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Comment: New Lustration Process Won't Cure Macedonia's Ills

Iso Rusi

26 01 2007  Weeding out low-level informers to the old secret services and not their bosses is neither just nor useful.

By Iso Rusi in Skopje (Balkan Insight, Jan 26 07)

This week Macedonia is making an attempt to weed out former security service informers from public life with a draft law imposing new conditions on those applying for office.

Deputies say the old secret police structures have had a devastating effect on the country's recent life, contributing to the many failures of the transition process, including increased poverty, criminal privatisation processes and stunted political pluralism.

While deputies blame these problems on the remaining elements of the former communist system - low level "snitches" - there is no word about the responsibility of those who ideologically mobilised and organised them and used their data for investigations, beatings, psychological maltreatment.

These people are all missing from this proposal law, which means in effect that they will be amnestied. It gives rise to suspicions that real lustration in Macedonia will in fact be impossible, as it would be carried out by the same people who ought to be its object.

There is a risk that other categories will never be fully uncovered, because, as some former senior police officials have admitted, the files of many accomplices of the secret services have already been destroyed.

The arguments of the legislators, that the only culprits for the country's situation are the "spread arms of the secret network of associates of the secret political police, personified in the state security services", sounds absurd.

Nobody can expect cleansing of the Macedonia system just by targeting the moles in these networks, especially if the people who organised and ran these networks will evade the whole process?

The weaknesses of the present proposal mean that, contrary to the proclaimed wishes of its initiators, it will strengthen the processes it seeks to counter as the people that in fact were responsible for Macedonia`s troubled transition will evade the lustration.

This is a lost opportunity, for what the country needs now is a proper lustration process aimed at removing all those who used their position to violate human rights and create an atmosphere of fear in which basic rights and freedoms were denied.

The draft proposal says the remaining elements of the former system have used the difficulties related to the process of independence and the excuse of preserving national security to transfer state capital to private hands in an undemocratic fashion, creating a new economic and social order that does not match the needs of a developing democracy.

The proposed law goes even further blaming smal ranks of secret service agents for the country's problems with its Albanian minority, saying that the failure to grant genuine equality to the community, "influenced the democratic process and caused instability", which, they add, "was one of the reasons for the ethnic conflict in 2001".

Small fish will end up being blamed "pauperisation, enormous unemployment, a high level of corruption and organised crime, inefficiency and a conscious resistance to the entry of foreign capital".

It is difficult to believe any reasonable person opposes the idea that our post-communist society should be freed from all those who in the name of the previous ideology, or for money, destroyed people's lives or their careers.

The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights of the Republic of Macedonia, which recently published an expert analysis, is not against this process.

But the committee also believes the proposed law is contrary to the constitution and other laws, does not take into consideration other countries negative experience with this type of law, like in the countries of the Eastern bloc, where lustration has proven pointless for various
reasons, and is contrary to the basic concept of human rights and freedoms.

For example, various analysis have shown that it is difficult to define who was guilty and who was innocent as many belonged to both categories. Legal procedures launched after lustration laws have usually ended up with processes against ordinary citizens, victims of the regime instead against the top echelons.

Another problem for lustration is the difficulty to verify validity of documents, when many were destroyed, but also because individual agents of the secret services to forge many of those.

Therefore, the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights considers that the proposal contains so many drawbacks that it will not increase the level of protection of human freedoms and rights and the rule of law, but will "contribute to the weakening of the rule of law and legal security, as well as directly or indirectly contributing to the violation of human rights and
freedoms".

Iso Rusi is acting president of the Macedonian branch of the Helsinki Human Rights Committee. Balkan Insight is BIRN's online publication.