On Tuesday, Slovakia and the Czech Republic are remembering the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies (Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Bulgaria), which occupied Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968. Officially, the armies entered the country in reaction to an invitation letter written by the conservative wing of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. With the invasion, the process of political liberalisation and democratisation called 'the Prague Spring' ended. It began in 1965 when Slovak Alexander Dubček was named the leader of the only legal communist party.
At the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Soviet led invasion, Slovak Foreign Ministry commented it as an act of unacceptable aggression. On Tuesday both Slovak and Czech national public TV will broadcast a speech of Slovak President Andrej Kiska. The Czech President Miloš Zeman refused to do so at the occasion. As his spokesperson Jiří Ovčáček explained, Zeman already held a courageous speech when he expressed disagreement with the occupation and was subsequently fired from his job at the University of Economics in Prague right at the time of the invasion.
