Controversial Czech institute sets new course with new director
The Czech Republic’s controversial institute for studying its Nazi and Communist totalitarian past is to take a new course. Its current director and one of the main forces behind the institute’s creation was surprisingly voted out of office. We report on the vote and the prospects for the troubled institute under new management.
The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes’ ruling council took a dramatic decision on Wednesday night to dump its existing director for the last two years Pavel Žáček. His replacement is an older and very different type of person, historian Jiří Pernes. He admitted he had not been expecting the backing from four of the council’s seven-strong members.
As the overall custodian of the Communist secret police files and other archives, the institute was supposed to shed light and help explain the darker totalitarian episodes of recent Czech history. But the institute and Mr Žáček often seemed to be caught up in controversy over its work and survival in the problematic present rather than dealing with the problematic past.
At no time was that truer than during the storm of controversy that followed the suggestion by one of the institute’s researchers that Czech-born international writer Milan Kundera was probably a secret police informer whose testimony had helped send a man to prison.
New director Mr Pernes says that episode, where he maintains mistakes were made in the way the information was checked and presented, was one of many which tainted the institute’s image and made it appear to have more of a mission to seek headlines and settle political scores.
“I think that the current management of the institute made some mistakes that troubled not just the council but much of Czech society. It meant that the institute acted to a certain extent in a political way, although I do not think that was the intention. I don’t think there was a political motive but it acted in an unfortunate way and then there were some things that came out that were not 100 percent reliable and created problems for the institute.”
Mr Pernes says his priorities will be to steer the institute away from the seeming sensational grabbing revelations of the past and towards deeper historical research of the period. That should include greater cooperation with other institutions.
One looming problem after he takes up the post at the start of April will be ensure the institute’s immediate future after being mired in so much controversy. The right of centre Civic Democrat Party was the main force behind the institute’s creation with many Social Democrats and, not surprisingly, Communist Party members of parliament calling for its abolition. The left-wing parties could win power in May’s lower house elections.
Whatever its recent history, the new director believes the institute should have a future role helping Czechs come to terms with their past.
“I think that the institute does have a future because its aims and mission are extremely important for Czech society ― that is to shed light on the Czech and Czechoslovak past under Nazism and Communism and the life of the Czech and Czechoslovak state under the Nazi occupation and Communist Party rule”
