Petr Uhl

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Petr Uhl

Petr Uhl (born October 8, 1941 in Prague ) is a Czech publicist and former dissident. He was one of the first victims of the purges in Czechoslovakia after the breakup of the Prague Spring in 1968. He saw himself as a Marxist and a Trotskyist at the time . He spent several years in prison.

Life

Petr Uhl studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University in Prague and became a graduate engineer. After a few visits to France, he began to sympathize with Trotskyism and the Fourth International ; he was strongly influenced by the ideas of Ernest Mandel . After the breakdown of the Prague Spring , he founded the HRM / Hnutí revoluční mládeže (Revolutionary Youth Movement), a small group of just a few dozen people, underground . As early as December 1969, the group was broken up, some members, including Petr Uhl and his then companion Sibylle Plogstedt (from West Berlin ), arrested and sentenced in a show trial; Petr Uhl to four years imprisonment. Petr Uhl has been married to the historian and philosopher Anna Šabatová since 1974 .

In 1977 he was one of the first to sign the opposition citizens' movement Charter 77 ; he was also the editor of the information bulletin of Charter 77. As early as April 1978, he founded the Committee for the Defense of Unjustly Persecuted VONS ( Výbor na obranu nespravedlivě stíhaných ) together with Václav Havel and others . In October 1979 he was sentenced again, this time to five years in prison. He worked in the Polish-Czechoslovak Solidarity , which was supposed to coordinate the cooperation of the Polish and Czechoslovak dissidents, from 1988 to 1989 he worked in the Eastern European Information Agency .

In the 1970s, Petr Uhl was one of the identifying figures of the Marxist-oriented resistance against Soviet hegemony in Czechoslovakia , including for the Czech-language magazine informační materiály , which appeared in West Berlin and which also published his work Program of Social Self-Government in Czech (original title : Program společenské samosprávy , published together with Index-Verlag). In the 1980s, the family's apartment in the center of Prague was an important hub for information between Charter 77, Eastern European dissidents and journalists from all over the world. The communist secret service monitored the apartment building with a permanently installed camera at the end of the 1980s.

After the fall of the regime, he was, among other things, director of the ČTK news agency . Between 1998 and 2001, Uhl was the representative of the Czech government in the field of human rights. Uhl was a journalist and joined the Czech Greens - Strana zelených - in 2002 , and left the party in 2007. He held various offices in the field of minorities, human rights and problems of the Roma , for which he was a.o. a. as a member of a committee for Roma affairs of the Czech Social Democratic Party .

Honors

Works

  • The challenge. Frankfurt / Main 1981 ISBN 3-88332-055-2
  • Program společenské samosprávy (camouflage title: Socialistické hospodářství ), with collective, coproduction Index / informační materiály, Cologne 1982
  • Právo a nespravedlnost očima Prague 1998

swell

  • Short biography in On-line s Petrem Uhlem , in: www.nezakladnam.cz (Czech)
  • Max Borin / Vera Plogen: Management and self-administration in the CSSR. Bureaucracy and resistance. Berlin 1970 (contains, inter alia, texts written by Uhl and his group)
  • Group International Marxists : Solidarity with Charter 77 - Freedom for Petr Uhl. Frankfurt / Main 1980

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Uhl, Petr
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech publicist and dissident
DATE OF BIRTH October 8, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague