Vaclav Havel, true friend of Sri Lanka

Vaclav Havel, the former dissident and veteran of the Prague Spring who died on Sunday, was the last President of Czechoslovakia and the first of the Czech Republic. He was a true friend of Sri Lanka.

In 2000, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam launched their offensive to capture Jaffna, using multi- barrel rocket launchers for the first time. It was the Czechs under Havel who supplied equivalent weapons to the Sri Lanka Army, allowing the latter to repulse the onslaught.

When my father, the late Anil Moonesinghe, was Sri Lanka's Ambassador in Vienna, he was accredited to the Czech Republic, and he drew very close to the Czech President; Havel used to invite him for almost every Presidential event that took place.

As an aside it should be noted that the government of Ranil Wickremesinghe, in its wisdom, decided to rebuke my father for travelling too often to Prague from Vienna. It apparently didn't like the idea of a diplomat actually doing his job by getting so close to a foreign Head of State.

My father had spent time in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic during the Prague Spring of 1968, when the government of Alexander Dubcek attempted to reform the bureaucratic system which existed, introducing 'Socialism with a human face'.

Enthused by what he had seen and then cast down when Soviet forces invaded the country and threw out Dubcek, he wrote a short book in Sinhala on the whole topic, called 'Czechoslovakia 1968'. With this background, and with his links to former dissident circles, he was uniquely placed to be our representative in the Czech and Slovak republics.

The reason, I think why Havel was so close to my father was because it reminded him of the days when he was still a dissident as well as of the immense well of shared hope that was the Prague Spring, when Dubcek and his colleagues were trying to do what Yugoslavia had done earlier, and to go even further.

The central problem of the East European command economies was their inherent inability to produce enough consumer goods. Available investment went mainly into heavy industry and armaments, so that the best technology was available, which often surpassed that of the West. The Soviet space programme was illustrative of this.

On the other hand, insufficient investment went into light industry and the production of consumer items. Manufacture was organised in the old Fordist manner of mass line production, with little room for variation, depending on long product runs for economy.

The Yugoslavs had modified the command economy in two ways; firstly by the gradual introduction of workers' self-management and secondly by using market forces to direct investment decisions. The architects of the Prague Spring were following the same path, but were also trying to take the additional step of political liberalisation.

They were aided in this by the democratic history of their country - which had been the only parliamentary democracy in Eastern Europe, surrounded by fascist dictatorships. Indeed the Communist Party had come to power through the ballot box.

This experiment was crushed by the Warsaw Pact invasion and the subsequent removal from power of the Dubcek government. The new regime of Gustav Husak was far more conservative and subservient to the diktat of the Kremlin. Dissidents now began to question the very tenets of Communism and began to dream of a capitalist restoration.

Havel was most interested in the concepts of political freedom and democracy. He came from the old bourgeois class that ruled Czechoslovakia before the revolution. For him, market forces and democracy were inseparable.

Following the 'Velvet Revolution' which overthrew the command economy, Dubcek was sidelined into a position of patron saint of Czechoslovakia. Havel was the natural choice for President of the new, 'post-communist' Czechoslovakia. He resigned when the country split into its Czech and Slovak constituent parts, but was later elected President of the Czech Republic.

Ironically, as Head of State of both Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, this former campaigner for human rights was called upon to preside over 'Lustrace' ('cleansing'), a 'Lustration Law' designed to purge the country of its Communist past.

Havel (along with Adam Michnik, another former dissident) argued that '... society has a great need to face that past, to get rid of the people who have terrorised the nation and conspicuously violated human rights, to remove them from the positions that they are still holding'.

Later Havel came to regret 'Lustrace'. 'The law,' he said, 'places on the same level a young man who cooperated with the police because he could not hold out during a beating ... and the policeman who beat the young man into [cooperating].'

Of course, the law went much further. 'Lustrace' was criticised severely on the grounds that it discriminated in employment and violated human rights by assigning collective guilt - prosecuting individuals solely on the basis of membership or affiliation.

Paradoxically, the term 'lustration' had been used by the StB, the Czecholovak secret police, for its process of checking the loyalty of citizens to the Communist Party. Realising its implications, Havel attempted to veto an extension of the law - which he had envisaged as a temporary measure - but was overridden by the Czech Parliament.

He also lent support to NATO's assault on the rump of Yugoslavia, during which extensive bombing of civilian targets took place. He tried to justify it on the somewhat mystical grounds that NATO was following 'God's Law' - which put him in bed with the Bible-thumping conservative backers of neo-colonialism.

Havel had the doubtful honour of being admired by the British right-wing former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. However, Thatcher's Czech counterpart, Havel's successor Vaclav Klaus, dismissed him as 'a socialist' - which he most definitely was not.

His epitaph may be that he was a man with the best intentions, a victim of history whose dream of a truly democratic Czechoslovakia was stillborn, suborned by the very forces he himself helped unleash.

VINOD