Milan Jansa

"You are touching a little bit on the role of the local communists. The militias were the 'armed fist' of the working class and the Communist Party, and it must be said that some communists tried that here. They didn't understand that it was over and they wanted to use the militias, and I appreciate their common sense for not doing it eventually. By then, they had seen the footage of Národní in Prague screened in some shop windows in Ústí, they saw the regime was beating on children, and they weren't going to do that. Still, there's a lot one could tell about the militiamen here. On the other hand, we had various people who came to the Civic Forum who, for example, worked in the authorities. A lady from the regional national committee came and brought us classified environmental reports, which showed us things were far worse than we had thought. I guess the lady was a communist too, working in such an office. Since then I've become a little wary of making assumptions about individual people. It's obvious to me the Communists were no good, yet individual people can sway at certain times, and there can also be people who do the right thing at the right time while not being exactly non-partisan or above reproach, but they'll do the right thing at the right time."

"My motivation for doing it was basically that my kids were always sick, coughing in their cribs all the time, and I attributed that to the environment. We lived in a block of flats in the middle of Ústí nad Labem, quite high up, and when my wife was washing the windows, you could grab the soot on the window sills. I thought it was a good reason to do something. All kinds of petitions were of little use. It came to a head in November 1989 with the environmental proests - the mood in society was ripe, because there had been protests regarding politics in general even before that, and ecology was the biggest reason here in the north."