The Last Dissident

The Wall Street Journal

By MARCIA CHRISTOFF KURAPOVNA
July 9, 2004

With Central and Eastern Europe formally integrated into the European Union and NATO, the moral and political vision of that region's magnificent Cold War dissident generation is assumed to be no longer relevant, or not even welcome. Indeed, the rebellious allure of figures such as Vaclav Havel, the living symbol of a romanticized Western realpolitik, has receded into respectful nostalgia for a hard-won (but underappreciated) battle.

So it is no wonder that the Slovenian economist and philosopher Ljubo Sirc feels like he is fighting on alone. Mr. Sirc, who was recently honored as a Commander of the British Empire, is the 84-year-old former Partisan, ex-Communist, death-sentenced inmate and then refugee who became a University of Glasgow professor and wrote the 1989 classic, "Between Hitler and Tito," a brilliant study of the blood-soaked fate of Yugoslavia caught between the 20th century's twin fascisms. More prominently, he is the founder of the London-based Center for Research into Post-Communist Economies," one of the few unapologetically antisocialist, pro-Hayek schools of economists left in Europe.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mr. Sirc has been an indefatigable political writer, commentator and lobbyist focused on setting a dangerously ignored record straight. The West, warns Mr. Sirc, has barely understood the extent to which the  legacy of communism lives on politically, economically and legislatively in the former Eastern bloc.

While Mr. Sirc is not the first to question the transparency of democratic reform in the region, he may be the most fiercely confrontational. He maintains that the recent governments of Central and Eastern Europe have stridently abandoned promised anti-Communist political reforms -- including the official acknowledgment of individual accountability in postwar Communist-led crimes against humanity.

"The transition is in a rut economically as well as politically and it is important to understand what is the cause of this situation," said Mr. Sirc in an interview last year. "Those who are now being exposed [through the work of Mr. Sirc and other investigative writers] scream that anticommunism is worse than communism but they do not explain why it is worse to condemn crimes than to commit crimes."

Observing Washington and Brussels celebrating fast-track NATO expansions, EU enlargements and the Milosevic trials, Mr. Sirc argues that the "new democracies" have all but reneged on two particularly crucial sets of legislative and judicial commitments from the early 1990s. The first, "lustration," required the eviction and barring from public office of anyone who formerly worked in high-ranking Communist Party positions. The second, so-called "decommunization" -- along the lines of the "de-Nazification" process in post- World War II Germany -- obligated the public disavowal of crimes against humanity and the restitution of Communist-directed mass confiscations of land.

In 1990-1991, a flurry of strongly worded laws appeared around the region calling for such measures. The Czech Republic led the way in initial efforts to expose informants and collaborators and bring citizens face-to-face with their past. A decade later, however, such laws across the region have languished; minimally implemented -- if at all. The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, today the second-most powerful party in the Czech Republic, has threatened to use its clout to repeal all lustration laws passed by Prague in 1991.

Poland's "Vetting Tribunal," introduced in the mid-1990s to screen political candidates for past crimes, has remained largely inactive. Legislation passed in the Sejm in the early '90s calling for official condemnation of the former Communist Party was deemed "too offensive" in 2000. In 2002, the Sejm passed a law allowing former Communist officials to hold positions in intelligence, counter-intelligence and border protection services, something a 1990 lustration law had banned.

In Hungary recently, parliament rejected amendments to a law on background checks which would have allowed people to learn the names of former police informers -- names which are still protected from public view. The majority parliamentary party in Slovenia, the United List of Social Democrats -- the former Communist Party -- is supporting an initiative by the old Communist managerial elite to reverse the liberal-minded 1991 Act on Denationalization which allowed people to seek restitution of private land and companies confiscated under communism.

Nor is Brussels so on the ball: The Council of Europe's tough-sounding 1996 resolution "On Measures to Dismantle the Heritage of Former Communist Heritage Systems" has remained an unenforced relic in the dustbin of EU bureaucracy. Meanwhile, U.S. senators and EU parliamentarians court the "ex-Communists" who hold leadership positions in many countries of the region.

The prominent presence of former apparatchiks in many of the region's governments should be disconcerting. Slovenia, Hungary, Romania and Poland, among others, all have or have had leaders who were once actively involved in the repressive and often fatally brutal Communist Party machinery. Yes, people change and the leaders and governments of these countries were freely elected. But the fact that voters didn't seem to care about their earlier incarnations and past records would seem to prove Mr. Sirc's assertion that the region has not sufficiently confronted the most gruesome aspects of its contemporary historical record. He believes it's a record that should make the West profoundly more cautious.

This is where Mr. Sirc's own story comes in. He joined Tito's Partisans as an army officer in 1943. Immediately disgusted by Tito's brutalities, however, he formed a democratic opposition to the communists, cultivating good relations with Western diplomats. In 1947, Mr. Sirc was sentenced to death by Tito's government along with several fellow soldier-dissidents. Mr. Sirc's sentence had been commuted to forced labor when he escaped to Switzerland and then came to England in the spring of 1955.

While Mr. Sirc was imprisoned, some of the worst massacres of the postwar period took place at the hands of Tito's Partisans. In May and June 1945, just after the war in Europe ended, the communists slaughtered more than 120,000 Slovenian civilian refugees and retreating Croatian soldiers trapped on the Austria-Slovenian frontier, known as the Bleiburg-Maribor massacre. While the Croatian soldiers had been formally assured that they would be treated according to the rules of the Geneva Convention, the British Eighth Army declined their surrender. Those soldiers and the civilian population trapped at the scene were turned over instead to Tito's butchers in the Slovenian secret police.

Since the 1990s, 110 mass-grave sites have been discovered in Slovenian territory believed to be the massacres area. A 2001 report investigating these murders, known as the Pucnik Commission, after opposition democrat Joze Pucnik, was effectively suppressed in the Slovenian parliament and has never been made public.

Such obscure chapters of the region's past, Mr. Sirc maintains, must be brought to light as part of communism's depressing catalog of mass murders, and with forceful acknowledgment by New Europe's governments before more talk of "joining the West" continues. That peoples weary of historical violence and political cynicism might want to bury the past is understandable. However, it is neither the tradition, nor in the interest, of the West to let criminal bygones be bygones -- something Central and Eastern Europe must respect culturally and politically. The great legacy of that region's dissident voices is as crucial today as ever, and Ljubo Sirc is playing the most prominent role. Only, he is doing so without the continuing tradition, without the activist generation -- and without the voices.

Ms. Kurapovna, a Vienna-based writer on Central and East European affairs, is at work on book about the political history of Eastern Orthodox Europe.