A European Purpose
NUREMBERG/CESKY KRUMOV At an event for an association of expelled ethnic Germans, the provincial leader of Bavaria, Edmund Stoiber, supported property right claims against the Czech Republic, while sharply attacking the legal obstacles stemming from the late Czech president Edvard Benes. Europe must support the German position, as the Benes Decrees were unfair. It must guarantee that such legislation is removed, said Stoiber at the Sudeten-German Day last Wednesday in Nuremberg. Stoiber claimed that the discussion after the Czech Republic's EU accession was not yet over. Rather, it stands just before the actual beginning.
As many prominent speakers at the Sudeten-German Day event emphasized, the European Union should see to it that the member states of Slovakia and the Czech Republic annul the Benes Decrees. The invitation letter to this mass event claimed that the European order of law would remain damaged and incomplete, as long as the Decrees remained on the books. 1)The Bavarian leader spent the previous few days at extensive talks in Budapest which, as an ally of Germany, supported the requests for termination of the Benes Decrees.
Exile
One of the highlights of the Sudeten-German Day events was a panel discussion for which the Sudeten German League, whose managing committee is considered a government-in-exile for ethnic Germans from the Czech Republic 2), announced the appearance of several prominent ethnic-conservative politicians. Among the invitees were Bujar Bukoshi, the former President of the Serbian province of Kosovo (who gathered political support in Germany during the 1990s), as well as Tilman Zuelch, the General Secretary of the Association for Threatened Peoples. 3)Known for their ethnic activities, the Association for Threatened People supports, among others, Chechen 4)and Uighur exile groups. Christoph Pan, head of the South Tyrolean Institute for Ethnic Groups, based in Bolzano, Italy, appeared to receive the Sudeten-German Culture and Welfare Association Prize. Pan was the president of the Federal Union of European Ethnic Groups from 1994 to 1996. For his efforts, he received the Hungarian Minorities Prize. Pan is included in the pan-German wing of German ethno-revisionism.
Ethnic Lebensraum
At the Sudeten-German Day events, of which the semi-official German television station Phoenix offered two-hours of live coverage, CSU politicians intensified the age-old festering argument with Czech Republic. The speaker, Johann Boehm, stated that Sudeten-Germans were driven into a destroyed and exhausted rump-Germany after the Second World War, in which their living space had been robbed. The Czech Republic described the former president of the Bavarian Parliament as a product of ethnic cleansing. Boehm's verbal assault was based on positions that were supported by the German federal state. The General Secretary of the Union of Expellees demonstrated soon thereafter, that all the German parliamentary governments since 1949 declared the questions of property as open. The Union of Expellees is supported by powerful politicians of the German government, such as the SPD politicians Peter Glotz, who received a Culture Prize from the Sudeten German League.
Deja Vu
Immediately preceding the Sudeten-German mass meeting, Czech war veterans unveiled the bust of the former Czechoslovakian president Edvard Benes. Benes stepped down directly after the Munich Accords of September 1938, as the governments of Great Britain and France allowed the German Reich the annexation of the so-called Sudeten lands. After the German capitulation, Benes, with the agreement of the Allies by means of the presidential decrees, led the reconstruction of Czechoslovakia. The memorials at Cesky Krumov were set up by an initiative of pilots of the Royal Air Force, who also participated in last Friday's celebratory display of the Benes bust.
1) See also German Parliament again demands end to ,,Benes decrees"
2) Georg Herde/Alexa Stolze: Die Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft. Geschichte, Personen, Hintergruende - eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme, Koeln 1987.
3) See also Background Report: The Association for Threatened Peoples (Gesellschaft fuer bedrohte Voelker - GfbV)
4) See also German Chechens
Sources:
Tschechische Kriegsveteranen enthuellen Benes-Bueste in Krummau; Radio Prag 28.05.2004
Sudetendeutsche senden versoehnliche Toene nach Tschechien; AP 28.05.2004
,,Wir werden nerven"; FAZ.net 31.05.2004
Stoiber will Streit um Benesch-Dekrete auf EU-Ebene loesen; AP 31.05.2004
