PRAGUE (AFP) – A monument to former US President Woodrow Wilson was unveiled in central Prague on Wednesday, 70 years after the occupying Nazis tore down a nearby statue during World War II.
About 500 people gathered outside Prague’s main railway station – once dubbed Wilson Station – for the unveiling of the 3.5-metre (12-foot) statue commissioned by the American Friends of the Czech Republic society.
“Much of the damage that the Nazis caused can never be undone, but returning the monument of Woodrow Wilson to its proper place is a direct reply to Hitler,” Prague-born former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright said at the unveiling.
Wilson, born in 1856, was US president from 1913 to 1921. He died in 1924.
He is celebrated in the Czech Republic and Slovakia for his role in the establishment of independent Czechoslovakia in 1918 as World War I brought down the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Wilson’s landmark “Fourteen Points” speech to the US Congress in early 1918 backed freedom for peoples under the rule of that empire as well as imperial German and Russia.
“In an era when other leaders saw a global chessboard with the imperial powers as players and everyone else as pawns, Wilson… believed that law should apply equally to big nations and to small, and that every country had a duty to defend this principle,” said Albright.
“Wilson’s words struck a deep chord in the minds of millions of people, especially those here in central Europe who had been struggling to escape the bonds of foreign domination and empires,” she added.
Two decades later, Czechoslovakia was carved up by Nazi Germany on the eve of World War II and then occupied. After declaring war on the United States in 1941, the occupying Nazi forces tore down the statue.
Czechoslovakia ended up in the Soviet bloc after the war, until its communist regime crumbled in 1989. It split peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993.
Guests at the ceremony included Czech President Vaclav Klaus and his predecessor, anti-communist icon Vaclav Havel, who marked his 75th birthday Wednesday.
“I think (the statue) is nice, but I’ll only have to examine it when it’s quieter,” said Havel, who is frail from recent illnesses, as he fought his way to his car through a throng of well-wishers.
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