Voting - State parliament sets up committee to review the Stasi
The state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt has set up a committee to investigate members of the state parliament for their activities for the Stasi. After the decision had been planned a few months ago and postponed at short notice, a large majority of CDU, SPD, FDP, Greens and AfD voted in favor of the appointment on Wednesday. Seven left-wing MPs voted against and four left-wing MPs abstained. Former Education Minister Marco Tullner (CDU) is to chair the committee.
The Parliamentary Secretary of the CDU parliamentary group, Markus Kurze, said in the debate that the population was still interested in the Stasi reappraisal. This can be seen in the requests for access to files, said Kurze. "The injustice that took place, ladies and gentlemen, has not been forgotten."
AfD parliamentary group leader Oliver Kirchner thanked the black-red-yellow coalition for setting up the committee. MP Sebastian Striegel (Greens) said that a new review after more than three decades only made limited sense. Nevertheless, he agreed with the establishment of the committee.
FDP parliamentary group leader Andreas Silbersack emphasized with regard to the surveillance by the Stasi: "Any relativization is out of the question." Silbersack described very personal experiences from his family history and fought back tears during his speech. Afterwards, the FDP politician received respectful applause from all parliamentary groups.
The Left Party does not want to participate in the committee and will not send a representative. MP Hendrik Lange emphasized that all Left Party candidates would have to comment on the topic and their biography at party list meetings. "We have faced up to this debate," said Lange.
A total of 79 votes were cast in favor of setting up the committee, seven MPs voted against and four abstained. Similar committees have also been set up in other federal states. In Saxony, according to the parliament, there was no recommendation to the state parliament to file a complaint against a member of parliament.
In Thuringia, according to the report of the review commission, AfD MP Dieter Laudenbach worked for the state security service as an unofficial collaborator (IM) for several years. The commission considers this to be proven after examining individual cases and reviewing a large number of documents, according to state parliament president Birgit Pommer, who chairs the committee. Laudenbach, who was gastronomic director of the Interhotel Gera in the 1980s, rejects the accusation that he was an IM of the GDR State Security from May 1985 to at least 1988.
In the GDR, the Stasi - short for the Ministry for State Security - was both an intelligence service and secret police force in the service of the SED. It monitored broad sections of the population and harassed critics of the system.
On January 15, 1990, citizens of the GDR occupied the Stasi headquarters in order to stop the destruction of secret service files, which had begun shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, the Stasi Records Archive is responsible for the storage, utilization and provision of the remaining documents.
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Source: www.stern.de
