Letter from Prague

Jan Kavan, the new Czech foreign minister, was the first man I ever met who had me composing his obituary on our first introduction, more than 11 years ago. It was not so much the inherited heart condition as Kavan's pronounced sense of his own place in history, his connection with sweeping events and lofty goals. But perched on such a pedestal, it was that much easier to fall off.

Kavan-a leading dissident activist in London following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968-became a focus of controversy following the 1989 "velvet revolution," when he was accused of having been an agent of the StB, the communist secret police. Kavan fought to clear his name in the Czech courts and succeeded two years ago, re-entering politics as a senator for the Social Democrats. Following elections this June the party formed a minority government and he became foreign minister. But with his high profile restored, the attacks have revived, too.

Even without the StB accusations Kavan was always a controversial character with a gift for making enemies. I know about this gift from first hand. He was one of those people who always ended up meaning trouble. When I saw the headlines re-emerge this summer my first thought was: "Not him again!" But when I looked over my old papers and re-read the definitive essay by Lawrence Weschler in his book Calamities of Exile (which finds Kavan not guilty as charged but probably unsuited to public life), the bad memories returned, and they were not about Kavan.



When the accusations first emerged against Kavan in March 1991, I was in Prague as Czech and Slovak correspondent for the Guardian. I knew Kavan well, having joined the band of people who carried messages to Czech dissidents and helped out at Palach Press. Like many others, I had subsequently fallen out with him, and when the accusations surfaced my first reaction was to believe them. I wrote in my diary, "When you first find out someone you know well was a spy, your body flinches, as in the moment when you know you are about to have an accident but you can't prevent it." But I quickly experienced another revelation. While the public, and some of his friends, realised for the first time what a flawed bastard he was, I realised the same thing about Czech politics.

The sheer poisonousness of that scene still makes me shiver: the paranoia, finger-pointing, hypocrisy, corruption and "with us or against us" mentality which affected every kind of relationship. Much of this is common to all of the former Soviet empire, but some of it is special to Czech life, the vindictiveness of a small country with chip-on-the-shoulder habits. After three years in Prague I felt the poison seeping into my whole life: despite a deep affection for the place, it was a relief to leave. Many of my Czech friends would have done the same.

I met Kavan in London in 1987. I was seeking introductions for a first visit to eastern Europe, and was sent in his direction. He took me into his confidence and met up with me in Prague that May, travelling there for the second time ever on one of his deed-poll-and-disguise British passports. As he waited for secure contacts to be made with fellow dissidents, he killed time by walking around town with me, telling me his life story as son of a communist minister caught up in the postwar Stalinist purges, 1968 activist and dissident. This was Kavan as flawed hero. But over time, as I listened to his tales of betrayals and disappointments, I began to see a pattern: everyone else failed to understand, everyone else had done something stupid. Kavan was never to blame. Then one day I learned of a small lie he had told: it concerned an everyday event, but because of his lofty position, it challenged my whole view of the man and I cut down my contact. I joked to mutual acquaintances that if he went out to buy a pint of milk, he would tell you he had to leave for a "meeting."

But being a bastard doesn't make you a spy. And the more detail I heard, the more I learned about Czech politics, the more my doubts grew about his guilt. (My personal prejudices also obliged me to play as fair as I knew.)

The worst of it was the hypocrisy: the undisguised political bias against dissidents with a left-wing background, while figures on the political right (with much more clear-cut evidence of collaboration against them) were immune from attack. The most startling case, never covered in the Czech or British press, is that of Dusan Triska, the "father" of the voucher privatisation system, and a close associate of the last premier, Vaclav Klaus. The gossip was that he was unambiguously listed on the "A" list of top StB agents. But these reports were never made public. The reason, one cabinet minister admitted privately, was that Triska "had his finger on the reform nuclear button." I might have dismissed this story as yet another rumour-except for one encounter. Sitting in the federal parliament lobby one day, I was accosted by one of the right's most fervent finger-pointers, who was always trying to interest foreign journalists in his case against the then foreign minister and ex-dissident, Jiri Dienstbier. "You're always going on about Dienstbier and other leftists," I said, "but what about Dusan Triska?" Instead of a denial, his face went white. "Well, he's just one man," he replied.