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Bulgarians Agree to Open Secret Service Archives

12 10 2006  Parties finally reach consensus on public right of access to communist-era files.

By Tatyana Vaksberg in Sofia (Balkan Insight, 12 Oct 06)

Bulgaria's main political parties have finally agreed to open the archives of the once feared secret service of Todor Zhivkov's regime, the Durzhavna Sigurnost (state security).

Parliament last week made its first move to permit public access to the millions of files that the secret services assiduously collected by an army of anonymous spies and collaborators.

The draft bill to open up the archive gained the support of all political groupings, including the reformed political heirs of the communist regime, the Bulgarian Socialist Party, BSP.

The agreement marked a striking break with the past, when left and right clashed bitterly over the issue.

The bill aims to establish a committee, dominated by no one party, which will manage the archive, be responsible for public access and inform the public about which current politicians, magistrates, businessmen and opinion leaders worked for the secret service in the past.

Analysts say the fact that the BSP agreed to get involved is a guarantee that the files will finally be opened.

At the same time, they are divided on whether the law will really work, and on what lies behind the apparent U-turn in Socialist policy.

The question of what to do with the archives has divided Bulgaria for more than 16 years now.

During the era of transition from communism to democracy, the Durzhavna Sigurnost files became a political football.

Various figures made use of their own access to the files to reveal select tit-bits about their opponents, revealing only partial information and so spreading rumours.

Last week's apparent milestone over opening up the archives is not the first in recent history.

In 1997 the UNITED Democratic Forces, UDF, which then had majority in parliament, made opening the files a priority.

For four years, the ministry of interior archive was opened, enabling the public to access documents connected to Durzhavna Sigurnost`s history.

In 2001, shortly before its mandate ended, the government of Ivan Kostov changed the law to broaden the circle of posts for which candidates had to undergo checks for a “clean past”.

Metodi Andreev, chair of the special committee empowered to vet candidates, at that time announced that 129 deputies elected between 1990 and 2001 had been former collaborators with the secret services.

But the brief era of openness soon ended. When the National Movement Simeon the Second, NDSV, won the following elections, it closed the secret service archives.

The selective leaking of information started anew, most recently when Minister of Interior Rumen Petkov revealed part of the archives, proving that several prominent journalists were ex-collaborators with the secret service.

At the same time it become clear that president Georgi Purvanov has also performed some tasks for Durzhavna sigurnost. Answering to accusations, coming from two former members of the dosseirs committee, Purvanov initially denied the reports. But later he admitted doing a historical consultation service regarding a book on the history of Macedonia.

Purvanov said when he started, he didn't know he was asked to perform this job for Durzhavna sigurnost, but when he later found out, he found nothing wrong in it.

The widely publicised affair increased pressure on the ministry of interior to open its dossiers again.

Several draft bills were put before parliament, which later merged into one,leading to the current bill.

In the past, the BSP opposed opening the archives, so their vote in support of the bill last week is seen as a major change of tack.

"The BSP was against privatisation, against NATO, against the EU and against opening the archive," noted a member of the BSP leadership, Yuri Aslanov.

"But things have changed and the Socialists have taken over the [archive] project from the democratic wing."

Aslanov attributed this change of heart to the recent changes in the party leadership. The new BSP leader, the current prime minister, Sergey Stanishev, 40, is a relative youngster.

Too young to feel personally threatened by any information contained in the archives, he is seen as eager to show he is a true democrat.

But other politicians and analysts say the BSP is still being less straightforward than it appears.

Kostov complains that the passage of the recent draft law on the archives was delayed to help President Purvanov during the current campaign for presidential elections scheduled for October 22.

Yavor Dachkov, editor of the weekly Glasove, says the BSP is only willing to open the archives because many files have been destroyed.

In the early 1990s, numerous sources claimed the former communist establishment had removed those parts of the files that compromised its members.

These allegations were proved in court. In 2002, a former interior minister, Atanas Semerdzhiev, was found guilty of razing 144,235 dossiers from the Durzhavna Sigurnost archive in 1990.

Prosecutors said he destroyed 41 per cent of a total of 250,000 dossiers along with 75 per cent of the reports of secret collaborators. Semerdzhiev was jailed for four-and-a-half years.

"The BSP was in power when the archives were destroyed," said Dachkov. "This is why it is safe for its members to open the dossiers now."

However, he still backs the opening of the archive, even if much of the most valuable information evidence has gone.

Another concern is whether the process of revealing the files dossiers will be managed properly.

"The success of the move depends on who owns the archives," said the journalist Hristo Hristov.

Hristov led a years-long battle to obtain the truth from government archives about the murder of Georgi Markov, a dissident killed in London in 1978.

At present, the ministry of interior manages the documents. But opposition politicians say this institution remains full of former officers of Durzhavna Sigurnost and cannot be trusted.

"If they keep responsibility for the archives, it will compromise the whole process of turning them into public documents," said Veselin Metodiev, former deputy prime minister in Kostov's government.

The independent commission envisaged under the new law may be a fit guardian of this important piece of heritage.

But it remains to be seen whether the archives will be taken out of the Ministry of interior and entrusted to such a body

Last week, Tatyana Doncheva, a BSP deputy, caused a stir when she remarked that she could not remember such opposition to a new law "for a decade".

Doncheva did not specify where she thought this pressure was coming from, but most of the media have concluded she was referring to former members of the secret service.

In the meantime, public interest is building in the project, partly because Bulgaria is one of the last countries of the former Soviet block to open up its communist-era archives.

A survey by the polling agency Afis said 52 per cent supported opening the archives, though 32 per cent also said they thought the documents would reveal only part of the truth.

Just 11 per cent were against the whole idea, saying the remaining archives should be destroyed.

Dachkov said Bulgarians had the right to know who had stabbed whom in the back. Reaching for a colourful metaphor from the Book of Genesis, he remarked, "We need to know who is Cain - and who is Abel."


Tatyana Vaksberg is a correspondent of Radio Liberty in Sofia and a Balkan Insight contributor. Balkan Insight is BIRN's online publication.