PiS off

Back in October, Poles threw out the Law and Justice (PiS) government in elections which saw record turnout. And now, after a failed last-ditch effort by PiS to retain control, the new coalition has finally taken power:

Donald Tusk has pledged to “chase away the darkness … chase away the evil” of eight divisive years of national-conservative rule, after Poland’s parliament voted to back his nomination as the country’s new prime minister.

[...]

In power since 2015, PiS has been accused of illegally eroding the rule of law, turning state media into propaganda outlets, rolling back minority rights and fomenting feuds with the EU, prompting Brussels to freeze tens of billions of euros of funds.

Tusk, who has promised to mend relations with the bloc and get the money released, is scheduled to address parliament on Tuesday, presenting his cabinet and laying out the government’s plans, before facing the formality of a confidence vote.

Besides rebuilding bridges with Brussels, Tusk’s campaign pledges included promising to allow abortion – subject to a near-total ban under PiS – until 12 weeks, declaring termination, IVF and contraception fundamental rights, and allowing civil partnerships for same-sex couples.

You know, behaving like a normal European country, rather than some authoritarian Catholic theocracy.

I don't expect Tusk's government to be perfect. But its basicly saved Poland from autocracy, and seems to be working in the right direction. Its unquestionably better than what came before. The job for Poles is to keep it that way, and avoid another authoritarian return.

Democracy wins in Poland

Poland has been on a nasty path for the last eight years, with the ruling "Law and Justice " Party becoming increasingly bigoted, authoritarian, and undemocratic. But they had an election over the weekend, and it looks like Polish voters have thrown their would-be tyrants out:

Opposition parties appear to have won enough votes in Poland's general election to oust the ruling right-wing populist Law and Justice (PiS) party, almost complete results show.

With more than 99% of votes counted, PiS led with 35.64%, while Donald Tusk's liberal Civic Coalition party had 30.48%.

But Mr Tusk is now most likely to be able to form a broad coalition.

That would end eight years of rule under PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

And all of this on a record turnout, with more young people voting than pensioners. I guess they wanted a future that wasn't just full of hate and resentment.

The new government will have a lot of work to do: restoring abortion rights, rebuilding relations with the EU, restoring the independence of the judiciary, public service, and state media (all of which are full of PiS cronies). But at least they have a chance to do it, and turn Poland back into a modern democratic state, rather than an authoritarian Kaczynski fiefdom.

No freedom of speech in Poland

In a functioning democracy, calling a politician a moron is practically a human right. Debate is expected to be robust, and this includes assessing the personal characteristics of public figures. But not in Poland:

A Polish writer faces a possible prison sentence for insulting President Andrzej Duda by calling him a “moron” over comments the latter made about Joe Biden’s US election victory.

Jakub Żulczyk, the screenwriter behind the popular TV series Blinded by the Lights and Belfer, said prosecutors had charged him under an article in the criminal code for insulting the head of state in a Facebook post.

“I am, I suspect, the first writer in this country in a very long time to be tried for what he wrote,” he said on Facebook.

Poland has become increasingly authoritarian over the past few years, as the Law and Justice party has dug its claws in, but this is a new low, and suggests they may be heading in the same direction as Hungary and Spain.

New Fisk

In the cases of two separate holocausts, Israel and Poland find it difficult to acknowledge the facts of history

Meanwhile, in Poland

While we're all worrying about Nazis in America, we might also want to keep an eye on Poland:

Polish police broke up a feminist rally and forcefully removed activists to clear the way for a march for far-right extremists.

A live stream of the protest shows members of the All-Polish Women's Strike group and activists from Obywatele RP, which aims to defend democratic principles in Poland, taking part in a sit-in in central Warsaw, to block the far-right rally's route.

Many of the women were holding up photos of Heather Heyer, the American woman killed when a car ploughed into a crowd of counter-protesters during a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend.

According to the story, the far-right groups included the National Radical Camp and the All-Polish Youth, explicitly racist, homophobic and anti-democratic groups (and in the NRC's case, fascist). Poland's politics has had an unpleasant nationalist and theocratic tinge for some time now, and recently the government has moved strongly towards autocracy, banning anti-government protests and attempting to end judicial independence. And now, their police are explicitly siding with fascists. Its a scary sign of how quickly democracy can die if you let people like the Law and Justice Party take over...

The power of protest

Think protesting doesn't matter, that your voice doesn't count, that you can't make a difference? Think again. In Poland, women have just forced the government to back away from a Catholic-inspired abortion ban, after tens of thousands of them turned out in the streets:

A controversial proposal to ban abortion in Poland appears to have collapsed after senior politicians from the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) backed away from it after a parliamentary committee urged MPs to vote it down following mass protests.

The justice and human rights committee, which reviews proposed legislation, recommended that parliament reject the bill following a wave of protests earlier in the week that appear to have caught the rightwing government off guard.

In a humiliating climbdown, PiS members who had referred the legislation to the committee less than two weeks ago threw it out.

The Liberal MP and former prime minister Ewa Kopacz told reporters the PiS had “backtracked because it was scared by all the women who hit the streets in protest”.

Which is good news, and a positive sign in Poland's politics (which is becoming increasingly nationalist and bigoted). But it also shows the power of protest. Speaking up does make a difference - all you need is enough friends joining you.

Justice for rendition

After the US launched its war on terror, Poland played host to a CIA "black site". Prisoners were kidnapped by the US, rendered to Poland, and tortured there. Now, the ECHR has found the Polish government guilty of unlawful detention and torture for their collaboration in these crimes:

Poland became the first EU country held to account for its involvement in the CIA's extraordinary rendition programme on Thursday when the European court of human rights found it guilty of the unlawful detention and torture of two men at a secret prison in the north of the country after 9/11.

In two damning judgments, the court also ruled that the Polish government had failed to conduct a proper investigation into the episode, and ordered it to pay €100,000 (£79,000) compensation to each of the men, who are currently held at Guantánamo Bay. The rulings are the first in a series of cases being brought against European states, with Lithuania and Romania also facing accusations that they allowed the CIA to open secret prisons on their territory.

[...]

The two unanimous rulings found that the rendition programme was completely illegal, as its rationale had been "specifically to remove those persons from any legal protection against torture and enforced disappearance and to strip them of any safeguards afforded by both the US constitution and international law".

The court at Strasbourg said it was inconceivable that the rendition aircraft could have landed in Poland, and that the CIA could have operated the prison on Polish territory, without the Polish authorities being aware. "It is also inconceivable that activities of that character and scale, possibly vital for the country's military and political interests, could have been undertaken on Polish territory without Poland's knowledge and without the necessary authorisation being given at the appropriate level of the state authorities."

A finding of government guilt and collaboration is great, but its not enough. The officials responsible for that collaboration must now face trial for conspiracy to torture - as must the torturers themselves.

Justice for rendition in Poland

Between 2002 and 2005, the US operated a Black Site in Poland at the Stare Kiejkuty military base. An unknown number of prisoners were secretly rendered there and subjected to brutal interrogation. One of them was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded approximately one hundred times to force a confession. The facility was established with the full support and collaboration of the Polish intelligence services, who were eager to please their US "allies". Now the Polish government is holding them to account for those crimes:

The former head of Poland’s intelligence service has been charged with aiding the Central Intelligence Agency in setting up a secret prison to detain suspected members of Al Qaeda, a leading newspaper here reported on Tuesday, the first high-profile case in which a former senior official of any government has been prosecuted in connection with the agency’s program.

The daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza reported that the former intelligence chief, Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, told the paper that he faced charges of violating international law by “unlawfully depriving prisoners of their liberty,” in connection with the secret C.I.A. prison where Qaeda suspects were subjected to brutal interrogation methods.

And he's not the only one. Former Prime Minister Leszek Miller could end up in the dock as well.

Compare this to the US, where the new political leadership has quietly collaborated in sweeping the crimes of the old under the table. The contrast couldn't be greater. The Poles see this as a crucial test of the rule of law. What happened at the prison was clearly criminal. Those responsible need to be held to account for it, regardless of their position. That's what a nation ruled by laws, not men, does. The US is clearly no longer such a nation. As for Poland, they're at least making the effort.

Charged

Back in August, Polish soldiers killed six civilians during a firefight with insurgents in eastern Afghanistan. Now seven Polish soldiers have been charged with war crimes over the incident:

Poland's chief military prosecutor said the troops had not come under attack from insurgents as previously thought.

The prosecutor said they violated international law when they opened fire on the village. Women and children were among the dead.

Rather than an accident or "collatoral damage", it seems this was a premeditated revenge attack on the civilian population in retaliation for an incident earlier in the day. That is not legal, it is not moral, and those involved should be going to jail.

European elections

Switzerland and Poland went to the polls yesterday in Parliamentary elections. In Switzerland, the racist Swiss People's Party - those of the infamous white sheep / black sheep ad - won the largest share of the vote and will form the core of the government. Their plans include kicking out immigrants and banning the construction of minarets (but not churches, of course). Meanwhile, in Poland it looks like the lunatic "Law and Justice" party has been toppled, and its even-more-lunatic (not to mention anti-semitic, anti-gay, and "barely crypto-fascist") coalition partners evicted from Parliament. Instead, Poland will likely be governed by the economically ultra-right Civic Platform, in coalition with the more centrist and agrarian Polish People's Party. It says something about the craziness of Polish politics that this is actually an improvement.

European Tribune has some good discussion threads here and here.

Homophobia in Eastern Europe

Homosexuality is legal in Russia. So, supposedly, is public protest. But if you try and hold a gay pride march, they call in the riot police, who stand back and watch while you are beaten by Neo-Nazi skinheads, then arrest you.

Meanwhile, in Poland, the government will be holding a formal inquiry into whether the teletubbies promote homosexuality. You can't make this stuff up.

Both of these countries are members of the Council of Europe and parties to the European Convention on Human Rights. But apparently, these countries feel that they can ignore its protections of privacy, freedom of expression and equality under the law, at least when it comes to gays.

America's Polish gulag

Just over a year ago, the Washington Post revealed that the US was operating a network of secret prisons and torture centres - "black sites" - in Eastern Europe. Today, the BBC World Service has a piece on one of them, at a place called Stare Kiejkuty in Poland. The Council of Europe draft report into Alleged secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers involving Council of Europe member states [PDF] noted that a US Boeing 737, with the tail number N313P - one of the infamous torture planes - had made regular visits to nearby Szymany. The BBC has pinned it down a little further:

After a week of meetings in smoky Warsaw restaurants and coffee bars with Polish intelligence sources, airport workers and journalists, I obtained what I had been looking for, and something that nobody in authority wanted to reveal, the flight log of planes landing at Szymany airport.

They confirmed my eyewitness's account - that a well-known CIA Gulfstream plane, the N379P, had made several landings at the airport in 2003.

The plane has been strongly linked to the transportation of Al-Qaeda terrorists.

(The leaked flight logs up at Ghost Plane show two arrivals and four departures, all in 2003, but they are far from complete).

According to the report and eyewitnesses, the planes would land in the middle of the night and make a secure transfer at one end of the runway. Whoever was in them was taken to Stare Kiejkuty, a former Warsaw pact intelligence training centre. An investigation by the UK's Sunday Mirror actually managed to get inside the place, and reported

a green hangar the size of a football pitch. Locals say this was built last year to house newly-arrived inmates.

The question now is what the EU will do about it. They have evidence that an EU member state hosted a secret US prison in violation of international and EU human rights obligations. That member state is steadfastly refusing to cooperate with any investigation, and behaving like an old Soviet despotism. Surely it is time for the EU to make good on its threats, take a strong stand for human rights, and suspend Poland from membership until it cooperates?

Naming the guilty

So, which European countries are playing host to secret CIA torture centres? The Times has some followup, and points the finger pretty much where expected:

Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria rushed to issue denials of their involvement.

But Frantisek Bublan, the Czech Interior Minister, said last night that the US had approached his Government a month ago about holding suspects on Czech territory, but Prague had refused.

Human rights groups point at Poland and Romania as two eastern European countries that have taken in America’s “ghost detainees”. They also claimed that the US was running out of countries willing to host its terror suspects.

And as expected, they use the flight logs from the now-infamous torture plane:

Tom Malinowski, the director of Human Rights Watch, told The Times that his investigators had tracked CIA aircraft transferring detainees from Afghanistan to airfields in Eastern Europe that are closed to the public and press, including two in Poland and Romania.

Mr Malinowski said that Human Rights Watch was “90 per cent certain” the CIA used Szymany airport in Poland.

“This is an obscure, rural airport which is very close to a Polish intelligence facility,” Mr Malinowski said.

He said the second major eastern European site was the Mihail-Kogalniceanu military airbase in Romania.

If proven, this will have major repurcussions. These are countries whose which remember what happened under the Soviets, and which will not tolerate their governments doing a dirty deal with the CIA to resurrect secret prisons where people are tortured. At the least, it will force an end to cooperation and a significant change in foreign policy. At the worst, politicians will be forced to resign, or even prosecuted. In Poland, the government is newly elected, and can easily claim clean hands; Romania's colaition government has no such excuse, and may disintegrate. Both may also have significant problems from the EU and Council of Europe. While the European Commission is being cautious, the European Parliament is already on the warpath. These countries will be facing consequences if they are shown to have cooperated with the US in this. Poland's membership was already in question as the new government wants to reinstate the death penalty; Romania had agreed to join the EU in 2007. They may be kissing that goodbye.

Meanwhile, I wonder whether the CIA are frantically evacuating?

Shrinking coalition watch

And now the Poles are leaving. Not immediately, but by the end of the year. They've already reduced their troop levels from 2500 to 1700, and will pull their remaining forces out when the UN mandate expires in December. I guess "New Europe" isn't so keen on Bush's war either, particularly if it means risking de-election...