“You know, they believed after the war ‘we’ll spin the wheels of the country again, smoke will rise from the factory chimneys’. They were still possessed by the idea of getting the economy going. The more industry, the more mining, the more tons of everything, the better off will the country be. But no one cared about the environment – except for a few people from research and development, who, either in the Academy of Sciences or in various institutes, saw the problems. Besides some people from the environmental protection the people from the area could really see it on themselves – their health. This is where it began.”
“Today’s condition is better, but not that better as we had hoped shortly after 1990. To our surprise many of the tendencies that we thought we had stopped by the first two years at the Ministry of the Environment and in the Federal Committee for the Environment with Vavroušek… after the split-up of Czechoslovakia and the arrival of Václav Klaus’s administration – after the administration of Petr Pithart, who was indeed an enlightened chairman – what followed in some areas was the crab-like movement back. Unfortunately. In the energy industry, thank God, investments were made into de-sulphurisation and Petr Karas, the then boss of ČEZ, managed to complete the project, but measures in surface mines, in chemical plants and in other industrial operation – but also in heating economy – were slower to materialise than in electricity-producing energy industry. So unfortunately the environment is somewhere getting worse, albeit from a better position at the end of 1999–2000, due to the fact that other administrations and other ministers of the environment were not as rigorous as Bedřich Moldan and Ivan Dejmal.”
“A new garniture of officials arrived at the Committee and they saw us as a kind of intellectual lair, the one that plays at being a parallel power centre and wants to decide about matters in our district while they believed it was them who had the right to decide. The people who came were, in my view, incompetent, both politically and professionally, but they were the members of the Party and were installed by the Party. A man named Vája was the chairman, some Palounek was his minion, the deputy was called Šedivý a he was the real villain. I had a beautiful conflict with him while I was still employed at the Committee. They turned us into kinds of political servants and asked us to supervise certain towns and villages in our district. People employed at the Committee were delegated to these communities as supervisors. I was assigned Těchlovice on the Elbe bank, just a short way upstream. They used to send us there during election to supervise, to take part in public meetings and to file in reports on what happened there. I rebelled since this was a task which was not in my job contract and was not paid for it; we were expected to do it in the evenings and in our free time. So one day I sat down and wrote them a letter saying I was giving up this honour and that I didn’t want to do it anymore. This deputy Šedivý summoned me to his office and started shouting at me what I dared. That my dad would have never dared. And I told him: ‘My dad is for me exactly the model of how not to end up. I won’t be serving you for thirty years in order to be kicked out only because I have my own opinion on something, like the occupation by these armies.’”
“To add to the misfortune of the region, some blokes have come, Soviet experts these were, who recommended that the whole region be mined in the so-called Big Version of Mining in one go, from Klášterec nad Ohří in the West to Ústí in the east, to mine all the coal there was. Regardless of dwellings, regardless of forests and farmland, roads and technical infrastructure. It was their idea to mine everything as fast as possible and then to put the land back in order. This is an approach that Russia can afford somewhere in Siberia, where there is no cultural land, cultivated by people for hundreds of years, where there are many sights and natural wonders that deserve protection, but even a lot of heritage in settlement, both in villages and towns. Just consider that the regime boasted about moving the dean church of the Ascension of Our Lady in Most by 840 metres or so, from the former centre to its contemporary location by the factory producing fibreglass. Today, it is surrounded by a fairly nice park, the mine Most–Kopisty pod Děvínem is flooded by water and one day it will be a rather nice leisure area for both cities, Litvínov and Most… and this was one of the few sights that have survived, while the royal city of Most was full of heritage sights that would have deserved to be saved, but only this church was moved. They destroyed hundreds of other churches, chapels, statues, monasteries… the monasteries in Osek, Mariánské Radčice have made a narrow escape – these are very important places of pilgrimage that only narrowly escaped the large scale mining thanks to the growing resistance of the general public and environmental initiatives.”
Martin Říha was born on October 22, 1945, in Varnsdorf. He passed his school-leaving exam at the Secondary Educational School in Děčín in 1962. In 1963 to 1968 he studied at the Construction Faculty, Czech Technical University Prague. Then he worked in the office of the chief architect, Municipal Committee Děčín, and when this office was closed as a part of normalisation measures in the early 1970s he worked in the department of land planning. Following a series of conflicts with the non-competent management of the Municipal Committee, installed thanks to their Party membership, he moved to the department of construction and planning at the District Committee Ústí nad Labem. He belonged among those who opposed the “Large Scale Mining” in the Ústí region and when he presented, at a press conference, a study outlining potential consequences he had to leave and find a job with the Terplan institute in Prague. In 1990–1992 he served as the deputy of the Minister of the Environment, also served at the Ministry of Development and Transport and worked in the Department of Development, Prague. He has been awarded the Josef Vavroušek prize and Ivan Dejmal prize.
