The lustracja document I have signed...

...must be given back to me.

That is the judgment of the Consititutional Tribunal. It is unconstitutional to archive it anywhere.

Waiting....

Fiasco! Polish Lustration Law – not constitutional

Key parts (at least half) of the articles in the Lustration Law – an issue that has been tearing Poland apart - breaks the Polish Constitution.

That’s the verdict of three days of deliberations and argument by the Constitutional Tribunal.

The government’s flag ship policy is in an ugly mess.

I have just been watching - along with millions of Poles - the verdict by the very formal looking tribunal, read out by two judges, one with a black hat on. This was serious stuff. Their verdicts took one hour 15 minutes to read out.

“Governments are not above the constitution”, said the judge. “If they are then that is the way of a dictatorship…The law should not be retroactive….There must be a guarantee of a legal defense [which there is not, at the moment]…the aim of lustration should not be revenge.”

This is a damning verdict against the government.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski has already pre-empted such a verdict by insinuating that the Constitutional Tribunal is itself full of commies…but then he would, wouldn’t he?

Here are the main bits of the verdict

* The lack of a right to appeal a decision in the Supreme Court is unconstitutional.

* Lustration of journalists is not constitutional.

* Lustration of rectors of universities is not constitutional.

* Lustration of scientists working in private research labs [?] is not constitutional.

* Lustration of heads of publishing houses is not constitutional.

*The public listing of previous secret service operatives is not constitutional.

*The current lack of access to files by anyone lustrated is unconstitutional.

*Lustration of heads of stock listed companies [??] is unconstitutional.

*Lustration of debt collectors [???] is not constitutional.

* Even the layout of the form that people have to fill in saying that they never collaborated with secret services is not constitutional.

* The tribunal also ruled that proof of collaboration with communist authorities must include, not only evidence that the subject agreed to collaborate – as it is in the present law – but that there must be evidence of actual collaboration. So the burden of proof now weighs much more heavily with the accusers: the government.

The Lustration Law is in tatters

The new Lustration Law, which came into force in March, requires hundreds of thousands of people in media, law, etc, to fill in a form declaring they have never collaborated with any secret services which spied on Poles during communist times.

This includes foreigners such as myself, a journalist. This was unconstitutional. I am extremely pissed off.

The law – which is a widening of the net of two previous laws – has created an atmosphere of suspicion, and for many people, fear.

I wasn’t scared, I just thought the whole thing was ludicrous. It’s good to know that the Constitutional Tribunal agrees.

Lustration worse than Stalinism?

At least under Stalinism it was Moscow persecuting Poles. Now it has been Poles persecuting Poles.

That’s an argument I heard on the television today. And you can see what they mean. Instead of trying to unite Poles around some common sentiment – a true solidarity – they pick over the scabs of the past. And the puss weeps out. A fractured society gets more fractured still.

What’s worst of all is that the Institute of National Remembrance is not required by law to share whatever information they have about someone. They make a decision based on what is in old, dusty files from many, many years ago, and that seems to be that. Everything is done behind closed doors. In secret. No transparency whatsoever.

Sounds familiar of another, even darker age?

The best solution is to open the files to everyone - a suggestion that the government has itself made if the verdict went against them - and let’s see what is inside. Then the court of public opinion can decide who is guilty, and who is not.

What a strange country, with a sad past that twitches like a corpse, refusing to recognize that it's over. Finished.

Sign the Geremek petition

Update, May 3: The much respected and award winning British blogger, Clive Matthews, aka Nosemonkey, at the Europhobia blog joins the Geremek campaign.

Update: British historian Norman Davies (who has been sent a lustration questionnaire!!!) in an interview with the Daily Telegraph on the new law: "This is either going to end in farce or coercion, and that would be the step from democracy to authoritarian rule. Academics and journalists are in the firing line. This is nothing to do with winkling out collaborators. This is about showing loyalty to the Kaczynskis."

A Polish European member of parliament (MEP) is in danger of losing his seat. In danger, that is, not from the European Parliament, or the voters that put him there in the first place, but from the Polish government. This is not democracy as we know it in Europe.

Bronislaw Geremek was one of the leaders of Solidarity through the 1980s. Later he served in several governments after 1989, and eventually was elected by Poles as a Member of the European Parliament.

After the latest ‘Lustration Law’ came into force earlier this year – which forces every public person to sign a declaration saying that they had not consciously collaborated with the communist secret services – Geremek has refused to sign.

He has signed similar declarations three times before, but being asked to do so for a forth time is, for him, ‘humiliating’.

The Polish government has decided that if he does not sign then they can dismiss him as an MEP.

But as EJP reports:

The European parliament has supported Polish MEP Bronislaw Geremek over his refusal to comply with a new Polish national law to weed out communist-era secret police informers.

Poland’s electoral commission has announced that Geremek was disqualified from being an MEP after he refused to submit a declaration saying that he had not cooperated with communist-era services.

Bronislaw Geremek "is a political personality of the highest esteem who has always stood up for democracy in his country and for European unification," said Parliament president Hans-Gert Poettering, Thursday in Strasbourg.

"We will examine all legal possibilities that he can continue his work," he added.
Five groups of the parliament – the centre-right, socialist, liberal, green and extreme-left- have pledged to defend Geremek against attempts to strip him of his mandate.

The interference by Warsaw into affairs that are between the elected MEP and his voters contravenes the usual standards of democracy. Aside from whether you think that he should sign the vetting document, or not, the principle of an elected official being answerable to the people who elected him is a vital one and must be respected by the Polish government.

There is a petition in support of Bronislaw Geremek. It says:

We, European citizens, are deeply concerned by the principles of democracy and human rights and give our full support to Mr. Bronislaw Geremek. The Polish law of lustration, which threatens him of dismissal from his mandate of Member of European Parliament, directly breaks the rules and values to which Poland solemnly adhered, while becoming a Member State of the European Union.
We firmly urge for the Polish law of lustration to be repealed. Otherwise, we ask our European governments to consider the application of all the provisions of article 7 of the Treaty.

Please show your support for democracy by signing the petition here.

More?
bloggers for Bronislaw, foe
Euro Parliament discussion of mandate of Polish MEP Bronisław Geremek

p.s. Milan Kundera signed it!

A week is a long time in Polish politics

It was the old British prime minister, Harold Wilson, who said ‘A week is a long time in politics’: he should have come to Poland.

It’s all been going off here.

Police raided the house of ex-construction minister in the previous SLD government, Barbara Blida, investigating allegations she had been involved in corruption when allocating building contracts. Blida went to the toilet, accompanied by a female police officer, when, somehow, she put a hand in a drawer in the bathroom, pulled out a gun and shot herself dead through the chest.

What had she been up to as minister of construction in that sleaze ridden, ex-communist government? How was she allowed to get hold of a gun when under police supervision? What was a gun doing in her bathroom in the first place?

Jurek and church

Only a few days ago, Marek Jurek announced, with a flourish, that he was resigning the powerful position of Speaker of Parliament, leaving the government and leaving the ruling Law and Justice party (see previous post)to set up his own party – the Polish Right.

Quite apart from the fact that Jurek’s Polish Right would not be ‘Right’ at all – it would be much the same as the current government: a conservative leftish party (a marriage made in hell) – we already have one of those nationalist-conservative grouping: the barmy League of Polish Families.

So the ‘right’ looked set to split and split again, and so split the ‘right’ vote in the process.

But now the talk is of Jurek rejoining Law and Justice. Maybe. But maybe not.

A week is a long time in the politics of Marek Jurek. But what has changed his mind and tempted him back with his old mates?

Cue – stage right – the entry of the good old Polish Catholic Church, which has been trying to mediate between Jurek and the Kaczynski government. Why? Because the church does not want further splintering of the rightwing (read ‘conservative-left) in Poland in case the real Left or secular liberals get in power.

That the Church thinks it has a role in Polish politics is a scandal. If Jurek does come back then I think quite a few Poles will vote in a way that will make the cardinals cry into their pulpits.

How to become exempt from lustration in Poland?

Become a Catholic.

I have had to go through the ‘auto-lustration’ process. Everyone who works in the media here, and born before 1972, has to sign a form saying that he, ''Is not aware or conscious of the fact that he worked for the Polish communist secret service.’

Me, a root vegetable from south London, a Polish communist spy?

I spent most of the 1980s half conscious in some university student bar near the Elephant and Castle.. So how would I know if, unaware to myself, the conscious half of my brain had been spying for the Polish communists, or any other communists, for that matter?

I signed this nonsense. I would have gotten in trouble, and my boss would have gotten in bigger trouble, if I had not. So I did.

But it appears that employees of anything to do with the Polish Catholic Church are exempt from the lustration process, because of the Concordat signed between the Vatican and the Polish state.

So the government thinks that I am a greater potential threat to Poland than some Polish Catholic university lecturer.

A week is not just a long time in Polish politics, it's a very weird week, as well.

Bush asked to come to Poland

The Polish government must be desperate.

So contentious is the planting of US anti-missile systems in Poland that the government has asked George W. Bush to come to Warsaw in the summer and sell the idea to the electorate.

That Bush can be seen in the eyes of the Kaczynski’s as an asset in winning any battles shows that they are a little detached from political reality.

But no matter – the government has its own way to hold together its support in the country – hounding out a communists and ‘collaborators’ left in the secret services, media etc, always does the trick.

While a majority of Poles are against the idea of having an anti-missile base here, around 60% support the government’s attempt to finish off the Solidarity revolution by kicking the old guard out of the public services.

So at a time when the Kaczynski administration is fraying at the edges, with bits falling off it from resignations, etc, and when no real progress is being made at making the public services more cost efficient for the poor bastards that have to pay for it, a bit of commie bashing always comes in useful.

But will Bush come in useful as an anti-missile base traveling salesman? That’s…er...a tricky one…

More?
According To Polish Prime Minister Democracy Is Not Functioning In Full, Polish Outlook

‘Communists still a grave threat’?

That’s the headline of an article by Eric Margolis in the Canadian Sun.

“Once again, the dauntless Poles show us the way”, says the piece, which goes on to recount the recent and on-going ‘Red Priest’ scandal and the continued digging by the government into some Poles pre-1989 records, looking for evidence of communist collaboration.

Margolis writes:

A few years after Poland's liberation from communist rule, I met with its deputy minister of defence. He suggested a stroll in a park, "because here in my office, there are many listeners."

I asked if communists still posed a threat. He whispered: "They are gone, but they are still here."

That just about sums up the Polish government’s position today. Last week brought more collaboration stories – as every week seems to, these days - one involving a former aid to Lech Walesa, and another about a popular TV historian, who was spying for the Commies in London during the 1980s, allegedly.

The Canadian article mentions some famous collaborators, in France and even the Roosevelt’s Whitehouse. But there is little evidence to back up the article’s headline: ‘Communists still a threat’.

A threat? Where? To who?

The Law and Justice government would claim that since 1989 ex-communists, turned capitalists, allied to their economic liberal friends (isn’t Poland complicated?) have carved up much of the economy for their own benefit.

But does that constitute a ‘present danger’, as Margolis seems to claim? Does he mean a ‘danger’ like in the old days? To the West?

Or is he expecting Polish priests, political aides and historians to drive tanks into the middle of Prague, at any minute?

‘Red Priest’ resigns, but the Church fights back

Appointed by Pope Benedict on December 6 as Archbishop of Warsaw, Stanislaw Wielgus resigns just before special ‘ingress’ ceremony this morning.

Watching on TV now it looks like a wedding where all the guests turn up only to discover it’s a funeral. President Lech Kaczynski is sitting in his pew with the wife. The whole of Poland’s political and religious establishment is there.

It’s like some sick reality TV show. Big Brother at prayer.

Archbishop Wielgus, thought proven to have been spying for the communist authorities over a period of 20 years, is there, humiliated. After all, only on Friday he made a statement saying: "I damaged the church. I denied the facts of this collaberation."

This contradicts previous statements he has made before denying any collaberation with the Communists.

Case closed then, surly?

But when the resignation was read out in the Cathedral this morning most of the congregation started shouting and chanting in protest. I have never seen anger in a Church before.

Then top Polish Catholic, Cardinal Glemp stands up to say a few words. But if the government – which will be defined in the history books for its relentless, ruthless vetting of public officials for collaboration with the communist regime – thought Glemp would be making some kind of apologetic statement on behalf of Wielgus, were in for a bit of a shock.

Cardinal Glemp said that ‘Today we have seen a ‘court’ where the evidence against amounts to Xerox copies of copies of copies of old documents. The case for the defense has not been put. We do not want this type of court.’

When he said these words applause rang throughout the cathedral. It seems that the Polish Church thinks that Wielgus – who admitted lying on Friday after a month long hounding by the media, by historians, by the government – thinks that he has been the victim of a witch hunt. Glemp seems to think that the government’s vetting process in this case has not been fair. Much of his flock appears to agree with him.

Someone in the Church shouts out ‘Stay with us…’

What looked to be the end of the matter seems to be only the start. Some in the Church now have joined a growing number who think that the 'vetting culture' here has turned into a frenzy of recrimination, of revenge, where innocent victims get caught up in the craziness (though as has been pointed out in the comments below, the irony is that Radio Maryja listeners - who have done as much to create this culture of revenge as anyone - are complaining the loudest. They are saying that the incriminating documents were leaked by someone who was in the communist secret services trying to screw the catholic Church..).

Revenge is the motive for much of what is happening today - not justice. I have seen at close hand a completely innocent person get caught up in this, accused of collaboration, of being ‘a Red’. It’s not pretty, it’s not fair, it’s not civilized, it’s not justice.

Sick, old Cardinal Glemp himself will now stay on in the role of Archbishop of Warsaw until they can find someone else who has no skeletons – real or imagined – in his closet.

Crowds are standing in the rain outside the Cathedral, chanting, protesting. Strange times in Poland get stranger still.