Arrest and detention of Union of Poles in Belarus community leaders

 

Yesterday the London based Federation of Poles in Great Britain CIO, which is the voice of the organized Polish community in Great Britain since 1947, has written to Mr Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, asking to bring to his attention the plight of Polish community leaders from our sister organization, the Union of Poles in Belarus – (Związek Polaków na Białorusi -ZPB), who have been imprisoned in inhumane conditions in the last two months and charged with inciting national hatred as a result of celebrating Polish culture in that country. 

On March 23rd 2021 in response to the organization of a festival commemorating the feast-day of a Polish saint, St. Casimir, ZPB Chairman, Ms Andzelika Borys was arrested and sentenced next day to 15 days’ detention for organizing an illegal gathering.  

Despite international protests Ms Borys was not immediately released after her unjustified sentence. Along with 3 other local Polish community leaders, Irena Biernacka, Maria Tiszkowska, and the journalist Andrzej Poczobut, she has been accused under Section 3, article 130, of the Belarusian Criminal Code of “organizing an illegal mass event”, which carries a possible prison sentence of between 5 and 12 years. The prosecutor claimed that they had been inciting nationalist hatred and seeking to “rehabilitate Nazism” on the grounds that they had celebrated wartime patriotic Polish partisans fighting the Nazis on what was then Polish, and is now Belarusian, soil. The application of Article 130 implied that in holding this festival these leaders would be seeking to incite a riot, possibly even leading to the threat of violent deaths. It was reported by Belsat, the Warsaw based Belarusian TV news channel, that Borys and Poczobut had both been given an offer to have the charges dropped, provided they allowed themselves to be deported to Poland, but they refused. Biernacka and Tiszkowska were deported on May 25th.

Currently Andzelika Borys is being held in an overcrowded cell with 15 others in Zodzhin Prison and is being deprived of a proper place to sleep. We fear, judging by the current regime’s record after the election protests starting in August last year, that in subsequent police interrogations she and her colleagues could be beaten and tortured. However, she has let it be known that on no account would she admit to being guilty of such absurd charges. 

East European commentators see these prisoners as hostages of ex-president Lukaszenka’s ideological conflict with Poland and the West.

Since 2005 the Lukashenka regime, in its aim to curtail the existence of all independent institutions in Belarus, had sought to harass the ZPB, the main Polish cultural organization in Belarus. It arranged to split the organization by creating a puppet ZPB, to whom it transferred the ZPB’s original registration details. Most of the 16 cultural centres that had been flourishing in the previous decade were taken over by the regime and closed.

The currently deregistered ZPB under the active chairmanship of Ms Andzelika Borys is still recognized by many Polish parishes and community organizations in Belarus as being their true representative umbrella organization. 

In his letter to Mr Raab, Dr Włodzimierz Mier-Jedrzejowicz, President of the Federation of Poles, thanks him for his current justifiable condemnation of the Belarusian regime, especially following the hijacking of a civilian airliner , and for his call for the immediate release of the kidnapped Roman Protasevich and more than 1000 other current political prisoners held in Belarus, but he also asks Mr Raab not to overlook the plight of the community leaders of the indigenous Polish ethnic minority in Belarus, whose only real crime is their love and promotion of Polish culture. Dr Mier Jedrzejowicz says that the Federation members would be grateful if Mr Raab could also raise their plight during the G7 summit in Cornwall next week.

In thanking Mr Raab and the UK government for their contribution to defending democracy and human rights worldwide, and particularly in Eastern Europe, the Federation looks forward to the eventual release of all prisoners and full recognition of the rights of ethnic minorities in Belarus.

The Polish diaspora in Belarus is not an immigrant minority. It is an indigenous ethnic minority, which had inhabited the western provinces of Belarus for many centuries, particularly in the provinces surrounding the cities of Grodno, Lida, Szczuczyn and Volkovysk. In 2019, the official Belarusian statistics registered 295,000 citizens as being of Polish nationality, but all evidence indicates that the figure is much higher, and earlier statistics had indicated at least 495,000 inhabitants of Polish nationality in 1989. 

Since the emergence of an independent Belarus in 1991, Polish culture had been allowed to flourish, and children in the Western provinces were educated to speak their native Polish tongue at home and in school. There were two Polish day schools where children were taught Polish literature and Polish history. 16 Polish cultural centres were constructed and flourished in areas where the Polish population was most concentrated. Until 2005 Belarus had been treating its minorities well in accordance with international undertakings given by an earlier Belarusian government concerning the tolerant treatment of national minorities

Attachments area

Post Election Options for Labour

Dear Editor,

As Labour leaders peer out from under the rubble in the former Labour heartlands in England and Scotland they should be aware that the blue collar vote in England is increasingly suspicious that Labour is too fine tuned towards the rights of selected minorities and insufficiently proud of its English heritage. In Scotland it is failing to ride the tide of Scottish national pride. It is also losing votes to more radical Green alternatives. Furthermore Boris Johnson is likely to first mock and then steal any popular policies they may bring forward. 

Labour must lay more stress now on the issues of protecting workers and pensioners' rights following Brexit, make strategic transport, water and energy utilities publicly owned, and pronounce more imaginative green policies. It must  promise to retain the break with the EU for the foreseeable future, but seek to renegotiate the customs union. This is vital to renew EU/UK trade arrangements  and to solve the current Northern ireland border conundrum. 

Also in the case of Scotland, Keir Starmer should promise the Scottish voter that a Labour government would grant an independence referendum, but not earlier than in 2030 when the impact of Brexit, good and bad, can be fairly assessed.

Yours faithfully

Wiktor Moszczynski

Sent to The Times

In place of amnesty in N Ireland

 

Dear Editor,

I can understand the torment that relatives and friends feel over lack of justice for innocent victims of the Troubles and the difficulty for the UK government in having to face continuous litigation over the possibly criminal behaviour by British soldiers in the Northern Ireland Troubles (Politicians condemn troubles amnesty i 07/05/21). 

Surely much of the air could be cleared and some closure offered for victims' loved ones, if the UK introduced a Truth and Reconciliation Court that could hear freely volunteered evidence from British soldiers, and from loyalist and republican former fighters, without  fear of facing criminal proceedings. 

This worked so well in South Africa after the end of apartheid. It would help considerably in healing the untreated  open wounds of anger and distrust that still threaten to undermine the Good Friday Peace Agreement.

Yours faithfully,

Wiktor Moszczynski

Sent to i

Succesful Polish statecraft

 

Letter to Editor of The Spectator

Dear Sirs,

I am sorry to witness my fellow Polish countryman wallowing in his masochistic hatefest towards his own country of origin (Letters to Editor, March 26th), as it was not a pretty spectacle. Also it was historically inaccurate. The Polish kingdom in the 11th and early 12th century, and again, following a period of dynastic divisions, in the 14th century and 15th centuries, was a formidable well run political unit that offered peace and prosperity to its citizens and protected them against German and Tartar invaders and eventually defeated the Teutonic Knights. In the next two centuries it offered the sophisticated model of a parliamentary multiethnic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that tolerated many religions, at a time when Europe was riven with religious wars, and Poland's formidable army defeated the Turkish Empire and protected a vast territory, the largest in Europe, which ensured the supply of wheat and timber to the continent. When, following the greed and corruption of its leading nobles, Poland temporarily became a failed state in the eighteenth century and was dismembered by three powerful neighbours, it was able to sustain a struggle to retain its culture and national spirit for a hundred years in order to rise again like a phoenix at the end of the First World War and set up a strong state combining three regions with different administrative traditions and holding back the Soviets for 20 years. Again when it regained its independence after 1990 it set up a secular well administered democracy that was the only country in Europe not to undergo recession in the last 20 years. Every country can have its ups and downs over a long span of a thousand years but there is absolutely no reason to share Mr Kowalczyk's bleak assessment.

Yours faithfully

Wiktor Moszczynski

Contaminated evidence of The August Trials

Letter to Editor of the Jewish Chronicle (but not published)

Dear Sirs,

With regard to Mark Glanville’s harsh assessment of Poland’s treatment of Jews in his review of “The August Trials” by Andrew Kornbluth (TheJC 19^th March 2021), we again have that sad case of two narratives, one Polish and one Jewish, running in a parallel universe that finds difficulty in coming together into one objective channel of history. Glanville’s opening sentence about a series of trials of Nazi war criminals and their collaborators beginning in August 1944 is, in itself, jarring to Poles, to whom August 1944 means only one thing, the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising against the Germans which led to the betrayal by the Red Army, the death of over 250,000 Polish citizens and the wholesale destruction of Poland’s capital city. The trials lasted more than 6 years, but the very name August Trials was originally part of the Communists’ propaganda to downplay the searing significance of August as the month in which to commemorate the Uprising each year.

While this does not take away from the courage and sense of civic duty with which some individual judges and prosecutors took up their task of investigating wartime collaboration, this does not apply to all of their zealous Communist colleagues seeking to take revenge on Poland’s pre-war elites. It also left them open to being considered by many of their countrymen as collaborators with the new oppressors. However useful the detailed information and accusations about Nazi collaboration and murder supplied in those courts, they will remain suspect to historians as evidence because of the toxic atmosphere of Red terror in which post-war justice was conducted.

I must take issue too with the suggestion that “butchery” of Jews had been taking place in the countryside since 1935. There was undoubted deep-seated antagonism towards the Jewish population in many rural areas, partly because of primitive religious beliefs, and partly because of distrust of an alternative culture that rarely spoke Polish and had little sense of loyalty to the newly emergent Polish state. But without Hitler’s invasion in 1939 and subsequent brutal occupation of Poland, there would have been no holocaust, and no wartime battle for survival by two nations in one country but at different levels of humiliation and extermination.

Obviously I have not read Andrew Kornbluth’s book as it has not yet been published, but I hope that in its detailed examination of the trails of accused collaborators more will emerge to help understand the complexities and the tragedy of Polish-Jewish relations during and after the Second World War.

Yours faithfully

Wiktor Moszczynski

author of "Hello I'm Your Polish Neighbour"

Nord Stream letter in The Observer

 

Dear Sirs,

Further to the article by Simon Tisdall "Biden must punish Putin's cyber-attacks" (21.03.2021) in relation to the ineffectiveness of current sanctions against Russia over the Nord-Stream 2 pipeline project, the geopolitical debate in Germany has been muddied by the insertion of a moral dimension. President Walther Steinmeier has declared that German support for the dual pipeline, which circumvents Poland and Ukraine and supplies gas directly under the Baltic Sea to Germany, is dictated by the need to atone for wartime German crimes against Russia. Of course, Germany should display a sense of guilt towards Russia for these crimes, but not as a justification for isolating Poland and Ukraine to whom Germany has a similar, if not an even greater, moral debt, because they lost far more lives per head of population in the Second World War than Russia proper and, unlike Russia, they are not a current threat to Germany's security and democracy. It is time that the UK took a similar stand to the U.S. government on sanctions over this pipeline. 

Yours faithfully,

Wiktor Moszczynski

Spokesman Federation of Poles in Great Britain

tel 07786471833

working address Flat 88 isambard Court Brentford TE8 8FP

Published in The Observer 28th March 2021

Nord Stream 2

 Letter to the Editor of The Observer

Dear Sirs,

Further to the article by Simon Tisdall "Biden must punish Putin's cyber-attacks" (21.03.2021) in relation to the ineffectiveness of current sanctions against Russia over the Nord-Stream 2 pipeline project, the geopolitical debate in Germany has been muddied by the insertion of a moral dimension. President Walther Steinmeier has declared that German support for the dual pipeline, which circumvents Poland and Ukraine and supplies gas directly under the Baltic Sea to Germany, is dictated by the need to atone for wartime German crimes against Russia. Of course, Germany should display a sense of guilt towards Russia for these crimes, but not as a justification for isolating Poland and Ukraine to whom Germany has a similar, if not an even greater, moral debt, because they lost far more lives per head of population in the Second World War than Russia proper and, unlike Russia, they are not a current threat to Germany's security and democracy. It is time that the UK took a similar stand to the U.S. government on sanctions over this pipeline. 

Yours faithfully,

Wiktor Moszczynski

Spokesman Federation of Poles in Great Britain

tel 07786471833

working address Flat 88 isambard Court Brentford TE8 8FP

Rescue of Polish patient in Plymouth Hospital

Letter to Editor of the Daily Telegraph

Dear Editor, You may be aware that there is currently a high level request from the Polish President’s office and from the Polish Foreign Ministry about the possibility of prolonging and saving the life of a Polish citizen, with initials RS, who is currently lying in what Plymouth doctors describe as a near vegetative state. In early November RS had a heart attack with subsequent brain hypoxia at his home in Southern England and his brain was deprived of oxygen for at least 45 minutes. Since then, he has been in a coma in Derriford Hospital in Plymouth and more than a month later specialists have concluded that his condition would never significantly improve and have consequently denied him life-sustaining treatment, including artificial ventilation, nutrition and fluids. A spokesperson for the University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust has acknowledged that the “main role of the hospital is to provide better care to patients, care for their safety and well-being” but maintains that RS is not likely to recover and that it has s complied with the wishes of the patient’s wife and children in denying the patient further sustenance on the grounds that RS had once expressed the wish not to be a “burden” to his family. This decision has been supported by a court in London and the Court of Appeal has refused the patient’s mother and family members in Poland permission to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. They maintain that as a practising Catholic he would not wish to have his life ended artificially. Despite this treatment the patient remains stubbornly alive. The Polish government, acting on behalf of the family in Poland and aware of the sense of outrage in the Polish media about this prolonged deliberate neglect of a Polish citizen, has already issued him with a diplomatic passport and is prepared to provide transport directly from the hospital in Plymouth to the Budzik Clinic in Olsztyn, Poland, which specializes in the resuscitation of patients in seemingly endless coma. A spokesman for the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales and the local bishop in Plymouth, Mark O’Toole, have already appealed to Matt Hancock, unsuccessfully so far, stating that “providing food and water to very sick patients, even by assisted means, is a basic level of care” and not a form of medical treatment, so that the hospital is required to provide it while the patient lives. The bishops urged support for the offer of the Polish government to take responsibility for his future care in Poland. Some 60,000 signatories in the UK have also signed a petition to that effect. I would not normally wish to question decisions made by doctors in the UK as they seek desperate solutions in overcrowded hospitals with limited bedspace amidst the chaos of the covid pandemic, but I feel that if there is a chance of saving this man’s life in a way that required no further burden on the National Health Service, then the British Prime Minister should listen to the direct appeal of President Andrzej Duda and authorize the release of this patient. While there is life there is always hope. I am sure that his wife and children would then be more than grateful that a glimmer of that hope appears that could save their loved one’s quality of life. This decision should be made instantly in order to be effective. Hopefully publicity by your newspaper would play an important part in convincing the Prime Minister and the Health Secretary that this action should be taken now. Perhaps then an opportunity may come where a grateful Polish nation could react with similar generosity to any urgent appeal of a UK citizen in their care. Yours faithfully, Wiktor Moszczynski Dear Editor, You may be aware that there is currently a high level request from the Polish President’s office and from the Polish Foreign Ministry about the possibility of prolonging and saving the life of a Polish citizen, with initials RS, who is currently lying in what Plymouth doctors describe as a near vegetative state. In early November RS had a heart attack with subsequent brain hypoxia at his home in Southern England and his brain was deprived of oxygen for at least 45 minutes. Since then, he has been in a coma in Derriford Hospital in Plymouth and more than a month later specialists have concluded that his condition would never significantly improve and have consequently denied him life-sustaining treatment, including artificial ventilation, nutrition and fluids. A spokesperson for the University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust has acknowledged that the “main role of the hospital is to provide better care to patients, care for their safety and well-being” but maintains that RS is not likely to recover and that it has s complied with the wishes of the patient’s wife and children in denying the patient further sustenance on the grounds that RS had once expressed the wish not to be a “burden” to his family. This decision has been supported by a court in London and the Court of Appeal has refused the patient’s mother and family members in Poland permission to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. They maintain that as a practising Catholic he would not wish to have his life ended artificially. Despite this treatment the patient remains stubbornly alive. The Polish government, acting on behalf of the family in Poland and aware of the sense of outrage in the Polish media about this prolonged deliberate neglect of a Polish citizen, has already issued him with a diplomatic passport and is prepared to provide transport directly from the hospital in Plymouth to the Budzik Clinic in Olsztyn, Poland, which specializes in the resuscitation of patients in seemingly endless coma. A spokesman for the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales and the local bishop in Plymouth, Mark O’Toole, have already appealed to Matt Hancock, unsuccessfully so far, stating that “providing food and water to very sick patients, even by assisted means, is a basic level of care” and not a form of medical treatment, so that the hospital is required to provide it while the patient lives. The bishops urged support for the offer of the Polish government to take responsibility for his future care in Poland. Some 60,000 signatories in the UK have also signed a petition to that effect. I would not normally wish to question decisions made by doctors in the UK as they seek desperate solutions in overcrowded hospitals with limited bedspace amidst the chaos of the covid pandemic, but I feel that if there is a chance of saving this man’s life in a way that required no further burden on the National Health Service, then the British Prime Minister should listen to the direct appeal of President Andrzej Duda and authorize the release of this patient. While there is life there is always hope. I am sure that his wife and children would then be more than grateful that a glimmer of that hope appears that could save their loved one’s quality of life. This decision should be made instantly in order to be effective. Hopefully publicity by your newspaper would play an important part in convincing the Prime Minister and the Health Secretary that this action should be taken now. Perhaps then an opportunity may come where a grateful Polish nation could react with similar generosity to any urgent appeal of a UK citizen in their care. Yours faithfully, Wiktor Moszczynski