Watch what you say

On its way to the USA

[Reprinted from Issues & Views October 1, 2001]

In the Netherlands reporters and other media people are being particularly careful about the type of questions they ask public officials these days. Last week, a Dutch reporter, who was developing a television program about biological warfare, telephoned an official at Holland's BVD, the Dutch counterpart of the CIA. She identified herself, and then requested information about particular chemicals and their effects.

A couple of hours after she made this call, she received a call from someone asking if she was Ms. Van den Broek. She replied in the affirmative and the party hung up. Five hours later, at 4:00 a.m., a squad of law enforcers appeared at her door, with battering ram in hand. Van den Broek was arrested and taken into custody. By the next morning, she still was not informed about the reasons for her arrest, but was allowed to make phone calls.

As it turned out, so says the BVD, the reporter's misfortune was that she had telephone the BVD official around the same time that they received an anonymous call about a possible bomb set to explode in a public place. After the lawyers of Van den Broek's employers traced her whereabouts and verified her story about the motives for her initial questions, she was freed.

Meanwhile, over in the Czech Republic, the Christian Science Monitor reports, "Twelve years ago, the Czech and Slovak nations overthrew one of the most repressive communist regimes in history with underground newsletters, enchanting folk music, and mass demonstrations. As a result, freedom of expression is held particularly dear in this part of the world. At the same time, it is treated as a very powerful--and sometimes dangerous--weapon."

So dangerous, in fact, that citizens of this "republic" have to watch what they say, when referring to the September 11 attacks in the United States. Jan Kopal, a leader of the National Social Bloc, learned about the return of repression to his country the hard way. At a meeting, he declared, "A state, such as the United States, which has perpetrated so much evil, supported international terrorism in the past and killed innocent civilians in, for example, Yugoslavia, deserved nothing but this kind of attack."

Kopal was quickly arrested by the Czech police--very much as they did in the bad old days of Soviet rule. The state then set about concocting a special set of laws to hold him and to be able to make other such arrests. The laws "ban expression of extremist views in public." Kopal is to be prosecuted for "praising a criminal act."

It seems like old times have returned to Czechoslovakia.

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