Czech press survey Prague- Not much has be left of the Charter 77 human rights movement that was launched 30 years ago, Bob Fliedr writes in Lidove noviny today, and adds that only few signatories have succeeded in politics.
The group, headed by later president Vaclav Havel, who took over power in late 1989, has practically disappeared from public life, he says.
The few Charter signatories who have succeeded in politics. "were not much good in team work in managing public affairs, the less so in the power struggle," Fliedr writes.
Charta 77 (Charter 77) was a document, a group of people and an ideology that defined the last quarter of a century (it is its 30th anniversary in January this year) in a variety of ways. First, it was a symbol of resistance against 'communism' as well as of regime collaborators in the late 70s and 80s. Then it became a source of politicians and Czech political philosophy for most of the 1990s, and now it's a memory. What is important that its impact cannot always be straightforwardly assessed simply from the ideas the document propounded or the events that surrounded but rather that it has permeated Czech cultural consciousness of the last three decades and as such cannot be easily disentangled from it.
This goes with another piece of news: the discovery of some lost documents from the early years.
mediafax Czech Historians have discovered 242 cards with the original signatures of the first supporters of the Charter 77 human rights movement launched 30 years ago, Lidové noviny (LN) reported, quoted by CTK.
The cards were part of the file the communist state police (StB) kept on the initiative. They will now be displayed on the internet site of the Libri prohibiti library, the paper said.
Edited to add: A full text of both the
Charter 77 and its counterpart "
Anticharta" (signed by prominent representatives of the communist controlled intelligentsia on January 28 in a public and for many humiliating ceremony) can be found on the
Lidové Noviny website. The
Libri prohibiti site on the Charter even has the original typescript in
Czech and
English (PDF links) - a very interesting look into history (how did they ever do it without an email and a blog?).
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