Czechoslovak Steps To Appease Soviet

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31784, 14 September 1968, Page 13

Czechoslovak Steps To Appease Soviet

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) PRAGUE, September 13. Taking its most significant steps so far towards meeting Russian demands, the Czechoslovak Parliament will today reimpose press censorship and pass a law to prevent the formation of any new political forces within the country. Before Parliament are a Government measure establishing an Office for Press and Information —the new censor—and a law on the National Front, which represents all the groups in the National Assembly as a Communist-led bloc.

The censor’s office, controlled by Mr Josef Vohnout, will issue Government directives to the press, radio and television to snuff out criticism of the Warsaw Pact nations whose troops invaded Czechoslovakia last month to curb the sweeping liberal reforms of the Communist Party leader, Mr Alexander Dubcek. z

Even the use of the word “occupation” to describe the Warsaw Pact troops now in Czechoslovakia is forbidden under the new bill. But Mr Vohnout, in a surprise appearance on television, has promised that there will be no return to the old Stalinist-style censorship, with numbers and rubber stamps. Editors now will be their own censors.

The National Assembly may also discuss changes in the Government and receive a new resignation—that of the Foreign Minister (Dr Jiri Hajek), who has been the target of Soviet criticism since he appeared before the United Nations last month to defend the Czechoslovak Government’s policies. There have been reports tn the last 24 hours that Dr Hajek already had resigned, but a Foreign Ministry spokesman said last night he was still at his post The law on the National Front will shut out the admission of further political parties and, in effect, reverse Mr Dubcek’s original plans to give non-party people Parliamentary representation. Since the invasion, the Ministry of the Interior has said it could not approve the statutes of two lobbyist groups which grew up in the first eight months of liberalisation, one for non-party members and one for former political prisoners.

Today's session of Parliament follows talks between the chairman of the National Assembly (Mr Josef Smrkovsky) and the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister (Mr Vasily Kuznetsov), who has been in Prague since last week. In. Moscow, the Soviet Union indicated today that it still hoped to hold a world Communist conference despite international disarray within the movement because of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The conference, which is due to be held in Moscow at the end of November, had appeared in jeopardy after strong criticism of the Soviet action from major world Communist parties. Many Western and Communist observers in Moscow had taken the silence of the Soviet press on the conference since Soviet troops moved into Czechoslovakia on August 20 as a sign that the Russians had resigned themselves to seeing the gathering fall victim to the invasion.

But today the Communist Party newspaper, “Pravda,” described the planned meeting as “vital for the consolidation of progressive forces throughout the world.” Publication of the article coincides with a statement in Rome by Mr Luigo Longo, the general secretary of the Italian Communist Party, that the conference would be “neither useful, nor opportune, nor perhaps even possible after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.” The Rumanians, the Jugoslavs and the Cubans have all expressed varying degrees of opposition to the meeting, and all three countries are believed certain to stay away. Meanwhile, the Soviet press has maintained silence on the Russian troop withdrawals from the centres of the principal Czechoslovak cities, but has renewed calls for the Czechoslovak press to be “given over into clean hands.”