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Yahoo! My Yahoo! Mail More Yahoo! Services Account Options New User? Sign Up Sign In Help Yahoo! Search web search Home Singapore Asia Pacific World Business Entertainment Sports Technology Asia Pacific World Death of anti-communist radical divides Czechs AFP - Monday, August 16 Send IM Story Print Death of anti-communist radical divides Czechs PRAGUE (AFP) - – The recent death of a radical anti-communist who shot his way out of communist Czechoslovakia to the West in 1953 has reopened a passionate debate among Czechs about their Cold War past. Was Milan Paumer hero or murderer? Twenty years after the fall of communism, the story of his resistance group -- which killed six people as it broke through the Iron Curtain to freedom -- still divides this nation of 10.5 million like no other issue. Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas made his stand clear at Paumer's funeral on August 4. "Milan Paumer's decision to fight the loss of freedom and abandon his life in a totalitarian regime was a heroic one," he told several hundred mourners who turned out for the service in Podebrady, a town 50 kilometres (31 miles) east of Prague. "People have the right to fight slavery using all means," said Necas, a conservative who described himself as an anti-communist in a recent interview for AFP. Not all agreed. "A murderer will remain a murderer," read 26 posters showing the face of Paumer, who died in Prague last month at age 79, plastered throughout the pretty little spa town ahead of the funeral. "Many Czechs like to adore passive martyrs rather than fighters," Senate chairman Premysl Sobotka, a conservative like Necas, told mourners in seeming retort. The story started in 1951, three years after the communists took power in the former Czechoslovakia, when the young Milan Paumer and brothers Ctirad and Josef Masin killed two police officers to steal their guns for their planned escape. A year later, they shot dead a cashier bringing salaries to a factory to raise money for the flight West. During the actual escape in 1953, the fugitives killed three East German soldiers before finally making it into West Berlin. Three other members of the group were arrested and executed by the communist regime, and some 20 others close to the band served long prison terms. The passage of time has done little to heal the divide over the fugitives. Some see them as anti-communist resistance heroes who had every right to shoot and kill. Others insist their victims were innocent and not responsible for crimes committed by the totalitarian regime. For historian Tomas Zahradnicek, the Masin brothers and Paumer "took the wrong direction at a fatal crossroads, causing unnecessary suffering to innocent people," he wrote recently in the leading Dnes daily. One of these is Stanislav Rosicky, who was only 10 when his father, the cashier, was killed by one of the Masin brothers. "My father was murdered on Saturday, August 2, 1952. Two days later, the director of the factory came to pay us his condolences -- and to tell us to leave our flat which belonged to the factory," he told the press in 2008. "Masin killed my dad. The communists kicked us out of the flat and doomed us to poverty," he said. All three men were officially decorated two years ago when Necas's predecessor Mirek Topolanek awarded Paumer and the Masin brothers the prime minister's medal. Yet Czech presidents have been reluctant to offer their recognition for the three, despite several proposals from the conservative-controlled Senate. And the absence of both President Vaclav Klaus and his predecessor Vaclav Havel, a hero of the bloodless Velvet Revolution and a former dissident playwright under communism, at Paumer's funeral did not go unnoticed by the Czech press. After the escape, Paumer joined the US army during the Korean War and later became a taxi driver in Florida. He returned to the Czech Republic -- a successor state with Slovakia after Czechoslovakia peacefully split in 1993 -- in 2001, 12 years after communism was toppled by the peaceful Velvet Revolution in 1989. As for the Masin brothers, their own past is painful. Their father, a Czechoslovak army officer and anti-Nazi resistance hero, was executed by the Nazis in 1942 and their mother died in a communist prison in 1956. Ctirad Masin himself spent 22 months in uranium mines after trying an earlier escape to the West as the communists took power in 1948. Both brothers still live in the United States and have refused to return home, but Josep sent a message read on public broadcaster Czech Television the day of Paumer's funeral. "The communist party still exists. It is even represented in parliament," the statement said -- in what was seen as the latest barb in a related debate over whether to ban the Communist Party, which has continued operating largely unreformed after 1989. In its 41-year reign, the former Czechoslovak communist regime took the lives of about 4,500 people who were either executed, shot when trying to escape to the West, or who died from abuse in communist prisons. Hundreds of thousands of Czechs and Slovaks were also imprisoned as enemies of the communist state. 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