Saygun Gokariksel
"Is there a limit to “the power to know”? Lustration Effects in Post socialist Poland"
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Abstract
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This project examines the political and judicial uses of the security files compiled by the communist security apparatus (SB) in Poland. Specifically, it analyzes the form of power that operates through the judicial process called lustration, a screening law which uses these files to ban former (communist) secret police agents and collaborators from holding public office. Since its initiation, the lustration law has been raising contentious questions concerning its legal foundations and implications for the rule-of-law democracy, human rights, and social order. The law requires state employees – politicians, professors, judges, journalists, as well as tax counselors – to file declarations stating whether or not they collaborated with the SB between 1944 and 1990. Those who refuse, or give false information could be banned from practicing their professions for ten years. As for those who confess their collaboration, there is no formal punishment prescribed but their “identity” is publicly disclosed. This project, through archival and ethnographic research at the Institute of National Remembrance, investigates the present conditions (legal, economic, and political) under which lustration operates. By observing the court proceedings my research attempts to understand how lustration articulates the concepts of the public and private, and responsibility in conjunction with state sovereignty and security; how lustration, through this confessional technique, affects the sense of selfhood, collectivity and social justice in Poland. With these emphases, this project departs from the widespread approaches that conceive lustration either as merely a legal procedure, or as simply an instrument employed by politicians against their opponents.
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