Government purges diplomatic corp.
The new PiS government has called back to Warsaw 10 ambassadors with alleged links to the old communist regime. Diplomats from Algeria, Argentina, Britain, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Israel, Lithuania and Slovenia have all been recalled in a purge of those “linked to communist-era special services or to the communist party", a Foreign Ministry spokesman told AP today.
One of those who have ‘lost credibility as representatives of Poland’, according to the Foreign Ministry, is the Polish Ambassador in London, Zbigniew Matuszewski (pictured above), who entered the Polish diplomatic service in 1980, the same year as the Solidarity trade union was founded.
But his career decision was not as a consequence of reading Marx and Engels, apparently. He was merely “one of a group of relatively young diplomats who were professionally, not politically, motivated,” he told the Diplomatic Information Group.
The move comes only weeks after the PiS government had a clear out of the top level of the secret services.
PiS stood on a ticket of 'cleansing' Poland of what they see as corrupt ex-communists from public life.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Is this the Polish enemy within?
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5 comments:
Teraz Kurwa My!
what else can be said?
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/TKM
Teraz Kurwa My unless your name is Andrzej Mikosz, of course!
A colleague of mine put it best, when she described President Duck as a "stary komuch" (old commie), referring not to his ideology but in governing style.
Poland, you wanted 'em, now you've got 'em. Let the purges begin! After all, what better way to break from a past of political persecution and constrained liberty than by purging people from public life based on their political associations 16 years ago.
We see rounds of this nonsense after every election and after every coalition power shift. And by no means just in Poland.
A stretch in the diplomatic service is a holding position for party barons who might need to be temporarily removed from the limelight. Valuable party 'beton' get lovely postings to the US while those who have favours to pull in but need to be urgently sidelined with a good wage and staff limo, get chucked into Africa.
More painfully, incoming governments also tend to gut the civil service, whose upper ranks are stacked with malleable cronies mainly looking to line their pockets by manipulating public sector tenders.
And thus the young democracy grinds on.
I had the "pleasure" of listening to a speach by Mikosz at a reception at the Polish Embassy in London not long after his nomination.
The guy was so incompetent, could hardly say a sentence without trying to squeeze in a joke... it was humiliating that he represented Poland.
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