Prague set for change after reformist’s fall

Press, 12 October 1988, Page 10

Prague set for change after reformist’s fall

NZPA-Reuter Prague The Czechoslovak leader, Milos Jakes, looked set to announce significant changes in the State and Communist Party hierarchy yesterday after the fall of the reformist premier, Lubomir Strougal. But Western diplomats said they doubted the arrival of new faces, some young and some old, would divert Prague from its course of economic restructuring at a snail’s pace. Nor was it likely to signal any easing of a clamp on political dissent tightened after 10,000 Czechoslovaks marched through Prague to demand democracy and reform. In a speech to the Party’s Central Committee on Monday, Mr Jakes announced that Mr Strougal had resigned after 18 years as the country’s longest-serving head of Government. Subject to a central committee vote which diplomats say is a formality, he will also leave the

Politburo, marking a fall into political oblivion. Diplomats told Reuters that Mr Strougal, aged 63, had probably brought his downfall by calling for wider and faster economic changes than many of his conservative Politburo colleagues could stomach. “They have just shoved him out,” said one senior Western diplomat. “I don’t think he showed any signs of wishing to resign. He’s the same age as Jakes so there’s no reason why he should go, other than disagreement with his colleagues. “For a number of years, he has been letting forth on reform issues without really showing he has the power base to carry those arguments into the Politburo and win them. He has become a curious voice in the wilderness.” Czechoslovakia’s Communist leaders finally publicly backed Soviet-style reforms just before the Kremlin leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, .visited the country last year. But changes such as an experiment to allow selected enterprises more au-

tonomy from the State and party bureaucracy have only crept forward.

Diplomats say all efforts to liberalise are overshadowed by fear among conservative leaders that the reform could run amok, leading to something like the “Prague Spring” of 1968. This radical reform movement under the party leader, Alexander Dubcek, ended abruptly when Soviet tanks rumbled into Prague. Mr Strougal’s successor — tipped by some diplomats to be the Czechoslovak premier, Ladislav Adamec — faces a hard task to assure the leadership that reforms are safe.

“He is supposedly someone in the same mould as Strougal himself, that is, someone who’s convinced that change and reform is needed,” said one diplomat. But he saw little chance of Mr Adamec, aged 62, succeeding where Mr Strougal failed, at least at first. “He’s someone with a great deal less political weight behind him than Strougal.”