Crime and immunity.

ONE BY ONE they came to the rostrum to denounce the misdeeds of the Part that had tyrannized them for forty years. All were determined, some somber, others vehement. There were nearly four hundred of them, from groups such as the Confederation of Political Prisoners, the Union of Victims of Communism, the Union of Opponents of Communism, the Documentation Center of the Movement for Civic Freedom.

Some of the testimonies were moving. Years in prison or labor camps for opposing the regime; families made homeless because the bread-winner had been removed by the secret police; parents whose children had been threatened to make them conform. There were complaints of wanton poisoning of the environment, putting health and even survival at risk in certain areas.

One delegate said President Vaclav Havel had lost the confidence of the public when he said: "We are all guilty." Nor was Alexander Dubcek spared, widely though revered in the West because of the Prague Spring of 1968. One speaker recalled that when Dubcek was the Party's First Secretary in Bratislava, he had ignored pleas for help while the murders continued.

THERE WERE 61 of us foreigners from 12 countries, including a Sikh mystic in orange robe and turban whose promises of the peace of God aroused mild bewildered applause. The occasion was, however, far from a merely therapeutic exercise in steam-letting. It was a political act which could have far-reaching consequences, not only in other ex-Communist countries, but even in the West. We were attending an International Conference on the Crimes of Communism, sponsored by the Institute for Central European Culture and Polities, one of a string of small think-tanks advocating Western-style democracy and the market economy.

The political clout behind the conference had been well timed, for the day before it began the Federal Assembly had passed the Lustracni Zakon, literally a "light-casting law" calling for a thorough check on the political background of those who hold positions in the ministries, the police, the armed forces, the judiciary, the schools and universities. For a start, a central register of two thousand names had been compiled. A purge was on the way and the point of the conference was to help the sponsors decide how far the purge should go.

By normal standards, this was clearly a newsworthy occasion, but the fact that the federal television system failed to cover it, after promising to do so, illustrates the problem. The head of State Television, Jiri Kanturek, was a high-ranking Party member in the dark era that was supposed to have ended with the velvet revolution" in Wenceslaus Square in November 1989; from which, perhaps, an inference is permissible. Several delegates wanted a sweeping purge, affecting all living Party members at the time of the velvet revolution. They argued that the Party was itself a criminal organization, and that all its membersship was voluntary. The consensus, however, favored specific charges against named Party leaders, including heads or section chiefs of the State Security Service, the StB, disbanded early last year.

On February 1, 1990, the StB, long a major instrument of Soviet foreign policy, was disbanded and the KGB link was officially severed. A new foreign-intelligence arm, the CZS, was launched, along with a new and reduced internal-security service, known as the FBIS. Whether all links with the KGB have indeed been severed was questioned by participants in the conference.

Having announced the changes, the then Minister of the Interior, Richard Sacher, was ousted. The credentials of his successor, Jan Langos, are also challenged on the ground of his own past Party affiliation.

The obstacles posed by the survival of the old Party elite seem almost insurmountable. For example, attempts to impeach the former hard-line President, Gustav Husak, expelled in December 1989, have failed on the ground that by virtue of his past position he enjoys immunity. The judges, of course, are former Party higher-ups.

The potential international repercussions of the Czech problem are worth thinking about. Can the crimes of Communism be punished, as were the crimes of Nazism after World War II? Despite the totalist similarities between Nazis/Fascism and Communism, the circumstancial differences are many. Hitler tried to spread his ghastly system by military war, and the Third Reich was utterly defeated. The victorious allies were then able to create the special court that sat in judgment at Nuremberg in 1945.

Communism, in contrast, spread by civil war (as in the USSR itself, and in China), by peripheral wars (as happened twice in Vietnam), by subversion, terrorism, and teleguided coups (as in Afghanistan and Ethiopia), and so forth. Many of the major criminals are dead: especially Lenin and Stalin (the perfect Leninist); and, in a minor league, Ho Chi Minh. Millions of crimes without punishment.

The major criminals of more recent times include Pol Pot of the Cambodian genocide, now under Chinese protection; Mengistu of Ethiopia, now a refugee in Zimbabwe; Fidel Castro, by now an insecure tyrant in Cuba; and Kim II Sung, more than ever isolated in North Korea. Moreover, the collapse of Communism is still far from complete. The biggest chunk of it is the Chinese People's Republic, where the gang of aged criminals are still in charge. Add Afghanistan to the list. As things stand, international action seems impossible. The Czech example, however, will be followed closely in neighboring Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania (where the old gang, minus a certain Ceausescu, are still running the show), and little Albania. The Soviet ex-Union will also be interested. All of these countries will have to tackle the problem in their different ways. But there is a case, in the longer term, for the creation of a new international court of justice with a specific function denied to the extant one in The Hague: to seek a historical verdict on the crimes of Communism and the eventual punishment of surviving criminals on proven specific charges.