EXPULSION AS GLOBAL PROBLEM TO BE THEME OF SUDETENS ASSEMBLY
NUREMBERG, May 27 ; (PVR)
Czech News Agency (CTK)
CTK National News Wire
May 27, 2004
Expulsion as a global problem will be the main issue of this year’s
Sudeten German national assembly scheduled for the forthcoming weekend,
Bernd Posselt, the chairman of the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft
(SL), told the German news agency DPA today.
The meeting will also be attended by representatives of other ethnic
groups which have fallen victim to expulsion and ethnic cleansing
such as Armenians, Kosovo Albanians and Croatians, Posselt said.
The SL leadership wants to set the deportation of Sudeten Germans
in the present-day context of ethnic cleansing in the world, as
evidenced by Posselt pointing to the current situation in Sudan as
a latest problem.
Posselt said he expected the meeting to deal with the Benes decrees,
called by Sudeten Germans as the cause of their deportation.
The meeting is likely to criticise the recent decision of the Czech
Parliament to pass a law saying that Czechoslovak president Edvard
Benes helped build the state.
Posselt said that the law was “unreasonable wilfulness on a part of
the Czech political scene.”
The meeting will culminate by the speech of Bavarian Minister President
Edmund Stoiber on Sunday.
On the basis of the Benes decrees, ethnic Germans and some Hungarians
were transferred from Czechoslovakia after World War Two and their
property was confiscated. The deportees and some politicians in
Germany and Austria as well as Hungary call the decrees incompatible
with Prague and Bratislava’s membership of the EU, and call for
their abolition.