Journalistic Investigations Center

About 250 thousand case files of victims of soviet political repressions continue to be secret in Moldova. Of these, about 170 thousand are kept in the special depositary of the Ministry of Interior (MI) and refers to the individuals who were deported, and the other 80 thousand are stored at the Information and Security Service (ISS). This statement was made by Mihai Taşcă, Dr. of Law, Secretary of the Commission for Studying the Totalitarian Communist Regime in Moldova, on Friday, 30 April 2010, at the debate of the Investigative Journalism Club. The debate was held on the topic “Rights of Deported to Rehabilitation and Recovery of Damages and Access of Victims of the Totalitarian Communist Regime to Their Own Case Files.”

The lawyer Alexandru Postică said that, at the first stage, it is necessary to have those files transmitted to the National Archives in order to make the access free to them, and later there should be created an institute to study the crimes of communism that would undertake them. “Many files are in deplorable situation. In addition, we noticed that, over the years, some of them have become thinner or have even destroyed. Therefore, it is necessary to implement a state program for restoring them and scanning them, so that to have them in digital format,” Mihai Taşcă said.

“The deported still do not have access to their own case files that are kept today in the MI and ISS archives. They invoke various reasons – either that such documents do not exist in the archives, or that the files were taken to Tiraspol, just to avoid giving them to us,” said Valentina Sturza, President of the Association of Deported of Moldova. She remembers that she got access to her family’s files only three years ago, after a lot of insistence, letters, and refusals. “I relived the entire nightmare. I was shocked to find out that my father had initially been sentenced to death and only later his sentence was changed to 14 years of imprisonment and ten years of exile. I urge all those who had to suffer from that criminal regime to ask for their right to see those files,” Valentina Sturza said.

“Some of those who were deported still do not know their rights. They are not benefitting from any special incentives. Therefore, it is necessary to implement social protection programs for those persons, at least to give them rights equal to the former participants in the Second World War,” the lawyer Alexadru Postică says, who represents many deported in court. The lawyer pleads for changing the current legislation with regard to recovering the nationalized properties. “The current provisions are not functional. The burden of paying the damages to the victims is put on the local governments who do not have the necessary budget means to do it. In the past years, money for this purpose has been provided only in the budgets of Chişinău and Bălţi,” the lawyer added. According to him, there are many cases pending before ECHR for failure to execute decisions on recovery of the properties of former deported, and so, Moldova risks finding itself in a wave of convictions.

According to Mihai Taşcă, the case files of political convicts are kept in the ISS special archivist depositary. As a rule, each of them has a criminal case based on which they were “tried” and convicted. The case files of those deported (1940-1941, 1949, 1951) are kept in the special depositary of MI. Certain information about the people subject to political repressions are kept in the National Archive.

“The ISS and MI are generally not open to provide information neither with regard to the structure of the archives they manage, nor about the number of those rehabilitated,” Taşcă said. According to the Secretary of the Commission for Studying and Assessing the Totalitarian Communist Regime in Moldova, the two institutions are obstructing the access to the case files kept in their special archives. “Those case files do not have a private character; they were prepared by a state agency, such as NKVD, and so, the state cannot impose the obligation that only the persons mentioned in them and their descendants should have access to them. They are public files to which every citizen should have access,” Mihai Taşcă adds. At present, if you want to see the case file of your parents, grandparents, great grandparents, you must prove that you are their descendant with all the birth certificates, marriage and death certificates.

According to some data, there are circa 100 thousand victims of deportations at present in Moldova. “The rehabilitation process is still continuing. Many individuals have not yet been rehabilitated. Certain documents were not preserved, others were destroyed, and the victims have to go to court to prove that they were subject to political repressions,” M. Taşcă affirms. According to the 1992 law on rehabilitation of victims of political repressions, MI is obliged to publish periodically the list of those subject to political repressions, or this has never happened in the 18 years that followed. The exact number of those who have been rehabilitated is not known yet. MI says that it has 33,590 case files of deports in its archives. A case file may contain information only about one person but usually they refer to entire families.

The debate of the Investigative Journalists Club was organized under the Journalists for Human Rights Campaign, supported by the US Embassy in Moldova, in cooperation with the project team of the “Desecretization of the Archive of the Moldovan ISS” Project, managed by the National Association of Young Historians of Moldova and supported by Soros Foundation Moldova (www.secretarhive.org).