5 - Legal Activism: ISOR as the OKV’s Major Lobby Organization

Summary

Abstract

Chapter 5 is a case study of the OKV's resistance against pension cuts. Since the mid-1990s, ISOR has been filing law suits against the German state, up to the Constitutional Court, arguing that the 1990 pension cuts for Stasi employees and other GDR professional groups were illegal. ISOR was successful in exempting several professional groups from the pension cuts but not the former Stasi coworkers. The chapter argues that ISOR's legal strategies have some of their roots in GDR legal practices with which ISOR leaders were very familiar. In the GDR, citizens could not sue their state as ISOR does today; however, the GDR fostered the practice of petitioning, which is a major business of ISOR and related groups, and of seeking redress through mediation.

Keywords: Stasi, pension law, interest groups, petitioning, GDR legal practices, linkage

The present chapter focuses on legal activism as conducted by the largest organization within the OKV, the Initiativgemeinschaft zum Schutz der sozialen Rechte ehemaliger Angehöriger bewaffneter Organe und der Zollverwaltung der DDR (Joint Initiative for the Protection of the Social Rights of Former Members of Armed Bodies and the Customs Administration of the GDR, ISOR). According to its own accounts, in the early 1990s ISOR had a membership of no less than 25,000, and still musters 20,000 members today. Although these figures most likely represent a gross overestimation of the actual number of members, ISOR remains the largest OKV organization by far. Founded in June 1991 with the aim of achieving the full restoration of the original pension rights of former GDR secret service and military personnel, ISOR drew from the 91,015 official Stasi coworkers at the time the Berlin Wall fell, not to mention former Stasi personnel already retired by 1990. ISOR is thus the OKV organization that most clearly represents Stasi interests. Its current director, Wolfgang Schmidt (b. 1939), was the head of the group for Evaluation and Information of Department XX of the MfS; this section was responsible for surveillance of the state apparatus, culture, church, and underground.