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Václav Klaus
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24. srpna 2009
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cited from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/world/europe/27czech.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3&em
Czech Wounds Still Open, Communists Face a Ban
By DAN BILEFSKY and JAN KRCMAR
Published: December 26, 2009
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JAN KRCMAR
Published: December 26, 2009
PRAGUE — For many Czechs, it is a historical reckoning that is 20 years too late.
Petr Josek/Reuters
2009 Czechs in Prague marked the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in November. (Related)
(International News Photos
1948 Communists staged a rally in Prague after the their party took to power in a coup.)
Two decades after the Velvet Revolution overthrew Communist rule here in 1989, a group of Czech senators is pressing to ban the Communist Party, the only surviving one in the former Soviet bloc in Europe and, to its many critics, a national embarrassment and aberration.
“The Communists ruined this country and oppressed freedom and yet here they are 20 years later in our Parliament,” said David Cerny, the iconoclastic Czech artist, who in 1991 painted a Soviet tank pink, transforming a memorial to the liberation of Czechoslovakia by the Red Army in 1945 into the equivalent of a large toy. “It is a national disgrace. The Communists are endangering the country. The Czechs need to wake up.”
This month senators took the first step, petitioning the government to file a legal complaint with the Supreme Administrative Court, the country’s highest electoral authority, for suspension of the Communist Party’s activities.
While there is an incongruity here — the anti-Communist campaigners say they are acting to defend democracy while working to ban a party that is still doing well in elections — the senators insist that there is a real danger. They say the Communist Party, the third strongest force in the Czech Parliament, remains loyal to undemocratic revolution. And they are calling for it either to disband or to abandon its Marxist call to arms, which they say flouts the Czech Constitution’s insistence that political parties renounce violence.
Under Czech law, the court has the power to outlaw a party — but only on an initiative from the government or the president. So the senators are pinning their hopes on Prime Minister Jan Fischer, an economist and a former member of the Statistics Office during the Communist era, who has described his nine-year membership in the Communist Party as one of his “biggest mistakes.”
The senator leading the campaign, Jaromir Stetina, 66, may seem an unlikely anti-Communist firebrand: his grandmother was one of the founding members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. But Mr. Stetina, a former war correspondent, argued that the unreconstructed party was a dangerous relic.
“We believe the Communist Party should be suspended until they give up the title of ‘communist’ and denounce Marx and Lenin, who regarded violence as a legitimate means of gaining power,” Mr. Stetina said. “Not even the millions of dead bodies, which are the consequence of Lenin’s policies, have convinced the Czech Communist Party to abandon his teachings.”
Mr. Stetina and his commission have been sifting through dozens of past speeches and statements by the party in search of transgressions against democracy.
Their campaign was given impetus during the recent Velvet Revolution anniversary celebrations in November when the Communist Party issued an incendiary statement lambasting the democratically elected governments that followed the revolution for 20 years of “promises and lying.” Czechs, the Communist Party contended, had not wanted to discard communism in 1989.
Unlike the Communist parties in countries like Poland and Hungary, which transformed themselves after 1989 into more mainstream center-left parties, the Czech Communist Party has studiously avoided a comprehensive overhaul. Yet it is still flourishing and gained nearly 13 percent of the vote in the last parliamentary elections in 2006. Its supporters are mostly those fed up with politics as usual and regime nostalgics, many of them elderly pensioners, for whom life before 1989 seems better than life today.
The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, named after the two main regions of the Czech Republic, is the successor of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. While the party has sought to distance itself from its violent past, its many critics contend that it never really cut its umbilical cord to its pre-1989 predecessor — a contention the party vehemently denies.
Vojtech Filip, the Communist Party’s leader, was adamant in an interview that the party did not support undemocratic regime change. But he fell short of condemning the Marxist principle of revolution and called Marx “the greatest thinker of the millennium.”
“We are a legal party and always act according to the Constitution,” he said.
Defending his party’s philosophy, Mr. Filip paradoxically invoked Vaclav Havel, the former Czech president who led the revolution that overthrew Communism, arguing that Mr. Havel himself had equated contemporary Czech politics with “mafia-capitalism.”
Mr. Havel, who languished in prison under the Communist regime, has also, in fact, called the Communist Party “a boulder weighing down” the political system. But many Czechs blame him for refusing to ban the party when he became president or to put on trial a system that allowed people to send their neighbors to labor camps. Some saw in his approach a noble effort to avoid polarizing the nation; others consider it a moral lapse that prevented the country from coming to terms with its past.
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Times Topics: Czech RepublicLubos Dobrovsky, a former dissident and defense minister, who ran Mr. Havel’s office when he was president, argued that it was not possible to ban the Communist Party in the immediate aftermath of 1989 because the reform wing of the party had been an essential ally during the transition to democracy, and helped avoid violence.
But he acknowledged that Czech politicians, including himself, had been naïve in thinking the party would just disappear. “We thought we could overcome them with our own programs, and we were wrong,” he said.
Mr. Havel himself recently stood by his decision not to ban the party but said he nevertheless regretted that former Communists had prospered after 1989 while those they persecuted had suffered.
“I regard it as very sad that people who struggled to ensure freedom and were persecuted their entire life retire with a microscopic pension,” he said recently at an event marking the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, “while their tormentors and secret policemen have huge salaries and are successful entrepreneurs.”
While many Czechs today are outwardly hostile to the Communist Party, in the past the party was accepted, even embraced. Founded in 1921, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia won the country’s first postwar general elections in 1946, with the memory that the Soviet Army had helped vanquish the Nazis still fresh. The party came to power in a coup in 1948.
While a majority of Czechs have no desire to return to the Communist era, Mr. Dobrovsky, the former dissident, said he hoped that the current attempt to ban the party would expose it for what it is, while helping the country come to terms with history.
“The proposal forces the Communists to react and by doing so they will show their true nature,” he said. “When people listen to the Communists’ arguments, they will realize that the party does not belong in a democratic party system.”
(A version of this article appeared in print on December 27, 2009, on page A10 of the New York edition.)
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