Polish President and Army Chief of Staff dead

[Jan Klimkowski]

Here are some fragments on Lech Kaczynski's thinking, and why the German and Russian elites will not mourn his death.

In particular, one of his aides compared the proposed Russian-German pipeline bypassing Poland to a C21st version of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. He also threatened to bring a lawsuit for Euros 54 billion in war reparations from Germany after the lebensraum mob started agitating about the "eastern territories".

I would interpret Kaczynski's support for the colour revolutions in the former USSR republics primarily in terms of his slav nationalism and anti-Soviet/Communist thinking. However, the twins could easily have had strong contacts with western intelligence agencies, particularly American ones.

The interpretation in the articles needs to be taken with the usual pinch of salt when examining such MSM stuff:

The Atlantic Times - August 2006

Where Is Poland Headed? Lech Kaczynski wants close ties to the U.S. and is eyeing a bigger role in Europe. By Barbara Oertel

During the Polish election campaign the new president, Lech Kaczynski, not only attacked his liberal opponent Donald Tusk, but Brussels, Berlin and Moscow as well. What is he up to?

Poland is led by twins: Since Nov. 10, Lech Kaczynski’s nationalist conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS), which is headed by his twin brother, Jaroslaw, has led a minority government supported by the left-radical agrarian party Self-Defense of the Republic of Poland (SRP) and the Nationalist League of Polish Families (LPR).

The new president is a fervent anti-communist and devout Catholic. He has dedicated himself to bringing about a “Fourth Republic” in Poland by vowing to relentlessly fight corruption and the power of insider cliques, by showing solidarity with the underprivileged, and by defending Poland’s national interests. He says he stands for honor, justice, morality, faith and family. He also favors the death penalty.

Constant references to the protection and defense of Poland’s national interests have made west Europeans sit up and take notice. What foreign policy are the Kaczynski brothers planning to follow? Soon after the election, President Kaczynski made his priorities clear. His first trip abroad would take him to the United States, the second to the Vatican, he announced.

The Washington Post has called these travel plans evidence that the new leadership will maintain the close ties between Poland and the United States. Their friendship was underscored when Poland, a NATO member, stood by Washington during the Iraq war, embodying what Donald Rumsfeld called “new Europe.”

In fact, the new Polish president regards good relations with the United States as indispensable for the defense of Poland’s national interests. The first signs are already visible. Poland had originally planned to withdraw its 2,500 soldiers from Iraq by early 2006. The new government has now assured Washington that it will keep 900 men in the embattled country until the end of the year.

Unlike Washington, the EU will have to adjust to changes under the regime of the Kaczynski brothers.

The PiS has joined the “Union for Europe of the Nations Group” in the European Parliament, a grouping of parties skeptical of the prospects for European integration. Lech Kaczynski is seen as a euroskeptic, and has made no bones about his dislike of the proposed European constitution. Missing in that text, according to him, are references to Christian values in Europe.

Kaczynski is also skeptical about the euro. He was recently quoted as saying that “the euro would increase inflation in Poland and depress the standard of living.” Moreover, he announced plans to hold a referendum on joining the eurozone – but only shortly before the end of his presidential term.

Polish commentator Piotr Semka regards the EU as one of the greatest challenges for the new president. “He will have to demonstrate that he is capable of reaching agreements with the other European nations,” Semka wrote in Rzeczpospolita. “But the negative image he has abroad will not exactly make this task easier.”

The network of relationships within the EU could also be skewed by the Kaczynskis, as the brothers would like to establish a Warsaw-Paris axis. That this might even have some chance of success can be gathered from a telegram in which French President Jacques Chirac not only congratulated Kaczynski particularly warmly on his victory, but also invited him for a state visit to Paris. As The Economist noted: “Politics in Warsaw may be taking on a more Gaullist hue: nationalist and wedded to farm interests, with a dose of Polish clericalism thrown in.”

Behind this Polish effort to create a Warsaw-Paris axis is the idea that a counterweight is needed for the friendly relations between Moscow and Berlin. It is particularly the use of the “anti-German card” during the election campaign that shows that Poland’s new president still has a number of historical accounts to settle with his western neighbor. One example is the planned creation of a “Center against Expulsion” in Berlin – which Kaczynski vehemently opposes. The CDU is in favor of establishing this center, which is to focus on the millions of ethnic Germans forced out of Poland, Czechoslovakia and other former German-populated territories in Eastern Europe after the end of World War II.

Kaczynski has also threatened to demand reparations to the tune of €54 billion from Germany for war damage suffered by Poland, should Germans attempt to make compensation claims in court for territory lost during the expulsions.

Old fears of their neighbors have also been reawakened among Poles by the deal former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Russian President Vladimir Putin struck in September to build a gas pipeline through the Baltic Sea, as that pipeline will bypass both Poland and the Baltic states. Kaczynski made good use of these fears during his election campaign, though his belligerent rhetoric has toned down substantially in the meantime.

At her inaugural visit to Warsaw on Dec. 4, new Chancellor Angela Merkel tried to pour oil on troubled waters. She said that Germany by all means wants to strengthen its relationship with Poland. Even though Berlin is interested in good strategic relations with Russia, this must not happen without consulting Poland, she emphasized.

The “Center against Expulsion” was not extensively discussed during the talks, but should now, according to Merkel, be tackled in a European network and with approval from Poland. Regarding the Baltic Sea pipeline, Merkel offered Warsaw the prospect of providing Poland its own access to the Greifswald terminal (see page 3). At the EU year-end summit, she managed to secure an additional €100 million for Poland.

In comments to the German tabloid Bild, Kaczynski sought to reassure Germans that he was their partner and their friend. He also said he wanted to improve Poland’s relations with Russia – to the consternation of some in Belarus and in Ukraine. Their dismay comes because Poland played a key intermediary role during the so-called Orange Revolution in Kiev last fall, and those in the opposition hoped to continue to rely on Poland not only for help with their efforts to democratize but to lobby Brussels as well.

Poland’s efforts to help its eastern neighbors are a thorn in Russia’s side. On the other hand, the help provided is in the interest of the U.S., which has by now placed Belarus on its list of rogue states. It remains to be seen whether Lech Kaczynski will be able to manage this balancing act.

- Barbara Oertel is foreign policy editor of the daily newspaper, taz.

The Times obituary - Lech Kaczynski: President of Poland

April 12, 2010

Like Ronald Reagan, Lech Kaczynski came to public notice as a film actor before he became President. Unlike his American counterpart, Kaczynski had a twin brother, Jaroslaw, who also appeared in The Two Who Stole the Moon and who in later years was to serve as his Prime Minister. When the 1962 film, based on a popular children’s story by Kornel Makuszynski, was made the twins were in their early teens; they were born in Warsaw in 1949.

Lech Kaczynski’s career divides into two halves: that of a rebel against communist oppression and that of populist advocate of many traditional, right-wing sentiments.

At school he showed considerable academic prowess and after taking a law degree at the University of Warsaw set out upon an academic career, moving in 1971 to the University of Gdansk to undertake research on his chosen speciality, labour law. It was a propitious choice of vocation and location. By the second half of the 1970s Poland was seething with anger and resentment. The economy, having expanded rapidly in the first half of the decade, was in apparent freefall while poor housing, appalling health services and privileges for party members, stoked social discontent. In 1976 a poor harvest forced the Government to import food, and to pay for this it proposed to increase the price of meat in the home market. Strikes, riots and protests engulfed the country and the price increases were rescinded. But some protesters and strikers had been arrested by the authorities. To defend these victims a new organisation was formed, the Committee for Workers’ Defence, or KOR, a body that brought together the proletarian and the intelligentsia opponents of the regime; it was also one of Eastern Europe’s most important manifestations of a new and powerful phenomenon, “civil society”. Lech Kaczynski began working for KOR in 1977 and his expertise in labour law played a vital role in making it one of the most skilful of anti-government organisations.

His ability and expertise were even more valuable in 1980 when industrial unrest on his own doorstep, in the shipyards of Gdansk, gave birth to the Solidarity movement that rocked the Polish Communist regime and did much to prepare the ground for the upheavals of 1989 throughout Eastern Europe. Kaczynski became an adviser to the inter-enterprise strike committee in the shipyards, and it was the system of inter-enterprise committees that formed the basis of the Solidarity movement. Kaczynski was therefore at the heart of the movement and, hardly surprisingly, was among the many activists interned when martial law was imposed in Poland in December 1981.

By the end of the 1980s Solidarity had re-emerged and an enfeebled and discredited communist apparatus seemed powerless to restrain it. His previous experience in Gdansk, together with his professional training, made him a natural colleague and advisor to the charismatic Solidarity leader Lech Walesa. He was now sufficiently close to the Solidarity leadership to be made a member of its team for the all-important round table talks with the government from February to April 1989. In June of that year the Polish authorities allowed multiparty elections for the new upper house of the Polish parliament, the Senate. The opposition won 99 per cent of the seats it contested, one of the newly elected senators being Lech Kaczynski. In December he served as chief adviser to Walesa when the latter was elected President of Poland. By this time he had also been elected vice-chairman of the Solidarity trade union. No doubt partly as a reward for his help, Walesa nominated Kaczynski as Security Minister in the presidential chancery. Two years later, in 1992, the President sacked him. It was the beginning of a long bitter dispute between Walesa and the Kaczynski brothers. In February 2001 Lech Kaczynski, who at the time was also the Prosecutor General, announced that two former aides of Walesa were to be investigated for having taken bribes from gangland leaders, but a year and a half later Kaczynski himself was ordered by a court in Gdansk to apologise to the former President and to one of those former aides. The feud never died and reached its greatest intensity in November 2009, when Walesa sued Kaczynski for slander after the latter had accused him, in a TV interview, of having collaborated with the communist secret police.

Kaczynski’s ousting in 1992 was not surprising. His agenda was that of traditional Poland: nationalist, socially conservative, Catholic. His mother was a philologist. His father, an engineer, had fought with the Armia Krajowa, the Home Army, which had resisted the Nazis tooth and nail, most ferociously in the Warsaw Uprising of August-September 1944. But the Home Army had also been determined that they were not going to liberate their homeland in order for it to be taken over by the communists. Inevitably, as communist power tightened after the war, the Home Army veterans suffered discrimination. Resentment at the treatment of former Home Army personnel pushed the Kaczynski brothers towards the right of the political spectrum.

Despite his ejection from the presidential chancery Lech Kaczynski remained in public office, serving as president of the supreme chamber of control from February 1992 to May 1995. In June 2000 he was given his first ministerial post when the Prime Minister, Jerzy Buzek, made him Minister of Justice. Kaczynski rapidly established himself as a powerful advocate for the law and order lobby. He had been in office for only two months when he announced plans to amend the penal code and to increase prison sentences for murder and other crimes of violence; in February 2001 he told parliament that criminality in Poland had taken on “dangerous dimensions” and proposed some 400 changes in the penal code, including raising the minimum prison term for aggravated murder from 12 to 25 years. In addition to promoting tougher sentencing, he conducted a vigorous campaign against corruption. His attitudes commanded widespread support; in May 2001, only 20 per cent of the Polish population approved of the Buzek Government, but 70 per cent approved of Kaczynski and his policies. This did not save Kaczynski. In June of that year he had a public row with the Prime Minister over the arrest of a government official. Kaczynski was sacked.

The following year he was elected Mayor of Warsaw and continued the policies he had adopted as Minister of Justice. To widespread popular approval he carried out major drives against the “Warsaw connections”, or the networks of criminal gangs and corrupt officials that plagued the city. But his policies were populist as well as popular. In 2004 and 2005 he banned gay movement marches, athough he did sanction later a “Parade of Normality”. He also showed his nationalist colours.

He gave enthusiastic backing to the newly founded museum of the Warsaw Uprising and he established a historical commission to estimate the losses the city suffered during the Second World War. He was reacting, in part, to claims by small groups of Germans who had been expelled from Poland after the war, but it was a theme he was to revisit as President.

In 2001 Kaczynski and his brother had founded the Law and Justice Party, for which Lech was elected to parliament in September of that year and which by the middle of the decade had established itself as one of the main forces on the Right of Polish politics. It was the party that was to serve as Kaczynski’s power base when he decided, in March 2005, to enter as a candidate in the presidential elections in the autumn. In the second round he emerged a clear winner with 54 per cent of the vote. In his inaugural speech as President he committed himself to continuing the fight against crime and corruption, which were prominent among what he described as “various pathologies in our life”.

In foreign affairs he echoed Polish nationalist tradition of suspicion of both Russia and Germany. He had angered the former even as Minister of Justice when, in December 2000, he ordered that prosecutors investigate a mysterious high-tech telecommunications cable that Russia’s Gazprom has laid along its gas pipeline across Poland. Moscow took much greater offence when he agreed that the US could locate part of its planned anti- ballistic missile system in Poland. Kaczynski made further concessions to Washington when he stated that under certain circumstances Polish troops could continue their stabilisation mission in Iraq.

In his augural speech Kaczynski had emphasised that Poland needed “energy security” that could only be guaranteed by co-operation with the US and the EU. But Kaczynski never enjoyed an easy relationship with the latter’s most powerful member, Germany. His support for the Warsaw Uprising museum was an understandable legacy of Polish history, but German and other EU officials were more than a little disconcerted by his statements at the time of the Brussels summit in June 2007; Kaczynski suggested that Poland’s financial obligations and rights should be calculated on the basis of what its population would have been without the losses it suffered in the Second World War. European officials were also frustrated by Polish suspicions of EU-Russian co-operation, though these had sound historical roots, as when one minister compared a planned pipeline between Russia and Germany with the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939 that led to the partition of Poland.

There were tensions at home, too. As has frequently happened in independent Poland, the president and the prime minister have leant in opposite directions, and when Donald Tusk became Prime Minister in November 2007 there was noticeable friction between him and Kaczynski.

Kaczynski’s nationalism perhaps fitted ill with the post-nationalist construct of the EU, just as his post-communist social conservatism could not be reconciled to the liberal Western attitudes that had emerged while Poland was under communist domination. But however uncomfortable Kaczynski’s attitudes, they had understandable historical roots and explanations.

Despite the demands of politics, Kaczynski did not entirely forsake his academic interests. In 1980 he completed and successfully defended his doctoral thesis for the University of Gdansk, and in 1990 was awarded his “habilitation”. He then taught at the University of Gdansk and at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw.

Kaczynski’s wife Maria also died in the crash. He is survived by a daughter.

Lech Kaczynski, President of Poland, was born on June 18, 1949. He died on April 10, 2010, aged 60