Czech Republic: Neo-Nazis, including DSSS members, did attend recent anti-Romani demonstration

The South Bohemian regional organization of the Workers’ Social Justice Party (Dělnická strana sociální spravedlnosti – DSSS) and its local branches have recently become a rewarding topic for the media. An incident in Vimperk during which a racist attack was perpetrated on the singer Tonya Graves has been exploited by the full spectrum of Czech Nazis and those associated with them. These people have asserted that the singer lied about the incident, which they see as part of a long-range campaign to discredit the DSSS, and they have threatened to file criminal charges against her.

The Antifa.cz internet server has posted a detailed, extensive article, including many photographs, about the South Bohemian DSSS in relation to the attack on Graves. Here news server Romea.cz presents excerpts from that article.

The regional organization of the DSSS in South Bohemia reportedly enthusiastically welcomed the news from Vimperk about increased tensions between local members of the majority and the Romani minority, if only because the news would deflect attention away from an internal clash between the party vice-chair and Jaromír Pytl, the local organizer of a nationalist rally this past August. Certain aspects of the situation in Vimperk are reminiscent of the atmosphere in the Šluknov foothills. Real conflicts and crime are being accompanied by many untrue claims and rumors generally blaming Romani people for these incidents even though there is no proof they are involved.

Police are having no luck tracking down the perpetrators of some strange incidents in the town. It cannot be ruled out that, as later came to light in North Bohemia, there might be someone involved who has an interest in increasing tensions there. It is also indisputable that members of the white majority population are venting their frustration with the deteriorating economic and social situation through attacks on Romani victims as their most easily accessible and vulnerable target.

Unlike North Bohemia, however, the town hall leadership was unanimously opposed to the DSSS demonstration in Vimperk. Of course, the town hall chose the rather unfortunate approach of banning the assembly, which is dubious for many reasons, as was shown by the town’s ban being overturned by the Regional Court.

The next dubious step taken by the town hall was to call on local Romani residents not to attempt to protest against the DSSS event, forcing them to passively accept the fact that racists would be making speeches in their town with the aim of terrorizing Romani people in particular. However, Romani residents and other citizens of Vimperk did not succumb to this official pressure and instead showed how easy it is to unsettle the DSSS “heroes”.

All it took was whistles of disagreement for the regional party leader’s hands to start shaking. When the displays of disagreement continued during the speech by party chair Vandas, DSSS officials set off to complain to police, who essentially ignored them this time around.

A small group of Romani residents arrived at the rally just after it had begun and held up drawings done by their children in silent protest. The response of the DSSS promoters to this innocent action was symptomatic – a shower of racist curses and threats. The final touch to the party’s Vimperk adventure was, of course, the assault on singer Tonya Graves (or as the Nazis refer to it, the “alleged” assault).

DSSS has presented its Vimperk rally as having been exceptionally successful, reporting that 300 party promoters attended. That claim, which has repeatedly turned up on the organization’s web page and has been uncritically repeated by several media outlets, is not based in fact. In addition to members of the national and regional party leadership, only about 30 neo-Nazis linked to the party traveled to the rally.

The start of the Vimperk event went as follows: During the speeches, several dozen people from the surrounding buildings came out to watch. The crowd included a group of Romani residents and other protesters. Even including the journalists, the riot police, a significant number of undercover police officers, and the Vietnamese clerks from the local store who came to take a look, there were less than 300 people total on the scene.

Among the roughly 30 actual sympathizers of the party who arrived on the square with the DSSS delegations, we also saw more or less well-known neo-Nazi activists from the South Bohemian party cells in České Budějovice, Tábor, and Strakonice. Several persons from Vimperk can also be added to the numbers of those sympathizing with the DSSS. They were behind the actual invitation extended to the party and established a new local DSSS organization in Vimperk during the following week.

The DSSS has claimed that neo-Nazis did not attend the Vimperk event. However, if we familiarize ourselves with the members of the local organizations and the party sympathizers who did attend, that claim is easily refuted. This also reveals that the party’s claims to be distancing itself from problematic members, made during the ostentatious removal of Jaromír Pytl and his associates from the party, are not sincere.

Among the 30 Nazis who arrived to provide the necessary cover for party chair Vandas, vice-chair Štěpánek and the regional chair, Vach, Antifa.cz saw persons who participated in Jaromír Pytl’s event in Kaplice where the Nazi salute was given. Neither Vach nor his superior, Štěpánek, reportedly had anything to do with that portion of the event in Kaplice. Even though, according to photographs taken by Antifa.cz, Štěpánek and Vach attended the Kaplice event together with singer Ladislav Budzo of Prague, they have defended themselves by noting they were only present for the “official” segment of the event.

What is less comprehensible is the fact that the DSSS leadership did not realize they had made a completely obvious political blunder by excommunicating only some of the people who gave the Nazi salute at Kaplice. Others who committed the exact same excesses are evidently still in the fold. Photographs published by Antifa.cz show Jitka Sládková and Pavel Sládek at the Kaplice event holding the Iron Cross flag and the flag of the Third Reich, and then show them later in the company of the DSSS leadership in Vimperk. The couple also attended the DSSS event in Prague on 17 November.

One of the leading neo-Nazis who participated in the Vimperk rally is a longtime activist connected to National Resistance (Národní odpor – NO) structures, Jindřich Šafránek, who is also listed on the web page of the South Bohemian regional organization of the DSSS as the secretary of the local DSSS organization in Tábor. Šafránek has a very long neo-Nazi career behind him; his name was repeatedly put forward on candidate lists for parliamentary and regional elections both by the DSSS and by its predecessor, the Workers’ Party (Dělnická strana- DS).

Neo-Nazis organized around the local DSSS chapter in Strakonice also attended the Vimperk demonstration in large numbers. The local cell was just founded this past September. Its chair is Eva Poláková; her husband, Jiří Polák, is party secretary, and Michal Šonka is treasurer. The claims made by the national-level representatives of the DSSS that no neo-Nazis attended the Vimperk demonstration are most easily refutable in the case of those attending from the local Strakonice organization. The South Bohemian regional edition of the daily Mladá fronta DNES has already covered that organization in a rather detailed article on 10 December, entitled “DSSS denies links to neo-Nazis” (“DSSS popírá spojení s neonacisty”). Photographs collected by Antifa.cz, however, show otherwise.

Eva Poláková was not known to Antifa.cz until she decided to fully launch her activist career this year by establishing the local DSSS cell. Since then, the organization has repeatedly seen her in the company of DSSS party chair Vandas and other influential party functionaries. Her husband, however, has a long neo-Nazi past behind him. Jiří Polák was the third neo-Nazi to be tried and convicted in the Strakonice stabbing; he was investigated along with assailants Martin Vachta and Lukáš Vorobel. Vorobel was sentenced to 12 years in prison, Vachta to three, and Polák to one year in prison for participating in the stabbing of a youth who shouted down the trio as they were giving the Nazi salute.

News server Romea.cz has reported in detail on how the charges against Polák, today the local DSSS secretary in Strakonice, have panned out. The court has since changed the categorization of the crime he is accused of having committed, that of chanting the Nazi slogan “Heil Hitler” in Strakonice about a month prior to the attack.

Polák, who is a longtime friend of Martin Vachta, has attended various neo-Nazi events over the years, as has Vachta. For example, they attended the demonstration on 17 November 2007 in Prague together which was convened by the Autonomous Nationalists (Autonomní nacionalisté – AN) after the debacle of an attempted Kristallnacht commemoration. Just like Vachta and Vorobel, Polák also attended the the AN-Plzeň demonstration against Zionism – actually an anti-Semitic gathering – organized in collaboration with the Workers’ Party on 1 March 2008 in Plzeň.

Other photographs recently published online in social networking profiles and collected by Antifa show DSSS-Strakonice treasurer Michal Šonka sporting tattoes reading “Honor, Nation, Pride, Race” (Čest, Národ, Hrdost, Rasa). He is also shown taking a walk with DSSS-Strakonice chair Eva Poláková, who is wearing a t-shirt advertising the neo-Nazi band Landser depicting a Nazi soldier, and Martin Vachta, who is wearing a “National Resistance” t-shirt.

Once the DSSS demonstration in Vimperk came to an end, it took only a few hours for some of the neo-Nazis to attempt an invasion of Romani neighborhoods there. DSSS promoters also attacked Tonya Graves, singer with the band Monkey Business, in a local restaurant.

Several neo-Nazi web servers have exploited the reporting of the assault on Tonya Graves to attack her and threaten to press criminal charges against her. DSSS party chair Tomáš Vandas, for example, has published an article entitled “The Alleged Assault on the Singer Graves is an Anti-DSS provocation”. The subtitle reads: “The Workers’ Social Justice Party (DSSS) emphatically distances itself from the information that promoters of the DSSS attacked the singer of the band Monkey Business after Saturday’s Workers’ Party SS rally in Vimperk.”

“In this situation, this entire affair is, both in its content and in the gradual release of the ‘reliable information’ about it, markedly untrustworthy … We consider this entire matter to be part of a long-term campaign to discredit the DSSS, and evidently it will not be the last time we see an effort to tarnish us in the eyes of the public, since the state bodies have to do something about our rising popularity,” Vandas writes in the piece.

The “Free Youth” (Svobodná mládež – SM), an online organization centered in Pardubice, also commented on the case. Their article was republished by the Nazi web portal Odpor.org (“Resistance.org”). That article, entitled “DSSS promoters, or police provocateurs and a seditious campaign against the genuine political opposition?”, is so surreal that Antifa.cz editors suspected for a moment that Adam Macura, the SM webmaster, had posted the text on the website as a joke.

In the piece, Macura speculates that the assault on Tonya Graves was actually committed by the Czech secret service. He asserts that politicians supporting multiculturalism, assisted by the secret service, intentionally arranged a performance by Monkey Business in Vimperk on the same day the DSSS demonstration was taking place. Moreover, he claims that Graves was never the victim of any assault. Unfortunately, his speculations were intended seriously.

The arrest of the actual assailants was probably the last thing the DSSS wanted. Slowly but surely, however, it is coming to light that Tonya Graves truthfully described what happened in the Vimperk restaurant. She was assaulted by promoters – and possibly actual members – of the DSSS who had attended the Vandas rally and who had stood just a few steps away from him during his speeches.

While Antifa.cz is not surprised by this turn of events, the group is of the opinion that this opportunity to provide yet another example of the DSSS party’s mendacity must not go to waste. It is also true that those concerned are active neo-Nazis who have been previously convicted of racially motivated felonies, theft, and violent robbery. Photographs taken at the Vimperk demonstration seem to show that those involved in the assault most probably traveled to the demonstration with Eva Poláková and Martin Vachta from Strakonice.

Photographs of the probable assailants have already been posted to the internet along with the information that one of them has swastika tattoos. The suspects have been reported as being Lukáš Knap (25) of Volyně, a town located south of Strakonice and north of Vimperk, and Jan Bízek (34) of Strakonice. By coincidence, Antifa.cz recently published a photograph of Bízek in their most recent article on the South Bohemian band Gabreta.

Once again, the DSSS has been caught in a lie. Not only is the party’s claim that neo-Nazis did not attend the Vimperk event untrue, but their attacks and threats against Tonya Graves have proven to be unfounded. The singer was in fact the victim of physical and verbal assault by DSSS promoters. Moreover, the suspected assailants traveled to the Vimperk demonstration together with members of the local DSSS organization in Strakonice. They are active neo-Nazis (just like Martin Vachta, who attended the Vimperk demonstration soon after his release from prison) who have previously been convicted of racially motivated felonies, theft, and violent robbery. On his publicly available Facebook profile, Jan Bízek has posted declarations such as “If it were possible through some sort of magic to get rid of Gypsies for good, such as making them fly up the chimney, then I would support it….”

The chair of the regional DSSS organization has also evidently lied in his ostentatious declaration about purges in the party and tackling individuals who are troublemakers. The organization of the demonstration was aided and supported by neo-Nazis and others who gave the Nazi salute at Jaromír Pytl’s event in Kaplice earlier this year. As Antifa.cz has shown through its analysis of the two other local DSSS organizations in Strakonice and Tábor, those cells are also riddled with neo-Nazis, either linked to the National Resistance, as in the case of Jindřich Šafránek, or those involved in the stabbing of a man who shouted down persons giving the Nazi salute.