Gomulka Defends Invasion

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31781, 11 September 1968, Page 13

Gomulka Defends Invasion

CN.Z.P A.-Reuter— Copyright) WARSAW, September 9. The Polish Communist Party leader (Mr Wladyslaw Gomulka) has warned Czechoslovakia that the way back to unity with its Warsaw Pact allies will be difficult and perhaps long.

It depended in the first place, he said, on the Czechoslovak Communist Party and its understanding of the political content of the developments in Czechoslovakia proceeding the five-power Warsaw Pact armed intervention. In his first public statement since the invasion, Mr Gomulka said the Warsaw Pact powers had had no alternative, and had acted “only when all other means had |been exhausted, and after deep thought.” He was addressing a harvest festival celebration attended: by about 80,000 people in a Warsaw sports stadium. Mr Gomulka said the Czechoslovak Communist Party leader (Mr Alexander Dubcek) had spoken the truth when he “admitted, selfcritically” in a recent speech that the Prague party’s leadership had disregarded the strategic and general interests of the Soviet Union and its four Warsaw Pact allies, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria and Hungary. But, said Mr Gomulka, Czechoslovakia’s interests were no different from those

of the other Warsaw Pact countries. “The West German militarists are sharpening their teeth for Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland, Poland’s western territories and East Germany,” Mr Gomulka said, “and the wrenching away of Czechosolavkia from the community of Socialist nations, and the resulting creation of a new balance of forces in Europe favourable to imperialism ... would have created equal danger for all Warsaw Pact signatories. “ . . If the enemy lays dynamite under our house, under the community of Socialist States, it is our patriotic, national and international duty to thwart It with such means as may be necessary.” Mr Gomulka added: “If the forces of counter-revolution and reaction had succeeded in destroying the unity of the Warsaw Pact countries, the situation in Europe would have been similar to that in the Far East, where the destruction of a unified front by the Chinese Communists made possible United States aggression against North Vietnam.”