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May 15
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May 8
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May 1
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By Daniela Lazarova
Never has a slap in the face been so resounding. The slap which a
Romany in Novy Bor dealt to far-right Republican leader Miroslav
Sladek is still ringing in all our ears. Was the slap racist and was
the swift Presidential pardon which followed it a politically correct
decision - is the question every daily and weekly has asked itself.
The slap came in answer to an insult and there is nothing racist about
that, says Martin Fendrych in this week's Respekt.
It's interesting
to note here that Fendrych, who was deputy interior minister under Jan
Ruml, abhors the verve with which police decided the attack was
racially motivated, and that they wanted to hold the accused in pre-
trial detention so that "they would not influence witnesses". In
detention for a slap! Fendrych says, pointing out that nobody proposed
detaining the two skinheads who beat up a dark skinned doctor on his
way from hospital recently, yelling "what you doing here nigger?" It
seems like the police are employing double standards, says the former
deputy interior minister who defends President Havel's decision to
pardon the offenders. The problem is the president failed to point out
the inadequacies of the police investigation, Fendrych says, he didn't
highlight the irony of the fact that after 8 years of racist insults
from the far-right republican leader it should be a Romany who is
charged with racism.
The Prague Post likewise has a headline that
reads " Havel's Romany pardon motivated by mistrust of police", while
Jindrich Sidlo of Respekt has gone further in highlighting the
failings of the Czech justice system . When the Romany minority wanted
the Czech Constitutional Court to ban the far-right republican party
for its racist policy programme the president argued it would be more
fair to charge individuals with racist actions. Easier said than done,
Sidlo says. Two years ago a Romany pressed charges against the authors
of a republican rag who published the view that "gypsies should be
gassed because they could not be recycled". After waiting for months
for independent experts to confirm that the statement was indeed
racist the judge is not yet prepared to hand out a verdict, having
asked for the case to be re-investigated. When, on a different
occasion, the head of the republicans said of the then Czech premier
that he had "sent his wife to a Gypsy Ball for voter sympathy, an
event he wouldn'd allow his dog to go to" the police proved incapable
of getting a tape recording of the public statement, sweeping the case
off the table. And when the same party leader said in Parliament that
"Romanies were guilty of even being born" the police said they
couldn't file charges against him because the statement had not been
directed against anyone personally. On the other hand, Sidlo
concludes, when the republican's deputy chairman was branded "a
fascist" for similarly outrageous statements he won his court hearing,
the verdict being that the republicans were a standard, parliamentary
party and nobody had any right whatsoever to call them fascists...
Jaroslav Weis of Tyden says "I still think the president was overhasty
in handing out the pardon , but I also think that he was nudging us
to recognize a problem : namely that we are giving the Republican
party too much freedom to poison the minds of all dissatisfied Czechs
by telling them that at the bottom of all their problems is a dark
skinned minority. They are spreading a disgusting and dangerous lie,
Veis concludes.
Another explosive topic taken up by the Prague Post is the country's
new drugs law, which the weekly reports , is widely criticized for
being too vague and giving too much power to the police. As opposed
to the present legislation under which dealers alone can be
persecuted, as of 1999 any person caught with "larger than a small
amount" of drugs in their possession will have committed a crime.
Experts have yet to specify what "a small amount" is. Critics of the
proposed law fear that it will harm addicts rather than dealers,
increase the spread of AIDS, result in widespread corruption and
enrich dealers since the price of drugs is expected to go up as a
result.
Interior minister Cyril Svoboda, whom the Prague Post quotes, rejects
most of these fears, saying police definitely won't punish people for
visiting drug-prevention centres. Challenged that the law, in its
present form, would give officers the right to decide what a "small
amount" of drugs was, Svoboda countered " who else should decide
that?" . The minister insists that the law is really aimed at drugs
dealers who he says have grown so arrogant they openly flaunt their
trade in front of the police. "I personally saw two dealers selling
drugs right in front of the ministry of the interior" Svoboda told the
Prague Post, " two policemen standing nearby said that under the
present legislation they couldn't do anything".
Not the best experience for a man in his position, but then minister
Svoboda has not had an easy life of late. Only recently his car was
broken into and everything portable was stolen. You'd think Prague's
street gangs would give at least him a break......
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