Posted on 05/15/2005 9:02:19 AM PDT by lizol
Sudeten German days open with decoration of Czech bishop AUGSBURG- The traditional Sudeten German days in Augsburg, Bavaria, opened today with the presentation of the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft's highest prize, the European Karl IV Award, to Czech bishop Josef Koukl. Koukl, 79, who became the first Czech on whom the Sudeten Germans bestowed their award, was decorated for his long-lasting effort at Czech-German reconciliation.
"Today is the holiday of sending the Holy Spirit when all nations spoke one language although they did not lose their identity. It is important to talk together and understand each other," Koukl told journalists.
He said that he was not afraid that his decoration will provoke controversies in the Czech Republic.
"Normal people who know that it is necessary to live in a united Europe together will understand it," he said.
Koukl, born in Brno, south Moravia, was the diocese bishop in Litomerice, north Bohemia, till the end of 2003. He strove for Czech-German reconciliation for many years and he was initiator of joint masses in the border regions celebrated in Czech and German.
The traditional Sudeten German meeting has had an almost unchanged scenario in the past years. Today, it was also opened by Sudeten German Landsmannschaft chairman and MEP for the Bavarian CSU Bernd Posselt.
"We all know that expulsion would not have happened without atrocities of national socialism and without World War Two and its disastrous development. But we also know, and it is necessary to stress it again and again, that expulsion was not a necessary consequence of the war, but an ethnic cleansing, cold-bloodedly planned and carried out," Posselt said, among other things.
Otherwise, his speech was without controversies.
He praised the ratification of the European constitution in the German parliament on Thursday as a guarantee of equality of all in the European Union. "However, there are people who worship idols of the past. They are people who in the 21st century have erected statues of Stalin and Benes," Posselt said.
A statue of second Czechoslovak president and long-serving Czechoslovak foreign minister Edvard Benes is to be erected outside the Czech Foreign Ministry in Prague on Monday.
The post-war decrees issued by Benes, mainly those concerning the confiscation of property of collaborators and traitors and their deportation from the Czechoslovakia mainly affected Sudeten Germans, provoke discussion up to date.
Rule in Czechoslovakia after World War Two was based on decrees for a certain time which were signed by Benes.
Bavarian minister Christa Stewens (CSU) welcomed the participants on behalf of Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber who will make a speech at the meeting on Sunday when tens of thousands of Sudeten Germans are expected to come to Ausgburg.
According to the organisers, about 50,000 people are expected.
Stewens said that the expulsion could not only be assessed in connection with World War Two atrocities and could not be pushed to the fringes of historical interest. A dialogue is necessary for a sincere, objective and just recognition of history, she said.
"It is necessary to talk together - Germans, Sudeten Germans and Czechs must talk with each other," Stewens said.
An address by Deputy Interior Minister Fritz Rudolf Koerper, who expressed the position of the German government which is often different from the positions of the Expellees' Association and the Sudeten German Landsmannschaft, met with a negative response.
He was booed by the participants when he said that as regards the establishment of the Centre Against Expulsions, the German government intends to transfer the topic to the European level.
The German government does not support this initiative by the Expellees Association (BdV) which wants to establish the centre in Berlin.
Koerper's statement that it is necessary ti gove time to the Czech Republic to make a reconciliation gesture also met a negative response.
You know, if we just let Germany have the Sudetenlands, they'll stop there. At least that's what Neville Chamberlain said.
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