BLACK COMEDY IN PRAGUE

Timothy Garton Ash runs up against the Czechoslovak

secret police, who are trying to turn back the tide of history in Eastern Europe

Prague A LADY with a red flower would meet us at breakfast, we were told. She would lead us to the meeting place. So there we sat in the faded Jugendstil splendour of the Hotel Pariz, a score of academics, writers, human rights activists, and parliamentarians from Western Europe and the United States, waiting for our mysterious guide. Most of our Czechoslovak hosts for this indepen- dent symposium 'Czechoslovakia 88' had been arrested the day before. Prominent Western guests had been refused visas by the Czechoslovak authorities on the grounds that the planned meeting was illegal' — although by what law they could not say. The streets around the Pariz were full of uniformed and secret police. It looked bad.

Then through the door swept not a lady with a red flower, but the playwright Vaclav Havel, the symbolic leader of the democratic opposition in Czechoslovakia and chairman of the symposium. He walked quickly to our table, sat down and formally declared the meeting open. With- in seconds, three plain clothes men were,, behind him. 'Well, in this moment I am arrested,' said Havel. But before they hurried him away he managed to repeat that he had declared the symposium open. Sally Laird of Index on Censorship, photographed the scene. More secret police moved in to confiscate her film. As We argued with them, we noticed a massive woman M a black leather jacket carrying out just one but a whole bouquet of flowers. She moved over to us and thrust into our hands, not the flowers but en- velopes, inside which we found the most extraordinary poison-pen letter it has ever been my privilege to receive. Typed, photocopied, unsigned, in English, Ger- man, French and Italian, it read as follows:

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I am warning you that the action called Symposium Czechoslovakia 88 is illegal and its performance woudl be contrary to the Interests of Czechoslovak working people and consequently illegal. In this connection your efforts to take part in this action would be considered as a manifestation of hostility

to Czechoslovakia and in virtue of this we should have to draw relevant consequences against your person.

But who was the Kafkaesque T? Some- one asked the lady with the bouquet to identify herself. She said she 'ensured order in the hotel'. In subsequent con- versation we tentatively identified her as a secret police officer who had guarded the Havel family flat, presenting herself as one `Lieutenant Novotna', which is to say (roughly) Lieutenant Smith. Briefly de- tained in a police car the next day, three of us were again handed this fantastical `Advertisement' (the German version was headed `Achtung) by another plain clothes policeman. We asked him whence it came. From the City Council of Prague, he said at first. But who was this 'I'? we insisted. He pointed to himself, adding helpfully, as if we might not realise: 'Police What we were doing by this time was to go round in smaller groups visiting such few of the Czech symposium participants as were still at home — usually under house arrest, and the families of those in prison. Before this we had attempted to reconvene the meeting in a private flat but police in front of the door had simply prevented any of our Czech friends getting in. We had shot off a demarche to the Czechoslovak government at the CSO (`Helsinki') review conference in Vienna. We had briefed our ambassadors. We had laid flowers on the grave of the philosopher and founding father of Charter 77, Jan Petoch, a moving ceremony filmed by an independent video team. We had marched up to the Central Committee building and delivered a letter of protest addressed to the party leader Milos Jakes. A rather clever-looking official at the door assured us -- in fluent Russian — that he would pass the letter on to 'Comrade Jakes, but regretted that there was no one to receive us on a Saturday. And who was he? What was his name and position? 'I just work here,' he explained shortly, glasnost glint- ing from his glasses. We had marched down to the main secret police office in the Old Town, demanding to know why and where our hosts were imprisoned. Once again the officer at the door explained that no one was working there at the weekend, a contention somewhat undermined by a succession of men in plain clothes pushing through our group to enter the building.

Now, as we paid our individual visits, I was interested to observe the surveillance techniques of the secret police. Their sheer number must make a major contribution to that full employment whch is one of the great advantages of socialism. Perhaps naïvely, I had not realised before how they use nicely dressed young couples, boy and girl walking arm and arm. And then I was glad to note that they, at least, have no shortage of hard currency, since three of us alone had the attention of at least two foreign cars, a blue Ford Sierra and a Snazzy little red Fiat. Spying the latter after one of our calls, and feeling rather tired and hungry, we decided to ask our narks for a lift back to our hotel. As we walked towards them, the driver started the engine and then pulled slowly away.

Amusing for us — but no joke at all for our Czech friends sitting in prison. In theory the Czechslovak authorities' hand- ling of the symposium was tactically re- fined. Earlier this year they got themselves a terrible press by breaking up a peace seminar and expelling the foreign partici- pants — including a certain Hitchens, C., late of this journal. Now they would allow our group, which included such eminent persons as Lord Avebury of the British parliamentary human rights group and a former Dutch foreign minister, to stay on, but lock up all the Czechs for 48 hours, and in some cases, immediately again for part of a further 48 hours, abandoning all but the barest shreds of legality. We, mean- while, would be allowed to go where we pleased. We would have what the Germans call Narrenfreihet, 'jester's freedom'. All doors would be opened to us, and the police would usher us courteously into empty rooms. Better still, we would bring suffering to the innocent. For if we were foolish enough to visit anyone not already well known to the police these people would surely feel the 'consequences' with which we were merely threatened. In practice, this exercise in damage-limitation did not go quite as planned: because of Havel's marvellous coup de theatre and the black comedy of Lieutenant Novotna with her flowers and her 'advertisements', be- cause we made our own protest dramatical- ly, urbi et orbi, and particularly because West German television managed to film Havel's arrest, and to get the film out. As I write, it seems certain that the Czechoslo- vak government is in for another interna- tional roasting.

What does this little tragi-comedy tell us about Czechoslovakia in 1988? It tells us, obviously, that the present Czechoslovak regime is still going backwards where Hungary, Poland, and, most important, the Soviet Union are going forwards, although not uniformly. Indeed, after the removal of Mr Strougal last month, the present government looks more reaction- ary than ever. As one Czech historian remarked to me between interrogations this is now the government that Brezhnev dreamed of after the invasion 20 years ago. But it is a Brezhnevite government without Brezhnev: a regime whose time has gone.

For this episode also tells us that the regime which has imposed the grotesque abnormality of 'normalisation' in Czecho- slovakia for two decades is now profoundly unsettled, confused and havering. It is unsettled from the East, for if Gorbachev is behaving like Dubcek, and Poland and Hungary almost like free countries, then how on earth do they justify their con- tinued immobility? By reference to the great socialist model of the German Demo- cratic Republic? Or perhaps to Bulgaria?

It is unsettled from the West, by the permanent example of West European prosperity and freedom, by the importance which most Western governments now attach to human rights and internal politic- al conditions in their conduct of the new detente, by the Vienna review conference and the ability of human rights activists such as those grouped in the international Helsinki Federation to mobilise public opinion on these issues.

Last, but by no means least, this regime is deeply unsettled from below — by the new flowering of independent initiative and civil courage within their own country. It now faces opposition and protest not merely from the front line of Charter 77, not only from intellectual samizdat, but from thousands of young people who have found the courage to speak out, and the no less than 600,000 people who have now signed a petition for religious freedom. On the 20th anniversary of the Soviet invasion thousands of mostly young people demons- trated in the centre of Prague, chanting `Dubcek!' and 'Freedom!' Last month, in a slightly pathetic attempt to gain some patriotic credibility, the authorities sud- denly declared that the 70th anniversary of Czechoslovakia's independence on 28 October 1988 be celebrated as a national holiday. (Canny shopkeepers hedged their bets by putting in their windows the slogan `Long live October!' which could refer either to Russia's revolution in 1917 or to Czechoslovakia's independence in 1918.) Then they locked up all the front-line oppositionists, to ensure that they would not face a genuinely patriotic manifesta- tion. Yet that is exactly what they did face, with a largely spontaneous crowd, again mainly composed of young people, and again chanting 'Freedom!' while being pursued through the narrow streets .

The police round-ups of oppositionists in connection with 28 October, and again in connection with this symposium, are the worst for years. Augustin Navratil, the prime mover of the petition for religious freedom (see `The yeoman and the cardin- al' in The Spectator, 16 April 1988) has been confined indefinitely to a mental hospital with a diagnosis of 'paranoia querulens' — and this at a time when even the Soviet Union is desisting from the abuse of psychiatry for political purposes. On the other hand, there are half-hearted gestures of reform and relaxation — for example, allowing devastatingly frank accounts of the country's economic stagna- tion to appear in the official press. As Tocqueville taught us long ago, such incon- sistency is characteristic of an ancien regime in its last years.

How long this twilight period will last, and how the change will come about, whether fast or slowly, peacefully or less so — these are, of course, unanswerable questions. The answers will depend pri- marily on developments inside Czechoslo- vakia, elsewhere in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. But they will also depend on us. 'The world sees you,' the crowd chanted to the police during the 28 October demonstration. But does it really?

In 1988, as at all those turning-points which were to have been the subject of our symposium — 1918, when Britain, France and the United States effectively gave Tomas Garrigue Masaryk the international licence to create an independent Czecho- slovak state; 1938, when, at Munich, Bri- tain and France sold that independent state down the river; 1948, with the communist coup, and 1968, with the Soviet invasion— in this 'year of eight' as in all those historic `years of eight', the fate of this small country in the centre of Europe still crucially depends on the attitude of the Western as well as the Eastern world.

Now the current line being peddled to the West by the Jakes regime goes roughly like this. 'We really want to press ahead with our own perestroika, with economic restructuring above all. But for this we need order and stability at home. Ordnung muss sein. Therefore you must give us credits and technology while understand- ing why we have to lock up dangerous criminal elements'. . . such as Czecho- slovakia's greatest living playwright Vaclav Havel. A pretty feeble line, you might think, yet incredibly enough there are signs that some Western powers might half swallow it. This applies above all to West Germany and Austria, both of which have a particular interest in keeping Ordnung in Czechoslovakia so that the Czechs don't upset the further progress of their own particular national convergences with East Germany and Hungary respectively. More surprising is the case of France, whose foreign minister earlier this year made the extraordinary statement that Czechoslova- kia's human rights performance was impro- ving (an assertion he subsequently mod- ified), and whose President, Francois Mit- terrand, has chosen this of all places, and this of all times, to pay a state visit scheduled for early next month. One might understand his reluctance to follow in Mrs Thatcher's wake to Poland or Hungary but this is taking competition a little too far. To offer political recognition and economic support to the present regime in Czechoslovakia is not just moral- IY abhorrent, it is also politically short- sighted. It ignores a prime lesson of recent East European history: the longer that fundamental reform is delayed, the more difficult it becomes, and the less likely it is to occur peacefully. Such an approach is thus likely to achieve the opposite of the desired effect. There is a time to praise, and a time to scold; a time to finance, and a time to refrain from financing. This is the latter.

In the short term, the prospects here look bleak: above all for the young, the faithful, the courageous and the indepen- dent. But not in the longer term. If there is such a thing as the tide of history, then in Central Europe today that tide is flowing Westward. And even if he puts our letter of protest straight into his personal shred- der, Comrade Jakes can no more halt the tide than old King Canute. There is thus a more than even chance that in the 1990s the Czechs and Slovaks will begin to enjoy some of the greater freedoms and opportu- nities that are already being enjoyed by their Hungarian and Polish neighbours and perhaps even, just conceivably, with slightly less of the accompanying economic distress.

And what, in that case, would they do with the likes of Lieutenant Novotna, or whatever she is really called? Looking at her muscular physique some of the intellec- tuals who were sent down the mines in the 1950s might nurse a bitter momentary thought. But the Czechs are the most gentle and tolerant of all Central European Peoples, so I have a better idea, inspired by her remarkable performance in the Hotel Pariz. I think she should go to work in the theatre. In a theatre which stages Vaclav Havel's plays. Indeed, she could perform in one of Havel's plays. I even have a title for it: Advertisement. She could play her- self.