The Czechs in a Nutshell

In the 1980s, when the communists reached their final stage of agony, the annual manifestations to commemorate Jan Palach turned into wild clashes between the growing opposition and the riot police. What’s more, the students who triggered the Velvet Revolution would probably have never got so many passive Czechs out of their easy chairs if the alleged police killing of a student had not so chillingly reminded them of Jan Palach’s death twenty years earlier.

Naturally enough, the years of post-communist freedom have put a veil of oblivion over Palach’s name. True, the park in front of Charles University’s Philosophical Faculty has been named Jan Palach Square, which is both an appropriate and highly symbolic change (it was formerly named the Square of the Red Army Soldiers). But as times go by, fewer and fewer people turn up for the annual commemoration at his grave. It’s not even commonly known that his remains have been relocated to the original Prague cemetery.

Yet Palach’s act still invites reflection. It’s nothing new that civilians choose to sacrifice their own lives on the nation’s altar, but the goal of such political suicides is almost always to kill as many enemies as possible. Contrary to all those desperate Palestinians, Chechens or Tamil Tigers, both Palach and Zajíc took painstaking precautions to ensure that nobody else — neither Russians nor Bolsheviks — was hurt.

As an act of ultimate altruism, their suicides bear a striking resemblance to those committed by Buddhist monks during the Vietnam War. Maybe it’s a bit far-fetched, but to many Czechs this underpins the myth (see: National Identity) that the Slavs’ nature is basically peaceful and non-aggressive. Unfortunately, Palach still serves as a model. In the spring of 2003, a series of self-immolations hit the Czech Republic when six people, most of them young, tragically ended their lives in flames in public places.

Pepa from Hong Kong

Politics in the Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution has had more than its fair share of comical elements, but few of them, if any, can beat the sponsoring scandal that broke out in 1997. Even though Czechs don’t have a monopoly on lugubrious relations between businessmen and politicians (but they certainly belong in the European Champion League), the way these fishy relations came to light, was quite unique.

The farce started in 1996, when Václav Klaus’ Civic Democratic Party (ODS), which had played a leading role in all Czech coalition governments since 1992, published a list of its numerous sponsors. Surprisingly enough, among the generous donors were also two foreigners — one Hungarian and one citizen of Mauritius. When the media checked the names, it appeared that the Hungarian had died ten years earlier, while the chap on Mauritius had heard neither about ODS nor the Czech Republic.

The widespread suspicions that there was something rotten in ODS’ finances sharply increased when members of the party’s leadership announced that ODS had opened a secret multi-million account abroad. What followed later entered Czech political folklore under the name of the “Sarajevo coup” against party chairman Klaus: while he participated at a conference in the Bosnian capital, several party bigwigs asked him to resign because of the financing scandal. Klaus was hesitant, but his government fell, the ODS split into two parties, and the Czech courts started to sort out the mess.

A sponsoring scandal good as any, one might say. It was indeed — except for the fact that nothing was ever sorted out.

The indications that ODS actually has secret funds in a foreign country are strong, but nothing was proved under the legal clean-up that took place in early 2000. The businessman who hid behind the foreign donors had previously privatised a large steel mill, but investigators didn’t manage to find enough evidence to prove that his under-cover sponsorship was more than a matter of sheer altruism. Today, the ODS earnestly profiles itself as a law-and-order party.

But Pepa from Hong Kong took the cake. Asked by a judge about the millions of korunas she donated to ODS without telling the tax authorities, a female party supporter answered that the money was not hers, but belonged to a certain Pepa (Czech slang for Josef). Unfortunately, she didn’t know where he was living, because she had met him in Hong Kong. And no, she could neither remember what he looked like, nor whether Pepa had given her the millions of korunas in coins or bank notes!

To be fair — ODS is probably the biggest, but hardly the only, financial wrongdoer on the Czech political scene. Suffice is to say that for many disillusioned Czechs, Pepa from Hong Kong has become the ultimate icon of the political corruption and murky business climate that apparently flourished in the Czech Republic in the 1990s.

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