Good work, that, although the PressEurop editors did somehow miss within that Rzeczpospolita piece the credit that journal was willing to give to its arch-rival Gazeta Wyborcza for actually getting the scoop, in the form of this article which appeared the day before the Rzecz report. Also, Zbigniew Siemiątkowski was not “head of intelligence” but rather Minister of the Interior; and there is another ex-Minister of the Interior who is under investigation in this connection as well, one Krzysztof Janik.

In any event, the combined reporting from Poland’s two most-respected national dailies provides a fascinating glimpse into a story with explosive potential that still is being treated as a Top Secret matter by the prosecutorial authorities involved. As the Gazeta piece reminds us, the first indication the world had that something funny was going on in Europe was the reporting in the Washington Post of early 2005 that alleged the existence of CIA-run “black site” prison facilities in European countries. The Council of Europe then took that as a cue to investigate on its own, and soon concluded that such installations were in place in Romania, Lithuania, and Poland. When questioned at the time, Polish authorities were noticeably unhelpful, eventually admitting only that yes, there was an airport in the northeastern Polish wilderness that the government had made available for CIA flights.

Unfortunately, the Poland-based Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (actually known as Helsińska Fundacja Praw Człowieka) recently released a document it had (somehow) procured from the Polish office of Border Security showing that the CIA flights to and from that airfield in 2002 and 2003 had departed with a total of at least 20 fewer passengers than they came with, i.e. there had to be some sort of holding facility there. Perhaps a luxury hotel? Not a chance; it was a prison facility which Polish officials at the very highest levels (thus President Kwaśniewski and Premier Miller) had approved for CIA use from December 2002 to September 2003. And then, strangely enough, after the Americans left the Ministry of Interior carried out a thorough cleaning and refurbishment of the installation.

The trouble these gentlemen are in, in the first instance, involves the questionable approval they provided for this CIA facility and the associated air access, which in several respects seems to have violated ordinary norms of Polish sovereignty, i.e. the control any nation is routinely supposed to have over the use of its airspace, as well as which people are deprived of their freedom at installations upon its territory and why – oh, and how those people are treated within those installations as well, for in other contexts there have been clear revelations of actual CIA torture of terrorism suspects carried out during this period at other such “black sites.” So the charges against these top officials could conceivably extend to enabling the practice of torture on Polish sovereign territory as well.

But Did They Know?

Well, that’s if it can be shown that they knew what was going on there. Remarkably, ex-President Kwaśniewski was actually willing to speak to the Gazeta reporters about this affair, after first admitting that he has not even (yet) been called in for questioning by the investigators. Then: “There was cooperation with American intelligence [authorities]. That’s how you had those CIA flights to Szyman [airport's location]. There wasn’t any prison.”

Gazeta: “Within the framework of that cooperation could Poland have given the Americans permission for a prison and torture?”

Kwaśniewski: “The Americans never asked us for any such permission.”

Gazeta: “Maybe they did it without our permission?”

Kwaśniewski: “I don’t have any information about the Americans torturing prisoners in Poland.”

Ex-Interior Minister Janik also spoke a bit to the Gazeta reporters, expressing his view that, whatever may or may not have happened at any prison that may or may not have existed, he actually doubted that Kwaśniewski or Miller would have known about it.

Again, for all the caginess of their comments (after all, Kwaśniewski denies the existence of a prison which does seem to have been there), these gentlemen were actually being quite cordial with their comments, inasmuch as the Polish prosecutors are refusing all comment since this is still supposed to be a Top Secret matter – understandable, since such serious charges, lodged against such prominent men in Polish politics, must be brought before the parliament itself (the Sejm) and approved there for prosecution before the State Tribunal.

In all, though, this raises the prospect of rather hopeful (if unexpected) further news to come out of Poland soon – namely of high political officials responsible for torture actually facing prosecution for their actions! What a concept! Admittedly, there has also been further progress along this line in Britain, what with the renewed inquiries into that country’s cooperation with the American “War on Terror” occurring with the advent of the new coalition government. Just no hint of anything similar coming along from the wellspring of the “enhanced interrogation” concept, the USA. How long can that situation last once the Obama administration sees foreign officials going to jail for acts that American officials ultimately ordered but that his Justice Department refuses to prosecute?

Postscript: I thought I would offer my readers the following embedded video for their consideration as an addendum to this post. I ran across it during my research, and it’s just over four minutes of a Gazeta Wyborcza reporter, Ewa Siedlecka, explaining to the TV camera what is known so far in this CIA prison matter. Yes, it’s all in Polish, with no sort of translation of any kind. Still, I found it irresistible (yes it’s true, I can understand it) and even historical in a way, to watch such a sober report about a Polish prison and especially the torture that was feared to have gone on there: noise, deprivation of sleep, with licensed physicians standing by to ensure that the abuse would take the prisoner up to the edge of death, but not over – it’s all there, and one can assume that it has a shocking effect on any Polish citizen that might have run across it. (Please pardon the juvenile 15-second cookie commercial you’ll have to put up with at the beginning to be able to see the rest of the clip. Cookies, torture: then again, Central Europe has always been drenched in irony . . . and the additional page-view you provide presumably ultimately redounds to the benefit of the Gazeta Wyborcza company, headed by that truly heroic and historical dissident Adam Michnik.)

                          

A pretty definitive statement, you would think. And, by the way, a resounding scoop for Gazeta, since no other on-line Polish newspaper treated Szmajdzinkski’s remarks until today, and that mostly in reaction to the splash he had made in yesterday’s interview. But unfortunately it’s not so simple as all that: Gazeta had several pieces accompanying that interview – as do other newspapers today – basically passing on a message of “don’t listen to Szmajdzinski!” from other leading Polish politicians, to include such figures as the President and Prime Minister! The situation is muddled, then, to say the least.

BOMBSHELL SAVED FOR THE END

Anyway, as to the interview itself: it’s a long one, conducted by Gazeta Wyborcza’s Pawel Wronski, and Szmajdzinski spends most of it mouthing the usual party-line about Iraq that you would expect. The Polish soldiers are only there to render assistance to the Iraqi people, who regularly express their gratitude – although he also admits to the expression of other sentiments in the form of regular bullets and mines aimed at Polish soldiers, particularly as they travel along the country’s roads. And there’s no more dispute among nations, either with the US or within the EU, as to whether there should still be forces “helping” in Iraq, Szmajdzinski also declares – after all, he points out, NATO has just approved in-country training for Iraqi police and security forces.

Towards the middle of the interview Szmajdzinski foreshadows what is to come, when he states that “Poland is a very important element [in Iraq]. Any decision we make about suddenly pulling out our forces could therefore cause a domino effect.” What’s more, he characterizes as “rather doubtful” the prospect that has been floated lately of a Arab peace-keeping force moving into the country after the January elections.

Finally, at the very end, it comes. Poland had already announced plans to “significantly reduce” its forces in Iraq after those January elections; when asked how the Americans had reacted to that, Szmajdzinski replies “calmly.” Then (prefacing his statement with moim zdaniem, or “in my opinion,” let it be noted), he firmly ties the date of complete Polish withdrawal to the end-date envisioned by UN Security Council resolution 1546 for Iraq’s status of limited political sovereignty, namely December, 2005. Two-and-a-half years occupation in Iraq is enough, he says, especially in view of the strain the mission puts on Poland’s armed forces. But note that all that may very well not mean complete Polish withdrawal from Iraq; in the minister’s view, there would still be room after December, 2005, for small numbers of staff, training personnel, observers, personnel like that. But of course these hardly count for as much as thousands of men with guns on the ground.

“SENSATIONAL!”

In his lead-in article to the interview, Wronski terms Szmajdzinski’s statements “a sensational declaration.” Admittedly, that is his own interview he is talking about; but still, those statements do set a clear deadline, and also fix that deadline according to the UN Security Council resolution and nothing else – no sort of turn of events in Iraq that might make the Polish government change its mind and keep the troops in there longer. The Americans certainly seem like they will remain in Iraq longer, Wronski notes – estimates range from five to eight years to completely secure the country, and Szmajdzinski also has a meeting coming up with US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to look forward to now. His interview is also rather “sensational” in that Szmadzinski finally breaks what has up to now been the Polish government’s policy of not setting any such deadline for withdrawal, even while repeatedly being called up to do so by opposition political parties, and indeed by some sub-elements of the ruling SLD party. All of this is spurred by the growing unpopularity among the Polish electorate of their soldiers’ presence in Iraq.

Then again, maybe it is still the Polish government’s policy to not set any such deadlines. Maybe Szmajdzinski was out on his lonesome with what he told Gazeta Wyborcza. Let’s start at the top: here (“Kwasniewski: There Is No Decision About Withdrawing Troops from Iraq”) the Polish President tells Gazeta that withdrawal might be at the end of 2005, but it might very well not be; it’s still hard to say, and what Szmajdzinski stated, says the President, is but his own opinion. (Kwasniewski happened to make this statement to the newspaper after a meeting with French President Jacques Chirac; the report doesn’t say where this occurred, but other sources on the Net say that Kwasniewski was visiting Paris.) Or take this interview with Polish premier Marek Belka – he’s Szmajdzinski’s immediate boss, you know – in the other leading national Polish newspaper, Rzeczpospolita. The title of the interview is “We Will Stay in Iraq”; in it, Belka characterizes Szmajdzinski’s statements as “not the position of the government.” Revealingly, he even calls his defense minister an “optimist” for thinking that things will look so peachy in Iraq by December, 2005, that it will even be possible for Polish troops to leave by then. And then there is Polish Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz – he’s Szmajdzinski’s colleague, you know, and they are really supposed to work closely together. But here Cimoszewicz characterizes Szmajdzinski’s statements to Gazeta as blad natury warsztatowej (my translation: “a workman-like mistake”). Otherwise, he is content to counter reporters’ various questions (like: Didn’t such statements harm Poland’s relations with the United States?) by simply repeating Prime Minister Belka’s assertion that what Szmajdzinski said was not approved by him.

A MESSY LOSS OF CREDIBILITY

Topping it all off, we have a brief commentary piece from Igor Janke in today’s Rzeczpospolita (Credibility is Necessary). Janke notes that everyone else in the government was surprised and even dismayed by Szmajdzinski’s setting of that December, 2005 deadline: yes, we’ve already discussed the President on down, but it seems that top Polish generals also knew nothing of what their civilian boss was talking about. One other small thing is that the US government did not know ahead of time what Szmajdzinski would be saying, and indeed only learned of it by reading the proverbial newspapers. What got into the Defense Minister’s head? According to Janke, he was probably just trying some political trick, trying to make the right noises to strengthen the position of his party, the SLD, and of himself within it too, if possible. After all, the strong undercurrent to this entire story is that a majority of the Polish people want out of Iraq, immediately; that’s some strong political pressure that it may not be possible to withstand indefinitely. In the meantime, though, Janke concludes by pointing out the uncomfortable but obvious: the credibility of the Polish government has taken a big hit in this affair.

                          

Yes, that’s right: for the very first time these yearly ceremonies experienced the presence of the head of government of the state (or rather, of course, the successor to the state) that was responsible for making the Uprising “necessary” in the first place and the bloody tragedy that it was. (18,000 Polish soldiers and 250,000 civilians killed – although, necessarily, the distinction between these two categories was often quite indistinct – and 17,000 German soldiers killed, Warsaw 85% destroyed during the fighting and the retribution afterwards.) For those who follow this sort of thing at all, the mind immediately associates this with another German “first” of earlier this year, namely Schröder’s presence at the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Given a second thought, however, it’s clear how that was rather different; the Germans in France were also occupiers, but of a somewhat different nature than they were in Poland. As Slavs, Poles were in the Nazi race hierarchy rather more “sub-human,” and thus Poland as a land could be raped more thoroughly during its occupation. (Its far-removed location from any Western European observers also made it a handy location for the extermination camps.) That in turn accounts for the desperation and viciousness of the Uprising and its suppression by German forces. Something that bloody and nasty you just don’t get over very easily, at least not as long as people who experience it directly still survive.

SCHRÖDER IS APPROPRIATELY CONTRITE

But we’ll get more into comparative-historical considerations below. There are first more pedestrian elements to note from that ceremony last Sunday. We take as our reporting text the account in the German business newspaper Handelsblatt (Schröder Acknowledges German Guilt – free registration required). And Schröder did indeed acknowledge German guilt: “We bow today in shame for the crimes of the Nazi troops. In this place of Polish pride and German shame we hope for reconciliation and peace.” At 5:00 PM sirens sounded all over Warsaw to commemorate the exact time the Polish Home Army had set for launching the uprising, and shortly afterwards Schröder laid a wreath at the monument to the Uprising, standing silently for minutes with head bowed. Then he headed off for a walking-tour of Warsaw’s Old City with Polish president Kwasniewski – the true Old City was completely destroyed, of course, and has had to be rebuilt according to old blueprints – where he was warmly applauded by spectators.

Those who are really into the history of Polish-German relations might also be spurred by last Sunday’s ceremony to recall the visit to Warsaw 34 years ago, in 1970, by then-German Chancellor Willy Brandt, preparatory to the signing of a treaty between West Germany and Poland easing the relations between those two states, an element of Brandt’s famous Ostpolitik. That was the first post-war visit ever to Poland by the West German Bundeskanzler; naturally, Brandt also visited the memorial to the Warsaw Uprising, where he famously fell to his knees in contrition. That was a touching moment, but Brandt was certainly not there to participate in any commemoration of the event with his Polish hosts.

(No, having the “head German” present at any such ceremonies as near to the actual occasion of the Uprising as a mere 26 years later would have been obscene in the eyes of all Poles. But it’s also true that the Uprising’s anniversary was not such a big occasion in Communist Poland, mainly because the event also reflected badly on the Soviet Union, whose armies were merely on the other side of the Vistula river during the entire uprising but refused to undertake parallel offensive operations in its support. That is really why this event occupies such a central place in Polish historiography, as it is a glaring instance of how the Polish nation was abused not only by the Germans – but fought back against them – but also by the Russians. And it also shows why the first-time presence at the yearly ceremony of the German Bundeskanzler is so very significant.)

NO GOVERNMENTAL SUPPORT FOR GERMAN LAND CLAIMS

Schröder also could make concessions of a practical nature that Brandt was unable to make back in 1970. And this touches on earlier EuroSavant coverage, in which we noted that the German government’s renunciation of any claim to land taken from Germany in the wake of WWII did not apply to private attempts by Germans to reclaim lost properties on the other side of the Oder river, and that, indeed, foundations had sprung up in Germany (notably the Preußische Treuhand) ready to go to court for German citizens to try to press these claims. In return, Polish figures like Lech Kaczynski, mayor of Warsaw, were ready to present the German government the bill for the destruction of Warsaw.

It was all threatening to get quite messy. But Gerhard Schröder thankfully used last Sunday’s occasion to straighten things out, declaring that the German government would refuse to support any such claims. “We Germans know very well who started the war and who were its first victims. Accordingly, there should be no more room for restitution claims from Germany, which turn history on its head.” It’s just as well that he said this since, as reported today in the Polish paper Rzeczpospolita (Ten Court-Cases for the Fall), the German organizations intend to go ahead anyway, appealing their cases to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. And, as we noted in that previous coverage of the Preußische Treuhand’s activities, if German claimants can’t sue the Poles for compensation for land seized, they might try to sue the German government; apparently now the German government is willing to take that risk.

RELATIONS ETERNALLY TENSE?

So much for reporting on this visit and the ceremony. For an examination of current Polish-German relations in general, we take as our text Gunter Hoffmann’s analysis in Die Zeit (Tense For All Eternity?), although it clearly was written in anticipation Schröder’s visit and not afterwards. Hofmann lays it all on the line in the very lead-in to his article: “Our relations with Poland are becoming more difficult. Warsaw is still searching for its place in the EU. The Germans don’t accept Poland as an equal partner.”

The list of recent annoyances in Polish-German relations is indeed long. For Polish “transgressions” there is the Polish stubborness about retaining vote-weightings for the Council of Europe from the Nice Treaty (expressed in Poland even as “Nice or Death!”) which did much to torpedo last December’s summit in Brussels that was supposed to approve the draft European Constitution. And then there is Iraq: not only did Poland’s then-premier Leszek Miller sign the infamous “Letter of Eight” back in the spring of 2003 that supported the aggressive American policy towards Iraq (and he did so without even any courtesy advance-notice to the German Chancellor), but of course Poland actually sent troops to fight in the invasion, and has been heavily involved since in the occupation, commanding its own occupation sector. On the German side there is of course the matter of those property claims sponsored by the likes of the Preußische Treuhand, as well as the activities of the German “League of the Expelled” (here’s the past EuroSavant coverage of this), which has been trying to get a “Center Against Expulsions” established in Berlin as a sort of museum to commemorate the sufferings of Germans driven out of Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc. at the end of World War II. As I explain in that previous €S coverage, the Czechs and especially the Poles are dead-set against this idea, seeing it as setting the perpetrators and the true victims of World War II Nazi aggression on an equal footing. It was that same “League of the Expelled” which actually organized its own commemoration ceremony for the Warsaw Uprising in Berlin last July 19 – a gesture that only made the Poles madder, along the lines of “Who are they to be doing any sort of commemoration of our national trauma?” Then of course there is the current intra-EU issue of comparative rates of corporate taxation within the different EU member-states, with Germany (and France) on the offensive against those with much-lower rates than theirs – mostly the new Eastern European members, including Poland – under the battle-cry “tax-dumping!” (Here’s the EuroSavant coverage of that.)

“TOO EARLY” TO WARSAW

Perhaps is was fitting in 2004 for the German Chancellor finally to take part in D-Day ceremonies, but, Hofmann asks, was it still not rather too early for the German head of government to be involved in commemorating the Warsaw Uprising? French President Jacques Chirac had termed his invitation for Schröder to come to Normandy a sign that the “post-war period [was] definitively at an end,” but no one pretends that Schröder’s presence in Warsaw means the same thing. Much more patience is needed there, on the Polish side if not the German, for Hofmann notes the asymmetrical flow of history in such matters as these (i.e. massacres and the like), that is, that it always goes rather more slowly for the victims than for the perpetrators, who of course ultimately would rather get their misdeeds behind them into historical oblivion as quickly as possible.

In sum, it seems this trip by the Bundeskanzler to Warsaw was a very ticklish affair indeed, quite unlike last June’s celebrations on the Normandy beaches where it was clear that, at long last, by-gones could be by-gones. Rather, President Kwasnieski’s invitation, and Bundeskanzler Schröder’s acceptance to attend, were gestures of very heavy symbolic importance performed within a strained environment of worsening relations between two states whose heavily-freighted history you could assume doesn’t allow them to have truly bad relations anymore, especially now that they sit at the same table in the European Union and in NATO. Yet they are worsening, even in the opinion of former Polish foreign minister (and Warsaw Uprising survivor) Wladislaw Bartoszewski, who in response to the commemoration ceremony of the “League of the Expelled” declared “Either you are for rapprochement or you are for it only on occasion,” and that “We don’t need any liars or hypocrites, either in our country or in neighboring countries.”

Ultimately, in Hofmann’s estimation, the problem is not that growing list of incidents and bones-to-pick between the two countries, but essentially the Germans’ continual refusal to treat Poland as an equal country. Contrition before a Polish audience in Warsaw from the Bundeskanzler is fine for a start; but Germany still has a way to go to erase an antagonism from Poland that goes back decades, and reining in the German land-claimants even more decisively would be a good place to start.

                          

Spanish troops now make up the third-largest national contingent in the Polish-assigned sector in southern Iraq – once thought to be a quiet backwater since the area is dominated by Shiites, but now containing some hot spots indeed, like Najaf and Karbala. (So reports Gazeta Wyborcza, without naming contingents numbers 1 and 2 – I’m guessing that those are the American and Polish troops, respectively.) So how do the Polish authorities feel about the Spanish action? Let’s take a look at their national press.

SURPRISE! WE’RE OUTA HERE!

Rzeczpospolita contributes to the coverage with a timely interview with Polish Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski – if you can call it that, since it consists of just one question, but it’s a good one: “Did the decision of the Spanish premier to withdraw soldiers from Iraq as soon as possible surprise the Polish government?” The essence of Szmajdzinski’s answer is “Yes.” The Polish government was still counting on that “fig leaf,” meaning that it expected the Spanish decision whether to really withdraw or not to come rather later, namely after two or three months, and what’s more was really counting on an appropriate new Security Council resolution to come along in time to save the day. The Americans and British were both working towards that, Szmajdzinski asserts. Despite the Spanish decision, that resolution might still come along, and in the interview the Polish Defense Minister expresses his hope that its passage will spur other countries to step forward and contribute (more) troops to Iraq occupation duty to fill in the gap left by the Spanish.

General Mieczyslaw Bieniek, commander of the Polish sector, is there on the scene in Iraq, face-to-face with reality on the ground, and so – thank goodness! – rather more realistic than his civilian boss about the prospect of getting any country (except perhaps the US) to contribute more troops there. Recent discussions he had with journalists at the Polish Camp Babilon on the Spanish pull-out form the core of an article in Dziennik Polski entitled Retreat of the Spanish. He admitted that the Spanish action is going to be difficult to deal with; after all, the Spanish were responsible for two out of the sector’s five provinces (namely Najaf and Kadisiya, although nowadays there is a strong American presence also, especially around Najaf city). What’s more, previous contingency planning for this withdrawal envisaged the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps being able to fill any such gap, but the recent performance of these troops as the fighting has gotten heavy has dispelled any notions that they are up to that job. Indeed, the crumbling of most of those units in the face of the Shiite rebellion lead by Mukhtada as-Sadr has created a forces gap of its own.

THE OLD “DOMINO EFFECT”

One thing is a given: that none of the countries currently stationing forces in the Polish zone intend to add more troops to make up for the loss of the Spaniards, the Poles included. So a number of re-shufflings of forces are now under consideration at Coalition headquarters for filling the gap. An article on this subject in Rzeczpospolita has General Bieniek asserting that Spain’s withdrawal will probably not pull along with it the associated troop contingents from El Salvador, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic, which altogether number an additional 1,400 soldiers – but unfortunately that has turned out to be wrong in two-out-of-three (registration required). Indeed, Gazeta Wyborcza reports that the Portuguese might withdraw, too, for what that is worth: their contingent in Iraq currently numbers only 128 gendarmes – i.e. mere policemen – stationed under the British in Nasariyah.

By the way, at the bottom of this article on the Spanish withdrawal in Rzeczpospolita there is a brief treatment of Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski’s appearance in Bob Woodward’s latest book, Plan of Attack. Woodward reports that Kwasniewski was assuring President Bush as early as January 14, 2003 of the participation of Polish troops in any attack on Iraq. But at the same time he inquired about what would be the further consequences of victory there, and also about the role the UN would play. Rz records Bush as giving a platitudinous answer that did not address Kwasniewski’s concerns, i.e. giving him a taste of what it’s like to be at one of the (American) President’s rarely-scheduled news conferences. But perhaps this is merely the fault of the Rz editor, who paired an inappropriate statement from the President with Kwasniewski’s question; in any event, I’ll not repeat the answer here, you can follow the link and go and read it in Polish yourself, at the bottom of the article.

                          

NO NEW ELECTIONS JUST YET, PLEASE

At least Poland is immune from the Czech threat of the Communists being elected back into power. That’s because that’s the Polish Communists there, elected into power already, in the form of the SLD party; current premier Leszek Miller himself was once a member of the old Polish Politburo. But that’s all OK, because in Poland 1) The SLD are really more like ex-Communists, since they do (by-and-large) repudiate the days of the Polish People’s Republic and have advocated policies which are squarely within the European leftist, socialist tradition, and 2) If you don’t believe that, or are still not willing to trust a bunch of ex-Commies, well, then rest assured that the SLD is definitely on its way out of power anyway. That party, which has essentially been running a minority government for a long time, was recently fatally split when about half of its representatives in the legislature broke off, under the leadership of Sejm speaker Marek Borowski, to form a new SDPL party – Socialdemokracja Polska, or “Social Democracy Poland.” As a result, Premier Miller has announced that he will resign his position the day after Poland officially enters the EU, May 2. (Still, you have no choice but to continue to trust another ex-Commie, President Aleksander Kwasniewski, who is definitely not on his way out of his office, at least to any premature schedule.)

Miller had recently been polling less than 10% when it came to the confidence of the Polish electorate. Among other things, that had made a lot of his fellow SLD party members nervous, thinking something rather wrong with such a situation, and that no doubt spurred the defections to the new SDPL. So maybe it makes sense that he should go, but then it might make even more sense to push the SLD out of the government entirely, at least until it proves once again – don’t hold your breath – that it has enough of the people’s support to be entrusted with the right to form such a government.

That means new elections, and those aren’t going to happen because President Kwasniewski has moved instead to simply replace Miller with another SLD prime minister, former finance minister Marek Belka (who these days, by the way, is an economic administrator for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq). You see, there are some disquieting indications on the Polish political landscape about who might win any such new elections, namely the Samoobrona, or “Self-Defense” party. That’s as in “self-defense” mainly for farmers; here I’m speaking here of that “notorious farmers’ party” that I mentioned up in the first paragraph, whose leader, Andrzej Lepper, has such a record of misbehaving in the Sejm. Indeed, Gazeta Wyborcza recently ran a report (Ethics Commission: Lepper Lied Again) about the fourth reprimand the Sejm’s Ethics Commission recently handed out to Lepper, for falsely accusing Speaker Marek Borowski of having purchased some stock of Bank Slaski. (Bank Slaski was privatized a few years back, being sold to the Netherlands’ ING Bank. It has remained controversial in Poland due to questions about share price manipulation.) And the other three reprimands? Two were for an infamous incident of last May 26, in which Lepper physically blocked access to the Sejm building for President Kwasniewski and smashed some windows, while the third was for falsely accusing a fellow-deputy (from the PSL, or the traditional farmer’s party) of illegal imports.

Nonetheless, it seems that the star of Lepper and his Self-Defense party is ascendant, or so at least according to a recent nationwide opinion poll, as Zycie Warszawy reports. In this poll, Samoobrona emerges as the country’s most popular party, with 28% support, as opposed to 25% for the runner-up, the centrist Platforma Obywatelska (“Civic Platform”) party, led by Jan Rokita. Lepper personally is the favored party leader among those polled, registering 26%, with Rokita next at 25%. Rczeczpospolita adds to that a discussion of Lepper’s poll rankings compared to those of President Kwasniewski (Lepper Pursues Kwasniewski). The percentage of Poles expressing confidence in their president is at an all-time low, at 68%, while those supporting Lepper have crossed the 50% barrier, to 53%. Rz also repeats the poll results showing the Samoobrona party ahead, and adds that in theoretical elections the League of Polish Families would win another 10% – that’s another ultra-right-wing political party with policies similar to those of Samoobrona, so that electoral support for the ultra-right would come in at nearly 40%.

A PLATFORM OF INCOMPETENCE AND CONFRONTATION – BUT AT LEAST A PLATFORM

What are those policies of Lepper’s party? Rzeczpospolita carries an excellent examination of Samoobrona’s party platform (Poland According to Samoobrona) – a detailed examination, with a column in red on the right side extracting many of the key passages from the text. If you think the Polish language is difficult to read, just try to read a detailed Polish economic document like this one, so I’ll just note the high points. According to Rz analyst Anita Blaszczak, this would be an economic policy mainly aimed at farmers and the unemployed. For farmers an agricultural minimum wage would be instituted, as would agricultural insurance heavily subsidized by the state. For the unemployed (actually, “those who can’t find work through no fault of their own”) there would be a minimum support payment of 733 zloty per month (which at current rates is $189 or €155). The party asserts that the “real causes” of Poland’s current economic problems (which especially feature high unemployment) are the national economic policies with regard to interest rates and the zloty, especially as conducted by the Polish Central Bank; a Samoobrona triumph would clearly precipitate as sweeping a change for those in charge of that institution as the law allows. The party would also institute import restrictions, not to mention reversing much of the privatization that has occurred in Poland (it’s platform calls that privatization “chaotic and criminal”), especially the privatization of banks.

Samoobrona was also among the few of Poland’s political parties to call for a “No” in the EU referendum of last June, and this shows in the party platform. The party would demand renegotiation of many of Poland’s terms of entry, especially those having to do with agriculture. But the treaty has been signed; those terms of entry are not up for any more discussion. What’s more, within the EU the sort of import restrictions that Lepper and his party are contemplating are not allowed. If you think the fuss within the EU a few years ago when Jörg Haider’s populist party entered into coalition in the Austrian government was nasty, you should remember that that merely had to do with politics; a Samoobrona victory will precipitate a much more nasty crisis, if the party is serious in instituting all of these EU-defying measures, since this time the argument will be over money.

Commenting at the bottom of the Rzeczpospolita article analyzing the Samoobrona platform, Halina Binczak notes that, although the platform contains some good intentions toward meeting the needs of the poor and unemployed, it mainly betrays the fact that its authors lack any concept about the fundamental workings of an economy in general, and in this era of globalization in particular. Still, at least Samoobrona has actually come out and staked out its position with such a platform; the Civic Platform hasn’t yet bothered to do so, while the SLD has, yet by its actions in government has shown that many of those in the party with positions with responsibility don’t necessarily agree with it.

CRISES ON THE HORIZON

Then there would also be a crisis of a different nature, as Samoobrona (claiming “we don’t have any argument with the Iraqi people”) has repeatedly called for the Polish troops serving on occupation duty in Iraq (indeed, commanding a sector there) to be called home. Especially with the reluctance of the new Spanish government to keep its troops in Iraq, this could be serious news for the Bush administration. As much as the Polish left (aided, it seems, by the president) are trying to stave off new elections for as long as possible, they are naturally sure to come along sooner or later; and the strength of Samoobrona as an opposition party raises the possibility of al-Qaeda terrorsts choosing once again to exercise their “vote,” by staging some sort of horrific attack within Poland to spur the electorate to reject entirely the current government, which sent troops over to fight the War in Iraq and to serve on occupation.

Still, there is some hope, as that Rzeczpospolita article on Lepper’s improving poll results points out, since the main poll was taken back before Borowski and his cohort had broken from the SLD to form their own SDPL, before Leszek Miller announced his resignation, and before President Kwasniewski intervened to propose a new administration headed by Marek Belka. Can the SDPL form an antidote to Samoobrona? Possibly; it’s too early to know. What is needed for that to happen was touched upon in an interview in Gazeta Wyborcza with the sociologist Andrzej Rychard (Failures Nurture Populism). In response to the question “What must be done so that Lepper does not win the parliamentary elections?” Rychard spoke of the need for mainstream Polish politicians to adopt more of an attitude of “safe modernization,” i.e. to be progressive but with a view to the fears of the electorate over economic uncertainty, so that that electorate can steer itself away from what he calls “unrealistic promises” (i.e. from the likes of Lepper) and take a rational approach to the country’s current problems.

What with the Madrid bombings, the recent electoral repudiation of the French government, and the continuing struggle to find a text for the European Constitution that all member-states can agree on, the EU hardly needs another crisis. But that looks like what it is likely to get, and in the largest of the ten new member states by far, if current Polish political trends do not reverse themselves.

                          

However, see this NYT article for the great Brazilian exception, where authorities – spurred by a judge’s ruling – have in turn instituted the requirement that all Americans entering Brazil be photographed and fingerprinted. And that’s all Americans – the article makes mention that even American diplomats, plus visiting US Senator Pat Roberts, were required to deliver up mugshots and prints – and a better solution is hard to imagine for the obvious problem here that the high-and-mighty setting such US policy normally get to remain blissfully unaware of the impact their decisions have on the everyday lives of ordinarily mortals. There just remains the task of getting George W. Bush to pose in an airport somewhere, which would have the collateral benefit of greatly assisting those many hundreds of thousands of anti-US-policy protesters in Western Europe whose own attempts at fashioning a Bush mugshot on the posters and placards they march with in the streets have too often been hopelessly amateurish.

Another reason resistance is less to the new mugshot-and-prints regime is that citizens from a core of 27 countries (mostly Western European) seen as low-risk and/or particularly friendly to US policy (plus Canada) are exempt. Unfortunately, it’s questionable whether the friendliness of the country and the degree of terrorist risk posed by its citizens are very much correlated; you can grasp this by recalling that that gentleman (now locked up in perpetuity) who two years ago tried to blow up a US-bound flight with explosives hidden in his tennis-shoes was a French national, as well as by reading this excellent opinion-piece on the whole issue in today’s Washington Post’s “Outlook” section. (Then there are those of you asking aloud now “What, France? A ‘friendly country’?” Sillies, for all the Franco-American policy differences of recent years, clearly from geopolitical and immigration perspectives France belongs in that camp of 27.)

But back to the new requirements for folks from what you could call the “great unwashed” parts of the world who would like to visit America, and in particular Poland. Yep, the Poles also belong to those “great unwashed,” notwithstanding things like the prompt and firm support the Polish government provided the Bush administration when it came to Iraq. The Poles are not happy with the new requirements, naturally. Surprisingly, though, a review of Polish press coverage of the matter has convinced me that this development itself barely rates “man-bites-dog” newsworthy status. Rather, the new requirements are merely the latest riff on what Poles perceive to be an ongoing insult – namely that they are required to obtain visas to visit the US at all. What’s more, George W. Bush’s announcement of this past week of proposed changes to US immigration law to grant amnesty in certain cases to illegals in the US turned out 1) To be directly relevant to the mugshot-and-photo issue, and 2) To be of much more interest to Poles. Intrigued? Just click on “More…”

Once again, on this issue Gazeta Wyborcza wins the prize for the extensiveness of its coverage; it builds a handy collection of links to its various articles on a page entitled Should We Introduce Visas for the USA?

But Americans who had been thinking about, say, savoring the Old World charm of Kraków’s Stary Rynek (“Old Market,” or the big market-square in the center of the old town) in the spring shouldn’t be alarmed. The brief article there quotes officials from the Polish Foreign Ministry as saying “No, we would be shooting ourselves in the foot; most travelers from the US to Poland are nasze Polonia,” meaning that they are those of Polish heritage visiting the “old country.”

(By the way, I don’t certainly don’t mean to be ironic with that Stary Rynek recommendation! Go check it out! But also don’t forget Wroclaw as another destination: Just as historic (or, in 20th-century terms, even more so), less tourist-overrun, and therefore cheaper, too. Also features a very nice central square for strolling and sitting at ice-cream cafés, by the way.)

A good place to start serious discussion of Polish coverage is with Gazeta’s article entitled Even the Union Won’t Help Us, meaning here “European Union,” of course. This article basically presents the laundry-list of Polish complaints about the whole US visa-regime: In addition to the new mugshot-and-prints rule, from last August each Pole aspiring to travel to the US has had to have an interview with an American consular officer; as of 2002 the whole process has cost $100, and that’s whether you’re ultimately granted the visa or not; as a result, the American federal budget profits mightily from Poles, to the tune of $15-16 million yearly, while of course Americans wishing to travel to Poland need no visas and so contribute no such fees; and, even if you do pay your $100 and get your visa, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be admitted into the country when the time arrives – the article cites several cases of Poles arriving at US airports, only to be put in handcuffs and promptly deported, because US immigration officials saw something wrong about them. (Some of you would say, “Quite right: Just because they managed to hide their terrorist connections from the consular officials doesn’t mean the airport personnel aren’t allowed to discover and pack them away.” But from our further discussion you’ll see that such handcuff-treatment need not have anything to do with being involved with “terrorists.”)

EU MEMBERSHIP NO PANACEA

With all of this, of course, I’m saving the issue identified in the article’s title for last. It seems that even Poland’s imminent membership of the European Union does not necessarily mean that Poland leaves the “great unwashed” simply by joining a multi-national confederation, most of whose members are among those exempt 27. Note the “most”: Greece is an EU member, but Greeks (or, if you prefer as G.W. Bush, “Grecians”) need visas to go to the US. That’s because, as the article notes, US law permits waiving visa requirements only to citizens of those states for which the US embassy and consulates there reject 3% or less of visa applicants. A full one-third of Polish applicants are rejected, says the article and, with the general tightening-up of the visa regime that mugshots-and-prints represents, that 33% can only be expected to go up, not down.

So many Poles are working for al-Qaeda, you might ask? Not in the least; Poles overwhelmingly have their visa applications rejected because they either have a history of extending a stay in the US illegally and/or working there without authorization, or because some consular officer simply thinks that they will. And this brings the issue of such illegal immigration into the picture – an issue that you think would have no place in discussions of terrorism and security (the supposed reasons why all this tightening-up at US airports is happening in the first place, you would think, why nice little old Paraguayan grandmothers are posing for mugshots), but which actually does.

This much we hear straight from US embassy officials in Warsaw, in the Rzeczpospolita article To the States without a Visa?. The quote from an unnamed official at that embassy: “According to mandatory regulations, it is possible to waive the visa-requirement when the number of persons illegally extending their stays in the USA as well as those who are refused a visa when presenting their documents does not exceed 3%. In Poland’s case both are even ten-times greater. Currently there therefore is no formal basis upon which to take that step.” That quote comes at the tail end of an article whose main point is that Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski is dissatisfied with the situation, and promises to put the issue on the agenda when he travels to Washington late this month to meet with President Bush. Kwasniewski himself is quoted as saying “I see no reason my the countries in the Union [i.e. presently] can have liberalized rules and we as a new country of the Union cannot.” (By the way, that summary-article I already cited from Gazeta, Should We Introduce Visas for the USA?, notes that Kwasniewski called Bush about this last Tuesday – i.e. the day after the new mugshot-and-prints regulations took effect. You want to tell me that that was a pre-planned telephone discussion? No way; rather, the wailing from his citizens was reaching the Polish president’s office already on the second day, prompting him to reach for the telephone.)

AMNESTY FOR ONE, AMNESTY FOR ALL

Which brings us to the comments reported in Gazeta Wyborcza from Marek Siwiec, head of the Polish Office of National Security, who in that capacity works under Kwasniewski and will be accompanying him to those Washington talks (Siwiec: At a Certain Moment We Will Have to React). Siwiec takes a somewhat harder line on the issue than does his president; by “we will have to react” he intends precisely to raise the prospect that Poland will impose a visa requirement on Americans in the future, if there doesn’t come to be some “imagination” applied to the whole issue and everything continues to proceed using “bureaucratic methods” instead. Siwiec also hits the following nail right on the head: “The Americans should answer the question whether ‘black work’ [i.e. illegal work in the US] which Poles accept is a threat to their national security, since that is the main reason that leads Poles to be subject to all these inconveniences.” And he places this in the context of the proposals President Bush presented last Wednesday to grant limited amnesties to illegal workers in the US; the proposals might have been aimed at illegal Mexican workers (or, more precisely, at the Latino vote for president), but hey, an illegal worker is an illegal worker; if the one is considered so useful to the American economy (rather than being some sort of terroristic threat to American security), then why can’t the other? Finally, Siwiec takes advantage of his status of not representing Poland diplomatically, not being so high as to actually represent the Polish state internationally, to make some rather frank and bitter observations about the “very difficult decisions” Poland had to make about a year ago about whether to support US policy toward Iraq, and about whether to send Polish troops there; “our evaluations [of the worth of such actions] are not always the same as that of the Americans,” he remarks, “and that also has to do with Iraq’s economic future.”

PULASKI WOULD BE SNUBBED

As if this weren’t enough, there are also a few further commentary pieces in Gazeta Wyborcza. A small one by Darius Rosati, Polish foreign minister in the early 1990s, helps explain why Poles feel so hard done-by: When Poland abolished the visa-requirement for Americans after the break from Communism (which occurred on 15 May 1991, although I got that exact date from yet another article), the Americans promised that the Polish visa-requirement for travel to America would be abolished “when Poland became a democratic country.” It’s been pretty democratic for some time now; and instead we’ve had the visa-fee set at $20 in 1994, and then $100 in 2002. (And see below for how much fun it is for Poles to visit the Warsaw embassy to get that visa.) Then we have the rather clever commentary from Piotr Stasinski: Pulaski Would Not Have Gotten a Visa. To those in need of some background, Casimir Pulaski (together with other figures such as Tadeusz Kosciuszko) was a Polish officer who came to America during the Revolution to join the Continental Army to fight for independence for the Thirteen Colonies from Great Britain. These days, Stasinski writes, Pulaski would be turned away at the embassy by the consular officer, on suspicion of wanting to go to America to engage in “black” military work.

IN FROM THE COLD?

Finally, there is the humorous tale by Lukasz Lipinski (Sojusznik na mrozie – dzien z zycia kolejkowicza, which I translate as “Ally Out in the Cold – A Day of Waiting-in-Line Existence”) of his attempts to go to the US embassy to be interviewed and get his own visa for the US. His appointment for the interview was at 13.00 hours, and he duly arrived fifteen minutes early. But his assumption that that 13.00 time had anything remotely to do with reality would turn out to be only his first naive misconception about dealing with the embassy’s consular bureaucracy. Sorry, I won’t go into too much detail here, even though it’s a shame that this is only in Polish since (just as with my remarks above about the US Senator contributing a mugshot to the Brazilian authorities) this account would work wonders in enlightening those responsible for this policy about what they are really putting people through with it. How about this: Lipinski was sharp enough to note ahead of time on the Internet that mobile telephones are not allowed in the embassy (not that all vital information on that website was kept up-to-date), so he didn’t bring his, but of course many others weren’t so enlightened. Where to put their mobiles during their visit? Obviously not in the embassy itself – they’re not allowed there. They found out that the travel agent across the street was doing a booming business in mobile telephone baby-sitting – for a fee, of course. “Long live the American spirit of entrepreneurialism!” Lipinski exults. That “Ally Out in the Cold” part of his title, by the way, refers to the fact that by far the longest portion of his visit was spent in a line that extended way out-of-doors into the winter’s cold; “next time I’ll be sure to take care of my visa when it’s summer,” he thinks to himself. But he’s still thankful for small pleasures: for example, in the section on the visa form that reads “name of clan or tribe” they allow you to answer with “does not apply.”

Accompanying Lipinski’s account is another article, Ambasada USA sie tlumaczy. Let’s see: tlumaczyc sie means “to explain oneself”; could this be “US Ambassador Explains Himself”? No such luck: The ambassador is busy with other things more in line with Bush administration policy (meaning he’s smoothing the way in Poland for wealthy Republican businessmen). Ambasada actually means “embassy,” and it’s embassy press-spokesman Dick Custin whom we have here responding to a few questions posed by reporter Wojciech Szacki. Like “Why do people waiting to apply for visas have to stand outside in the cold for so long?” “Local conditions don’t allow everybody being allowed inside. We’re working on doubling the size of the waiting-room.” “Why do we have to pay $100 for a visa. And why do we have to pay 4,44 zloties per minute just to call the embassy?” “The amount of the charges has to do with the increase in costs and inconvenience after the tragedies of September 11. It’s the same everywhere in the world. . . . The telephone charges only cover the costs of the telephone service – the American government does not profit from them.”

                          

Fortunately, I grabbed the relevant URLs while I still was in the US, so that I can still access the articles in the Polish press even if they are a day or two old. And now I am back at home-base in Amsterdam and can check out what they say.

Interestingly, the best account of the hand-over ceremony – and the issues surrounding the start of the Polish command – I find in the Krakow-based Dziennik Polski, in the article which appeared a few days ago entitled W Wiezy Babel, or “In the Tower of Babel.” As we will see, that reference to Babel is not just some headline-writer’s facile trick, taking advantage of the fact that this is all taking place in the area where the original Tower of Babel was said to have been built, but actually has some present-day relevance as well.

OK, about the hand-over ceremony: It took place last Tuesday, 2 September, in an ampitheater at Camp Babilon, near the Iraqi city of Hilla, which is the main camp for the Polish forces and those of twenty other countries contributing forces under Polish command. General Andrzej Tyszkiewicz took over command of the Polish sector from US General James Conway, commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, which is withdrawing from the sector. Also there was US Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of all coalition forces in the country (he expressed his “full confidence” in the forces of the twenty-one countries), as well as the defense ministers from Poland, the Ukraine, and Spain. The Iraqis – let’s not forget them! – were there in the form of four leading sheikhs from the occupation zone, as thousands of ordinary spectators, and in the person of the governor of Babil province, Iskander Wofu (we learn his name not in the Dziennik Polski article, but rather in Gazeta Wyborcza), who expressed his gratefulness to the the coalition forces.

I particularly like the Dziennik article because of the great job it does in breakdown the deployment of the various forces in the Polish zone, by numbers and nationality. In all, the zone occupies some 80,000 square kilometers, with over 3 million inhabitants. The Poles themselves, aided by 500 Bulgarians, will watch over Babil and Karbala provinces; 1,700 Ukrainians and Kazaks (i.e. from Kazakstan) will be in Wasit province; and Qadisiya province, including the important Shiite holy city of Najaf, will be manned by 1,400 Spaniards aided by 350 soldiers from El Salvador, 300 from the Dominican Republic, 160 from Honduras, and around 100 Nicaraguans. (But this will be delayed; see below.) Finally, general logistical functions supporting these deployments will be provided by Romanians, Mongols, Hungarians, Latvians, Slovaks, Filipinos, and Lithuanians.

As I just mentioned, there’s going to be some delay in getting the Spanish and their Central American allies into Qadisiya province to replace the American forces there. And apparently this is not only because Najaf has been very tense of late – that was where the truck bomb exploded at the mosque last week, killing a leading a Shiite clerics along with many, many worshippers. The Spanish, it seems, are refusing to deploy there as scheduled because the Americans have been slow to provide promised equipment to the Central American contingents. The Spanish general who is going to be in charge there, one Alfredo Cardona, is rather angry about all of this; he has told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo of his displeasure that “the bilateral agreements over the forces which the Pentagon is obliged to provide” the Central American contingents are being ignored by the Americans. (Rzeczpospolita also mentions this dispute, and Genreal Cadorna’s quote, but less clearly; in Gazeta Wyborcza, on the other hand, mention is only made that things will go slower than planned in Qadasiya because they are waiting on the Central American troops to get up to scratch.)

Dziennik Polski is also willing to go into further detail about an uncomplimentary recent article about this multi-national force in the French newspaper Le Monde. According to Le Monde, the forces under Polish command are still struggling with organizational problems – in particular, with language problems. (The article speaks of these problems extending to issues of podzial sprzetu – division of equipment. Maybe that includes the squabble over the Central Americans in Qadasiya.) With twenty-one different nationalities, you can easily understand how this would be the case – but anyway, this is what justified the “Tower of Babel” reference in the article’s title.

Elsewhere, Rzeczpospolita adds some interesting details here and there in its coverage, in an article entitled Przywrocic Irak Irakijczykom, or “Return Iraq to the Iraqis.” For instance, it cites “unofficial” word that the Poles plan to be there, in all, for two years. Polish units will be rotated every six months – although extensions of tours to a full year might have to be invoked for operational reasons. On the lighter side, rehearsals for the transfer ceremony which Rzeczpospolita‘s reporter observed including practice by non-Polish participants in pronouncing the new Polish commander’s name, Tyszkiewicz. (It’s a fairly easy one: Tish-KYE-veech.) On the darker side, in remarks sent to the ceremony by Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski, he included the warning “Soldiers taking part in such a mission accept the risk and must be prepared for it. Victims are calculated into this sort of activity.”

And Rzeczpospolita‘s account also mentions a convoy in the town of Mahmudija being fired upon, on the very day of the transfer ceremony. Actually, it was the convoy involved in bringing Polish journalists out to Camp Babil for the ceremony! (How many convoys are fired upon that the world never knows about, because journalists don’t happen to be present? . . .) Reportedly some American soldiers escorting that convoy were injured.

Turning to Gazeta Wyborcza, that newspaper distinguishes its coverage by noting the tight security, the general air of tension (helicopters patrolling overhead, etc.) surrounding the take-over ceremony. It also mentions, more briefly but to reinforce this impression of tension, that Polish journalists had to undergo that baptism of fire just to be able to cover the event. And Gazeta‘s coverage of the prayers offered by the departing and arriving chaplains I also find interesting:

American marine chaplain: “Help us, O God, to be not conquerors in this land, but builders.”
Polish chaplain: “Grant that we may never use our weapons in anger.”

                          

For me, this offers a fascinating parallel phenomenon to the experiences of the American and British troops already present in Iraq and trying to bring some security and rebuilding to that country. So I think it might be interesting, for me and for the burgeoning ranks of my beloved readers, to start a semi-regular “Iraq Watch” feature in which I try to report from the Polish press on current Polish attitudes to what their troops are doing over there. As we know too well, things are going rather less well than expected for the American troops, who have been dying in low but regular numbers (to accidents, but also rather often as the result of deliberate attacks) since major combat there ceased back in April. For British troops, too, I hasten to add. Similar difficulties for the Poles seem inevitable. Indeed, last Thursday as President Alkesander Kwasniewski was bidding the troops farewell at two different, widely-separated military bases in Poland, someone was already mortaring a Polish base inside Iraq – but causing no casualties or even material damage, according to the BBC World Service report.

Poland is new at this sort of thing; actually, as I remember how it was expressed in a commentary I heard on Polish radio, the Poles are different from the Brits and the Americans in that their history (and particularly their recent history) has in fact been one of being the occupied, not the occupier. Will this matter? Might this make them more sensitive to the plight of local Iraqis, and so able to enjoy better, more peaceful relations with them? Poland is new to NATO, new to overseas deployments; make no mistake that there is doubt out there as to whether they are up to the assignment, notwithstanding the help they will be provided by twenty-four other nation-friends. Of course, I wish them well, but the Polish deployment should still be rather interesting to observe – starting from the assertion in one picture caption that those troops will surely be over there for (only) six months – and I invite you to look over my shoulder as I do so.

That picture-caption, and the details of the Polish deployment that I cite up in my first paragraph, come from last Friday’s paper edition of the leading Polish daily Rzeczpospolita. That’s why I can’t provide you with the links. (Another reason is that I haven’t yet figured out how to work Rzeczpospolita’s on-line archives.) Strangely, considering the troops actually starting flying out today, there’s little coverage to be found on the subject in today’s Polish press. From the leading paper, Gazeta Wyborcza, how about . . . a news item reporting the departure of 45 Lithuanian soldiers from their homeland to Szczecin, in Poland (the site of one of the bases from which the Polish soldiers going to Iraq come from), from whence they will join the Polish soldiers in flying to Kuwait, for acclimatization and training, and later in helping to man the Polish sector. It seems that there are already 43 Lithuanians service in the British sector in Iraq.

Today’s Rzeczpospolita does go a bit further – but not by much – in an article that starts off by discussing the burial on Saturday, in the town of “Owia” (Polish spelling) near Tikrit, of Saddam’s Husseins two sons. (And also one son of Qusay – fourteen-year-old Mustafa, buried at the same ceremony. It seems he died in the same shoot-out in Mosul that killed his father and uncle.) It then goes on to quote American administrator Paul Bremer, to the effect that the informant who led American soldiers to Uday and Qusay has now been paid his 30 million dollars and has been moved together with his family to a safe location outside of Iraq. Now, Bremer asks, who wants to earn the 25 million dollars and passage outside of the country with his family for turning in Saddam?

Elsewhere, much the same, or less. Dziennik Polski, out of Krakow, reports W Iraku bez zmian – which could fairly be translated as “All Quiet on the Iraqi Front”: no recent attacks on American soldiers, just the burial of Uday and Qusay – and Paul Bremer making all that he can out of the 30 million dollar payment and whisking out of the country of the person who fingered the Hussein sons, and his (was it a “he”?) family. Twenty-six Baath Party soldiers arrested; 166 grenades, ten Kalashnikovs, 200 million Iraqi dinars (= around $120,000) and other useful military stuff captured in connection with these arrests; a special medical group sent by the American military to Iraq to investigate the outbreaks of pneumonia there, which have already killed two American soldiers and caused fifteen to be evacuated to American military hospitals in Germany.

So it’s a quiet time in the Polish press, as the soldiers prepare to actually fly away. Here’s hoping that it remains largely quiet; no news is probably good news. But, if there is interesting news in this area, I’ll try to let you know what it is.

                          

But you know this already, since you’ve read yesterday’s EuroSavant entry. Still, on Wednesday Klaus granted an in-depth interview to Lidové noviny, his favorite newspaper. (He used to write a regular column for it.) This interview deserves in-depth examination, since it lays out many of the Czech President’s shall-we-say unconventional and even abrasive views on the referendum and on Czech EU membership in general. Maybe we’ll finally get some “asking of the tough questions,” the absence of which I decried in my long entry about the Polish referendum of last weekend!

(Before we go to “More…”: Sick of Poland? Sick of Czech? Sorry about that. Remember, EuroSavant is also versatile enough to do France, Germany, the Benelux, who-knows-what-else. We’ll get back to other parts of Europe soon, but I did want to take a good look at these once-in-a-lifetime accession referenda. Anyway, if you don’t like this weblog’s direction – e-mail me! I might be so taken aback as to actually listen to what you say!)

Once again – but of course! – President Klaus is asked directly how he will vote in the referendum. And once again he refuses to say: “In no case should you even want me to say how I will vote. That would violate the principle of the referendum, which is secret [ballot] and not public.” When reminded that Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski apparently did not think enough of the “secret ballot principle” to forbear from endorsing a “Yes” vote, Klaus dismisses the Polish political system as “rather different” – for one thing, in his view the Polish president has the de facto power to choose the foreign minister. “It’s my feeling that my task is to make sure that serious discussion is given to EU accession, that it doesn’t all boil down in the end to false arguments, which a not-inconsiderable part of the political representation is prone to.” Indeed, Klaus accuses this “Czech political representation” of “trivializing” the prospect of entry into the EU – “and that gets me tremendously angry,” he adds.

Discussion in the interview soon turns to whether EU membership would mean “and end to the history of the Czech state” – or at least to one stage in that history. Klaus agrees that it’s the end of one stage – and that, in his mind, that stage is ending too early: “It’s ending too early in the sense that we completely lost our identity in the Communist era, and there should have been some stage of reasonable length to ‘get used to’ our independence, a stage where we could truly find ourselves and prepare ourselves for the next stage.” But the ongoing rush of EU expansion of course will not be slowed down by a small country – a zemicek – like the Czech Republic.

In an interview of some weeks ago with the German weekly Die Zeit Klaus had spoken of the EU’s “threat to democracy,” so naturally those sentiments were raised again in the LN interview. Klaus expands on them: Firstly, he has serious doubts whether democracy can truly be preserved at an above-state-level multinational entity like the EU. In any case, secondly, the EU is already showing disturbing signs of more and more centralism, signs which to Klaus are only reinforced by the ongoing proceedings of the Constitutional Convention. Thirdly, Europe has already gotten too involved in the regulation of economic activity, going beyond that to regulating even human behavior.

In this connection the subject of the Euro arises, and Klaus is asked if what he means is that he thinks that the Euro is a bad idea for the Czech Republic. Similarly to his view on EU accession, Klaus denounces the “dogma of the single currency,” as if that is the obvious best solution for all EU member-states. Instead, hard questions need to be asked: Are the European economies perhaps too heterogeneous for one currency and its associated one-size-fits-all interest-rate policy? Shouldn’t perhaps the Czech Republic wait before adopting the Euro until she has adapted fully to the European economy – however long that might take?

Well, that should do it for my Václav Klaus fixation for a while. (EuroSavant actually saw him speak once – the year was 1993, the place was the main auditorium of the Economics University in Prague, Klaus was Czech premier at the time, unemployment was low, wages were also low but growing, and the packed hall of economics students greeted him like a rock star. A former economics researcher/professor himself, he was also in his own natural element, and it didn’t take long before he was drawing supply-and-demand curves on the blackboard behind his lectern. Wait – EuroSavant also saw him more recently, at a campaign rally at the foot of Wenceslas Square, in Prague, shortly before the June, 2002, Czech general elections, in which his ODS ultimately did rather more poorly than expected.) As my coverage of the Czech referendum winds down I’ll try to cover other aspects – like, what about Vladimir Spidla? He’s been the premier ever since those elections last year! (But maybe for not very much longer.)