Uneasiness Expressed As Prague Leaders Meet

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31867, 20 December 1968, Page 13

Uneasiness Expressed As Prague Leaders Meet

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) PRAGUE, December 19. Czechoslovakia’s National Assembly met yesterday to change the Constitutional structure of the country amid signs of growing uneasiness among workers and students.

Parliament started a four-day sitting in the Spanish Hall of Prague Castle to approve a number of bills to create separate Czech and Slovak Socialist Republics with a common Federal Government on January 1.

But a few miles away in the fairgrounds of Julius Fucik Park, delegates to a meeting of the country's largest trade union, the 900-000-strong metal workers, ha already applauded student protests against a return to closeddoor politics in the country.

Mr Oldrich Balam, a union official, told the meeting yesterday: “We want to solve the problems of our country without foreign interfer-

jence,” the trade union newsI paper, “Prace,” reported. I The union was disturbed that State bodies carried out measures limiting freedoms of speech and assembly, he said.

Referring to the changes in staff now taking place in the party and Government, Mr Balam said it was a basic condition for normalisation | of post-occupation life in ; Czechoslovakia that people who had the general trust of the population lead political, State and union organisations. A writer, Nichel Lakatos, complained in the weekly magazine, “Zitrek,” yesterday that preparations for federalisation had been insufficiently explained. “We only know a few details, nothing more,” he said. People were learning more

about Sauta Claus than about State institutions, he added. “None of the competent functionaries thinks about asking what the citizens think about the changes,” he said. However the make-up of the new Federal Government looks as if it retains many of the middle-■•f-the-road ministers in their present posts. The emerging “realists" in the party and Government are men ready to cept the restrictions which the Soviet Union has demanded in the liberalisation programme after the August occupation. The Prime Minister (Mr Oldrich Cernik), the Defence Minister (Mr Martin Dzur), the Interior Minister (Mr Jan Pelnar), and the Deputy Prime Minister (Mr Frantisek Hamouz) were expected to continue in their present

functions, according to an unconfirmed party list of nominations. Prague students today said there was still talk among! students of a new sit-in strike to be called before Christmas. Tragic Party.—A man who is said to have opened fire with two guns and killed four people and wounded four others, died tonight in a Carlinville, Illinois, hospital, apparently from a self-inflicted head wound. Sherman Kline is alleged to have opened fire at a Christmas party for his children at a welfare agency, killing his estranged wife, two social workers and a receptionist. Four of his 10 children were wounded, two critically. (Carlinville, December 19.)