration of the Czech army into the wider system of Euro-Atlantic institutions helped us a lot. For example, the NATO Partnership for Peace program was one of the projects in which Czech army soldiers got acquainted with former adversaries from the North Atlantic Alliance. The military had to completely change its thinking — not only at the level of doctrines and strategies, but also at the personal level.

— Does this mean that army and police officers should be forced to meet with their former enemies, with colleagues from the West?

— Sure. I think that's the recipe. If I'm not mistaken, as early as 1990, Czechoslovak troops were sent to the Persian Gulf to help our allies avoid Saddam Hussein's occupation of Kuwait. These were the first examples of this kind of cooperation and reintegration with the democratic world. This social contact with former adversaries, if not enemies, was important to many. But, of course, there were institutions that had to be completely eliminated. I am talking, for example, about the officers responsible for the so-called political education.

Our current head of state, President Petr Pavel, was a cadet of the Military Intelligence School. It's also part of his story. An intriguing detail is that in the last presidential election in January 2023, two former members of the Communist Party opposed each other. I mean Petr Paveland Andrej Babiš. The latter also publicly admitted that he cooperated with the SSS.

— This brings me to the last question: is the lustration process radical and punitive? Should ordinary bureaucrats in Belarus or Russia be afraid to undergo lustration? What conclusion would you draw?

— It is important to emphasize that lustration, along with other methods we talked about today, serves as a necessary tool for getting rid of the past. If you live in a country like today's Belarus, where a dictatorial regime rules, there is no other way to get rid of cruelty and immorality in society but lustration. Of course, it is necessary to initiate criminal proceedings against some persons. The International Criminal Court in The Hague is engaged in the criminal prosecution of dictators, for example, Vladimir Putin.

Thanks to lustration, a place for democratically minded people is created in the state apparatus. They allow society to break away from the authoritarian past and move towards a democratic future. Without this, the Czech Republic and other countries would not have been able to completely free themselves from the communist regime and the communist mentality. It is impossible to move forward without establishing clear boundaries of what is normal and what goes beyond the boundaries of normality; what is acceptable and what is immoral; what is legal and what is illegal in a democratic society.

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