CAPITALISM, CORRUPTION, AND CLEANING UP
    
    Moral Cleansing Romanian Style
    Lavinia Stan
    
    Romania’s secret police files are used more to fight current political battles than to expiate the sins of the communist regime.
    
    LAVINIA STAN is assistant professor of political science and Killam postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University. She would like to thank Lucian Turcescu, Nadya Nedelsky, Michael Shafir, Antoine Roger, and especially Gabriel Andreescu for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article.
    
    HE issue of transitional justice has posed difficult political and ethical problems in Eastern Europe since the demise of communism. The effort to establish culpability for the sins of the former regime leads inevitably to hotly debated differences about lustration, the ritual cleansing of former communists, and about access to the voluminous files compiled by the secret political police. Policy advisers, political commentators, and social scientists alike, seeking models and lessons for post-communist Eastern Europe, have looked closely at how the process of transitional justice played out in post-authoritarian Latin America.1 Some authors, based on thorough studies of the legislation on lustration and file access in various countries, emphasize the limitations of the process.2 Others focus on the economic, psychological, and political considerations motivating efforts to out and oust former high-ranking communists and secret police officers.3 Still others, adopting a more comparative approach, try to explain the tactics postcommunist societies have used in dealing with lustration. The outcome of the “torturer problem,” as the effort to root out former secret police agents is called, is said to be determined by the type of transition a society undergoes, the psychological variables of “exit” (emigrate) or “voice” (criticize official policies) and the amount of political power retained by the communist successor parties in the early stages of the democratic transition.4 Few studies, however, have probed the efficacy of the new legislation.5 Did it actually identify former torturers? Does it provide a legal basis for excluding them from politics? A great deal is known about the laws themselves, the arguments for and against adopting
    Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 49, no. 4, July/August 2002, pp. 52–62. © 2002 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN 1075–8216 / 2002 $9.50 + 0.00.
    
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    them, and the political bargaining process that led to their passage, but not much about their impact on the political process or their success in achieving their stated goals. Studies of lustration and file-access laws usually chronicle the events leading to enactment and the establishment of appropriate enforcement mechanisms. They implicitly assume that the enforcement agencies will bring the intended process to a successful consummation. But there is no reason to believe that the transitional-justice laws adopted across the countries of the post-communist region all address the issue with equal success or that the verdicts handed down by the enforcement agencies are always correct. This article starts from the premise that transitional justice in post-communist Eastern Europe does not end with the adoption of a legal framework on lustration and file access but extends, like any other policy process, to implementation and enforcement. Taking the investigations of parliamentary and presidential candidates in the 2000 Romanian elections as a case study, the article discusses two seemingly mistaken verdicts in an effort to discern why the process of unmasking former Securitate collaborators was so quickly compromised in the eyes of the Romanian public. Among the reasons outlined here are the many loopholes in the law, several unresolved issues pertaining to the political police archive, and a series of mistakes by the National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives, the agency in charge of the process. The aim is not to recount the positions of various Romanian political actors or to provide a step-by-step history of Law No. 187, the Law on Access to Files and the Unmasking of Securitate as a Political Police (December 1999). These issues have been detailed elsewhere.6 Rather, the focus is on how well the spirit of the law was translated into practice and what the verdicts reveal about the Securitate archive and the tenuous link between life under communism as it really was and as depicted in the files. It must be stressed that Romania was a latecomer to transitional justice, adopting the necessary legal framework well after the other countries of Eastern Europe, but still ahead of Russia and the newly independent former Soviet republics. One reason for the delay is that the Party of Social Democracy in Romania (PDSR), the communist successor, controlled politics from the downfall of Ceauºescu until 1996. President Ion Iliescu lost his bid for re-election in November 1996 to Emil Constantinescu of the Democratic Coalition of Romania. Many observers expected that this election would finally allow the transition to come to Romania. Iliescu was re-elected in 2000.
    
    Romanian President Ion Iliescu continues to dodge accusations that he is papering over his past as an employee of the notorious Romanian Securitate. A Romanian man passes by Iliescu’s campaign posters during the November 2000 presidential elections. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)
    
    Although former political prisoner Constantin (“Ticu”) Dumitrescu drafted a lustration and file-access law as early as 1993, it took six years for a watered-down version to narrowly win parliamentary approval.7 The law’s tortuous road through parliament seems to indicate that the self-avowed pro-democratic parties like the Liberals and the Christian Democrats did not want it to be enacted. Nor did the Social Democrats, understandably, as many of them had been highranking communist officials. Instead of supporting Ticu Dumitrescu’s initiative, the Christian Democrats promptly expelled him from the party and joined hands with the Social Democrats to drop the stipulations that would have made the law a “therapeutic instrument” for the country’s moral regeneration.8 In its final form, the law grants Romanian citizens the right to read their Securitate files and allows citizens and the media to request investigations of the Securitate involvement of political candidates and highStan Moral Cleansing Romanian Style 53
    
    Table 1
    
    Occupations Subject to Lustration
    President Members of parliament Cabinet Local administrative and governmental bodies Judiciary Army chiefs Heads of police Heads of national and county financial guards Heads of diplomatic corps Heads of ombudsman Heads of public utilities and state-owned enterprises Heads of press organs Heads of banks Heads of postal service Heads of universities and schools Heads of hospitals Heads of political parties Heads of non-governmental organizations Heads of trade unions Heads of officially recognized religious denominations
    
    individual was an angel or a villain. Each raises fundamental questions about the accuracy and ultimate relevance of the council’s efforts to identify Securitate agents and collaborators.
    
    The Legal Framework
    According to Article 2 of Law No. 187, Romanian citizens monitored by the Securitate, or their designated close relatives, can obtain the names of the police agents and collaborators who contributed information to their secret files. To access one’s file it is necessary to submit a written request which the council must answer within thirty days (Article 12).9 Citizens can read their files at the council headquarters and can obtain copies of their files or a statement about their collaboration, or lack thereof, with the secret police (Article 13). Such statements can be contested within thirty days, and the council has sixty days to respond, explain its verdict, and uphold or reverse it. Citizens dissatisfied with the response may petition the Court of Appeals for a review (Article 14). The three-judge appeals panel that reviews the case may interview the plaintiff in a closeddoor session before handing down a final decision (Articles 15–16). Once the court does so, the council must make public the identity and role of the Securitate informer (Article 17). More important for the present discussion is the provision stating that ordinary citizens as well as members of the press, political parties, civic organizations, and public administration bodies must be informed, on request, of any collaboration with the Securitate by candidates elected to or nominated for almost every position of responsibility in the state at the central and local levels (Article 2). The list of “positions of responsibility” appears in Table 1. To the chagrin of civil society representatives, it does not include members of the secret services, but it paves the way for investigating such minor figures as village priests and teachers. Together with their nomination or election registration, individuals seeking state posts must submit a personal statement “of honor” detailing their past relationship with the communist political police. The council verifies the accuracy of the statements and sometime before the election publishes the results of its investigations in Monitorul Oficial al Romaniei (Article 3). The verification process stops if a candidate withdraws or renounces the post within fifteen days of the beginning of an investigation. It is unclear whether false personal statements incur any penalties, since the law does not provide for indicting candidates who misrepresent their past.
    
    ranking appointees. The law falls short of being a tool for lustration, however, in that it does not ban unmasked Securitate collaborators from participation in politics, and simply hopes they will voluntarily step down, something which has not yet happened. Following the law’s adoption, the Council for the Study of Securitate Archives was set up as the Romanian version of the Gauck Institute for East German secret police files. The council’s main task was to identify politicians and officials who had collaborated with the communist political police. During its first year the council released the names of some seventy tainted electoral candidates, parliamentary deputies, and party leaders, and cleared hundreds of other prominent figures. None of those named as informers had been ranking communist officials, and most were former communistera political prisoners who after 1989 had rekindled their political careers as members of pro-democratic parties, especially the Christian Democrats and Liberals. The verdicts have been bitterly contested but also passionately defended by journalists, political commentators, and representatives of civil society. The discussion that follows will explain the legal framework guiding the council and then examine two of the most controversial verdicts. Each case provides a glimpse at how the council uses information from the files to decide whether an
    54 Problems of Post-Communism July/August 2002
    
    Collaborators. The law defines the political police as including all Securitate agencies whose activities infringed on fundamental human rights and liberties. A secret agent is defined as a person who worked overtly or covertly for the political police between 1945 and 1989, when Romania was under communist rule. The law distinguishes several kinds of informers but does not recognize degrees of past taint, for everyone involved with the Securitate, regardless of the nature of the involvement, must be identified publicly. A collaborator is defined as a person who received an honorarium, was a Securitate resident, was enlisted by the secret political police to offer information that infringed on human rights, or facilitated in any way the transmission of such information (Article 5). The law includes as collaborators everyone who had decisional, juridical, or political responsibilities, whether at the central or local level, related to the activities of the Securitate or other totalitarian structures of repression, but does not say what these “other structures” might be. While the law does not clearly distinguish different types of Securitate employment, the political police are known to have had both full-time officers and part-time informers. A simple informer would become a collaborator upon joining the Communist Party, then a paid collaborator, and finally a paid referent contemplating promotion to the rank of Securitate officer. An officer’s identity could be uncovered, partly covered, or completely covered, with the last being the highest honor within the Securitate organizational structure. Add to this the largest network of informers in Eastern Europe, believed to have included some 600,000 to 700,000 people in a total population of 23 million. Monetary and non-monetary perks alike were available to informers, who could earn as much as an additional average monthly wage if they provided useful information on their relatives, colleagues, neighbors, friends, and personal enemies. Romanians in all walks of life enrolled as Securitate informers in the hope of being granted a passport, permission to work abroad, transfer to a big city, or a better job. Of course, not all collaborations were voluntary and opportunistic, but it is simply impossible to say how many informers spied out of fear, revenge, misplaced patriotism, or blackmail. To further complicate things, some of the victims who were reported on were themselves spying on others, making it difficult to differentiate victims and perpetrators. There are few reliable independent estimates of the number of informers in communist Romania. Human rights activist Gabriel Andreescu and former antiCeauºescu nomenklatura member Silviu Brucan esti-
    
    mate that the country had around 700,000 informers, and Ticu Dumitrescu cites 600,000, of whom 100,000 were Communist Party members.10 According to documents Dumitrescu obtained from the Information Service in late 1993 as head of the Senatorial Committee on Abuses and Petitions, there were 507,003 informers, but archival evidence confirmed the involvement of only 486,000. Of these, 29,613 were former Nazi sympathizers, 6,726 had been members of the inter-war National Peasant Party, 3,641 were members of the National Liberal Party, and 2,753 were former political prisoners. Demographically, 241,932 were between sixty and eighty years of age, 145,294 between forty and sixty, 81,572 between thirty and forty, and 17,995 under thirty years of age. The number of active informers fluctuated over time, depending on the domestic and international political situation, but steadily increased from 73,000 in 1968 to 144,289 in 1989. According to a socioeconomic analysis of 3,007 new informers quoted by Dumitrescu, 39 percent had university educations, and another 37 percent high school educations, 18 percent were engineers, researchers, or scholars, 17 percent were professionals, 19 percent public servants, and 32 percent military officers, workers, or peasants. Around 97 percent had been recruited voluntarily because of their “political and patriotic sentiment,” 1.5 percent through offers of financial compensation, and 1.5 percent were being blackmailed with compromising evidence.11 Custodians. The Council for the Study of Securitate Archives, an autonomous public agency under parliamentary supervision, serves as custodian of the archive and ultimate judge of the involvement of Romanian citizens with the communist political police. The council is led by an eleven-member college whose members, nominated by the legislature, can serve for two six-year terms. Civil-society groups object to the college, arguing that the council should be independent of the politicians whose past it is supposed to investigate. The balance of forces in the upper chamber of the Romanian parliament determined the composition of the college in the spring of 2000. The seat allotment favored the self-avowed pro-reformist and pro-democratic governing parties, hailed in the West as Romania’s last chance to move closer to democracy and a market economy. The government won the right to nominate seven members of the college, including the president and the deputy president, while the opposition nominated the remaining four.12 By law, candidates must not have been Securitate agents, cannot be members of any political party, and cannot be occupants of a state office
    Stan Moral Cleansing Romanian Style 55
    
    Table 2
    
    Extant Securitate Files
    Type of file Individuals or groups Informers Appendix “Documentation” Correspondence Actively compiled in December 1989 Number 1,162,418 507,003 154,911 29,281 47,917 317,258
    
    when nominated. But despite protests by the opposition, the parliamentary majority ignored these restrictions, nominating philosopher and former exterior minister Andrei Plesu and poète extraordinaire and former dissident Mircea Dinescu. Both men had surrendered their Communist Party cards more than twenty years earlier, but the taint of membership remained. The council has access to everything in the Securitate archive except files whose release might jeopardize an undefined “national security.” Before they reverted to the council in late 2001, the Securitate files had been scattered throughout the country in the archives of the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Justice, the Romanian Information Service, and the External Information Service. Nobody knows exactly how many files the Securitate produced, how many were destroyed, and whether the council now has custody of all the extant files. Since its inception in 1990 the Information Service, which housed the bulk of the Securitate files (around 1.9 million) in its Bucharest headquarters and forty county branches, has offered contradictory information on the number and contents of the files and refuses to grant public access to them. In 1993, according to Information Service data obtained by Ticu Dumitrescu, there were 1,901,530 extant Securitate files (see Table 2). Around 78,227 files were destroyed sometime between 1989 and 1993.13 In 1996 the Romanian government announced that the Securitate archive totaled 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) of files on those informed upon, 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) of files on informers, and another 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) of denunciations. Since every meter (1.1 yards) of archival material contains around 5,000 documents, and every file, on average, is 200 pages in length, one wonders why the Securitate produced only one-fifth of the East German Stasi’s output when it had to account for a populace of about the same size.14 Whether the files released to the council are authentic or were fabricated since December 1989 by unknown hands eager to compromise local luminaries is still an open question.
    56 Problems of Post-Communism July/August 2002
    
    The college meets twice weekly in closed-door sessions, works with a quorum of at least eight of its eleven members, and makes decisions and gives verdicts with a simple majority of those present (Articles 23–24).15 If someone is absent and the vote is split, the meeting chair, usually the council president, breaks the tie. Collaborator verdicts are based on evidence from the files, and, when the files are missing or incomplete, on written documents submitted by interested parties. The council’s personnel are public servants who must preserve the secrecy of the information contained in the files even after retiring or transferring to another job (Article 20). Destroying, falsifying, or concealing Securitate files and documents is punishable with a two-year prison term. Leaking or misrepresenting information in the files is punishable with a prison term of six months to five years. Publishing false information to slander a person’s life, dignity, honor, and reputation is punishable with three months to three years. The law and the statutes, however, do not clearly specify the punishments applicable to regular council employees and to the college members, and there is no provision for dismissing college members found guilty of misconduct.
    
    President Ion Iliescu: High-Ranking Communist But No Spy
    Born on March 30, 1930, in a small southern Romanian town on the banks of the Danube River, Ion Iliescu was drawn into the Communist Party through his father, a loyal Stalinist, and by attending a Soviet university. Iliescu became minister of youth in 1967, shortly after Nicolae Ceauºescu became Party leader. Ceauºescu subsequently appointed Iliescu Central Committee secretary for ideological issues and propaganda. When Ceauºescu launched a personality cult rivaling those of Mao and Kim Il-Sung, and Iliescu did not sufficiently laud his accomplishments, he fired him. Iliescu was exiled to remote Iaºi County, where, despite his feud with Ceauºescu, he faithfully served the Communist Party, first as a county councilor (1971–74) and then as county leader (1974–79), a position combining political and administrative responsibilities. Claiming that he was the sole leader of the December 1989 revolution that toppled the dictator, Iliescu has tried to reinvent himself and rewrite his past. He depicts himself as having been an active opponent of the Ceauºescu regime and downplays his image as a highranking communist and state official who advanced as a protégé of Ceauºescu and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.
    
    His political opponents see his activities in Iaºi as proof positive of his continuing allegiance to the Party, but according to Iliescu his stint there was an undeserved punishment inflicted by a mad leader. In reality he never openly challenged Ceauºescu or the Communist Party. He signed no letters of protest, not even the one drafted by top communist officials and released just months before the December 1989 uprising. In the late 1980s many Western observers saw Iliescu as a possible successor to Ceauºescu—a liberal, open-minded communist apparatchik predisposed to follow Gorbachev’s reformist lead, but he seemed impressive only in comparison to Ceauºescu.16 In the final days of the November 2000 presidential campaign, the council cleared nine of the twelve candidates. The Christian Democrats contested the decision and asked for the 1974–79 activities of Ion Iliescu as Party secretary for Iaºi County to be re-evaluated and re-verified. Since county first secretaries were responsible for blunting popular criticism of the Communist Party, they usually supervised the local Securitate inspectorate. For this reason, the Christian Democrats believed that Iliescu would qualify as a Securitate collaborator under Article 5 of Law No. 187. In order to clear him, they argued, the council would have to find that the Iaºi inspectorate did not function as a political police at the time when he was county leader.17 The Christian Democrat protest stirred up a hornet’s nest. The Social Democrats, the main opposition party supporting Iliescu, denounced it as an attempt to block his presidential bid, which seemed likely to be a landslide because of the unexpected withdrawal from the race of incumbent Emil Constantinescu. After four years of erratic rule marred by inefficiency, mismanagement, clientelism, and corruption, and with practically no prospect of winning a majority in parliament, they alleged, the Christian Democrats were hoping to avoid political obliteration by helping to elect the new president. Since their candidate, long-time Central Bank governor and prime minister Mugur Isarescu, had neither the popularity nor the charisma needed to win the presidency, their call for re-verification looked like a last-ditch attempt to inflict a mortal wound on their political enrmy. The incumbent ruling coalition vehemently denied the Social Democratic allegations, insisting that in keeping with the spirit of the law, all former communist officials had to be designated as Securitate collaborators. Thus the Social Democrats considered the matter closed and upheld a verdict that, they claimed, accurately reflected Iliescu’s lack of ties to the Securitate, but their
    
    political opponents demanded a thorough review of new archival materials. Iliescu defended himself with a statement claiming that as Iaºi County first secretary he had supervised the inspectorate only from an ideological standpoint and thus had nothing to be ashamed of. Like most other Party officials, he had nothing to do with recruitment, investigation, and persecution, the core activities that made the Securitate a political police. Moreover, by the time he was demoted to the post of Iaºi first secretary in the early 1970s because of his opposition to Ceauºescu ’s policies and cult of personality, he had become a victim of the Securitate, not one of its tools. In other words, his statement implied, an official evicted from the higher nomenklatura by Ceauºescu could hardly have been considered reliable enough to control a county Securitate apparatus, and if he had done so would have aroused suspicions that he was trying to build a personal power base for someday challenging the dictator. Iliescu sent this statement neither to the council nor to the Christian Democrats, but to the press, the arbiter of political reputations in Romania. He provided no documents in support of his claimed opposition to Ceauºescu or the Securitate’s independence from the Party. His argument was baffling, because it was widely believed that the Party had controlled the Securitate, not the other way around. But the fact that Iliescu did not feel compelled to produce concrete evidence shows that the conflict was a war of words and public image more than anything else. For its part, the council insisted that time and personnel shortages precluded a re-investigation of Iliescu’s past so near election day. The council’s president, Gheorghe Oniºoru, a history professor whose appointment to the college had been supported by the Liberals, declared that the two archives his organization had consulted before arriving at a verdict, those of the Romanian Information Service and the Ministry of Defense, did not reveal Iliescu to have been either a Securitate collaborator or a target. In an open letter to the Christian Democrat campaign committee, Oniºoru pointed out that a guilty verdict could not be handed down without supporting documentation.18 The letter raised three important points. First, all guilty verdicts, even those involving former communist officials, had to be supported by hard evidence. Article 5 of Law No. 187 was interpreted by many Christian Democrats to equate nomenklatura membership with collaboration—in other words, the very fact of occupying a Party leadership post meant that one had a more than casual connection to the political police. However, Oniºoru acknowledged
    Stan Moral Cleansing Romanian Style 57
    
    the council’s refusal to name informers without conclusive archival evidence. Second, Oniºoru said that what appeared to be final verdicts were just “preliminary,” since new evidence might yet surface in archives that the council had not consulted. Few critics accepted this. Third, Oniºoru implied that the Iliescu verdict had been based only on archival evidence, even though the law allowed, in cases where files were partially or completely missing, for the consideration of additional materials submitted by third parties. It had not have been possible to solicit such materials because the council lacked the time and money that would have been needed to collect, catalog, authenticate, and analyze them while concomitantly searching the archives for the files.
    
    Ashes to Ashes
    If those who wanted a moral cleansing had hoped that the council would reveal links between the Communist Party and the Securitate, the Iliescu case proved them wrong. Iliescu, and most probably other prominent communist leaders, had no Securitate file. As the council itself confirmed, hundreds of thousands of files relating to Party members employed by the Securitate had been destroyed at the Party’s request in the so-called Jarul (“ashes”) operation of 1969. Only a small fraction of the files had survived thanks to the negligence of certain Securitate officers, or perhaps by design. Wary that its links to the Securitate might become public, the Party had decided that none of its members should continue to work for the political police. The Information Service has repeatedly claimed that Party members followed this recommendation, but, quite to the contrary, Romanians interviewed in early 1999 admitted that, as Party members, they had drafted reports for the Securitate as late as 1989. Although the informer files of Party members might have gone missing, the information they contained was not irretrievably lost. According to historian Marius Oprea, by 1989 the Securitate’s Information and Documentation Center had computerized the names of 135,000 active informers.19 This easy-to-use databank could help reconstitute the identity of the informers and the nature of the reports they filed.20 Exiled Securitate officer Liviu Turcu claimed that by early 1989, the center had entered 1 million files in the computerized databank, and the rest were available both in microfiche and hardcopy.21 According to Oprea, when files were incinerated, their contents were summarized in memos that the Securitate stored separately. Moreover, the associations of Party members with the Securitate
    58 Problems of Post-Communism July/August 2002
    
    was recorded both by the Party and by the political police. Therefore, when Securitate records were damaged or lost, the names could be recovered by consulting Party records or Securitate incineration memos, provided that these could still be located. Another possibility would be to study the lists of “sources” submitted by Securitate officers as part of their annual performance reviews.22 Gabriel Andreescu contends that the most complete Securitate archive, located at Bran, a village in the southern Carpathians, includes microfiches of all political police documents, including those destroyed after 1989. He says that the council has yet to avail itself of this archive. The council did not explain the investigative methods it used in reaching verdicts, but press reports suggest that it did not explore these indirect sources. Oprea faulted the council for not adhering to the spirit of the law, which “stipulates clearly the reading of all available archives, including that of the Communist Party,” before reaching a verdict.23 The council, in response, claimed that the Party archive had not yet been catalogued, and thus its holdings were not readily available. In an effort to exonerate itself, the council pointed out that it did not have direct access to the Securitate archive. According to college member Claudiu Secaºiu, the council first manually searched the old card files listing the names of everyone with a Securitate file, whether informer or target. Once it selected those it wished to investigate, it submitted their names to the Information Service. In Secaºiu’s words “we look up the person’s name in the card system. If it does not come up, then the person is ‘clean.’ It is possible for the name to turn up in somebody else’s file and thus to come to realize that that person brought lots of damage to others. In that case we will publicly name him or her as a [Securitate] informer.”24 The Information Service would release any files held in Bucharest within a few days, and files stored in other localities usually arrived in several weeks. None of the college members publicly acknowledged the obvious problems associated with this procedure. They were assuming that the card system was complete and reliable even though it had been set up by the secret police. Since council personnel did not search the shelves personally, sensitive files not listed in the card system might be overlooked or stashed away. Nor was there any guarantee that the files the council received were complete, since only the Information Service knew the size and contents of each file. As a result, the investigations and the subsequent verdicts were questionable. Whether the council relied on the card system because
    
    of time and personnel constraints or because the Information Service refused to grant direct access to the files is uncertain. But if the latter, the council should have complained publicly, because its legislative mandate required direct access to the files.
    
    Ludovic Rakoczi: The Man Who Collaborated by Resisting
    For the November 2000 parliamentary elections, the council had to verify some 20,000 candidates from eighty-eight parties running for a total of 467 seats. In the end, it managed to verify only the 4,500 candidates considered likely to pass the 5 percent electoral threshold. One week before the vote, the college began to interview candidates suspected of past involvement with the Securitate, revealing that one-tenth of the verified names (i.e., around 450) had extant informer files.25 Three days before the election, on November 23, the council made public the names of thirty-eight former Securitate informers seeking parliamentary seats. Two of them had been Securitate officers, seventeen had drafted reports for the Securitate and were remunerated for their efforts, and nineteen others had collaborated in unspecified activities. This time, the council stated that its verdicts were based on the archives of the Ministry of Defense and the Information Service. Two-thirds of those named were candidates representing the unstable democratic coalition that ruled Romania from 1996 to 2000. Interestingly, the list included no prominent communist officials or sycophantic supporters of the Ceauºescu regime, but as many as seventeen communist-era political prisoners. Mircea Ionescu-Quintus (of the National Liberal Party) was the only leader of a major party.26 Among those listed was Ludovic Rakoczi, an incumbent deputy running again on the list of the Democratic Union of Magyars in Romania (UDMR), a broad coalition representing the interests of the 2-million-strong Transylvanian Hungarian minority. His name figured in the third category of Securitate collaborators whose involvement could not be proven with documents contained in the files. On December 7, a few days after the list was made public, Rakoczi petitioned the council for a chance to exonerate himself in an interview. Months later—and long after the election—the council officially responded to his petition. Gheorghe Onisoru, the president of the college, apologetically told the press that Rakoczi’s files indicated a “refusal to collaborate with the political police organs.”27 But by that time the damage was done. Together with four other UDMR
    
    politicians labeled as former Securitate informers, Rakoczi had been struck from the UDMR parliamentary list on grounds that representatives of the Hungarian community must be of impeccable moral and political background. Bowing to public pressure, he had resigned his post as teacher and principal of a remote Transylvanian village school because, in his own words, he “no longer had the moral basis for teaching children.” As if being unemployed were not enough, he and his family had been publicly ostracized, and his teenage daughter had repeatedly been harassed and humiliated by her high school teachers.28 Eager to clear his name, Rakoczi asked the college for a written statement exonerating him of any link to the Securitate, a reasonable request given the not-guilty answer to his petition. After a long wait and several trips to Bucharest, he eventually received the statement via the UDMR member of the college, Ladislau Csendes. When the council did not see fit to inform the press about its erroneous verdict, Rakoczi went public. Joining several council members on the popular Marius Tuca television talk show, Rakoczi explained the basis for his complaint. To begin, he said, the council had not given him a fair chance to tell his side of the story, even though Law No. 187 requires it to interview individuals with informer files before publicizing their involvement with the Securitate. Rakoczi had only learned about the verdict from press reports when it was already too late for him to do anything. The college claimed that it did not have enough time to interview every parliamentary candidate suspected of past collaboration, but it had not explained the criteria for selecting the names for interviews. The council’s representative on the program, Mihai Gheorghiu, reminded the audience that time was short because the list of informers had to be released before the election. But Rakoczi had a point, because countless other candidates, representing several political parties, all had opportunities to face the council before the list was published. Equally unconvincing was the council’s claim that it had tried to telephone Rakoczi, and that the legal stipulation he had invoked applied only to citizens inquiring about their own files, not investigations into a politician’s past. Thus the council was trying to claim that it was not required to interview candidates suspected of collaboration, thereby simplifying its mission at the expense of due process. While the article laying down the procedure for individuals appealing their own files does stipulate the need for interviews, the provision was clearly also intended to include cases where third parties launched investigations
    Stan Moral Cleansing Romanian Style 59
    
    of current and would-be state officials. The parliamentary debates preceding the adoption of the law support this interpretation, as do the council’s statutes. Interviews are, therefore, a requirement, not a discretionary favor the council grants to selected candidates. Rakoczi also complained that the delay in responding to his November 2000 petition was unpardonable. The law provides for a resolution within thirty days, but the official answer took two months. Constantin Berechet, the college’s secretary, who was also appearing on the talk show, replied that Rakoczi had been informed in a timely manner that the council had erred with respect to his past and had cleared him. Specifically, Berechet drew attention to a December 2000 interview with college member Ladislau Csendes in the Hungarian-language newspaper Kronika. But even if the council had made sure that Rakoczi read it, an interview could hardly qualify as an official answer. And even if, as Berechet pointed out, the council was not legally obliged to publicize verdict reversals, it was morally responsible for the way its decisions affected those identified as Securitate collaborators. As Oprea argued, “To say that ‘there was no time for appeals’ demonstrates irresponsibility on the part of an institution supposed to sustain the country’s moral rebirth.”29 Even more puzzling was the council’s casual attitude about the inconsistency between its first verdict and its later statement of exoneration. Rakoczi held that the very category under which his name was listed was a contradiction in terms, since one cannot be an informer without concrete proof of collaboration. If that was the case, the college should have branded all suspected individuals as Securitate collaborators, including communist officials like Iliescu. Moreover, the law provided for only two categories of individuals to be publicly identified (communist officials supervising the political police, and Securitate agents and informers), neither of which included individuals not proven to have engaged in activities specific to the political police, Rakoczi’s category. Thus, Rakoczi said, his name should not have been made public in the first place. Furthermore, he continued, in mid-1989 the Securitate had harassed him by twice searching his house and subsequently forcing him to sign three documents, including the collaboration pledge the college used as the basis of its verdict. But during the few months between his signing the pledge and the December revolution he had not provided any meaningful information to the Securitate. Adding to the confusion, months after the reversal the council’s president, Gheorghe Onisoru, continued
    60 Problems of Post-Communism July/August 2002
    
    to defend the initial verdict, saying that Rakoczi’s file as a Securitate informer did exist and that Rakoczi himself had admitted that the collaboration pledge in the file was authentic. The investigation had also turned up a written evaluation signed by an unnamed Securitate officer which mentioned that Rakoczi had given the secret police some valuable information. Despite these findings, Onisoru said, Rakoczi had not been listed as a Securitate informer because the council did not have “uncontestable proof” for his actions, as the folder with his reports on others could not be found. Onisoru summed up by saying that Rakoczi “had an informer file, and this is why we could not remain silent about his involvement with Securitate” but “[the college] could not label him an informer on the basis of the information we discovered.”30 Other college members echoed Onisoru’s position. Mircea Dinescu told the press that his colleagues should not have given Rakoczi the statement declaring him morally clean because the document contradicted this finding. Since Rakoczi had provided information to the political police, “he is neither an angel, nor a victim.” Around the same time, Ladislau Csendes, the very person who wrote and signed the not-guilty statement, declared that “Rakoczi was no victim of the witch-hunt for Securitate collaborators because his career was not thwarted: from village teacher he became a member of the Romanian Parliament.”31
    
    Conclusion
    To carry out its mission, the National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives must hand down well-researched verdicts based on as much information as possible, including archival and non-archival materials and personal interviews with suspected Securitate collaborators. Before publicly labeling someone as an informer it should clearly explain any limitations on the investigation. To fend off possible criticism, and be faithful to the spirit of the law, the council should list the archives it consulted and should identify, in general terms, the documents supporting a guilty verdict. More generally, it should clearly spell out, for its members if not for the public, the type of materials that would prove beyond any doubt a person’s involvement with the political police. And the council should realize that its verdicts, and its work in general, will be taken seriously only to the extent that it takes seriously the legal stipulations governing its activities, especially regarding the interview and appeal procedures. During its first year, the council undoubtedly worked under tremendous pressure to demonstrate the utility of
    
    its existence and justify the public money it spent. True, the late adoption of Law No. 187 delayed the appointment of college members. When the time came to launch the candidate verifications, the council had too few personnel, no office space, and no official access to the archive. But the many reversals, the careless and contradictory remarks made by many of its members, and the fundamental mistakes it could have easily avoided shed serious doubt about the council’s competency. The strategy of shifting the blame to the Information Service, the conservative political parties, the electoral candidates, the press, and even the general public, combined with the hasty excuses its leaders came up with every time their verdicts were questioned, denote an unexplainable lack of responsibility. The two cases detailed here were not the only ones to arouse criticism. Candidate Mircea Bleahu also complained about not being interviewed before his name was made public. Another candidate labeled a Securitate informer pointed out that he had a different middle name than the person designated by the council. When the Caras-Severin press published documents indicating that certain Social Democrat and Liberal candidates running in local elections had been associated with the secret police, the council refused to label them as Securitate informers, claiming that the documents were inconclusive. Similarly, it refused to name as an officer of the political police Ristea Priboi, the head of the parliamentary committee in charge of supervising the activity of the Information Service, on grounds that “the institutions housing the Securitate archives reported that [Priboi] did not engage in political police activities.”32 But as head of a Securitate service supervising dissident activities abroad during the 1980s, Priboi had ordered the monitoring and the physical assault of some Radio Free Europe collaborators. Two council employees pursuing advanced research degrees, Mircea Stanescu and Gabriel Catalan, were fired after divulging the intimidation they had been subjected to by unnamed persons both inside and outside the council. The college, however, refused to discuss the dismissal of Mircea Dinescu, a member who had openly supported a presidential candidate despite regulations barring college members from political activity. Some of the council’s problems stem from the legal framework governing its activities. The law lists several categories of Securitate agents and informers, failing to recognize that more often than not there was no clear-cut difference between informers and those informed upon. Furthermore, individual actions on behalf of the Securitate are difficult to categorize, and
    
    neither the law nor the council’s statutes distinguishes between actions in terms of the damage they caused their victims. As Gabriel Andreescu points out, “a measure of the council’s performance is its capacity to identify the presence of the ‘political police’ in those cases when [that presence] is not apparent.”33 Probably the most serious legal difficulty is the absence of clear guidelines regarding the type of written documents that could attest to collaboration. Does collaboration rest in the quantity or the quality of the information given to the political police? If both matter, is one more important than the other? Was a person who signed a pledge of allegiance a Securitate informer? In some cases such pledges were not followed by active involvement, while in others information was given to the political police even in the absence of a written pledge. Then was a person who periodically signed information reports a Securitate informer? Often these reports contained worthless information already in the public domain. What about someone who was praised by the secret police for the quality of his or her collaboration? An automatic guilty verdict in such cases would mean that the council was giving up its function as ultimate judge and deferring to evaluations made by the very political police whose evildoings it is supposed to undo. Even more important, can the archive be trusted? What guarantee is there that materials in the files are authentic and were not altered after the collapse of the Ceauºescu regime? Perhaps the greatest challenge facing transitional justice in Romania is the delay that occurred before the Securitate archive was transferred to the custody of an independent agency. Because of the delay, Romania was the only East European country where the destruction of political police files continued after the demise of communism. The verdicts handed down by the council seem more provisional than the agency is ready to admit. As the two cases detailed here suggest, neither a guilty nor a non-guilty verdict is ever definitive. Part of the blame rests with the elusory relationship between reality and recorded material. Archival verifications do not uncover an individual’s real involvement with Securitate, but only whether an archive heavily altered during the last decade lists him or her as an informer. Over the years, press reports have documented the buying and selling of files on the Bucharest black market, and the more or less skillful addition and subtraction of archival materials.34 But most of the blame rests with the council itself and the way in which it misunderstands its mission. Fearful of being unable to justify their expensive headquarters and lavish wages, the council’s leaders hurStan Moral Cleansing Romanian Style 61
    
    riedly published the results of incomplete investigations as definitive verdicts. Instead of erring on the side of caution and employing materials from a variety of sources, the council set a dangerous precedent of sloppy research and contradictory declarations, forgetting that any moral reform must start with the council itself.
    
    Notes
    1. See, for example, Daniel Nina, Learning from Experiences of the “Past”: Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in Latin America and the Situation in Eastern Europe (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1994). 2. Among the many articles that describe lustration, see Mark S. Ellis, “Purging the Past: The Current State of Lustration Laws in the Former Communist Bloc,” Law and Contemporary Problems 59, no. 4 (autumn 1996): 181–96; Maria Los, “Lustration and Truth Claims: Unfinished Revolutions in Central Europe,” Law and Social Inquiry: Journal of the American Bar Association 20, no. 1 (1995): 117–63; Herman Schwartz, “Lustration in Eastern Europe,” Parker School Journal of East European Law 1, no. 2 (1994): 141–71. 3. See Helga Welsh, “Dealing with the Communist Past: Central and East European Experiences After 1990,” Europe-Asia Studies 48, no. 3 (May 1996): 413–29; Vojtech Cepl and Mark Gillis, “Making Amends After Communism,” Journal of Democracy 7, no. 4 (October 1996): 118–24. 4. The explanations were proposed, in order, by Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); John P. Moran, “The Communist Torturers in Eastern Europe: Prosecute and Punish or Forgive and Forget?” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 27, no. 1 (March 1994): 95–109; and Nadya Nedelsky, “The East European ‘Torturer Problem’: Lustration in East Germany, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia,” University of Toronto, 1995. 5. The only exception is Roman Boed, “An Evaluation of the Legality and Efficacy of Lustration as a Tool of Transitional Justice,” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 37, no. 2 (1998): 357–402. 6. For more details, see Lavinia Stan, “Access to Securitate Files: The Trials and Tribulations of a Romanian Law,” East European Politics and Societies 16, no. 1 (2002). 7. Calls for lustration accompanied the December 1989 revolution and were first featured in the Timiºoara Proclamation, a text produced by a group of local intellectuals and supported by the Christian Democrats and Liberal Party and the Hungarian ethnic minority. Article 8 of the proclamation envisioned a temporary ban of former communist officials and secret police officers from post-communist politics. The proclamation was never picked up. 8. The phrase belongs to poet Ana Bladiana. 9. See also Gabriel Andreescu, “Legea 187/1999 si primul an de activitate a Consiliului National pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securitatii” (Law 187/1999 and the First Year of Activity of the National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives), Revista Romana de Drepturile Omului, no. 20 (2001): 38–56. 10. See Silviu Brucan, Generatia irosita: memorii (Wasted Generation) (Bucharest: Editurile Univers and Calistrat Hogas, 1992). The author would like to thank Gabriel Andreescu for this information. For historical details, see Denis Deletant, Ceauºescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965–1989 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995). 11. See Ticu Dumitrescu’s report in the newspaper Ziua (January 21, 2002). 12. The seats were divided as follows: the Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, and main government and opposition parties got three seats each; the Democratic Party, a junior ruling partner, got two; and the National Liberal Party, the Democratic Union of Magyars in Romania, and the Greater Romania Party, one each.
    
    13. See his report in Ziua (January 2002). 14. 22 (November 13–20, 1998). 15. See Monitorul Oficial al Romaniei (June 2, 2000). 16. An independent biography of Iliescu is yet to be published. For information on his political career and involvement in the December 1989 events, see his Revolutia traita (The Revolution as I Lived It) (Bucharest: Redactia Publicatiilor pentru Strainatate, 1995), Revolutie si reforma (Revolution and Reform) (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedica, 1994), and Momente de Istorie (Moments of History) (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedica, 1995). 17. The request was posted on the Christian Democrat Web site (www.pntcd.ro) and at the same time sent to the press. See also Curentul (November 21, 2000) and Cotidianul (November 19, 2000). 18. Onisoru’s statement was published by almost all the Romanian dailies, including Ziua (November 20, 2000) and Cotidianul (November 21, 2000). 19. Before 1976 the Securitate’s Information and Documentation Center was known as the Centrul de Triere, Dispecerat, Cercetare, Documentare si Arhiva. After 1990 it became part of the Information Service. 20. Article 10 of the Instructions on the Organization and Functioning of the Securitate Database (Interior Minister’s Order 1050 of May 25, 1977) states that the “alphabetically organized database was housed at the Information and Documentation Center at the national level and at the Interior Ministry Inspectorate at the county level. It includes data on the following categories of individuals: persons currently under surveillance or previously under investigation; current and former informers; individuals with reactionary political pasts; individuals found guilty in cases documented by the Securitate; individuals who were warned (by dismantling their support circle, by publicly denouncing them, by cutting short their visit to Romania, by labeling them personae non grata, etc.); Romanian citizens who went abroad for personal or business reasons and refused to return; citizens who crossed or tried to cross the border fraudulently; individuals who asked to emigrate or who asked to marry foreigners; foreign citizens living in Romania; and other persons of interest for the Securitate.” See also Romania Libera (December 10, 2001). 21. 22 (August 21–28, 1998). 22. Ibid. (November 13–20, 1998). 23. Cotidianul (November 24, 2000). 24. Adevarul (January 31, 2001). 25. Cotidianul (November 20, 2000); Romania Libera (November 20, 2000). 26. This list was later enlarged to include a total of sixty-seven names. See Stan, “Access to Securitate Files.” 27. Adevarul (February 12, 2001). 28. Ibid. 29. Cotidianul (November 24, 2000). 30. Evenimentul Zilei (February 13, 2001). 31. Ibid. 32. Ziua (February 13, 2001). 33. See Andreescu, “Legea 187/1999.” 34. The attempted destruction of seven tons of Securitate files occurred in June 1990, when former Securitate agent Nicolae Bordeianu arranged for the cargo’s abandonment in the forest. The files were soon found, however. They included information on individuals, secret correspondence and informative notes drafted before December 1989, religious pamphlets and mail confiscated by the political police, and various documents belonging to post-communist political parties and the Information Service. The military Procuratura and a special parliamentary committee began investigations but were unable to conclude them.
    
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    Problems of Post-Communism
    
    July/August 2002

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