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and company, but numerically they did not represent the major–
ity. The groups spanned the ideological spectrum (with the
exception - using your terms - of right-wing groups, who were
not there and are still not there) . When two rock groups were tried
for their unorthodox songs and unorthodox music, suddenly a
defense campaign sprang up on their behalf, both inside Czecho–
slovakia and in the West, uniting various political groups. Infor–
mal, personal links developed among all these various opposition
groups.
It
was during this period that Czechoslovakia published the
full text of the International Conference on Civil and Political
Rights....
Howard:
The Helsinki Accords?
Kavan:
No, not the Helsinki Accords . The Helsinki text is of a
declaratory nature; it's not legally binding. In 1976, following the
Soviet-led part of detente with its image-making goals, the
government ratified the 1968 Helsinki Declaration, which con–
tained both the International Covenant on Political Civil Rights
and The International Covenant on Economic, Cultural and
Social Rights. They were published in November 1976 as Czecho–
slovak Law 120. This was at the time when people had begun to
look at the laws to try to find out how opposition groups could
function legally. Now in this new law, there was suddenly guaran–
teed freedom of press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly,
freedom of association, also freedom to strike, freedom to create
independent unions - all these fantastic freedoms for which they
had been fighting for so many years .
Now, as I said, an informal network already existed among
the various opposition groups. That network seized the
opportunity to write a Declaration which was fairly innocuous,
just drawing attention to the fact that the government had ratified
this law, and that there was a certain gap between the law and
actual practice, and a gap between this particular law and the rest
of the laws - especially the code which permitted sentencing
people to up to ten years for exercising the very freedoms now
ratified. The Declaration offered the government what it called a
"constructive dialogue" - a phrase inserted by the Euro–
Communist group and supported by the others .
That's how
Charter
'77
came into being. At the very
beginning, the government's reaction - that this was a group of
intellectuals and former politicians - was correct to a certain
