Encounters with Oxford dons – a continuation

II. Kavan and Oxford dons

Barbara Day’s The Velvet Philosophers (published by The Claridge Press in 1999 on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Prague Velvet Revolution) sheds additional light on the affair in which Kavan’s perjury played an important role. In 1979 Oxford University began to be involved in Czechoslovakia by taking part in dissident seminars; the Czech participants needed books, which the Oxford dons were ready to supply. According to Barbara Day, early in 1981 Kavan made an offer to the trustees of the Jan Hus Educational Fund – a fund organized by Oxford dons for the sake of supporting Czech intellectuals – to transport a minimum of 700 books for a payment of £3000; the offer was accepted in principle, but it was proposed to Kavan that the initial payment would be £500 for the transport of 100-150 books. On April 28th, a day after the seizure of the van, Kavan wrote a letter to the trustees of the JHEF ‘which shows a scarcely suppressed irritation at what he felt to be parsimonious attitude of the British’ (p. 86). Barbara Day adds that when Kavan wrote the letter he ‘did not know about the dramatic events of the previous day’. On what basis does she make this additional statement? She herself writes that in the Czechoslovak secret police files allegations were found by an agent in the London Embassy that Kavan had been giving information about his emigré compatriots from 1969. She adds that in 1969 he was cleared of the allegations, but she does not say on what grounds and by what means (p. 87); did it happen in the same way as in the case of his perjury?

Careful reading of Barbara Day’s book in itself provides grounds for doubting the ‘clearing’. If I understand it well, after the incident with the van the JHEF trustees began to pay Kavan the money he requested and from then on everything went smoothly. Could that have happened without the Czechoslovak Secret Service turning a ‘blind eye’ on Kavan’s activities? But was it just ‘a blind eye’? It appears from the Adjudication of the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of September 1985 that Rudé Právo, the Czechoslovak Communist Party daily newspaper, maintained on 30th June 1981 ‘that there were code names in the van but no names and addresses’. Rudé Právo thus prepared the ground for Kavan’s perjury, which in the end gave Kavan the victory; in the Adjudication this ‘information’ figures prominently among those circumstances, to which ‘the Commission gave particular attention in deciding the case’ in Kavan’s favour.

The visits of Oxford dons to Czechoslovakia were triggered by my invitation. In 1977, I opened a seminar on Ancient Philosophy for young people excluded from higher education because of their parents’ involvement in the Prague Spring in 1968. On 20^th May 1978, I addressed a letter to Oxford University in which I wrote that I should welcome Oxford dons in my seminar. I wrote openly about the grave infringements of basic human rights in Czechoslovakia and about the harassment to which the police exposed those who attended my seminar. Nevertheless, my seminar had not been directly attacked since I defended it by a ten days hunger-strike in 1977. Posted in May, the letter reached Oxford philosophers the following December. Barbara Day writes that nobody can tell why my letter reached Oxford philosophers with such a delay, but I have no doubts that had I used Kavan as mediator, the letter would have reached Oxford much sooner. I did not use his ‘secret channels’, for I was convinced that they were ‘secret’ at the discretion of the secret police. At any rate, I could not see how true freedom could be achieved in the way of secrecy. By inviting Oxford dons to my seminar, I hoped to enlarge the miniscule island of freedom that I and my students enjoyed at our meetings. I was not prepared to compromise it through my own initiative.

My suspicions concerning Kavan’s collaboration with the secret police have been confirmed. But let me name just one incident. On 2^nd November 1979, one of my students, Ivan Dejmal, was detained ‘on suspicion of preparing a criminal act of terror’. Around that time, I received a telephone call from Kavan; he asked what I could tell him about an alleged bombing of a statue of a prominent politician in South Bohemia. He had been well informed about my seminar, he knew that vulnerable people attended it, and he could not have been so naïve as not to know that my telephone was most certainly bugged by the secret police. Was his telephone call anything but an attempt to provide the police with a good reason for implicating me and my students in ‘a criminal act of terror’?

To my utter consternation, on the occasion of Kathy Wilkes’ first visit to my seminar in Prague I learnt that Jan Kavan became an advisor to Oxford dons concerning their contacts with Prague dissidents. I was particularly alarmed by Kavan’s offer that through his dissident channels he would send me books that Oxford dons would be donating to me. I believed that with the support of Western press and public opinion we were strong enough to win free access to Western literature by legal means, which would have enormously enlarged our freedom.

In an effort to explain why Oxford dons accepted Kavan’s offer of the delivery of books, Barbara Day writes: ‘Seminar leaders warned that books should not be sent through the ordinary post’ (p. 85). This was false at least as far as I was concerned. In my letter of invitation to Oxford dons, I mentioned that my foreign mail had been confiscated by the police for months. This was one of those infringements of human rights that I hoped to tackle openly with the help of visitors from Oxford. There was a way of doing so: I asked Kathy Wilkes to send me books specially registered, so that the Czechoslovak Post would have to pay a heavy fine for every undelivered item. There was a successful precedent; one of the signatories of the human rights Charter 77 had in this way earned good money after emigrating to Sweden; the Czechoslovak authorities had to give in, in the end, and the post started delivering his letters to his friends. But all my entreaties concerning this were in vain.

Concerning the aftermath of the seizure of Kavan’s van by the Czechoslovak police, Barbara Day writes: ‘… whilst still appreciating Kavan’s efforts on their behalf, many of the dissidents decided not to use his channels in future …’ (p.87). This may explain why Kavan committed the perjury. He attempted to explain the matter in an interview for Czech TV on 13^th August 1998. It was an interview in which I took a small part, for it was held on the occasion of my hunger-strike in protest against his nomination as the Czech Foreign Minister. I said that while I fully appreciated his contribution to the fall of the old regime, I was aware of the negative sides of his contribution, especially his pronounced disregard for the truth. Kavan responded by saying that I was telling untruths. At that point the Czech broadcaster intervened – the interview was held via satellite, I was at the Oxford BBC studio, Kavan and the interviewer were in Prague – and said that in a Czech court Kavan was found guilty of having committed perjury during his stay in Britain. Kavan dismissed her intervention by claiming that it was just a Czech court, not a British court, implying that a Czech court should not be taken seriously. At this point I re-entered the debate and pointed to his sworn affidavit of 19^th August 1982, the copy of which I was holding in my hand. Kavan then changed the tack and justified his perjury by the need to protect dissidents in Czechoslovakia. He ended with a rhetorical question: ‘When you were interrogated by the secret police, didn’t you feel fully justified to lie in order to protect others?’

I was not given an opportunity to ask Kavan how he could compare his perjury in a British court with lying to Czech secret police interrogators, and how could Czech dissidents be protected by his falsely claiming in a British court that the van he sent to Prague contained no names and addresses, when the secret service had those names and addresses in their hands, having found them in the van he had sent to Prague.

Let me go back to Barbara Day’s notes on the aftermath of the seizure of Kavan’s van: ‘The Jan Hus Foundation was not directly involved in the crisis … Of a large number of dissidents detained, seventeen were charged with “subversion of the Republic on a large scale in cooperation with a foreign power”; seven of them (including the seminar student Jan Ruml) remained in prison without trial for a year.’ (p. 87). Kavan’s van seized by the secret police was carrying an assignment of books chosen by the trustees of the fund for the seminars, and yet, not a single don protested against the Czech men and women imprisoned because of that. In the spring of 1982, I was invited to give a talk to an Amnesty International group somewhere in East Anglia. I talked about my seminar and about the imprisoned. After the talk, in a break before the discussion, I was given a precious surprise gift. Amnesty International printed a number of postcards with a photo of one of the imprisoned, Jan Ruml; he was one of my students who took part in the decision to invite Oxford dons to our seminar. The idea was that anyone willing to help to obtain freedom for Ruml should buy one, sign it, and send it to the president of the Czechoslovak Republic in protest against Ruml’s imprisonment. I was delighted. I asked for a hundred postcards, for there was about a hundred philosophers at the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University. I then sent one postcard to each. Ruml and his fellow prisoners were released from prison shortly afterwards, without trial.

Concerning me and Jan Kavan, Barbara Day writes: ‘Jan Kavan and Julius Tomin represented two completely different approaches to the issue of how to behave within a totalitarian regime: on the one hand, an emphasis on secrecy and disguise; on the other, a determination to carry on “as normal”, to hold to one’s rights.’ (p. 29). On page 35 she writes: ‘Tomin’s guiding principle was that if one’s actions were not illegal or dishonourable, then they should be carried out in the open. To this end he always made public the dates and times of his seminars. When the Oxford dons started arriving regularly, Tomin would take them to lunch talking openly in fluent English – at a time when many Czechs, if they even dared to have English-speaking friends, would ask them to speak in low tones or not at all in public.’ On page 245 she writes: ‘… the philosophers found themselves between the extremes of Julius Tomin’s openness and Jan Kavan’s secrecy.’ Oxford dons found Kavan’s way more congenial. Let me quote from Roger Scruton’s ‘A catacomb culture’, which was published in the TLS, February 16-22, 1990:

‘The publicity-conscious Tomin then emigrated … We decided that, although our purpose was charitable … it should not be openly pursued, and that we could henceforth best help our Czechoslovak colleagues by working secretly … we won the confidence of a large network of people, none of whom knew the full extent of our operations … We therefore began to establish other, purely nominal organizations through which to pay official stipends, so that the names of our beneficiaries could not be linked either to us or to each other … In the mid-1980s, thanks to a generous grant from George Soros (who will surely be commemorated in future years … as one of the saviours of Central Europe), we had expanded into Moravia … the organizer of our work in Slovakia, Jan Čarnogurský, was made Deputy Prime Minister … and another of our beneficiaries [Václav Havel] was President, and within weeks we were to see our friends occupying the highest offices in the land. Among those who worked with us we could count the new rectors of the Charles University, of Masaryk University in Brno, and of the Palacký University in Olomouc.’

My next post will be devoted to part III of the ‘Encounters’, which is entitled ‘A Surprise on the Internet’.

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In the preceding post I mentioned that during my break from Plato I am improving my Latin. As part of this, I am reading Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer. Today I came across a line from Cicero which expresses well the mood in which I am doing so, and the enjoyment I am deriving from it: Haec studia adulescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant. (These studies nurture youth and delight old age.) There is only one thing that does not quite fit my case: I began to learn Latin in my late twenties, after I did my PhD.