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Czechoslovakia Police Repression
A manifesto made public under the title Charter 77 in January
1977 challenged the government to live up to its own laws in
regard to the rights--human, political, and social--of the
Czechoslovak people
(see Charter 77
, ch. 4;
Appendix D
) . The
manifesto revealed that Dubcek-style reformism was alive and well
eight years after Dubcek himself had been forced into obscurity.
Signed during the next two years by several hundred citizens
representing the entire spectrum of economic, political, and
social life, the document claimed to be apolitical, but in an
authoritarian state any demand for a lessening of
authoritarianism is inherently political, and the government
reacted accordingly. The police responded by sharply increasing
the very activities of which the Charter complained, that is,
unwarranted arrests, illegal searches, harsh interrogations, and
general harassment. Charter spokesman Jan Patocka, a well-known
and highly respected retired professor, died one week after an
intensive interrogation by State Security agents. Another
prominent signer, Vaclav Havel, who had been blacklisted as a
playwright for earlier support of Dubcek, was arrested
immediately, held for four months, and then released without
being charged. Havel was rearrested in 1979 and sentenced to
prison for antistate crimes.
Repression continued into the 1980s as the dissidents refused
to give up their demand that the basic laws of the land apply to
everyone, including those officials sworn to uphold them. In
April 1978, a group calling itself the Committee for the Defense
of the Unjustly Persecuted (Vybor na branu nespravedlive
stihanych--VONS) was formed to publicize the police vendetta
against the signers of Charter 77. The new group itself then
became a police target, and in October 1979 several of its
members were convicted on charges of subversion and sentenced to
prison terms By early 1987, the Charter 77 movement and its
offspring, VONS, were still clinging tenaciously to their demand
that legal processes be observed, a demand that had brought grief
to the members but had also attracted world attention. The
movement remained small, and the security agencies always had the
upper hand, but the dissidents refused to capitulate.
The use of brutal methods by the Czechoslovak police
continued into the 1980s. In a 1984 report, Amnesty International
cited Czechoslovakia as a country that used torture as a tool of
state policy. Yet continued concern in the West with human rights
in Czechoslovakia may have helped to ameliorate the situation
after that time. In a 1986 telephone interview with Austrian
radio, a Charter 77 spokesman said that the political oppression
of human rights activists had diminished somewhat and was not as
severe as it had been in the early 1980s. The police also showed
restraint at a December 1985 demonstration in downtown Prague
commemorating the death of John Lennon, a restraint that had been
lacking at a similar demonstration the previous year.
Nevertheless, marked oppression of religious groups and believers
continued unabated into the 1980s
(see Religion
, ch. 2). As one
Western observer has suggested, this differentiated approach
toward dissent indicates that the Czechoslovak government
considered religious activists, who are supported by a large
segment of the population, to be more of a threat than a small
number of political dissidents.
* * *
A number of excellent monographs concerning various aspects
of Czechoslovak national security have been published in the
1980s. Party control of the military, the professionalism and
nationalism of the officer corps, and Czechoslovak-Soviet
military relations are discussed in East European Military
Establishments by A. Ross Johnson, Robert W. Dean, and
Alexander Alexiev. William J. Lewis's The Warsaw Pact
presents useful information about the structure, training, and
equipment of both the CSLA and the internal security forces. A
former wing commander in the Czechoslovak Air Force, Zbynek
Cerovsky, has written several excellent articles for Armed
Forces based on his experience and insights. Much has been
written by Condoleezza Rice concerning the reliability of the
CSLA and the cohesion and loyalties of its military elite.
Richard C. Martin has focused on force modernization and how it
may affect the performance of the CSLA in a future war. Otto Ulc,
a former Czechoslovak judge, has continued to write highly
entertaining and informative monographs on various aspects of
life in Czechoslovakia, including dissent, crime, and public
attitudes toward the emplacement of Soviet nuclear-tipped
missiles in the country. And finally, The Military
Balance, published annually by the International Institute
for Strategic Studies, the Yearbook on International Communist
Affairs, is a convenient source of personnel strength and
information about weapons. (For further information and complete
citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of August 1987
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