Perspective

Polish president Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria have been killed after their plane crashed on their way to Smolensk airport in western Russia. Kaczynski’s wife, Maria, was an economist. They had a daughter, Marta, and two granddaughters. Poland has declared a week of national mourning after the plane crash that killed 96 people, including Polish President and the first lady, as well as dozens of Poland’s senior military, political and religious leaders.

Thousands of Poles continued to walk through the square in front of the president’s residence. They lay bouquets of flowers, lit candles or just stood quietly, staring at the Polish flag fluttering at half-staff above the presidential palace.

The loss is devastating to Poland; in addition to the president and first lady, the rest of the dead include the head of the Polish central bank, the deputy foreign minister, the national security adviser; the deputy parliament speaker and several members of parliament, including two presidential candidates.

The military faced equally horrific loses: the heads of the Polish navy, air force, special forces, ground forces and the army chief of staff were all killed.

The fact that President Lech Kaczynski and his retinue had flown to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, only a few miles away, was one of those malign coincidences that haunt Polish history. TV footage showed the smoldering, twisted wreckage of the Polish presidential jet, a Russian-made Tupolev-154, spread across a wooded area more than a mile from the airport.

Warsaw resident Alex Martin calls it Poland’s biggest tragedy in its post-World War II history.He also said, “We are left without any commanders of the army and the president of the national bank, so it was really disaster for the country and the people.” The parliament speaker is now acting president, and the country will hold presidential elections sometime in June. And it happened at a moment when Russia and Poland were trying, with some success, to put their long and dreadful past behind them. The spontaneous, great-hearted grief of ordinary Russian people in the days after the air crash amazed and then moved the Poles. The death of Kaczynski, many of his aides and several opposition lawmakers is a heavy blow to Poland’s body politic, but analysts said they saw no threat to stability in the NATO ally and EU member state.”Today in the face of such a drama our nation stays united. There is no division into left and right, differences of views don’t matter. We are together in the face of this tragedy,” parliamentary speaker and now Poland’s acting president, Bronislaw Komorowski, said in a televised address to the nation. The event which shook the world at times and still somehow influences the foreign policy of Poland is called “Katyn Massacre”.

The Katyn Massacre was execution of 4,443 Polish military officers by Soviet forces in 1940, initially denied by Russia but revealed to be true in documents released after the end of the Cold War. The term ‘Katyn Massacre’ has been increasingly expanded to mean the murder of many more Polish soldiers and civilians ordered by the USSR at around the same time as the officers. Estimates of these dead vary from 15,000 to over 20,000.

In 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union concluded a ‘Non-Aggression Pact’, otherwise known as the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact after the foreign ministers who agreed it, to divide Poland between them. In 1939 Germany attacked west Poland, prompting France and Britain to declare war on Germany, commencing the conflict which became known as World War Two.

In the wake of the German invasion of Poland that started on 1 September, 1939, the Soviet Union declared on 17 September 1939 that the Polish government was no longer in control of its country and that any diplomatic agreements were thus null and void. On the same day, the Red Army invaded Poland from the east, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Meanwhile, Britain and France, pledged by the Polish-British Common Defense Pact and Franco-Polish Military Alliance to attack Germany in the case of such an invasion, did not take any significant military action. This is referred to as the “Western betrayal.”

On April 13 1943 Germany, whose forces were engaged in a bitter war with the USSR after invading in 1941, announced that its forces had found the mass grave, dug up and identified the bodies as Polish officers and accused the Russians of having carried out the massacre. Russia denied this, accusing the Germans of having killed the men, who were working as construction workers, as their army invaded the region, a position they stuck to for decades, only admitting the truth in 1990.

Russia never has formally apologized for the murders of the Polish officers, but Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s decision to attend a memorial ceremony in the forest near Katyn was seen as a gesture of goodwill toward reconciliation. Putin, like his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, called the massacre a “terrible tragedy” but emphasized that it should become a “focus of reconciliation” between the Russian and Polish peoples. The presidential Tu-154 was at least 20 years old. Polish officials have long discussed replacing the planes that carry the country’s leaders but said they lacked the funds.

According to the Aviation Safety Network, there have been 66 crashes involving Tu-154s, including six in the past five years. The Russian carrier Aeroflot recently withdrew its Tu-154 fleet from service. Some Poles are now calling the plane crash the “second Katyn,” and refer to the forests around the Russian town as “cursed,” “haunted” and “damned.”

There are already conspiracy theories circulating. One man standing in front of the presidential palace held a sign that said “the inhuman murderers have done it again,” referring to Russia.

But investigators so far believe the accident was most likely the result of pilot error. Witnesses said the pilot made three or four attempts to land before crashing into woodland nearby.According to reports, the pilot accelerated as the plane came in to land and at that point lost contact with air traffic control.

Russian media report that the Polish pilot was warned several times by air traffic controllers to divert to another airport because of the dangerous fog conditions.

President Kaczynski had been one of the leaders of the pro-democracy Solidarity movement that helped Poland overthrow the communist regime. His friend Lech Walesa, the dissident who went on to become president, said simply of the crash, “the elite of our country has perished.” Kaczynski, 60, became president in December 2005 after defeating current Prime Minister Donald Tusk in that year’s presidential vote. The nationalist conservative was the twin brother of Poland’s opposition leader.

Kaczynski’s death will bring forward elections originally scheduled for the fall. His main challenger was Bronislaw Komorowski, the speaker of the Polish Parliament and a member of Tusk’s centrist Civic Platform Party, who has taken over Kaczynski’s job until new elections. At the time of his death Kaczynski and his nationalist, conservative Law and Justice Party had been trailing Komorowski in the polls. Tusk and his close ally Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski have advocated a policy of rapprochement with Russia since a damaging row with Moscow over Polish meat imports four years ago. No doubt that it is a blow for Poland as well as its allies since Poland is a NATO ally and Kaczynski and his govt. playing a vital role in serving the western interest. So now we have to wait for the next election to see the changing dynamics of Poland’s domestic politics as well in foreign policy.

As the shock slowly settles in, people across the world are asking one question: why was the entire Polish elite on board one jet? Regardless of the findings of the undergoing investigation, one already can conclude that so many leaders of Poland’s society should not have flown together.

Writer: M R Khondoker