Havel sharply criticises situation in Czech Republic - Bloomberg

Havel, 72, playwright, thinker and a leading anti-communist dissident, told Bloomberg that "not many of us thought the door would be opened so quickly to all the mafiosi and back-street money-changers" who have now become "millionaires and billionaires."

"We are living in the first truly atheistic society, and there's no feeling that there is any kind of moral anchor," said Havel, major protagonist of the Velvet Revolution in November 1989 that toppled the communist regime in then Czechoslovakia and catapulted him from the dissidents' underground to Prague Castle, the presidential seat.

Havel, was Czechoslovak president from 1989 until mid-1992 and Czech president from 1993 until early 2003.

Havel said in the interview that he would prefer writing plays than stepping into the political fight, but the economic and political imbalances forced him to express his opinions loud, Bloomberg reports.

In spite of the economic growth in the country, which has tripled in the past 13 years according to Bloomberg, the Czech Republic still has far to go, Havel said.

Speaking about reconstructing the country after 40 years of communism, he used a comparison to a broken piece of furniture.

"When you have a beautiful table, or a piece of furniture, it can be kicked to bits in half a minute, but it takes weeks, months, to put it all together again," Havel pointed out.

Countries cannot "switch political systems the way commuters change trams," Havel told Bloomberg.

"We had communism only once in history and now we have post-communism for the only time in history," he added.

Havel has been preoccupied with corruption among the new political elites in the country for long, Bloomberg writes, reminding of his address to Czech parliament in 1997 in which he criticised it.

Six years after he left the Presidential Office, Havel expresses disappointment that the story he described as a "fairy tale" in his autobiography To the Castle and Back from 2006 had no happy ending, Bloomberg reports.

"The moral code is something unwritten but understood about what is proper and what is improper, what is right, what is wrong... There exist no perfect laws which can't in some way be circumvented," Havel said in the interview.

He pointed out that the anti-communist resistance movement members of 1989 had hoped for something better. "After the revolution , we fought for a different political system than what we ended up with," he said.

He also stressed that new political parties would not change the system because lawmakers elected under one system would not vote for a different system.

Havel recalled that his best-known phrases from the November 1989 Velvet Revolution that "truth and love will triumph over lies and hatred" still nags some people even after 20 years.

"Even if they ridicule it in the newspapers, that is better than if it is completely erased from people's minds," Havel concluded in the interview, Bloomberg writes.

Author: ČTK
www.ctk.cz