If anyone can understand the rush of change that revolutionaries in Egypt and Tunisia are experiencing right now, it's their counterparts in post-communist Eastern Europe. This region gorged on change, evolving -- painfully -- from dictatorship to democracy. After decapitating the leadership, East Europeans know what comes next. The purge.
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It's begun in Egypt and Tunisia, with a despised target in the crosshairs: secret police.
For the Egyptian dissidents and Islamists persecuted or even tortured by the State Security Investigative Service, Hosni Mubarak's Feb. 11 abdication wasn't enough. Real liberation came the weekend of March 5, when they went after the regime's "planning brain" and most feared weapon: its 500,000-strong intelligence agency. Word had spread that State Security bosses were shredding files and burning other incriminating evidence. Thousands of men stormed past security cordons in Alexandria and Cairo to scour secret-police headquarters for proof of human-rights abuses.
Not to be outdone, Tunisia dismantled its State Security Department altogether on March 7. The interim Interior Ministry said the aim was to foster a "climate of confidence and transparency ... between the security services and the citizen." Several days later, Egypt announced it was symbolically renaming its state security service, as a "national security" agency with a dramatically narrowed focus -- just terrorism.
Amid the new drama that unfolds every day in Egypt and Tunisia, these swipes at the regime's tormentors stand out as an early test of how truly committed reformists are to their own calls for democracy and human rights. Vigilante justice is one thing. Transitional justice is another: Not only a break with the past, but the creation of a new political culture based on civic freedoms and rule of law.
To see this kind of transition firsthand, North Africans need only peer across the Mediterranean and study what post-authoritarian Eastern Europe has undergone during the past two decades. Nudged forward by a desire to join the European Union, new elites tackled the question of what to do with the key perpetrators of the ancien régime -- plus all the loyal foot soldiers who propped it up. The key question: Beyond the secret police, how deeply to cut into the old elites, public administration, bureaucracy, courts, economy, army and regular police, even in the media and universities?
In each country, it began with lustration: a legalized "controlled purge" of collaborators. These lustration laws -- the name derived from lustrum, the purification rituals of ancient Greece and Rome -- were forged in the newly democratic parliaments of Eastern Europe. Crucially, though, they were hammered out by all factions -- even the vanquished communists, by then reconstituted as socialists.
"This is not revenge, where you purge because you're in the position to," says political scientist Lavinia Stan, co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice and a Romanian who was raised under the repressive rule of Nicolae Ceausescu. "You want to send a message: This is a new regime, and we're so committed to democracy that we give [former loyalists] a stake in the new system. Otherwise, you'll have insurgency."
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