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]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] ON CHARTER 77 [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[
By Roger Scruton (10/29/88)
From Untimely Tracts (NY: St. Martin's Press, 1987), pp. 230-2
[This originally appeared in the Times (London), 25 June 1985]
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
Ten years ago, in the heyday of western illusions, the
Helsinki accords were signed and the regimes of Eastern Europe
loudly undertook to guarantee the liberties of their subjects.
The Czechoslovaks even ratified the International Covenant on
Political and Civil Rights, which they had signed in 1968, so
including the covenant in their country's laws. The 35 nations
who signed the accords recently met in Ottawa to examine the
extent to which human rights guaranteed at Helsinki had been
upheld. Predictably, the Soviet block countries permitted no
examination of their record and the meeting ended without a final
document.
If we wish to know what is at issue in this attempt at
dialogue, we should discard the uncertain language of 'human
rights' and refer instead to the reality from which it derives:
the reality of law. In particular we should look at the law of
Czechoslovakia and at those citizens who have tried to uphold the
law which supposedly applies here.
The Czechoslovak authorities neither applied nor obeyed the
laws guaranteeing fundamental rights which were passed in 1976.
In 1977, therefore, a group of courageous citizens signed a
document, Charter 77, solemnly beseeching the government to
uphold its own laws and to protect the people against those who
violate them. One of the three first spokesmen of Charter 77 was
the Philosopher Jan Patocka [`hook' over the 'c'] -- a pupil of
Edmund Husserl and a writer increasingly recognised as the
greatest luminary of modern Czech culture. Although an old man
and in poor health, Patocka [`hook' over the 'c'] was brutally
interrogated by the secret police and, as a result, died of a
brain haemorrhage.
Despite this crime, his fellow signatories continued to step
forward to uphold the cause of justice, truth and law. Some were
arrested and imprisoned on trumped-up charges; others were
harassed by searches, interrogations and day and night
surveillance; all lost whatever privileged they might otherwise
have enjoyed. And yet, every year, three more spokesmen step
forward and dutifully expose themselves to persecution and
imprisonment.
Charter 77 documents and declarations are published in
samizdat editions, which are neither mentioned nor mentionable in
the official press. Nevertheless, publicity afforded to them in
the West ensures that these documents are noticed, not only by
the people of Czechoslovakia (who learned what is happening in
their homeland from western television and radio), but also by
the regime. By degrees, this tiny institution, composed entirely
of social outcasts, has become the major voice of Czechoslovak
public opinion, and one which the authorities must either silence
or listen to. The formidable combination of moral courage and
intellectual force displayed by the Chartists has made the first
course of action increasingly difficult. Even VONS, the committee
established to support the unjustly prosecuted, continues to
perform its magnificent task in the face of exemplary jail
sentences imposed on its founders.
The steadfast refusal of the Chartists to be deflected from
their moral purpose has therefore compelled the regime to listen
to their utterances and to take whatever small measures might
serve temporarily to shore up its sinking credibility. Law are
not exactly respected, but they are less flagrantly set aside;
freedoms guaranteed by the Helsinki Acts are not upheld, but they
are no longer denounced as bourgeois illusions and imperialist
propaganda.
Meanwhile, however, the regime continues to prosecute its
undeclared war against the Czech and Slovak nations, hampered by
the Chartists but not prevented by them. In 1982 Petr Hauptmann,
a construction engineer working on a building site at the border
crossing of Rozvadov, crossed into West Germany, hoping to settle
there and to earn money so that his wife and children might
follow him. He was interrogated at length by the West German
authorities and, being habituated to 'socialist law', assumed
this to be normal in the case of potential immigrants. Meanwhile
one of his children fell seriously ill and, urged by his wife, he
returned home, having been assured by the Czechoslovak consulate
that he would not be imprisoned.
On return Mr Hauptmann was charged with intentionally leaving
the republic -- a charge which he might reasonably have expected,
and the penalty for which he might reasonably have borne. He was
also charged with spying, the sole evidence for this being that
he had been interrogated by the intelligence service of a
'hostile' power. As a result he was jailed for ten years.
The meaning of this case should be understood by those who
reflect on the Helsinki agreement. The Prague regime wishes its
citizens to live in a state of war; it wishes them at all costs
to understand that contacts with the 'enemy' are dangerous; and
it wishes them to feel the danger as emanating not from the
regime and its servants, but from the West. It seeks to negate
the natural peace-loving sentiments that unite the Czech and
Slovak nations with the rest of Europe, since it recognises that
it has no other claim to legitimacy than the mendacious promise
of protection against 'hostile' and 'imperialist' powers.
In countering that benighted paranoia, Charter 77 continues to
make the only real contribution to peace that has originated in
communist Czechoslovakia since 1968. By reminding us that a
government can be at peace with its neighbours only if it is
first at peace with its subjects, and by showing peace to be
inseparable from the rule of law, it provides a lesson not only
to the authorities in Prague but also to the world. Peace in
Europe can be achieved only when the Communist Party acknowledges
that power alone cannot be the source of its own legitimacy, and
that a legitimate government must bow before the law. Those who
have sacrificed so much in order to bring communism before the
law are the friends not only of their homeland, but of the entire
civilised world.
* * *
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