Pisek, South Bohemia, Sept 21 (CTK) – The trial of Martin Holkup, a veteran from the Bosnia and Herzegovina mission, started yesterday over his having said on Czech Television that if the government forces him to fight under the NATO flag, “the shooting will at first start in the Government Office and parliament.”
State attorney Petr Ciganek said this was the crime of dangerous threat. If convicted, Holkup may receive a one-year prison sentence.
Last year, Holkup spoke as a member of the Czechoslovak Reserve Soldiers (CVZ).
Holkup told the court that as a former career soldier, along with his friends he had decided to form a parallel armed force that would be able to protect the state border.
“This was a group of friends who had no legal basis. We felt that the protection of our border has been jeopardised since 1989, while the state does not care,” Holkup said.
Holkup said in his testimony that his friends possessed firearms, but all of them legally.
Holkup said when Czech Television made the filming, a group of men was training the protection of borders against migrants.
“This is a danger to our state. We want to upgrade national combat capability,” he added. He also refused to take part in a war conflict alongside NATO.
Holkup said the case had been fabricated by Czech Television reporters.
“If Czech Television had not said at the beginning that we threaten politicians, no one would know about the report,” Holkup said.
“I only outlined a hypothetical situation. I expressed the citizens’ view that we are threatened by a war. This will be followed by the intervention of a foreign power or a civil war, which none of us want,” he added.
The secret service is watching the CVZ, a pro-Russian association calling itself President Milos Zeman’ followers who consider NATO a criminal organisation and Czech politicians enemies, an aide to Chief of Staff, Ludvik Cimburek, said last November.
In their statements, the CVZ members say they want to prevent the war NATO wants to unleash, calling the Czech constitution “deliberately imperfect” and arguing that “representational pseudo-democracy” threatens freedom and independence.
The CVZ members are also against migration, denoting Zeman as the only politician behaving like a “citizen of the Czech Republic” and patriot, he added.
Cimburek said the people who supported the CVZ on Facebook were “potential recruits of foreign secret services” operating in the Czech Republic.
On the Facebook, the group has over 7300 followers.
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