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of Czechoslovakia, however failed to prevent World War II and therefore fully discredited the policy of appeasement of tyrants and dictators;
Whereas between 1938 and 1945, Nazi Germany annexed part of Bohemia, set up a fascist "protectorate" in the rest of Bohemia and in Moravia, and installed a puppet fascist government in Slovakia;
Whereas during World War II, the Slovak and Czech resistance movements against Nazi occupation and fascism, with the support of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, launched the Slovak National Uprising in August 1944 and the Prague uprising in May 1945, and in their determination to stand united against hatred and oppression these movements contributed to the defeat of Nazism and fascism;
Whereas the Communists seized power from the democratically elected government of Czechoslovakia in February 1948;
Whereas troops from Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968, ousted the reformist leadership of Alexander Dubček, and restored a hard-line communist regime;
Whereas in November 1989 the peoples of Czechoslovakia in a nonviolent Velvet Revolution overthrew 40 years of totalitarian communist rule in order to rebuild a democratic society, and since then have established vibrant, pluralistic, democratic political systems based upon freedom of speech, a free press, free and fair open elections, the rule of law, and other democratic principles and practices, values embodied for many in the personality of the first post-communist president Václav Havel;
•HCON 99 IH
