Main focus of Thursday, March 15, 2007

Examining Poland's past

Today, a new law requiring journalists, university lecturers, teachers, lawyers and politicians to reveal any past collaboration with communist era secret services enters force in Poland. The highly controversial "lustration law" goes further than all previous attempts to confront the past in Eastern Europe and is on par with Germany's law on Stasi files.

El País - Spain

"This is the main action inscribed in the hunt for Communist collaborators launched by the conservative twins Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski (respectively President and Prime Minister) since they have been in power. Europe is astonished by it", explains Cristina Galindo. "Bearing the name of lustration law, it is coming into force today and will oblige several hundreds of thousands of Polish people (between 400,000 and 700,000) to answer the question, 'Did you ever collaborate secretly and knowingly with the former communist security forces?'. This question is dividing the Polish. Those in favour of this initiative say that it will allow the system to become more transparent and that there is nothing to fear. Those who are opposed to this - many people are threatening to boycott this law - feel that on the contrary, it represents an unconstitutional norm." (15/03/2007)

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Le Soir - Belgium

"The principle of Polish 'lustration' is fair, but has arrived twenty years too late", considers the editorialist Pol Mathil. "It was, of course, at the time of the peaceable transition from dictatorship to democracy in 1989/90 that the political police files should have been opened and measures imposed according to their contents. ... It is naive to think that such an operation, started after so much delay, can deliver a 'new man'. ... On the contrary, we can expect this purification of a bygone era to not only fail in re-establishing national cohesion, but exacerbate division of Poles. The paradoxical aspects of lustration do nothing to improve its credibility. Lustration bases conclusions on files established by the Communist secret police who were in the habit of falsifying its archives... . It is not possible to build; as the 'twins' wish, their moral revolution on such foundations." (15/03/2007)

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Trybuna - Poland

Not only the media are divided in their attitude towards the new "lustration law", with the conservative Rzeczpospolita supporting it while the left-leaning Gazeta Wyborcza is against it. Journalist associations are also polarized on the subject. Unlike the country's largest association, the Polish Journalists' Association, Jerzy Domanski, president of the small left-wing Journalist's Association of the Republic of Poland and editor-in-chief of Polish weekly Przeglad, roundly condemns the application of the law to the media. Talking to Krzysztof Lubczynski he explains the following: "I believe that the lustration law is part of a bigger project and that the current government is violating the constitution on all fronts... As a journalist, I consider the law an act of revenge against the media, because these criticised the government for its attempt to discipline them and ply them into submission. It's an attempt to intimidate the media and journalists." (15/03/2007)

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More from the press review on the subject » Domestic Policy, » History, » Poland

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