By: mag. Igor Omerza
The initiators of the referendum on the amendment to the law on parliamentary inquiry emphasised during the signature‑collection campaign, in which they were successful, that this referendum request was a fight “against political police.” It is a very effective slogan, but it does not withstand serious scrutiny when applied to any form of parliamentary commission activity (here or abroad).
Every political police force operates secretly, whereas parliament and parliamentary commissions operate publicly! The existence of a political police force, whether NKVD, Securitate, Stasi, Udba, etc., is unimaginable without secrecy, concealment, silence, complete isolation from the public, and the spreading of disinformation. That is why we usually speak and write about a secret political police! Hmm, do secret parliamentary inquiry commissions exist? Of course not!
Allow me to list some main characteristics of a political police force and, on that basis, explain why the referendum slogan “against political police” is untenable. The easiest way is to use the example of Udba, since it operated in the failed socialist Yugoslavia, and socialist Slovenia was part of that rotten state.
The unofficial name Udba, which carries an extremely negative connotation, became widespread throughout the multilingual Yugoslav federation already during the time this secret political police operated, and it is still used today. At the top of the Yugoslav Udba were the federal administration and the federal chief. All six republics had their own republican Udbas (there were also two provincial Udbas in Vojvodina and Kosovo).
Udba’s primary task was not intelligence or counter‑intelligence, but above all the fight against domestic church structures (in Slovenia, the Roman Catholic Church), internal opposition (real, potential, or imagined), political émigrés (Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian, Bosniak, Montenegrin, and Albanian), and against the Informbiro supporters (those who sided with Stalin in the 1948 Tito–Stalin split).
After World War II, OZNA (Udba’s predecessor), following the decisions of Tito and his closest party comrades – among them Slovenians Edvard Kardelj, Boris Kidrič, Ivan Maček, Miha Marinko, Boris Kraigher, and Lidija Šentjurc – participated in mass killings of tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of domestic class enemies. We will never know the real numbers due to decades of silence and destruction of documentation. Today, in Slovenia alone, around 800 post‑war mass graves have been identified!
Udba used numerous investigative, surveillance, monitoring, and classic criminal methods. Very important was the use of registered sources and collaborators (commonly called snitches or informants; in the army we called them “cinkaroši”). The difference between a source and a collaborator was that a source only listened or observed, while a collaborator was a higher category of informant, provoking, spreading disinformation, encouraging certain activities, participating in operations at home and abroad, etc. Registered sources and collaborators received code names to protect their identity in case of an intelligence breach.
Udba also used secret monitoring of mail, telephones, telegrams, and telex, both domestically and internationally. Its technicians installed microphones, cameras, and photo devices into walls or furniture to secretly listen, record, and photograph. They also carried out mass secret searches – entering homes, offices, hotel rooms, and cars unnoticed.
Secret political police officers (and their sources and collaborators, sometimes collectively called confidants) observed certain locations and followed people (these Udba agents were called trackers). With the help of public police, they stopped vehicles or monitored their movement and determined when someone entered or left the country. Abroad, Udba used the most brutal state‑terrorist methods: kidnappings, bomb attacks, and murders.
Are these parliamentary tools and methods? Not even close! The paradox is that many of the initiators of the referendum “against political police” were secretly surveilled by Udba in the past. On the other hand, one of them, Rastko Močnik, was once (in 1968 and 1969) even a registered source of the political police (code name Albert Arko). He informed on the Quakers, and his handler was the high‑ranking Udba officer Marko Zore. You can read more, much more, about this in my book Temna stran Dela (second volume).