ROMANIA: Eugen Uricaru does not deny he was an informer, but the files contain the names of innocent people too, writes Daniel McLaughlin in Budapest
The head of Romania's prestigious Writers' Union has become the latest prominent Central European figure to be ruined by evidence from recently opened files that suggests he collaborated with the hated communist-era secret police.
Eugen Uricaru (58) said he would give up the leadership of Romania's leading literary organisation after former dissident Doinea Cornea accused him of informing on both her and Nicolae Steinhardt, a writer who was jailed by the communists.
Ms Cornea (75), an outspoken critic of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, was put under house arrest by his regime, which collapsed in 1989. Fr Steinhardt, a Jew who became a Christian Orthodox monk, was seen as one of Romania's holiest men and best writers, and his books were censored by the communists. He died in 1989.
Ms Cornea says she received documents in March about Mr Uricaru from the council that publishes the files of the dreaded Securitate, the Romanian secret police believed to have had about 700,000 informers on its books, and former members of which are thought to still hold powerful posts in the country's establishment.
According to Ms Cornea, she urged Mr Uricaru to step down and admit his past and only went public when he failed to respond.
Mr Uricaru has softened his vehement initial rejection of the accusations, saying over the weekend that he had never signed a formal pledge to collaborate with the Securitate; he did not appear to directly deny claims he had been an informer.
President Traian Basescu, who hopes to lead Romania into the European Union in 2007, has insisted on far greater transparency in dealing with the Securitate files than was shown by his predecessor, a former communist who helped topple Ceausescu.
Mr Basescu wants judges and top magistrates to be checked for collaboration with the Securitate and for all its files to be opened, a task that should prove easier now the intelligence service is being forced to hand over the dossiers to civilian control.
The old Eastern Bloc has long debated how best to deal with its murky past.
The Czech Republic threw open most of its files without investigating their veracity, with the result that perhaps thousands of people lost their jobs simply because their names appeared somewhere in the archive.
The files of East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, were also opened to victims, historians and journalists, and a number of politicians and public figures were ruined.
In Hungary, all public officials are screened for a security service past and parliament has pledged to grant the public wider access to files which, in 2002, revealed that former prime minister Peter Medgyessy had been an agent in the 1970s and 1980s.
Slovakia opened the last batch of its files earlier this year, and its three most senior prelates were accused of collaboration. One, Archbishop Jan Sokol, a prominent critic of communism, is now planning to sue to clear his name.
Lithuania has been rapt by an inquiry into how the foreign minister, intelligence chief and deputy speaker of parliament all allegedly became KGB reservists.
It is in Poland, however, that the dossiers have caused the greatest convulsion.
Earlier this year, journalist Bronislaw Wildstein tapped into Poland's fascination with its secret police files - and impatience at the speed at which they are being opened - by copying some 240,000 names from documents kept at the national archive and posting them on the internet.
That followed the resignation of parliamentary speaker Jozef Oleksy for lying about his role as a Soviet-era agent, and the bombshell that Malgorzata Niezabitowska, a prominent Solidarity activist and spokeswoman for Poland's first post-communist government, had informed on her pro-democracy colleagues.
Ms Niezabitowska denies the allegation and says her predicament exemplifies the danger of opening the files without investigating the veracity of each one.
Last month, as Poland was still reeling from the death of Pope John Paul, the archive that keeps its communist-era files accused Fr Konrad Hejmo, a long-serving Polish priest at the Vatican, of informing on the pontiff.
Fr Hejmo has been suspended by his Dominican superiors for passing Vatican news to a man whom he believed was a pilgrim but may actually have been working for the East German secret police, at a time when John Paul was seen as the moral guide and inspiration for Poland's anti-communist movement.
"He wasn't a real collaborator. He was not a spy or a secret agent. He provided information and became dangerous because he gave too much concrete news too openly," said Fr Maciej Zieba, head of the Dominican Order in Poland.
Urging calm, he added: "Even if we are angry with him, we have to remember he is our brother."