after 35 years since the fall of the regime, we feel a strong threat to democracy and the rule of law. Those of us who have experienced communist dictatorship are reminded of these practices from times not long ago. The arrogance of power and the government with the vocabulary of Gottwald and Husák are dismantling the rule of law and democratic institutions before our eyes.
We are monitoring the disruption of the special prosecutor’s office, efforts to control the public media. We have resigned ourselves to justice. We watch as investigators are pulled from live cases that lead to the highest officials of the state and lose their jobs. It’s again the removal of inconvenient people.
Even after February 1948, the communists removed the investigators who investigated their crimes in the tavern affair. One of them, Zdeněk Mariánko, died in prison, others served many years. We are witnessing the drawing of targets on the backs of journalists. Despite the fact that in 2018, journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancee Martina Kušnírová were murdered.
Servants of the former Soviet occupiers today refer to other people as American agents. With their rude vocabulary, they have upset society, they are inciting hatred.
On the contrary, they themselves behave like agents of the Kremlin, who bow down to the aggressor – Putin’s Russia, which unleashed the biggest war conflict in Europe in the last 80 years. They relativize truth, past and present. They have more sympathy for the perpetrators than the victims. They call themselves political prisoners.
We, as former political prisoners and people persecuted by the communist regime, strongly protest against this, we consider it an insult and a mockery not only to us, but also to all those who can no longer speak today.
They include victims of the fifties – such as Milada Horáková, Heliodor Píka, Pavol Haruštiak, Cecília Schelingová, Dorota Kováčiková, victims of the occupation Danka Košanová, Jozef Bonko or Peter Legner, and victims of the seventies and eighties such as Jan Patočka, Jaroslav Rusnák, Přemysl Coufal , Milan Gono, or Štefan Polák.
We paid a high price for freedom. Despite this, some did not notice November 17 or are turning to Russia today. After 1989, Slovakia was already a black hole on the map of Europe during the era of Vladimír Mečiar, and thanks to Fico and his government, we are returning to these times.
Politics should be a service to citizens, not a belief that whoever wins the election can do everything.
As Miroslav Lehký says: “The fight for justice never ends.”
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