Havel to Invite Bush, Gorbachev to Prague

President Vaclav Havel today announced that he will invite President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to hold a future summit in Prague.

Havel made the comment in a speech to Parliament that was carried live on state television.

“I personally would like to present to Mr. Gorbachev various important and mutually interrelated proposals, including the offer to hold his future (summit) meeting with Mr. Bush in Prague,” said Havel, who plans to visit the Soviet leader in Moscow in early February.

He added, “Naturally, I will present the same proposal shortly afterward to Mr. Bush during the big state visit to the United States.”

Precise dates of Havel’s visits to Moscow and Washington have not been announced.

Gorbachev and Bush have already scheduled their next summit for June somewhere in the United States. No exact location has been disclosed. The two leaders last met on ships off the coast of Malta in December.

At the White House today, spokesman Roman Popadiuk said that U.S. officials received no official word on Havel’s invitation and that officials have seen only news accounts. “There are no plans for anything beyond the June summit at this time,” he said.

Havel, a playwright who served five years in prison under Czechoslovakia’s hard-line Communist rule, led a grass-roots movement that staged a peaceful revolution for democratic reform in November and December. Parliament elected him president of the new non-Communist government on Dec. 29.

On his first presidential trip abroad, he visited the German states in early January. He will visit Poland and Hungary in late January.

“Their journey to democracy is also our journey, and with them (Poland, Hungary and Romania), we want to coordinate our journey as much as possible,” he told the Parliament.