Czech ODS plans measures to prevent extremists in party - server

Another member of the Czech senior government Civic Democratic Party (ODS) has contacts with right-wing extremists, and in reaction to it the ODS is preparing measures to protect the party from controversial members, iDnes server reported today.

The server reported that Martin Bacik, treasurer of the ODS local branch in Bohumin, north Moravia, has close contacts with extremists, but Bacik dismissed it.
The media also reported recently that Vaclav Bures, who organised the unauthorised neo-Nazi march in Plzen, west Bohemia, last Saturday, was an ODS member during the march’s preparation.

"We have already commented on Bures’s case and we distance ourselves from him. We cannot know everything about our members, but we are planning measures to prevent it [extremists in the party]," ODS spokesman Milan Bouska told iDnes.

ODS Bohumin branch deputy head Jitka Kocianova said he thinks Bacik’s days in the party "are counted."

Local ODS brach in Plzen-Lochotin cancelled Bures’s party membership. In spite of it the leadership of the Plzen ODS town branch called on the Plzen-Lochotin branch heads to resign.

The server writes that Bacik, a 23-year-old student of the private CEVRO Institute, organised or co-organised some meetings of the National Corporativism (NK) extremist organisation that was listed in the BIS counter-intelligence report among the groups that affected the neo-Nazi movement in the Czech Republic in 2006 .

The ODS officials say the had no idea about Bacik’s activities, the server says.

Bacik denies any connection with extremists. He told iDnes he had tried to penetrate the NK to persuade its members that their ideals were wrong.
The server writes Bacik figures in photographs from radicals’ meetings, and a member of the Anti-fascist Action said Bacik had regularly taken part in ultra-right demonstrations in Moravia.

Other ODS members had problems with extremists in the past.

Information surfaced recently that several ODS politicians had signed a petition defending "traditional values" among whose signatories some extreme right-wingers figured.

The respective ODS politicians said they had signed the petition as they agreed with its contents and that they had no idea who had prepared it.
A meeting between ODS chairman and current Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek and representatives of the extremist National Party caused indignation about three years ago.

PHOTO: www.antifa.cz