Jiřà Dienstbier
Jiří Dienstbier ( born April 20, 1937 in Kladno, † January 8, 2011 in Prague) was a Czech politician and journalist.
After 1989 he was the first foreign minister of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the communist government. In 2008, he was elected in Kladno district senator for the CSSD.
Life
Jiří service beer came from a family of doctors. His father was Emil Ophthalmology primary physician in Kladno. He studied at the Charles University in Prague philosophy and then worked as a journalist at the Czechoslovak Radio. In 1958 he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. As a foreign correspondent, he reported primarily from the Far East, and stood out as critical mind, among other things, that he - contrary to the rules - even interviews sent that were not authorized by the communist leadership in Prague.
In 1968 he was one of the supporters of the Prague Spring. When this reform movement with the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops and tanks brutally crushed, service beer was a correspondent of the Czechoslovak Radio in Washington, DC Also his son was born. He returned from a sense of duty and save with the will, what can be saved, in the home back. The new rulers closed service beer from the Communist Party, occupied him with a professional ban, arrested him again and pushed him into financial hardship and isolation.
Service beer earned his livelihood with different activities and continued to work as an oppositionist. He signed with many other dissidents of the Charter 77 for his political activism in 1979 he was convicted (along with Václav Havel and others) to three years in prison.
After his release in 1982 he had to work ( until his appointment as a Minister ) as a heater, but left in his political commitment not deterred and continued to write for underground newspapers. The political changes of 1989 (see revolutions in 1989, in Czechoslovakia called the " Velvet Revolution " ), he stepped back into the public spotlight. Service beer was one of the founders of the Civic Democratic Forum. On December 10, 1989, he was appointed Foreign Minister in the government headed by Marián Čalfa of national consent. On December 17, 1989, he cut and the then Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock, together with a bolt cutter the barbed wire of the Czech-Austrian border fence between Hatě and Kleinhaugsdorf through and underlined so that the fall of the Iron Curtain. It was a similar ceremony on December 23, 1989 at Waidhaus - Rozvadov together with the then West German Foreign Minister Hans -Dietrich Genscher.
1992 service beer resigned as foreign minister. In the following years he worked as a local politician in the city council of Prague and also worked as a journalist again. In 1998, the United Nations sent him as a special rapporteur on human rights in the former Yugoslavia.
After service beer was founded in 1990 together with Hans -Dietrich Genscher, the German -Czech commission of historians, he and Genscher got together in 2004 Art Prize for German -Czech agreement, the Munich Adalbert Stifter Association jointly with the Union of Good neighborhood Czech- and German-speaking gives countries from Prague.
In 2008 he retired as a non-party candidate with a support of the Social Democrats ( CSSD ) in the Czech Senate. A post he held until his death. Dienstbier died after a long illness with cancer. Genscher praised him.
Service beer was married four times. He had three daughters: Monika, Kristina and Irena (1998 died ). Service beer son Jiří is also a politician. He was for the Social Democrats elected to the Senate in March 2011 in the constituency of his father ( Kladno ).