885096440

JPRS-EER-91-053 25 April 1991

POLITICAL

because I think today’s situation does not correspond to what is good, representative, and honorable in them. I would say that, so far, they have not managed to orient themselves properly and that this is the reason for nervousness and irritation.

{Gressner] Many people are claiming that VPN-For a Democratic Slovakia [ZDS] supporters are clearly ori-ented—toward the left____

[Miklosko] A very interesting grouping has evolved in our parliament: The Party of the Democratic Left, the Slovak National Party, and the VPN-ZDS platform.... On the other side are the Christian Democratic Move-ment, the Hungarian Independent Initiative, and the VPN liberał wing who are mostly represented by intel-lectuals.

[Gressner] Many participants in the extraordinary and expanded VPN Slovak Council session complained that Vladimir Meciar did not participate in it. They thought that the extremely contcntious issues would be resolved in peace and without emotions.

[Miklosko] Today’s situation is rather schizophrenic. On the one hand, the VPN Slovak Council has issued a statement according to which Messrs. Meciar and Knazko are no longcr part of the VPN. Therefore, from this point of view, I am not surpriscd that they did not come to Trencianske Teplice. On the other hand, how-ever, both of them are still declaring that they consider themselves to be members of our movement. They should demonstrate this by their presence.... That is, we are witnessing a situation in which everyone is making specific and unequivocal dccisions and is doing what-ever suits him at a given moment.

[Gressner] You spent almost five hours in the SNR with Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar—face to face—just a few days ago. Did you manage to come to a positive and joint conclusion?

[Miklosko] To tell you the truth, we did not. At the moment, I consider the following to be the most impor-tant things: Putting an end to all the personal attacks and getting together at a roundtable where it will be borne in mind that we have one morę coalition partner. At the same time, no one will demand that ministers, deputies, and so on be changed. Any other solution to today’s situation would be a confrontational one and neither side should accept that.

[Gressner] What kind of role does Federal Assembly Chairman Alexander Dubcek play in this Slovak divorce?

[Miklosko] At the beginning, Alexander Dubcek stood unequivocally on one side; now he is trying to build a bridge toward conciliation, but, so far, he has not been successful.

[Bratislava PRAVDA in Slovak on 8 April on page 2, under the headline “To Whom Will A Chance For

Slovakia Be Left?,” carries a 600-word report by Fran-tisek Melis on the VPN Slovak Council meeting in Trencianske Teplice on 6 April. The report notes a statement by Federal Assembly Deputy Ernest Valko that “of the 52 Federal Assembly VPN Club members, 16 support the ZDS platform, two—Alexander Dubcek and Milan Cic—are independent, and the rest support the platform represented by Fedor Gal.”]

Current State of Academy of Sciences Reviewed

91CH0479A Prague TVORBA in Czech 27 Mar 91 pp 6-7

[Article by Jiri Koryta: “Scicntists, Grants, Furriers”]

[Text] Radio Yerevan once asked: “Can a paralytic be an academician?” The answer: “Absolutely, but he must be a progressive paralytic.”

Fortunately, such an image of representatives of the scientific community, festooned with academic titles, is not in accordance with the view the public has of people who are actually working in science. In a recent public opinion poił, which was conducted by the Institute for the Theory of Science of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, docents, professors, and other scientific workers placed nicely in the upper 25 percent of the ladder of professions, immediately behind physicians. This is a noteworthy result because I do not think that we Czechs are specifically a “scientific nation”; for exam-ple—What was the share of the spiritual effort of our nation throughout its history which was devoted to research in naturę? I believe that, in comparison with, say, the Germans or the English, it was less. The Czechs contributed to European culture in a different way—in the Middle Ages, they struggled for ethical values, and in modern times they contributed far morę through the arts than through the Sciences, and if they contributed through the Sciences, it was through history. Until the end of the 19th century, we were, after all, concemed with the revival, the maintenance, and the development of the nation, and this was aided far morę by literaturę, musie, and the humanities....

It is said of our academy that it is a product of the totalitarian system which—like in Russia—was sup-posed to represent some ornamentation of an oriental type of despotism. There is a little bit of the truth in this, but the actual situation is morę complicated and not all that bad.

The Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences came into being at the end of 1952. Its origin marked some kind of a breakthrough in the conception of existing institutes; an expansion took place in the direction of the humanities and in the direction of technology (even the president of the academy himself, Z. Nejedly, did not grcatly concem himself with the progress of the academy). With the exception of the already existing institutes of the humanities (the institutes of history, Orientalia, the Czech