Word: czechoslovakias
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...secluded wood 55 miles east of Prague, smoking chimneys rise above the East Bohemian Chemical Enterprise. A large complex of ramshackle sheds and concrete buildings, the factory looks unprepossessing enough. But a "special production unit" is mixing batches of one of Czechoslovakia's most lethal exports: Semtex, the odorless, colorless plastic explosive of choice for terrorists the world over...
Other plants in Czechoslovakia are engaged in similar businesses, producing all manner of weaponry and components -- hand grenades, automatic rifles, tanks, armored personnel carriers -- almost all for export. In a high-security compound outside the industrial city of Brno, trainees from such countries as Angola, South Yemen and the People's Republic of the Congo are being drilled in what officials describe as "police methodology and criminology," a euphemism for paramilitary training...
...four months since they came to power, Havel and his democratically inclined colleagues have practically erased communism from political life. They are finding it far harder, however, to do away with another legacy: Czechoslovakia's extensive role as arms supplier to Communist regimes, liberation movements and outright terrorists. Says an Interior Ministry official: "The Communists may be gone, but they have locked us into a web of arms deals and even terrorism that may be impossible to escape...
Over the past 15 years, arms exports outside the Warsaw Pact have earned Czechoslovakia an average of $850 million annually in cash or such essential raw materials as oil and mineral ores; additional revenues flow in from the sale of ammunition. All told, the arms trade accounts for a quarter to a half of Czechoslovakia's foreign exchange earnings. Havel said last week his country would continue to sell arms to democracies but not to totalitarian regimes. However, cautions Foreign Ministry spokesman Lubos Dobrovsky, "we have existing obligations that we must honor...
Easier but wrong. Because, as strange as the notion may seem to those who view opera as Dr. Johnson's "exotic and irrational entertainment," art matters. It matters in Czechoslovakia, where a playwright has become President; in East Germany, where a Leipzig conductor, Kurt Masur, was a spiritual leader of the peaceful revolution; in Lithuania, where a musicologist is seeking to lead his land out of the Soviet Union. And it matters in Paris, where the Socialist Mitterrand has undertaken a series of cultural public-works projects that have enhanced the quality of life in the world's most beautiful...