Remember the 100,000 World Cup East European sex slaves story?

Well, it was a load of...balls.

Remember the beatroot wrote back in May last year, just before the FIFA World Cup in Germany, that the Catholic News Service reported:

'Polish nuns, anticipating an increase in human trafficking and prostitution during the World Cup in Germany, have issued anti-prostitution leaflets in multiple languages for circulation during the competition.

"Our resources are extremely limited, but we're doing what we can," said Ursuline Sister Jolanta Olech, president of Poland's Conference of Superiors of Female Religious Orders. "We're deeply concerned at reports that men's lives are to be made nicer by importing 100,000 young women from Europe's poorest countries."

The story of the ‘100,000 sex slaves’ originated in the European Parliament (as 40,000) when the matter was raised by German Green MEP Hiltrud Breyer. The Polish nuns then added another 60,000 to the scare for good measure.

So German Greens formed an allaince with Polish nuns (and weirdly, George Bush got involved, too) against the more baser instincts of us thuggish football fan types, who like a nice eastern European sex slave after a good game of footie.

I also noted that the figure of 100,000 appeared to have been plucked out of thin air, much like a goalkeeper plucks a ball from the head of an attacking forward.

Well, Bruno Waterfield of the UK Daily Telegraph has seen a copy of the reports by the Council of the European Union - documents 5006/1/07 and 5008/7 – on the matter, which reveal the real number of the East European sex slaves imported into Germany during the World Cup. One hundred thousand? Well, Waterfield quotes from the report:

‘Of the 33 investigation cases reported to the Federal Criminal Police Office on the grounds of human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation and/or the promotion of human trafficking, and which took place at the time of the 2006 World Cup, only five cases were assumed to have a direct link to the 2006 World Cup’, concludes the report.

‘The increase in forced prostitution and human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation during the 2006 World Cup in Germany which was feared by some did not materialise’,

So not 100,000, or 40,000, but...five.

The next time you see an unholy alliance of a German Green with a Polish nun, keep your cynical hat on, won’t you. Football fans are not a bunch of sex starved Neanderthal things.

Read the rest of Bruno Waterfield’s article here.

What’s brown and sounds like a bell?

Dung!

After Zbigniew Brzeziński, called for a little bit of sense to enter into the recent spats between Poland and Germany, Polish authorities have apparently...completely ignored him! Look at this from Expatica:

Poland's coastguard has cancelled the loan to Berlin of a ship's bell recovered after the world's worst maritime disaster, the 1945 sinking of a liner carrying 9,000 German civilians, exhibition organizers confirmed Thursday.

The bell was on display at a newly opened Berlin exhibition devoted to 20th century refugee expulsions including the flight of Germans from eastern Europe. Many Poles say it is offensive to their own war dead to memorialize Germans' suffering...

Brzeziński has said that the current conflicts between the two countries are much smaller than the role the two countries could be playing on the international stage.

Good advise, me old mate. Shame nobody seems to be listening.

More?
Another Polish object withdrawn from Berlin expellee display, Radio Polonia, Aug 17

Lech Walesa beats a tin drum

Gunter Grass (pictured) admits he was in Waffen SS, Walesa is not pleased.

More nonsense from the Polish – German relations front?

Lech Walesa, Gdansk’s most famous son, thinks that Nobel Prize winner Gunter Grass, Gdansk’s other famous son (when it was known as Danzig) thinks that the author of the Tin Drum and many other works should give up his honorary citizenship of Gdansk.

The Independent writes:

Grass told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that, aged 17, he was called to the Waffen SS 10th Armoured Division, the combat arm of Hitler's paramilitary forces.
Grass, 78, said in the interview: "My silence over all these years is one of the reasons I wrote this book. It had to come out, finally."
He has written a book of recollections, which details his war service. The book is due out in September.

Walesa, also an honorary citizen of Gdansk says he feels ‘uncomfortable’ in Grass’s company.

Ruling Law and Justice member of parliament, Jacek Kurski has also called on Grass to return his honorary citizenship.

Spiegel online reports:

From the middle of 1944 until the end of the war in the spring of 1945, Grass served in the Frundsberg tank division of the elite military outfit. Previously, he had contended that he was teenage helper of an anti-aircraft unit.

Grass makes the revelations in his new autobiography, While Peeling the Onion. In it he says that he was only in the SS for around 9 months just before the end of the war and did not fire a shot.

Some in Germany are calling for his Nobel prize to be stripped. It’s not that he served in the SS – albeit not as a volunteer – that has angered the German press but that he concealed the fact for so long.

And what about other, elderly German gentlemen who got caught up in the Nazi machine in their youth? Would devout Catholic Lech Walesa object to being in the same company as...Pope Benedict?

President Kaczynski runs for cover...updated

...and calls off Weimar Triangle 15th anniversary celebrations after suffering mysterious illness.

‘The Weimar what?’, I hear you cry. It’s an informal alliance first formed between France, Germany and Poland back in 1991. It’s really a series of summits where leaders sit around and talk about stuff.

The celebrations for this ‘triangle’ were complete in the town of Weimar, where the first talking shop took place. And then, with French and German bags packed and ready to go, President Kaczynski, right at the last moment, says he can't come! ‘Due to an illness’ the presidential palace announced but without filling in the details.

And then it emerges that the president has an extreme case of Belwederska Belly, which he picked up at the weekend.

Still, cynics will be cynical: this is a president who is not really into foreign affairs. He doesn’t like traveling abroad. Not really interested.

And France and Germany can’t be his favourite countries. Some Poles still haven’t got over Jacques Chirac’s remark after Poland supported the US position before the Iraq war. He said, rather patronizingly:

"It is not well-brought-up behaviour. They missed a good opportunity to keep quiet,"

So President Kaczynski might well prefer sitting on the can all day with Chirac’s Revenge than he would spending a day sitting around having to indulge in diplomacy small talk on a pleasantly sunny afternoon.

Update Tuesday morning:
The talk now surrounds an insulting article in a newspaper printed in Berlin at the weekend about the Kaczynski brothers, which many are speculating led to the presidents ‘diplomatic illness’.

The article does seem rather childish: it refers to the diminutive height of the two twins, calls them ‘a couple of potatoes’ and says something nasty about their mother.

Now here’s the weird bit: the article was put, in full, onto the Polish Foreign Minsitry web site! The person that did that was the director of the web site, Pawel Dobrawolski, someone who has long experience as foreign spokesman for the various right wing governments here – and someone I have spoken to many times and is a very nice, helpful guy.

Dobrawolski has now been given the sack.

But did the German ‘potatoes’ give President Kaczynski his ‘bad stomach’?

The plot thickens.

Don’t mention the war!

Polish defense minister likens Russian-German gas deal to Hitler-Stalin pact. Germans not pleased. Tanks invade Sudetenland.

Basil Fawlty once memorably warned his staff when he had a hotel full of German guests: “Don’t mention the war! I did once, but I think we got away with it.”

Last Sunday, Poland’s defense minister, the otherwise un-Fawlty-like Radek Sikorski, mentioned the war in connection with the planned gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, by-passing Poland.

But he didn’t get away with it.

Reacting to the news that a deal had been finalized to build a new gas pipeline that will supply Russian gas to western Europe, but will exclude Poland, thereby threatening the nation’s energy security, Sikorski said:

“Poland has a particular sensitivity to corridors and deals above our head. That was the Locarno tradition, that was the Molotov- Ribbentrop tradition. That was the 20th century. We don't want any repetition of that."

Ooops! The Germans and the EU – already a bit nervous about some of the weirder statements coming out of Warsaw these days – aren’t too pleased. Expactica reports:

‘Ruprecht Polenz, a senior member of Chancellor Merkel's Christian Democrats hit back telling Germany's daily Bild: "Such absurd comparisons are damaging to German-Polish relations."

In the meantime, Hans-Ulrich Klose, a leading member of the Social Democrats, which have forged a coalition with the CDU to form Germany's national government also lashed out at the remarks made by Sikorski.

Klose said Sikorski should reconsider his remarks and then withdraw them as quickly as possible.

Echoing the comments by German politicians, the European Commission's chief spokesman Johannes Laitenberger described Sikorski's comments as neither "helpful nor proportionate" adding that Brussels was seeking to address concerns about the pipeline.’

So what’s Radek Sikorski's next move to be? Maybe he can do one of Basil’s silly walks?


More?
Cheney: Russia is blackmailing Europe, Mail and Guardian, May 4