business Unsealed Cardassian records implicate restaurateur in collaborator controversy

[Federation News Service]

ASHALLA, BAJOR — Iba Sizo, owner of the popular Bajoran-Terran restaurant chain The Orb of Taste, stands accused of collaborating with the Cardassian occupational government.

Late last year, the Bajoran Central Archives unsealed an enormous cache of Cardassian records, which made known the fates of hundreds of Bajorans who disappeared during the last months of the Occupation. Historians have spent months analysing the records, comprising kiloquads of data, before the Archive makes them publicly accessible next year.

One record concerns Iba Sizo, then a refugee from Ilvia and a member of the Bajoran Resistance.

Having lost his entire family during the Occupation, Iba immigrated to Betazed in 2369. He studied culinary arts and worked in some Alpha Quadrant’s finest restaurants before opening The Orb of Taste on Earth in 2390. Iba’s unique Bajoran fusion cuisine proved popular on Earth and elsewhere, and franchises have since opened on Terra Nova, Risa, and most recently, Trill.

In 2395, Iba published a memoir and embarked on a series of motivational lecture tours based on his life story. Last year, the city of Tallinn, home to the first Orb of Taste location, honoured him with a Distinguished Citizen Award.

Historians working with the Archive have discovered that Cardassian recorded Iba Sizo’s death at the Elemspur Detention Centre, in 2368, just weeks before the Cardassians withdrew from Bajor, at 40.

“The records suggest that the individual currently known as Iba Sizo is actually the Bajoran Enji Tebrey from Hedrikspool,” said a historian with the Central Archives on condition of anonymity, as they do not allow her to speak on its behalf to the media. “Enji worked for ten years as a senior-level bureaucrat in the Cardassian occupation government.”

Bajoran records show Enji vanished from his home in the Bajoran capital Ashalla, the same week that Iba died at Elemspur.

“So many collaborators simply escaped to Cardassia during that tumultuous period,” said the source in the Central Archives. “But they gave some identities of deceased Bajorans to avoid capture. We always presumed that Enji was a case of the former, but these new records suggest the latter.”

Enji Tebrey was, according to the source who examined the records, surgically altered to resemble Iba Sizo. It is unknown whether Iba was killed intentionally for his identity, or if the timing of the events was coincidental. Cosmetic alteration and identity replacement were well-documented Cardassian practices of the time, particularly within the Obsidian Order, the Union’s former intelligence agency.

After the Cardassians withdrew from Bajor in 2369, the Provisional Government named Enji Tebrey, among hundreds of other Bajorans, in the Ilvian Proclamation (2370), which sentenced all Bajorans who held positions in the occupational government to exile.

The Cardassians kept meticulous records of the identities, whereabouts, and actions of Bajorans during the six decades of occupation, but destroyed many of these records just prior to their withdrawal. Since then, the Central Archive has had the painstaking task of reconstructing them as part of the planet’s recovery and to help the Bajorans reconcile a dark chapter in their history.

A significant fraction of reactions were denouncing this nameless historian for perpetuating the hunt for collaborators.

“The Cardassian Occupation ended 29 years ago,” said Vedek Elian Kastion in a prepared statement. “We must start healing and stop looking for ghosts under our bed. And I think that attacking successful Bajorans just damages us all, rather than finds closure.”

The post Unsealed Cardassian records implicate restaurateur in collaborator controversy appeared first on Federation News Service.

View the full article