Poland: where the past never dies

Twenty four years after martial law, Jaruzelski is to be charged with ‘breaking the constitution’.

He’s 82 years old, has an attractive daughter in show business and was hoping for a quiet retirement.

But General Wojciech Jaruzeski will not be allowed to drift quietly into obscurity just yet. Ewa Koj, a prosecutor with the National Remembrance Institute, which pursues communist-era crimes, is preparing to charge the old dictator with harassment, internment of thousands of prisoners during and after the martial law period (late 1981-2) and the deaths of over 100 people.

"It's necessary to say at last that the general is not a hero, that what he did was bad and brought about serious consequences," Koj said on TVN24 television.

The charges could lead to Jaruzelski being banged up for up to three years in prison.

The General has always maintained that if he had not imposed marial law on December 13 then the Soviets would have done something about it themselves.

Many Poles, however, agree that Jaruzelski is not a villan, but was acting for the good of the country.

Jaruzelski’s lawyers are certainly busy. The General still faces trial for the 1970 shooting to death of striking shipyard workers in Gdansk and other port cities when he was defence minister. The trial began in 2001, but ran in to procedural problems.

Euro scandals and ‘bollocky EU bureaucracy’

Two scandals fight for the top headline in this evening’s news.

Bogdan GOLIK (pictured), Polish MEP for the radical farmers union Samoobrona, has been charged in Brussels with raping a French prostitute.

Apparently, she was in his room when, it is alleged, an argument took place over the wearing of a condom. When she refused to do it without one, Golik used force.

When leader of Samoobrona, Andrzej Lepper, was asked for a reaction to the story, he leered at the reporter: “So how is it possible to rape a prostitute?”

What charmers these guys are. Allegedly.

The other scandal involves a ‘joke’ script for a speech by Tony Blair to the EU when he comes to Brussels this week to try and do a deal on the 2007-13 budget. Written by Britain’s Ambassador in Warsaw, Charles Crawford, and emailed to Downing Street, it’s not very complimentary to the Poles.

The juicy bits of the email include:

Mes chers amis and, in particular, mon ami Jacques, it gives me great pleasure to be back here in Brussels, home of the bollocky EU bureaucracy.

Here you breathe the sweet smell of Belgium’s unique brand of corruption, which it has generously bestowed on the rest of Europe.

I welcome to the table the representatives of the new member states, who joined our community in May last year. It hasn’t been long but you have already adapted well to the ways of the EU. You are now displaying a rudeness and ingratitude it took the likes of Portugal and Greece years to develop. With your unpronounceable names and incomprehensible languages — why don’t we all just speak English? — you may have some difficulty understanding this but let me say it plainly. We in Britain have thrown open our doors. We’ve created more jobs for Poles and Czechs than you could have dreamt of under your five-year plans. And what do we get? Not a word of appreciation but a sniffy thumbs-down for my budget plan…

You can imagine the panic that gripped the Ambassador’s residence last Sunday morning when he read that email in the Sunday Times.

The British Embassy finally scrambled out a statement saying that the email was ‘a joke’.

And I must say, it is a bit of side-splitter. He’s in the wrong career!

The Polish Foreign Office has invited His Excellency for a cup of tea with milk, and to discuss the differences between Polish and British humour (In Poland when someone refers to ‘English humour’ they often mean that something isn’t funny).

But many Polish politicians have been on television saying that this shows up the arrogance that the British government have for the Polish negotiating position on the budget.

The email must be a joke, of course. Polish MEPs are never 'rude and ungrateful', are they? They are all perfect gentlemen. Even Bogdan Golik and his boss. Allegedly.

Pot, kettle, and black sites

Embarrassing notes to a meeting two years ago come back to haunt those principled Eurocrats.

EU Referendum blog points out an interesting article in the UK Sunday Telegraph. It seems Brussels’ indignation about possible US ‘gulags’ etc in Poland and elsewhere contradicts an offer they made to Americans a couple of years ago.

The European Union secretly allowed the United States to use transit facilities on European soil to transport "criminals" in 2003, according to a previously unpublished document. The revelation contradicts repeated EU denials that it knew of "rendition" flights by the CIA.

The EU agreed to give America access to facilities - presumably airports - in confidential talks in Athens during which the war on terror was discussed, the original minutes show. But all references to the agreement were deleted from the record before it was published.

The original minutes say that:

"Both sides agreed on areas where co-operation could be improved [inter alia] the exchange of data between border management services, increased use of European transit facilities to support the return of criminal, inadmissible aliens, co-ordination with regard to false documents training and improving the co-operation in removals.’

The EU is currently carrying out its own investigation into the 'black sites' affair and Polish and others involvment. We must presume, then, that its own offer to cooperate with ‘renditions’ will be included in the evidence.

Watchdog gets in a muddle

It appears that Human Rights Watch – the NGO that ‘exposed’ Poland as the site of gulags and torture – can’t quite make its up about the quality of its evidence.

Times Argus reports:

Poland's Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper caused a stir when it published an interview with Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst with the rights organization, saying his group had documents corroborating that Poland was the chief CIA detention site in Europe in a system of clandestine prisons for interrogating al-Qaida suspects.

"Poland was the main base of interrogating prisoners and Romania was more of a hub," Garlasco was quoted as telling the newspaper. "This is what our sources from the CIA tell us and what is shown from the documents we gathered."

But Human Rights Watch quickly distanced itself from those remarks, with one of their reseearlier this week, archers, John Sifton, saying they "had left a misleading impression with some people" that the group has more evidence than it in fact does.

So, that’s nice and clear then. I bet handbags are being thrown at HRW HQ.

On Tuesday, ABC News in America said that Polish sources had confirmed that 11 al-Qaeda suspects had been held at a camp in Poland as recently as last month, when HRW made their initial statement. The detainees had then been rushed out of the country to somewhere in Africa, ahead of the visit of Condoleeza Rice to Europe this week.

All of a sudden, Prime Minister Marcinkiewicz has leapt into action. He’s announced that he’s going to be having a bit of an enquiry into the whole matter. It’s only taken him a month to get around to it. Must be a busy man, bless him.

His excuse for not getting around to investigating the matter previously - ‘if there is no evidence then what do we investigate?’ - was a supple intellectual gambit that evaded most of us. But is he now starting to think that, maybe, there is a bit of evidence? Both Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita are now claiming that five planes have landed in Szymany airstip since 2002. An eye witness one time said that nobody got out of the aircraft, which was surrounded by vans from Kiejkuty, the site of a Polish secret service school.

Or is the belated investigation by the Polish government because virtually every other nation that has CIA planes landing at one of its airports is having an enquiry, and Marcinkiewicz is starting to feel lonely? Or has the speculation - fed by HRW and its vague evidence - got so out of hand that he has to be seen to be doing something, anything?

Don’t miss the next installment of Human Rights Watch and the Polish gulags from hell – at a blog near you.

Good post on this from Jakub Wrzesniewski at WorldAndUS

Polish heaven or hell in Ireland?

Press reports of ‘suicidal Poles’ in Dublin are an exaggeration, says Ambassador.

The Polish Ambassador to Ireland, Witold Sobkow, is not a happy man. I have come to interview him about an article published in Newsweek Polska three weeks ago claiming that Poles are often living in misery in Ireland. He didn’t like the piece, I gather.

“If this sort of article becomes the norm in the Polish press then the Irish government might just stop giving Poles PPS [social security] numbers”, he fumes.

The Newsweek article claimed that many of the 120,000 Poles who have turned up in Ireland looking for work since Poland joined the EU in May last year have had trouble fitting in to Irish society, do not speak English, have not found work and are living in sub-standard accommodation or are homeless. In the last 12 months, says the magazine, eight lonely Poles have taken their own lives in Ireland, so complete was their alienation and isolation.

Newsweek blames the ‘fairytales’ told by Polish media about Dublin’s streets being paved with gold Euro coins. These stories have filled young Poles with false expectations of how easy it will be to make a new life for themselves in the Emerald Isle. And the Irish, says Newsweek, are using Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians and so on as cheap labour, while falling to provide support for those who run into trouble.

On the day that I went to see the Ambassador, the Irish Times picked up an article in StrefaEire – a Polish language weekly published in Dublin – agreeing with Newsweek. The Irish Times reports the editor of StrefaEire, Tomasz Wybranowski, as saying that media back home in Poland paint a rosy picture of life in Ireland, where everyone can find work. “The Polish media only shows one side of the story – the big money side,” he told the Times.

Irish employers are ‘racist’ in their treatment of Poles and other central Europeans who are competing with each other for jobs, says Wybranowski. He also thinks that this ‘racism’ will get worse if Ireland's booming economy falters.

The Polish Ambassador argues, however, that the 500 or 600 Poles who are having problems with work and accommodation make up less than one percent of Polish migrants, and that they are not representative.

Ambassador Sopkow told me that he has written to the editor of Newsweek – someone he says that he has met on several occasions – saying that the article is sensationalist and presents the hard luck stories as the norm, when they are, in fact, the exception. “But I have yet to receive a reply.”

Personally, I couldn’t find Poles willing to say that the Irish were racist. Izabela, who works as a television presenter on the City Channel’s Polish language programme said that she had not met anyone who was having as bad a time as Newsweek or StrefaEire make out.

I also asked a policeman if he has ever had any trouble with Poles. “I’ve never had any contact with Poles at all. They have not come here to be criminals,” he said.

The Ambassador claims that Irish employers do not discriminate against Poles – quite the opposite, in fact. “Polish nurses work longer and harder than their Irish counterparts. They are also better trained. Irish employers know that.” He also thinks that the Irish government is genuine when it says that it opened its borders to the new EU countries to share Irish prosperity.

I couldn’t find anyone to support the racist argument, but it would be a very unusual place if there was no exploitation going on in Ireland. For the Poles who have no qualifications and who can’t speak English then things are going to be tough. And if they are having a hard time then young Poles have the choice of going back home to a youth unemployment rate of nearly forty percent.

Demonstrators march against slave ships on the Irish Sea

An Irish industrial dispute highlights exploitative employers using central Europeans as wage slaves. But Poles and others have helped to create jobs in Ireland and have not depressed wages.

As my plane took off from Dublin airport on my way home to Warsaw yesterday, marches were taking place all over Ireland in support of Irish Ferry workers. The company plans to sack staff and replace them with low paid, non-unionized employees from Latvia. AP reports that:

More than 10,000 labor union members protested Friday in Ireland's capital and other cities over shipping company Irish Ferries' plan to replace its workers with low-paid Eastern European immigrants in the country's most bitter industrial showdown in decades.

Irish Ferries, a subsidiary of Dublin-based Irish Continental Group PLC, earlier this year offered its 543 unionized workers on its main Britain-Ireland routes payoffs worth 25 million euros ($30 million) if they quit voluntarily.
But when the company two weeks ago began introducing new workers, chiefly from Latvia - who were willing to work for 3.60 euros ($4.25) an hour, less than half of Ireland's minimum wage - union chiefs seized control of two ships, forcing the company to shut down services at an estimated loss of 2 million euros ($2.5 million) a day.

Many demonstrators – including Poles and Lithuanians – carried banners saying ‘Stop outsourcing’ and ‘No slave ships on the Irish Sea’.

But the Irish Confederation of Employers warns that Irish Ferries might simply close down and hire other firms outside the country to do the work for them at much lower labour costs.

But you won’t find many Irish people complaining that Poles and others have harmed their booming economy and are dragging down wages. In fact, wages are increasing way beyond the EU average. And while there are around 65,000 registered Polish workers in Ireland at the moment, unemployment rates have not gone up – they have gone down! In the last 12 months, 70,000 new jobs have been created, and the Irish unemployment rate remains at 4.3 percent – again, around half that of the average rate in the Euro zone.

The reason why Ireland and the UK welcomed people from the new EU accession states was that the economies in those countries are performing much better than on mainland Europe. As long as Ireland continues with growth rates of 4 or 5 percent you won’t be seeing anyone setting up an Irish national Front anytime soon.
Good economies have nothing to fear fro migrant workers. So it’s no surprise that fear of the Polish plumber is most acute in places like France where the economy is about as dynamic and agile as an edible snail.

Blair Witch Project

That’s the headline in today’s Gazeta Wyborcza, describing the Polish attitude to Tony Blair’s plan to ‘reform’ the way European Union does its business.

The British Guardian reports that France and Poland are spearheading the attack on Blair’s attempt to get a compromise agreement on the EU 2007-2013 budget, which plans to cut spending by 16 billion euros.

Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, the Polish prime minister, underlined the deep unease in Eastern Europe at Britain's plan to slash their structural funds by £9.3bn. "The proposal is not based on solidarity," he said. "In this form it is unacceptable."

In a sign of Britain's isolation, the European commission's president, Jose Manuel Barroso, added his voice.” This proposal amounts to a budget for a 'mini-Europe', not the strong Europe we need."

Britain hopes to win round the new member states by proposing four measures that will make it easier for them to spend the £100bn they will be offered in structural funds. These are: cutting the level of cofinancing the new members will have to provide from 20% to 15%; allowing private funds to be included in co-financing; giving an extra year to spend the money; and allowing inner-city housing to be funded. Mr Straw said: "This is an enormous amount. The total funds for the new member states is twice the amount of the Marshall Fund that rebuilt Western Europe 60 years ago."

There has been some surprise that Poland and the other 8 countries from Central Europe that entered the EU in May last year are so opposed to cutting budgets and liberalizing markets. And that surprise is not just limited to Britain. Whatever happened to Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘New Europe’, many Americans are asking themselves?

But the ‘New Europe’ thing always was a load of tosh. The reason that countries like Poland wanted to get into the EU in the first place was to get their hands on some much needed investment – not to have Brussels tell them to put funny little traffic light symbols on their food packaging and regulate how to throw away their rubbish.
Poland wants structural funds to help with infrastructure projects like road building and repair – Polish roads currently have more holes in them than a string vest.

So the prospect of Britain getting a deal when the nations meet on December 16 looks slim, though Poland is under enormous pressure to find a compromise, as it cannot start planning for expenditure in the 2007-13 period until a budget is agreed.

For Poland, Blair’s six-month presidency of the EU has turned into a horror movie.

The beatroot is going to be spending some EU money of its own this week, as I am being sent – at the EU's expense – to Dublin to do some reporting. So the next post will be from the Emerald Isle. See you then.

Blood and treasure in Iraq

Update Dec. 5…....PM Marcinkiewicz says that a decision on Polish troop withdrawal will be made after the Iraqi elections on December 15...

The Polish defense minister is in Washington this weekend discussing when troops will be withdrawn from Iraq.

As the United States’ ‘coalition of the willing' in Iraq gets less willing by the day, and the queue to get troops out becomes ever longer, Radek Sikorski has gone to negotiate where Poland will be in the line.

The previous SLD government had said that the 1,500 troops would be handing over the Polish controlled south-central sector of Iraq in January. But Poland’s president-elect, Lech Kaczynski, indicated that troops may stay until next summer, and some will remain behind after the rest have left.

Sikorski has said that the decision to stay or when to go is as much dependant on economic factors as military. He said last Thursday that the war had put enormous strain on Poland’s resources:

"We've invested a lot of energy - both blood and treasure and government attention, and political capital - in the mission and we certainly want to end it with success. By success, I mean handing over our sector of responsibility to a democratically elected Iraqi government ... and I think they are actually pretty close to success."

Poland’s mission in Iraq, which is centered around the ancient city of Babylon, has cost $600 million - ten percent of the defense budget.

"Whereas our army has increased its readiness and we are proud to have participated in an operation to help to stabilize Iraq, to bring democracy in Iraq, we could have modernized our forces faster with those funds," Sikorski told The Associated Press.

17 Poles have died in the conflict.

Mercenaries?

Apart from showing the US that Poland is an enthusiastic and responsible member of NATO, the economic aspect was always a major factor in deciding to join the occupation.

Iraq had lots of unpaid debts with Poland from back in the nineteen seventies and eighties. The Polish government also thought that it would get its hands on some tasty reconstruction contracts. But these have been slow in coming and have not lived up to expectations.

Poland sold Iraq $400 million dollars worth of arms in two years, though. The deals included helicopters, guns, special military vehicles and field service equipment, accounting for about 30 percent of all the arms Iraq purchased in that period.

And the new PiS government is involved in an oil deal between Warsaw and Baghdad. Prime Minister Marcinkiewicz denies, however, that this is ‘blood for oil': “We do not connect these things," he told Polskie Radio last week. He said that Poland had to find a way of diversifying its supplies of oil – at the moment the bulk of which come from a not very friendly Russia.

Time to go

Many in the United States like to think of Poland as their most staunch ally in the war. And it’s true that Polish governments have been, and will be, falling over themselves to sound positive and lend a helping hand.

But the war has never been popular with ordinary Poles. Only around one in three have ever supported it. The liberal middle class share the same dislike as their counterparts in other coalition nations of what seems to be an idiotic attempt to ‘bring democracy' to the people of the Middle East by cluster-bombing them. Religious Poles follow the Vatican line that foreign intervention of this kind is sinful.

So getting troops out of Iraq – and the sooner the better – will be a popular political move at home. The terms that the pull-out takes will be decided in Washington this weekend.

But the only people who should be able to decide if Polish, British or US troops stay or leave are the Iraqis themselves. If anyone took the trouble to ask them, they would – like you and I would if we had foreigners occupying our land – tell them all to get out, now, and fast.

But then, what ordinary Iraqis want has never been at the top of the list of priorities in this bloody and ridiculous war.

CIA ‘torture’ planes only landed in Poland once…

…but they appear to have arrived and departed in the UK more frequently than a no-frills airline.

The UK Guardian says it has seen the flight logs of 26 planes used by the CIA. “Only one visit is recorded to the Szymany airbase in north-east Poland, which has been identified as the alleged site of a secret CIA jail” says the paper.

But CIA planes have been whizzing all over the skies of Europe in the last few years and appear to have the sort of widespread coverage of airports that many airlines would kill for.

Suspicious Boeing 737s touched down 96 times in Germany and 80 times in the UK.

The New York Times claims that 26 planes known to be operated by CIA front companies have made 307 flights in Europe since September 2001.

Now this must, I hope, come as a bit of a shock to Britain’s Interior Minister, Jack Straw, who, only last Tuesday, asked the United States for formal clarification of the issue. So we have to presume that Jack didn’t have a clue about the 80 flights touching down right under his nose.

I bet he will be having an interesting conversation with Condoleeza Rice – his American counterpart – when she comes to Europe for talks next week, if his ignorance is genuine (and we should always presume the ignorance of New Labour politicians).

Suddenly the case against Poland being the host to ‘gulags’ starts to look a little pathetic. I hope Human Rights Watch has got better proof than this. Otherwise it is going to look very silly indeed.

And it always was a slightly ridiculous argument (see US Auschwitz), begun by the Washington Post and elaborated by Human Rights Watch, the NGO which named Poland and Romania as being the torture camp capitals of eastern Europe after the Post had agreed with the US government not to reveal which countries the camps were in (those brave, independent journalists!).

The director of Szymany airfield, Jan Pashtorchziak, told the Russian Izvestia daily that there is simply no room to house a torture camp in that part of northeast Poland.

"Two kilometers long runway and a small building - that is all we have here. The airport was closed in May, 2004 when Poland entered the EU for it does not meet the European requirements. At that time 40 people worked here, and now – only 10. We are going through repairs. No suspicious American planes landed here. I do not know what could cause the suspicions of HRW. Maybe the fact that the airport is located in the forest?"

And since there is only evidence that a single plane landed at the airport in September 2003 then it must mean that either the prisoners are still there huddled in their little building, have been secretly transported across borders to another location, or they never existed in the first place.

Outgoing Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, sais on Thursday: "There are no such [CIA sponsored] prisons on Poland's territory, there are no such prisoners on Poland's territory," Kwasniewski said. "If there had been any planes landing, the proper authorities have to comment on this. No president is informed about every airplane that lands. I can assure you that there are no such prisons or prisoners held in Poland. And there were none in the past."

And now the director of HRW, Tom Malinowski, seemed to back off, slightly, from its original claims. He told RFE/RL: "We have specific evidence which is circumstantial; we've never said that we have proof that there are facilities in these countries or that there are facilities. It's the flight logs of the aircraft that were known to be carrying Al-Qaeda prisoners; in particular, flights that began in Kabul, ended in Guantanamo, and made several stopovers in Poland and Romania -- which really can't be explained by the need to refuel or anything else."

But when the original report came out a few weeks ago, HRW had said that they were ’90 percent certain’ that there are, or were the so-called ‘black sites’ prisons in Poland and in eastern Europe.

The truth appears to be that the CIA have been landing planes all over Europe, and particularly in western Europe – not in the east, as was originally claimed.

Everybody is waiting for the US to confirm or deny that they are imprisoning and torturing terror suspects in European locations.

Post 100

The beatroot is six months and one hundred posts old. I never knew it would be so much fun!

Got an email from expatanchor.net. Apparently the beatroot has been judged as ‘most influential expat blog in Central Europe’ – whatever that means! It was good to see, as well, that two other blogs – Kinuk in Poland and Warsaw Station - got in the top ten as well. I don’t really understand how they have come to this conclusion, but I am not complaining.

Sorry this post is a bit self-indulgent but, what the hell, it’s my blog!

I started the beatroot originally to put things that I had written elsewhere in one place – like a portfolio, or something. But then I soon discovered that there was much, much more to blogging than that!

Since then I have met so many people via other blogs, have learnt loads, and found out which of my arguments are good and which ones are just completely stupid.

Blogging is not like journalism. I have no editor, sub-editor (although many people say that I need one!) advertisers (blogs should not have advertisers!), board of directors, etc. That’s the strength of blogs – they are independent. The weakness of blogging is that there is no editor, sub-editor (although many people say that I need one!) advertisers (blogs should not have advertisers!), board of directors, etc. It means that blogs have none of the usual filters that journalism has.

So the only checks and balances that we bloggers have is through the comments we get from our readers. And I want to thank the many people who pop in to tell me about the things that I have written and express their opinions. I love it when the comments are more interesting than the original post – which is quite often. As far as I can understand one of the criteria for ‘most influencial expat blog’ is the quality of the comments. And I have been lucky to have some real battles going on(see comment section on last post for a good example of this). Two contributors stand out – Michael Farris and Stefanmichnik, who have had some very entertaining battles over the last couple of months, or so.

On the beatroot’s one hundred posts birthday, can I also thank (this is turning into an Oscar type speech – sorry!) all the other blogs who have said nice things about the blog, including EU Referendum blog, Brussels Journal, By Dawn’s Early Light, European Democracy, Around the World in Eighty Days, Bicyclemark.org (who I talked to yesterday on his excellent podcasting blog from Amsterdam) and many more that, to be honest, I can’t remember right now.

So, thanks again and I hope the next 100 posts are as much fun and education for me as the first lot have been.

Peace!

PS. Please visit our collective blog – P3 - that we have set up here in Warsaw. It brings together several individual bloggers under one name and place. Our next p3 meeting is this Saturday, I believe.

Poland needs a new PR agent

‘Queer bashing, CIA torturing, Star Wars II anti-ballistic missile hosting American poodles’. Is Poland becoming a European pariah?

It’s not been a good couple of months for the image of Poland abroad.

The EU thinks that the new Polish parliament is a nest of Eurosceptics; headlines in the international newspapers scream at the injustice of gays denied the right to demonstrate, and get beaten up when they do - and British MEP, Sarah Ludford has called on Brussels to take legal action against the government; human rights campaigners suspect Poland is hosting secret CIA torture camps; and western Europeans fret that Poland might welcome, in the near future, American, Son of Star Wars, anti-ballistic missile systems on its soil.

The government has been warned by the EU that it has signed documents guaranteeing rights to sexual minorities; the Council of Europe is investigating the possibility of CIA camps and has warned that, if true, then Poland would be in breach of numerous international agreements and could face serious sanctions from Brussels.

But is Poland as bad as it’s being portrayed by some foreign journalists?

Europe’s homophobes?

The charge of homophobia is certainly justified. Many here hold social attitudes more applicable to Warsaw in 1935 than 2005. For four decades communism stopped Poland’s development dead in its tracks. When the regime crumbled the nation’s economy, social structure and culture were stuck in the past. A can of worms opened and out spilled some antiquated and distasteful social attitudes.

A religious based homophobia is one of them. This is being expressed by the new PiS government, which reflects the backwardness of maybe 1 in 2 of the population who feel that freedoms of speech should only be for people ‘like us’ and not for people ‘like them’.

And that’s a very ‘1930s’ type of attitude.

Anti-ballistic missile base?

Still living in the 1930s, many Poles feel that Russia is the threat and that a defense shield should be put up to guard Poland from eastern threats.

“We will analyze everything thoroughly and at the appropriate moment say whether it is good or not for Poland,” PM Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz has said, admitting that talks about a US antimissile system have been going on with the Pentagon for years. He has promised that, before any final decision is reached, a thorough public debate will take place first.

But Poland is not alone in looking at this system. The Czech Republic and Hungary are also looking at the plans, and the UK has long supported the general idea of a system being set up in Europe.

CIA gulags?

I have argued on the beatroot before that the often hysterical claims about these camps do not match the evidence. Just because we know that planes used by the CIA for transporting terror suspects landed in Poland does not prove anything at all, apart from the fact that the planes have been using a northern Polish airstrip to land on.

We now know that the CIA has been using many countries to do this in, including Denmark, Spain, Holland, Italy, the UK…. But nobody has suggested, like one Turkish writer has done, that the UK or Holland are sites of a ‘US Auschwitz’.

I wonder why? Perhaps these writers are being informed by some 1930s prejudices of their own – if Poland and other Central European countries had a death camps on their soil once, could they have them now?

Last Friday, Dick Marty, the Swiss senator heading the investigation on behalf of the Council of Europe, said that the prospect of large clandestine torture camps in Central Europe was ‘highly unlikely’, though he did think that is possible that ”there were detainees that stayed 10, 15 or 30 days. We do not have the full picture." The Council of Europe is currently trying to get hold of satellite images of the airbases in Poland and Romania.

Eurocepticism?

There is no doubt that many politicians affect an anti-European stance in much of their rhetoric. Again this reflects an almost pre-war distrust of Western Europe and an inability to deal the world as it is today. Two parties currently propping up the minority government in parliament – Self defense and League of Polish Families have indicated that they would like to re-negotiate Poland’s terms of entry into the Union.

But Poles in general are not as Eurosceptic as are many in northern Europe – particularly in the UK and Denmark. And the Polish government has said that the EU is essential for the economic development of the country. The torturous negotiations over the EU budget shows that it is not Poland who is holding up a resolution to the problem, but rather richer countries like the UK that want to reduce their contributions. Poland, on the other hand, wants to get its hands on those contributions in the form of subsidies and joint investment projects.

So though of the criticism of Poland recently rightly points out a backwardness of much of the population to issues that were settled in the nineteen sixties in the western Europe, a lot of that criticism is also based on a misunderstanding of the facts, a love of conspiracy theories, an ignorance of Central Europe, and lazy journalism.

But I still think that Poland needs a better PR manager, because the current Polish government is not doing a very good job at all – in fact, it’s very much part of the problem.

Gay activists in Warsaw protest Polish homophobia

Over 1000 gather peacfully at Plac Konstitucji, in the centre of the Polish capital, surrounded by several hundred police.

Under gloomy skies and in light rain the demonstrators listened to speeches and music booming out of sound systems, as the rest of Warsaw did their Sunday shopping. The action came in response to violence from police and rightwing thugs in Poznan last weekend, when several protestors from the Campaign Against Homophobia were beaten and arrested.

Left wing members of parliament from the SLD, SdLP, Greens and the Democratic Party gave suppport to the protest.

An expected counter-demonstration from far-right politicians and hooligans did not happen - except for a small press conference from the League of Polish Families in the square. A handful of skinheads hung around the four corners of Plac Konstitucji, making calls on their mobiles (I was suprised that they seemed to know how to work them!) trying to get more of their little buddies to come along.

The demonstration is part of a nationwide action this weekend involving six Polish cities, including Gdansk, where the local chapter of the Solidarity trade union gave its support.

Hypocrites

Update!!!… Demonstrations organised by the Campaign Against Homophobia in Poland will take place this weekend in Elblag, Gdansk, Torun, Lodz, Warsaw, Rzeszow, Wroclaw, Katowice and Krakow…The demo in Warsaw will start on Sunday at 12.00p.m. at Plac Konstitucji…. If you care about human rights in Poland then BE THERE……


Two Polish newspapers, Wednesday, had parts of their front pages blacked out with ink in support of freedom of speech in Belarus. Video footage, however, shows that human rights problems can be found closer to home.

Under the headline ‘This is what freedom of speech looks like in Belarus’ Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita inked out sections of articles on their front pages in support of an Amnesty International campaign against human rights abuses in Belarus.

And jolly good, too.

Shame then that the Polish newspapers don’t pay as much attention to human rights abuses going on in their own country.

To the usual deafening silence, gays and lesbians and human rights campaigners were denied the right once again to protest against officially sanctioned homophobia in Poland. Last Saturday, protesters in Poznan – who went ahead with an Equality March even though the local council had denied them permission to do so – were beaten and arrested by cops and intimidated by local right wing thugs.

See how the Polish authorities respect human rights in this video.

And where is the blacked out front pages about that one then?

Last night, Marian Pilka (Marian is a male name in Poland), an MP from the ruling Law and Justice party, called for gays to have psychiatric treatment and to ban the 'promotion' of homosexuality.

And word is getting around. On his first trip to London since becoming PM, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz had to use a side entrance when visiting Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street so as to avoid protests from activists.

It's easy for Polish newspapers to look good and radical when you are up against someone like Belarus' President, Alexander Lukashenko. It's not even a very controversial move to have a go at old baldy, now is it? I'm sure even Gazeta's advertisers didn't mind that much.

Might it not be a great idea, though, for Polish newspapers to take a look at somewhere a little closer to home, perhaps?

Now that really would be radical.

Rainbow warriors

The liberal-minded environmentalist Greenpeace, and the socially conservative Law and Justice government are united in their campaign against ‘Frankenstein food’.

The Baltic port of Gdynia had never seen anything like it. Last Thursday, activists from Greenpeace, the direct action environmental campaigners, tied themselves and their yellow rubber dingy to the anchor of a ship, preventing it from docking. The ship, the Hope, which began its journey in Argentina, was full up with 25,000 tons of animal feed made from Genetically Modified soya beans.

In Argentina, say Green activists, GM soya is causing massive environmental problems, such as deforestation, dramatic increase in the spraying of toxic herbicides and infertility of the soil.

Greenpeace say that Poland – where the majority of soya beans imported are used for animal feed - is rapidly becoming a ‘gateway’ through which GM crops are ‘sneaking into Europe’. Polish meat producers – which Greenpeace ominously remind us are ‘mostly in the hands of foreign owners’ - feed GM products to animals, which are them exported to countries such as Belgium, Germany, Sweden, UK, The Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania. Greenpeace says that ‘GM derived meat and other products bare a completely unqualified health risk for consumers.’

I should warn that the ‘unqualified health risk’ in that sentence is another way of saying that there has been no proven health risk to humans from GM crops – but that’s another argument.

Meanwhile, back at the port in Gdynia, Greenpeace had picked a bad day for attaching themselves to a large ship’s anchor. The Baltic Sea is an unforgiving one. At this time of year it is absolutely freezing. After five hours of dangling from the anchor, buffeted by high winds in low temperatures, Greenpeace called it a day, and the cargo, imported by the US firm Cargill (I told you those nasty foreign firms were involved), finally made dry land.

Following directives from the European Union, growing GM crops in Poland is now illegal. But importing GM crops is legal. Greenpeace want to ban it all.

Bad news for greens

Though Greenpeace opened an office here a few years ago, the green movement is not a large one in Poland. People are not so much interested in sustainable development, they just want some sort of development.

Many in the West have decided that that their level of consumption is bad, and that emerging economies should not reach the same amount of consumption, and wealth, as they have. They must develop in a ‘sustainable’ way. And that means slowing down development. They are expecting people in Poland, naively, to slow down the rate at which their incomes grow.

I don’t think I need to point out why this is not going to be a very popular political option.

And now the good news…

There is some good news for the green movement in Poland. Central and eastern Europe is beginning to freak out about GM. Around 76 per cent of Polish consumers say they don't want to eat any food containing GM ingredients, according, that is, to a PBS opinion poll commissioned by Greenpeace Polska.

This follows an earlier study that says that 95 per cent of Russians who are aware of GM ingredients are either opposed, or are ‘seriously concerned’ by them.

And there is more good news for Polish greens. The new, populist, socially conservative, Law and Justice (PiS) government has come out squarely against genetically modified organisms getting in the food chain and messing up the wildlife.

This government position comes from two sources: one is that the EU is putting pressure on governments to fall into line with its anti-GM, precautionary stance. The other is what I would call the ‘Prince Charles’ position - that doing research into genetics, nanotechnology etc, is ‘scientists playing God’.

And the religious in the Polish government, and its allies in parliament, agree with the red faced, jug-eared, unemployed Royal about that kind of thing.

So the new, socially conservative government in Poland, and the ‘radical’, ‘liberal’ green campaigners of Greanpeace, have something in common: they are both against Genetically Modified Crops.

Another unlikely alliance in this wacky 21st century, Post-Cold War world.

Catholic Poland

A survey conducted by the Polish church shows that the majority of Poles are not ‘religiously active’.

Working as a journalist in Poland forces you to write sentences that include phrases such as ‘in staunchly Catholic Poland…’, or, ‘the devoutly Catholic Polish…’, or, ‘In a country where 95% are Catholic…’, etc. And every time I write these words (editors like it when you do, for some reason) I know that I am misleading the reader. Yes, 95% of people identify themselves as Roman Catholics. But that does not mean Poland is overflowing with the god-fearing.

A survey just released confirms this. Only 43% of Poles claim to be ‘actively religious’, or practicing Catholics. The majority of Poles only go to church on religious holidays, or for births, weddings and deaths. Some never go near the place at all.

This tallies with opinion polls that say that 50% of Poles want their very strict abortion laws liberalized. Seventy-five percent do not believe in the Catholic explanation of what happens after death. And, remarkably for a country where ‘natural methods of contraception’ (otherwise know a ‘cross your fingers and hope for the best’) are taught by the priests, Poland has one of the lowest birthrates in the world.

So the next time you see an article with ‘In a country where 95% are Catholic’ in it, make sure you put inverted commas over the catholic bit.

Is it a bird, is it a plane...?

...no, it’s Andrzej Lepper, Super-capitalist!

Yes, you thought that Lepper, leader of the populist, left wing farmer’s union and lawmaker, was the former communist party political bruiser, the farm owner down on his luck, who came to fame as the organizer of road blocks in rural areas in the fight to defend the Polish farmer from market reforms, Brussels, and towns and cities in general with populations of over six hundred and fifty.

You thought his foreign policy included a sympathetic ear to the trials and tribulations of the Belarus’ president, Alexander Lukashenko.

You thought his economic plan included halting privatization, and the state keeping hold of all major industries.

You thought that Andrzej Lepper was an unreconstructed, Soviet-type socialist with a dollop of nationalism thrown in.

But just as Clarke Kent slipped off his suit and tie in a phone booth to reveal the caped crusader beneath, so Lepper has thrown away the muddy boots and straw in the top pocket, to reveal a tasty pinstripe suit.

Andrzej Lepper has declared himself a capitalist!

“A socialist party has no chance today,” he says, with the dazed look of a Damascus experience still lingering in his eyes. He’s in favor of the privatization of everything but essential industries. He’s a modern guy! Honest!

But what led Lepper to this flash of market orientated inspiration? What took Leper out of the pig shed with shovel and into the office and executive toys?

Naked ambition? Quite probably. He knows that the minority PiS government can’t rule without him and his Samoobrona (Self defense) party. He wants a formal coalition with PiS, and a place in the government.

But he’s not just decided he’s a capitalist. He also says that he is now a ‘social-liberal’.

Oxymoron? Yes, but a typically Polish, political oxymoron. The liberal bit means he ‘believes’ in the market. The social bit means that the state is not going to be cutting social services, welfare, and social spending in general. And the farmers are still going to get price stability and lots of subsidies.

A tactical metamorphoses. But the change is less like a Clarke Kent to a Superman, as a tadpole into a frog.

Poles ban gay parade, EU bans anti-abortion exhibit

Polish reactionaries and EU liberals have more in common than they think.

It’s becoming a bit of a habit. Local authorities in Poland, this time in the mid-west city of Poznan, have banned a Gay Pride march, scheduled to take place this Saturday. The reason the local council give for denying people the right to free assembly and expression is that the march would be a, ‘serious danger to social order and property.’

A similar excuse was given by the then mayor of Warsaw, and now president of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, when he banned (for the second year running) a similar parade through the centre of the capital this summer.

Of course, if you asked these politicians what the real reason is for such authoritarian behaviour they would tell you that they just find homosexuality offensive and ungodly, and don’t want to see such a parade in their city.

Polish human rights campaigners have argued that banning gay pride marches goes against the Polish Constitution. The European Union has warned President Kaczynski that he is going against human rights agreements signed by Poland.

Meanwhile, down at the EU parliament…

An anti-abortion exhibition entitled Life and Children in Europe ended in fisty-cuffs yesterday. Sponsored by MEPs from the League of Polish Families (LPR), the exhibition showed photos of unborn foetuses, and children in WWII concentration camps.

Enraged by the connection between terminations and Nazis, liberals and social democrats in the parliament, where the exhibition was being displayed, tried to take down the photographs. Security guards intervened when LPR members tried to keep the photos just where they were, and a fight broke out.

But the liberals succeeded in getting the offending material taken down.

Leader of LPR in the EU parliament, Maciej Giertych, said that he “never thought that the exhibit would be censored. I thought parliament was the place where controversial opinions were expressed.”

And, of course, he’s right. Just because someone doesn’t like opinions being expressed, or finds them offensive – like I do - is no reason to ban those opinions.

And that includes the actions of bigots in the local council in Poznan. Just because they find homosexuality offensive is no reason to ban a Gay Pride march.

Both the League of Polish Families and the liberals in Strasburg seem to agree that freedom of speech and expression is only permissible if that speech is not offensive to anybody.

But freedom of speech is not divisible. Both gays and anti-abortion activists have the right to press their case. And if people don’t like that case then they should be free to oppose it. Unfortunately, that kind of thinking is becoming increasingly unfashionable, both on the left and the right of the political spectrum.

If I was the security guard at the EU parliament I would have left the MEPs to it. These days, bigots and 'liberals' deserve each other.

It’s not been a good week for European liberty.

Still a hard sell?

The Polish defense minister, Radek Sikorski, and Star Wars II

The Warsaw Station blog comments on official recognition that Warsaw and Washington have been negotiating a deal on placing the US ‘Star Wars II’, anti-ballistic missile system in this country. Gustav notes that:

Gazeta [Wyborcza] reports that Dominique Moisi from the French Institute of International studies, says: "Did Poland consult its decision with European allies? Poland sees itself in the EU as a bridge between NATO and Europe. Together with this new government the question arises: Hasn't she already gone to the other side of the bridge?"

The US is building two bases at home where anti-rocket rockets and radar systems will be searching the skies for incoming threats from the latest bogey-state of the day. The Pentagon has been searching for a third base, in central and Eastern Europe, since late 2003. Candidates include Poland, Czech Republic or Hungary.

If Poland is chosen, then the man on the Polish side responsible for dealing with the Pentagon is the new Defense Minister, Radek Sikorski. If this is the new government’s policy then Sikorski must presumably be for the policy too.

Well, late last year he was more skeptical. In December 2004, Emmanuel Evita writes at the American Enterprise Institute web site:

Sikorski said granting interceptor host rights to the United States amounts to "ceding territory (for one country) to launch violence against another country to affect its strategic calculus." Anything less than a generous package -- which could include greater industrial and economic incentives according to Sikorski -- would be "a difficult sell in the current atmosphere of Central Europe" -- including Poland, said Sikorski. "There is a growing feeling in the region that 'We are not doing Iraq again.'"

So what’s happened since a year ago? Has the situation in Iraq got any better? Or is the 'package' getting better?

A United States’ Auschwitz?

Speculation about CIA gulags in Poland reaches new heights of absurdity …and I get quoted in the Washington Post!

Imagine my surprise when reading an article in the Post – the newspaper that originally broke the allegations - on reactions to the story in central and Eastern Europe, to see extracts from something I wrote for the radio. Washington Post journalist Jefferson Morley writes:

In Poland, Peter Gentle of Radio Polonia said the Post story came "as a bit of a shock to Poles. Most – maybe all – people I have spoke to just can’t believe a word of it. A Guantanamo Bay type prison in the middle of northern Poland? Don’t be ridiculous. "

Gentle described the evidence to support the claim of a prison in Poland as "dodgy, to say the least," adding that Poles "won’t believe that there are any [secret prisons] in Poland until physical evidence of these camps is uncovered before their very eyes."

The headline on his column evoked incredulity: "CIA Gulags--in Poland?"

Blimey!

Poles’ reaction is indeed one of disbelief, and some feel insulted that, on the back of circumstantial evidence, Poland is being accused of not just hosting secret camps, but of trying to cover up their existence.

But this hasn’t stopped the speculation in the media. Again from the Jefferson Morley article in the Post:

In Turkey, a columnist for the Yeni Safak newspaper said, "human smuggling sponsored by governments is gradually becoming a nightmare for the entire world... Are we going to cover up operations, unlawful acts, and crimes against humanity committed by the CIA or on its behalf in this country?" Ibrahim Karagul predicted the "secret torture centres" in Eastern Europe will be recorded in history as "the United States' Auschwitzs."

The Turkish writer goes on to say that he, ‘has no doubt the largest of these camps is in Poland’.

A ‘United States’ Auschwitz’ in Poland? This is an amazing claim to make, and I really think the guy who wrote that is a fool. Quite apart from the nauseating way that people, these days, over use words associated with the holocaust – and in doing so take away the unique horror of what happened during WWII – does he really think that another Auschwitz in Poland could be kept a secret? Does he know what the original Auschwitz was like?

In search of a smoking gun...

The evidence for a camp in Poland is based on one fact, and lots of ‘unnamed sources’.

A plane, en route from Guantanamo Bay to Afghanistan and back again, touched down in Szymany airstrip, northern Poland. We know this from the flight logs of a 737 Boeing thought to be one of a fleet of planes used by the CIA the purpose of moving around terror suspects.

An eyewitness – the ex-director of the airport - has said that, on September 22, 2003, she saw five men get on the plane, traveling on US passports. She also said, however, that nobody got off the plane, which was on the runway for about an hour.

We also have a TIME magazine article this week claiming that ‘counter intelligence sources’ had conformed the existence of the camps in central and Eastern Europe.

Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at the National Security Archive, a public-interest documentation center in Washington, told Democracy Now:

I think the bottom line is that the C.I.A. fears that if the names of these countries are published, the people in those countries, Eastern Europeans who have, you know, pushed away from the gulags of the past and are trying to rebuild democracies in the present, will say: ‘Hey, this is not what we want in our countries!’ And this is exactly what happened with the C.I.A. detention center in Thailand. When it was revealed the C.I.A. was running a secret center in the war on terrorism in Thailand, the Thai government said: ‘We want to be able to deny that we have such a detention center here, and you have to shut it down.’ That is what the C.I.A. is truly worried about, is losing its ability to sustain these facilities.

These claims are also backed up by the TIME article I referred to earlier.

Maybe the best bit of evidence comes from the Washington Post itself, which says that it knows which countries are involved, but has agreed with the US government not to reveal them. The media watchdog, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, has complained that this ‘self censorship’ is dangerous for press freedom in the States. "The possibility that illegal, unpopular government actions might be disrupted is not a consequence to be feared, however-it's the whole point of the First Amendment,” it says.

While it is certain that there are secret camps being used around world for keeping al.-Qaeda suspects, the evidence that they are here in Poland is circumstantial, and certainly not good enough to claim that there are modern day equivalents to Auschwitz.

In the meantime, me, the girlfriend and the dog will not be opening the door to dodgy looking Americans who say that they are ‘from Washington’.

Forward to ‘Polish capitalism’

The vote of confidence in parliament Thursday means that Poland finally has a government. But for how long?

It was no surprise, really. Two hundred and seventy two deputies voted for the Law and Justice (PiS) led government – including lawmakers from League of Polish Families and SelfDefence, and 187 voted against, including ex-communists SLD and the largest opposition party, the free market Civic Platform.

This gives the government, headed by PM Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, the go ahead for their slightly vague program. Details include; trying to forge closer links between the US and the EU; no privatizations of key state industries such as the postal service, public television and radio, banking and energy; a simplified (but not flat) tax system, the end of capital gains tax on stock market earnings, and a 30 billion zloty (8.75 billion dollars) ceiling on the budget deficit.

But what to call this new arrangment?

"We are going to develop these companies to create a Polish brand name and Polish capitalism," Marcinkiewicz said after the vote last night.

Polish capitalism? Throw in some of PiS’s more socially authoritarian policies and what you get is a Polish conservative-socialism!

PiS are presenting all this as a pragmatic agenda and not an ‘ideological’ one. This is wise as it gives them more room to change their program as external political realities dictate.

The support achieved by PiS in parliament in the vote of confidence from smaller, more extreme populist parties is provisional. Roman Giertych, head of the far-right League of Polish Families gave PiS a warning that they could not expect his party to just vote for everything that comes their way: "We won't give this government another chance if it departs from what has been announced in the policy statement," he said.

In an attempt to stabilize the situation, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, head of the parliamentary wing of PiS, said yesterday that he did not rule out a more formal arrangement for a coalition government with the farmers union, SelfDefence.