Slovak President Andrej Kiska has made a request for a special appearance on public radio and television on August 21st to give a speech on the 50th anniversary of the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia. Details of the speech were not specified.
In August 1968, the invasion of the armies of the Warsaw Pact countries de facto ended the so-called Prague Spring, an attempt of the Czechoslovak communists to establish “socialism with a human face”. A long period of normalization then started in Czechoslovakia which ended in November 1989.
On the contrary, Czech President Miloš Zeman is not preparing any speech. According to his spokesman Jiří Ovčáček, Zeman was courageous at the beginning of normalization when he was fired from his job because of his stance on the invasion. “Such a stance is worth thousands of purely formal and insincere speeches that will be heard on 21st August,” the spokesman said.
