Who is Bureš?
Eastern approaches 2014-07-03
Summary:
THE sun seems to have set on the so-called Czech lustration laws passed in the 1990s . After he won a lawsuit in a Slovak court on June 26th, the name of the finance minister, Andrej Babiš (pictured), will be removed from a list of collaborators with the communist secret police (StB).
The laws gained their name from the Czech word lustrace, which has roots in the Latin word lux (light). They were meant to keep high-level communists or secret-police collaborators away from top government posts in the years following the end of communism. Over time they fell by the wayside elsewhere in central Europe, but they remain on the books in the Czech Republic. Even so, they were simply ignored when Mr Babiš joined the government earlier this year.
Mr Babiš’s own StB file, along with many others, went missing long ago. The businessman-turned-politician is of Slovak origin, but has been based in Prague for decades. He sued the Nation’s Memory Institute (ÚPN) in Bratislava over his inclusion on a list of former communist StB collaborators. As an intriguing post-communist blur of circumstantial...Continue reading