20th Anniversary: The Velvet Divorce

Few should have been surprised when the 64-year-old Czechoslovak state foundered in the summer of 1992 following years of often bitter disputes between the Slovak and Czech nations over the division of power.

As in any bad marriage, the actual roots of the "Velvet Divorce," as the split was dubbed, can be traced to the wedding of the two halves when Czechoslovakia was created in 1918. For years, politicians from West and East bickered over the language, economy, education, laws and constitution, with only the ugly spectre of communism serving as handcuffs to bind the two groups together.

Elections June 5 and 6, 1992, made it immediately clear the end was near after Václav Klaus' Civic Democratic Party (ODS) took the most seats in the Czech lands and Vladimír Mečiar's Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) won the largest representation in the Slovak territory.

Klaus was wedded to a form of federation between the two territories, while Mečiar and others in Bratislava had been drifting for months toward backing a loose confederation or outright separation.

Efforts to mend fences and find a compromise that would keep Czechoslovakia from reaching its inevitable end quickly proved fruitless, and the end came on a sultry night not long after the elections.

In the summer of 1992, the Expat Movement, for lack of a better description, was reaching its first arc, with the downtown area becoming transformed by new night clubs and restaurants, while nearby the country's citizens were caught up in the question of whether their country would split.

So it was on this warm night that our coverage began in earnest.

In a pre-mobile, Twitter, Internet age, news traveled slowly. A colleague came wandering out of the darkness into the restaurant Zvonařka to announce that the talks had ended and Klaus and Mečiar would be the respective prime ministers of their nations. The only negotiations that would follow were how best to manage a split.

A reporter from CBS News, who was in town to film another report about Americans in Prague, asked if there would be a war. Her question revealed the gaps in the foreign understanding of a story that had yet to gain widespread coverage.

Still, Yugoslavia had disintegrated the year before, and questions about nationalist identity were a common feature in many nations across the former Soviet sphere of influence. A late-night press conference in Prague that followed the announcement that Klaus and Mečiar would negotiate the terms of the split was chaotic and noisy, with reporters shouting questions in what sounded on the radio like a super-charged atmosphere.

The press conference was the only time when passion rose to such a historic level. From that day on, the split seemed to plod along with almost a metronomic predictability, including the actual declarations of independence, the development of separate constitutions and flags and borders.

Even the famous photos of Klaus and Mečiar sitting under a tree in their shirtsleeves are reflective of the languid torpor that surrounded the split. Few seemed to care that the public itself was not directly asked whether to carry on as one country or two, although more than a few commentators dredged up the "O nás bez nás" (About us, without us) spirit of Munich 1938 to describe Klaus and Mečiar's independent actions.

Václav Havel, who had exhausted whatever small political capital he had on trying to keep the country together, complete with repeated trips to Bratislava, where he was jeered and egged (a good headline for The Prague Post) threw in the towel during the summer by quitting his post as president rather than preside over the end of the country he was elected to lead.

The decision to split the country gave focus to our reporting that had wandered for months between vague analysis and questions about how much we should be reporting these endless debates about the divide to our mostly foreign audience, which was seeking answers and hard facts and not necessarily conjecture.

It also provided The Prague Post with more readership as foreign readers sought to learn basic news such as what currencies would be employed, how the customs union would work and how Slovakia would seek to govern itself under Mečiar.

Slovakia at once became more important to The Prague Post for news that affected the Czech lands but also less so, as it was now an independent country that was less in the orbit of what we were trying to cover from Prague.    

- The author served various roles at The Prague Post from 1991 until 1994 including managing editor. He is the author of Pink Tanks & Velvet Hangovers (North Atlantic Books/Frog Ltd) and bureau chief for Bloomberg News in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and an editor for Eastern Europe.

Douglas Lytle can be reached at
news@praguepost.com