Laszlo Verga on Hungary's Stasi past

Hungarian historian Laszlo Varga calls for the Hungarian government to follow Germany's example and give the public access to Hungary's Stasi files: "Joachim Gauck (the first federal commissioner for the files of the GDR's state security service) and his colleagues realised at the right moment how important it is for democracy to confront the past, to take peaceful possession of Stasi buildings and preserve Stasi files for posterity... They deprived state power of its monopoly on information... This was not possible in Hungary because here the Stasi used the 'police' as a cover and was intricately bound up with them. In Germany everybody knew where the Stasi 'lived', but we had no idea... Over the past ten years, those who were spied on have gained more and more rights and we historians have also been given greater freedom in our research, but the most important thing – access to the Stasi files and the frequently quoted confrontation with the past – has yet to happen."

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