REVIEW TOPICS:
Russia's new first vice premier, ex-KGB officer, given wide powers
Polish President and PM wage a `Political War' on ex-communist agents
Court to investigate allegations that former Warsaw archbishop collaborated with communist secret police
Czech Minister: Opening secret police archives will heal wounds
Police centralization talks fail in Bosnia, EU talks stall
Bulgaria's Parliament sifts out Secret Files Commission candidates
Romanian authorities deny CIA actions ever took place in Romania
Russia's new first vice premier, ex-KGB officer, given wide powers
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| Sergei Ivanov |
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Russia's new first deputy prime minister, Sergei Ivanov, seen by many as a potential successor to the Russian president, has been placed in charge of a wide spectrum of activities, RIA Novosti reports.
Following a major government reshuffle last week, in which Ivanov was promoted from the posts of defense minister and vice premier, Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov today assigned duties to his four deputies. "I would like to inform you that I have signed a document outlining the duties of deputies and first deputy prime ministers," Fradkov told a government session. The premier said responsibilities would be divided between his deputies along the priority lines of government policy.
Ivanov 54, a former KGB officer like Putin, will now supervise industry, transport, science, the defense industry, national defense, communications, law enforcement, and the nuclear and space sectors. "These are what we call the real economy, including the defense industry, on which we place high stakes to diversify the economy and develop the sector in innovative ways," the head of the government said. Ivanov will now enjoy equal authority with another first deputy prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, chairman of gas giant Gazprom's board of directors, who is also a potential presidential successor. Medvedev will be in charge of education, healthcare and the social sector. He will guide socially oriented priority national projects in housing and demography, and will supervise the use of mineral and natural resources.
Alexander Zhukov has retained his responsibilities of deputy prime minister and will oversee lawmaking, intergovernmental fiscal relations, the main lines of the country's social and economic development and migration policy. "Overall, everything related to macroeconomics," Fradkov said.
The president also appointed the former government chief of staff, Sergei Naryshkin, as a deputy prime minister. He will be responsible for foreign trade, including with former Soviet republics, and property relations.
Naryshkin, 52, who worked in the St. Petersburg mayor's office in the early 1990s under Putin, who was then deputy mayor of Russia's second city, will also lead a government commission on economic integration with the European Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
Polish President and PM wage a `Political War' on ex-communist agents
Almost 18 years after Poland broke away from Soviet domination, the country's ruling Kaczynski twins are clamping down on former communists, who they say have too much influence on Polish society, Bloomberg writes today.
Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, 57, is preparing a bill that would make public the names of people who spied for the secret services. His brother Lech Kaczynski, Poland's president, has signed a law that will ban people who collaborated with the secret services from working as judges or taking top positions in state-owned companies. The Kaczynskis say Poland needs these laws to complete its transition to democratic government. Critics say the brothers are conducting a witch hunt to deflect attention from more important issues such as Poland's unemployment rate, the highest in the European Union.
``Having a clean-up is long overdue,'' Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg. ``But there is a suspicion here it's being used for political ends.''
Radoslaw Markowski, a political analyst at the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw said: ``This is more like waging a political war.''
Poland has been slower than many of its eastern European neighbors to confront its communist past. The Czech Republic, for example, passed a law in 1991 preventing former collaborators from holding public office, and its interior ministry almost four years ago published an official list of people who cooperated with the secret police.
Most Poles support the idea of lifting the lid on who did what during communism. A September 2006 survey by the Warsaw- based Center for Public Research found that 58 percent believe that some or all of the files gathered by the secret services should be opened.
``These people enjoy material privileges and remain entirely unpunished,'' said Kazimierz Ujazdowski, culture minister and a co-author of the prime minister's draft bill, in a January 11 interview with Radio Tok FM. ``This isn't a settling of accounts but a project to implement justice in a free country.''
Others are sceptical about the Kaczynskis' motives. The same poll that found support for opening the files also found that as many as 70 percent of Poles believe the government is trying to distract public attention from other issues, including squabbles among cabinet members and the recent resignations of two ministers, Bloomberg writes.
``These laws won't complete the transition from communism; they'll just perpetuate a sense of injustice,'' Wiktor Osiatynski, a law professor who helped write Poland's post-1989 constitution, said in an interview with Bloomberg. ``The people who drafted them want to use the past for their purposes today, not put the past to rest.''
The Kaczynskis were members of the Solidarity movement, which led the fight against the communist regime. They quarrelled with Solidarity leader Lech Walesa shortly after he became president, and in 2001 they founded the Law & Justice party. The party came to power four years later, promising to fight the corruption it said was caused by communist rule and the ease with which former apparatchiks found places for themselves in democratic Poland after 1989.
Since then, Poland's parliament has changed the rules governing applications to the civil service, giving the Law & Justice party the right to vet candidates for top jobs. The Kaczynski government has also replaced a number of top managers at state-controlled companies who the government asserts were implicated in deals with ex-functionaries.
The law that will open the secret-service files of public figures takes effect March 1. Previously, historians, journalists and academics had relatively free access to the archives, while private citizens had access only to their own files, Bloomberg writes.
The new law will also require applicants for 53 types of jobs to provide more information about any involvement they had with the secret services. The change will affect an estimated 400,000 people, the daily Gazeta Wyborcza reported on February 14. The legislation will allow the government to publish the names of people defined as communist agents. Professors, judges and civil servants, among others, will lose their jobs if it's proven that they lied about working with the secret services.
The services officially employed about 24,000 Poles toward the end of the communist regime, according to Jerzy Szmajdzinski, leader of the opposition Democratic Left Alliance's parliamentary club. The services placed these people in more than 14 intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies that gathered information on anyone the government regarded as suspicious and that penalized opposition activists and their families.
More legislation is in the works, Bloomberg asserts. The cabinet is writing another bill that will slash the pensions of former secret- service agents. The president is drafting a bill that will demote General Wojciech Jaruzelski, 83, Poland's last communist leader, to the rank of private for imposing martial law in 1981 to fight the Solidarity movement, according to Aleksander Szczyglo, who was President Kaczynski's chief of staff until he became defense minister on February 8.
``Former communist leaders sit comfortably at home and decent citizens who suffered cannot do anything,'' said Tadeusz Cymanski, a Law & Justice deputy, in an interview. ``It's a disgrace that no measures like this were introduced earlier.''
Court to investigate allegations that former Warsaw archbishop collaborated with communist secret police
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Stanislaw Wielgus |
A court agreed today to the former Warsaw archbishop's request for an investigation into allegations that he cooperated with the communist-era secret police, The Associated Press reports.
Poland's powerful Roman Catholic Church was rattled when Stanislaw Wielgus abruptly resigned as Warsaw archbishop just minutes before he was to be formally installed at an opulent Mass on January 7. He stepped down after admitting he agreed to cooperate with the much-hated communist-era secret services but denied hurting anyone.
Last week, Wielgus asked a special screening court to take up his case in an attempt to clear his name. The court allows public individuals accused of collaboration to seek a ruling on whether they were informers — a step some opt for in an attempt to clear their names.
Poland's screening law exempts members of the clergy, but because Wielgus served as rector of the Catholic University in Lublin, judge Malgorzata Mojkowska ruled he also holds a right to screening. Wielgus has acknowledged signing documents agreeing to cooperate with secret police, but argues they are now unreliable.
In a letter made public on Tuesday, Pope Benedict XVI expressed "understanding" and a "wish" that Wielgus "resume his activity in the service of Christ."
The Wielgus scandal spurred Poland's church to finally address the issue of collaboration among the clergy — a touchy issue given Polish reverence for the Church as a bastion of resistance to the Communists.
Polish-born Pope John Paul II, the former archbishop of Krakow, is credited by many with helping hasten the regime's demise in 1989.
Czech Minister: Opening secret police archives will heal wounds
Delving into the archives that document a dark chapter of Czechoslovak history will be a rocky, painful process — but it’s a necessary one that the current government will tackle, Interior Minister Ivan Langer says according to The Prague Post. Though it’s been more than 17 years since the 1989 revolution toppled communism, the archives containing the names of the many Czechs who collaborated with the regime and its secret police, the StB, have yet to be fully declassified and catalogued. Instead, these documents languish in dusty boxes in offices scattered around the country.
As recent cases have shown, many collaborators, some of them high-ranking public figures, have long gone undetected, The Prague Post reports. Since January, a prominent theologian and former dissident, a one-time prime minister, a top police official and a popular singer have all been accused of acting as informants for the communist regime. These cases show that there is still much work to be done, says Langer, of the ruling Civic Democratic Party (ODS).
“The old wounds were never healed,” he says. “There is a growing pressing need to find a systematic solution to this problem, where we have new cases [of communist collaboration] appearing every month.”
His solution is the Otevrená minulost, or Open Past, project, launched last November. The program focuses on consolidating, organizing and declassifying the Czech Republic’s archives. Its ultimate aim is to have all the files available online.
The project will “solve the inconsistencies and flaws of the previous years, when there was no will to solve these problems,” he says.
Langer’s efforts to open the past have whetted the media’s curiosity, and, in several of the recent cases, it’s the media that has gone digging through forgotten files to expose one-time collaborators.
In January, former dissident and distinguished theologian Jindrich Holecek was stripped of a scholarly medal after his name emerged on a list of StB collaborators. Soon after, Czech Interpol head Pavol Mihál was outed by Czech Television as a former StB agent, despite receiving the clean lustration certificate required to hold top public jobs. Spurred by that scandal, Langer ordered all top police to be re-vetted.
On Feb. 10, daily Lidové noviny accused folk singer Jaromír Nohavica of being an StB snitch, and, the next day, daily Mladá fronta Dnes accused former Prime Minister Josef Tošovský of aiding the StB while serving as adviser for the Czechoslovak Central Bank back in 1986.
If the Open Past project goes as planned, any member of the public will be able to search files online with a click of the mouse.
That goal, however, is still a long time away.
On Feb. 13, Lidové noviny reported that the Interior Ministry has only organized and digitized 4 percent of the files from the communist era, and it will take at least 10 years just to sort through the 850,000 names they contain. Placed end-to-end, the documents would stretch 17 kilometers (10.6 miles).
Also complicating the process is the political debate surrounding the issue, The Prague Post asserts. The Czech Republic passed its lustration law in 1991, and today that law continues to be one of the toughest in the former Eastern bloc. But Jan Ruml, a former dissident and the interior minister from 1992 to 1997, says the issue was complicated by politics right from the start. The lustration law passed “wasn’t perfect … as it did not include some types of collaboration. I would have preferred it to be much tougher, but it was hard to push it through. There were enormous tensions.”
Also, both Václav Havel, the first post-revolution president, and current President Václav Klaus were weak on the issue. They would both rather look toward the future than rehash the past, Ruml says. The Social Democrats (CSSD), the ruling party until last June’s national election, also took little action, and the issue “went to sleep.”
Pavel Zácek, head of the Interior Ministry’s archives, agrees. “It could be said that in the past neither the leadership of the archive nor the previous governments were sufficiently interested in solving this problem,” he says. “This showed itself in the shortage of archive workers and the insufficient support of modern technologies.” Some reports have said former StB collaborators, who have since been fired, were working in the archives.
Now, with the ODS in power, Langer is attempting to turn the tide, but the political bickering continues.
In a Feb. 15 press release, the CSSD accused the Open Past project of violating Czechs’ constitutional right to privacy. “The totalitarian regime did not follow these rights. … Mr. Langer is going to continue in this practice,” party spokeswoman Kveta Kocová wrote.
Jaromír Štetina, a former dissident and now an independent member of the Senate, disagrees. “The Open Past project is highly necessary and should have been implemented a long time ago,” he says. “Not just because we should tell the truth to each other. It is a kind of repentance for the people who are exposed as former StB collaborators.”
Langer is using the recent rash of exposures as support for his project. The case of former Prime Minister Tošovský is a perfect example of one of the flaws of the current system, Langer told the Czech News Agency Feb. 14. The files detailing Tošovský’s past are kept in two separate places, he said: in a Czech office, where it is still classified and inaccessible to the public, and in a Slovak one, where it has been declassified.
The case of Interpol head Mihál is another example, Zacek says. Though Mihál had previously received a lustration certificate clearing him of StB collaboration, that certificate had been issued under the name Pavel, not for his actual name, Pavol. This was a common trick in the 1990s: Spelling just one letter of a name incorrectly, or omitting one diacritical mark, could throw investigators off the trail. Since then, the vetting process within the Interior Ministry has been tightened and past collaborators will not slip through the cracks so easily, he says.
Police centralization talks fail in Bosnia, EU talks stall
Bosnia-Herzegovina-Another round of talks between Bosnia's leaders failed late Tuesday night to produce an agreement over a police reform, Serbianna news agency reports today. The continuing disagreement is preventing the country from taking the next step on its path toward European Union membership.
Representatives of 11 parties could not find a compromise between a European Union proposal on how to organize Bosnia's police force and the wishes of the Bosnian Serbs. The European Union said it will not sign the Stabilization and Association agreement with Bosnia if it does not reorganize its police so it fits EU standards.
Since the end of the 1992-95 war, the country has been divided into a Serb republic and a federation shared by the Bosniaks and the Croats. Each mini-state has its own police, which proved to be ineffective in fighting crime.
Civilians can cross the unmanned border between Bosnia's two mini-states, but the police cannot, which makes it easy for criminals to commit a crime in one part of the country and flee to the other.
An international proposal offered a unified police structure, free of political influence. Bosniaks and Croats, who advocate a general unification of the country, support the EU-proposed unification of the divided police. Serbs would like to maintain the territorial and ethnic division and say they will only agree to a partial unification. They support a common budget and other common elements but they do not want to loose their own police force and disagree with the idea that police can cross the borders of the mini-states.
Bulgaria's Parliament sifts out Secret Files Commission candidates
Bulgaria's parliamentary commission on internal security yesterday heard the first candidates for the newly established commission for the secret files, Sofia News Agency reports.
The independent MP Mario Tagarinski is among the nominated future members. The candidates from Simeon II National Movement party, United Democratic Forces, Ataka party and Coalition for Bulgaria will have to undergo another hearing today.
The candidates of the socialists are Georgi Georgiev, who is former deputy minister of regional development, historian Iskra Radeva, MP Evtim Kostadinov and Hristo Marinski.
Simeon II NM's candidates are lawyer Todor Trifonov and Bulgaria's ex-envoy to the Czech Republic Martin Tomov, as well as Rumen Borissov and Bogdan Tzanev.
United Democratic Forces proposed writer Georgi Konstantinov for the post and Democrats for Strong Bulgaria's proposal is Iralion Ilarionov. The commission will have to handle the secret files of Bugalria's former state security secret services.
Romanian authorities deny CIA actions ever took place in Romania
Liberal senator Norica Nicolai declared on Wednesday that the Romanian Authorities have no information regarding any possible flight conducted by the CIA in Romania, HotNews reports. Nicolai added that the suspect airports were investigated by a special committee, any suspicion being annulled.
"The only airport that could have offered the facilities it's been talked about is Kogalniceanu, and this one was especially investigated. There were no secret flight discovered at the Timisoara airport either", Nicolai said.
Norica Nicolai conducted a special investigation committee to check the CIA chartered flights and on the "secret detention facilities" supposed to be found on Romanian soil.
Kazakhstan: Secret police plans more restrictions on religious freedom
Kazakhstan plans to even more severely restrict religious freedom than it currently does following 2005 restrictions, Forum 18 News Service has learnt. According to a draft of a new Religion Law, all unregistered religious activity would be banned, and registered religious communities with fewer than 50 members would be banned from publishing or importing religious literature, maintaining open places of worship or conducting charitable activity. Human rights activists and religious minorities have condemned the latest proposals, Ninel Fokina of the Almaty Helsinki Committee describing them as "reminiscent of army regulations." Kazakh law professor Roman Podoprigora finds it "very alarming that the draft Religion Law says nothing about the procedure for formal registration," he told Forum 18. "The procedure should merely be of a question of notification." The KNB secret police are also planning separate restrictions on religious freedom via the Anti-terrorism Law.
Kazakhstan’s religious minorities have told Forum 18 of their concern over the new Religion Law now being prepared by the government’s Religious Affairs Committee. According to one recent draft, seen by Forum 18, all unregistered religious activity would be banned, while communities with fewer than 50 adult citizen members would be prohibited from publishing or importing religious literature, maintaining open places of worship or conducting charitable activity. The head of the Almaty Helsinki Committee, Ninel Fokina, condemned these planned restrictions. "The rights and obligations of members of religious groups would be reminiscent of army regulations," she complained to Forum 18.
Amanbek Mukhashev, deputy head of the Religious Affairs Committee within the Justice Ministry, insists it is necessary to change the Religion Law yet again. "The need for this Law arose long ago. The old Religion Law was adopted back in 1992," he told Forum 18 from the capital Astana on 16 February. "So far, it is too early to say definitively what the new Law will say." He did not discuss why the authorities think a new Religion Law is necessary, when the current Law was last amended in 2005 for what were claimed to be "national security" reasons.
Mukhashev said the draft text would be given to "representatives of the various confessions" to consider "in about a month", without indicating which religious communities would be allowed to see the draft. He said the draft would go to parliament and then if approved to the President for his signature.
Mukhashev insisted that "any" religious groups may participate in discussions on the draft law, as well as Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) experts and human rights activists. But he did not indicate whether Kazakhstan would ever reply to the OSCE Advisory Council on Freedom of Religion or Belief’s November 2006 offer to help resolve the government’s dispute with the Hare Krishna community.
Most Protestant churches have fewer than 50 members, Aleksandr Klyushev, head of the Association of Religious Organisations of Kazakhstan, told Forum 18 on 14 February. He described the planned changes as "placing severe restrictions on the rights of Protestant believers". Similarly restricted would be the Hare Krishna community, as only two of their 10 currently registered communities – in Astana and in the commercial capital Almaty - have more than 50 members.
"The draft Law is no surprise to me," Maksim Varfolomeyev of the Hare Krishna community told Forum 18 on 16 February, commenting that Krishna followers in most of their communities "will lose the most elementary rights". Referring to the government’s attacks on his community’s religious freedom, Varfolomeyev described the draft Law as "more evidence that state policy towards religious minorities is becoming harsher". Jehovah’s Witness communities mostly have more than 50 members and are not at present publicly commenting on the draft Law. "Let us see how events unfold," Anatoli Melnik, deputy head of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Kazakhstan, told Forum 18.
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