Czechs Break Up Rights Symposium, Seize Leader

Czechoslovak police broke up an independent meeting attended by prominent Western academics and human rights activists today, seizing its chairman, playwright Vaclav Havel, moments after the seminar began.

Fifteen guests from the United States, Britain, France and six other West European countries gathered in a Prague hotel restaurant for the seminar entitled “Czechoslovakia 88,” to examine the country’s 20th-Century history.

Sally Laird , editor of the London-based magazine Index on Censorship, photographed three plainclothes officers as they took Havel away but the police later confiscated her film.

Martin Palous, a member of Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 Human Rights Movement, was present at the seminar’s start but vanished from the room when the police entered.

A burly woman identifying herself as “a hotel employee in charge of keeping order” then distributed envelopes to the foreign participants containing an unsigned warning that the seminar “is illegal and its performance would be contrary to the interests of the Czechoslovak working people.”

“Your efforts to take part in this action would be considered as a manifestation of hostility to Czechoslovakia and in virtue of this we should have to draw relevant consequences against your person.”

Written in Four Languages

The note was written in English, German, Italian and French.

Timothy Garton Ash, an Oxford university historian who is also an editor of the Spectator magazine in Britain, urged fellow seminar participants to carry on regardless.

“We deplore the fact that the Czechoslovak participants have been arrested but Havel declared the seminar open and we wish to continue,” Garton Ash said.

The Western delegates later issued a statement deploring the detention of their Czechoslovak host and saying they considered the continuation of the symposium to be “entirely legitimate.”

Austrian and West German television crews filmed the scene but were warned by police to leave the area.

Police began rounding up dissidents--including Charter 77 activists Jiri Ruml, Vaclav Benda, Ladislav Lis and Milos Hajek--on Wednesday evening. By this morning, dissident sources said, police had freed Petr Uhl, Jiri Dienstbier and former Foreign Minister Jiri Hajek.