Czech Dissident Havel Freed, Vows to Speak Out

Vaclav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s most prominent dissident, was freed Wednesday after serving half of an eight-month prison sentence, and he said he will continue to speak out and risk arrest.

Havel, a playwright whose works are produced in the West but banned in his homeland, was arrested Jan. 16 and convicted on charges arising from a week of anti-government demonstrations.

Prague District Court Judge Eva Kvetenska granted his request for early release and placed him on 18 months’ probation. But Havel, acclaimed as a hero by critics of the hard-line Communist leadership, pledged to continue his work with the Charter 77 human rights movement he co-founded.

“I will speak out regardless of whether I will be arrested or called a national hero,” he said in an interview after he left prison.

Another Charter 77 activist, Jiri Wolf, was also released Wednesday upon completing a six-year prison term for subversion after he wrote a report about conditions while he was in jail from 1978 to 1981, dissident sources said.

Havel, nominated for the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, attributed his release to a petition by more than 3,000 artists and intellectuals, many of them Communist Party members who had previously refrained from dissent.

The unprecedented petition, which demanded Havel’s freedom and called for national political dialogue, alarmed the Communist leadership, which admitted it had not expected such outrage in response to police violence against the protests in January.

Western diplomats said the Czechoslovak authorities may have decided to release Havel to avoid coming under further criticism at an international human rights forum in Paris later this month.