Coming Apart

BELIEVERS IN A UNIFIED CZECHOSLOVAKIA MAY NOW regret that Vaclav Havel's 1989 "velvet revolution" wasn't the "Velcro revolution" instead. Parliamentary elections have revealed deepening differences between Czechs and Slovaks, thus increasing the chances that the 74-year-old federation will become unstitched like the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Last week, after the autonomy-seeking Movement for a Democratic Slovakia topped the polling in the Slovak republic, the group's leader, Vladimir Meciar, pressed his demand for a total rearrangement of Czech-Slovak relations.

Prime Minister-designate Vaclav Klaus, whose Civic Democratic Party won the largest number of votes in the Czech republic, met with Meciar in two rounds of talks that ended with mutual accusations of intransigence. "The other side refuses to accept anything we are proposing," said Klaus, who has the support of Havel, the country's first postcommunist President. Part of the problem is that Slovaks believe their economically depressed republic bears the brunt of Klaus' radical proposals for privatization and austerity. But several thousand Czechs signed petitions in Prague calling for an independent Czech republic, complaining that Slovaks were backward-looking and even dangerous. Where does the dispute leave Havel? He warned of a "permanent political and constitutional crisis" and suggested that he will not run for re-election next month if the federation breaks apart.