POLAND:Polish president Lech Kaczynski has put himself on a collision course with the country's new government after appointing to a senior parliamentary post a man who has questioned details of the Holocaust.
Senator Ryszard Bender (75), the oldest member of the Polish upper house, was appointed "senior speaker" by Mr Kaczynski and will play a ceremonial role in the opening of the new parliament. Mr Bender is a controversial figure in Poland for claiming that Auschwitz was "not a death camp . . . [ but] a labour camp".
"Jews, Gypsies and others were annihilated there through hard labour," he told Radio Maryja in 2002. "Actually, labour was not always hard and not always were they annihilated." In the subsequent uproar, Senator Bender attacked "Jewish fundamentalists [ who] seek to claim Auschwitz and Birkenau camps for their Holocaust, while those and other camps were the scene of the holocaust of Poles too".
Politicians from the incoming Civic Platform government have called the appointment a scandal but Mr Kaczynski's office said that the president "is obliged to appoint the oldest senate member" to the office.
An estimated 1.1 million people died at the Nazi camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau from 1940 to 1945. Most were killed in gas chambers, while other deaths followed overwork, starvation, disease and medical experiments.
For years the camps have been a battleground over Holocaust denial; author David Irving was imprisoned last year for claiming in 1989 that the Auschwitz gas chambers were a "fairytale".
Meanwhile, another conflict could be looming over the new government's plan to withdraw Poland's 900 troops from Iraq.
President Kaczynski, who under the Polish constitution determines defence and security policy, said the troops would only be withdrawn when "conditions were right", without specifying what these conditions might be.