New wave of “Gorilla” demonstrations

On February 3, “the Gorilla was hunted across the squares” of Slovakia, leads SME. A week after a first demonstration against the corruption depicted in the Slovak secret police file entitled “Gorilla”, thousands of people have come back out into the streets of Bratislava and other Slovak cities, prompting the newspaper to note a “resemblance to November 1989 in the despair and disillusionment with political elites.”

However, this "disillusionment with politicians shouldn't keep you from voting in the early elections on March 10,” protesters were told by investigative Slovak-Canadian journalist Tom Nicholson, who first broke the story. However, reports SME, “the court in Bratislava has banned the publication of [Nicholson’s] book on the Gorilla file at the request of Penta’s co-owner [Jaroslav Haščák]” – Penta being the financial group at the centre of the affair.

The ruling, on the basis that Haščák's individual rights needed protection, is “absurd”, considers the Bratislava daily, given that the document has been circulating freely on the internet for several weeks. Nicholson is “convinced” the book will come out before the elections anyway. “The ban will be its best advertisement,” SME explains. “Is there any literature more exciting than the forbidden kind?”