Prague Spring Hero Dubcek Elected by Czech Parliament

PRAGUE, Czechoslovakia — Alexander Dubcek was elected Speaker of Parliament today in an extraordinary reversal of political fortune for the man ousted as Communist Party chief after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion ended his “Prague Spring” reform movement.

Parliament also cleared the way for the election of playwright and opposition leader Vaclav Havel as president Friday by dropping a pledge “to serve the interests of socialism” from the head of state’s oath of office.

“I see this as a sort of continuation of the Prague Spring of 1968 and a certain moral vindication for the hundreds of thousands of its active participants,” Dubcek declared after being elected by a vote of 298 with a lone abstention.

“This will become a place where the people’s wishes will come true and their rights will be respected,” he said of the Federal Assembly, the parliamentary body whose legislative work he will oversee until free elections are held by June.

The Assembly had been a rubber-stamp tool of hard-line Communists until huge pro-democracy protests forced them to hand over their guaranteed monopoly on political power Nov. 29.

Dubcek, 68, gained the post under an accord reached last week among the Communist Party, the opposition Civic Forum movement and other political groupings, which also provides that Havel will become president.

After Dubcek’s Moscow-engineered ouster as party chief in April, 1969, he was appointed Federal Assembly chairman for a few months before being sent off to Turkey as Czechoslovak ambassador.

He was expelled from the party in June, 1970, and demoted to a forestry job in his native Bratislava. Dubcek lived there in obscure retirement until he began speaking out against his orthodox successors about two years ago.

Havel, as successor to hard-liner Gustav Husak who stepped down Dec. 10, will become Czechoslovakia’s first non-Communist president since 1948.

Language affirming loyalty to the state--identified as the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic--remains in the oath of office, although Civic Forum suggests that when a new constitution is drafted the word “socialist” be deleted from the country’s name.

Havel, 53, has maintained that the word has lost all meaning over the last 41 years of one-party rule.

He is a Czech, while Dubcek is a Slovak. The accord on their elections aimed to retain the traditional balance of power in top political posts between the two halves of the federated republic.

Dubcek was among a group of 23 new members named by the Assembly to fill seats vacated by Communists forced out due to massive public pressure.

Among those named to the new seats were several former dissidents, including Charter 77 human rights movement spokesman Tomas Hradilek and Charter activists Vaclav Benda and Jaroslav Sabata.

A new government sworn into office as Husak’s final act has vowed to hold free elections within six months and the reconstructed Assembly will serve until then.