With an epic refugee crisis on Poland’s southeastern border with Ukraine, it was easy to overlook this week what is happening on another border; and attention was also deflected from a murder trial in the northern port city of Gdansk.
A 30-year-old Gdansk man, identified only as Stefan W, is accused of fatally stabbing Pawel Adamowicz, the city’s long-serving mayor, on live television in January 2019.
Adamowicz was on stage at a popular Christmas charity concert when Stefan W rushed the stage.
The mayor underwent a five-hour emergency operation for serious wounds to his internal organs, including heart and diaphragm, but died a day later.
The trial, delayed for three years amid competing opinions on whether the defendant was mentally fit to stand, has reopened old wounds in Gdansk and comes at a very uncomfortable time for Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party.
Magdalena Adamowicz, the late mayor’s widow and now an MEP, says she will not attend the trial as she is “not ready to look at the man who changed irreversibly the lives of myself and my daughters”.
Her gaze is fixed beyond the man in the dock to a system – of smears, incitement and obfuscation – she says contributed to the murder.
“I strongly believe that the justice system will meet its greatest challenge: to establish the perpetrator’s motives,” she added. “We all want to know why this tragedy happened.”
On Saturday, US president Joe Biden praised the Polish people “for the depths of their compassion”, accepting over two million people into their country within a month, “opening their hearts and homes simply to help”.
But the Gdansk murder trial will hear of another Poland, that hasn’t gone away. Of a government that, in recent years, described refugees as “carriers of disease and parasites” and attacked EU efforts at refugee burden-sharing in 2015-2016 as “blackmail” and “forced solidarity”.
Poland’s public prosecutor, controlled directly by the minister for justice, declined to investigate in 2018 when a far-right group declared Adamowicz a “liberal traitor” last year and issued him and 10 other mayors with a “political death certificate”.
False claims
Public broadcaster TVP, degraded under the PiS into a government propaganda station, described Adamowicz – a vocal supporter of migrant rights and the LGBT community – as the “wrong kind of Pole”. Among their false claims against him: tax evasion, promoting Nazism and communism, supporting criminals and the mafia.
The terrible irony of this trial is that the murdered man would have been at the forefront of helping Ukrainians today. And many of those now taking credit for helping refugees exploited refugee fears to secure re-election and called Adamowicz Poland’s public enemy number one for assisting immigrants as mayor.
The late mayor’s brother, Piotr Adamowicz, told The Irish Times in 2019 that his brother “was a target of a campaign organised by public media . . . all of that was simply disgusting”. That the case is only coming to trial now, he says, is down to the “deformation” of the justice system under the current government, in particular its appointment of judges deemed illegal by observers in Poland and in Europe’s highest courts.
The PiS says its seven-year legal reform of the court system was to streamline procedures and sideline old, encrusted cronyism; critics see a hamstrung system of fearful judges that lacks legal certainty and where the rule of law is no longer guaranteed.
“In light of European jurisprudence, we have a serious systemic problem,” said Piotr Adamowicz.
But he knows how Russia’s war on Ukraine has changed the confrontational Warsaw-Brussels relationship on several fronts.
Senior EU officials insist that nothing has changed on its standoff with Warsaw over the rule of law. But political pragmatism means other rows are pushed on to the back burner, such as Poland’s refugee pushbacks into Belarus.
Since last summer, volunteers from the Grupa Granica organisation have camped in the forest no man’s land between Belarus and Poland, trying to assist trapped Kurds, Syrians and other people. Often they can do nothing but give emergency medical assistance and document their fate.
Like the malnourished 20-year-old Kurdish man with a broken spine; a pregnant woman with the symptoms of nephritis, a kidney infection. Or the boy from war-torn Yemen, struggling with asthma because he has lost his inhaler.
Polish-Belarus border
“The border guards say he’s okay, search him for several minutes and take the boy with them and almost immediately take him to Belarus,” the group documented. “And this although he asked for asylum, even though there is a war in his country, although he was exhausted and weakened.”
On March 28th, Grupa Granica witnessed a group, including sick children, pushed back and forth between Polish and Belarus border guards.
“They used pepper spray against children and women, they shot, my family is completely destroyed,” said Sirwan, a father of a seven-year-old sick girl, to the group. “My daughter is crying because of kidney pain. The kidneys can stop working at any time. There is no water, it is very cold . . . Please, is there any organisation that can come and pick us up? We are between the fences. I’m afraid I will lose my children.”
Poland’s border authority reports 20 deaths on the Polish-Belarus border, but aid groups estimate the true death toll to be much higher.
While Grupa Granica volunteers are celebrated as heroes for helping refugees on the Ukrainian border, four were charged this week with criminal behaviour for helping on the Belarus border.
For Jakub Sypianski, an activist with Grupa Granica, Poland is practising ”refugee apartheid”.
“These people are fleeing war in the same way in Aleppo and Kharkiv, but their rights are different depending on whether they are white, brown or black,” he argues. “Our government is openly racist.”
Last December, Warsaw rejected the European Commission proposal, accepted by Lithuania, to allow an emergency relocation of people on their border with Belarus.
Instead Warsaw is building a border wall through a nature reserve and has passed a law allowing border guards use force to push back those seeking asylum, in violation of European and international law.
One reason the Belarus situation continues in this way is because Warsaw knows now it can act with impunity.
The European Commission and other member states are unlikely to tackle Warsaw over Belarus, EU officials admit, while Poland remains such a crucial partner in Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Warsaw weathered a hot surge of social media outrage when some non-Ukrainian nationals fleeing into Poland experienced discrimination and open racism at the Polish border. But the systematic breach of human rights on the Belarus border goes largely unnoticed.
A bitter quid pro quo is looming. The long-running row over Poland’s courts prompted the EU to suspend emergency pandemic funding to Warsaw. This week, as Polish demands for EU refugee assistance grew in volume, a Warsaw minister suggested that the commission would free up pandemic funds “any moment now”. He was instantly fired but, like the two very different categories of refugees on its borders, Poland’s demand for emergency funding has not gone away .
“Of course, we feel that we deserve some help,” said Jaroslaw Kaczynski, head of the ruling PiS party this week, “but we will not go begging.”
