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October 11th, 2008

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Buried deep in communist-era archives

The Czech Republic's struggles mirror similar issues in Germany and Slovakia

By Hilda Hoy
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
April 4th, 2007 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST

The Interior Ministry's 17 kilometers of file boxes have all the players nervous when it comes to the question of public access.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, a popular saying goes.

But remembering isn’t always an easy task.

The 20th century’s legacy of occupation and oppression is a heavy burden, and today, nearly 18 years after the fall of communism in the Czech Republic, how the country bears that history has yet to be resolved.

Following the lead of other Central European former Soviet bloc countries, the Senate proposed a resolution last June: a National Memory Institute (ÚPN), to be opened by the government.

Essentially a repository for the reams of archive material from the communist era, the office would “open access to the documents to the public with the aim of helping people come to terms with the communist regime,” the Senate bill said. The proposal originally slated the institute’s opening for this summer.

Currently, the most common use for this material is to vet politicians and civic employees for secret ties to that regime. Research is hindered by the disorganization and sheer volume of the material, and members of the public who seek access often find themselves entangled in red tape. The ÚPN is designed to solve these problems.

But getting the bill passed has been a rocky process, and debates in the Chamber of Deputies, Parliament’s lower house, continue to be heated and emotional.

Opponents have a host of complaints: The center would be too costly, upgrading the files would be time-consuming and delay investigative work.

But the real crux of the debate is a struggle over how a nation interprets its past and who controls that view.

The institute would be crucial for helping the Czech Republic heal, says former dissident Jaromír Štětina, now an independent member of the Senate. “The process of de-communization has not come to an end,” he says. “We need to know the truth in order to realize what we lived through.”

But, for opponents, the ÚPN would paint history with a political brush.

“It would be just another political office,” says Deputy David Rath of the opposition Social Democrats (ČSSD). “If politicians are involved, then we are right back to communism, when the communists ordered scientists what to focus on.”

Better to entrust national memory to the Czech Academy of Sciences, he argues. “There are experienced historians there, and they are not under the influence of any political party.”

Debates delayed a final vote scheduled for mid-March. The bill is now in its third reading, and voting isn’t expected until sometime this month.

Aging archives
In some ways, the ÚPN would be a symbolic institution. Documents currently dispersed in offices around the country — such as the Interior, Defense and Justice ministries and the military and civilian secret services — would generally stay where they are. The ÚPN office would consolidate management of those files and make them easier for the public to access, says Senator Jiří Liška, a member of the ruling Civic Democratic Party (ODS). Ideally, within several years, the majority would be digitized.

Investigative work, however, would be left to the existing Office for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Prague.

Similar initiatives already exist elsewhere: Hungary has its Archives of the Hungarian State Security. Poland has its Institute of National Remembrance. Slovakia has its own ÚPN, and, in Germany, the archives of the secret police (Stasi) were opened to the public in 1992.

Under the bill, the Czech ÚPN would be run by a Senate-elected council of seven, none of whom could have political affiliations or ties to communism. That council would in turn appoint a director.

Originally, the ÚPN was only to cover the period from April 1945 to February 1990. Revisions of the bill added the period of Nazi occupation from 1939 to 1945.

“We are convinced that an unbiased interpretation of history is possible,” Liška says. “Objectively, communism was a time of oppression and nonfreedom.”

Not surprisingly, the ÚPN’s most vocal opponents are from the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM).

“Anyone who respects our Constitution and Bill of Rights can’t agree with this unconstitutional proposal from right-wing senators,” KSČM Deputy Miroslav Grebeníček says. “Our Bill of Rights says the state is not allowed to persist in any ideology, no matter if it’s right-wing or left-wing.”

Rath is unconvinced politics could be separated from the ÚPN, and compared it with the former regime’s Institute of Marxism-Leninism. There, too, “pseudo-scientists” portrayed history only in a way favorable to ruling politicos, he says.

Štětina dismisses these claims. “Even a train schedule can seem politicized” if you want it to seem so, he says.

A line in the sand
The debate over the ÚPN has been divided along party lines. In strong support is the right-leaning ODS, while the left-of-center ČSSD and KSČM, Parliament’s two opposition parties, are strongly against the proposal.

The Senate, which proposed the bill, is also dominated by the right.

Neighboring countries have faced similar political wrangling.

The debate over opening the Stasi archives was so politically divisive it left the German reunification process “close to collapse,” says Günter Bormann, head lawyer at the archive office in Berlin.

“The West German government was very skeptical about opening the files and using them for vetting or research [but] East Germans were quite clear that they wanted it,” he says. The West argued that exposing all Stasi employees and informants would perpetuate the human rights violations the secret police had used.

In the end, there were “huge demonstrations,” sit-ins at the former Stasi office and hunger strikes before the governments could compromise, Bormann says.

Today, the only politicians who still mildly oppose the opened archives are a few former communists, he says. Public interest continues to be massive: Every month, about 8,000 people apply to view the files kept on them by the Stasi.

In Slovakia, which formed its own ÚPN in 2003 at the urging of former dissident Ján Langoš, politics are affecting the office’s future. Voting to replace Langoš, who died in a car accident last year, dragged on for seven months thanks to political bickering. In January, a squabble erupted when the Justice Ministry annulled its lease contract. Opposition parties accused the ministry of trying to shut the institution down.

Politics have also stalled past attempts to form a Czech ÚPN. In 2002, the government — then controlled by the ČSSD — rejected a similar bill.

But, these days, the political tide has turned, and an ODS-controlled coalition is in power. Even Deputy Rath begrudgingly admits the bill will probably pass by a narrow margin once voting happens.

That idea has Senator Štětina overjoyed.

“Opening the archives is a way to finally come to terms with the past,” he says. “After all, what is more precious than the truth?”

Naďa Černá and Hela Balínová contributed to this report.

Hilda Hoy can be reached at hhoy@praguepost.com

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