A Stasi Expert Advises Egypt on Secret Police Legacy

By Frank Hornig, Spiegel Online

Two decades ago, Herbert Ziehm helped storm the headquarters of the East German secret police, the Stasi. Now, he is advising Egypt on how to deal with its own legacy of official abuse. History, it would seem, is repeating itself.

Herbert Ziehm has traveled a long way to meet his past. Finally, standing in front of his destination, the building that houses the Egyptian state security service in Cairo, his composure cracks.

It is 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning and Ziehm has donned a gray jacket for the visit. He is well groomed; clean shaven with a neatly tied knot in his flower-patterned tie. He is a German civil servant under the hot Egyptian sun. All that is missing from the stereotypical image is his briefcase, which he left at the hotel.

The most momentous day in his life was 21 years ago, in January 1990, when he and other demonstrators occupied the East Berlin headquarters of former East Germany's notorious secret police, the Stasi. The activists formed citizens' committees and prevented informers' reports from being destroyed. Afterwards, Ziehm simply stayed on and organized the archives. Over the years, he has seen so many files that nothing can shock him anymore.

High Walls, Watchtowers and Tanks

"There is an inner logic to evil," he said shortly before boarding his flight to Cairo. He is a man who has grown accustomed to rationally and abstractly analyzing the horrors of the Stasi. Ziehm is 64 years old and, with retirement just around the corner, he spends a great deal of time at his cottage in the countryside outside Berlin. "Things have become a little boring at the office," he says about his work for Germany's federal commission that oversees old Stasi documents.

But suddenly the past comes roaring back to him. And it is not an abstract version of the past, but tangible: High walls, watchtowers and tanks with poised machine guns protect a windowless concrete fortress and a number of administrative buildings extending for hundreds of meters. It is the headquarters of Amn al-Dawla, the Egyptian State Security Investigations Service. It looks like the Stasi under palm trees. The gates remain closed and visitors are not wanted. Here there is no civilian oversight, the military rules.

Ziehm falls silent. He gets back into the car and wants to keep going. He looks away with moist eyes, folds his hands, anxiously twiddles his thumbs. He does not notice that the photographer is asking him questions, he is too lost in his memories. Ziehm prefers to keep his feelings to himself. "I first need to take a deep breath of air," is all he says, and remains silent for the rest of the drive.

Facing Up to the Past

Poland, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria have all sought his advice, wanting to know what he recommends they do with old secret police files. Coming to terms with the former East German dictatorship has effectively become a sought-after German export. Ziehm quickly gave up his profession as an engineer and traveled throughout Eastern Europe until interest waned and the upheaval of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall became a topic for historians.

Can his model now also be applied to the Middle East? What can Egyptians and Tunisians learn from Ziehm? Will Libyans and Syrians soon also require their own agencies to deal with old secret police files?

In early March, hundreds of demonstrators stormed Amn al-Dawla headquarters in Cairo. They found deserted offices, empty prison cells and shredded files -- but also many secret reports that were still intact. For a few hours, the revolutionaries enjoyed what felt like a victory over the state security agency. Then the military took control.

Stasi Expert Export

It was around this time that Andreas Jacobs had the idea of bringing a German Stasi expert into the country. Jacobs heads the Egyptian office of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which has close ties to Germany's center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He aims to foster civil society and, with Ziehm's help, maybe even bring some much-needed momentum into Egypt's process of democratization. Jacobs says the movement towards democracy is stagnating. "Perhaps you are coming too early. Nobody wants to see you here," he said when he greeted Ziehm three weeks later. Jacobs says that the secret police don't want to speak with the visitor from Germany and the Egyptian Interior Ministry is putting up resistance. Many of the same old people are still in positions of power.

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