Sudeten row rumbles on
The outgoing Czech prime minister, Milos Zeman, has said that the election of Edmund Stoiber as German Chancellor in this autumn's elections ,,would not be conducive to the further development of Czech-German relations". He said Stoiber was one of ,,those politicians who always look to the past because they have nothing to say about the future", a reference to Stoiber's strongly anti-Czech stance on the question of the Sudeten Germans and their expulsion from Czechoslovakia after the war.
Zeman's deputy in the Social Democratic Party, Vladimir Spidla, has said that the expulsion of 3-4 million Sudeten Germans was ,,far sighted"and ,,one of the sources of peace". This naturally caused great outrage in Germany. Spidla insisted that all property matters had been resolved at the Paris conference in 1952 and that ,,neither the Czech Social Democrats nor any other relevant political force (would) open the way to the restitution of property to the Sudeten Germans."The Austrian parliament, meanwhile, has complained about the hardening of Czech attitudes and has expressed regret that the Czech parliament had recently voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Benes decrees. The president of the Austrian parliament, however, said emphatically that the Sudeten German question should not be connected with the question of Czech EU membership. This corresponds to the Czech position on the matter.
European Foundation Intelligence Digest No. 143