In last week's column, I sat down with Jan Urban, a former leader of the dissident movement here in the Czech Republic - and conveniently enough, my teacher. We discussed the Communist regime and his life as a dissident. This week's column is a continuation of that conversation.
The day after the Communist Party fell in 1990, Urban quit politics. He had been one of a handful of dissidents, many of the rest of whom went on to become the political elite in the country's new democracy. But after over a decade of fighting for his country's political freedom, Urban simply dropped out.
"I didn't want to stay in a fight, in a conflict mode," Urban said. "I could see it in many of my former colleagues. When you know nothing but fighting, you are in trouble."
"It is important to say that it's not about being better or worse, I was just different," Urban said. "I lacked any drive for power - I really wanted to try to be normal, because I did not have a life."
To be sure, Urban hasn't been living a quiet life of retirement. Upon leaving the Czech political scene, Urban traveled the globe, reporting and writing on conflict situations everywhere from El Salvador to Bosnia. Most recently, Urban has been working on a project to promote Iraq's historical and cultural unity.
"After '89 I tried to understand all these conflict and post-conflict situations," Urban said. "Then I realized it was eating me up. So right now I'm trying to help with projects to save culturally historic items in Iraq. I'm trying to create or confirm the possibility to negotiate and communicate through finding elements common to all sides. It gives me much better feelings than seeing horrors committed [against] other human beings."
I asked Urban if, after all that, he achieved "normalcy" - the quest for which drove him out of politics in the first place.
"No," he said. "Not in the sense that I failed to keep my family together. It took years. I gained this kind of self-control much later on, not with the regime change [in Czechoslovakia]."
In the Czech Republic, the political situation has been far from consolidated since the triumph achieved by Urban and his colleagues in '89. Politics are riddled by corruption. And the Communist Party, now a legal part of the democracy, is still breathing, having garnered a healthy 18.5 percent of the vote in the 2002 lower house elections.
Ominously enough, rumors have been growing louder that the Center Left seeks a coalition with the Communist Party in order to retake power from the Center Right in the 2006 elections. I asked Urban if this scared him.
"I'm not scared," he said. "But for me it offers a very clear future. The day this would happen, I am out in the streets organizing civil disobedience campaigns. I am not going to tolerate the Communists back in power."
The phrase was uttered with his typical nonchalance, but the conviction beneath his words conveyed the force of his fervor on the matter.
"[The Communist Party] has not changed at all," Urban said. "The chairman of the party was a paid secret police informant. You ask them about crimes, about executions that took place...what you hear are more excuses."
In Urban's class at the New York University center in Prague, nary a lecture passes without some student bringing up our own country. Whether the questions criticize the current Bush administration or a perceived sense of American civil apathy, students are always looking to elicit Urban's opinion on the state of our union.
I understand why the questions keep coming. My personal image of America right now is a compass with its needle spinning wildly. From Iraq to the current administration's nightmares, from our distrust for politicians and corporations to our distrust of the media, America's never felt so lost in my short lifetime. When you're abroad, this sense is only heightened. So it doesn't surprise me that Urban's been getting a lot of "America questions" from his students.
And he occasionally obliges with an answer. I asked a man who challenged his government if Americans might not be doing enough to challenge theirs today.
"I would not be defeatist," Urban said.
"Definitely there is a problem," he added. "For the greater part of the 20th century, America was viewed by the world as a pro-democracy, pro-liberty element. And to be an American, it became a self-explanatory value. This has been lost, and it has to be rebuilt."
"I think something is brewing," Urban said. "Every society needs to realize that there is a need to re-negotiate values and symbols. So now it's America's turn."
The day before we spoke, the story had broken about Vice President Cheney's push to legalize CIA torture of prisoners. I asked Urban if he would comment.
"My answer to that is that [Cheney] should be immediately impeached. This guy is going against the basic structure of the U.S. constitution," Urban said.
"The whole misunderstanding about Sept. 11 is that you don't fight terrorism with less democracy, you fight it with more," he said. "If we agree that we are at a 'war on terror,' we better choose our weapons. Democracy is much more powerful than precision-guided missiles."
"By using torture you create martyrs, and if you don't know what martyrdom means for Islam, or for any religion, you are crazy," Urban added.
Before anyone reads that as a political answer, heed the source of those words. They're coming from a man who has seen the effects of torture firsthand, who has been interrogated. He knows what he's talking about, and he's right.
