Former Communist Cop To Supervise Czech Police Inspection

A former Czech Communist riot police officer who helped suppress anti-regime rallies in the 1980s will chair a parliamentary committee supervising a police inspection body, lawmakers decided on Friday.

Prague, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 02nd Mar, 2018 ) :A former Czech Communist riot police officer who helped suppress anti-regime rallies in the 1980s will chair a parliamentary committee supervising a police inspection body, lawmakers decided on Friday.

Zdenek Ondracek, a 48-year-old Communist lawmaker, won by a single vote to lead the committee supervising the General Inspection of Security Forces (GIBS), which investigates crimes committed by police officers.

Critics blame Ondracek for his role in anti-Communist rallies in central Prague in 1989, including the November 17 student march brutally suppressed by the police with hundreds of protesters injured.

The rally resulted in the Velvet Revolution that toppled Communism in late 1989, four years before Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. On Friday, Ondracek -- dubbed the "Communist thrasher" by some Czech media -- insisted that "we served the country, the citizens of this republic.

" In January 1989, Ondracek commented on a rally held to commemorate student Jan Palach, who had burnt himself to death 20 years earlier in protest against the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Speaking to the communist Czechoslovak tv, the then 20-year-old policeman described the peaceful rally as a violent affair with protesters armed with chains, stones, knives, even knitting needles attacking the police.

"I am convinced that action by the riot police unit... was essential for restoring order in the centre of the capital," he said then. In an interview later on, he confessed to having hit a protesting young woman with a truncheon during a rally.

The Communist Party emerged from last October's general election as the fifth strongest party with 7.76 percent of votes. The election was won by the populist ANO movement of billionaire Andrej Babis, which took 78 seats in the 200-member parliament.