LIBERTY VOTED OUT

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31785, 16 September 1968, Page 15

LIBERTY VOTED OUT

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) PRAGUE, Sept. 15. In the vast Spanish Hall of Hradcany Castle, a historic room which for centuries has witnessed both glory and tragedy, 275 men and women raised their hands to legislate out of existence eight months of freedom in Czechoslovakia, the New York Times News Service reports.

It was Friday the thirteenth, and below the ancient castle's hill, Prague lay wrapped in the hazy drizzle of an autumn afternoon. It must have been hard to let go the hopes and Illusions that Czechoslovakia’s short-lived experiment in liberal communism had awakened since last January. But the 275 deputies in the National Assembly knew they were writing finis, at least for now, to the dream of liberty. Almost automatically—not because they were rubberstamping, but because they were stunned beyond recall —they approved the restoration of press censorship and a catalogue of restrictive measures that the Soviet Union had classified under the coverall heading of "normalisation.”

Before they cast their votes, the Prime Minister (Mr Oldrich Cernik), a man whom the Soviets held captive three weeks ago and then restored to power to help enforce the “normalisation,” told them with brutal realism that there was no room for promises that the back-tracking on liberalisation would indeed be temporary. From the windows of Hradcany Castle, the deputies could see through the haze the hills of Troja, the suburb where a Soviet armoured division was based, and the grey ribbon of Route East 12, where, five miles away, other tanks and mortars and howitzers had their sights trained on Prague.

This was the reality and the counterpoint of the tragedy.

It had taken the Soviet Union three weeks to erode and then destroy the fabric of the fabric of the liberal reform, even though Mr Alexander Dubcek, the First Secretary of the Communist Party and his nation’s first liberal dreamer, still sought to tell his people that there was no going back to the preJanuary period. In a sense, however, Mr Dubcek and ' his colleagues were telling the truth. After a series of embarrassing political situations, the Soviet Union made up her mind that, having achieved most of her military, political and economic goals, there was no real need to force a return to the days when President Antonin Novotny, now an almost forgotten figure, ruled in the old-fashioned Stalinist manner.

It seems a safe guess that, even now, Czechoslovakia will

not be rolled back to the Novotny period. Instead, what is in store for her is an indefinite lapse of penumbra—something that certainly will not be freedom but, most likely, will not be outright repression, either. What is left of the reform movement? A few threads of illusion and the few palliatives that the Russians were willing to leave the Czechoslovaks, like so many crumbs on the table. Press freedom has gone for all practical purposes because, as the Moscow agreement put it in all starkness, “censorship strengthens socialism.”

A fair-weather liberal Communist politician in Prague went on television to deplore both the Novotny days and the “excesses” of the Dubcek revolution, an increasingly fashionable position. But a lonely writer who would not run away from Prague stood the other evening in a darkened square watching Soviet armoured cars on patrol and said: \ “Their guns and tanks have silenced us now, but they cannot stop the march of history. After the night, the dawn will rise again.”