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Subject: Memorandum December 2005
Sender: Ljubo Sirc, Dr.
Contact: www.projusticia.net
Email
The article will also be published in a Collection of Dr Sirc's
articles by CRCE in 2006.
Security exposures of expanding NATO to nations with Communist heritage
Director of the Centre for Research into Post-Communist Economies, London, former Earhard Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow, Member of the Mont Pelerin Society and editor of the journal Communist Economies and Economic Transformation. (Fax: 441-41-357-4917).
Slovenia’s citizens should certainly be grateful to the United States Congress for its Concurrent Resolution 117. The membership of NATO, which the S. CON. RES 117 recommends, would be an honor and a benefit to Slovenia. Yet, to be really worthy participants, we Slovenians must warn Americans and other NATO nations of some of the dangers involved. It seems that Western politicians still do not fully grasp the dangers of Communist heritage.
Communism 2000
The essence of Communism was, and presumably remains, the denunciation of private property rights as the source of all evil. So, the Communists strove for a takeover in order to abolish such rights. This aim is deemed so important that the Communist doctrine requires its followers to use violence and deceit in the service of its implementation. Violence and deceit are no abstract tenets. They were used by the Communists all over the world with the result that one hundred million perished at their hands 1.
At least in Europe, they are not sufficiently strong at the moment to indulge in violence. But deceit is without much doubt practiced at present. This is the reason why it is so difficult to cope with the Communists: unless they have very clearly given up their Communist doctrine, one never knows whether their present views are just tactics or something more serious.
Maybe this duplicity of Communists has been of little importance after 1989 because their center in Moscow was in the hands of more or less normal people. But with the ascent of Vladimir Putin the center could be revitalized – if it has not been as yet. All of a sudden we may be confronted with a regrouped Communist movement.
The Western powers would therefore do well to be somewhat more careful in attributing excellent marks to the results of European extremists on the Left -- at least as careful as they are about the extreme Right. Otherwise, they could discover that their new military-political alliance has been infiltrated by Communist agents.
Under these circumstances, Western politicians should beware of mock friendliness of former Communist leaders and their lip service to democracy and human rights. They should also take into account that in the Communist double-speak, words often mean the opposite of what they mean for normal people. ”Democracy” is equal to the ”rule of the Party” and ”human rights” are ”what the Communist political police is protecting”.
It can no longer be ignored that some prominent Communist leaders occupy high positions in the new members and candidate-members of NATO.
Take Slovenia for example. The President of the Republic of Slovenia, Milan Kucan, is the last Secretary General of the Slovenian Communist Party (in Yugoslav Communist parlance: President of the Slovenia League of Communist). Foreign visitors find him a charming man. Yet, this charmer advocates to this day a Slovenia based on ”anti-fascism” -- his doublespeak for Communism -- and on the values of the national liberation struggle during the World War II, which the Yugoslav and Slovenian Communists used to disguise their revolution.
As early as in December 1941, the spontaneous national liberation struggle was transformed into a typical Soviet-run class revolution run by the Liberation Front. From then on, Communists terrorized their Liberation Front allies into giving up their separate political organization so that it would not compete with their Party. Anybody who wanted to fight Nazis had to do this under the Communist command. Those who disobeyed were attacked and murdered. Some Conservatives and Liberals were thus driven into collaboration with the Nazis, just to save their lives. Mostly in vain. For, in their revolutionary quest, Yugoslavian Communists killed hundreds of thousands of their own countrymen, while fighting Nazis on the side. 2
Slovenia’s President Kucan is too young to have participated in this Communist terror during and after the Second World War, but there is abundant evidence that to this day he approves of Communism and of its violent and deceptive tactics. His mentor was Stane Dolanc, a prominent political policeman and his best friends remain Colonel Ribicic and Professor Zdenko Rotar, both political policemen of the highest standing.
The author knows both well; they interrogated him when he was tried and sentenced to death for his pro-American and pro-British views in 1947. 3 In fact, Ribicic was the head of the so-called Second Department of the political police. Its task was to eradicate all friends of America and Britain in Slovenia. This aim was considered so worthy that Ribicic became Tito’s Vice President in the 1970’s. It must not be forgotten that the political police also systematically killed off the great majority of American and British-trained radio operators who were parachuted into Slovenia to help the partisans during the war.
President Milan Kucan is not just a figurehead of Slovenia. As the former Secretary General, he currently commands the loyalty of the remaining Communist old guard and of the former Communist Youth. They make up the membership of the two Communist successor parties: the United List of Social Democrats and the Liberal Democratic Party. Moreover, Kucan has enormous influence on the senior judges who were mostly appointed to the judiciary when such an appointment still required moral-political qualifications, i.e., blind devotion to the Communist party.
As a result, today, ten years after democracy allegedly returned, Slovenia is far away from the rule of law. The evidence is abundant. For example, the courts have denied restitution of property to many whose property was seized by the Communists, claiming that such restitution would ruin the country’s finances. This is a nonsense, because two thirds of all Slovenia’s capital remains under the control of the State and Government agencies.
During the last nine years, Slovenia’s former Communists had prevented restitution of most of the confiscated private property which should have been returned according to the 1991 Law of Denationalization. To date, the communist-appointed judges and administrators have done their best to sabotage this Law, fearing that such restitution threatens firm entrenchment in power of the Left wing parties.
In fact, Slovenia’s Communists vociferously deny that ownership of property is a human right – an opinion clearly echoed by Slovenia's current deputy ombudsman, proposed for this post by the President Kucan.
Nevertheless, a small crack in this stranglehold occurred in June, 2000. Three parties, composed of non-Communist members, managed to form a new government with a tenuous majority of two votes in the Parliament. Confronting the fledgling government is the very resourceful President Kucan, an array of Communist managers and administrators and a majority of communist-appointed judiciary, not to mention the financial resources plundered and accumulated over the last fifty years.
Some Rule of Law
The thinking of Slovenia’s judges may best be exemplified by the view of Bostjan Zupancic, the Slovenian judge at the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights. In May 1999, he was reported to say that ”there is a deep chasm in the European Court of Human Rights between Western and Eastern thinking, especially as a sizeable part of the former is still caught in the bourgeois legal mentality”.
After this offending statement had been drawn to the attention of the Swiss President of the Court, judge Zupancic succeeded in explaining it away. He reiterated a similar view in an article in the Supplement to DELO of 3 January 2000. There he declared that all values have been rendered valueless.
Western law, which he calls ”neo-liberalism” literally embodies ”the yuppie values of selfishness, ruthlessness and rapacity”? . These are the summarized conclusions of judge Zupancic: ? in opposition, socialism as ideology and also in practice was at least nominally in pursuit of solidarity and altruistic. Under transition, the populations of Eastern Europe find the change to selfish values to be regressive, so that the feeling is becoming ever stronger that there are no values.
Here is a man who aims at socialism through nihilism, put forward by President Kucan to represent Slovenia at the European Court of Human Rights. Can such views at the top lead to the rule of law and economic progress in Slovenia?
In this atmosphere, the Association of Slovenian Judiciary invited two American judges to visit Slovenia: the Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and the Federal Court Judge Richard M. Stearns. The conclusion of their meeting was that the aim should be ”universality of diversity” which means that the ”autonomy of a judge is limited by laws and the political and cultural tradition of the environment.”
There cannot be any doubt that for Slovenia’s judges the tradition of the last fifty years is that ”law is what suits the Communist Party”. Was it not the whole purpose of the upheaval of 1989 to get away from this kind of lawlessness?
The newspaper DELO of 5 July, 2000 pictures Judge Kennedy cordially shaking the hand of Mrs. Lavtizar-Beber, the main opponent of the restitution of property to victims of Communism. She was one of the architects of the retroactive changes to the Denationalization Law made in 1998. In Slovenia, Judge Kennedy’s cordiality will be seen as approval of the refusal by the judiciary to honor the Denationalization Law passed by the Parliament as well as negation of private property ownership as a human right.
Under such auspices, Slovenia will have to wait a long time to achieve rule of law, certainly a prerequisite for a membership in NATO.
Follow the Money
Recent glorification of a great economic progress in Slovenia by the international press displays their economic ignorance, political inclination to the left, bad knowledge of history and even some amnesia. Some corrections are in order.
The fact that Slovenia has the highest per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in Central and Eastern Europe is no great achievement. It is to a large extent due to the capitalist – entrepreneurial development between 1918 and 1940 which lifted the GDP per head of Slovenia from 60% of the Austria’s GDP, to over 80%. During the second half of the 20th century, the proverbial Communist-mismanaged economy slowed down the GDP of Slovenia so that wages in Slovenia now amount only to about 40% of Austrian wages.
It is primarily due to this decline that Slovenia, along with other Central and East European countries, can now glory in substantial growth rates. The press should only read their own reports on East Germany when it was growing at such a rate that many considered it to have overtaken West Germany. Now we all know that after the Wall came down it revealed East Germany as a miserable country which paid no attention to the functioning of enterprises, their productivity and value added, which was far below that of the Western Germany.
From 1941 to the end of the 20th century, the objectives of Nazis, Communists and their heirs were identical: to destroy Slovenia’s entrepreneurs. So far, they succeeded. To this day, Slovenia badly needs some new entrepreneurial initiatives financed by domestic private capital, of which there is virtually none. That is why the restitution of property to the prewar entrepreneurial families could be very important. It could help establishing smaller enterprises which are now so badly lacking. Their reappearance could give the decisive push to Slovenian economy. 4
This problem was supposed to be fixed in 1991 with the Act of Denationalization. This Act would return about four billion dollars worth of nationalized capital into private hands, from where it could serve as venture capital. Nothing even close to this actually happened. Over the last nine years less than half of these capital has been returned, mostly in carefully selected non-performing assets.
The usual excuse of Slovenian authorities for refusing the restitution of property is that most owners collaborated with the Nazis. This is patently not true, but an invention of communist propaganda. To add insult to injury, the worst treatment is meted out to those persecuted first by the Nazis and then by the Communists, i. e., to sympathizers of the Western Allies. People, whose property was confiscated by the Germans and destroyed, are told that this is war damage and nothing can be done about it.
This is a blatant lie. The Austrian State Treaty in 1955 handed over to Slovenia and Yugoslavia all Austrian property in its territory as compensation for war damage. But this compensation was then simply appropriated by the State, viz. the Communist Party, and the Communists are concealing this fact because they do not want to disgorge what they have taken for themselves.
But this is just one example of across-the-board plunder. Most of the private wealth in Slovenia today has been ”inherited” by the heirs of former Communist rulers either directly or through management of government-owned industries such as banks, insurance, and media. These ”heirs” have neither interest to invest nor understanding of how venture capital works. The situation is not exclusive to Slovenia. Such a lack of private capital remains all over Central and Eastern Europe simply because their new democratic systems of government have been unable to wean themselves from the state-dominated economies with socialist tendencies. Very few new enterprises and even fewer new jobs will be created this way.
A break through the permafrost of socialism may have happened on June of this year in Slovenia. It deserves solid support and careful nurturing by the Western Powers. Slovenia is likely to prosper under this center-right coalition government, because it firmly believes in private property rights. If the new government survives assaults from the Left, odds are high that it will lead to Slovenia’s genuine economic success and become a model stimulating the rest of Central and Eastern Europe to follow.
To Protectors of Freedom - a Word of Caution
We Slovenians must be grateful to the United States Congress for the Concurrent Resolution 117. But at the same time we must warn Americans that their kindness and generosity to share defense secrets could provide now-dormant Communism with the second chance. If the Western Powers believe that bad Communists have become good Democrats, they may awaken in some years to find a strong Communist movement in place.
Let us not forget the advice of Resolution 1096 of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, stating in its article 11:” Concerning the treatment of persons who did not commit any crimes that can be prosecuted in accordance with paragraph 7, but who nevertheless held high positions in the former totalitarian communist regimes and supported, them, the Assembly notes that some states have found it necessary to introduce administrative measures, such as Lustration or decommunization laws. The aim of these measures is to exclude persons from exercising governmental power if they cannot be trusted to exercise it in compliance with democratic principles, as they have shown no commitment to or belief in them in the past and have no interest or motivation to make the transition to them now.” 5
The faint-hearted in authority in the United States and its allies have in some instances claimed that they must not interfere in internal affairs of ex-Communist countries or take sides, in other words, that there is no choice between Communists and their victims. This attitude shows a touching innocence but also some forgetfulness: the equally totalitarian Nazis were not treated with such circumspection and neither are, at this very moment, the Austrian rightists.
The NATO countries are not just passing judgement on Central and Eastern European countries. They are selecting their new military allies at a time when there is a revival of political secret police and some sort of Communism in Russia. In this, NATO should not forget that it is dangerous to trust former Communists whose credo included murder and deception as political means, to say nothing about Lenin’s need for ”useful idiots”.
Since nobody can be certain that they are not just lying low until the time is ripe, it would be wise for NATO to wait until the former Communists, such as President Kucan, are elected out of their high offices.
1 The Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press, 1999
2 The total WW2 casualties among the Yugoslavian population were about one million, or 6 % of its citizens. Most were ideology inspired murders: about 300,000 were killed by the Nazi-sponsored Croat Ustasha, another 300,000 by the Communists and about 300,000 fell in combat or were murdered by the occupation forces.
3 Ljubo Sirc: Between HITLER and TITO, Deutsch Publishing, London 1989
4 Ljubo Sirc: Communist Economics Plague The Balkans, The Wall Street Journal, July 13, 1999, see: www.prah.net
5 The 1096 Resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, see: www.prah.net
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