Stop the Lustration NOW!

By David Edenden

Macedonia needs a "peace and reconciliation" process using the South African model rather than the current witch hunt model. Lustration only serves to divide ethnic Macedonians at a crucial time when we need unity.

Stop Lustration now!

Macedonia makes progress on lustration (SETimes.com):
10/08/2011"

The latest uncovered spy for the once dreaded Yugoslav secret police is the Open Society Institute director Vladimir Milchin.

By Misko Taleski for Southeast European Times in Skopje -- 10/08/11

Lustration Commission President Tome Adziev. [Courtesy of the Lustration Commission of Macedonia]

Macedonia advanced the lustration process by announcing the file of a third person who freely collaborated with the Yugoslav secret police in the 1970s and 1980s.

Initially the Lustration Commission did not offer any personal details about the informant except the file name "dramaturg" (theatre director).

However, recognising himself in the file, theatre director Vladimir Milchin -- better known as the director of George Soros' Open Society Institute -- hastily organised a press conference proclaiming himself a victim, not a collaborator.

"In a political lynching, the procedures, law, democracy, even the people suffer. My dignity is not protected because I have been labeled [guilty] before obtaining confirmation about the file," Milchin said.

He also insisted that procedural rules had been violated, given his request in 2000 to keep the file secret until 2047. The then government granted his request.

"The request ... concerns protection of his secrecy in relation to the public, not the institutions which are required to act according to the law. In fact, he introduced himself to the public at the press conference, while we consistently protected that person's identity," Lustration Commission President Tome Adziev told SETimes.

He said that given the sensitivity of the subject matter, the commission is particularly keen to follow all laws and procedures. "Not a single case is politically motivated or instrumentalised. If we make a mistake somewhere, the courts are here to correct us," Adziev said.

Furthermore, the Commission determined that Milchin's claim is untrue. His 217-page file contains information he supplied to secret police operatives. They classified him as having "anarchist-liberal views" which, like other such informants, provided fertile ground for spying on dissidents such as actor Risto Shishkov.

Political analyst Biljana Vankovska welcomed the lustration of Milchin and explained it is not a punitive but preventative measure. However, she also argued the case serves more to counter the negative public reactions stemming from the recent amnesty given to four Albanian war crimes suspects.

"It clearly has to do with defocusing [public attention], having in mind that Milchin had created much antipathy on the part of the public," Vankovska told SETimes.

She is referring to Milchin allegedly financing his political party's campaigns with Soros foundation money, as well as the activities of A1 TV owner Velija Ramkovski, for which he is criminally charged.

Journalist Sashe Ivanovski says society at large supports the continuation of the lustration, which it views as a positive and necessary process that is pre-emptive in nature.

"Macedonians were sent by the hundreds to infamous gulags like Goli Otok because of their stated national and political ideals, and their families' accumulated hurt and anger are understandable. Only by continuing to conduct the lustration correctly will we cleanse society of those [structures] that poison it," Ivanovski told SETimes.

Adziev explained that by law, anyone who holds a public function must submit a written, notarised statement that they had not collaborated with the former secret services. The law stipulates a three-year jail sentence for a false claim.

Like Milchin, the previously uncovered spy and constitutional court president Trandafil Ivanovski also denied being a collaborator. Ivanovski, however, announced he will appeal his case at the Human Rights Court in Strasbourg.

This content was commissioned for SETimes.com.

"Lustration in the Western Balkans"

By David Edenden

This organization, which is funded by the usual suspects, is an example of how Nato/EU subverts peace in the Balkans. The "lustration" process is designed to throw light on the communist past, but this organization excludes Slovenia and Bulgaria. With the exclusion of Bulgaria, no need to talk about the repression of Macedonian ethnicity. Also, lets not talk about Nato and EU member Greece. If there ever was a country that needs a "lustration" process, its Greece, regarding its Macedonian minority. Can't do tht because it might upset the "Greek Issues Caucus" Macedonians should not play ball with these vampires because it only serves to divide us ... it's a plot, I tell ya!

Lustration in the Western Balkans:

"The “Disclosing hidden history: Lustration in the Western Balkans” project will create a regional network of NGOs with the purpose of strengthening good governance, the rule of law, and the participation of civil society in the democratic process, via regional and local activities. Specifically, this project aims to enhance lustration legislation and practices and to extend citizen participation in the public debate on the past in the Western Balkans."

More on "Lustration"

This is Grozdan Popov's analysis on the lustration law in Macedonian which i discussed here. I did not know that it was unconstitutional in the EU, but it shows how the EU is willing to promote anti-democratic laws for their own self interest. It reminds me of the pressure on Macedonia to re-do its census with rules that would not be acceptable to other EU countries, including France.


Of Ideas and People: February 2007:
Lustration Laws in Europe are Unconstitutional: Why Macedonia Wants One?
Sunday, February 18, 2007


The other day the Macedonian parliament passed the initiative to open up (urgent) legislative work that will result for the first ever Lustration Law of the small Balkan state. Since the poor country had been under concentrated and daily growing pressure by all sort of domestic and international thugs - I was shocked with the news. I though that my people have lost all orientation and that Barosso should better summon this guy Olli Rehn and warn him that he scared the Macedonian government out of its wits.

I have a feeling that the aspiring candidate-member countries are squeezed into submission and faced with some rather ugly and totally arbitrary choices. Thus - the Lustration Law. (Here: the Speaker of the house tries to bring some order in the Parliament -Sobranie- in Skopje)

A Communist Under Every Bed

This article is one of the many reasons that I view the IWPR as an agent of destabilization. Macedonian needs a "truth and reconciliation commission" along the lines of what happened in South Africa. This will bring people together. We don't need a which hunt with people accusing each other for political gain. This will tear them apart.That, I fear, is the objective of the IWPR!
Wikipedia - Lustration is historically the term for various ancient Greeks and Roman purification rituals.
In the period after the fall of the various European Communist states in 1989–1991, the term came to refer to the policy of limiting participation of former communists, and especially informants of the communist secret police, in the successor governments or even in civil service positions.

New Lustration Process Won't Cure Macedonia's Ills:
In Weeding out low-level informers to the old secret services and not their bosses is neither just nor useful.

By Iso Rusi in Skopje (Balkan Insight, Jan 26 07)

This week Macedonia is making an attempt to weed out former security service informers from public life with a draft law imposing new conditions on those applying for office.

Deputies say the old secret police structures have had a devastating effect on the country's recent life, contributing to the many failures of the transition process, including increased poverty, criminal privatisation processes and stunted political pluralism.

While deputies blame these problems on the remaining elements of the former communist system - low level 'snitches' - there is no word about the responsibility of those who ideologically mobilised and organised them and used their data for investigations, beatings, psychological maltreatment.

These people are all missing from this proposal law, which means in effect that they will be amnestied. It gives rise to suspicions that real lustration in Macedonia will in fact be impossible, as it would be carried out by the same people who ought to be its object.

There is a risk that other categories will never be fully uncovered, because"