Around 200 people, thought to be mostly curious about the first Czechoslovak astronaut Vladimír Remek, gathered at a Communist May Day rally in Zvolen in Banská Bystrica region on Saturday, May 1.
Remek, 61, who is currently a Member of the European Parliament for the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM), recalled the times when he as an air-force pilot used to fly over Zvolen (which is near the military airport Sliač).
He cautioned the rally participants against what he described as dangers of the “reign of big-capital interests”, which he said represents a threat to their human and civil rights.
“The dividing line nowadays doesn’t lie between nations and ethnic groups, but between big-capital interests and workers,” he stated from the rostrum, as quoted by the TASR newswire.
Remek in 1978 became the first non-Soviet or non-American to fly a manned mission into space. He was followed by a representative of the Socialist Association of Youth (SZM) who called on the participants to combat capitalism; not with weapons in their hands, however, but rather through discussions on the internet, for example.
At the end of the rally, a Slovak Communist party (KSS) official issued a resolution demanding the introduction of progressive taxation, a ban on lay-offs and the abolition of the Nation’s Memory Institute, which primarily focuses on crimes of the Communist era in Slovakia between 1948 and 1989.
Source: TASR
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
The Slovak Spectator cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information presented in its Flash News postings.
