Europe Horrified By Hail Of Bullets Fired On Slovakia’s Prime Minister

Europe and indeed the world stared at it with a mixture of curiosity, awe, and open anxiety as three bullets oozed out of a firearm to a target not in the imagination of anybody. From my observatory, what I can deduce from this unexpected twist on Thursday 15 May, 2024 is that sporadic violence remains an existential threat to democracy anywhere.

The assassination attempt on the life of Slovakia’s Prime Minister in a public place, followed rapidly by a rescue mission is one more blot on civilization. The latest incident is the umpteenth time of such a manner and highlights the need for vigilance even when systems are working.

Brief footage of the horrific scenes showed the Prime Minister being whisked to a more secure place. Bravo to the guards who ignored the threat and hurriedly moved the figure to a waiting saloon car thence to a local hospital to deal with the emergency. Doctors are in a battle of their lives to keep him alive.

Would they succeed? Reports say, Robert Fico was shot multiple times, initially told to have hit his head and chest. We now know that a bullet went into his stomach and another hit his joints. From the precision of bullets, the assassin aimed at killing him straightaway and make recovery impossible. Intentions become much clearer if you consider the fact that the prime minister was the only person who was injured in the shooting. It was a clever act of a marksman.

The suspected villain in this real life action was also spotted in television footage disarmed, pinned down to the ground, and completely surrounded by police. Thumbs up for the police for quickly suppressing the hitman.

A little information on him indicates he is a 71- year-old man who lived in the southern part of Slovakia. He is alleged to have had a stint with a Russian paramilitary force in the past. It is suspected that a planned closure of Slovakia’s state broadcaster to be replaced with another medium, are among the factors that motivated his attack on the prime minister.

There have been reactions to this poignancy. Czech Republic, Ukraine, Hungary, and European Commission leaders have condemned the act urging an end to violence in Europe. The West was slower and measured in weighing into the distressing news unlike the former Eastern bloc in the era of the cold war which is vibrant with scorn of the attack.

Mr Fico is considered a willing confederate to Russia’s Vladimir Putin in his positive assessment of Russia’s War In Ukraine. Until the latest turn of events, perhaps none had envisaged the Slovakian Prime Minister stood in any danger of the kind that came on him in mid-May.

Now, the Slovakian state police may find it necessary, in their war against sabotage, to perhaps follow the example of the Nazis under whom their sovereignty suffered for so long.

On September 30, 1938, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, French Premier Edouard Daladier, and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact, which sealed the fate of Czechoslovakia, virtually handing it over to Germany in the name of peace. Although the agreement was to give into Hitler’s hands only the Sudentenland, that part of Czechoslovakia where 3 million ethnic Germans lived, it also handed over to the Nazi war machine 66 percent of Czechoslovakia’s coal, 70 percent of its iron and steel and 70 percent of its electrical power. Without those resources, the Czech nation was left vulnerable to complete German dominance.

The 1970s saw the rise of a dissident movement in Czechoslovakia, represented among others by Václav Havel. The movement sought greater political participation and expression in the face of official disapproval, manifested in limitations on work activities, which went as far as a ban on professional employment, the refusal of higher education for the dissidents’ children, police harassment and prison.

During the 1980s, Czechoslovakia became one of the most tightly controlled Communist regimes in the Warsaw Pact in resistance to the mitigation of controls notified by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Russia now acts as the surviving force of the then Soviet Union.

In 1989, the Velvet Revolution restored democracy. This occurred around the same time as the fall of communism in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany and Poland.

The word “socialist” was removed from the country’s full name on 29 March 1990 and replaced by “federal”.

In 1992, because of growing nationalist tensions in the government, Czechoslovakia was peacefully dissolved by parliament. On 31 December 1992 it formally separated into two independent countries, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic.

The elaborate response by the formal system to rabble-rousers in the body politic may take into account the factors in the wide angle. It starts from the dominance over the past 15 years in Slovakian politics of the symbolic victim of the assault. His more than covert solidarity with Putin the man held by the West as the spoke in international mechanisms, is also worth examining within the context of the Fico affair.

According to most international media outlets, the BBC inclusive, the most recent fall of Fico from grace was in 2018, when mass protests forced his resignation in the wake of the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée. Turning to the then president Andrej Kiska – one of many political enemies – Robert Fico vowed to return to politics.

The Covid crisis in 2020 gave him new oxygen as he joined and later led mass demonstrations against the government’s handling of the situation. On the crest wave of this order, Fico rode to power again against all the odds but given the fractious and fragmented political order of personal betrayals, and popular insurrections, there was always going to be a pushback on his re-emergence.

The deputy of Robert Fico, Deputy Prime Minister Andrej Danko says Slovakia is heading to a political war. Which of the wars could this be? With political contests raising the stakes so high in all places, security cannot be taken for granted for all persons either defending or seeking political turfs.