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Prague Opposition Leader Confident butCautious; Playwright Vaclav Havel HasBeen In and Out of Prison Since `PragueSpring' of 1968

Article from:The Washington Post Article date:December 10, 1989Author: Dan Morgan

"In Czechoslovakia," Vaclav Havel said this week, "there is a sayingthat you should not praise the day before evening."Havel, the unelected but undisputed leader of the Civic Forum pro-democracy coalition, is a cautious man with good reason to be.Those who praised the day prematurely during the 1968 "PragueSpring" were rained on by divisions of Soviet tanks. In the 21 yearsof Communist repression that followed, playwright Havel was in andout of jail.Now, caught up in the center of the breathtaking events that aretransforming his country, Havel, like the democracy movement, hasbegun to show a bolder side.His confidence seems to have increased with every passing day. OnWednesday, after one hour of sleep, he seemed exhausted andgrim as he read a communique about his meeting with CommunistParty leader Karel Urbanek, then hurried out without answeringquestions. By Thursday night, when he held his first pressconference in more than two weeks, he was droll, unflappable, andat times eloquent.Havel showed up tieless and in shirtsleeves, accompanied by hisfriend and assistant, Pavel Mencl, a music critic. He apologized for turning down so many interviews. "If I spent all my time commentingon the revolution I couldn't participate in it," he explained.

Questions centered on the possibility of his becoming president of Czechoslovakia, a subject that seemed to exasperate him and led toevasive answers. "You don't seem to want to accept the basicpresidential quality that I answer in a roundabout way," he said.Finally he said he would accept the presidency if it was "the onlyservice I could render my country."He does not look like the kind of man who would be considered for such a dignified position as the presidency of a nation.His lifestyle is that of the typical Prague intellectual-fittinglyBohemian, filled with the smoke of bad cigarettes (the "perfume" of the dissident movement, a writer called it) and intense cafeconversation. Even last week he found time late at night to sliparound the corner to the Aurora Club, off Wenceslas Square, for coffee and beer with associates."What we are seeing is a cultural revolution, not a revolution of people who work in culture," he said. "What's important about this isthe humanitarian dimension-love, resistance to violence, longing for truth and moral integrity."Yet the shock troops of the revolution have been intellectuals likeHavel. Civic Forum's 16 founding signatories include an actor, aprofessor, two engineers, a retired priest, a journalist, a dramatist, aprofessor and Havel, the author of books and plays. At an art gallery on the Vltava River that is being used as amakeshift Civic Forum headquarters, it seemed that half of thesenior volunteers were sculptors. At Thursday's press conference, Havel showed himself to be a manwho cares deeply about words and language. He shaped hissentences thoughtfully. They began with a gravelly, nervous chuckledeep in the throat, which, presumably, gives him time to weigh his

words.He is fond of using proverbs, and Zen-like sayings that he hasthought up himself to make a point. He left the journalistsspeechless with a philosophical answer to a question about hisexperiences as a dissident:"When a person believes in accordance with his conscience andwhen he tries to behave as a citizen, even under conditions whencitizenship is degraded, it might not lead to something. But whensomeone calculates whether it will lead to something, it won't." A fatalistic belief that history can only be accepted andaccommodated, never steered or directed, may be a clue towhatever calm Havel has found in the tumultuous days since CivicForum was founded Nov. 19.Most of the time he has been hidden behind the milling crowd of volunteers at Civic Forum, which last week began installingcomputers at its new headquarters.Downstairs, where striking students hovered in clumps, Havelhuddled behind closed doors with his inner circle of friends andadvisers-former Communist Jiri Dienstbier, author and lawyer Petr Pithart, former priest Vaclav Maly and Jiri Hajek, who was foreignminister during the Prague Spring.Teetering at the top of the stairs was a tightly packed crowd of journalists and television camera crews.Civic Forum is the story. But what is Civic Forum? The answer remains cloudy, and even Havel's exacting care with the languagehas not dispelled the ambiguities. This week, he called it simply acoalition "to take the country to free elections very soon."