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GROUND REALITIES

Two brave men of Prague

Syed Badrul Ahsan
VACLAV Havel will be recalled for the nobility of purpose he brought into his struggle for a democratic Czecholovakia in the 1980s. But, of course, his campaign for popular liberty began long before that, through his plays and his articles and his absolute fearlessness before the powers that were. When he died recently, it was once again time to recall the tumultuous times which he inhabited, indeed helped shape, in what would soon be a post-Cold War world. By the time he died — and this is again the unvarnished truth — he was no more the political giant he was when he rode to power in Prague at the head of what came to be known as the Velvet Revolution; and yet that old appeal, the unforgettable charisma was always there. Havel went to his grave as one of the more widely respected political figures of his time.
In a very important way, Havel's crusade in the 1980s was a forceful reminder of the struggle that the doomed Alexander Dubcek once initiated in Czechoslovakia for a freer land, a more liberal form of communism. Dubcek thought, and rightly too, that socialism needed a human face, unlike the Stalinist harshness symbolised by the regime of which he was a part. And it was a regime led by the likes of Antonin Novotny, an unrepentant Stalinist who believed, years after Stalin's journey into mortality, that a strict application of communism was what would guarantee his country's future. Novotny was not the only one of his kind. Across much of the Warsaw Pact landscape — East Germany, Hungary, Poland, the Soviet Union, et al — the belief persisted that a liberalisation of communist principles would endanger the future of the system, that it would mean the loss of a world which had meant a huge deal for millions of people.
That was the world Dubcek wished to transform through reforming the system in Czechoslovakia. A shrewd political operator, he mustered enough support within the party to be able to eject Novotny and his fellow hardliners from its leadership
in early 1968 and went on to inaugurate what would soon become known as Prague Spring. A spree of liberalisation — in the communist system, in the arts, in people's ways of life — followed without any danger of Czech communism coming apart. For the first time in twelve years, people in Czechoslovakia and outside it convinced themselves that Prague would not be a repeat of Budapest 1956, when Warsaw Pact forces had rolled into Hungary to snuff out the rising liberalism of Prime Minister Imre Nagy. Hungary was brutally crushed and Nagy and his fellow reformers were swiftly shot and buried in unmarked graves.
The world was surely far removed from what it had been in 1956. That, at least, was how many looked at it. They would soon be proved wrong, for Prague Spring would eventually not be able to last through the summer. In August 1968, it was once more the Warsaw Pact which sent its tanks into Czechoslovakia and quickly crushed Dubcek's reformist landscape. The cornered Stalinists, with strong support from the Soviet Union's Leonid Brezhnev and company, had hit back. Dubcek and his allies were bundled on to an aircraft and flown to Moscow, in all the humiliation that could be heaped on them. They were treated to a stern lecture on what they should not have
done and what they ought in future to do in the interest of communism. It was a weakened, demoralised Dubcek who came back to Prague, to undo his own measures of reform. He was not to last more than a few months as Czech leader. Replaced by the hardliner Gustav Husak, he was soon packed off to Ankara as his country's ambassador there before being brought back as a lowly forestry official in a remote region of his country. For the next twenty years, Alexander Dubcek was as good as forgotten history.
And then came Vaclav Havel. As communism collapsed in Czechoslovaka, it was Havel's
moment to let the world know that what Dubcek had begun in 1968 had now reached a point of fullness under his leadership. He was elected president of Czechoslovakia. And Dubcek, retrieved from obscurity, became speaker of the national assembly. For the people of the country, it was, decades after the decline of such good men as Eduard Benes and the two Masaryks, time for good cheer once more. Liberty was all. In distant Moscow, a zealous Mikhail Gorbachev was forcing change in the Soviet Union itself through glasnost and perestroika. All of eastern European communism was crumbling, the Berlin Wall came crashing down. It was an exposure of hollowness rather than an inherent weakness of the communist system that the world saw happening before it.
Vaclav Havel's triumph, on a personal level, would however turn out to be short-lived. A democratic Czechoslovakia, intoxicated by freedom, succumbed to fissiparous tendencies. The Slovaks soon went their separate way with their own country Slovakia. Havel was left leading a shrunken country, the Czech Republic, as its president.
Alexander Dubcek died in a car crash in 1992. Now, with Vaclav Havel's death, the old revolutionary spirit which once ignited gentle fire and passionate fury on the streets of Prague remains but a memory. Dubcek and Havel have entered the pages of history, for all the right reasons.
The writer is Executive Editor, The Daily Star. E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk