Dubcek Remains Leader

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31864, 17 December 1968, Page 21

Dubcek Remains Leader

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) PRAGUE, Dec. 16. Fears of a new political upheaval in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia subsided today with the news that Mr Alexander Dubeck would remain Communist Party leader and press forward a limited programme of economic reform, the Associated Press said.

Mr Dubcek, the National Assembly Chairman, Mr Josef Smrkovsky, and other remaining progressives in the party leadership were given more time at a key party meeting last week to set post-invasion policy, official documents showed. Early editions of newspapers today carried the first detailed account of that twoday meeting of the party’s 191-member central committee that ended on Friday. They carried unanimously adopted resolutions emphasising the economic tasks ahead. Workers and students met throughout the week-end preparing strikes and other protest actions if their more liberal favourites were deposed. Blit there was no mention in the central committee documents of any leadership changes and informed sources said there were none. A resolution said: “The party takes the main line in the sphere of economic policy to be continuation of economic reforms which have been started.” These were in doubt after the August 21 invasion. Political reforms adopted

before the invasion, such as an end to press censorship, were abandoned earlier in the occupation. Czechoslovakia, like Hungary after Soviet tanks crushed the 1956 Budapest uprising, thus embarked on a programme that emphasised putting its economic house in order after the invasion. But the resolution also made it clear that the economic programme would be delayed. It said the party would “lay down a mandatory schedule of proceeding with the economic reforms so that the central committee might discuss the document by mid--1969.” In effect, this clause shelved action for some six months.