Polish provocations

  • 2011-08-31
  • By Rokas M. Tracevskis

VILNIUS - Massive acts of anti-Lithuanian vandalism against Lithuanian cultural monuments and road signs with Lithuanian-language inscriptions took place in the town of Punsk (Punskas in Lithuanian) and its surroundings which, both ethnically and historically, are Lithuanian and which now belong to Poland. Vytautas Liskauskas, or Witold Liszkowski in his Polish ID due to the historical Polish state policy of Polonization of all ethnic minorities (only 22 out of 15,000 of Poland’s Lithuanians have their Lithuanian names in their IDs), who is the head of Punsk municipality, said to Lithuanian public TV that the Polish fascist-style actions were provoked by an atmosphere of anti-Lithuanian hatred created mostly by two notorious individuals, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski and Valdemar Tomasevski, head of the radical Polish nationalist political party in Lithuania, Lithuania’s Polish Electoral Action. Lithuanian politicians and political analysts are guessing: is this some hidden agenda by Warsaw towards Lithuania, or just a part of the current parliamentary election campaign in Poland and preparation for the parliamentary elections in Lithuania in 2012, though suspicion that these two Polish nationalists are just puppets of Moscow, putting Russian geopolitical theories into practice, is expressed as well.

On the night from Aug. 21 to Aug. 22, the Polish nationalists vandalized 28 road sign inscriptions in the original Lithuanian-language names of Punsk and 13 villages around it, as well as a monument in the town of Punsk situated in the ethnic Lithuanian lands, which belongs to Poland since the Polish army’s occupational march, ordered by Polish strongman Jozef Pilsudski, on southern Lithuania in October 1920, on the eve of the internationally negotiated day of the signing of the Suwalki (Suvalkai) truce agreement between Lithuania and Poland, which would have left Vilnius and Punsk on the Lithuanian side. According to Liskauskas, the vandalized Lithuanian-language inscriptions will probably not be restored because the locals of Punsk are afraid that such inscriptions would provoke further attacks – the local Lithuanians are afraid of attacks on residents due to a radically nationalistic atmosphere in Poland.

The monument was built in 2006 to mark the 100-year anniversary of the first Lithuanian-language theater performance in the neighborhood. The Polish nationalists painted over the Lithuanian-language road sign inscriptions and the monument’s inscriptions with colors of the Polish national flag – white and red. The word “Falanga” was also written on the monument. The National Radical Camp Falanga is the name of a fascist-Catholic Polish organization that was established in 1934 by Boleslaw Piasecki. It was mostly famous for attacks on Jews (after WWII, Piasecki led the pro-Communist Catholic organization PAX Association, promoting the new communist regime to Poland’s Catholics). During WWII, despite the ideological similarity, the Falanga members, like the Polish radicals in the Vilnius area, opposed the German Nazis due to the racist attitude of the latter towards Poland. The symbol of Falanga, the swastika-style hand holding a sword, was also painted on the monument, marking the Lithuanian theater performance in Punsk. Falanga on its Web site, denied that this was the job of their organization, but praised “the raid on Punsk,” suggesting that a Polish army tank attack on “the bandit Republic of Lithuania” is needed.

“The action had an informational character,” Falanga wrote on its Web site, pointing out that the bilingual street names posted by activists of Lithuania’s Polish Electoral Action in several towns and villages of the Vilnius region are officially illegal, according to Lithuanian laws. Lithuania’s Polish activists have ruled those areas of Lithuania since the mid-1990s when municipal elections were allowed there.

Immediately after the failed hard-line communist coup of Aug. 19-21 in 1991, the Lithuanian government imposed its direct rule in three municipalities: the Vilnius region, Salcininkai and Snieckus (now Visaginas), where pro-Soviet Polish and Russian separatism, under the patronage of the main August coup’s ideologist Oleg Shenin, member of Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was instigated in 1989-1991 and where the local municipalities expressed their support for the coup of Moscow’s hard-line communists.

Poland’s main TV channel, TVP, reporting on the vandalism in Punsk showed statements by Ryszard Tomkiewicz, spokesman for the prosecutor’s office in Suwalki, who said that the action is not punishable by the criminal code and prosecutors will find out if some material damage has been done. TVP in that report also showed how “Lithuanians are removing signs with Polish-language street names” in Lithuania. In fact, they showed Mantas Malukas, a participant in a LNK TV reality show, who removed one sign during the show, and the court will make a ruling on this action by Malukas this fall – this information, of course, was not mentioned by TVP.

Irena Gasperaviciute (or Irena Gasperowicz in her Polish ID), head of the Lithuanian community in Poland, said that bilingual road signs in the tiny space around Punsk (but not further where Lithuanians also live) were allowed by the Polish authorities, to give a pretext for pressuring Lithuania to do the same in the area of southeastern Lithuania. Such signs in Lithuania are considered to be controversial by many Lithuanians due to memories of anti-Lithuanian terror in the Polish-occupied Vilnius region from 1920-1939 (immediately after the Polish occupation, from 1920-1922, it was the state of “Middle Lithuania,” but it was still a Warsaw-ruled puppet). That occupation spoiled the relations between both countries, which continues until today.
On the night from Aug. 22 to Aug. 23, the monument to Lithuanian poet Albinas Zukauskas, in his native village of Bubeliai (now Poland), was covered with red paint.

On Aug. 23 (the anniversary of the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), during a meeting of EU justice ministers in Warsaw (Poland holds the rotating EU presidency in the second half of 2011), on the occasion of the EU’s official European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism (adopted by the EU due to lobbying mostly from Lithuania and Poland), Polish Justice Minister Krzysztof Kwiatkowski passed along the regrets of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk about the Punsk incidents to Lithuanian Justice Minister Remigijus Simasius. “I regard the events in Punsk as a brutal provocation, instigating ethnic discord,” Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius said on Aug. 25.

Even more sophisticated provocation took place a month earlier. A provocative pseudo-historical brochure in Polish, Lithuanian and English about the “Lithuanian occupation of Vilnius” in 1939 and “the German-Lithuanian occupation of Vilnius” in 1941-1944 was placed on the official Web site of the Polish Foreign Ministry due to the personal initiative of Polish Foreign Minister Sikorski. Officially, the brochure, titled “Ponary, the Place of Human Slaughter,” deals with the place of Paneriai, near Vilnius, where the Nazis and their local collaborators killed tens of thousands of people. Unlike the statements which the brochure suggests, this place was not forgotten during the Soviet times (though, indeed, the killings of Jews were not accented by the Soviets) or after the re-establishment of independence. It is difficult to find some middle-aged inhabitant of Vilnius who did not visit the place with a school excursion in his or her teenage years, and this tradition has continued. The participation of Lithuanians in the murders of Paneriai was never hidden – rather, on the contrary, it was always highlighted during the post-WWII era.

According to Gediminas Merkys, professor at the Department of Sociology of the Kaunas University of Technology (this professor is a big supporter of writing road signs also in Polish, Russian and Yiddish as well as writing the names in Polish letters in IDs for those who wish), the brochure is typical propaganda consisting of 98 percent truth and 2 percent lies. He told delfi.lt that the brochure’s task is not the memory of WWII, but the provoking of Lithuania by presenting all Lithuanians as collaborators of the Nazis, which is rather far from the historical reality. According to Merkys, during most of the 20th century Poland was a fascist state (this type of nationalism is still cherished there, according to him) and Pilsudski, not Mussolini, was the first fascist in Europe, turning a blind eye on the killings of Orthodox priests and the burning of Orthodox churches in Poland. Merkys also mentioned the Polish border guards shooting at Jews who tried to escape from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s.

Lithuanian Foreign Minister Audronius Azubalis expressed his surprise about the brochure’s statements about the “Lithuanian occupation of Vilnius” and the brochure’s hyperbolized stories about Lithuanian persecutions of Poles from 1939-1940. Azubalis’ letter to the Polish Foreign Ministry appeared on the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry’s Web site, but later it was deleted, possibly because somebody suggested to Azubalis that this may have been exactly what Sikorski wanted.
According to Audrius Baciulis, political analyst at the magazine Veidas, Sikorski was regarded by Polish President Lech Kaczynski as a Russian agent and Sikorski was closely monitored by the Polish counter-intelligence in the past. Baciulis stated that Sikorski wants to play the same game as the Russian Foreign Ministry played with Lithuania from 2004-2008, when the Russians published something provocative on their official Web site and, after getting the Lithuanian response, commented on it in a biased manner to escalate the war of words.

Indeed, the current Warsaw PR policy has many similarities with the Russian one. MEP Vytautas Landsbergis said that the Russian state services, believing in the power of PR, now organize their writing of comments under Lithuanian Internet articles which are related to Russia. Interestingly, the chauvinistic comments from Poland can also be found under most of the Lithuanian Internet articles on delfi.lt, although it seems obvious that people writing in Warsaw slang could not themselves read these articles in Lithuanian. Their ‘comments’ are usually provocative chauvinistic slogans (an absolute majority of Lithuanians cannot read Polish).

Povilas Gylys, former foreign minister in the Lithuanian leftist government from 1992-1996, wrote on delfi.lt that Poland has a “hidden agenda” towards Lithuania and the current Lithuanian officials make a mistake by closing their eyes to it. Jan Widacki, Polish leftist MP and former Polish ambassador to Lithuania from 1992-1996, wrote his similarly critical opinion on Sikorski’s office in the Polish magazine Przeglad, pointing, as an example of bullying, to the protests of the current Polish ambassador to Lithuania regarding the Vilnius council’s intention to name a street in Vilnius as “Lecho Kacinskio Gatve” (“Lech Kaczynski Street” in Lithuanian, which the Polish embassy found insulting due to the Lithuanian version of Kaczynski’s name) – Widacki recalls the “Aleja Jerzego Waszyngtona” (“George Washington Alley” in Polish) in Warsaw, which the Americans somehow do not find insulting.