(The following is the text of remarks delivered by exiled Czechoslovak dissident Jan Kavan at a meeting held at the Mutualité in Paris May 17. The meeting was organized by the French Trotskyist group Organisation Communiste Internationaliste.]
I believe that to understand what is happening in Czechoslovakia today we have to look back to at least 1968. Ten years ago Alexander Dubcek was elected general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in what was a classical party coup d'état.
Different party factions reacted to political and economic tensions in the society. Alexander Dubcek was the compromise choice acceptable in January 1968 to all the factions.
The first two months under Dubcek revealed that the factions were united only by their opposition to [former CP boss] Novotny, for it slowly became evident that they did not have a clear political program for reform.
At the same time, Novotny refused to give up. He visited important factories, arguing demagogically that the change had been organized by party intellectuals so as to deprive workers of what they had gained in 1948. The general attitude of the workers at that time was one of "wait and see."
In March 1968 Dubcek decided to introduce a radical change that would prove to have a revolutionary impact-that is, to completely abolish censorship. He received support from some of his colleagues, though not from all, because they believed that freedom of the press would allow people to express their opinions on Novotny's regime, to express the bitterness that had remained bottled up in them for twenty years, and that this would help to defeat Novotny.
A few weeks later Novotny lost his post as president and his last remaining power. But it was not possible to reintroduce ensorship, and people began actively to ise their new freedom of press. speech, assembly, and association.
What started as a coup d'état acquired the characteristic of a mass spontaneous movement. If one had to characterize the whole of the Prague Spring in one sentence, it would probably be best described as a nationwide discussion about what
Charter 77 spokesman Jiri Hajek sort of socialism we want, how the society we want to live in should be structured to allow the people to make-or at least influence-the decisions that affect their lives, and how the power of the government should be limited and controlled so that abuses of power could never be repeated.
There were many different opinions on many different subjects. Early in the spring the students were probably the most radical. But through their spokesman Lubos Holecek in March, even they expressed their support for Dubcek, mainly because unlike Novotny he allowed them to meet, to discuss politics and their future political program quite openly, without fear of arrest. But at the same time Holecek warned that when the program of the young generation was finally formulated it would be different from the program of the party reformists.
The party eventually published its program in April 1968, calling it the Action Program. It was a program that in January would have justly been acclaimed as the most radical put forward by a Communist party. By the time it was issued in April, however, it was out of date on a number of points. The masses had moved faster, not waiting for the promised freedoms to be legalized. They had simply put them into practice.
There were a number of disagreements. It is impossible to list them all here, so I will give just one example. Many people were concerned about the growing power of the technocrats and were therefore extremely interested in the factory councils, or workers councils as the workers preferred to call them. The government proposed that such councils should be composed of three parts-one elected directly by the workers, one by the managers and local party bureaucrats, and one made up of representatives of the State Planning Commission and the banks.
Under popular pressure the government eventually backed down and proposed that the whole council be elected by the workers themselves. It added, however, that the council should have only the power to elect and recall managers and put forward suggestions to the managers. Power to make final decisions was to be left to the managers.
In the summer, such discussions virtually ceased and an artificial unity was established, as everyone felt that there was a grave external threat to the whole reform movement. They rallied behind Dubcek. In the middle of the night of August 21 the Russians invaded and immediately dragged the entire Dubcek leadership off to Moscow in chains.
People responded with a well-organized passive resistance that not only prevented the establishment of a puppet "revolutionary workers and peasants government," but also forced the Russians to return Dubcek and the others alive and back to power. But before the politicians returned they were forced to sign the so-called Moscow Protocols, an agreement that in effect meant the death of all the reforms. Dubcek and his friends argued that this was necessary, but the fact that Dr. Frantisek Kriegel, a member of the party presidium, was able to refuse to sign proves that there was an alternative to capitulation.
But the majority of people still believed in Dubcek, believed his promise that the most important achievements of the Prague Spring would be salvaged. Only after the Central Committee plenum in November did it become clear that the post-invasion Dubcek government was prepared to make one concession after another, always giving in to Soviet pressure.
The students decided to call a strike against this policy. They adopted a tenpoint manifesto that did not include a single specific student demand, but represented a minimal program based on the Action Program of the party. And so, ironically, the students who in April considered the Action Program too moderate, in November defended this program against the government that had created it in the first place.
The most important aspect of the threeday occupation-strike was the tremendous support it received from the workers. Workers assemblies accepted the ten-point manifesto as their own program and threatened to go on general strike if the government arrested the student strike organizers. Half-hour work stoppages took place; buses of the urban transport were placed at the disposal of the strikers, enabling them to come out without contravening the law forbidding assemblies of more than twenty persons; agricultural more than twentv persons: agricultural cooperatives sent food; and so on.
The most important result of the strike was that the students and workers got to know each other and trust each other. Important political agreements were signed between the student union and every industrial Czech trade union. This made the government very angry. The bureaucracy, understandably, felt threatened by this political activity of the working class. Husak went so far as to call these agreements counterrevolutionary, and he described such slogans as "Students, Intelligentsia, Workers, Unite" as antisocialist and antiparty.
At the same time, the workers refused to wait for the law legalizing the workers councils to be passed by parliament. They began electing councils and took over the running of at least 150 major factories.
In January 1969, the workers councils held their first congress and elected a central council. The government was powerless to stop them. Only in the summer of that year was the Husak government able to ban the councils and purge all the tradeunion militants. But the government couldn't purge the informal network of student/worker action committees. They couldn't reverse the process of politicalization.
The level of political consciousness of the students is clear from their 1969 letter addressed to the New Left in the West. In it the student leaders declared:
The original slogan "Society is not free if the intelligentsia is oppressed" has been corrected. It now reads, "Only when the immediate producers enjoy full and genuine democratic rights will the intelligentsia then perhaps have the right to speak about its own freedom."
By April 1969, Dubcek had made all the concessions he could and had lost most of his popular support. And so the Russians
MAlE
Der Spiegel
"Invaders Go Home!" Slogan painted in Russian on Soviet monument in Czechoslovakia in 1968 protests against invasion.
were able to achieve their main aim—to remove him completely and to install the "more reliable" Gustav Husak.
By the time of the first anniversary of the invasion, the only opposition against Husak's government that was possible was that utilizing classical clandestine methods. The first political group that decided to go underground was the Revolutionary Socialist Party. But they were soon arrested and sentenced to up to four years' imprisonment. Other groups went underground, and the opposition functioned in this way uninterruptedly for nine years, although Western newspapers scarcely reported it.
In 1971, hundreds of persons were arrested. In 1972, forty-six persons were sentenced, some to up to six and a half years' imprisonment. Those victimized included Milan Hübl, former rector of the party school and friend of Husak; former Secretary of the South Bohemian Party Dr. Jaroslav Sabata, who is the current spokesman of the Charter 77 movement; and former New Left student leader Jiri Müller. But even these setbacks did not destroy the opposition.
At the end of 1976, a number of different political groups united in a defense campaign on behalf of two groups of rock musicians who were then on trial. At the same time, the government published the full texts of two International Covenants on Human and Civil Rights, which by the act of ratification became part of Czechoslovak law.
The plain little brochure became a bestseller overnight. People learned for the first time that they had a legal right to freedom of press, speech, assembly, and association, and also freedom to strike and freedom to set up independent trade unions. They began to point out the difference between this law and everyday practice. Thanks to the defense campaign for the musicians, there was an informal organization prepared to express these feelings, and that is how Charter 77 was born.
The Chartists made it clear that they were not a political organization, had no political program, and did not want to be an opposition. Their only aim was to draw attention to individual cases of humanrights violations, and they offered to enter into a dialogue with the government over the solution to such problems.
Of course, they did not expect the government to say, "Sorry, we forgot to implement all these freedoms but we will do so now." It is clear to everyone that to give such freedoms would be suicidal for the government, and no government voluntarily commits suicide. But the Chartists did not expect the hysterical reaction by the government, which saw in the movement the greatest danger to its stability since the invasion.
The government began to broadcast vicious daily attacks on the movement, and thus accomplished what the Chartists could never have hoped to accomplish. That is, within a few days every worker and every peasant in villages where the Chartists could never have reached knew that something called Charter 77 existed. They did not know what it was, because the party did not allow the text of the charter, or even extracts from it, to be read out. But they assumed that it must be very radical and very powerful to make the government so worried.
The party argued that the Chartists were just a small group of former politicians and intellectuals. And in the beginning they were almost correct. Among the first
242 signatures, there were only seventeen workers.
But then the government helped the movement again. It organized assemblies of workers and tried to get them to vote for anti-Charter 77 resolutions. The workers argued that they would condemn the Charter only after they had heard its text. This could not be allowed, and so the campaign had to be called off. Instead local managers and party and trade-union representatives were asked to condemn the Charter in the name of the whole factory.
This made the workers even more angry and more interested in finding out more about Charter 77. By the end of last year, more than a third of the 1,000 signatures had come from workers, and thousands more workers support the Charter, distribute its documents, and participate in its actions.
The Charter 77 movement has always been politically very heterogeneous. It is comprised of Dubcekists, socialists, Trotskyists, liberals, democrats, Christians. That is another reason why the Chartists could not agree on a political program even if they wanted to. Their only common denominator is a determination to defend mutually agreed-upon principles.
Ladislav Hejdanek, one of the three present spokesmen of Charter 77, defines these principles as follows:
1. Struggle in behalf of basic human and civil rights for every individual, for which support from all people in the world is sought.
2. Struggle to respect the existing Czechoslovak law, which includes the International Covenants.
He paraphrases Marx of 1871 in saying that the Charter 77 movement wants to enlarge the domain to be removed from state control and that will be freed from the chains of governmental violence.
Such a description is in fact a direct reply to the present discussion inside the movement. There always has been such a discussion-about strategy and tactics, aims, the best means to employ, and so on. Last year the internal discussion resulted in a Charter 77 statement recognizing informal interest groups within the movement, which could act independently of others and prepare and sign their own documents. These groups would be based not just on geographical divisions and on professional interests, but also on political sympathies.
Only this year, an internal discussion became public when Jan Tesar, a Chartist and historian who spent a full six years in prison, wrote an open letter to the thenspokesman of the movement, Professor Jiri Hajek, a former foreign minister. Tesar argued the necessity of political plurality both before and after victory in any struggle. He argued for democratic competition between different political tendencies. He expressed his suspicion that Hajek and the group of purged Communists-reformists, or "ex-Communists," as Zdenek Mlynar, a former party secretary now in exile calls them—are hoping to reach an agreement with the ruling bureaucracy eventually and be integrated slowly back to power. He suspects them of being against the interna-
DUBCEK
tionalization of the Charter struggle because they hope for the emergence "of an enlightened ruler" in Czechoslovakia.
Tesar refers to a number of interviews with Hajek that Western journalists published and attacks him for expressing fears that international pressure on the Soviet bloc to get it to observe humanrights obligations will only result in increased repression.
Hajek answered in his own open letter and denied that he ever expressed such fears, though it is possible that some Western journalists distorted his words when he explained that he is against
2112 support for a Charter that is in reality aimed against "the dialectical unity of human rights and peaceful coexistence."
These two letters sparked off a series of reactions from a number of Chartists. The most balanced so far is the one I mentioned earlier from Charter spokesman and philosopher Hejdanek, who also explains that there is no legal way in which the Charter movement could become an organization.
This, of course, should not stop and does not stop activities carried out by the Chartists. But these are outside the framework of the movement as such. For example, the unofficial university, sometimes called the University of Jan Patocka in memory of one of the first Charter spokesmen, who died last year, can find justification in both Czechoslovak and international law.
It functions on the simple principle that purged lecturers and young people who were not allowed to study can get together. But it is not a Charter activity. It's a "specific citizens' initiative.
" There is probably no limit to such initiatives, which take encouragement from the atmosphere created by the Charter.
and in th
Vest the best known, political anuping o Chartists is the group of Communist reformists. Petr Uhl, a Trotskyist who recently joined the public exchange of opinions, is highly critical of them and points out that they illogically link the Charter to the Prague Spring (some Western journalists do the same) and regard the Prague Spring as the spiritual father of presentday Eurocommunism.
Uhl, unlike Tesar, recognizes though that the reformists are highly differentiated into "moderates, center, and radicals." Among the "radicals," he would probably place those Communist leaders of 1968 who opposed the Moscow Protocols during the invasion and continue to oppose the conciliatory policy of the postinvasion Dubcek government (for example, Kriegel, Sabata, and a few others).
It is highly significant that these men are among the signatories of last month's new manifesto entitled *100 Years of Czech Socialism" This manifesto contrasts sharply with a document entitled "Ten Years Since the Prague Spring," released only three days earlier by twentyeight Prague Dubcekists, who take as their starting point the Prague Spring and compare the present situation with 1968. The signers of the latter document conclude that present political and economic problems are the same as the ones existing at the end of 1967, only more widespread and deeper. They indirectly offer cooperation with the government in solving these problems, because the "situation is grave."
The twenty-three signatories of the "100 Years of Czech Socialism," on the contrary, take as their starting point the first program of a socialist and working-class movement in Bohemia, the founding program of the Czech Social-Democratic Party of 1878. They show clearly that many socialist principles have never been implemented over the hundred years, and some that the workers won have been again taken away from them by the bureaucracy after 1948 and after 1968. They conclude that they are determined to fight for the implementation of all socialist principles and that today this fight would have to be a struggle against the Communist bureaucracy, which "the workers today do not regard as a workers party but as a party of 'overlords.'"
The government's reaction to the two documents was instructive. They ignored the "Ten Years Since the Prague Spring" and its signatories, but the secret police immediately subjected most of the signers of the "100 Years of Czech Socialism" to great harassment, interrogation, and house searches. During these searches, more documents were apparently found. Some were draft documents for discussions between socialists of different opinions, probably first in Czechoslovakia and later maybe also between socialists in different East European countries and between socialists of the East and West.
A report written by one of the interrogated signatories is very interesting. He states that he was questioned thoroughly about his proposal to create an independent trade union at his place of work. The interrogators apparently told him that such a union would be illegal because it would be contrary to the law concerning a unified trade-union movement, and that anyway every new organization must join the National Front, otherwise it would be a criminal act.
Premysl Janyr answered that first the union would have to be set up, which hadn't yet happened. Then it would have to be evaluated to see if its creation was contrary to the law or not. And lastly it would have to be proved that a criminal act was indeed committed. He regarded that interrogation as a bit premature. But the reaction of the secret police indicates that they do not share his view.
The examples of Klebanov and his comrades and the initiative in Poland was enough to scare the bureaucracy. It knows perfectly well that the greatest danger to its survival is cooperation between socialists across the borders, of East European countries and between East and West, and the strength of an organized working class. That is why bureaucratic regimes like Dr. Husak's cannot tolerate even attempts to set up free trade unions. That is why support for the right to set up such unions cannot be underestimated. It is today one of the most important developments in Eastern Europe.
It is extremely important to express solidarity with those who actively oppose the rule of the bureaucracy in the so-called socialist countries. In this connection I would like to thank FEN and FO* for launching a campaign to raise money for unemployed, or partially or badly employed, Chartists. In this regard, FEN followed an earlier example of an Italian trade union, UIL*
2. Fédération de l'Education Nationale (National Education Federation, the largest of France's teachers unions, with more than 500,000 members).
3. Force Ouvrière (Labor Force, a French tradeunion federation).
4. Unione Italiana dei Lavoratori (Italian Feder ation of Trade Unions).
To express solidarity verbally is important because it helps to break down the barriers of isolation that the Czech government tries to raise around the population.
дай
HUSAK
But words are not enough. For words to be believed and not to be taken as a mere hypocritical public exercise with some other political aim, such words should be translated into concrete action. Financial support for the unemployed, that is those who are unemployed for political reasons and who were abandoned by their own trade unions in Czechoslovakia and who cannot get any unemployment benefits because officially there is no unemployment, is one such clear concrete action. It could convince people in Czechoslovakia that they have genuine allies and support ers among the Western left and especially trade unions.
I have read with great interest the CGTS statement following their recent visit to Prague, and I agree with all their proposals, spelled out to me also yesterday in Dijon by a CGT representative. I can here only express my sincere hope that the CGT will soon decide to translate this expression of solidarity into concrete actions that can have an actual impact on the lives of persecuted trade unionists in Czechoslovakia.
Two of my best friends are among today's Czech political prisoners. Both were known for their support of the workers councils in '68 and '69 and of cooperation between students and workers.
One of them-Ales Machacek-is now serving the longest sentence of all the Chartists-three and a half years. For what? For alleged distribution of literature that the police failed to find because, as the judge explained, Machacek had time to hide it. His hostility to socialism was proved by the court by simply referring to his refusal at the trade-union meeting to condemn the Charter. He was never a member of the CP, he is unknown in the West, he is young and a technician, not an intellec tual, and therefore it is very difficult to organize a campaign in the West on his behalf.
But I strongly believe that the fight to release prisoners like Machacek must form an integral part of a struggle of any socialist force anywhere. I strongly believe that workers in the East will finally win their struggle against the bureaucracy only if they are unceasingly supported by all those who oppose exploitation.
I strongly believe that those in power both in the East and in the West are defeatable. But we have to realize that our struggle is a common struggle, and we have to unite!
"The Skunks of the World'
An article in the June 16 Far Eastern Economic Review describes the "elaborate network of arms, military and quasimilitary cooperation, electronics, uranium and [weapons] 'laundering' operations" linking Taiwan, Israel and South Africa.
Taiwan-whose military arsenal is stamped "Made in USA"-supplies South Africa with small arms and "riot-control" equipment. Review reporter Melinda Liu was told that Taiwan officials undergoing "anti-riot" training took a trip to South Africa to "watch rioters being shot" during Black demonstrations.
Israel has supplied South Africa with fast patrol boats, missiles, submachine guns, radar stations, antiguerrilla alarm systems, and computers. "The two coun tries also collaborate," says Liu, "in armour development and military electronies."
Israel sells sophisticated heavy weaponry to Taiwan as well, much of it "laundered" through South Africa.
Perhaps most ominous of all, both Taiwan and Israel look to South Africa to supply the uranium that they need to be able to produce nuclear weapons.
This cozy triangle is apparently comforting as well as profitable. It must be reassuring to deal with another government as internationally despised as your own. Reassuring enough to joke about it. Liu quotes "a representative of one of the three countries" as saying "The skunks of the world must unite."
Notes
1. See Intercontinental Press/Inprecor, August 28, 1978, p. 964 for an English translation of the text of this document.
5. Confédération Générale du Travail (General Confederation of Labor, France's largest union federation).