Moldovan Prosecutor keeps on issuing certificates of rehabilitation to political repression victims

Last 24 years, starting from 1989, the Moldovan Prosecutor General’s Office has issued more than 60 thousand certificates of rehabilitation to Stalinist repression victims.

In the first 6 months of 2013 alone, the Prosecution received 296 new applications for rehabilitation, and issued 215 certificates for 283 persons.

The Law on rehabilitation of political repression victims stipulates that such applications are submitted to the Prosecutor General’s Office by citizens who were repressed by decisions of state organs or extrajudicial agencies (VCK, GPU/OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB) for the so-called “counter-revolutionary activities”, “high treason”, “dissemination of defamation or slander discrediting the Soviet Power”, and for other ‘state crimes’.

Rehabilitation may be applied for by those people who were forcibly hospitalized by decisions of courts or other agencies for forced psychiatric treatments for political, national, religious, social or other reasons, as well as people who were placed to hard-labor penal camps or deported over to forced labor far from their homes.

The rehabilitation spreads also on people who were convicted by Soviet courts for participation in public demonstrations for the independence of Moldova.

Ion Varta, Doctor of History, said to Infotag that all the measures undertaken by Moldovan state institutions after 1989 bore the character of restoration of justice to liquidate the odious policy conducted by the USSR authorities with respect to hundreds of thousand citizens of the former Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR).

“Such accusations were absolute inventions, and often were just silly. By rehabilitation actions, the present Moldovan authorities are confirming that an overwhelming majority of repressed people were innocent and were condemned unfoundedly. They failed to get back the property confiscated by the Soviet power. And though the Moldovan state has lately been providing some compensations for the material losses of repression victims, this cannot indeed cover the real volume of lost property”, said the historian.

Adapted from Infotag