Speech of the Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek on the Occasion of Awarding Ten Dissidents of 1968 Delivered on 21st August 2008
Dear ladies, dear gentlemen,
I welcome you here to the Straka Academy on the day which, for many of you, remind the day of shattered hopes, and perhaps also new hopes; nevertheless the day the 40th anniversary of which we commemorate today, I do not want to say celebrate. It is a day which means for us, but not only for us, a lot. This day, this time and the opening of the exhibition is above all your time. I am looking at ten men and women who are sitting in front of me. It is your exhibition and the exhibition is here thanks to you. Our admiration and our respect are yours. It is never easy to fight for freedom. It is not easy in particular under the totalitarian regime.
It is worth true honour, when in such conditions with full awareness of a risk find people who not only protect freedom, which is a human nature, but who protect freedom of other people. You are those people whom I am speaking about – you, who are sitting here today. You represent all those who cannot be here either because they do not live any longer or because we do not know anything about them, because they are nameless heroes of that period.
It required a lot of courage to stand up against the occupation of Czechoslovakia by troops of the Warsaw Treaty in August 1968 when you were living in the territory of one of the then aggressors. You mustered up the courage and demonstrated that they were not Russians, Poles, Germans, Hungarians, and Bulgarians who brutally ended the "Prague Spring". The "Prague Spring" was not ended by people of those countries. It was the then Soviet imperialism that occupied our country.
You opposed that imperialism. You opposed as free citizens in non-free countries. Freedom is a value that has always been important. I think it is clear that the then process (as Robert Fico says nowadays the Bratislava Early Spring and the Prague Spring) did not mean democracy yet. Democratization does not mean democracy, but it means hope. And it means also desire of many people in this country but also in neighbour countries, in your countries, desire of people who were craving for freedom. Neither the socialism with human face nor democratization meant freedom or democracy. But they gave hope. That was what the citizens of then Czechoslovakia wanted, and it also wanted you and people in all the totalitarian countries.
Your protests in August 1968 confirmed that freedom is indivisible, that by curtailing the freedom of an individual, hi relatives and friends are loosing part of their freedom as well; that we have common responsibility to uphold freedom not only at home but all over the world, that we have an obligation to defend this freedom. That is why you showed great personal courage.
This is the most positive massage of August 1968 for me. We are allied by freedom, we are allied by courage to fight for freedom, and we are allied by our care for defending freedom. Your actions during those August days forty years ago led to today's freedom of ours and yours. I thank you a lot for that.
