Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Communists forged his file, Belka says

Insisting he is innocent of ever collaborating with the communist secret police, Prime Minister Marek Belka says that the chekists themselves forged the material in his 70-page file.

"The file the media is talking about isn’t mine, its full of documents fabricated by the communist secret service," Radio Polonia reports him as saying. "In legal terms, the whole matter makes a mockery of the law and my vetting case is closed."

The issue is a tricky one for all involved. The Communists were notorious for writing exaggerated and completely false reports in individuals' files, and many people across the former Soviet empire of Central and Eastern Europe were falsely accused when their files were made public.

For well over a decade, Polish politicians - especially the former communists - fought the creation of a lustration process that would handle the secret police archives in a legal and confidential manner, while screening out certain categories of collaborators with the former Soviet-controlled regime.