Dubcek’s Expulsion Sought

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32216, 7 February 1970, Page 11

Dubcek’s Expulsion Sought

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright) PRAGUE, Feb. 6. A central Slovak district Communist resolution demanding the expulsion of the former liberal leader, Mr Alexander Dubcek, from the party has revealed much about the thinking of Czechoslovakia’s ultradogdiatist political wing.

The resolution, which expresses deep thanks to the Soviet Union for intervening with its troops in 1968, appears to have become one of the most important themes of the current Slovak Communist Party central committee meeting in Bratislava.

The district party weekly newspaper, “Socialisticky Dnesok” published the resolution, first drawn up by 400 "Communist internationalists”

in the town of Kovarce in December. A copy of the weekly became available in Prague yesterday. It asks the party leadership for an over-all assessment of individuals “and to draw conclusions from their antiSocialist and anti-Soviet activities . . . we, therefore, ask that Comrade Dubcek be expelled from the party.” “When we see that the aims of counter-revolution were not opposed by the Rightist opportunist and revisionist Dubcek leadership of the party, we express our deep thanks to the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and other Socialist countries for preventing an open conflict civil war—in Czechoslovakia,” the resolution says. Mr Dubcek—himself a Slovak—is now Czechoslovak Ambassador to Turkey. He took up the job apparently determined not to bow to conservative pressure to admit

failings in his leadership. The resolution names 20 politicians "who stood in the forefront” of the counterrevolution after January, 1968, when Mr Dubcek was elected Czechoslovak leader.

Among the 20 are some politicians now regarded as con-servative-leaning, such as a trade union official, Mr Vojtech Daubner and Mr Vojtech Mihalik, chairman of the Federal Parliamentary House of Nations. They were ranked with Mr Dubcek and Mr Josef Zrak, now very much-out-of-favour reformers. Mr Zrak lost his position on the Slovak presidium and quit the Slovak central committee yesterday. The resolution says “Only firm Marxist-Leninists cadres must remain in the party. We shall not allow compromises and liberalism in these fundamental questions.” It demanded that the screening of Communists in Slovakia be headed by a pro-

minent Slovak conservative, Mr Vasil Bilak. The resolution apparently does not want the exchange of party cards, now under way in the 1,500,000 rank-and-file in the nation-wide Czechoslovak party, to be run by the Federal Party apparatus in Slovakia but by Mr Bilak. “We ask that the Rightist opportunist and revisionist and anti-internationalist organisation of the Czechoslovak party is not allowed to screen Communist internationalists,” it says. (An internationalist is a Communist who places the international goals of the movement in the forefront—thus a backer of the 1968 invasion.) The resolution goes on to “ask the information media and others not to speak and write about the temporary stationing of allied troops on our territory and for the word ‘temporary’ to be left out.”