Právo: President Klaus is only author of amnesty

Prague, March 2 (CTK) - Outgoing Czech President Vaclav Klaus is the only author of the extensive amnesty that he declared on New Year's Day, though he consulted his close cooperators and the Justice Ministry on its extent, he told Saturday's issue of daily Pravo.

"I am the author. There is no other author," he said.

Klaus said, however, his life would have been easier if he had not declared the amnesty.

The amnesty has aroused an outcry by its extent and by halting the proceedings in some closely-watched corruption and fraud cases.

Klaus said he was considering declaring an amnesty for a long time and that the 20th anniversary of the foundation of the independent Czech Republic shortly before the end of his presidential mandate seemed a suitable occasion.

The main idea of the amnesty was to release persons with short prison sentences and to cancel punishment of old inmates and people who were prosecuted over actions dating from the early 1990s, Klaus told the paper.

He said the amnesty was based on the applications for pardons that the Presidential Office had been receiving.

When asked about the widespread criticism of the amnesty, Klaus said people from the other side of the political barricade triggered a huge wave of negative reactions that affected a lot of common people.

Klaus said the attacks against him have been the same since 1989 and that they have been led by the same people, or the circles around late president Vaclav Havel. These attacks have been gradually joined by the leftist opposition, he added.

At first, it was a group of student leaders like Martin Mejstrik who claimed that somebody stole the revolution against the communist regime from them, Klaus said.

He said he considers the post-communist development as a ideologic struggle between him and Havel.

Havel's group promoted the vision of a civic society, which was an elitist attitude that did not want standard parliamentary democracy, Klaus said.

"The fact that they were against political parties, which they identified with the Communist Party, was a fatal clash of the early 1990s," he told Pravo.

Klaus said he was praised for his implementation of an economic transformation. He added that he believes he also significantly contributed to the development of a significant political structure, or a system of political parties and elementary parliamentary democracy.

Klaus wanted to turn the umbrella Civic Forum (OF), which forced the Communist Party to give up its power monopoly in late 1989 and help prepare free elections in 1990, into a standard political party. Due to differing views, Klaus founded the right-wing Civic Democratic Party (ODS) that splintered off the OF in 1991.

The OF then broke up and the centrist Civic Movement (OH) was founded, led mostly by former dissidents. The OH failed in the 1992 elections, which the ODS won, and gradually ceased to exist.

Klaus told the paper he backed former socialist prime minister Milos Zeman in the recent presidential election, although Zeman is not a favourite of his but only the lesser evil and the most hopeful candidate.

Zeman will replace Klaus as president on March 8. Zeman beat Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg (TOP 09), former head of the presidential office under Havel, in the runoff election.

Klaus admitted that it is hard for him to leave the Presidential Castle after ten years.

"It is affecting me more than it seemed to me two months ago," he said.

He told the paper that he is going to move to his house in Prague-Kobylisy with his wife and to visit his cottage in Prudice in southern Bohemia more frequently.

Klaus said he does not plan to return to the ODS or to run for the European Parliament though he cannot say this definitely would not happen.

He said he has no plans apart from the work in his new think tank. Immediately after his mandate ends he will fly to the United States where he will have three lectures, he added.