NEW CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26216, 29 July 1946, Page 6

NEW CZECHOSLOVAKIA

A POLICY STATEMENT ADHERENCE TO UNITED NATIONS (Telepress Service to Daily Times) PRAGUE, July 10. A democratic Constitution, the solution of the man-power problem, a wellconceived foreign policy in relation to the western democracies, and loyal and sincere adherence to the United Nations will be the aims of the new Czech Government. This was the substance of a declaration by the Prime Minister, M. Klement Gottward, in an interview with this correspondent today., M. Gottward emphasised his desire that the new Constitution should guarantee that the people of Czechoslovakia. should be the source of all power in the State; the old bureaucratic police system of State administration must be removed for ever. The new Constitution must also embody nationalisation of key industries and finance, the new settlement of relations between Czechs and Slovaks, and the Slav character of the State which will be achieved after the transfer of the German and Hungarian minorities. That transfer, the Prime Minister recognises, will create temporarily a man-power shortage which will be a handicap to the carrying out of the two-year reconstruption plan to which all the parties of the National Front are pledged. It will be necessary, he said, to organise an economic distribution of man-power within the framework of a general national mobilisation for work. Everything must be done to increase the productivity of labour, and manual work must be given “the honourable status which it should rightly enjoy.” (Asked how the Government would carry out the dual aims of alliance with the Soviet Union and friendship with the western democracies, M. Gottward expressed the hope that Czechoslovakia would be able to extend and develop economic and cultural relations with Britain, the U.S.A., France and other democratic countries. His belief was that the gradual elimination of technical barriers affecting currency, transport and so forth would soon facilitate the broadening of relations.