As from February 1st all former KGB agents and collaborators in Lithuania are required to register with a special commission of the Department of State Security.
Published:
3 February 2000 y., Thursday
If former agents fail to register, the Lithuanian authorities have threatened to make public their previous activities. The law of registration, acknowledgement, confession and protection of individuals who secretly collaborated with the special services of the former USSR_ was passed by the Seym (Lithuanian parliament) in November and a special commission of officials from the Department of State Security, the Center of Genocide and Resistance and representatives of the Prosecutor-General_s office has been created. The law states that anyone who collaborated with the KGB must, in the course of 6 months (i.e. before August 1st), phone the Department of State Security and to arrange an appointment with members of the abovementioned commission in order to recount his/her activities. According to a member of the Interdepartmental Lustration Commission Rimantas Martinkenas, the commission is interested primarily in information, documents and objects concerning KGB activities. All the collected information will be classified and the Department of State Security will, upon request, protect the confessors from attempts to force them to collaborate or from any other violence by special services. If the former collaborators do not come forward within the time limit or deliberately give false information about themselves, other persons or the activities of special services, then details of their collaboration will be made public. These people would then be subject to a Lithuanian law, which forbids such individuals from becoming state employees or working in the education system.
Martinkenas says that at the time of its abolishment, there were about four thousand people in Lithuania who were in some way connected with the KGB. For the whole post-war Soviet period, the figure amounted to about 30,000 individuals from all social groups.
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