euro|topics - Ryszard Kapuscinski's secret-service past

Main focus of Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Ryszard Kapuscinski's secret-service past

The attempts to confront the communist past in Poland have sparked a new scandal. A Polish weekly has revealed that the internationally renowned Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski wrote reports for the communist secret police. Why did Kapuscinski, who died last January, remain silent all these years? And will his case now be used as a political instrument in the current debate?

Rzeczpospolita - Poland

The Polish weekly Newsweek Polska has revealed that the renowned Polish writer and journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died last January, wrote reports for the Polish communist secret police in the 1960s and 1970s. However according to the files kept by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) Kapuscinski's activities for the secret service while working as a foreign correspondent never brought anyone to harm. "The collaboration of a journalist with the secret services - particularly those of an undemocratic state - can never be regarded as a virtue. In the People's Republic of Poland such collaboration, when not undertaken for ideological reasons, was the result of blackmail, weakness, ambition, conformism and historical and political fatalism. This was almost certainly the case with Kapuscinski... It's just a shame that in the ten years he lived in a free Poland he never made the decision to talk about it openly and explain his motives." (22/05/2007)

ABC - Spain

Ramiro Villapadierna, the daily's Berlin correspondent, looks back on the life of Ryszard Kapuscinski and what he has been reproached. "The recently deceased journalist, who was also a brilliant writer, covered the most important conflicts as a correspondent for the national Polish press agency (PAP). He described immense poverty in Africa and Latin America as well as the workings of power ... . In exchange, it seems, the police asked him for information on North American individuals and companies as well as on Israeli and west-German espionage. Thus he apparently wrote a ten page report in Central America, 1970, on Cuba's foreign policy and a three page report on Mexico's, along with the portraits of three people he met. ... Certain local journalists feel that the leaking of this report, which comes from the Institute for the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) is aimed to make him loose all his prestige." (23/05/2007)

Neue Zürcher Zeitung - Switzerland

Correspondent Ulrich M. Schmid was little impressed by Newsweek Polska's exposure of the recently deceased star reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski as an informant for the communist secret police. "'Newsweek' is following in the long-standing and futile tradition of Polish papers of confronting celebrities with their communist past. All the fuss is a storm in a teacup: the information that was passed on to the secret police was for the most part unimportant and harmed no one... In Kaupscinski's case there was also little of any interest. When he took up his post as Africa correspondent for the Polish state news agency the secret police assigned him the task of reporting on US activities on the Black continent. This type of double mandate was common in communist Poland: those who were allowed to travel widely had to declare their willingness to cooperate with the authorities." (23/05/2007)

Frankfurter Rundschau - Germany

Arthur Becker puts the Kapuscinski debate in a wider context. "One has to be aware of the fact that Poland is currently experiencing a genuine constitutional revolution. The conservative governing PiS party recently lost an important battle over opening the secret police archives to the public. The constitutional court declared it unconstitutional to open all suspect secret service files to the public as the government had proposed... The danger of prominent figures of Poland's political and cultural life being exploited now lurks on every corner. In this respect Ryszard Kapuscinski's fate optimally serves certain interests. Kapuscinski's case could be described as a 'feast' for certain parties... Kapuscinski needed to travel because he needed to conduct his research. Evidently the price he had to pay for his passport was very high." (23/05/2007)

» To the complete press review of Wednesday, May 23, 2007

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