The first problem with files of dictatorships is that they rarely nail top people. No country did more to open up secret-police files than Germany. The archives of the special commission contain 180 kilometers of files from the Stasi, the infamous East German secret police, and everyone from ordinary citizens to media organizations can request access. Yet Erich Honecker, who presided over this police state from 1971 to 1989, was able to evade the courts by pleading ill health, and then took off to comfortable exile in Chile before he died. By contrast, several border guards who carried out their “shoot to kill” orders against escapees found themselves in the dock. In Poland, ex-communist leader Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski is now on trial for allegedly issuing orders to security forces to fire upon the Gdansk workers in 1970 when he was Defense minister. Jaruzelski denies the charges, no smoking gun has surfaced in the files and his defense team has engaged in endless delaying tactics. The prospects for a verdict, any verdict, keep receding. Secret-police files have exposed genuine informers: neighbors who reported on neighbors, family members who reported on one another–in one famous East German case, a husband who kept tabs on his dissident wife. But often the evidence is neither clear-cut nor reliable. In her book “The Haunted Land,” American writer Tina Rosenberg notes that Czech secret-police men, “under pressure to fill their quota, wrote up candidates and casual contacts as if they were agents.” In some cases, the motive was as simple as the need to justify a phony expense account. And, of course, the secret police focused their attention on dissidents, compiling the thickest files on them. This meant that those who kept their heads down in the old system had nothing to fear from the opening of the secret-police files, while the activists suddenly looked suspect.
Jan Kavan was a prime example. A student in England at the time of the Soviet invasion of his native Czechoslovakia in 1968, he remained in London until the collapse of communism. From there, he organized shipments of “subversive” literature to his homeland and publicized human-rights abuses. But after he returned to a free Prague and won a seat in Parliament, a parliamentary commission denounced him in 1991 as a collaborator. The evidence: his secret-police file, which consisted mostly of reports from the education counselor at the Czech Embassy in London in 1969 and 1970, who had met with Kavan and assigned him the code name “Kato.” Kavan insisted he was guilty of nothing more than naivete in not realizing the diplomat was an agent. Treated like a political pariah, Kavan spent five years fighting the charges in the courts and won complete vindication. He is now the country’s foreign minister, a seeming triumph, but his political opponents continue to recycle the old charges.
Poland took a different tack than its German and Czech neighbors, initially trying to draw a “thick line” between the old era and the new. That meant keeping the secret-police files secret to avoid such miscarriages of justice. But this only led to politically motivated leaks of their contents, with little recourse for those who were defamed. Finally, in 1998, a new law established a vetting procedure, and allowed no less a legendary figure than former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa to clear his name of accusations that the files contained incriminating evidence about him. Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek has conceded that the whole process looks like “a bitter joke of history.”
But even Kavan admits that there’s no way to ignore the files of old repressive regimes, no matter how tainted. “In Mexico’s case, I’d be very careful,” he says. “It’s a box of dynamite. This doesn’t mean the dynamite should be buried, just that it has to be handled very carefully.” And that the handlers should pray that it doesn’t explode in their faces.
