THE LEFT HAS FOUND A MARTYR

James de Candole dismisses

claims of a witch-hunt in Czechoslovakia

THE CASE of Jan Kavan, the former Czech dissident named in the Czechoslo- vak parliament as a secret police collabor- ator, is fast developing into a left-wing cause célèbre in Britain. Kavan has few supporters in his native Czechoslovakia, but in this country the liberal-Left have leapt to his defence.

The reason for Kavan's popularity among British Labour MPs, members of the Peace Movement and assorted left- wing journalists is not hard to find. Kavan, who is a socialist and a pacifist, has provided the British Left with the martyr to right-wing anti-communism for which they have been searching since the collapse of 'real existing socialism' in 1989.

It is not only Kavan's reputation that is at stake here. The disclosure that he is registered as a collaborator makes all those in the West to whom Kavan had been feeding information for 20 years look a little stupid. I asked him why he thought certain British journalists had come out in his support. He replied that most of them could not have written half the stories they did about Czechoslovakia without his help. They have now closed ranks around him.

Kavan's supporters in Britain have both ideological and personal reasons for not questioning his innocence. The assumption of Kavan's innocence is well founded; after all, the man has spent the last 20 years opposing the Communist regime in Czech- slovakia. But it is the manner in which he expressed that opposition that made him so unpopular with many of his fellow Czech exiles, especially those forced to leave Czechoslovakia in 1948, who never flirted, as did Kavan and his '68 reform Commun- ist friends, with communism.

Such people view Kavan with deep suspicion, and are made angry by his portrayal in the Western press as 'one of

Czechoslovakia's bravest dissidents', whose family 'suffered cruelly from the communists' (see Michael Binyon's one- sided piece in the Times, 29 April 1991, entitled 'Defiant dissident fights to clear his name'.)

Kavan's family was detested in Czechos- lovakia in the early 1950s, and for good reason: Kavan's father, Pavel, was a prom- inent Communist diplomat and a supporter of the Communist takeover in February 1948. Like Rudolf Slansky, whose task it had been to orchestrate the Stalinist terror in Czechoslovakia, Pavel Kavan was de- voured by the system he had helped to create and in which he believed.

The East European Reporter, the maga- zine established by Jan Kavan in 1985 to publicise the views of the left-wing opposi- tion to communism, presented the human face of socialism. The magazine's close association with the Peace Movement, which made Kavan the darling of the liberal-Left, was unacceptable to many of his fellow dissidents, who resented being tarred with the same pacifist brush.

The commission set up by the Czechos- lovak federal parliament to investigate the secret police connections of MPs has now revealed that Kavan is registered in in- terior ministry files as a collaborator, codename Kato, from 1968 until June 1970.

The commission is not the instrument of a Macarthyite witch-hunt, as Kavan's sup- porters in Britain have suggested. It is composed of all political parties repre- sented in the parliament, including the Communist Party.

Neither is the commission a court: its purpose is to identify those politicians registered as secret police collaborators, not to find them guilty. Kavan has claimed that his collaboration with the secret police was unintentional, and many are prepared to believe him. But according to the commission, this is highly improbable: any person registered as a collaborator knew that he was in contact with the secret police; he knew that he had a codename; and that he had agreed to collaborate.

The West would be foolish to take up Kavan's case. It is an internal matter, and should be left to the democratically elected Czechoslovak parliament. Kavan is in no danger of being hanged; he is not about to be thrown into jail; his family and posses- sions are not in jeopardy. He has lost the confidence of his parliamentary colleagues, who have insisted, by a majority vote, that he give up his seat. This Kavan has no intention of doing. Instead, he has set about turning his case, with the help of the publicity from his apologists in the West, into an international scandal.

To portray Kavan as the victim of an anti-Communist purge is pure fantasy. There has been no purge in Czechoslova- kia. Not for nothing is the revolution known as the 'velvet revolution'.

Even the current Czechoslovak ambas- sador to London, Dr Karel Duda, was a former high-ranking Communist diplomat: between 1963 and 1968, Duda was the Czechoslovak ambassador in Washington, a position dependent upon the personal approval of Leonid Brezhnev himself. Kavan's most vociferous defender in Czechoslovakia, Petr Uhl, is, like Kavan, a self-proclaimed Trotskyite. Uhl is also director of CTK, the state news agency.

If Kavan has a genuine complaint, it is that he has been thrown to the lions by the real guilty men who were too important ever to be registered on any secret police file. Of the former highest ranking Com- munists, only one is in jail, Miroslav Stepan, formerly head of the Prague Com- munist Party. Every other leading figure in the old regime has been allowed either to fade into obscurity on a full state pension, or to re-enter political life. The current prime minister of Czechoslovakia, Marian Calfa, was Communist deputy prime minis- ter in November 1989. His former boss, Ladislav Adamec, is now an MP in the federal parliament.

There are good and bad reasons for sympathising with Kavan. His political future is in ruins, whilst the position of those whose crimes are well proven go unchallenged. Nevertheless, Kavan should resign his seat in parliament, in order to allow the process of lustrace, or positive vetting, to continue. Important secret police documents are scattered far and wide, and many are now feared to be in the hands of the KGB in Moscow. The only way to prevent blackmail of former col- laborators is to remove such people from all state and legislative bodies.

Even President Havel, who embodies the gentleness of Czechoslovakia's too gentle revolution, has come to recognise the necessity of driving from public life those like Jan Kavan compromised by their association with the secret police: 'It would be very unhealthy', Havel warned recently, 'if we were to say that what's done is done. This might be the simplest way out, but this is a sore which has to be lanced.'