Prague, July 27 (CTK) – The Czech police accused three members of the former communist secret police StB of threatening a doctor from northern Bohemia within an operation against the political opposition codenamed Asanace in the early 1980s, daily Hospodarske noviny (HN) writes today.
Exerting physical and psychological pressure, Asanace, which means sanitation, aimed to force opponents of the communist regime to permanently leave the country.
HN writes that the doctor openly presented his criticism of the communist regime. The StB officers allegedly threatened to kill his whole family if the doctor does not emigrate. In 1983, he and his family left for West Germany. The StB helped arrange the required permissions.
The doctor returned to northern Bohemia after the fall of the Czechoslovak communist regime in 1989, the paper writes.
The three accused former StB officers face up to ten years in prison. They are in their 60s.
“We believe that we gained sufficient evidence in the archives,” Eva Michalkova, head of the Office for the Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism (UDV), told HN.
Michalkova said similar crimes from the communist era are not subject to the statute of limitations.
The Asanace operation is important for the UDV because a lot of StB documents on it have been maintained, she said.
“The aggrieved persons are still relatively young and they feel the need to talk about it,” Michalkova said.
Several verdicts, which imposed mostly suspended sentences on the main organisers of Asanace, were issued in the 2000s. Former StB officers Zbynek Dudek and Jiri Simak were sentenced to prison. Jaromir Obzina, who was Czechoslovak interior minister in 1973-83, was also prosecuted, but he died in 2003 before a verdict was issued.
Historian Petr Blazek said it certainly is a satisfaction for the victims that the StB officers are prosecuted. “But more than 30 years after the events? This is ridiculous,” he told the paper.
Michalkova said the UDV is now focusing on those who did the dirty work – the threatening, beating and forcing to emigrate.
The StB often targetted less known dissidents in hope that this would attract less attention and lead to fewer protests, both at home and abroad. Those who were forced to emigrate included musicians Vlastimil Tresnak and Jaroslav Hutka, actor Pavel Landovsky and priest Svatopluk Karasek.
In 1980, the StB feared that the Czechoslovak dissidents signing the human rights manifesto might join forces with the Polish Solidarity movement.
