The Reluctant Unlocking of Serbia's Secret Past

Dictatorships have a tendency to collect a great deal of information on their citizens. Serbia was no exception. After 40 years of Communism and 13 years of totalitarian rule under Slobodan Milosevic, the country's secret police had accumulated hundreds of thousands of files bulging with information it had acquired by spying on its own populace.

Shortly after Slobodan Milosevic was ousted in October 2000, the new government promised Serbs they would have unlimited access to files that were kept on them. Granting access would be a necessary step, according to officials, towards coming to terms with the country's past. At the same time, they said it would expose those who had spied for the secret service or supported Milosevic. But almost three years later, that promise has still not been kept.

"On October 5th, perhaps a little before or a little after, there was an agreement worked out between representatives of the Milosevic regime and the Democratic Opposition of Serbia," said Dusan Janjic, coordinator with the Forum for Ethnic Relations, a Belgrade-based nongovernmental organization. "The result of which was that institutions continued to employ people, whose past and whose own files weren't exactly clean. They're the ones who have a problem with allowing people access to the police files."

He is convinced that the decision to only allow interested parties access to parts of their files that didn't contain the names of informants, was done at the behest of leading officials, who didn't want their past involvement with the Serbian secret services brought to light.

Serbian paranoia

Politicians from the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) have admitted that there were indeed conversations between Milosevic supporters in paramilitary groups and the police at the time of the dictator's fall. But they defend them as a necessary evil, as the only way to prevent civil war in the Balkan country.

Zarko Korac, deputy prime minister of Serbia, rejects criticism of DOS policy regarding the files. He said it is a particular Balkan characteristic to put stock in conspiracy theories and to tend toward paranoia.

"Everyone thinks there has been a secret service file opened on him," he said.

He said that such a voluminous number of files was never found after Milosevic was driven from power, although he adds that during the days immediately following the overthrow, the new DOS government was not able to monitor all secret police activity.

"It's possible that a large number of files were destroyed from October 5th to the 8th, and we think that did happen," he said. "But as for suspicions that the files on leading politicians of today were also destroyed at the time, we need proof or at least some kind of evidence for that. We don't have any."

High-level resistance

There are many who think such proof will never come to light, because leading figures in the DOS government don't want it to.

"The people who are resisting publication of the files are people in the ranks of the police, the justice department and the secret services," said Bogoljub Milosavljevic with the Center for Anti-War Action. "They know that if the files were opened, others would be able to see that these leading figures have violated human rights at some time or another."

The investigation following the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic (photo) in March of this year showed that Milosevic had placed his followers in almost all state-run organizations and that many of those people stayed in key positions even after the dictator was driven from power.

Making it legal

Milosavljevic's group, along with the Democratic Christian Party of Serbia (DHSS), have written a bill that would overhaul the rules around secret police file access. The proposed law would establish a special national agency to open the files kept by the state security and by other state services which existed prior to it.

According to DHSS leader and Minister of Justice Vladan Batic, the law would define the procedure for individuals to gain access to their own files, as well as for specific cases involving third parties. The police files would be uncensored and would include the names of informants. Experts and politicians have largely agreed in principle to complete the disclosure and Batic has presented the bill to parliament.

NGOs are claiming victory. Biljana Kovacevic-Vuco, head of the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights, is convinced that this is an important step towards the normalization of Serbian society.

"The disclosure of [secret service] files is the first step a state has to make if it wants to come to terms with darker parts of its past. Now the possibility for us to look our own past in the face is sitting there right in front of us," she said.