UNMIK On-Air
Lustration in Western
Balkans
SLUG:
The Center for Democratization and Reconciliation in Southeast Europe launched
a project that aims to enhance lustration legislation and practices. Their hope
is to extend citizen participation in the public debate concerning the recent
history in the Western Balkans.
Hello and welcome. This is UNMIK On-Air
Brutal
wars in the Balkans that lasted for more than a decade through the 1990’s
invariably tainted personal perceptions of suffering for those living in Former
Yugoslavia.
For
those who have lived through such conflict, perceiving what has been done to
others in an objective fashion is often a difficult task.
With
this in mind, an international non-governmental organization based in
Thessalonica, Greece, the “Center for Democratization and Reconciliation in
South-east Europe” or CDRSE, launched a project with other participating NGO’s
named “Disclosing hidden history:
Lustration in the Western Balkans.”
One
of the partner NGO’S in the project is the Belgrade-based “Center for Anti-war
Actions.” CAC Director, Alexander Resanovic explains his approach towards
lustration.
Alander
Resanovic: “The aim of this project is to gather countries of Western
Balkans, Serbia and Montenegro, Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Albania and Greece as the country that leads the project, in order to
reconsider their common past and to see if there is some possibility to
identify bad moments from the past and to overcome them. We don’t have some big
ambitions in the sense of reconciliation; we don’t see lustration as
reconciliation but as a process of overcoming bad things in the past.”
Lustration
is a legal process that authorizes government actions ranging from gathering
information to investigating and disqualifying from office those most complicit
with the wrongs committed by past regimes.
In Central and
Eastern Europe it implies the purification of state organizations from their
sins under their former communist regimes.
In an exclusive interview with UNMIK on Air, Corinna
Noack-Aetopulos, Project Coordinator with the CDRSE, notes that so far there was no real lustration
process in the Western Balkans.
C.
Noack-Aetopulos: “There will be research undertaken on lustration procedures,
which have been conducted already. It’s like what has been done already, what
will be the next steps in the future, what can we learn from lustration, which
has been a tradition in Central Europe and even in Germany. So it is a
comparative study of lustration procedures in Europe and what can we learn from
that for the western Balkans.”
Project
‘Lustration in Western Balkans” is divided in three seminars. The first one
emphasized facing the past and was held a week ago in Belgrade.
How does one
establish the truth in a region where myths are so prevalent?
Alexander
Resanovic of the Center for Anti-war Actions:
A.
Resanovic: We are witnessing that in our environment every ten or twenty
years the truth is being changed by the transience of political regimes and
elites. (edit to) In human nature one wants to ignore troubles rather then face
them. That’s why people - especially politicians – escape by tending to the
things that are simple and calm. (edit to) But history teaches us that the facts
and the crimes that were, for example, committed during WWII and that were put
under the carpet, in 90-ies they erupted in much worse form and brought to well
known problems. No matter how the true is unpleasant in some way we have to
face it, we have to face with evil that was committed also by our people and
also from neighboring countries. We have to reach some consensus on it. That is
unpleasant process that is supposed to bring first to individual responsibility
of those who committed crimes in the past.”
With the
establishment of the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia in
1993, the United Nations sped up the possibility for the lustration process in
the Balkans.
However,
Balkan analysts attest to the fact that this Court is still facing a lack of
cooperation from Western Balkan countries.
Unsolved and
unfinished political and transitional processes are vivid in Kosovo, whose
international status as a province is still open.
Lulzim Mjeku,
the Director of The Human Right Center of Prishtina University, thinks that in
Kosovo there is still no political will and support for lustration:
Lulzim Mjeku: “From
the year that the tribunal was established in 1993 it was an obstacle for peace
and stability in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the region. This can be
explained by simple example, THOSE who were leading the war in Bosnia and in
Kosovo, THEY at the same time should be the ones who should sign peace
treaties. If THE international community wants to achieve peace in one region
it cannot in one way have a diplomatic approach, and in other hand to show the
sword of justice and to say to the same actor that did crimes if you sign
peace… tomorrow you are going to be chased by Hague Tribunal.”
As Mjeku says
the peace has been achieved in the Balkans, but establishing stability and rule
of law will take much more time.
The CDRSE
conference is just one of the lobbying projects, helped by EU and USAID, that
is helping to foster democracy and rule of law - necessary things for the
Balkan countries to finish the lustration process and finally to become a part
of euro-Atlantic integration.
That is all for this edition for UNMIK On-Air. Thanks for listening and stay tuned.