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Václav vs. Václav

Ex-President Havel's memoirs paint a portrait of power battles hidden by a thin veneer
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May 16th, 2007 issue

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By Václav Havel

translated from the Czech and annotated by Paul Wilson

This week, The Prague Post publishes the second part of an excerpt from the English-language edition of President Václav Havel’s memoirs, which came out in Czech last May titled Please, Be Brief. The new edition, published by Knopf in the United States as To the Castle and Back, reveals much about the contentious relationship between Havel and his successor, Václav Klaus, who was prime minister from 1992 to 1997.

Klaus led the way for fundamental economic changes and was credited abroad for the rapid transformation of a centrally planned economy into a market-driven one. But Havel contends it was mainly Klaus’ spotlight grabbing instincts that explain this.

The conservative Civic Democratic Party (ODS) was the other chief legacy of Klaus, having split off from Havel’s Civic Forum early on. By 1997, Klaus’s party had become enmeshed in a funding scandal, causing the collapse of his administration. Klaus returned to power as president in 2003.

Havel responded to questions by journalist, Karel Hvížďala.

KH: Why did you wait to criticize Václav Klaus publicly until the so-called Rudolfinum speech in 1997 [published in English March 5, 1998, by The New York Review as “The Sad State of the Republic”], after his government had fallen? Some observers found it unconvincing and above all too late.

VH: In the first place, as president I gave between 20 and 30 major speeches every year. They all appeared later in book form, and they are in my collected works. Anyone who reads them through will notice they were not occasional shouts provoked by a particular situation and that together they make up a single unified whole, continuing and developing my view of the world, of politics, of the position of our country, and so on. In fact, I deliberately tried to write my speeches that way: More than once I started one speech where the previous speech left off, without anyone noticing.

KH: Excuse me for interrupting, but, while we’re on the subject of your speeches, you must often have had to repeat yourself. Didn’t that bother you as a creative person?

VH: It bothered me a lot. When I had to express something again that I had already expressed, it was painful. But unfortunately there was no other way. Ivan Medek, who at one time was my chief of staff, always tried to ease my mind by pointing out that the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Masaryk, had in fact said the same thing all his life.

The Rudolfinum speech was simply one of the many dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of speeches in which I said — perhaps in other words and in different circumstances — essentially the same thing I had said many times before or after. … Perhaps it became famous because accident placed it at a time when Klaus’ government had resigned, but the speech was in no way connected with the resignation. It had been planned and written long before that.

For the most part, the issues I raised were meant for future consideration, or were tasks I felt we had to confront. Only the introductory part was critical, and it wasn’t a critique of Klaus as such, but of Czech politics. That those politics were inextricably linked with Klaus, his opinions and his behavior is another matter. That’s not the speech’s doing.

But something else played a role here: The new presidential election was approaching in early 1998, and, knowing that I would probably be in the running again, I wanted to lay all my cards on the table and avoid any suspicion that I was cozying up to Parliament and not telling them straight out what I thought. For that reason, the speech to both the houses was perhaps a little harsher than others.

KH: And now to the notorious, so-called Sarajevo assassination. What actually happened concerning Klaus’ resignation in 1997, and how did you perceive it and experience it?

VH: There wasn’t anything especially complicated about it. The government was facing economic problems: The reforms were dragging, and the solutions proposed kept getting put off, or else they were only half-measures. Conflicts within the governing coalition were growing.

Then came the affair involving the uncertain sources of funding belonging to the governing ODS party, complete with allocations of secret Swiss bank accounts and unpaid taxes. Many people had suddenly had enough. And so it began: The foreign affairs minister, Josef Zieleniec, who up to that point had been Klaus’ closest ally and the co-founder of his party, resigned; next, both smaller coalition parties — the Christian Democratic Union–Czech People’s Party and the Civic Democratic Alliance — withdrew from the government coalition. It came to a head with the resignation of several more ministers from the ODS itself, above all the interior minister, my longtime friend from the Charter 77 days, Jan Ruml, and the finanve minister, Ivan Pilip.

If I am not mistaken barely half the Cabinet remained, perhaps less. In such a situation, the government had to dissolve itself. It was only logical, and I publicly appealed to Klaus to do so. My impression at the time was that none of those who resigned was willing to say publicly what his real and most profound reasons for resigning were. All indications were that they had not resigned over specific conceptual disagreements, or over the affair involving ODS financing and the subsequent attempt by the ODS to deny, obfuscate and disprove everything, but something far more trivial: Klaus’ way of running the government.

He was capable of humiliating his ministers in all kinds of ways, ridiculing the proposals they brought to Cabinet meetings, and arbitrarily changing their order on the agenda. The atmosphere in Cabinet meetings was often incredibly tense, and it was his fault. I had seen this behavior a couple of times with my own eyes, but it wasn’t that extreme; after all, he toned down his behavior somewhat in front of me. But from various ministers I know how those Cabinet meetings often played out. When the material problems began to accumulate as well, regardless of what they were caused by, most of the Cabinet ministers had had enough and walked away.

KH: Why was it called the “Sarajevo assassination?”

VH: I remember one day Ruml phoned me when I was in Lány [the presidential residence outside Prague] to report that he and Pilip were going to announce their resignation at a press conference that afternoon, but that Klaus had just gone to Sarajevo for a summit of the Central European Initiative, which they said they hadn’t known when they called the press conference. When they learned that Klaus was out of town, they didn’t want to change their plans and create further speculation.

That, at least, is how Ruml described it to me. It was Klaus who called it the “Sarajevo assassination,” and he succeeded — as he had in many other instances — in popularizing the notion to the point that he was able to impose his own inverted interpretation of events on almost everyone — and mainly, of course, on the snide brigade — and he did it subtly, by playing on this cliché. The government had collapsed, and he presented it as an “assassination” attempt on himself.

— The author was president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic from 1990 to 2003.

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