Was Lech Walesa an agent for the Communist secret police?
Laughter broke out in the halls of parliament on Friday when the accusation was suggested, but the issue surrounding it is anything but funny. Poland, unlike its neighbors, turned its back on revenge in 1989 and vowed to draw a ”thick black line” between the present and the Communist past.
Now that line is being erased, and some say a kind of mass collective guilt has taken root not only in Poland but across Eastern Europe.
Last Thursday, Poland`s Interior Ministry gave parliament lists of public officials alleged to have served as secret police informants. But there was little satisfaction that justice was finally being done.
”This is a pile of lies!” shouted Jacek Kuron, a famous Solidarity activist who now is a member of parliament.
In Czechoslovakia, which passed such a law before Poland did, accusations and counteraccusations have been flying for months. Only two weeks ago, hoping to cool matters, President Vaclav Havel announced that he, too, had been listed in the infamous files.
If Havel and Walesa are suggested as secret collaborators, perhaps others should feel they`re in good company. But emotional scar tissue about the Communist past makes the accusations explosive.
During the Communist era, ”the majority ignored the violations of human rights,” said Jan Chudomel, spokesman for Havel`s party, the Civic Movement. ”All of us have blame, guilt for the past,” he said. ”It`s an issue of bad conscience. If we say, `These people are to blame,` then the rest of us are purified. It`s a psychological problem. We can`t deal with the past through a law.”
”Screening laws” were designed to rid the new democracies of former stool pigeons. Poland`s parliament passed the law just a week ago. But as soon as members got the lists, they were denounced as fake.
”I know a lot of these people,” Kuron said. ”I worked with them very closely and I don`t need any paper from any ministry. . . . I want to know what kind of games we are playing.”
Walesa quickly joined the cries of protest. ”A considerable number of documents in the files have been fabricated,” he said. ”They are already circulating . . . slipping out of control.”
Not long afterward, a member of parliament said Walesa himself-the Solidarity leader who triggered the fall of Soviet domination in Poland and went on to be elected the nation`s president-was named as a collaborator.
Even if the files weren`t falsified by current politicians or past Communists, there are other troubling parts of the screening acts: questions of guilt without trial and uncertainty about whether people on the lists really cooperated or were tricked by secret police they considered friends.
Release of the names in Poland was quickly followed by the fall of Prime Minister Jan Olszewski`s government.
Olszewski already was under fire amid rising economic woes. But just before parliament voted him out Friday, Olszewski took to the airwaves to charge that it was ”no coincidence” he was being dumped just as the agents` names were being released.
His government, he said, was ”based on honesty and truth. Truth about ourselves, both the glorifying truth and the shameful truth. That`s why my government wanted to be the first to reveal past secret connections.”
Parliament erupted in a furor, as some members accused Olszewski`s Cabinet of falsifying the records in a last-ditch attempt to keep power. The wild night in parliament started Thursday and stretched into Friday`s early hours.
Similar scenes have become almost common in Czechoslovakia-so much so that voters seem almost immune to the charges and countercharges.
Czechoslovakia was in the midst of a parliamentary election campaign last Wednesday when a leading politician, Vladimir Meciar, erupted in fury, yelling and waving his arms.
”You`re a liar!” he shouted at a Czech reporter. ”I see no reason to answer you!”
The reporter had accused Meciar of being a ”hidden Communist,” a charge that had appeared the day before in a local newspaper, complete with photos of secret police files listing Meciar`s name.
There is lingering suspicion about Meciar`s involvement, partly because some of the files disappeared while he was Slovakia`s interior minister.
”Here are the pages in the book where there was the name Vladimir Meciar, and they are torn away,” said Jan Petrik, pointing to the newspaper photo.
Petrik, vice chairman of a rival political party, is demanding an investigation. Under the screening act, Meciar couldn`t serve in parliament if he was a secret collaborator, no matter how many votes he gets. ”In that case, he couldn`t even be postmaster,” Petrik said.
The initial charges that surfaced against Meciar were followed the next day by similar accusations against one of his main rivals, Ivan Carnosursky.
Perhaps it was such antics that prompted Havel to talk about his own file. It may have been wishful thinking on the part of the secret police, but in 1965 they did list Havel as ”a potential secret collaborator.” A famous dissident playwright who was often jailed by the Communists, Havel said he had later been listed by the secret police among ”persons hostile to the regime.”
In Czechoslovakia, Martin Fendrych is spokesman for the men with the files-the Interior Ministry. And he believes in his job.
”Our intention isn`t to imprison somebody, but we want to describe what happened in reality,” he said. After living for years with official lies,
”the people have a right to know.
”About 150,000 collaborators were registered. And the files include the names of their families, their friends, the people they worked with. . . . Every page has its own number and every line on every page has its own number.
”Of course, there were many more records of people who were considered dangerous, so there are millions of names. . . . It will take years to go through all these files.”
It didn`t take years, however, for politicians to find what they want.
In Poland, the uproar began when Foreign Minister Krzysztof Skubiszewski was accused of being an informant even before the lists were released. He vehemently denied it, threatening to take the matter to court.
At first, Walesa agreed that it was morally necessary to remove former informants from public positions. He warned, however, that the law could become a ”great disaster for Poland.” Little did he know.
Some Poles already were glancing apprehensively toward Czechoslovakia, where human rights advocates who once helped dissidents had started to worry that the dissidents, now in power, were themselves becoming abusive.
Havel`s party initially supported the screening act as a way to ”help us eliminate the old structure,” said its spokesman, Chudomel, but changed its position when the act didn`t allow people to defend themselves in court.
”We paid for this position because the only other parties that had doubts about it were the Communists and the left wing,” he said. ”We were labeled as collaborators.”
