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Panelists describe many paths to transitional justice

Different countries have different focuses when it comes to achieving transitional justice, panelists from Lithuania, Hungary and Taiwan said in Taipei yesterday.

Former government officials and academics from countries previously under authoritarian regimes were invited to take part in an international conference on transitional justice organized by Taiwan Thinktank yesterday.

In Lithuania, first occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II and then by the Soviet Union after the war, the No.1 issue of concern for its citizens was the restitution of property, Algimantas Prazauskas, an Asian studies professor at Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania, told the conference.

"Many lands were confiscated by the government during the Soviet era," said Prazauskas, explaining one of the origins of the property issue. "Then there were also Jewish communal lands left by Jews who fled Nazi persecution during World War II."

Although some land has been restored to its prior owners, controversies still exist, he said.

"Different local and international Jewish organizations claim to be the sole successors of former Jewish communal property," he said.

The Lithuanian government also set up committees to investigate crimes committed during Nazi and communist rules, Prazauskas said.

As many as 123,000 Lithuanians were deported to Siberia, Russia, while 21,000 were executed for anticommunist activities under the communist regime, he said.

Krisztin Ungvary, an adviser for the Hungarian Ministry for Culture and Eduction, said that thanks to self-imposed reforms, the authoritarian Hungarian Socialist Workers' and Peasants' Party (HSWP) was able to avoid committing large-scale abuse.

"The party leadership recognized quite early the advantages of a free market economy and therefore -- not without furthering its [own] interests -- worked for economic transformation," Ungvary said.

Facing tremendous pressure to publicize its party assets and dissolve party organizations, as well as demands for parliamentary elections and the election of a new president by the new parliament, the HSWP dissolved in 1989 and founded the Hungarian Socialist Party (HSP), he said.

"The HSWP or [the] HSP and their affiliated organizations actually got off rather lightly from the checks [into] their assets as prescribed by ... the new act on political parties," Ungvary said. "The old political system was completely dismantled, there was also social change in everyday political life. The least changes, however, took place within the elite of the economy."

Comparing each country's experiences, the panelist said that the media can play a key role in achieving transitional justice.

"The media exposed cases of government corruption [in communist Lithuania] ... and helped to fight corruption," Prazuskas said.

"In Hungary, [the] media had greater freedom compared to other eastern European countries ... They publicized issues in other countries," Ungvary said.
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