 |
|
WARSAW, Poland--Next year, when Poland joins the EU, the relationship between Warsaw and Kiev could prove the key tie across the “Brussels curtain” that will divide Central and Eastern Europe. Certainly, many in Poland’s political elite believe their country has a special responsibility to help Ukraine, its formerly partly Polish neighbor, to become more deeply integrated with the rest of Europe.
But this is a solidarity strained by history, as a controversial ceremony held last week in a small village in western Ukraine highlighted. Sixty years ago, in this village, then known by the Polish name Poryck, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) killed 200 civilians attending mass.
Poryck was just one of 167 towns and villages in Volhynia, then part of Poland, that the UPA attacked on 11 July 1943.
On that day, and on other days in 1943 and 1944, Ukrainian nationalists killed a total of 50,000 to 60,000 Poles, Polish historians say. (Some figures are much higher.) The aim was to ethnically cleanse the region, leaving it open for settlement by Ukrainians after the war.
In retaliation, the Polish Home Army, the Polish resistance, killed 10,000-20,000 Ukrainian civilians in 1944.
This was one of a violent--some say connected--sequence of events on the Polish-Ukrainian border at the end of the war. Volhynia, like Galicia after World War I, was contested territory.
In 1947, the communist government in Poland uprooted roughly 150,000 Ukrainians from southeastern Poland and settled them in northern and western areas formerly populated by Germans.
Both historical wounds have festered through the decades of communism and one post-communist decade.
In 2002, Poland took a first step toward settling the two issues when President Aleksander Kwasniewski expressed “regret” over the postwar resettlement program, known as Operation Vistula. “The infamous Operation Vistula is a symbol of the abominable deeds perpetrated by the communist authorities against Polish citizens of Ukrainian origin,” he said. He continued, labeling the argument that “Operation Vistula was the revenge for the slaughter of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army” in 1943-1944 “fallacious and ethically inadmissible,” as it invoked “the principle of collective guilt.”
Reaching agreement on any similar statement about the massacres in Volhynia has been harder still. The text of the declaration received just one vote more than the necessary majority in the Ukrainian parliament. Staring failure in the face, the speaker of parliament tried without success to persuade the speaker of the Polish Sejm to change the text to accommodate grievances that Ukrainian victims had received less prominent mention.
THE MISSING APOLOGY
The result was that, at last week’s ceremony, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma spoke of “sadness and sorrow” at the Polish deaths, but did not say the words of apology wanted by many Poles.
Marek Siwiec, a chief of the National Security Bureau, said he knew that the word “sorry” would not pass Kuchma’s lips, as an apology would have been unacceptable to the political elite around Kuchma.
 |
| Train station in Zytomyr (formerly Zhitomir), Volhynia. Photo by Dave Obee |
Nor did Kuchma want to risk upsetting Ukrainian society as a whole, argues Jerzy Kozakiewicz of the (Polish) Institute of Political Studies. “We all know that Kuchma is not accepted by the vast majority of Ukrainian society,” he says. “How, then, could we expect that he would apologize on behalf of the Ukrainian people?”
The Polish Sejm took the view that a compromise was necessary. Two days before the ceremony, in a heated debate about the text of the common declaration, Marek Jurek from the center-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) argued that the word “genocide” should be included in the text. In the end, most Polish parliamentarians agreed the Ukrainian side would find that unacceptable.
Nonetheless, in his speech President Kwasniewski did use the term “genocide,” while Kuchma stressed that there were also Ukrainian victims.
These were two pointed comments on what proved a prickly occasion.
A bus full of Polish veterans that was supposed to be heading to Pavlivka (as Poryck is now known) was stopped at the border. UPA veterans were also refused entry.
Locals were also left outside--though how much they wanted to take part is questionable.
“The local people did not want to talk to us; the atmosphere before the ceremony was tense,” said Jaroslaw Junko, a Ukrainian journalist working for the Ukrainian section of Radio Polonia.
“Then I understood what Poles in Jedwabne might have felt,” says Junko, referring to a similar 60th-anniversary ceremony held two years ago at the site of a Polish slaughter of hundreds of Jews in 1941.
In the end, the ceremony in Pavlivka was attended only by national and local officials (and journalists).
Junko’s conclusion is that “the ceremony in Pavlivka was just window-dressing.” The words of reconciliation, he argues, were not sentiments shared by ordinary Poles and Ukrainians.
Jerzy Kozakiewicz takes a radically different view. “The idea of presenting the problem as an axis of Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation was senseless because there is no historical tension between our nations, and relations between the two neighboring states are developing in a positive direction,” he contends. The ceremony should therefore not have been held, he believes.
|
|