PhDr. Ivan Gabal

"But the main thing was that after Palach week... we started to write an academic petition for Havel's release." - "An extra petition besides the defence one?" - "That was an extra petition that I did with my friend Láďa Hlavatý, now a university professor, but with Pepík Vavroušek, Petr Kučera, and later also with Miloš Zeman and the whole society around the scientific and technical society and so on... we did a petition. And when the petition came out and everybody started to have kind of some problems, but not too many, the academics started to say: 'But we can't stay with this and we should start doing something.' So, we started discussing it in February and we created the Circle of Independent Intellectuals."

"Quite a lot of people are now calling for the Communists to be banned. I, because I happened to run the Civic Forum election campaign, thought it was far more important to defeat them in a head-on collision in an election as an existing political party, because that one ballot that people could cast against them, whether they gave it to the Civic Forum or whoever else, was a really important cathartic moment whereby every citizen had the opportunity to emancipate themselves from the terror of that backwardness, that demoralization and everything. That's why I think it was more important not to ban those communists, but to defeat them head-on."

"Back to the normalization. I think that a certain privilege that came out of it was dissent. Because these people were so pushed to the edge, marginalised and persecuted, that in a sense they gained a certain freedom to talk about things that Czechoslovak society and the rest of its academia hadn't thought of at all. I always give the example of the thesis from the dissent that without the unification of Germany there could be no unified Europe. So, we helped a lot actually to overcome the division and the Germans. And I think the Germans know that to this day. It was the thesis not only of Havel, but also of Dienstbier and other people."