On September 1, Macedonia became the latest South East European country to adopt a law stipulating the lustration of former collaborators and agents from its communist-era secret services.

As in other Cold War Warsaw Pact countries, the debate in Macedonia on barring former communist secret agents from the government and public life was highly controversial.

Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the issue has haunted the region. Countries have adopted their own unique approach. Some, like Germany, (after reunification with the German Democratic Republic) handled the matter deftly and quickly. Others,  like Bulgaria, waited almost two decades to sift through records and decide who did what over 45 years of communism.

All countries agree on principle that their communist past should be addressed. But they disagree on how this should happen. Some have completely banned former communist agents from assuming public posts while others have left it to the individuals concerned to steer clear of public life.    

Latest in the club
Macedonian law dictates that all candidates for public positions will be investigated for ties with the former communist regime. All candidates for the civil service, judiciary, universities, media, NGOs and religious organisations will now be required to sign a declaration about past membership of communist agencies. A specially ordained nine-member parliamentary commission will check the declaration.

If it is proven false, the person will be asked to step down. By the end of the month, all current top public officials, starting with the president, prime minister and cabinet ministers, will have to file such declarations. This was an important victory for the opposition who in 2007 managed to defeat the government’s plan that the law should apply only between 1944 and July 2000, so exempting the country’s current rulers from the probe. Now the law will apply from 1944 to the present.

Significantly, the law will only be enforced for five years, meaning that anyone who decides to run for a public post in 2015, for example, will be exempt from the vetting procedure. In addition, Macedonian law provides for a check and ban not only on collaborators and spies but also on those who had issued the orders.    

The ‘fine’ example
Germany has been cited as one of the best examples of how to deal with communist archives. In Bulgaria, for example, the work of the former German Democratic Republic’s federal commission for state security records was often hailed as a role model in its work on confronting the past.

While attending a round-table on communist archives in Bulgaria in April 2008, Marianne Birthler, a member of the federal commission, said "in Germany it is impossible for someone with a communist secret services past to hold a public position in today’s secret services". She was referring to the Bulgarian law, adopted in 2006, which said that no one would be prevented from holding public office because of past communist affiliations.

This allowed President Georgi Purvanov, a former researcher for the communist services, to keep his job along with Petko Sertov, then head of the State Agency for National Security.

A year after Birthler underlined her confidence in the effectiveness of the federal commission, Germans were surprised to see a Financial Times Deutschland report that there were about 17 000 former employees of communist East Germany’s Ministry of State Security, or Stasi, currently holding government jobs in eastern German states. The high number of former Stasi employees stemmed from the German provinces’ right to freely interpret and implement the law, adopted in 1991, that vets state employees for any Stasi-related activity before 1989, FTD said.

Some states saw only managerial positions within the East German secret police as grounds for exclusion, the newspaper said, quoting evidence compiled by historians at Berlin’s Free University. This evidence said that thousands of local civil servants, police officers and teachers employed by East Germany, or Berlin, were once working for the all pervasive communist secret organisation, FTD said.