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Here yesterday, here tomorrow?

Dienstbier faces new challenge as he works for presidential nod

January 30th, 2008 issue

By Eva Munková

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST

Former Foreign Affairs Minister Jiří Dienstbier is seen as a dark-horse candidate for president in the election. enlarge

ČTK

Václav Havel chose Dienstbier to help run the government in 1990. enlarge

What others say

For 10 years, Jiří Dienstbier has avoided the Czech political circus. There are some, including a prominent resident of Prague Castle, who would like to write him off for good. Public opinion polls show this would not be wise.

In October, Dienstbier took a substantial lead in an informal poll on the presidency, sponsored by Aktualne.cz with 250,000 votes, compared to President Václav Klaus' 199,000 votes.

Jiří Pehe, politologist and director of New York University, Prague campus:
"His shield is clean. ... Unfortunately, nothing is forgotten in Czech politics. Mr. Dienstbier is said to have failed in the leadership role of the Civic Movement and the Free Democrats. That's a characteristic of politics that works against him.
If Švejnar beats Klaus in the first round, it will mean that he got a certain number of ODS votes and then his chances are much greater than Dienstbier's. But if he doesn't win, the opposition has a more left-leaning candidate to unite the Social Democrats, Communists and Green Party.
There has been a certain preparation of the public for him as a candidate. I think that if Švejnar doesn't pass in the first round, Dienstbier will be fielded in the second."

Petr Sokol, politologist of the CEVRO INSTITUT:
"The main reason he wasn't chosen was because he's been involved in so many political directions: the communists, the Civic Movement, the Free Democrats and now the Social Democrats. He's made lots of enemies.
He's a man who could play a significant role in an exceptional political situation, like the time after November 1989, but he will have a hard time gaining a foothold in the day-to-day politics that are the daily bread of European democracies."

Political analyst Milan Hamerský:
"Mr. Dienstbier is a solitary figure without a broad backing or a movement to stand behind him. He doesn't have followers — Klaus does. ... But often heads of state, Masaryk, Beneš and even Havel, didn't represent the median population.
There's that 'outsider' element. But many countries had outsiders that stayed out of the game for years and then became president: Churchill — even Masaryk. There's a tradition of strong political personalities who get defeated and withdraw for several years, and then come back.
That chance is still there. ... The ODS is probably going to attack challengers, including Švejnar, and it tends to use very rough tactics. I think we can expect some big surprises."

For the Post

He has been a dissident, a diplomat, a prisoner, a foreign affairs minister, a stoker, a professor, a reporter, an author, a human rights commissioner and a politician.

Jiří Dienstbier is also one of President Václav Klaus’ harshest critics. Completely pro-Europe and anti-whatever it is that the United States stands for now, he’s against the U.S. radar base, independence for Kosovo and greater cooperation with the European Union. He is a man without a party, a smoker of Marlboro cigarettes and a fan of the FC Bohemians 1905 soccer team.

He has never been involved in a political, financial or personal scandal. The worst Dienstbier’s enemies — and he has some big ones — can say about him, is that he is a former communist, a loose cannon, a lone wolf, the kiss of death for every political party he’s ever been in and a political loser who always bets on the wrong horse.

Nonetheless, since last spring, the opposition has been bandying his name about as a possible candidate in February’s presidential elections. Granted, in the end the nomination went to Jan Švejnar. But analysts say the Social Democrats just could, at the very last moment, put Dienstbier back in the race.

Keep your shoes on

“It’s a communist-panelák habit,” Dienstbier says at the door of his Prague flat. “Nobody ever took off their shoes in our house — except for StB agents. It was fun to watch them turn the place upside down in their socks.”

The sympathetic thing about Dienstbier is that he sees the humor in a situation — be it a house search, an StB interrogation or even his three years in jail.

“Jail’s not the worst thing. At least, if you’re in jail, they can’t lock you up,” he jokes. “The bad part was the house searches, the interrogations. … When they were taking you away, you never knew if it was for an hour or for three years.”

Dienstbier was born in 1937 in Kladno. He studied journalism, then got a job in the foreign news section of prestigious Československý rozhlas (Czechoslovak Radio). In the early 1960s, he started a promising career as a foreign correspondent.

In 1958, he joined the Communist Party. Like many others, he had hopes of changing the system from the inside.

“You have to fight where the battle is,” he says of his membership now.

The reformers thought they could give socialism a human face — and they almost succeeded.

“We actually won in 1968. Whoever was there can tell you that it was a huge nationwide uprising. … They only sent in the tanks when they realized nothing else was going to stop the fundamental changes in the regime.”

During the invasion, he and a group of reporters from Československý rozhlas took to the streets and broadcast news of the invasion from hiding.

Thus ended his career as a foreign correspondent. At 32, Dienstbier was ousted from the Communist Party and fired from his job. With the exception of three years in jail, he would spend the bulk of his adult life in menial jobs — ending up as a stoker at Metrostav.

But instead of withdrawing into a gray mist of passive-aggressive obedience, he and a group of like-minded dissidents (including Václav Havel, Zdeněk Mlynář, Petr Uhl and Václav Benda) attacked the system from the inside. In the face of constant harassment, they maintained contact with the West, published samizdat (banned literature) and generally refused to shut up.

In 1977, the group published Charter 77 — calling upon the government to respect the final act of the Helsinki Human Rights Covenant that it had signed in 1975. Dienstbier served as a spokesman for the group.

“I would always tell people: Go home, think about it, talk to your family. (If you sign it) they are certain to throw you out of your job. They might interrogate you, threaten you, blackmail you, and you have to be able to take it.”

For his activities, and his involvement in the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS) he spent 1979 to 1982 in jail.

In November 1989, 100,000 people jangling their keys on Wenceslas Square proved the dissidents right. The communist leadership caved in, and, by Christmas, the Charter 77 leaders, united in a loose coalition called the Civic Forum, had taken the reins. In the 1990 elections, the party won 80 percent of the votes.

Havel became president, Dienstbier foreign affairs minister. In 1990, Klaus, a dynamic professor from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, became chairman of the forum. But his policies were opposed by other leaders and party unity soon vanished.

The Civic Forum split definitely in 1992 as Klaus’ Civic Democrats, focused on the economy, swept the polls. The original idealists coalesced around Dienstbier and Petr Pithart in the Civic Movement — and were routed. His subsequent political attempts, the Free Democrats and a bid for the Senate, also failed.

Dienstbier decided to turn his efforts elsewhere.

New directions

From 1998 to 2001, he was the United Nation’s special reporter for human rights in the former Yugoslavia. There, he ran afoul of Bernard Kouchner, the UN special representative and head of the UN interim administration in Kosovo with his criticism of the United Nation’s inability to guarantee basic safety for minorities in Kosovo.

“Mr. Dienstbier, please shut up,” was Kouchner’s crude rejoinder. Eight years later, Kosovo is still a quagmire.

“I was there to monitor human rights, not to say everything was all right,” Dienstbier says. “I wish I had been wrong. … In eight years, the international presence hasn’t been able to ensure the most basic goals of the operation, not democracy, or safety in the streets or protection of minorities.”

Closer to home, he opposes the government’s unilateral push for a U.S. radar base on Czech soil, calling it a wedge between the Czech Republic and the rest of the European Union.

Instead of isolating itself further, he thinks this country should be working to help the EU and the United States concur on a joint foreign and defense policy.

“We will not create a functioning defense system until we come to an agreement with the Americans about what the dangers are and how we are to face them. But it must be a joint strategy,” he stresses.

In general, Dienstbier feels the present leadership focuses too much on economic issues.

“It’s not just about the economy,” he says. “It’s about the values that blossomed out of resistance to the regime: true freedom, a cultivated society, a strong political culture. They are at least as important as the economy, which, actually, is doing all right.”

Clearly, at the tentative start of his fourth political race, Dienstbier is betting on the same old horse:

“Czechs tend to be skeptical,” he says. “But, if you give them a vision, and are able to make them believe in it, they’ll rise to the challenge.”

It’s a horse that’s been known to win.

Eva Munková can be reached at features@praguepost.com

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