Macedonia's Frckoski Attacks 'Political' Lustration Probe

Ljubomir Frckoski

The commission is apparently probing Frckoski's motives when he ordered police surveillance of several people during his time as Police Minister from 1992 to 1996 in the government of the now opposition leader Branko Crvenkovski.

“Their only goal is to discredit my public position and the influence that I have,” Frckoski said, noting that issuing surveillance orders was part of the job description of a police minister.

Frckoski is a columnist and a harsh critic of the cente-right government of Nikola Gruevski. He was runner-up in the 2009 presidential election in which he was backed by Crvenkovski’s Social Democrats.

The Frckoski case is the first in which the Lustration Commission has probed a senior police official. So far the commission has probed only suspected former police informants.

Some members of the commission have complained of a politically motivated witch hunt in the Frckoski case.

“People are being targeted and hurriedly pronounced as [police] informants or as givers of orders,” commission member Cedomir Damjanovski said on Tuesday.
 
However, the head of the commission, Tome Adziev maintained that their work was being conducted strictly according to the law.

Following the practice of many former Communist countries, Macedonia adopted a Lustration Law in 2008 aimed at rectifying injustices from the Communist era, when people were tried and jailed based on information from police informants.

However, many are concerned about its potential misuse. They fear the ruling VMRO-DPMNE party wishes to use it to discredit political opponents.

In March, the VMRO-DPMNE government passed another controversial amendment to the law, extending the scope of the hunt for former secret service spies to the period after the early 1990s, when Macedonia became a democracy.

The Constitutional Court has already struck out this provision from the law and the court is expected to rule again on the matter next month.

The law now targets not only high-ranking public office holders but also journalists, university professors, lawyers, clergy and NGO activists.

If the Lustration Commission rules that someone was a former police collaborator, he or she is obliged to resign from any publicly significant office.

The Commission has so far said it has uncovered around 20 former collaborators whose identity it is obliged to hide.

But some people named secretly as former collaborators have come out in public, claiming they were politically targeted.

The former head of the Constitutional Court, Trendafil Ivanovski, and the theatre director and head of the Open Society Institute Macedonia, Vladimir Milcin, were among those who said they had been named as former police spies.

Denying the claims, they accused the authorities of taking revenge on them for holding stands that were contrary to government policy.

Controversially, in late 2009, the commission said it had no jurisdiction to probe spy allegations against senior officials from the Democratic Union for Integration, an ethnic Albanian party that is part of the government.

The commission scrapped an intended probe into the DUI on the grounds that the alleged spy files that it had received were photocopies and thus invalid as evidence.