POLITICS-SLOVAKIA: Communist Ghosts Haunt Leaders

By Pavol Stracansky Reprint | | Print |

Pavol Stracansky

BRATISLAVA, Jan 25 2005 (IPS) - The resignation of a senior minister following the publication of files identifying him as a communist secret police agent has provoked one of the largest public debates on Slovakia’s communist past since the fall of communism 15 years ago.

Deputy construction minister Jan Hurny resigned earlier this month after he was identified as an active agent of the former communist secret police, the StB, in files made available on the Internet late last year by the state-run National Memory Institute (NMI).

The StB kept records on tens of thousands of people under the communist regime in former Czechoslovakia until the regime fell in 1989. Between then and the creation of the NMI those records were held by the current secret service, the Slovak Information Service (SIS).

The NMI, created in 2002 for the archiving of state records between 1939 and 1989, plans to release more files at the end of this month and a third and final set later this year.

Hurny’s resignation sparked public debate on whether people in public position listed on the NMI files as former communist collaborators should remain in their posts.

That debate intensified when it emerged that Jozef Banas, member of parliament from the ruling coalition Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKU) party figured in the institute’s records.

Banas admitted that he had had contact with the StB but told Slovak media that information he provided to them “did not hurt anyone.” He has refused to step down. He said he intends to clear his name through the courts.

The developments have been a major feature of press and broadcast news reports and discussion shows this month.

President Ivan Gasparovic of this small East European country of five million said people who had worked with the secret police and were now in public positions should step down.

“Those who really did actively cooperate with the StB should leave of their own accord,” he was quoted as saying by the Slovak daily Sme. “It’s down to the morality of those who at that time were in such positions to go before the people and tell them ‘yes, I did wrong and today I should not hold a function where I decide about you’.”

Leader of the coalition Christian Democrat (KDH) party Pavol Hurosovsky told local media that “all those who were StB agents, who voluntarily informed on their closest peers, should resign from public life.”

Senior officials at the SDKU party say people should be left to deal with their communist past.

Slovaks appear divided over the issue.

“It’s best to move on and leave it in the past,” said Katerina Markusova, 36, a company secretary in Bratislava. “Some of these people may have done something wrong but bringing it all up and punishing them by forcing them out of jobs isn’t going to undo that wrong.”

Jozef Kubala, 68, a former factory worker, disagrees. “These people have no conscience. The secret police ruined people’s lives and destroyed some families. People who helped the secret police do that should not have jobs in any public institutions.”

The discussion is important for the country to come to terms with its communist past, sociologists say.

“It is important that this topic become an issue in public discourse, even if it is 15 years after the fall of communism,” says Sona Szomolnyi, a sociologist at Comenius University in Bratislava. “It is also important that people have access to this information, especially if it implicates people holding public office.”

But some politicians have cast doubt on the authenticity of the files being made public by the NMI.

Banas, who is also vice-president of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) Parliamentary Assembly, said the files could have been manipulated to suit the needs of the secret police at the time. He said NATO officials too had doubted the veracity of the files when he discussed the matter with them just before he took up his post.

Leader of the opposition Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) party Vladimir Meciar, said the files are “untrustworthy” and that many had been falsified.

The Slovak Communist Party (KSS), successor to the communist party that was in power until 1989, has denounced the publication of the files.

KSS MPs, along with Banas, have proposed amendments to laws on the NMI functioning which would make it possible for people to sue it over files that falsely identified them as StB agents or informants. They want to block the publication of disputed files until their authenticity is established.