Havel hits at delay in filling top job

Press, 18 December 1989, Page 8

Havel hits at delay in filling top job

NZPA-Reuter Prague The playwright, Vaclav Havel, leading contender for the Czechoslovak presidency, said in an unprecedented television address on Saturday that the job must be filled as quickly as possible. Mr Havel, symbol of the reform movement and mobbed wherever he goes by supporters, added that the Communists should help speed the selection process as they were responsible for the country’s pressing problems. “We cannot afford the luxury of waiting until new laws are drawn up,” he said, stressing the urgency of getting planned economic and legal changes under way. “We should have someone in the Castle (the presidential seat) soon — hopefully before the end of the year,” he added in his first direct address on television. The Communist Party’s parliamentary caucus has proposed changing the constitution to have a new President elected directly by the public. Mr Havel and the Civic Forum opposition movement want Parliament to choose a new President quickly, as the constitution demands. The post has been vacant since Gustav Husak resigned last Sunday. In his 20-minute address, which amounted almost to a presidential election broadcast, Mr

Havel said most of Czechoslovakia’s 1.7 million Communists “had to keep quiet for 20 years, the same as the rest of us, and many of them — despite the difficulties — did many good deeds.” But he added that the Communist Party had shielded the totalitarian system which jailed him and others. “All Communists, without exception, carry a higher responsibility for the morass in which our country has got stuck,” he said. “They are bound to draw from this responsibility the appropriate conclusions, and more than anybody else work more for a future of freedom for us all.” In a pointed reference to the dispute over how to elect a successor to Mr Husak, he added: "This applies to the Communist deputies in the Federal Assembly, too.” Mr Havel stressed he would accept the office only as a temporary measure while free parliamentary elections were prepared. His other condition for accepting the presidency would be “that at my side, regardless of his function, Alexander Dubcek will stand.” Mr Dubcek, the former reformist leader ousted after a Soviet-led invasion crushed jiis 1968 Prague Spring reforms, has also been put forward as a presidential candidate.