Word: civic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...last Tuesday, Vaclav Havel stepped from a silver Volkswagen Golf and, trailed by eight fellow members of the Civic Forum, proceeded to a second-floor conference room in the cream stucco building. Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec opened the talks with a seven-minute statement outlining the government's concessions. In return, Adamec said, "please terminate your strikes. This is my wish and my plea." Havel was in no mood to be conciliatory. For the next 18 minutes, he listed the Civic Forum's demands, all of which, he said, must...
Like a video tape on fast forward, Prague was racing through a revolution so quickly that even the participants could barely keep track of developments. The opposition never stopped to bask in celebration. Since its inception three weeks ago, the Civic Forum has emerged as the most single-minded and uncompromising opposition force in Eastern Europe. Last week, as the Communist leaders tried to mollify their countrymen, the Civic Forum kept up the pressure, meeting each new concession with more demands and deadlines...
...brisk rate of change has already created stress fractures between the students, who have their own strike committee, and the Civic Forum, whose leaders are drawn largely from Charter 77, an umbrella opposition group set up in 1977 to defend human and civil rights in Czechoslovakia. The students, who were faster to draw up a concise list of demands, have been irked by the Civic Forum's failure to include younger voices in its deliberations. "The Civic Forum is more experienced," says Monika Pajerova, 23, "but we are more radical." Some within the Civic Forum regard the students as "children...
There are also hints of potential rifts within the Civic Forum. Until now, the organization has striven to encourage consensus and avoid partisan affiliation. "The Civic Forum's purpose," says Havel, "is to be a bridge between the totalitarian system and true pluralistic democracy." But popular heroes are already emerging. One is Valtr Komarek, 59, director of the official Institute of Forecasting of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. An academic with a magnetic speaking style, Komarek seized the nation's imagination last weekend with a nine-minute televised address that detailed Communist incompetence in economic management. By the Monday strike...
According to some Civic Forum supporters, Komarek is furious that Havel and his colleagues are banking on the political survival of Prime Minister Adamec instead of supporting Komarek for the position. When asked by TIME if he was a candidate for Prime Minister, Komarek responded, "I leave this open. My position personally is very modest. I don't think a well-brought-up person ! should say, 'I want to be Prime Minister.' " Komarek feels that the Civic Forum tends too heavily toward compromise and should instead mount a radical assault on the existing order. "What's needed," he says...