Former Opposition Figures Still Being Bugged in Czechoslovakia

Former Czechoslovak opposition figures--some of them now in the government--are still being monitored through electronic devices, a Socialist Party newspaper reported Friday.

Stanislav Devaty, former spokesman for the human rights group Charter 77, found a new bugging device in his apartment several days ago and sent a letter of inquiry to non-Communist Interior Minister Richard Sacher.

Charter 77 was founded in Czechoslovakia in 1977 to monitor the former Communist government’s compliance with human rights accords of the Helsinki agreements signed by all European nations but Albania. Many of its spokesmen and supporters were persecuted and some, including Devaty, were imprisoned.

Devaty told the Socialist Party newspaper Svobodne Slovo that one bugging device he found earlier “had been rendered ineffective” by his neighbor. But then he found a microphone with a new cable leading to it “and wondered to whom to return the microphone because the state security no longer exists.”

It was the second case this week of electronic eavesdropping being uncovered, the newspaper said.

A bugging device was dismantled in the flat of Jan Urban, a member of the board of the main non-Communist umbrella group Civic Forum and a key adviser to President Vaclav Havel.

The Socialist Party was the first of the legal, Communist-allied parties to break its ties and join ranks with the Civic Forum in the demonstrations last November that toppled the old regime.

Sacher, who has the job of dismantling the nation’s state police operation, has proposed establishing job-training centers for unemployed security police. He also has said there is no immediate threat of armed action by those police, but that some of them should be kept to combat terrorism and drug abuse because they are highly trained.

The problem of continued secret activities by factions opposed to democratic reform is a persistent one in Eastern Europe.

In Hungary, the former Communist Party was damaged by a scandal in which opposition parties’ telephones were tapped. In Poland, Interior Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak endorsed legislation requiring the approval of both himself and the prosecutor general for any telephone tapping of suspected criminals.