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Ambassador fired for telling truth in Kabul By Alan Levy The Prague Post (December 23, 2003) You may have read the headlines about how Prague's outspoken ambassador to Kuwait was fired Nov. 28 for criticizing a Cabinet decision to close the Czech Army's 7th Field Hospital in nearby Basra, Iraq ("Diplomat sacked over hospital flap," News, Dec. 3-9). Jana Hybaskova, 38, had the audacity to write in Mlada fronta Dnes that "we are surrendering to the indolence of the military health service, security anxieties and insufficient political will to complete the job." Yes, it was undiplomatic -- and for that Hybaskova was recalled. She arrived home in mid-December, in time to ski over Christmas with her family (husband Ivan Gabal, a military affairs specialist, and their two daughters). She landed not quite four months behind her friend and colleague, Petr Pribik, 66, who'd been dismissed as ambassador to Pakistan and Afghanistan for calling some Defense Ministry officials liars. Much less was written about the Pribik affair. But relaxing in his home in Prague 5, the abruptly retired ex-ambassador -- looking more like a benign, gray-bearded Santa than a courageous whistleblower -- matter-of-factly told a visitor how he managed to defend diplomacy, stave off bureaucracy and serve out his full four-year term. Their man in Islamabad A veteran of 28 years with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in its Munich era, Pribik returned to his native Prague around the time RFE/RL moved here, but he retired from the radios and used his severance pay to buy a house and begin a diplomatic career. In 1996 he was posted to Havana as charge d'affaires but was not named ambassador to Cuba because the Castro regime wouldn't accept an ex-RFE/RL broadcaster in the job. In 1999, however, he won a dual ambassadorship, serving in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, but also accredited to Afghanistan, though to its then-rebel Northern Alliance, not its cruel Taliban regime. Even before Sept. 11, 2001, changed the world, Pakistan -- seething with terrorists and fundamentalists -- was a dangerous place. In early 2001, two Czech tourists camping out in northern Pakistan were stoned to death in their tent by robbers. Instructed to evacuate the 50 or 60 Czech tourists still in the region, Pribik was faced with fully booked flights out of Islamabad. But the local Rotary Club chairman, an airline official, agreed to smuggle them onto planes to Karachi, where they could catch international flights. When Sept. 11 happened and the Taliban were bombed out of power (and often, into Pakistan), many diplomats left Islamabad and most evacuated their dependents. But Pribik's five Czech employees (seven or eight Pakistanis worked in the embassy, too) all stayed. So did his wife, Natalie, Czech-born to a White Russian father and a Sudeten German mother. Honorary patron of St. Joseph's Hospice for the dying and ailing in Islamabad, she saw her diplomatic volunteers leave and local funding dry up in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Madame Ambassador devoted herself full time to raising money for the hospice, e-mailing around the world and inviting the remaining diplomatic corps to gala fund-raising dinners to put the hospice back on its feet. In the spring of 2002, Foreign Minister Jan Kavan and Defense Minister Jaroslav Tvrdik decided to pay a joint June visit to liberated Afghanistan and entrusted Pribik to arrange it. The ambassador rode over the Khyber Pass to Kabul, where the Czech Republic had no diplomatic residence and the one hotel was booked solid. So he lodged with Mirek Stetina of the Czech charity People in Need and journalist Petra Prochazkova. From this base, Pribik visited President Hamid Karzai and even tried to see the newly returned King Zahir Shah. At the royal villa, while Pribik pleaded for an appointment, the elderly monarch poked his head into the office in search of a spoon with which to take his medicine. "Who's that?" he asked an aide. Came the reply: "It's only the Czech ambassador." The king withdrew without greeting Pribik, though they met on a later visit under more formal circumstances and had a 10-minute chat. But such was Pribik's rapport with Karzai and other officials that he was able to arrange a VIP visit (usually reserved for heads of state and major guests) for the Czech delegation. Plans included a welcome by Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah at a secured airport, a tour of areas safely under American and allied control, a meeting with the president and a possible session with the king. Pribik was still in Kabul when word came from Prague that the visit was off. With a crucial national election looming that June, Kavan and Tvrdik had decided to stay close to home to campaign. Pribik was told to cancel the visit on the stated grounds that Afghanistan was unsafe.
He refused to give that excuse. After all, the hosts had gone to great effort to render at least some of Afghanistan safe for the two ministers. It would be a slap in the face, a diplomatic gaffe, to brand the country any more dangerous than it was. Invoking the U.S. first lady and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, he told Prague: "If Mrs. [Laura] Bush and Mary Robinson have come, who are we to say it's too dangerous for Kavan and Tvrdik?" The response from his boss, the head of the Foreign Ministry's Asian department, was that "your position is very complicated," Pribik recalls -- meaning that his job was in danger. Pribik was willing to compromise a little. He told his chief, "You send me a message saying anything you want and I'll read it to them" -- just so long as the words weren't his own. He was told he'd receive the message in two days. "I am still waiting," he says now, a year and a half later. "It never came." Excuses, excuses! While he waited, he hinted to his Afghan hosts that the ministers might not be coming. "What's the matter?" the chief of protocol asked him. "Are they both ill?" "Worse than that," Pribik replied. "They are cowards." When Michal Kubal of Czech TV phoned him to ask why the visit was off, Pribik answered: "Because the defense minister's advisers aren't elected or responsible to anybody; they sit in Prague. They're clerks who know nothing about the situation in Afghanistan. They told him it's dangerous. It's not true. It's a lie." When he hung up, Petra Prochazkova said to him: "This will cost you your job." "No way!" he assured her. "I left Czechoslovakia for 30 years because I couldn't speak freely. I didn't come back to keep my mouth shut." The next night, his words were broadcast on TV over a still photo of him. Nothing happened right away. He went back to Islamabad and that July took his home leave in Prague, where he was met with frosty shoulders at the Foreign Ministry. A deputy minister handed him written notice of recall, backdated to June 9, 2002, and signed by President Vaclav Havel and brand-new Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla. He was told to wind up his affairs in Pakistan by September. Pribik refused to accept the paper for two reasons: Islamabad was misspelled Islabad. And Spidla wasn't yet head of government June 9, when Milos Zeman still was. Instead of correcting the technicality, the government let him return to "Islabad" and carry on. Around Christmastime he negotiated a June 30, 2003, termination date, at which time he would resign from the foreign service. Then he and Natalie took an extended vacation in Australia before arriving home at the end of August. Pribik plans to write a memoir next year -- and so does Hybaskova, who will go back to Kuwait to wind up her work in January. Czechs can look back with pride and nostalgia at having had two ambassadors who broke protocol to speak their minds.
Alan Levy can be reached at
alevy@praguepost.com
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