Jiri Dienstbier has quite a curriculum vitae. He went from being a political prisoner and then a stoker under the communists to Czechoslovak foreign minister after the revolution. Then from 1997 to 2001 he was United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in Jugoslavia. But Jiri Dienstbier's original profession was journalism, and - in the 1960s - he worked as a foreign correspondent for Czech Radio. Even that was a sign of the easing of the restrictions which ended with the Prague Spring of 1968, he says; in the 50s the Czechoslovak media simply repeated what they were given by Soviet press agency.
Jiri Dienstbier
"I was for three years the Far Eastern correspondent of the Radio. I covered the Vietnam war and the Chinese cultural revolution and Indonesian events. There was a very fine atmosphere when we broke one barrier of censorship every day, practically. For instance, I did an interview with a young professor from Harvard, Henry Kissinger, in 1964, and it was a big scandal because I didn't ask for permission from the press department of the central committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. I even didn't know I should ask for permission. So it was a one-month discussion, but because Kissinger criticised some demands of the Sudeten Germans, it was finally permitted. But they had to decide not about one thing but they had to make this systematic decision, so that it was written that we were permitted to do interviews with foreigners. It was a very fine period leading to 1968...when we had problems we had them - in the Far East - with American journalists...we met in Phnom Penh or Jakarta, they were the only places we could both go, because some countries didn't permit us to go there, and others didn't permit American and western correspondents, so when I travelled from Phnom Penh to Hanoi, I had to fly from Prague-Moscow-Peking-Hanoi (laughs) because there was no other way to get there. But it was a very nice period of my life."
