Doug Saunders

Prague

Twenty years ago this week, two young men found themselves standing in a crowd here in Prague’s Wenceslas Square, chanting, jumping up and down to music and demanding an end to one of history’s more cartoonishly heavy-handed dictatorships.

Read original column in The Globe and Mail

Dan Drapal and Frantisek Kostlan were both manual labourers with decent educations, trapped in the menial and constricting lives that state socialism offered to otherwise creative people. They embraced the protest movements of 1989, both as a way to express their frustration and as a form of community.

By the time December was over, the regime had stepped down and the newborn protest group they’d joined, Civic Forum, had become the government of the country then known as Czechoslovakia.

It’s interesting to see what happened next. At the moment when liberation arrived, both young men decided it was time to start doing what they’d always wanted to do.

For Mr. Kostlan, it was a moment of freedom that had long been repressed.

He began distributing rock music and formerly forbidden publications, and, discovering liberalism and social justice, started pushing for even more dramatic freedoms and rights - for women, homosexuals, racial minorities. His 1989 was a moment when people could finally do what they wanted.

For Mr. Drapal, it was a moment of morality that had long been repressed. “I remember that one day in November, there were no more restrictions, so I started going into the high schools and talking about the gospel of Jesus Christ,” he told me.

A state-censured protestant pastor, he discovered conservatism and began advocating for family values, patriotism, national independence. His 1989 was a moment when people no longer had to do what the state wanted.

Those two views - one that saw communism as too restrictive and limited, the other as too permissive and immoral - would create an enormous rupture in the politics of eastern Europe and draw millions of people in opposite directions. Today, as the anniversaries of those Iron Curtain transitions are being celebrated, the tensions that lay beneath the surface have overwhelmed European politics in 2009 and ground it to a standstill - usually guided by the same people who brought communism to an end.

For November of 1989 was something like what astrophysicists call a singularity - a moment when all matter and energy become the same thing and converge into a single, dense point. It can’t last, and leads to a Big Bang.

In Poland, the divergent forces were united in the Solidarity movement. In East Germany, they rallied in Leipzig. And in Czechoslovakia, they were organized by the playwright Vaclav Havel, on Nov. 17, 1989, into Civic Forum, the coalition that brought down the government.

All these groups agreed what they were against - but nobody knew what they were for.

“We talked endlessly about basic rights and responsibilities and the need for openness,” says Petr Uhl, one of the founders of the original Czech anti-communist movement Charter 77 and a key figure in Civic Forum. “But we said nothing about all about any kind of government system or democracy, because we were unable to agree on that and, in fact, had no idea about any of those things.”

At first, it was the liberation-minded people - the Frantisek Kostlans and Vaclav Havels - who got all the attention. Freedom was the byword - freedom of movement, free markets, free trade, free people. But as the 1990s progressed, the voices that began to prevail were those who had felt that communism had been too permissive, valueless and internationalist. The conservative moralists seized the moment.

In Prague, it was Vaclav Klaus, a conservative economist who had joined Civic Forum from what Mr. Uhl calls “the grey space” between dissident movements and the communist regime, who took over. Even as Mr. Havel won the presidency, Mr. Klaus took control of the economy, leading the wave of privatizations - and calling for a return to national values.

In 1992, Civic Forum split into two parties, the most successful one, the Civic Democrats, led by Mr. Klaus. They are nationalist, libertarian, opposed to international deals and to feminist and gay-rights issues. Mr. Klaus believes that global warming is a hoax, and has published papers to this effect.

Today, Vaclav Klaus is the president of the Czech Republic, and his version of anti-communism has a dramatic effect on Europe. He has been the only one of the European Union’s 27 heads of state to refuse to sign the EU’s new constitution, the Lisbon Treaty. He has said that the EU with its open-border regime resembles Moscow’s colonial control of his country in Soviet times.

(Only this week, with the EU allowing the Czech Republic to be exempted from its minority-rights charter, did it appear that Mr. Klaus would sign the deal).

In Poland, former Solidarity activist Lech Kaczynski, a member of the dissident side of the Round Table negotiations that ended communism, is now president.

He, too, represents a closed, nationalist, xenophobic view of post-communist life, resisting the EU, clashing with Germany and Russia and attacking sexual and reproductive rights.

And in Hungary, the party poised to win the next election and dominate the country’s life is Fidesz, created by anti-communist activists in 1988. It started out on the liberation-minded side of the divide, forbidding people over 35 from joining and promoting a lively liberalism.

But by the end of the 1990s, under the leadership of anti-communist hero Viktor Orban, it had dramatically switched paths, turning into an ethnic and religious-nationalist movement that makes it one of the most far-right mainstream parties in Europe.

The post-communist liberals have often dispersed: Both Frantisek Kostlan and Petr Uhl have drifted from party to party, never quite satisfied. While there are ex-dissident progressives in power, such as Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, they’re outnumbered.

The Klauses and Kaszynskis and Orbans have risen to the top because, I suspect, ultra-conservatism offers voters a kind of purity and authority - one that offers something strikingly similar to the old certainties of communism.

Original Article

Prague

In 1989, Jirka Meska was in the business of making information move, as fast as possible, around the communist state of Czechoslovakia.

Read original article in The Globe and Mail

Officially, that meant he was among the country’s highly protected elite software engineers, responsible for writing operating systems and networking applications for the primitive mainframes of the Eastern Bloc.

Unofficially, he had discovered more effective information-spreading techniques. As a secret link to the country’s anti-authoritarian underground network called Charter 77, he was capable of helping cause 10,000 people to appear at a protest suddenly, or to stop work for a day, an escalating wave of actions that played a key role in bringing down the government.

“It got to the point that half the country could know something within a few hours, even though it couldn’t be mentioned in any of the media or spoken over the phone,” the bearded programmer said the other day in his Prague campus office.

Twenty years after the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989, and the communist government in neighbouring Czechoslovakia joined its neighbours in giving up power six weeks later, the activists involved are struck by the fact they were able to communicate with a speed and efficiency that would be difficult today - even though they lacked the cellphones, e-mail networks, Twitter accounts and websites used nowadays by anti-government movements in places such as Iran.

Former resistance members in the Czech Republic and the former East Germany say there were two factors that made news move at better-than-Twitter efficiency in the revolutionary days of ‘89: A network of human relationships that conveyed information informally on a regular basis, and a population who were highly focused on only a few channels of information, both official and clandestine.

“You didn’t have people looking at 200 different TV channels and 10,000 websites and e-mails from thousands of people,” says Rainer Muller, one of the East German dissidents who brought 200,000 people onto the streets of Leipzig in October of 1989. “You could put something on a Western TV or radio station and you could be sure that half the country would know it.”

The technology was often primitive, for a good reason: Using the telephone was extremely risky, and the print and broadcast media were regime-controlled.

Mr. Meska, the software engineer, held such an important position that the regime had a high threshold for his insurrection. So he became a trusted communication hub for the underground, a human router - though he resorted to a pre-digital medium to reach the nation.

“I went into the research institute’s photocopy office one day with a copy of the underground secret newspaper Lidove Noviny, and I was surprised to find that the woman there let me make a copy of it,” he said. “So later that day I came in and made 200 copies. And after that I became a samizdat publisher, effectively.”

Each of those copies would reach hundreds of people, because they would be circulated among networks of people - not members of the underground, but ordinary citizens who were used to meeting at pubs, passing on information and rumours, and sending them along to other circles of friends the same day.

“I had a friend whose nickname was ‘pamphlet’ because he was always coming over to the jobsite and handing out pamphlets on various events, and whenever you went to the pub each night, you knew who were the people from the underground and they’d tell you what was up,” says Frantisek Kostlan, who was a construction worker in 1989.

His interest in the Doors and Led Zeppelin was enough to get him into anti-government networks: the typically obsessive networks of music fans, ubiquitous in the eastern bloc and particularly zealous in Czechoslovakia, easily turned themselves into subversive communication webs when things got intense in 1989.

The phone was a risk - but the East Germans discovered it could be used effectively if large groups of people shared calls from public phones.

And the goal was always to reach radio and TV stations outside the Iron Curtain that reached across the border.

“We would hold a weekly telephone conference in which we would report on what was going on, and the purpose of this was to have someone different each day who could relay all the information to the Western media through West Germany - this proved an extremely effective method to reach the whole country,” said Mr. Muller, the East German.

They would smuggle videotape out of the country on a weekly basis, using trusted officials who had reason to cross the Iron Curtain on a regular basis.

This meant that news coverage was delivered to the whole country the same day, despite being officially unmentionable.

For example, on Nov. 17, 1989, when 20,000 people gathered in a spontaneous protest in Prague, a rumour spread that a student had been killed by the police.

By the end of the night, the rumour had been carried on Radio Free Europe and other powerful stations, and everyone in Czechoslovakia knew about it.

Suddenly, demonstrations were attracting half a million people.

The news was also carried across borders within the Iron Curtain.

Mr. Muller would make regular clandestine trips to Czechoslovakia where he would meet with Petr Uhl, an editor of the Czech resistance newspaper.

“We were much more co-ordinated than people realize today, so that people in Czechoslovakia were able to know almost immediately what was happening in Poland and East Germany, even though it could not be reported or even mentioned in the official media,” said Mr. Uhl, still a political activist and writer.

After the Berlin Wall fell in Germany, Czechs began to organize a serious resistance movement known as the Civic Forum in early November, 1989, and within six weeks it became the government.

It was launched in typical lo-fidelity fashion: Czechs, who gathered habitually at the theatre, suddenly found the actors reading anti-government news rather than lines from the play. It was massive, fast, and more effective than a text message.

Original Article

Warsaw

Innovative and risky discussions in Warsaw became a template for Europe’s non-violent transition back to democracy

Read original article in The Globe and Mail

The Warsaw carpenter received the mysterious instructions from the highest ranks of the Communist regime to build a piece of furniture of unique design and purpose: a plain wood table, perfectly round, nine metres in diameter, capable of seating 58 people, with nothing that could be considered a head, a foot or a centre.

In previous uprisings here, carpenters had been ordered to build gallows. This time, as the economy ground to a halt and strikes froze the nation, the solution would be less bloody, more symmetrical, and without precedent in history: The Communists at one end, Lech Walesa and his dissidents at the other, a dictatorship negotiating on live television with people whose names had been illegal to utter on TV for eight years.

By the time the Berlin Wall collapsed on Nov. 9, 1989, an event whose 20th anniversary will be the subject of fervent celebrations in Germany next week, the Polish-style Round Table had become not only a metaphor for peaceful change and an emblem of tolerance, but an actual instrument of transformation, first in Poland, then in Hungary, then in Germany and Czechoslovakia.

The Berlin events this month are proving a quiet reminder to Europeans that the non-violent nature of their transition to democracy owes much to the oft-neglected innovations of Poland.

“We did not expect much from these talks - it was entirely unexpected by anybody in Poland that as a result of the Round Table discussions, a Solidarity-led government would be holding power in Poland by September of 1989, and Communism would be gone,” says Wladyslaw Findeisen, the quiet, methodical computer-science professor who was the chairman of the Solidarity side of the table.

Mr. Findeisen was typical of the figures who populated the table: An acclaimed scholar and veteran of Poland’s anti-Nazi resistance, he had been expelled from his position as university chairman in the 1980s and driven into the underground. Then, in January of 1989, he suddenly found himself on television as a figure of national prominence.

“The most we really hoped for was that our union would be made legal again, and that we might have some chance of winning some role in government perhaps by the mid-1990s,” Mr. Findeisen, now 84, says.

Yet seven months after the talks began, and two months before the Berlin Wall fell, the Warsaw talks had restored democracy, had caused the Communist regime to hand over power and had given Solidarity a national government with a majority mandate, with Mr. Findeisen, to his surprise, elected to the Senate.

For many of those who sat around that table 20 years ago, the experiment was even riskier than an armed revolution, its potential outcome more dangerous.

For the Communists, who had banned the Solidarity union under Moscow’s orders in 1981 by imposing martial law, it meant publicly treating an explicitly anti-communist group, whose 10 million members had been forbidden for eight years from meeting, as complete equals. For Solidarity, it meant compromising with a regime that had imprisoned, banished and sometimes killed its members.

Yet for both sides, there was no doubt that sitting down and talking was the only option left.

“We had to negotiate with the authorities, because through the whole of the ’80s, our slogan was ‘don’t talk, just fight,’ ” says Wojciech Maziarski, who ran Solidarity’s underground information office through the 1980s.

“And besides, the society was very tired. Everybody was so tired, the people needed hope, and the possibility of negotiations meant some kind of hope,” he said from his office at the Polish edition of Newsweek, which he edits. “The leaders of Solidarity couldn’t reject it.”

To maintain the guaranteed employment and housing that was at the core of its legitimacy, Poland’s military-run government had borrowed tens of billions of dollars and imposed rigid rationing of food, fuel and other necessities.

Western banks had refused to extend any more credit unless sharp reforms were undertaken - reforms that would entail shutting down factories and laying off hundreds of thousands of workers.

Those workers were members of the illegal Solidarity movement. In 1988, they held a general strike, which Communist leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski repressed with tanks, soldiers, water cannons and beatings.

That summer they held another, larger strike, and Gen. Jaruzelski invited Mr. Walesa for secret meetings.

“It was an ordeal, thinking about how to resolve the situation,” Gen. Jaruzelski said in an interview this year. “I knew that no matter how it ends - and I believed it would end with the situation stabilizing - that a large part of society will be hostile toward me.”

The talks would have been unthinkable even two years before. But Mikhail Gorbachev had become leader of the Soviet Union, and in an address to the Soviet congress that summer, he declared that Moscow’s tanks would not be sent to crush reform movements in Eastern Europe - as had happened in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Talks suddenly became a solution that seemed reasonable: For Solidarity, to get their union legalized again. For the regime, to get the imprimatur of Poland’s opposition on economic reforms that would prove painful and contentious.

When the ragtag gang of Gdansk shipyard workers, Silesian mine union leaders and long-banned professors took their seats across from the men in big suits, they did not expect much. It seemed that economic reform would be the limit of the discussions.

“The Communists realized that they would have to introduce unemployment, for the first time in Poland, and they could not do this without some kind of endorsement on the part of Solidarity,” Mr. Maziarski said.

But the increasingly open and liberal behaviour of Moscow emboldened both sides. As the weeks went on, Solidarity began demanding full and free elections. And the Communist officials, especially Gen. Jaruzelski, became open to reform, even democracy.

“In 1981, I would say that Moscow was kind of a wall behind Gen. Jaruzelski’s back,” Mr. Maziarski said.

“At the end of the ’80s, he suddenly realized there was no wall behind him. He’s only pressed from in front by the Polish opposition and the people.”

When elections came, on June 4, 1989, Solidarity would win 99 of the 100 newly created Senate seats. Gen. Jaruzelski realized within weeks, after a national debate, that he would have to hand over power to a Solidarity-led government, with the caveat that he would be president and that two of the 20 cabinet positions would be held by his deputies.

Within two years, Mr. Walesa himself would be president. By then, the astonishing success of the Round Table had inspired similar handovers, with a minimum of violence, in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and East Germany.

It was, in the end, a triumph of the roundtable over the wall.

Original Article

CRTC asked to rule that small TV is beautiful

One group argues local news is priority, others pull for ambitious drama.

by Doug Saunders

Sep 30, 1998

Source : Globe & Mail Hull – A curious debate is emerging over the future of Canadian television: Should it be local, or should it be “good” ?

At the moment, most of it is neither. Local news shows are broadcast in off-peak hours and have been cut back in some cities, and much Canadian-content fare is designed so it can sell at low cost to U.S. stations.

This is why the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission – the federal broadcast regulator – is holding marathon hearings for the next two weeks into Canada’s system of TV regulations.

But a schism has opened between those who argue that Canada’s national networks ought to fill their prime-time hours with high-budget, distinctly Canadian dramas, and those who would rather see the networks’ revenues channeled into local news and information programming in diverse regions.

The latter thrust is led by Ian Morrison, head of the viewer-rights lobby group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting. He argued before the commission that networks such as CTV and Global have diverted their energies away from local programs and focused instead on national advertising opportunities through network-wide shows.

“Canadians are demonstrating a major, and sustained, appetite for local programming,” Morrison said, but pointed out that the public CBC and the private networks have reduced their expenditures. Using Winnipeg as an example of a typical TV market, his organization’s research shows that the quantity of local news programs available there has dropped by 20 per cent over an 11-year period. He claimed that the same is true in other cities. Morrison argued that networks should be required to devote more airtime and money to local programming, though he did not say how much.

Over the next two weeks, his argument will be echoed in submissions made by a number of organizations, including municipal and provincial governments and unions.

At the same time, many prominent groups are telling the commission that more network time and money should be devoted to nation- wide, prime-time drama programs with distinctly Canadian subjects.

This position is led by Elizabeth McDonald, head of the Canadian Film and Television Production Association, which represents independent producers. Like Morrison, she is a lobbyist who is said to have formidable personal influence over many of the CRTC commissioners.

A variety of groups representing screenwriters, directors and producers are preparing to echo McDonald’s argument that networks devote too much airtime to rebroadcasting U.S. programs.

Her organization argued that private networks should devote 10 per cent of their revenues to broadcasting at least 10 hours a week of prime-time, distinctly Canadian drama.

On the face of it, these arguments are not necessarily incompatible: Morrison also argued that networks should create more prime-time drama, and McDonald’s group supports an increase in local programming. But they are both aware that each of their main arguments could undercut the potency of the other group’s.

Broadcasters, on the other hand, have pointed out in their submissions that a gain in national, Canadian-content drama shows, which are expensive and do not earn profits for networks, can mean a loss in local programming.

“One of the challenges for the system is to continue to deliver local programming in an environment in which resources are being concentrated instead on Canadian entertainment programming,” the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, which represents private networks, argued in its submission.

According to figures filed with the CRTC this summer, CTV and WIC earn profits from their local news programming while Global and CHUM still spend more than they earn on local shows.

Because a substantial share of TV advertising is bought locally and regionally, local programs tend to be the subject of heated competition. U.S. networks such as CBS have moved away from national network programming, choosing instead to devote their resources to more lucrative local markets.