Way Down South: In Wenceslas Square

It was all rather embarrassing. Just as Radio Prague was gleefully reporting the battle in Birmingham, race riots exploded in the heart of the Communist capital.

It began at midday near the Ambassador Hotel just off ancient Wenceslas Square. Two foreign students—one from Africa and another from the Middle East —were out for a stroll when they were attacked by a gang of 300 Czechs who pummeled them with fists and bunches of keys while police stood idly by. That evening another group of young Czechs began swinging at an African walking with his Czech wife, then picked a fight with two more Africans who had been arguing with some Cubans. This time police broke up the brawls, but not before a fourth incident occurred. An African diplomat had parked his car to investigate the trouble; the diplomat returned to discover that all four of the tires on his automobile were slashed.

Five days later, when Radio Prague finally got around to reporting the anti-African outbursts, the regime glossed over the incident as the work of drunken hooligans. It was more serious than that. For months, Czechs have complained that subsidies to underdeveloped countries, including direct outlays to scholarship students, are responsible for Czechoslovakia's worsening living standard. And the black students in Prague sometimes seem to walk away with the prettiest girls.

The arrival of Africans has created race problems in several parts of the Communist world. There was trouble in Prague last year. At Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University, 500 African students are carefully segregated from Russians; three months ago in Sofia, 600 club-wielding Bulgarian cops cracked the skulls of African students who were demonstrating for nothing more than their own campus organization.