Proposal to repatriate Kazak-Czechs approved

The outgoing cabinet of Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek has approved a proposal by the Interior Ministry which will allow approximately 170 people of Czech origin living in Kazakhstan to move back to the Czech Republic. Mr. Topolanek says that the program is the second part of a repatriation program begun in 1994. The Kazak-Czech families that the Ministry of the Interior intends to invite will join the approximately 650 Czechs from Kazakhstan who relocated back to the Czech Republic in the last years of the 1990s. The Ministry of Interior says that it decided to extend the resettlement invitations because economic and security conditions of ethnic Czechs in Kazakhstan have grown increasingly worse in recent years. The remaining roughly 170 people (about 50 families) comprising the Czech community in Kazakhstan are the descendents of those who left Bohemia in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.