Remembering E. Germany's last rigged elections

By Andrea Exler

BERLIN (DPA): Violence is not the only tool unjust regimes use to stay in power: there are other means, less conspicuous but just as effective, of ensuring their rule goes unchallenged. A classic example in recent times is of course Communist East Germany's dictatorial system. It was working at full throttle in the country's last local elections, in that fateful year before it joined West Germany in the Federal Republic of Germany and disappeared...

In May 1989, the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), monopolized by the Socialist Unity Party (SED), suffered a battering in the run-up to the fall of the Berlin Wall later that year. In a novel move in the hardline state, opposition groups had sent poll observers up and down the country to monitor the elections. At the dreaded Ministry for State Security (MfS) in the East's half of Berlin, alarm bells were ringing.

Following the final count, the mayor of Hoehnstedt, near the city of Halle, received a phone call telling him: "There are too many swine in your area." In the town hall in Dieskau, likewise in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, the telephone was also ringing: "The abattoir refuses to take ten swine."

The cryptic messages concerned the "no" votes in the election, the votes that were not allowed to appear in the official results. What no-one realized then was that it would be only a matter of months until the "swine" had overthrown the regime.

After the collapse of Communism, the German judiciary felt duty bound to pass judgment on 156 defendants accused of rigging that last vote, including the one-time prime minister of East Germany, Hans Modrow, and the former mayor of Dresden, Wolfgang Berghofer. In the end, around 40 percent of people who came before the courts were found guilty of manipulating the election.

The trials fill one of the most controversial chapters in the history of integrating and ironing out the problems in the second German state. "State crimes are often placed on a par with human- rights abuses. But many miss the point that the falsification of facts is a significant feature of a dictatorship," says criminal- law expert Gerhard Werle.

Since 1996, he and Klaus Marxen have headed a research project called Criminal Justice and East Germany's Past at Berlin's Humboldt University. They have now presented the first catalog of documents on the lawsuits which sought to bring the vote-riggers to justice.

The dilemma was summed up by an expert witness in the case against Hans Modrow: "The history of elections in the GDR since 1950 is the history of their falsification." When the first trials were brought after the GDR's disappearance as a state, critical voices loudly pointed out that, "In a place where there were no elections, they could not have been forged."

Everyone knew that manipulating election results was an inherent part of the system: rival political programs were never on offer, and whether there were 1.25 or 8.34 percent of votes were against cannot be measured against crimes such as manslaughter and grevious bodily harm. The criticism finally climaxed with the denunciation of vengeful "victor's justice".

But East German civil-rights activists oppose the calls for amnesty and reconciliation. "In hindsight, state criminals always talk of reconciliation and inner peace. They adore these words. One could say that they were prevented in the past from pursuing their favorite notions," says Hans-Joachim Gauck, the former eastern clergyman who until recently headed the agency which stores and evaluates the masses of files collected by the Communist authorities.

He does not think a policy of drawing a fat line under the whole affair, such as happened in Russia, serves the interests of the truth. "Romantic idealists is what I would call people who maintain that former criminals who have not been confronted with accusations in a court a law enjoy greater freedom of conscience to reveal the truth," says Gauck.

Revealing the true facts is an urgent priority for those who have recognized and resisted the lies and silence that are keep a dictatorship going. "The work of the opposition was all about confronting the people and the authorities with the facts that the regime denied. Some risked their lives in doing it," says Evelyn Zupke, who was active in the Weissensee Peace Circle.

Her work in the opposition group involved handing out flyers on the streets of East Berlin which detailed secret police operations against dissidents. Like her colleagues, she experienced the dictatorship in everyday life as the obstacle to finding out anything about the facts. In May 1989, the Peace Circle decided to make the real results of the election known to the public.

So, on election day, 150 volunteer monitors helped record the results of the count on the ground, in the actual polling stations. Afterwards, the activists tallied up the differences with the official figures printed in the Communist press and then initiated legal action with a complaint to the authorities. "We were ignored, denigrated and criminalized," says Zupke today.

Vote-rigging was an offense "even" under East German law; the electoral law and the constitution guaranteed free elections, if only on paper. With the Unification Treaty of August 1990, the West German criminal law system became law across the whole of the newly reconstituted Federal Republic. And yet only those crimes which contravened East German law went to court.

The Federal judiciary decided to investigate only those electoral crimes which were committed in the GDR's last local elections. As the opposition had dispatched monitors to almost every constituency, collecting the evidence proved to be no problem. Even before unification was officially achieved, on Oct. 3, 1990, 25 East German courts had convicted 25 defendants. Six of them had been arrested and placed in custody before the trials.

By the standards of a law-abiding state, the sentences were scarcely proportionate. "These trials must be understood as a concession by the changing GDR judiciary to the population," says Klaus Marxen. "If an independent East Germany had survived a little longer, most of the sentences would have been tougher."

After unification, the courts passed rulings on 52 cases against 82 defendants. Three-quarters were fined or given suspended sentences; 20 percent of cases were dismissed for lack of evidence; four were acquitted.

The judgments did not only meet with the disdain of the former East German elite: ordinary ex-citizens of the fallen GDR and even a few 1989-vintage protesters had meanwhile found themselves caught in the wheels of the East German-West German conflict. They clearly saw the courts' actions as a threat to the eastern German identity.

Finally, a third group roundly dismissed the courts' verdicts. They were the victims of the East German system: civil-rights activists who had paid dearly for their resistance and considered the sentences against their former oppressors in the SED too lenient.

"People whose dignity has been injured often expect exaggerated retribution," says Gauck. "But it is precisely those people who have spent their whole life dreaming of a country which respects the law who should not be hankering after a judiciary which operates in a similar manner to the regime they hated."