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The face of our country

Commemorating Ivan Dejmal and the nationwide ecological movement he helped seed
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February 27th, 2008 issue

By Barbara Day

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What I shall most remember about Ivan Dejmal is his smile, a smile so much a part of his character that, in photographs still, you can see it lurking even in his most severe expressions.

The former environment minister died Feb. 6 at age 61.

One might expect the smile of someone who had spent more than two-thirds of his life on the down side of a totalitarian regime to be cynical, even bitter. He had enough to complain about: He was expelled from the agricultural university in 1970 and twice sentenced to prison stretches totaling four years, for “subversion of the republic,” “anti-state activities” and membership in the Revolutionary Socialist Party. Like others who could not feign approval of a corrupt government, Dejmal spent two decades as a laborer.

The period of Normalization (1969–89) was a time when President Gustáv Husák (himself a political prisoner in the 1950s) trained the population to behave like good children. If they were well behaved, they would have nice presents in the form of consumer goods and a little patch of ground to call their own; if they showed themselves to be especially reliable, they would be allowed to join the Communist Party, take the best jobs and even go on vacations abroad.

Those who didn’t learn this properly would be isolated from the others — especially from young people who might want to imitate their bad example.

Many people remember this time, especially the 1970s, as a period that stretched endlessly without landmarks, making it difficult to remember what happened first, and what came afterward.

But out of what seemed dead earth, growth emerged — appropriately — in the field of the environment.

Young people began to care for the landscape and to do what they could to rescue it. Some of those who possessed the leadership qualities but could not knuckle under the hypocrisy of the regime found room to exercise their talents. The Czech way of life lends itself to such projects — things like the country roots of most city-dwellers, the traditions of tramping and vandrování.

It was out in the open, away from the hated apparatus of the regime, that young people could gain a sense of independence, of being in a world where their presence made a difference. There were tasks to suit every talent, from cleaning out blocked springs and compiling environmental databases to teaching children the names of flora and fauna.

Dejmal, who had attended horticultural secondary school in his hometown of Ústí nad Labem, north Bohemia, was part of all this. In late 1976, he was among the first round of dissidents who signed Charter 77, responsible for its environmental program and for the samizdat journal Ekologický bulletin.

As the torpid ’70s moved into the more dynamic ’80s, the layers of the countrywide ecological movement began to mesh with each other. Knowledge began to be transferred between the semi-official networks (the Czech and the Slovak Associations for Nature Conservation formed from local groups in 1980) and official workplaces such as the Research Institute for Scientific and Technological Development.

As long as no information was released to the general public or abroad, the regime allowed the institute’s highly proficient staff to compile its damning statistics. For example, a meticulously researched atlas of morbidity in north Bohemia came out in a “limited edition” of 50 copies.

One of the senior figures at the institute was the charismatic Josef Vavroušek, a friend of Dejmal’s.

In 1986, the Oxford-based Jan Hus Educational Foundation partnered Vavroušek with the British ecologist Tom Burke. By linking Czech and Slovak environmentalists with their Western colleagues, without the knowledge of the communist authorities, they created a base of people ready to do the urgent work that was waiting for them after 1989.

Ivan Dejmal had earlier cooperated with the Jan Hus Foundation to organize seminars of the “underground university.” He was one of the philosophy students who met at the home of his neighbor, Julius Tomin. He was there when the letter was drafted that eventually reached the Oxford philosophers, and when the first foreign visitor — Dr. Kathy Wilkes — led the seminar in Julius’ home on the Wednesday of Easter week in 1979.

Later that year, after the police had put a 24-hour guard on the Tomins’ house (“for their own safety”), Ivan offered his own apartment as a venue.

That November, Dejmal was detained “on suspicion of preparing a criminal act of terror” — plotting to assassinate Husák — and was asked “whether the [philosophy] course theoretically discusses the problem of terrorism.”

Eventually, he was told that the course would be stopped “with maximum publicity — so that everybody in the flats would know what kind of charlatan philosopher they have there.”

His hair was cropped, and, for the time being, he was released.

After 1989, when Normalization was over, and normal life could resume, Dejmal was one of those who put their knowledge and skills to the service of their country. In 1991, he became minister of the environment for the Czech Republic — not to line his pockets, but to safeguard the passage of a crucial law for the protection of nature and landscape.

Later, he served as director of the Ecology Institute and then director of the Czech Institute for the Preservation of the Countryside.

Before Vavroušek’s death in an avalanche in 1995, the two founded the Society for Sustainable Life.

As a member of the Green Party, Dejmal worked for its renewal. In 2000, he created the exhibition and ongoing project Tvář naší země — krajina domova (The Face of Our Country — the Landscape of Home).

This February has been cruel: Only a day after Dejmal’s death, one of his contemporaries, Viktor Dobal, passed away. Dobal was not only a contemporary but a fellow worker in that active zone that the communists were never able to subdue. Already in the ’80s Dobal was a co-founder of the Movement for Civic Freedom; in the 1990s, he was elected to Parliament, and was later named deputy minister without portfolio. In this role, he concerned himself with the rights of minorities, especially the Roma, the restitution of Jewish and church property and support for the disabled. In addition, science and technology, the financing of political parties, the intelligence services and the Constitution were part of his brief.

Dobal was such a fragile, bony figure, it was as though he had burned up all his energy on these causes. Behind thick lenses, his eyes seemed to float in the dark pools of his eye sockets. His last years were shadowed by illness and financial anxieties. While former ranking members of the Communist Party live on in their comfortable villas, Dejmal and Dobal truly gave their lives for the rebuilding of their homeland.

Dejmal is gone, but his ideas will live on. He will be missed.

— The author is a founding member of the Prague Society for International Cooperation

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