Czechs bid farewell to ex-minister who cut through Iron Curtain

Jan 14, 2011, 12:53 GMT

Prague - Czechs on Friday bid farewell to Jiri Dienstbier, a former foreign minister who cut through the Iron Curtain, the barbed wire fence between Eastern bloc and the West, after Communism fell in Europe in 1989.

Dienstbier, who was the first Czechoslovak foreign minister after Communism's fall, died in a Prague hospital on Saturday after suffering from cancer. He was 73.

Several hundred people bid him farewell before funeral, held in the country's Senate, to which he was elected in 2008.

The guests included former German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, former Czech president Vaclav Havel and his successor Vaclav Klaus, and Polish journalist and freedom fighter Adam Michnik.

They praised his integrity and will to defend unpopular ideas. 'He was a symbol of new Czechoslovakia,' Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg said.

Dienstbier was born on April 20, 1937, in the town of Kladno, 30 kilometres west of Prague.

A member of Czechoslovakia's Communist Party since 1958, he was ousted from the party and his job as radio journalist in 1969 as a punishment for his involvement in the so-called Prague Spring reform movement the year before.

He then worked as a boiler man and night watchman and joined the dissident movement, serving prison time for his opposition activities between 1979 and 1982.

In 1989, Dienstbier became a symbol of the fall of the Iron Curtain that divided the Soviet empire and western Europe.

Weeks later, together with Genscher, he cut through the barbed wire on the German-Czechoslovak border.

Besides his involvement in national politics, Dienstbier lectured at universities and served as the United Nations' special rapporteur for human rights in the former Yugoslavia.

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