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More former agents will be outed

Opening secret police archives will heal wounds, minister says

By Hilda Hoy
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 21st, 2007 issue

ČTK
Former PM Josef Tošovský, right, pictured in 1998 with UK PM Tony Blair, denies providing the StB with info while serving at the state bank.
Delving into the archives that document a dark chapter of Czechoslovak history will be a rocky, painful process — but it’s a necessary one that the current government will tackle, Interior Minister Ivan Langer says.
Though it’s been more than 17 years since the 1989 revolution toppled communism, the archives containing the names of the many Czechs who collaborated with the regime and its secret police, the StB, have yet to be fully declassified and cataloged. Instead, these documents languish in dusty boxes in offices scattered around the country.
Alleged StB sources since 1990
  • 1991 Jan Kavan, former foreign affairs minister and president of the United Nations General Assembly. Later receives negative lustration certificate
  • 1993 Vladimír Stehlík, director of Poldi Steel company. Later cleared
  • 1997 Vratislav Kulhánek, chairman of the Czech Ice Hockey Federation and former chairman of Škoda Auto board of trustees. Later cleared
  • 2005 Jan Kanyza, actor. Initially cleared, later convicted
  • 2005 Jitka Horová, High Court judge. Later cleared
Sources: iDnes.cz, Týden
As recent cases have shown, many collaborators, some of them high-ranking public figures, have long gone undetected. Since January, a prominent theologian and former dissident, a one-time prime minister, a top police official and a popular singer have all been accused of acting as informants for the communist regime. These cases show that there is still much work to be done, says Langer, of the ruling Civic Democratic Party (ODS).
“The old wounds were never healed,” he says. “There is a growing pressing need to find a systematic solution to this problem, where we have new cases [of communist collaboration] appearing every month.”
His solution is the Otevřená minulost, or Open Past, project, launched last November. The program focuses on consolidating, organizing and declassifying the Czech Republic’s archives. Its ultimate aim is to have all the files available online.
The project will “solve the inconsistencies and flaws of the previous years, when there was no will to solve these problems,” he says.
Langer’s efforts to open the past have whetted the media’s curiosity, and, in several of the recent cases, it’s the media that has gone digging through forgotten files to expose one-time collaborators.
In January, former dissident and distinguished theologian Jindřich Holeček was stripped of a scholarly medal after his name emerged on a list of StB collaborators. Soon after, Czech Interpol head Pavol Mihál was outed by Czech Television as a former StB agent, despite receiving the clean lustration certificate required to hold top public jobs. Spurred by that scandal, Langer ordered all top police to be re-vetted.
On Feb. 10, daily Lidové noviny accused folk singer Jaromír Nohavica of being an StB snitch, and, the next day, daily Mladá fronta Dnes accused former Prime Minister Josef Tošovský of aiding the StB while serving as adviser for the Czechoslovak Central Bank back in 1986.
If the Open Past project goes as planned, any member of the public will be able to search files online with a click of the mouse.
That goal, however, is still a long time away.
On Feb. 13, Lidové noviny reported that the Interior Ministry has only organized and digitized 4 percent of the files from the communist era, and it will take at least 10 years just to sort through the 850,000 names they contain. Placed end-to-end, the documents would stretch 17 kilometers (10.6 miles).
Political will
Also complicating the process is the political debate surrounding the issue.
The Czech Republic passed its lustration law in 1991, and today that law continues to be one of the toughest in the former Eastern bloc.
But Jan Ruml, a former dissident and the interior minister from 1992 to 1997, says the issue was complicated by politics right from the start. The lustration law passed “wasn’t perfect … as it did not include some types of collaboration. I would have preferred it to be much tougher, but it was hard to push it through. There were enormous tensions.”
Also, both Václav Havel, the first post-revolution president, and current President Václav Klaus were weak on the issue. They would both rather look toward the future than rehash the past, Ruml says.
The Social Democrats (ČSSD), the ruling party until last June’s national election, also took little action, and the issue “went to sleep.”
Pavel Žáček, head of the Interior Ministry’s archives, agrees.
“It could be said that in the past neither the leadership of the archive nor the previous governments were sufficiently interested in solving this problem,” he says. “This showed itself in the shortage of archive workers and the insufficient support of modern technologies.” Some reports have said former StB collaborators, who have since been fired, were working in the archives.
Now, with the ODS in power, Langer is attempting to turn the tide, but the political bickering continues.
In a Feb. 15 press release, the ČSSD accused the Open Past project of violating Czechs’ constitutional right to privacy.
“The totalitarian regime did not follow these rights. … Mr. Langer is going to continue in this practice,” party spokeswoman Květa Kočová wrote.
Jaromír Štětina, a former dissident and now an independent member of the Senate, disagrees.
“The Open Past project is highly necessary and should have been implemented a long time ago,” he says. “Not just because we should tell the truth to each other. It is a kind of repentance for the people who are exposed as former StB collaborators.”
Escaping notice
Langer is using the recent rash of exposures as support for his project.
The case of former Prime Minister Tošovský is a perfect example of one of the flaws of the current system, Langer told the Czech News Agency Feb. 14. The files detailing Tošovský’s past are kept in two separate places, he said: in a Czech office, where it is still classified and inaccessible to the public, and in a Slovak one, where it has been declassified.
The case of Interpol head Mihál is another example, Žáček says. Though Mihál had previously received a lustration certificate clearing him of StB collaboration, that certificate had been issued under the name Pavel, not for his actual name, Pavol. This was a common trick in the 1990s: Spelling just one letter of a name incorrectly, or omitting one diacritical mark, could throw investigators off the trail.
Since then, the vetting process within the Interior Ministry has been tightened and past collaborators will not slip through the cracks so easily, he says.
Hela Balínová, Naďa Černá and Magdalena Herelová contributed to this report.

Hilda Hoy can be reached at hhoy@praguepost.com


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