To the Editor:



LET point


[Re: "Ray of hope," Oct. 4- 11]: Do you have any idea how much money and experience it takes to turn around a company like LET with over 1,500 employees? ... If you had done even the slightest bit of investigation you would have realized that Pan Pacific Airways does not even own any planes -- PPA is an idea. It appears that you were wooed by [PPA President Randall] Brink's skills at dealing with the media, as he himself is a contributing editor to an airline magazine.

Charles Peake
Structured finance
Commerzbank Aktiengesellschaft
Prague Branch
Prague 2


Editor's note: PPA is a fully organized, capitalized and functioning U.S. company. It is true that they have been hampered in creating a fully-scheduled passenger service network because the aircraft that they ordered were never delivered by Let, under Ayres' management.

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Showing respect


Thank you for printing the opinion piece [by Gwendolyn Albert] "Ladies first, women last" in the Sept. 27-Oct. 3 edition of The Prague Post. This lucid and insightful contribution highlighted two vital concerns. Instead of women's bodies at the forefront of the commercial industry, respect for the human dignity of women within Prague and within the International Monetary Fund should be at the forefront of the globally minded emergence of Central Europe. I am heartened to see this discussion emerging in The Prague Post.


Rebecca Schaaf
Sarasota, Florida

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'Day of Action'


We visited Prague and decided to participate in the peaceful part of the S26 Global Day of Action to help bring attention to the devastating consequences of neo-liberal policies on the environment, and local, especially indigenous, communities. The scene was calm, with just a few people looking around, taking photos, and police standing here and there. Without warning five or six riot cops ran toward me and beat me to the ground, and hauled me off to jail, where the dehumanization continued. [I was] never charged with any crime and released only three days later when my (Belgian) Embassy contacted the detention center where I was being held. I was then expelled from Czech Republic.

It was predominantly the peaceful protesters who paid a very high price of the brutally indiscriminate police response.


Michael Van Broekhoven
San Francisco

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On Sept. 26, I saw something very peculiar. I saw some people yelling "kill capitalism" and "what solution ... revolution," [and they had] flags with the picture of Che Guevara. When I looked more carefully, I saw that these people were wearing Levi's jeans, drinking Coca-Cola, smoking Marlboro cigarettes and using cellular phones. Che had everything a man could need in Cuba: a family, friends, love from the people. El Che was such an idealist that he gave it all up and went to Bolivia to build a revolution there, and was prepared to lose his life fighting for his dream: To make Latin America a better place, with equity and justice. What are these people leaving behind in their own "revolution," when they are so much addicted to the products of the capitalism that they want to kill?


Varthalitis Dimitrios
Prague 4

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Do Czechs really believe that it is acceptable for police to kidnap completely innocent bystanders and assault them? Do they agree with [Miroslav] Macek that members of a legitimate protest group should be shot with live ammunition? Did they actually believe the lies that were printed in the Czech papers about the demonstrations? If so, then we can be thankful that this country is not a member of the European Union, and hope that it is a long time before it is allowed in. The Czech Republic should make friends with Serbia, Belarus or Ukraine, not with Western European countries, which have respect for human rights and dignity.

Peter Griffin
Prague

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I was among those arrested on Stepanska street on the night of Sept. 26 and detained for 24 hours. I was only a bystander, as were most of the other people arrested. I was detained in a jail for 12 hours, after which 25 foreigners, including myself, were transported to another jail and detained for another 12 hours. In the jails, the policemen were intimidating, rough, and, on occasion, brutal. The detainees were not allowed to call anybody outside. In the first jail, the detainees were fed once. In the second jail, there was no feeding and the use of a toilet was severely restricted. Shouts, slaps on the head, and kicks on the leg were frequent. I witnessed several beatings of detainees. At the end of detainment, each of the foreigners was beaten one by one. I received about a dozen blows involving batons and fists. None of the policemen had an identification number, and some were not wearing uniforms. I was released with no charge and the other foreigners were deported.


Byeongju Jeong
Assistant professor
CERGE-EI
Prague 1

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I was glad to see that The Prague Post is covering PETA's protests against the World Bank. However, the organization is not protesting against "animal cruelty in developing countries," nor are they protesting because "IMF/ WB agriculture puts animals at risk in developing countries," as you say in a different article. They are against the World Bank's policy of giving loans for intensive farming projects.

World Bank and IMF Structural Adjustment Programs encourage developing countries to switch from traditional farming, in which the animals are kept relatively humanely, to factory farming, in which they are kept under conditions of extreme brutality, often in cages so small that they cannot even move. Traditional husbandry adds to the total amount of food available for humans, whereas intensive farming reduces it. This is because animals in factory farms eat grain rather than grass, and consume many times their own weight over their lifetime.


Paul Kail
Director
Animal Consciousness Foundation
Prague

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