Four of the five members of the Sabata family have been convicted for political offences by the Czechoslovak government. The father, daughter, and younger son are in jail and the eldest son is under a suspended sentence; only the mother has not been arrested and tried. Dr. Jaroslav Sabata, 45, is a Communist of more that 25 years' standing. A lecturer at Brno University, he was elected secretary of the Brno Regional Committee of the Communist Party in 1968, and subsequently became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party nationally. At the 14th Congress of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, convened secretly at Vysocany in August 1968, after the Russian invasion, he was elected to the Presidium (highest executive body) of the Central Committee. Until his expulsion in 1969, he used his position to resist Moscow's attempts to turn Czechoslovak Communists away from the path of reform embarked on in 1968.
Dr. Sabata was arrested after the November 1971 elections, and charged with having prepared and distributed leaflets. One of the real reasons for his arrest appears to have been his authorship of a Marxist discussion document called 'The Little Action Programme'. On August 8, 1972 he was convicted and sentenced to 6½ years in jail. When called as a witness in other important political trials, Dr. Sabata has consistently rejected allegations against both himself and the defendants. He proclaimed to one court, "We are humanists. We are Communists in opposition. You are not Communists." His daughter, Anna Sabatova, has been arrested at the same time as her father. In August 1972 a Brno court sentenced her to 3½ years imprisonment. This was later reduced to three -years by the Prague Supreme Court.
The youngest son, Jan Sabata, aged 20, was also arrested during the 1971 elections, along with other young people distributing leaflets. He received a jail sentence of 2½ years in July, 1972.
The eldest son, Vaclav, was arrested shortly after his younger brother. He was sentenced to 2 years in jail, despite the Prosecutor's recommendation that a suspended sentence would be adequate, but in October of last year the Prague Supreme Court replaced his imprisonment with a suspended sentence. Vaclav, a university graduate, was a hotel stoker before his arrest and now works as an asphalt layer.
Earlier this year Mrs. Sabatova made a public appeal to socialists, and to the Communist and workers' parties, around the world to aid in her fight to free her family. The Sabata family symbolise the fate of many Czechoslovak socialists who have been jailed by the regime set up after the Russian invasion. Among them are Dr. Milan Hubl (6½ years), student leader Jiri Muller (5½ years), Dr. Jan Tesar (6 years), Dr. Milan Sithan (5 years), Antonin Rusek (5 years), Dr. Zdenek Prykryl (4 years) and Vlastimila Tesarova (4 years). For that reason, Mrs, Sabatova's appeal is being taken up in Britain by the Committee to Defend Czechoslovak Socialists. Lawrence Daly, Secretary of the National Union of Miners, is Chairman of the Committee and its members include Monty Johnstone, Tamara Deutscher, Benedict Birnberg, Marion Sling, Quintin Hoare, Robin Blackburn, Dennis Ogden and Ralph Miliband.
As a first step, the Committee is organising a post card campaign in support of the Sabatas. Two postcards have been prepared, one addressed to Dr. Husak (First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communsit Party), and the other to the Czechoslovak Ambassador in London. The postcards bear the message "Free the Sabata family and all socialists imprisoned in Czechoslovakia' in both English and Czech.
socialists. More information about the work of the Committee can be obtained from: Committee to Defend Czechoslovak Socialists, 32 Belitha Villas, London, N.1.
Red Weekly 24 August 1973 Page 4 All who value the cause of socialism should participate in this urgent defence of Czechoslovak NATO expressed real admiration for the skill and speed of the operation and the secrecy with which such great forces had been mobilised.
The only aspect of the operation which bore the marks of improvisation was the matter of the political credentials of the invaders. An attempt was made to repeat the Hungarian tactic and present to the world a letter of invitation from the leaders of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. This failed. The Communist Party remained united and the tiny clique of collaborators had to be discarded by Russian invasion met with a militant response but demoralisation gradually set in as the lack of decisive leadership became evident the victory of oppositional elements at the Fourth Congress of Czechoslovak writers in June 1967, the government reacted with expulsions from the party, banning of the writers' journal, Literarni Listy, etc. Far from destroying the opposition, these measures merely succeeded in carrying the crisis on to the level of the regime itself.
On 5 January, 1968, the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party voted to instal Alexander Dubcek as Party Secretary in place of Novotny. This marked the entrance of the "Reformers' on to the centre of the political stage. The forces they were representing then began to appear in a more definite way: a coalition of a powerful section of the party bureaucracy, the new technocratic and managerial strata, and the intellectuals. For the first time, the party press began to publish realistic assessments of the state of the economy