Rights activist recalls vacation with friends, Czech police (12/29/85)

Rights activist recalls vacation with friends, Czech police

WASHINGTON - Playwright Vaclav Havel, a founding member of Charter 77, a human-rights monitoring group in Czechoslovakia, recently took a vacation trip, visiting with friends around the country. His holiday was marred, however, by constant surveillance and harassment by plainclothes police.

Mr. Havel later wrote a letter to the Czechoslovak prosecutor general, outlining the operations carried out against him during his August vacation. The text of the letter was released in the West by U.S. Helsinki Watch, and it appeared in The Washington Post on December 1 under the headline "How the Secret Police and I Spent My Vacation."

Mr. Havel began his letter to the prosecutor general:

"I consider it my duty to inform you about certain operations recently carried out against me. I believe them to have been unwarranted and arbitrary - if not totally unlawful."

Mr. Havel had decided to visit some friends who lived outside Prague. A friend Jitka Vodanska, agreed to join Mr. Havel if the trip could be arranged during her vacation, August 9-17.

Thus, Mr. Havel began planning.

"We wrote letters about the trip. So, I assumed the police would be well-informed of my plans, which I had no reason to conceal from them anyway. This may seem an ungrounded suspicion that the police violate the privacy of the mails. However, it is certainly not unfounded," he wrote to the prosecutor general.

Mr. Havel goes on to say that the day he was to visit his friends at their vacation addresses, their homes were surrounded by police. Additionally, in any town he was to visit, the local police were to report immediately on Mr. Havel's arrival. He stated that only four hours before he left Prague, three plainclothes policemen in an official car drove up to his home and told Mr. Havel that they were to follow him to the city limits, which they did. Then, Mr. Havel and his friend were followed by three other policemen in an official car, who discussed freely with Mr. Havel their mission.

"Our first stop was the home of my friend Ladislav Lis at Peklo near Ceska Lipa. Awaiting us on our arrival were police officers from Ceska Lipa who took over our surveillance, tailing us on a walk through the woods and then staking out the house," Mr. Havel continued in his letter.

Around 8 p.m. the house was invaded by policemen who said they were looking for a draft of the Charter 77 statement on the 17th anniversary of the August 16-18, 1968, Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The police first asked Mr. Lis to voluntarily hand over the document, which he did not have. The police then said they had to wait for further instructions.

"We later learned that, at about the same time, other police officers went to the nearby summer cabin of the current Charter 77 spokesman, Jiri Dienstbier, with the same orders. He voluntarily handed over the document, so the ostensible reason for the search disappeared. The search was carried out anyway," Mr. Havel wrote.

It was agreed that while the police awaited orders, only four would sit in the house with Mr. Havel and his friends. Then around 11 p.m. another group of police arrived to search the house for the document, although it had already been handed over, Mr. Havel explained to the prosecutor general. He was then arrested, driven back to Prague and asked questions about what he knew in relation to the Charter 77 document.

"I answered truthfully that I knew nothing about the document and that my trip was a vacation and had nothing at all to do with my human-rights activities."

Mr. Havel was held for 48 hours under "suspicion for conspiring to commit a breach of the peace," although neither he nor Mr. Lis had the document. Afterwards, he was released and returned to Mr. Lis's home on August 12. At that point, he wrote, he thought the police no longer regarded his trip as suspicious.

He was wrong.

Mr. Havel and his friend continued to be tailed, but then, on August 15, the surveillance increased substantially. He tried contacting the secret police, who had assured him that if he ever incurred any trouble, he should not hesitate to call them. He attempted to do so, and even wrote a letter to them, but his efforts were fruitless.

Then, on August 16, he arrived in Bratislava, where he and Miss Vodanska planned to spend the night before going to his country house in the morning. After their arrival at the home of their friends, the Kusys, the police invaded the house. Once again Mr. Havel was arrested, this time on "suspicion of conspiracy to commit incitement." Although the previous charges against him had just been proven groundless, Mr. Havel wrote that his trip was again considered to have something to do with Charter 77 and its planned August statement.

Mr. Havel, when previously trying to contact the secret police, had asked them if he should cancel the rest of his trip.

"A request to me not to continue my trip and risk committing some assumed criminal act could have been conveyed to me by a reply to my letter," Mr. Havel wrote. He continued that it was not his intention to break any law. Despite this, he was detained, arrested, and this time joined by Miroslav Kusy (his original host) and Miss Vodanska, who was not a Charter 77 signatory. All of his belongings were searched, even those which usually are not, and many items were confiscated, including those which are usually left alone.

"Understandably I protested and reinforced my protests by going on a hunger strike," he wrote.

When Mr. Havel's detention ended August 18, he was escorted out of the Ministry to Interior building to his car. There, he wrote, he was informed by an elderly man he should not return to Bratislava for the next 20 years. This was a message he was to pass onto his friends.

Miss Vodanska was sent back against her will to Prague, by train, and Mr. Havel was escorted out of Bratislava, through Prague and on to his summer cabin.

"The over-all balance sheet of my holiday trip appears as follows:" he wrote.

"My trip either directly or indirectly and for various lengths of time, employed - according to my rough estimate - some 300 policemen. So, it cost the Czechoslovak state at least a hundred times more that it cost me (not even counting the gas that was used up).
"My journey was slightly spoiled, but not entirely so: I will definitely recall it longer than if it had gone off normally.
"All the groundless and absurd operations connected with my trip and related (by the police) to August 21, including above all the fact that I was held in custody twice in the course of two weeks, as were five other citizens, once again alerted the public at home and abroad to the attempt to hush up the 17th anniversary of the Soviet invasion and the practices employed by the regime installed by the Warsaw Pact forces.
"And, of course, the operation helped magnify the August statement of Charter 77. (Incidentally, I learned about the content of the statement from foreign broadcasts after I returned to Prague.) Thanks to our various departments of the Ministry of Interior, the attention of the world was once more drawn to our country and in a manner that did it no credit."