In Memoriam

Please take the time to read the names of those who died at Smolensk; this list is primarily intended to remind  my non-Polish readers of the magnitude of the tragedy that befell Poland that dreadful day five years ago. As you scroll down, the enormity and awfulness sinks in...

Joanna Agacka-Indecka, president of the Polish Bar Council

Ewa Bąkowska, representative of the Katyn Families

Lt. Gen. Andrzej Błasik, Commander of the Polish Air Force

Krystyna Bochenek, deputy speaker of the Senate

Anna Maria Borowska, representative of the Katyn Families

Bartosz Borowski, representative of the Katyn Families

Maj. Gen. Tadeusz Buk, Commander of the Polish Land Forces

Brig. Gen. Miron Chodakowski, Orthodox chaplain of the Polish Armed Forces

Lt. Col. Czesław Cywiński, president of the World Association of Home Army Soldiers

Lt. Col. Zbigniew Dębski, co-founder of the Union of Warsaw Insurgents

Leszek Deptuła,  member of the Sejm (Polish parliament)

Grzegorz Dolniak, member of the Sejm

Katarzyna Doraczyńska, press officer at the Chancellery of the President of Poland

Edward Duchnowski, secretary general of the Union of Siberian Deportees

Aleksander Fedorowicz, interpreter at the chancellery of the President of Poland

Janina Fetlińska, senator

Lt. Col. Jarosław Florczak, close protection officer

Warrant Officer Artur Francuz, close protection officer

Gen. Franciszek Gągor, chief of the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces

Grażyna Gęsicka, member of the Sejm, former Minister of Regional Development

Brig. Gen. Kazimierz Gilarski, commander of the Warsaw Garrison

Przemysław Gosiewski, member of the Sejm, former deputy premier

Fr. Bronisław Gostomski, personal chaplain to President Kaczorowski

Maj. Robert Grzywna, co-pilot

Mariusz Handzlik, undersecretary of state at the Chancellery of the President of Poland

Fr. Roman Indrzejczyk, personal chaplain to President Kaczyński

Lt. Paweł Janeczek, close protection officer

Dariusz Jankowski, member of staff at the Chancellery of the President of Poland

Natalia Januszko, flight attendant

Izabela Jaruga-Nowacka, member of the Sejm, former deputy premier

Fr. Józef Joniec, Roman Catholic priest

Ryszard Kaczorowski, former president of the Republic of Poland in Exile

Maria Kaczyńska, First Lady

Lech Kaczyński, President of Poland

Sebastian Karpiniuk, member of the Sejm

Vice-Admiral Andrzej Karweta, Commander of the Navy

Mariusz Kazana, director of diplomatic protocol at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Janusz Kochanowski, Civil Rights Ombudsman

Brig. Gen. Stanisław Komornicki, chancellor of the Order of Virtuti Militari

Stanisław Komorowski, Deputy Minister of Defence

Warrant Officer Paweł Krajewski, close protection officer

Andrzej Kremer, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs

Fr. Zdzisław Król, member of the Council for the Protection of Martyrdom Sites

Janusz Krupski, head of the Office for War Veterans and Victims of Oppression

Janusz Kurtyka, President of IPN (Institute of National Remembrance)

Andrzej Kwaśnik, Roman Catholic police chaplain and chaplain to the Katyn Families

Lt. Gen. Bronisław Kwiatkowski, commander of the Polish Armed Forces' Operational Command

Col. Wojciech Lubiński, personal physician to President Kaczyński

Tadeusz Lutoborski, representative of the Katyn families association

Barbara Maciejczyk, flight attendant

Barbara Mamińska, director of the Decorations Office, Chancellery of the President of Poland

Zenona Mamontowicz-Łojek, president of the Polish Katyn Foundation

Stefan Melak, head of the Katyn Committee

Tomasz Merta, deputy Minister of Culture and National Heritage

Warrant Officer Andrzej Michalak, flight engineer

Capt. Dariusz Michałowski, close protection officer

Stanisław Mikke, deputy head of the Council for the Protection of Martyrdom Sites

Justyna Moniuszko, flight attendant

Aleksandra Natalli-Świat, member of the Sejm

Janina Natusiewicz-Mirer, social activist

Second Lt. Piotr Nosek, close protection officer

Piotr Nurowski, president of the Polish Olympic Committee

Bronisława Orawiec-Löffler, representative of the Katyn Families

Lt. Col. Fr. Jan Osiński, Roman Catholic priest

Col. Adam Pilch, Lutheran military chaplain

Katarzyna Piskorska, representative of the Katyn Families

Maciej Płażyński, member of the Sejm, former Speaker of the Sejm

Maj. Gen. Tadeusz Płoski, Roman Catholic Bishop of the Polish Armed Forces

Junior Warrant Officer Agnieszka Pogródka–Węcławek, close protection officer

Maj. Gen. Włodzimierz Potasiński, commander of the Polish Special Forces

Capt. Arkadiusz Protasiuk, pilot

Andrzej Przewoźnik , secretary of the Council for the Protection of Martyrdom Sites

Krzysztof Putra, deputy speaker of the Sejm

Fr. Ryszard Rumianek, rector of the Cardinal Wyszyński University

Arkadiusz Rybicki, member of the Sejm

Andrzej Sariusz-Skąpski, president of the Federation of Katyn Families

Wojciech Seweryn, sculptor, creator of the Katyn Monument in Chicago

Sławomir Skrzypek, president of the National Bank of Poland

Leszek Solski, representative of the Katyn Families

Władysław Stasiak, head of the Chancellery of the President of Poland

Warrant Officer Jacek Surówka, close protection officer

Aleksander Szczygło, head of the National Security Bureau

Jerzy Szmajdziński, deputy speaker of the Sejm, former Defence Minister

Jolanta Szymanek-Deresz, member of the Sejm

Izabela Tomaszewska, head of protocol at the Chancellery of the President of Poland

Warrant Officer Marek Uleryk, close protection officer

Anna Walentynowicz, co-founder of the Solidarity trade union movement

Teresa Walewska-Przyjałkowska, deputy president of the Golgotha of the East Foundation

Zbigniew Wassermann, member of the Sejm

Wiesław Woda, member of the Sejm

Edward Wojtas member of the Sejm

Paweł Wypych, secretary of state at the Chancellery of the President of Poland

Stanisław Zając, senator

Janusz Zakrzeński, actor

Lt. Artur Ziętek, navigator

Gabriela Zych, representative of the Katyn Families

Cześć Ich Pamięci.

This time two years ago:
Warszawa 1935: 3D film reconstructs lost city

This time three years ago:
Cats and awareness

This time three years ago:
Why did this happen?

This time two years ago:
Britain's grey squirrels turning red

Provoked

Sitting in the lobby area of Toruń's Hotel 1231 on Tuesday lunchtime, I was glued to the big screen broadcasting a live press conference at which PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński accused premier Donald Tusk of complicity in covering up the murder of his twin brother Lech and 95 others at Smoleńsk. Under the image of Kaczyński and PiS press spokesman Adam Hofman were newsflashes; the daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita had run a story stating that traces of TNT (trotyl in Polish) and nitroglycerine had been found within the wreck of the Polish Air Force Tupolev Tu-154M. 

For several hours, this news put me into a state of personal crisis. If this is true, and a bomb was the cause of the Smoleńsk tragedy, my world view would be turned upside town. I would have to apologise to my readers, presenting an act of contrition. It was not, after all, a dreadful concoction of foolhardiness, slackness, contravention of safety procedures, misunderstanding, bad habits and political pressure - but a bomb, a bomb placed in the passenger cabin. A bomb within Poland's equivalent of Air Force One or the Queen's Flight.

Numbing, shocking news. If true, it changes everything. After more than 30 months, the smoking gun comes to light. The hardcore faithful that have ever stuck to the line that Smoleńsk = murder, had finally been vindicated. So where does this leave the majority of people, who believe it was monumental cock-up rather than sinister conspiracy? We'd all be eating humble pie, in industrial quantities, for many, many years to come. I can now feel myself in the shoes of the Smoleńsk conspiracy faithful - believing in a cock-up theory and holding to it for so long was just an act of faith, something that I wanted to believe in, rather than something that held with the truth.

The political scene would witness a revolution.

I flicked through my copy of Rzeczpospolita - not a word (it was an early edition for the provinces). Later, on the train back to Warsaw, I was cut off from the outside world. Would my train be greeted by cordons of armed Interior Ministry troops and armoured personnel carriers?

Not a bit of it.

It turns out the Rzeczpospolita article was, er, misguided. After some furious back-pedalling from the publisher, a statement appeared on the paper's home page (may disappear soon), pledging a full investigation into how and why the trotyl story got published. Over the past few days, numerous experts were paraded on the pages of Gazeta Wyborcza, none giving any credence to the explosion theory. There were no traces of explosive on any of the bodies, nor did their eardrums bear any tell-tale signs of concussion caused by a blast.

If it's time for a conspiracy theory - here's mine. In the past months, PiS has effectively caught up with PO in the polls and the past few have shown the two main parties neck-and-neck. Chairman Kaczyński had dropped the Smoleńsk rhetoric in favour of a policy-focused approach; public debates on the economy and healthcare had portrayed the party as one keen to listen to experts, to offer new initiatives on taxation and social security - and this new approach was working. Working so well, indeed, that PO, five years in power, was looking decidedly tired.

What could be better, then, to trip up Kaczyński than a simple provocation? Nimbly plant a made-up story in the right-wing media, and watch Kaczyński reveal his true self. It worked perfectly, timed perfectly too - on the eve of the long All Saints'/All Souls' public holiday, when the media and their consumers would be operating at a more leisurely pace.

In the meanwhile, PiS is sticking to its guns. The two links at the top of this post are active as on Saturday 3 November - will they be retracted, corrected - or simply disappear in the hope that this faux pas will quickly be forgotten?

POSTSCRIPT: 10 November 2012. An article from today's Rzeczpospolita (translation courtesy of PolandAM):

PiS losing support
The recent turmoil following the controversial article in Rzeczpospolita about explosive traces found on  Tupolev wreckage didn't help the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, show the results of the latest TNS Polska poll. The support for PiS has slumped to only 30%, compared to 39% in a similar poll carried out a month ago. On the other hand, the ruling Civic Platform (PO) is enjoying a 9% increase in support. As many as 42% of Poles declared they would vote for PO, were the vote to be held today.

If my conspiracy theory is correct - it worked.

This time last year:
Wilanowska - south Warsaw transport hub

This time three years ago:
Powiśle on a cold, clear autumn morning

This time four years ago:
Okęcie "to remain Warsaw's only airport"

This time five years ago:
Searching for autumnal perfection

Exorcism by the Presidential Palace

The Presidential Palace, Sunday 12 August. A warm and pleasant evening, a throng of Varsovians intermingled with an almost equal number of tourists, are enjoying a stroll along Nowy Świat and Krakowskie Przedmieście, as they have done for centuries. Poland, more prosperous and secure than ever in history. And yet, and yet... The police have cordoned off Krakowskie Przedmieście stopping all motorised traffic including buses.

Some kind of congregation has gathered, no more than 20 in number. In their midst is a Roman Catholic priest. He is talking about the dark powers of Satan inhabiting the Presidential Palace. The president and his aides - tools of Satan. And then, the Prayer to St. Michael. The Exorcism prayer. The small congregation repeats it in a call-and-response manner similar to the Hail Mary. I'm surprised they all know it, but then discover that the Prayer to St. Michael was regularly said after the end of Low Mass each Sunday, and abolished by the Vatican in March 1965. So to know this prayer by heart, you have to be at least in your sixties, and have been a significant God-botherer, the type who hangs around after Mass has ended (rather than going forth in peace).

The congregation was calling on St. Michael to do battle with Satan and other evil spirits, including specifically those lurking within the bodies of the staff working in the Palace.

O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God,
Thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits
Who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.
Amen.

Or for my Polish readers (the entire Exorcism to St. Michael in Polish is here):

Wodzu niebieskich zastępów,
Szatana i inne duchy złe,
Które na zgubę dusz ludzkich po tym świecie krążą
Mocą Bożą strąć do piekła.
Amen.

Passers-by were amused, curious; there was none of the szarpanie (aggressive jostling) I witnessed outside the Presidential Palace when the original 'Smolensk Cross' was being defended here in the spring of 2010. The congregation itself was minimal, the police and security services were clearly expecting more.

Reflecting on the whole thing, I'd posit the following theory: people who believe in the physical presence of Satan in our universe are far more likely to vote for PiS than those who don't.

My enemy's enemy is my... ?

The Przybył case gathers momentum. "Here's that gunshot again, viewers, in case you missed it last night. And again" - Bang! A day later, Col. Przybył's doing fine, conducting media interviews.

I watch with interest what would occur on Toyah's blog, the right-thinking antidote to what you're reading here (written by me, someone incapable of independent thought - brainwashed by years of reading Gazeta Wyborcza and watching TVN news. And growing up in the West.).

[To get my non-Polish readers up to speed on this story, here's the BBC report.]

Instead of lashing out at the System, the one that murdered President Lech Kaczyński, intriguingly, Toyah lashes out at... Artur Zawisza. Readers may associate him with the lighter moments of the PiS-LPR-Samoobrona government (2005-07). Zawisza will primarily be remembered as the politician who wanted to ban the wearing of mini-skirts alongside public highways. And this while his coalition partners from Samoobrona were busy offering jobs for sex.

What has Artur Zawisza done to offend Toyah? He's a splitter. SPLITTER! Along with Marek Jurek (Prawica Rzeczpospolitej), then Adam Bielan, Michał Kamiński, Paweł Poncyliusz and Joanna Kluzik-Rostowska (Polska jest Najważniejsza), and then Zbigniew Ziobro and Jacek Kurski (Solidarna Polska), Zawisza had the temerity to set up a rival right-wing party in opposition to PiS.

OK, Zawisza is a splitter - indeed proto-splitter, because he was one of the very first to break off from Chairman Jarosław Kaczyński. But what did he do to earn Toyah's opprobrium?

The key thing to remember as the Przybył case unfolds is that it is being presented by the media as the result of the conflict between the civilian and military prosecutor. Now, the civilian prosecutor-general, Andrzej Seremet, with whom the military prosecutor is at odds, was appointed by President Lech Kaczyński.

So... Seremet is our friend. Przybył and his boss Krzysztof Parulski, being at odds with him are... So whatever Przybył says is... ? Well? About Smoleńsk, about dodgy public procurement practices in the armed forces? About organised crime? True? Or an insane attempt to discredit Seremet, anointed by the martyred President?

This case will get curiouser and curiouser. Expect some fine conspiracy theories to emerge from all this!

Postscript, Wednesday 11 January: As predicted, we did not have to wait long. Read the comments of Jagoda B. Kidding on Toyah's post from today. Przybył did not shoot himself. (Something to do with the 9mm round in a NATO Parabellum)

This time last year:
Some thoughts upon the Nature of Warfare

This time two years ago:
Snow so deep it needs a plough

This time three years ago:
A fieldfare in midwinter

This time four years ago:
Kraków, a bit of winter sunshine

I understand... nothing

Just when I thought I had Poland well-understood, this happens. Now I'm utterly flummoxed.

Military prosecutor, Colonel Mikołaj Przybył, was holding a press conference about press leaks concerning information about the Smolensk air crash investigation, when he ushered out the media, saying he needed to air the room. There was a sound, which journalists took to be that of a camera crashing to the floor. They dashed in to find Col. Przybył lying on the floor. It looked like he'd taken his life...

Now TVN24 has just inferred that he shot himself through the cheek and he'll be out of hospital tomorrow. True? Or cover-up?

Hang on - a man with a gun and live ammunition is allowed to host a press conference? He was allowed to have a gun because there were threats to his family's life? This is getting weirder and weirder by the minute!

Grounds for conspiracy theorists (who've had a rather tough time over the past few months alleging that President Lech Kaczyński and 95 others were murdered, rather than being the victims of cock-up piled upon cock-up) have suddenly become fertile once more.

Gnash Dziennik has (as of this evening) nothing to say on the matter (lead story about TV Trwam not getting a digital licence).

Col. Przybyl has claimed that attempts were made to scare him - threats to his family, break-ins to his house, attacks on his car - by whom? To what end? "It's like Lenin said. Look for the person who will benefit. And, uh, you know, uh..."

I am the Walrus?

What's going on? Lot of ins, lot of outs, lot of what-have-yous. uh... Right now, I really don't know. I do know, however, that the conspiracy theories, having somewhat run out of steam (Russians filling the valley in front of the runway at Smolensk with helium etc) will resurface.

And with them the division between the "brainwashed" (brainwashed by Tusk, PO, Gazeta Wyborcza and TVN) and the "brainwashed" (brainwashed by Kaczyński, PiS, Gnash Dziennik and TV Trwam) get ever deeper.

This is going to be an interesting story.

I look forward to the regular battle of wits between the usual suspects...

This time last year:
Wetlands winter meltdown

This time two years ago:
Jeziorki rail scenes, winter

This time three years ago:
Winter drivetime, Jeziorki North

This time four years ago:
Disappearing winter

A rare PS: I notice a clear correlation between climate-change deniers and PiS supporters. Am I right?

Rhetorical question: Why the fuss?

I picked Moni up from W-wa Centralna this morning just before seven - she's back from the seaside on the night train. Driving home, she remarked "What are all the flags up for?" "Warsaw Uprising," I reminded her. "But that was on the first of August," she said. "Yes, but it lasted 63 days," I replied.

Later, in Park Dreszera in Mokotów, I came across this monument to the Home Army (AK) units that fought in this Warsaw district, still full of floral tributes, votive candles, flags and ribbons.

Behind us, two elderly ladies - old enough to have lived through the Uprising - were sitting on a bench facing this memorial and arguing about... Smolensk. One - dressed in black - was getting increasingly agitated. She wanted the truth. "It's a plot! A conspiracy!" The other - dressed in light blue, was smiling, shaking her head at her friend.

Najważniejsza jest prawda. Prawda zawsze zwycięża ("The truth is the most important. The truth will always triumph") said the one in black. The one in light blue said Trzeba modlić się po cichu, nie należy obnosić się ze swoją wiarą ("One should pray in silence; one oughtn't to display one's faith"), to which the woman in black said nie powinniśmy się wstydzić naszej wiary, nie powinniśmy jej ukrywać ("we shouldn't be ashamed of our faith, we shouldn't hide it"). The woman in light blue said "I can't agree with you," and pulling herself up on her crutch, got ready to hobble off.

The contrast between the two ladies put me immediately in mind of the debate going on just one post lower down on my blog. The tragedy has indeed divided the nation.

Meanwhile, the debate rages about the Uprising. There's increasing clarity emerging from the arguments for and against. In military terms, the losses suffered by both sides - considering this was a battle for a capital city that raged for over two months - were not huge in absolute terms. The civilian losses were. The German strategy of wholesale slaughter of uninvolved civilians (around 180,000, mainly in mass executions) was something the Uprising's leadership should have come to expect from a totally dehumanised foe - yet they didn't. This issue deserves greater attention from historians. Did the Government-in-Exile and the AK leadership knowingly condemn hundreds of thousands of civilians to barbarous slaughter - or did they overlook the Nazi's capacity for such utter barbarism?

Either way, the jury is still out; emotional voices can be heard extolling both points of view - a) the Uprising was inevitable - driven by furious rage at what had happened over the past five years in the Nazi-occupied capital - or b) that it was a foolish waste of life and property that could have been avoided.

Incidentally, my assertion that the Uprising - by halting Stalin's tanks on the Vistula for five months - spared much of Western Europe from 45 years of communism - is echoed in no less hallowed a title than Gnash Dziennik. Prof. Witold Kiezuń wrote there "How deep into Europe would the Red Army have penetrated, had it not been held up by the Warsaw Uprising? Poles paid an enormous price in terms of the destruction by the Germans of the Home Army in Warsaw and the centre of independent, political, patriotic action in Poland... In answer to the outbreak of the Uprising, Stalin halted the Red Army's offensive on the Vistula. The Uprising thus halted for over five months the dynamic 'thrust for Berlin'."

After 67 years, historians are still debating the sense of the Warsaw Uprising. Will the Smolensk debate still be raging in 2077? Maybe not. But in 2017, certainly.

This time last year:
The wonder of a quarterly karta miejska

This time two years ago:
Nerds - mankind's avantgarde

This time three years ago:
Into the fading light

This time four years ago:
A little bit of Poland in Wales

Making sense of Polish politics

In case my British and American readers have been puzzling over the recent descriptions in their media of the late President Kaczyński as being 'right wing', here's a simple graph above that I prepared ahead of the 2005 elections to show that the Anglo-Saxon concepts of 'left' and 'right' don't make too much sense in the context of Polish politics.

You need to operate in two axes. A social one, where 'right' means traditional, conservative, patriotic, religious, espousing traditional family values; while 'left' means modern, secular, tolerant, cosmopolitan, liberal. And an economic one, where 'right' means the free market, privatisation, laissez-faire, small government, low taxes, while 'left' means statism, dirigisme, big government, redistribution of wealth; tax and spend. You can argue about where exactly one should plot the position of the given parties on the graph, but essentially, the point is to put the parties into one of four quarters.

In the above graph, you will see the two biggest parties in Polish politics occupying quarters that neither of the main British or American parties occupy. Hence the problems with understanding Polish politics. Supporters of Poland's Law & Justice (PiS) might see eye-to-eye with American Republicans on Christianity, patriotic duty, abortion and gay rights, but would disagree on the primacy of free enterprise over the state.

The word 'liberal' in the US (and in the UK to a lesser degree) means 'social liberal'. In Poland, it means both economic and social liberal.

If anyone would occupy the same quarter as PiS, it would be - further to the right - Generalissimo Franco (God-fearing, patriotic, anti-communist, syndicalist, suspicious of enterprise) and, more moderately, the French Gaullists.

The forthcoming Polish presidential elections will be fought over an entirely different battleground than the UK parliamentary elections. What the respective media of both countries will make of the elections in the other will no doubt be sprinkled with much misunderstanding.

The post-communist Polish 'left' (the SLD) is more free market than PiS and more socially liberal than PO; but it is increasingly marginalised. Its place in the nation's debate is becoming irrelevant. A comparison with Irish politics (Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil) is apt; two parties that you'd be hard pressed to tell apart (one is Christian Democrat Centrist, the other Conservative Centrist). The fault line between the two is which side their grandfathers fought on in the Irish Civil War - the Pro-Treaty side, ready to accept the compromise that left the Six Counties British, or the Republican side, that would not give up the struggle to unify Ireland. 87 years ago.

The parallel with Poland is clear. PO is seen as the successor party to the wing of Solidarity that accepted the Round Table compromise which left the communists unpersecuted in return for giving up power, while PiS is the successor to the harder-line anti-communists that insisted on the heirs to the PZPR being brought to book for their crimes against the nation.

The Smolensk tragedy may lead to a mould being broken, a destiny to follow the Irish path for decades to come may not come to pass.

Okęcie before the funerals

Volcanic ash has totally halted passenger air travel over Poland and much of Europe. Yet with the state funeral in Kraków tomorrow of President Lech Kaczyński and his wife, there has been much military activity over Okęcie airport today.

Above: A PZL W3S Sokół helicopter, from the 36th Special Aviation Regiment. Tactical number 0916.

Below: A Yakovlev Yak-40 (NATO reporting name: Codling), from the 36th Special Aviation Regiment. Short- and medium-range VIP transport. Tactical number 045.

Below: CASA 295M, one of four landings I saw today. Like the other 19 CASAs in service with the Polish air force (one crashed at Mirosławiec in January 2008), this one - tactical number 014 - belongs to the 13th Air Transport Squadron based at Kraków-Balice airport. One of these brought the body of President Kaczyński back from Russia last Sunday; I guess that one will be flying the coffin from Warsaw to Kraków tomorrow morning.

He kept the faith

When we were growing up in England, the Polish Government-in-Exile struck us teenagers as a bit of an oddity. We lived then in a bi-polar world in which a free-market, democratic Atlanticist bloc glared across the Iron Curtain in a nuclear standoff with an equally-powerful Soviet bloc, a dictatorship of captive nations, one of which was Poland. Thus it was when we were born, thus, many thought, would it ever be. Yet at 43 Eaton Place, London, the spirit and legal legitimacy of pre-war Poland endured, though diplomatically shunned by the governments of the west since the summer of 1945. And for the next 45 years, the Polish Government-in-Exile would soldier on, maintaining the continuity of the Polish state. For us, children born to Poles exiled in the UK after the war, that continuity was an integral and defining part of our lives, especially at weekends.

We spent our Saturday mornings at Polish school learning Polish grammar, history and geography; Saturday afternoon we spent at Polish scouts, learning military drill, fieldcraft, national traditions and patriotic songs; on Sundays we went to mass in the Polish church. Poland might have been under the yoke of the Soviet Union, but in our heart we were keeping alive the true spirit of Poland. Ojczyznę wolną/Racz nam wrócić Panie ('Let us return, O Lord, to a free fatherland") we'd sing at the end of mass, every Sunday.

If there was a tipping point when things started to be different, it was 1980. The Solidarity movement suddenly gave us hope that Poland could pull itself free of the Soviet orbit and become a independent country once more. Then came Martial Law; a cold dark hand fell over the Polish nation. In the mid-1980s, it looked once again like the east-west split was indeed a permanent feature of the world in which we lived. But the Government-in-Exile kept the faith.

I personally had a lot of time for Kazimierz Sabbat, the penultimate President-in-Exile, who actively encouraged support for the Polish opposition. This was a time of political meetings with activists from Poland, immersion in Polish history and long, long discussions into the night about how Poland could look as an independent state. Tragically, President Sabbat died months before Poland regained its freedom. He was succeeded by Ryszard Kaczorowski, prominent in the Polish scouting movement in the UK. And so it fell to President Kaczorowski to fly to Warsaw, and on 22 December 1990, to hand over to Lech Wałęsa, who'd just been democratically elected President of the new Third Republic, the insignia of state that had left Poland with President Ignacy Mościcki on 17 September 1939.

Since then, Ryszard Kaczorowski had remained a powerful symbol of the survival and continuity of the Polish nation and the Polish state. It is somehow tragically fitting that he should be among the victims of last Saturday's crash at Smolensk. His presence on the aircraft is highly symbolic, lifting into the great history book of the Polish people the role of the Government-in-Exile, and its role when many had all but given up hope. His fate could have been similar to the 22,000 Poles murdered at Katyń. He too was arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to death. He was fortunate, however, to have had it commuted to a ten-year stretch in the GULAG. He made his way out of the Soviet Union with Anders' army after the Nazi attack on the USSR, like so many other Poles, including my mother.

Ryszard Kaczorowski was a personal friend of my parents-in-law. My wife was at yesterday's requiem mass for President Kaczorowski at the Church of the Holy Cross (her photo above).

Looking at the photo: Isn't it a damned shame that the ceremonial weapon used in such occasions is still the AK-47 Kalashnikov? Wouldn't a Lee-Enfield rifle be more appropriate? The weapon used by Polish soldiers at Monte Cassino, where Ryszard Kaczorowski also fought?

The fault-lines in Polish society

Lech Kaczyński was a divisive president, but his death unified a shocked nation. For a while. Until the decision to bury him in the Wawel Castle* was announced. Then things kicked off.

Depending on your point of view, burying Lech Kaczyński in Wawel is akin to placing James Callaghan (a decent but ultimately mediocre premier) alongside Elizabeth I, Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens in Westminster Abbey - or giving Poland's greatest post-independence president his rightful resting place in the pantheon of the Polish nation.

The fault lines are clearly defined. To generalise, to peddle stereotypes: on the one hand, TVN-watching, Gazeta Wyborcza-reading, cosmopolitan, secular, modern, tolerant, young, urban Poles; on the other, TVP-watching, Rzeczpospolita-reading, patriotic, Catholic, traditionalist, older, rural Poles.

I confess to tend towards the first group. Yet I must say that the Kaczyński twins left Poland two great legacies.

The first was knocking corruption on the head. From 1996, when Poland was first included in Transparency International's global Corruption Perception Index (CPI), to 2005, each successive government was perceived as being more crooked than the last. Post communist, post-Solidarity, post communist - things got worse and worse, reaching an apogee with the government of Leszek Millllllller and his SLD ('Stalin-Lenin-Dno' to quote graffiti of the era) cronies. The Kaczyński twins were swept to power on a mandate to stop corruption large and small. They succeeded, in that since PiS (Law and Justice) took office, Poland has been consistently moving in the right direction in the CPI. (The downside of the Kaczyńskis' 'trust no one' approach is that today, Polish bureaucrats would rather do nothing than take a decision that could remotely be construed as resulting from a backhander.)

The second was in sucking the venom out of the populist left and populist right wing tendencies in Polish society. Poland today is one of the very few EU member states not to have any nutty nationalists or wacko communists in the European Parliament. The UK has more UKIP and BNP MEPs than ones from the ruling Labour party. By bringing into a government coalition members from Samoobrona (Self Defence) and the LPR (League of Polish Families Oi!) and then letting them destroy themselves, by accident or design the Kaczynskis brought on the total destruction of the embarrassing element of Polish politics. By marrying social conservatism with economic soft-socialism, they took the wind right out of the sails of the post-communists. My hope now is that the garbage element of the political extremes does not come crawling out of the sewers to fill the vacuum left by the decimation of PiS's senior ranks.

Say what you like about Law and Justice, but they are (as individuals) decent, principled, intelligent, well-mannered. Quite a different breed of people from the boorish, self-interested, old Moscow-educated meatheads from SLD or the boorish potato-chucking nest-feathering philanderers of Samoobrona. And as for the ultranationalist element of the LPR/Radio Has-a-Snout/Gnash Dziennik crowd... I was in Powązki cemetary with my good friend and Poland's best political blogger Krzysztof (of Toyah fame) last August to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw uprising. Leaving Powązki, we saw a sad-looking band of pamphleteers peddling some twaddle about the Lisbon Treaty being the work of the Anti-Christ. Krzysztof said - and quite rightly - that we have the Kaczyńskis to thank for these people being pushed out to the very margins of Polish political life.

As a counter-weight to PO (Civic Platform), PiS is the optimal opposition. The fault line is longer 'post-communist' vs 'post-Solidarity' - the post-communists have (I hope) been knocked out of contention for good as a governing party, largely through the skilful politics of Jarosław and Lech Kaczynski. I hope that PiS can re-group after this tragedy and return to being a conservative counterbalance and conscience to PO.


* He should be buried there. Lech Kaczyński himself is not worthy of Wawel. But I go along with Jarosław Gowin in that we're not just burying President Kaczyński - we are burying along with him the legacy of Katyń. In his death, he will symbolise to the ages the continuity between the massacre and today's independent Poland. Also, logistically, Powązki cemetery is, well, too narrow. I can't really see the world's leaders tip-toeing their way through the narrow corridors between the graves of Warsaw's fallen insurgents. Wawel will focus the world on Poland, volcanic ash permitting. For these reasons, I opt for - Wawel. To quote Lech Wałęsa: "The Holy Spirit hath spoken. Debate not."

Volcano shuts down aviation over NW Europe

As I write, there are only four aircraft over Polish airspace. FlightRadar24.com, an excellent source of real-time aviation information, shows absolutely nothing across of broad swathe of Europe from Portual, the UK, Scandinavia and Russia. Blue crosses are airports, yellow symbols are aircraft (click on map to enlarge).

This is the flight ban resulting from the plume of volcanic ash from the eruption at Eyjafjallajökull* in Iceland (under the FlightRadar24 logo, top left).

Look at Turkey - that's the normal air traffic density you'd get over the whole continent of a weekday morning. Many of the aircraft in the air right now are long-haul passenger jets making it back to Europe from places like South Africa or Singapore. I can also see planes being diverted.

Sitting here under the approach to Runway 33 at Warsaw's Okęcie airport, at this time of day - it's weird - usually there's a stream of take-offs or landings. Normally, we can expect 40 aircraft movements from 06:00 to 07:00. The airport's website reports 12 cancelled arrivals (four landed/two more expected in from southern Europe, Wrocław and Kraków). Nothing's due to take off.

Will this bizarre situation clear up before Sunday's state funeral in Kraków?

* Where is the BBC's Pronunciation Unit when it's needed?

Strange days indeed

An unreal, uneasy dreamlike atmosphere has settled over Warsaw. Helicopters overhead, tank transporters in the streets, soldiers on the platforms of the stations, sirens of police cars and ambulances; people all dressed in dark grey and black - the odd red jacket or yellow coat an anomaly; and those newspapers, black and white like the 1960s, and TV screens on the trains and in the metro, black and white pictures of Lech and Maria, in perpetual slow motion...

We're waiting for a sign, anxiety in the air; people quieter than usual, hushed tones at the bus stop. Chopin in place of hip-hop, flags, flags everywhere, red and white or faded pink and grey, black ribbons fluttering on aerials, on trains.

Superstitions, prophesies... "my hairdresser had a terrible dream the night before it happened." A volcano is erupting. Symbols. Symbols. The End of Days. "The sedge is wither'd from the lake/And no bird sings". "One for sorrow..." a solitary magpie sits on my lawn.

"What's going to happen?""What will happen to my country? To my family?" weeps a distraught woman to camera. Ostensible stability; sensible, measured behaviour. Nothing's changed - or has it? Princess Di, John Paul II - but this is deeper; not melodrama, not rubbernecking, not an expected passing. This is History unfolding. This is Mass Psychology, this is a nation experiencing traumatic tension, the unease is palpable; I'm in the crowd yet alone. What is going to happen? Will the great and good manage to fly to the Funeral? Portents in the sky. God's displeasure?

A morbid, tense, angry election is in the offing. There will be 22 funerals on Monday, another 16 on Tuesday.

May I never live to see such accursed days as these ever again.

Here's the video version of this post - courtesy of Nick Morris.

A high-definition version is here (slightly longer download time).

UPDATE: 22:21 FlightRadar24.com is down. Strange planes are coming in to land in Warsaw, driven south by volcanic ash.

Twenty years, ten months, six days

The following thought struck me this afternoon in the office. So I found a website to help me with the calculation.

From Poland regaining independence at the end of World War I to the Poland's invasion by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union - 7,615 days.

That's from 11 November 1918 to 17 September 1939, when President Ignacy Mościcki crossed the border into Romania, taking with him the insignia of state, the day of Stalin's invasion of eastern Poland. The formal length of the Second Republic of Poland.

From Poland regaining democracy to the Smolensk air crash - 7,615 days.

That's from 4 June 1989, when Poles were able to vote in a partially-free election which led to the formation of a non-communist government, to 10 April 2010.

Spooky, eh, readers? Something for the numerologically inclined conspiracy theorists to get their teeth into! (Check data here)

Let's see how viral I can make this... translate into Polish please...

Od momentu odzyskania niepodległości Polski do najazdu naszej ojczyzny przez Hitlera i Stalina, i przekroczenie granicy Rumuńskiej przez Prezydenta Mościckiego upłynęło 7615 dni.

Od odzyskania demokracji przez Polskę do tragicznego wypadku w Smoleńsku upłnęło... 7615 dni.

Someone had blunder'd

I know this post will be controversial. I find my state of mind concerning Saturday's crash shifting from grief to anger. Anger that so many people have died, so many influential Poles that have had - and could have had - a signficant say in how our country develops. Blogging is a personal matter; I'm expressing my personal views, strongly held though they be.

While Warsaw continues to be in a profound state of mourning (everyone in our office today was dressed in black, men with black ties, flags everywhere), questions regarding the circumstances of the crash are focused on why a decision to land in such treacherous conditions was taken.

Work on recovering data from the flight data recorders and the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) is going ahead smoothly, with the chief prosecutor of the Polish Army, Krzysztof Parulski, describing cooperation with the Russians as 'exemplary'.

Did anyone from the official entourage order, recommend, suggest or politely ask Captain Arkadiusz Protasiuk to make one more attempt to land? There seems to be unity from the Polish media as of this evening that there was no such order or request; the CVR will reveal all. Someone, at the end of the day, took a decision to land. A decision to have flown on to an alternative airport would have saved 96 lives.

I find it quite inconceivable that an RAF pilot flying a Queen's Flight aircraft, or the pilot of Air Force One, would even contemplate such a risky landing.

There is a big cultural gulf when it comes to risk assessment and attitudes to health and safety between Poland and Britain, something that my fellow British-born Poles here in Warsaw are conscious of. Consider the numbers of fatalities in both countries in road accidents (2,538 UK vs 5,437 Poland in 2008). This is despite the fact that there are 31 million cars on the road in the UK, a mere 19 million in Poland. Fatalities on Polish building sites are six times higher per 100,000 man-days than in the UK. Health and Safety may be overzealously policed by Nanny State, but the result is far fewer human tragedies. It is salutary to look at what happened when the Prince of Wales landed the Queen's Flight BAe 146 too fast at Islay airfield in 1994.

"Better safe than sorry"; "more haste, less speed"; "don't keep all your eggs in one basket" - these are things drummed into my head at Oaklands Road Primary School many years ago.

The adage that Polak potrafi ('a Pole can'/'a Pole is able to') is only right 99 times out of a hundred. Consider the case of Polish Olympic medallist Otylia Jędrzejczak. An inexperienced driver, she drove her powerful car into a tree at 160kmh killing her brother. Instead of her remorseful face being used to warn Poles not to drive like lunatics, after her recovery she became the poster girl for drinking milk. "Drink milk, be big" Like me. There's nothing big about driving into a tree at high speed.

Now a personal confession. Last November I had a car crash while driving to Dobra. After four hours at the wheel without a break, as light was fading, with less than half an hour to my destination, my right-hand wheels came off the road and on to a ploughed field. I was unable to get the car back onto the asphalt; I'd have come off OK (I was driving at 70kmh) had it not been for a ditch running perpendicular to the road. My Toyota Yaris was a total write-off, the airbags saved me from anything worse than two stitches above my eyebrow and some bruised ribs. I could have gone on about the lack of rest facilities along the road from Radom to Kraków, the lack of Tiredness kills: take a break signs every few kilometres or the lack of hardened verges on the road between Muchówka and Żegocina. But I don't - it was my own foolish decision to press on to my destination despite everything. My fault.

If there is one Great Big Lesson that should be learned by the Polish nation from this terrible tragedy, it is this. Treat risk seriously. Consider the consequences of impatience and rash decisions. May this be a wake-up call to my countrymen. I shall end this post with my mother's favourite Latin saying (from Ovid), which carries so much wisdom:

Quidquid agis, prudenter agas, et respice finem

Whatever you do, do it prudently, and consider the outcome

Cokolwiek czynisz, czyń rozważnie i myśl o wyniku

Someone had blunder'd

Fertile ground for conspiracy theorists

Princess Di: murdered by the Royal Family. NASA on the moon: an ingenious fabrication. 9/11: devised by the Bush regime for its own ends. JFK: assassinated by the Military-Industrial Complex, Cuban guerillas, LBJ, the Mob and the KGB all working together.

It is clear that conspiracy theories will circulate around yesterday's tragedy at Smolensk for decades to come. The sense of shock and disbelief will turn into rumour and searches for dark motives and guilty conspirators. Here we go!
The death of General Sikorski at Gibraltar strongly parallels Smolensk; both resulted in the deaths of the nation's head of state and military leader (along with President Kaczynski and many senior politicians, the chiefs of Poland's army, navy and air force and the chief of general staff all perished yesterday). To me and to a great many Poles, Gibraltar was sabotage. It will take mountains of historical evidence to convince me that the crash was simply an accident. Previous attempts on his life also involving his aircraft and the presence of Soviet spy Kim Philby all lead the rational mind conclude that it was murder at Stalin's behest.

Removing a large number of the nation's elite at a stroke, yesterday's crash immediately revives the ghost of Gibraltar. I must confess my very first thought on hearing confirmation of the news was 'this was deliberate'.

In my professional career I was always taught never to speculate, yet speculation based on unfounded information will circulate, plots will be devised, shady characters uncovered, entire underground cottage industries will inevitably develop, each firmly wedded to their own theory of who, why and how managed to wipe out such a significant number of the people who run Poland.

To the elderly man or woman in the Grochów tram, the motives of any putative plotters would have been clear - remove the conservative right from Polish politics, the staunch defenders of Polishness against godless liberalism at home and Bruxello-Muscovite machinations abroad (no doubt aided and abetted by Jews, Masons and Cyclists).

It's too early to offer a true explanation of how this latest Polish tragedy came to pass. As I wrote yesterday, an entirely transparent air crash investigation is an absolute must - not the minutest detail can be hidden or brushed aside by either Russia or Poland. The world's media need to have total access to all information concerning the crash.

After 24 hours of media examination, my current thinking is as follows. In thick fog, the crew of the Tu-154 made three attempts to land. The control tower is reported to have recommended flying to another airport. The captain (who takes ultimate responsibility for the aircraft and its passengers) took the decision to make a fourth attempt. I feel that there may well have been an element of mistrust between tower and flightdeck (as in 'those Russians don't want us at Katyń so they're trying to put us off). The cockpit voice recorder will tell us whether the pilot was pressured by someone into making another attempt to land. Whether or not this was the case, whoever ultimately took the decision to land made a fatal error of judgment. It was also the sheerest folly to pack so many VIPs on one flight, akin to Princess Di failing to put on a seatbelt as she set off at high speed from the Ritz.

A pilot who makes it down safely through thick fog is praised for his skill. Several years ago, flying back from Christmas in England, our LOT flight was unable to land at Okęcie because of fog. As we circled over Poland, waiting for a decision whether to make for an alternative airport (Berlin? Katowice?), we could see the Tatras and even the Świętokrzyskie hills (600m) sticking out through a uniform white blanket covering the entire country. After several circuits, we were told to prepare for landing. From our position, I could work out that we were going for Warsaw. As we neared the top of the cloud, the undercarriage was lowered. I've never seen that before - wheels out, and not only could we not see the ground, but we were still above the clouds in a blue sky! We dipped into the dense cloud, I could not even see the wingtips. Then suddenly, the wheels were on the ground. One attempt, a perfect landing. Skill or luck, Kapitan Śmietana*? Later on the TV news we learned that only one plane had managed to land at Okęcie that day.

But then Okęcie has Category II instrument landing system. Smolensk has no ILS, just a rudimentary glide slope indicator. The element of risk in trying to put down a plane as large as a Tu-154 in such weather conditions with so many VIPs on board was shockingly high.

I'm mindful of the Mirosławiec disaster in January 2008, where 16 senior air force officers were killed when their CASA-295M crashed in bad weather on a repeated approach to a military airport in north-west Poland. Lessons just don't seem to have been learned. The Polish media and blogosphere is also talking about the flight of five presidents to Georgia in 2008, where Lech Kaczyński insisted that the pilot of the Tu-154M land in Georgia despite adverse conditions. The pilot, whose passengers also included the presidents of Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia disobeyed the order, flying on instead to Azerbaidjan.

* Could it be this Kapitan Śmietana?

Why did this happen

A Tu-154M as pictured above flying over our house, crashed this morning 1.5km from Smolensk military airport, killing all 96 people on board including President Lech Kaczyński, his wife, the last Polish President in Exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski, the President of the National Bank of Poland, Sławomir Skrzypek, and many other politicians, military leaders and VIPs.

Emotionally, the shock of the news felt to me like a gigantic, numbing, punch in the chest, the more so when the full list of passengers on board was revealed. I'd met several of them. We will be mourning for a long time. The enormity of the implications are beginning to sink in.

No doubt there will be criticism of the fact that Poland's leaders still fly around in elderly Soviet-era aircraft, the planes of the 36th Special Aviation Regiment are of the same mid-'80s vintage as those used to fly Britain's royalty and politicians. The Polish VIP fleet is well-maintained, despite difficulties with spares and avionics.

It's worth remembering the crash in December 2003 involving the Polish premier of the time, Leszek Miller, in a 36th Special Aviation Regiment Mil Mi-8 helicopter. At that time, nearly six and half years ago, there was a renewed public debate about the urgent need to replace the elderly Soviet aircraft used to fly Poland's leaders. An inquiry concluded that the accident was due to pilot error (the pilot had not switched on the engines' de-icing heater). More recent talk about using chartered commercial airliners to transport Poland's VIPs remained just talk.

No doubt some voices will immediatly be talking of a 'second Gibraltar'; a full and transparent inquiry will be needed to ascertain why the Tu-154M hit trees in fog a whole 1.5km from the end of the runway at Smolensk. At first sight it looks like pilot error - after circling the airport three times, it clipped trees as it made its approach. There must be full openness, no obfuscation or official foot-dragging; why did the pilot not take up the offer to land at an alternative airport?

Poland's head of state is now Bronisław Komorowski, speaker of the parliament (and Civic Platform's presidential candidate). The presidential elections, due for November, will be brought forward.