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Finnish diplomat accused of helping Stasi seeks justice

19.08.2007

HELSINKI, Aug 19, 2007 (AFP) - Alpo Rusi carries the weight of suspicion like a heavy rock: this high-ranking diplomat from Finland is seeking compensation from the Finnish state which he says wrongly accused him of being a collaborator of East Germany's Stasi secret service.
Now an advisor to the president of the United Nations General Assembly, Rusi will finally see his case against the state open in Helsinki's district court on Monday, more than five years after his nightmare began.
He is seeking 500,000 euros (675,000 dollars) in damages.
Police opened a preliminary investigation against him in May 2002, based on information from the Finnish intelligence agency Supo. The case was closed in June 2003 due to lack of evidence.
The Finnish justice system never found him guilty, but never declared him innocent either.
"I was accepted back into the foreign office but I lost two or three important jobs. It was really ugly for my family and for me," he told AFP in an interview.
Now 58, Rusi hopes to be have his name cleared once and for all.
He also hopes his trial will shed some light on the post-war period in Finland, a country that long lived under the threat of its imposing eastern neighbour, the Soviet Union, and the influence of its intelligence agency the KGB.
"The KGB brainwashed two generations of Finnish politicians. That's why Finland is not in NATO," he said.
Five years after Supo opened its case against him Rusi now has harsh words for the intelligence agency and its methods, which he calls a "product of the culture of the Cold War and cooperation with the KGB", as well as friends who turned their backs on him.
Off the record, he reels off the names of Finns who he says were real Stasi or KGB informants.
Among them, his late brother Jukka Rusi, a senior government official 10 years his senior.
The Stasi had opened a file for each brother, the only Finns to have been targeted by the Finnish justice system for suspected collaboration with the East German secret service.
But Alpo Rusi's file was empty, he claims. Jukka Rusi's consisted however of 101 documents.
Jukka Rusi admitted having passed information to the Stasi before his death, though he was never charged.
But why did the Stasi open a file on Alpo? Was it a mistake? Did it think it would be able to recruit him because he had been a member of the Social Democrats in his youth? Or was it because his brother was already an informant?
Rusi is at a loss to understand it.
"I was never a leftist. I even called for the public condemnation in Finland of the occupation of Czechoslovakia" by the Soviet Union in 1968, Alpo Rusi insists.
Like many in Finland, including speaker of parliament Sauli Niinistoe, Alpo Rusi has called for Supo to make public the Stasi files concerning Finland which the US Central Intelligence Agency handed over in the early 1990s.
The so-called Rosenholz files were grabbed by the CIA after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and given to Germany in 2003. They contain information on 290,000 people and some 57,000 accounts of undercover operations.
But Supo has refused to budge, arguing that an intelligence agency never publishes documents received from a foreign intelligence service.
Finnish researchers have rejected that argument, noting that academics and journalists in Germany and Denmark have been granted access to the files.
Some 200 informants reportedly worked for the Stasi in Finland, primarily East German diplomats. Some 20 Finnish names are said to be on the list.
According to Finnish experts, the Stasi was only an extended arm of the KGB, which had 10 times the number of agents.
"The Soviet Union's and KGB's influence was considerable" from 1945 to the 1980s, said Jukka Seppinen, a researcher and former diplomat who recently published a book disclosing the names of a slew of Finnish KGB informants.

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