The barometer of Russian-Polish relations showed fair weather for several months in the immediate aftermath of the Smolensk air crash. Now someone seems to be willing it to fall. The smear campaign against the inquiry into this disaster that filled Polish newspapers virtually all summer and fall has finally erupted: Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk rejected the International Aviation Committee (IAC) report into the crash. The IAC is a Moscow-based organization that deals with flight safety across the 12 former Soviet republics that formed the Commonwealth of Independent States in 1991-1992.
The mysterious leg
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, twin brother of the late Polish President Lech Kaczynski, made a truly unprecedented statement the other day. Now, seven months after the crash, he announced that the body entombed in the Wawel Cathedral of Krakow, where coronations were held for generations of the country's royalty, may not, after all, be that of his twin brother. His suspicions were aroused by some "fragment of a leg in trousers" that did not seem to belong to his twin brother. He did positively identify him after the crash, but now he is less certain. Journalists were scrupulous in immediately interviewing the generals who delivered the late president's body to Warsaw, and who swore that they did not leave it for a moment and that there could be no doubt that it was, definitely, carried to Wawel.
Poland is a religious country, where funerals, burials and memorial services are all of enormous significance. Lech Kaczynski's burial in Wawel Castle became a subject of nationwide discussion. Renowned film director Andrzej Wajda said that this one issue "has split Poles more than any other since 1989."
When one recalls that 1989 was the year "developed socialism" collapsed in Poland, it is clear this is no exaggeration. Moreover, a certain cult surrounding the late president and his wife Maria can be discerned among nationalistic-minded people who usually vote for Kaczynski's Law and Justice party. They decorate portraits of the late president with white robes, halos and roses and hold a memorial vigil for the late president in front of his successor Bronislaw Komorowski's office. In summer, they blocked the opening of a memorial to Red Army soldiers killed near Warsaw in 1920, until the memorial plaque to the late president had been unveiled on the presidential palace. Needless to say, these people accuse Komorowski of having "sold himself" to Moscow and "let the investigation into the crash take its own course."
Killed and tortured
Although thanks to geopolitics, the once cohesive Slavic ethnos is now scattered across Eurasia, some affinity between the mentalities of the Poles and the Russians remain. In terms of crowd psychology, rumors that "the late president was murdered by the security services" are rooted in the same mechanism as the rumors about "Nicholas II being tortured by Jews" in Russia. No facts or documents stand any chance of influencing people who believe such rumors.
We should give the Polish media and the general public some credit for being a real force, giving the government no option but to take it into account. But is being swept along by these fast moving currents of public opinion worth the risk? Can those who stood in front of the presidential palace chanting "This is Poland, not Moscow!" during President Dmitry Medvedev's visit to Warsaw ever be satisfied? They wanted to be sure the Russian guests heard them.
It seems Tusk has been influenced by this public opinion. This is the only possible explanation for the obvious contradictions between his different statements. He said: "The draft report, from the Polish point of view, in the form it has been sent, is undoubtedly unacceptable." His later statements became increasingly uncertain and confused: "The negligence, or mistakes, or the lack of a positive reaction to Poland's suggestions, all this allows us to say that some conclusions present in this report are unfounded."
"I'm not saying they are false, but they are not confirmed by our investigation of the matter. Let's see what Russia's response is," he added.
Well that certainly seems clear, doesn't it? Your information is not false but it is unacceptable. It will continue being unacceptable until it coincides with the conclusions that we have drawn. Now the Polish side has sent Russia its "comments on the report," all 150 pages of them. Tusk willingly sent the ball right back into Moscow's court: let's see how it will respond.
What he really meant
Now let me attempt a translation of what Tusk really wanted to say, placing his words in the context of well-known facts. He had been fighting a Cold War with the late president for at least five years before the crash because of the unethical conduct of the Law and Justice party towards him in 2005. Lech Kaczynski's visit to the cemetery for Polish servicemen killed by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, at Katyn was planned as a direct affront to Tusk, who had visited the site shortly before as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's guest. On the day of the crash the weather was bad and air-traffic controllers advised the plane's pilots to land at another airport in Vitebsk or, heaven forefend, in Moscow. They refused because some of the passengers were afraid lest they arrive at the ceremony late, or because they did not want to be put in a position of begging favors from Putin or the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko. The plane crashed, killing all passengers on board.
Now the late president's associates are attempting to accuse the Russian air-traffic controllers of not prohibiting the plane from landing. They are pressuring Tusk and Komorowski to follow this line in talks with the IAC and threaten to turn the crash into a "second Katyn" (to quote Bartosz Cichocki, a member of Poland's National Security Bureau).
The Russian air-traffic controllers were in a difficult position that day in April. Prohibiting the plane from landing meant subjecting Moscow to a powerful diplomatic protest. It would make sense to inquire who has overseen the descent of Russian-Polish relations to such a state when an innocent landing ban because of bad weather risked sparking a diplomatic war. Who now wants to see relations return to that condition? The Russian side will find the appropriate words to use in its response to Warsaw and its report may well end up dwarfing Poland's meager 150 pages.
The views expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
