Dossiers Show Swiss Spied on Citizens

Switzerland, usually a tranquil haven in a troubled world, is in an uproar because of disclosures that the government spied on its own citizens for decades.

Paul C. Schaffroth, retired managing editor of the liberal newspaper Der Bund, was among hundreds of thousands who demanded a summary of his file.

Federal police gave him a clean political bill of health, but their dossier on him went back 20 years.

It noted, among other things, that the Chinese Embassy once invited him to watch a movie about pandas, he took part in a press trip to China and, as a city councilor in charge of police, once received a letter on the visit of a Soviet delegation.

The federal police files on Schaffroth and more than half a million other Swiss and foreign nationals were secret until a parliamentary commission disclosed their existence in November.

Another file was kept on Justice Minister Arnold Kohler, who is in charge of the police and also serves currently as president of this nation of 6.5 million.

Switzerland, one of the world’s oldest democracies, celebrates its 700th anniversary next year. What Kohler describes as a “deep crisis of confidence” threatens to overshadow the event.

More than 300,000 people have asked the federal prosecutor’s office for copies of file cards summarizing dossiers the police may have on them. Just answering the letters will take at least until the end of 1990.

The government also is under pressure to release the full dossiers on which the file cards are based. Officials say that would take many more months.

Fewer than 30,000 people have received information to date.

Published excerpts of Schaffroth’s and other files indicate that surveillance focused on contacts with leftist circles and travels to Communist countries, but was not limited to them.

Even a taste for beer or watching street theater was recorded. A car parked near an anti-nuclear rally could inspire an entry in the owner’s dossier.

“These methods are unworthy of our democracy,” Schaffroth, 69, said. “I feel angry and concerned.”

Kohler characterized the methods as “unacceptable and amateurish,” but said the surveillance began during the Cold War and was similar to that in other countries.

“Snooping state” has become a widely used reference in the Swiss press, but the strongest reactions have come from regular critics of the Establishment.

Artists and writers have said they may refuse to help prepare for next year’s anniversary celebrations. There have been calls for a boycott of a national census planned in December.

“What made us deserve a state which is so unsure of itself that its concern for security becomes paranoid?” Adolf Muschg, a well-known novelist, asked at a protest rally last month in Bern.

He said the federal police had turned Switzerland “into a banana republic.”

Disclosures of other secret files in the Justice and Defense ministries have added to the clamor. They include lists of “suspects” to be interned or restricted in case of war or political emergency.

Particularly startling was the discovery in the Justice Ministry of data on thousands of foreign children who vacationed in Switzerland in the early years after World War II under a Red Cross charity program.

Hubert Bucher, secretary-general of the Swiss Red Cross, said the records were turned over to the government for lack of space. He denied suggestions that the Red Cross offered them for possible use by Swiss counterintelligence.

“A storm of mistrust is sweeping the country,” Defense Minister Kaspar Villiger told a congress of his conservative Radical Democratic Party in March.

An editorial in the influential conservative newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung spoke of the “brutal disillusionment” of citizens.

The independent Basler Zeitung said the files “reflect the reverse side of our national character: This proverbial tidiness, this efficiency, this zeal, once unleashed . . . can turn into unscrupulous fulfillment of duty which evidently may eliminate intelligence as well as conscience.”