The monument is to be erected not far from Prague-Pankrac prison where many political prisoners, including Horakova, were executed. Miloslav Ransdorf, a MEP from the Communist Party (KSCM), also attended the ceremony. The building of the monument was initiated by the Czech National Socialist Party as Horakova was a member of its predecessor party, along with the Masaryk Democratic Party and the Milada Horakova Club. "Everyone can come here and this should be viewed as an expression of Czech President received by British Queen Elizabeth ...
CzechRep gives up UNSC candidacy after two failures ... democracy, as a possibility to offer people an opportunity to re-assess their positions and deeds and as forgiveness in the Christian sense," National Socialist Party chairman Jiri Stanislav told CTK regarding Ransdorf's participation in the ceremony. Ransdorf, who donated 20,000 crowns for the building of the monument, told journalists that in his view, it was high time to stop playing the card of the division of the Czech nation. He said Horakova was a great patriot and a socialist. Ransdorf traditionally attends ceremonies marking birthdays of Klement Gottwald, former Czechoslovak communist president who had Horakova executed regardless of international community's protests.
Ransdorf wrote in the KSCM's Halo noviny newspaper before Gottwald's 110th birthday last year that Gottwald contributed to a "national and democratic revolution." The initiators of the monument say it will be a monument to Horakova and 234 victims "of the Czechoslovak regime of the 1950s," without naming the communist regime. Czechoslovak democratic politician Milada Horakova was the only woman whom the Communists executed in a show trial in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. Horakova, a lawyer by profession, took active part in the anti-Nazi resistence movement during World War Two. She was arrested in 1940 and spent the rest of the war in Nazi concentration camps. After the war she was elected a deputy of the Czechoslovak parliament. When the Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, she gave up her mandate in protest against it. Later she unsuccessfully initiated concerted efforts of non-Communist parties. Horakova was sentenced to death on the basis of fabricated charges of treason and espionage and was executed on June 27, 1950, at the age of 49, despite a wave of protests from around the world. The sentence was annulled in 1968, but she was not fully rehabilitated until 1990, after the collapse of communism. ($1=18.391 Czech crowns)
(Ceske Noviny)
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