Poland: Red, White, and Orange

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by Jakub Jedras
29 November 2004

There's no doubt whom Poland's politicians, media, and people are supporting in Ukraine.

WARSAW, Poland--Thousands of Poles are on the streets decked out in orange. Both of Poland's post-communist presidents have been to Kiev to mediate. A near-total consensus in parliament and in the media: Poland has been absorbed by the events in Ukraine over the past week, and its politicians, media, and citizens are expressing an overwhelming solidarity with the Ukrainian opposition as it tries to overturn the results in Ukraine's flawed presidential elections.

In Warsaw crowds of Poles, most of them young, have gathered outside the Ukrainian Embassy, the parliament building, and the monument to Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine's national poet. Thousands have attended special concerts, Ukrainian poetry readings, and a range of other events in Warsaw. In some parts of central Polish capital where demonstrators gatheredy, not wearing anything orange has seemed at least a little odd. The same applies in Katowice, Krakow, Lodz, Wroclaw, Lublin, and many other cities with large student populations.

Those who believed opinion polls that indicated that Poles disliked Ukrainians more than Germans or Russians might now be feeling astonished. So too might Warsaw's shopkeepers as they try to cope with the new fashion for orange. Orange scarves, gloves, hats, and even shoes have reportedly been sold out, and kilometers of orange ribbon have been bought up.

"Yushchenko, Yushchenko!" "Ukraine without Putin," and "Free Ukraine" are just a few of the slogans being shouted by supporters of Viktor Yushchenko, presidential candidate and leader of Ukraine's opposition.

Why are they doing this? "This is the most important event in the past 15 years," says Michal, a university student reading economics. "Ukraine has an opportunity to be changed. We must support this!"

The view that Ukraine's current leadership is a relic of the Soviet era and Russia's perceived overweening involvement in Ukraine play a key role in Polish attitudes. Again and again, Poles say that the protests in Poland's eastern neighbor remind them of 1980 and 1989, the years when Poland's trade union movement Solidarity pressed the communist system to the wall and finally toppled it. "We were supported then; now we are supporting," says Magda, who has attended rallies every day since the second round of Ukraine's presidential elections on 21 November.

SOLIDARITY INTERNATIONAL

Solidarity figurehead and Nobel Prize-winner Lech Walesa swiftly flew to Kiev to give flesh to the analogy, apparently at Yushchenko's invitation. Though he talked with the government candidate, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, as well as with Yushchenko, there was no doubt where his sympathies lay when he addressed a crowd of 200,000 orange-clad Yushchenko supporters.

Others contented themselves with attending pro-Yushchenko rallies in Warsaw.

In fact, the only prominent Polish politician not to come out in favor of Yushchenko was President Aleksander Kwasniewski, who flew off to Kiev on 26 November, a day after Walesa, to act as an intermediary. There he joined Lithuania's President Valdas Adamkus, a representative of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the head of EU foreign policy Javier Solana at roundtable talks.

As president, Kwasniewski has adopted a neutral stance, and officially his relations with Kuchma have always been very good.

But the details suggest a more critical stance, both now and in the past. Two days before going to Kiev, Kwasniewski told journalists that Kuchma was "disappointing me" as he had failed "to adopt a role as mediator between Yanukovych and Yushchenko," a reference to Kuchma's close relationship with Yanukovych and his consistent support for him during the election campaign and in the early days of the post-election crisis.

He also backed the visit by his predecessor, Walesa, after Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma sharply criticized Walesa's mission as "increasing tensions."

"I had less room to act as I must take care of future Polish-Ukrainian relations," Kwasniewski said, in an ambiguous statement that seemed designed to imply where his sympathies lay.

The Polish president has also had reason to be disappointed on several occasions in recent years. To no avail, Kwasniewski has urged the Ukrainian president to clarify the circumstances of the killing of journalist Georgy Gongadze in 2000, a crime in which secretly recorded tapes implicated Kuchma. Poland also recently suffered a setback in its "strategic relationship" with Ukraine, as it is always described, when Ukraine decided to allow Russia access to a pipeline that runs from Odessa in Ukraine to Brody in Poland.

While there have been some symbolic advances--the joint commemoration in 2003 of the 60th anniversary of massacres in the border region of Volhynia--those have been offset by setbacks, such as a scuttled joint ceremony at a cemetery for Polish victims of fighting in 1918 in Lviv, close to the Polish border.

Now, the political consensus seems to be that Poland has much more to gain by backing the opposition than by trying to preserve good relations with Kuchma and his prime minister.

Feelings are particularly strong among the founders and activists of Solidarity. "A mass movement very similar to Solidarity has emerged in Ukraine," one former Solidarity leader, Bogdan Borusewicz, told the daily Gazeta Wyborcza. "It has no name at the moment, but we can see that civic society has raised its head."

He added that Poland now has a great role to play and that the weight of Polish public opinion could help avert bloodshed in Ukraine.

Henryk Wujec, who also was a member of the anti-communist movement, echoed those feelings, pointing to visits to support the Ukrainian opposition by Polish politicians such as former Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek and former Defense Minister Bronislaw Komorowski.

Not all of this political support may be selfless. Some newspapers, among them the left-wing Trybuna, accused right-wing politicians of seizing on the crisis for domestic political purposes.

The parties most actively supporting the Ukrainian opposition are the liberal Civic Platform (PO) and the conservative Law and Justice (PiS), which may well both form a new governing coalition after parliamentary elections next year. The PiS sent its leaders, the brothers Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski, to the demonstrations in Kiev.

Civic Platform went further, inviting Boris Tarasyuk, the former Ukrainian foreign minister and a close ally of Yushchenko, to speak in the Polish parliament. Tarasyuk’s speech in the Sejm was unprecedented; normally, only those officially invited by parliament are allowed to address the chamber. Tarasyuk underlined the shared history of Poles and Ukrainians, the importance of Solidarity, and a geopolitical axiom expressed by Jerzy Giedroyc, a Polish intellectual who died in 2000: "There can be no independent Poland without a free Ukraine."

Walesa used the same quote when he addressed the crowds in Kiev.

Some Polish politicians have, however, remained on the sidelines. Their reasons are various. "I am not going to Ukraine," said Wojciech Wierzejski, a far-right Polish member of the European Parliament. "The situation is not unambiguous; Yushchenko is backed also by nationalists hostile to Poles."

Janusz Wojciechowski, leader of the Polish Peasant Party, called for Poland to be "reserved," arguing, "We don’t want anybody to pry into our affairs, and the same goes for the Ukrainians. They must solve their problem by themselves."

THE ORANGE PRESS

The media has made clear its affinities. Gazeta Wyborcza--the country's leading paper, edited by a former dissident, Adam Michnik--has gone the farthest. It has supported Yushchenko and the opposition, handed out orange ribbons, and prepared a special eight-page supplement in Ukrainian that was distributed for free in Kiev and Lviv.

The public service channel TVP and the news station TVN24 have carried live broadcasts from Kiev and Lviv, with hourly reports from around the country. Most newspapers have devoted acres of space to articles, analyses, commentaries, and interviews relating to events in Ukraine.

The warmth felt toward Ukraine is accompanied by chilly feelings about Russia's role. Moscow's overt support for Yanukovych has reinforced perceptions that Russia still has an imperialist mindset.

President Kwasniewski expressed the sentiment in more careful but still clear terms when he told Gazeta Wyborcza that Russia's main aim is to re-establish its influence in this part of the former Soviet Union through "concrete political and economic acts."

Claims that Russian troops have been brought into Kiev have awakened fears of bloodshed. But ultimately, "If Ukraine's orange revolution is won, it will be a very serious blow to Russia," wrote Agnieszka Romaszewska in Rzeczpospolita, expressing a very widespread perception

Janusz Onyszkiewicz, a member of parliament and former minister of defense, believes Russia will have to accept whatever solution is reached in Ukraine. "In any case, Yushchenko is not an anti-Russian politician," Onyszkiewicz added.

The events in Ukraine and the massive support for the opposition in Poland is being seen as an opportunity to reinvigorate Poland's and the EU's eastern policy. The strong backing expressed by the presidents of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania--and the presence of Kwasniewski and Lithuania's President Adamkus, rather than representatives of Germany or France, as negotiators in Kiev--is adding to the belief that the EU's new member states should and can influence EU policy. In Poland, the EU is generally seen as preferring good relations with Russia to becoming involved in Ukrainian, Belarusian, or Moldovan affairs.



Jakub Jedras is a TOL correspondent