Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 6. januar 2007 / Time Line January 6, 2007
Version 3.55. Januar 2007, 7. Januar 2007
01/06/2007
National Security Archive Update, January 6, 2007
Charter 77 After 30 Years : Documenting the Landmark Human
Rights Declaration
Original Signature Cards, Secret Police Files, U.S. Intelligence
Reports Published for First Time
Washington D.C., January 6, 2007 - The Czechoslovak human rights
activists who launched the landmark Charter 77 movement secretly
gathered their first 240 signatures on handwritten cards without
leaving copies with the signators, but were arrested 30 years ago
today by the secret police on charges of "subversion" and
"hostility to the socialist state and social system" before they
could deliver the original Charter to the Federal Assembly,
according to Charter 77 and Czechoslovak secret police documents
published in English for the first time on the National Security
Archive Web site.
But the Chartists had already arranged for publication of their
manifesto in the western press, where the Charter was featured in
major articles on January 7, 1977 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, Corriere della Sera, The Times of London, and Le Monde.
One of those arrested on January 6, 1977 was Charter 77
co-spokesperson Vaclav Havel, who spent years in prison for his
dissident activities, helped lead the 1989 "velvet revolution," and
subsequently served as president of Czechoslovakia and then the
Czech Republic from 1989 to 2003.
"Charter 77 was a bolt from the blue in the otherwise stagnant
political atmosphere of Czechoslovakia," remarked Professor Vilem
Precan, one of the editors of today's Web posting and head of the
Czechoslovak Documentation Centre in Prague. "Together with
movements for human and civil rights in other countries of the
Soviet bloc, Charter 77 became a vital factor working from below in
the Helsinki process and towards the democratic revolutions of
1989."
The Web posting includes:
* original drafts of the Charter with handwritten edits by Vaclav
Havel and Pavel Kohout (who originally proposed the name "Charter
77");
* typed and handwritten agendas for the conspiratorial meetings of
the nascent Chartists in December 1976 and January 1977 to organize
the gathering of the first signatures;
* the original signature cards of Vaclav Havel and other leading
Chartists;
* the January 5, 1977 letter to the Federal Assembly signed by
Charter’s three spokespersons that was confiscated by the
secret police from Havel and his companions January 6 on their way
to present the Charter to the authorities;
* the first secret police report from January 6, 1977 calling the
Charter a "crude attack" by "hostile elements" who "have been
winning over other anti-socialist elements";
* the January 14, 1977 legal opinion by the Czechoslovak Communist
authorities finding Charter 77 to be "untrue and grossly slanderous
... clearly pursuing the aim of evoking hatred and hostility
towards, or at least distrust of, the socialist social and state
system of the republic";
* the secret police report from April 1977 recording the decision
of the Communist Party Presidium not to prosecute anyone solely on
the basis of signing the Charter, but on other grounds;
* contemporary reporting on Charter 77 in previously secret
documents by the CIA, the U.S. State Department, and the German and
French embassies in Prague;
* Professor Precan's 1978 commentary on the impact of Charter
77;
* contemporary U.S. official statements about Charter 77 from the
Congressional Record and presidential documents;
* Vaclav Havel's own reminiscences about Charter 77, courtesy of
Paul Wilson, who translated (from the Czech) Havel's answers to
questions from Karel Hvizd'ala for the 1990 book Disturbing the
Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf).
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