Special | All stories

August 21 marks the anniversary of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union and other communist countries. The occupation crushed an attempt to reform the communist regime, and drove the country into two decades of hard-line rule. What that all meant to the people of Czechoslovakia has been looked at many times. In our special programme today, we look at August 1968 from another perspective: that of the occupiers.

As they enjoy a day off work every year on July 6, few Czechs give much thought to the man behind the holiday. In the Czech calendar this date marks the feast of the early 15th century religious reformer, Jan Hus. In fact, it is a rather grim anniversary that we are remembering. On July 6 1415, Jan Hus (or John Huss, as he is sometimes known in English) was burned at the stake as a heretic in the southern German city of Constance. It was a time of deep schisms within the Roman Catholic Church, and from the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague Hus had preached

Football is, quite literally, the buzz these days, and no less so in Prague, where Czechs are following the 2010 World Cup wholeheartedly, despite their team’s absence from the pitches of South Africa. In the week since the tournament began, one Prague locale in particular stands out as “the” place to watch the games; not just for Praguers, but also for the tens of thousands of foreigners who inhabit the Czech capital. In a special feature for today, Christian Falvey reports from Prague’s epicentre of football fandom, Riegrovy sady.

In this final segment of Radio Prague’s series on Czechs in Afghanistan, Christian Falvey returns to the NATO base at Kabul International Airport to visit the most celebrated Czech army unit of past and present, the Radiological, Chemical and Biological Protection Brigade.

For the last month we have focused on the humanitarian side of Czech activities in war-torn Afghanistan; today we move closer to the war itself. There are more than 500 Czech soldiers in the country as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, and many of them are serving at Kabul International Airport, where Radio Prague’s reporter Christian Falvey went to find out more about their mission and their day-to-day lives.

As Radio Prague’s series on Czechs in Afghanistan winds down, Christian Falvey leaves the Czech humanitarian mission in northern Afghanistan and reports on the feelings about the future among the people working there, Czech and Afghan alike.

The essentials of humanitarian work can be very much the same wherever it is done in the world, but there is an obvious added difficulty in Afghanistan: an ongoing, 30-year state of armed conflict. In this instalment of Czechs in Afghanistan, Christian Falvey looks at the security conditions that Czech aid workers live in, as they carry out the work of redevelopment in a complicated and dangerous situation.

Traditional handicraft is alive and well in Afghanistan, particularly the celebrated trade of carpet weaving. But the established methods in place since time immemorial are also holding people back in the struggle for sustainable livelihoods. In the next edition of Radio Prague’s series on Czechs in Afghanistan, Christian Falvey sees how Czech aid workers are supporting a unique and renowned local industry with a simple innovation.

Emergency aid is the first step in humanitarian work in Afghanistan, but much of the north of the country is beyond that now – what the people there currently need is sustainable livelihood. In the seventh part of Radio Prague’s series on Czechs in Afghanistan, Czech humanitarian workers bring their business sense to the fields to help bring tangible, maintainable profits, sometimes in the midst of insurmountable disasters.

Today Radio Prague returns to Afghanistan, and the Czechs at work rebuilding a country where an estimated 72% of the population is illiterate. In this edition of Czechs in Afghanistan, Christian Falvey reports from the north of the war-stricken country on the educational programmes of the Czech charity foundation People in Need.