SUCCESSOR TO DR. BENES

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25517, 10 June 1948, Page 5

SUCCESSOR TO DR. BENES

MR GOTTWALD NAMED

MR ZAPOTOCKY AS PRIME MINISTER (N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) (Rec. 12.15 a.m.) LONDON, June 9. Reuter’s correspondent in Prague says that reliable sources confirm that the Prime Minister (Mr Klement Gottwald) will succeed Dr. Benes as President. These sources say that Mr Antonin Zapotocky will be the new Prime Minister and that the Deputy Prime Ministers will be Mr Rudolf Slansky, secretary-general of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, and Mr Vilem Siroky, the Slovak Communist Deputy Prime Minister in the present Cabinet. Mr Gottwald has signed. the new constitution, which will come into effect at midnight to-day. The Czech Socialist Pa«4y executive, in a proclamation on Dr. Benes’s resignation, says: “It is a comfort to all of us that Dr. Benes took this steo by his own desire—shared by the whole of the people—to regain his health, which has suffered as a result of 15 years’ struggle with Nazi Germany. Dr. Benes is leaving the battlefield only when the battle is over and victory is assured, and when the elections proved that there is no force in the State that could hamper the people’s march to Mr Nosek, who resigned his post as Czech Ambassador to Paris when the Communists assumed power in Czechoslovakia. told the Paris newspaper “Combat,” that he interpreted Dr. Benes’s decision to resign as “expressing the absolute impossibility of saving the slightest part of our liberty and of our right to freely decide the destiny of the Czech nation. Dr. Benes understood that he could never agree with the new system.” Mr Edward Taborsky, the Czechoslovak Minister in Stockholm, has resigned in protest against “the intolerable conditions in Czechoslovakia which forced Dr. Benes to resign.”