Prague – The day of samizdat should fall on October 12, the House of Representatives decided. She rejected the amendments of the Senate, which wanted to commemorate the publishing of independent publications in totalitarian regimes at their own expense on April 27. It also did not approve the Senate’s renewed effort to also include June 24 as a day of remembrance for villages and settlements exterminated during the Nazi occupation. The amendment on public holidays will now be signed by the president.
According to a group of MPs led by STAN MP Josef Bernard, the adopted version of the amendment is intended to commemorate October 12, 1988, when a group of 92 Czech and Slovak samizdat publishers protested the imprisonment of one of them, the Christian activist Ivan Polanský from Dubnice nad Váhem, in a letter to the then communist president Gustáv Husák . But according to critics, Polanský published collections of texts whose authors, according to them, glorified the president of the clero-fascist Slovak state, Jozef Tis.
Because of this, the Senate wanted to choose April 27 as Samizdat Day, which would fall, among other things, on the anniversary of the establishment of the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS) in 1978, i.e. in the communist era. At the same time, on the same day in 1981, the communist secret police interrupted the smuggling of illegal printed matter into Czechoslovakia during the Delta or Kamion action. However, the communist regime did not succeed in eradicating the issuing of samizdata.
CR Senate House of Representatives OTVÍRÁK
Source: www.ceskenoviny.cz
