The communist secret police dossier angst that currently dominates Romanian media debates and recently dominated Bulgarian media debates is twinned in the west by Western European angst over Romanian and Bulgarian migrants.
On August 22, German president Horst Kohler said that his country could abort the two countries’ scheduled January 1 2007 European Union entry lest they produced actual results in judicial reform and high-level corruption control. Germany has, so far, not ratified the accession treaty for Bulgaria and Romania, as have Belgium, Denmark, France and Ireland - the latter the country best versed in the benefits of allowing migrant worker flows.
All of that appears troubling, and political elites in both Bulgaria and Romania should take Kohler’s statement as a warning because both countries attempted to dim dialogue on high-level corruption and judicial reform with rackety dossier openings of former members of communist secret services. (Although Romania’s efforts to do so appear more recent and loud.) The process of uncovering former collaborators is too alike in the two countries - it was started by journalists; it is selective and reminds more of a settling of political accounts and even of libel than of the real thing; it largely happens in the media, a field that does not necessarily understand the issue and is, therefore, open to manipulation and misinformation; and there is no adequate legal procedure to determine how exactly the opening of dossiers is to happen and whom exactly it should affect.
“Yesterday I was invoking the coincidence that people keen on reforms were always stigmatised for their guilty connections with the Securitate (communist secret service in Romania),” a comment in Romanian daily Adevarul read, in a probable reference to National Liberal Party MP Mona Musca, who resigned after the Romanian Council for the Study of Securitate Archives (CNSAS) alleged that she had collaborated with the former secret services.
Musca is a former minister of culture, one of the three possible nominees for the position of European commissioner from Romania and one of those who worked hardest to implement reforms in the media. The report made the point that there should be a ranking of guilt and a differentiation between the many who signed engagements with the Securitate and informed on their colleagues, friends and employees, and those who collaborated with the political police.
And this is where the real concern should be, secretary of the parliamentary committee for controlling the Romanian Intelligence Services (SRI) and PSD deputy Ion Stan said on August 22. Because how guilty is Mona Musca as a former professor compared to Ion Iliescu, a former first secretary of the Communist Party in two counties with power over the local Securitate and three times president of Romania after 1989, wrote Victor Roncea, founder and co-ordinator of the Romanian Civic Media Association, in Adevarul.
The true uncovering will begin when dossiers from the Securitate archive that were transferred to the justice ministry or the national defence ministry are analysed, he said. “They are now unmasking politicians by releasing lists of collaborators of agents under cover, while no one touches the most important part of the archive that highlights the atrocities that the Securitate committed. This archive was transferred to the justice ministry, but they do not analyse it. Well, it is there where you can find the political orders received by the prosecutors who were drawing up charges and sentencing people to tens of years of prison,” he said.
Another problem with the uncovering of dossiers is the way CNSAS works. The body receives files from the SRI, and the SRI is dependent on those currently in power, Romanian daily Ziua wrote. The SRI’s decision to declassify the dossiers on politicians only came after the heads of three intelligence services resigned following their failure to prevent the escape of terrorist suspect Omar Hayssam from Romania, and Romanian president Traian Basescu announced his decision to start declassification. After this announcement, Basescu met with the top Romanian security council (CSAT). His act, some commented, was an attempt to divert attention from the failure of Romanian intelligence to arrest Hayssam.
Accusations that Basescu was the one to start the security files “hysteria” came from SDP (Social Democratic Party) senator Sorin Oprescu as well. “These days, I am under the impression that there is an immense manipulation managed by president Traian Basescu, who uses the security files as a pretext for reaching certain unmentioned goals,” Oprescu said.
The week of August 13, Basescu appeared in primetime to deny allegations that he had collaborated with the Securitate, thus mimicking the dossier allegations against Bulgarian President Georgi Purvanov.
The procedure of opening the dossiers gained significant pace after Basescu’s decision to declassify files. The former government had kept it a secret, claiming them to be a matter of national security.
The campaign to clean the political ranks from former collaborators was started by the Bulgarian organisation Journalists Against Corruption, the Bulgarian Media Coalition and the Romanian Civic Media Association, Ziua wrote.
Their Clean Voices campaign aimed to clean newspapers from former collaborators with the communist secret services.
In Sofia, six journalists were found to be former collaborators of the political police and made to step down from their organisation positions.
In Romania, the Civic Media Association requested that 1000 journalists be checked by the CNSAS. The editor-in-chief of Ziua and the former editor-in-chief of the daily Cotidianul - another respected daily - (who formerly worked with BBC) were found to be former collaborators. Part of the urge to disclose the names of former journalists collaborators came after SRI spokesperson Marius Burkaru said during the summer that his service has secret agents planted in all mass media where it needs presence.
The crisis will lead to a complete reform of secret services in Romania and is backed by more than 60 per cent of Romanian society, media wrote.
Adevarul recently wrote that all archives of the Securitate and the Communist Party should actually be published online so that people can form their own opinions on the subject and avoid political manipulation and witch hunting that reaches nowhere.
Even if the form of disclosure is not through the internet, it appears that the disclosing mechanism is irreversible: the ex-chief of the SIE (Foreign Intelligence Service) promised that a next round of disclosures would affect “intelligence officers with fake identities that are still active in Romanian politics”.
The Securitate is thought to have been the largest network of spies and informers in Eastern Europe with some 500 000-700 000 informers watching over 23 million people.
