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Sit-down demo on first anniversary of Russian invasion-same spirit survives today
"Charter 77 is a free and informal and open association of people with various convictions, religions and professions, linked by the desire to work individually and collectively for respect for human and civil rights in Czechoslovakia and the world". (quotation from Charter 77).
Such is the aim of the statement known as Charter 77, which Czech defenders of civil liberties attempted to deliver to the Prague government in January, It was signed at the time by 282 persons, including the playwrights Vaclav Havel and Pavel Kohout, as well as Jiri Hajek, foreign minister in the Dubcek government. The number of signatories has since risen to over 672.
SIGNIFICANCE OF CHARTER 77.
Charter 77 "represents a new stage in the development of opposition in Czechoslovakia" according to Jiri Pelikan, Director of Czech TV under Dubeek, now in exile. Its importance, according to Pelican, is also that it "comes at a time when the spirit of resistance has begun to rise with a new force in the other East European countries". (article in Rouge, French Trotskyist daily, Jan. 14th).
Charter 77 acted as an immediate spur to the opposition in other East European countries. On Feb, 3 sixty Jugoslav intellectuals signed a petition demanding immediate repeal of a law which allows police artbitrarily to reject applications for passport. And in Rumania for the very first time there appeared on Feb. 13 a letter signed by eight intellectuals which demanded that the Rumanian government "honour the country's constitutional guarantees".
RESPONSE OF THE CZECH GOVERNMENT Government response was immediate and harsh, When representatives of Charter 77 tried to deliver the petition they were dispersed and harassed by waiting police. The official press began a campaign of slander and vilification against the signatories. In its Jan. 12 issue the CP organ, Rude Pravo, wrote that the Charter 77 group were "agents of imperialism without a mite of honour and conscience [who] cannot have any mission but the preparation of counterrevolution". On Jan. 17 Havel was arrested along with four other representatives. Arrest, detention and police harassment have continued ever since.
On March 13, Jan Patocka, a Czech philosopher and one of the representatives of the Charter group, died. This was only a few days after he had been questioned for eleven hours by the political police. Over a thousand persons attended the
funeral despite the repression. According
to a report in Aver, paper of the anti-Moscow
faction of the Greek CP. "most were arrested before or during the ceremony" There has been a sharp increase in the arrests and harassment since the Patocka Tuneral.
SOVIET SLANDER CAMPAIGN
The Soviet bureaucracy mounted its own
stander campaign. The Feb 12 issue of Pravda had the following to say about the Charter 77:
"In the press and over radio and TV in
many western countries an unprecedented hoopia has developed around the anti-
socialist gutter document called Charter 77,
which was fabricated by a group of rightwing counterrevolutionaries, figures whose
true anti-socialist face was exposed in 1968".
In the face of the new rise of opposition
in Eastern Europe the Kremlin bureaucracy
has decided to draw a hard line immediately
in Czechoslovakia. For it was here in 1968 that the Stalinist clite faced its greatest
challenge and was able to restore its "order"
only with a brutal military occupation. For this reason also the Charter 77 is a key test, and is seen as such by the entire opposition movement throughout Eastern Europe. UNDERMINES REFORMISM
The Stalinists have every reason to attempt
to repress the new rise of opposition which, it fears, will go beyond the limits of Dubcek-style reformism. This dynamic was pomted out by lios lanakakis, a University professor who joined the Czech CP in 1948 and was a supporter of the Prague Spring. According to lanakakis "a characteristic of the movement today is
that reformism the idea that such societies
can be reformed through working within the
party has been discredited." (statement
in Rouge, March 3).
A similar dynamic exists in Poland where, according to Krzysztof Pomian, 3 Polish socialist oppositionist, the myth has been exposed that "this regime is bad for the intellectuals but it may be good for the workers". According to Pomian, In Poland "in the 20 years between 1956 md 1976 more workers were killed than between the two wars. Since June there has been open repression against the workers. The masks have been ripped off." (statement in Rouge, March 3).
Foday there exists in Fastern Europe for the first time a real possibility of overcoming the uneveness which has always characterised the opposition struggles in the past, a real possiblity of unity and co-ordination between the working classes of Eastern Europe against the Stalinist bureaucracies
GUS FAGAN.