Czechs on trial

Press, 2 September 1981, Page 21

Czechs on trial

One of the biggest mass political show trials to be staged in Czechoslovakia since the late 1950 s is expected to begin in Prague within the- next fortnight. Among the 18 accused are a former Foreign Minister under Alexander Dubcek and leading members of the dissident Charter 77 group. They face up to 10 years imprisonment. The trial will be the centrepiece of the Czech Government’s fiercest campaign against its dissidents since the Stalin era more than 25 years ago. It comes at a time when the country’s leaders are increasingly concerned by the prospect of Czechoslovakia being infected by the "Polish disease.”

Some 30 people have been rounded up since the beginning of May, and the scale of the arrests and the severity of the sentences handed down so far are clearly inteded as a warning.

The Czech crackdown has already been vigorously criticised in France, West Germany and Austria. An official visit of Czechoslovakia’s President Husak to

By

STEPHEN ARIS

“Sunday Times,” London

Austria this year is now unlikely to take place.

The main defendant in the show trial, known as the case of Siklova and Company; is Dr Jirina Siklova, a 46-year-old sociologist and psychologist, who has been singled out for attack in the official newspaper, “Rude Pravo.” She has been in prison, along with seven of the accused, since her arrest in May. ' Siklova was an active supporter of the reformist regime of Dubcek, who was ousted during the Russian invasion of 1968. She subsequently lost her university job, but after working as a Cleaner and as a secretary, was partially reinstated. Another leading defendant is Karel Kyncl, a former well-known journalist who last worked as an ice-cream seller and is now reported to be seriously ill in prison. Two others are Jan Rumi, a Charter 77 activist,, and his son Jiri, who formerly worked as a journalist.

The best known of the defendants, however, is Dr

Jiri Hajek, who was briefly Foreign Minister under Dubcek. Now 68, Hajek is unlikely to receive a heavy sentence. Dubcek himself is now living in obscurity as a forestry commission official in Bratislava. The Czechs accuse Siklova of master-minding the export of samizdat (underground) novels and Charter 77 material to the West, and of receiving what is regarded as susbversive literature. Siklova and Company have been charged with “subversion of the republic on a large scale and in co-opera-tion with a foreign power.” It is one of the most serious crimes in the country’s penal code and carries a maximum sentence of 10 years.

Only a fortnight ago, another well-known dissident and spokesman for Charter 77, Rudolph Battek, was sentenced to seven years and a half for the same offence.

Siklova and Company were arrested only a couple of days after two young French lawyers had been detained at

the Czech frontier. The Czechs say they were trying to smuggle half a ton of subversive literature into the country wiith the intention of passing it on to Siklova. The lawyers were detained for three weeks and then released. The organisers of the trip, Jan Kavan, claims that there was nothing in the French van to link it with the accused. Kavan says that the

van contained some emigre Czech publications from France and Italy, novels and poetry by banned Czech writers, records by banned folk singers and rock groups, and specialist foreign language books unobtainable in Czechoslovakia. “What the Czechs are trying to do." he says, “is to suppress all independent cultural and scholarly activities and to silence the Charter movement once and for all.”