Past Cannot Be Forgotten
- Human Rights
Jerzy Pomianovski
Human rights (HR) abuse of the past cannot be forgotten on the basis of focusing only on the future, Poland’s Deputy Foreign Minister Jerzy Pomianowski told reporters in Colombo on Thursday.
This appeared to be a hint that at least Poland, a member of both the EU and NATO, takes HR abuse seriously and, relating such to the local context, alleged HR abuse by the Government of Sri Lanka and its security forces, especially during the closing stages of its war against LTTE terrorism in 2009 cannot be condoned.
USA and EU were behind the sponsorship of a successful anti Sri Lanka vote in this context in Geneva in March, where this issue is expected to resurface before the international community in Geneva in November.
But, as an apparent escape clause, as opposed to punishing such alleged miscreants, Pomianowski suggested a Truth Commission, in line with the South African model, where what was practised there was “naming and shaming” such abusers of HR, but which stopped short of prosecuting the same.
Deriving from the Polish experience, where some 20,000 Polish military officers were shot dead by the Red Army during World War II, and where the then Soviet Union tried to pin the blame on the Nazis for this massacre, he said that after independence from the Soviets (ie after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989), the Polish Government together with civil society in Russia pursued these killings with Moscow, to obtain details of such. The same process was used with Germany, vis-à-vis Nazi atrocities committed against the Poles during World War II.
At the same time after the end of that war, when Poland became a Soviet satellite, three million Germans were expelled from Poland, said Pomianowski. Warsaw is in the process of trying to grant redress to those affected Germans.
Poland borders both Germany and Russia. World War II began in September 1939 with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland. At the same time Soviet troops also entered Poland, effectively bifurcating Poland, with one part belonging to the Soviet Union and the other to Nazi Germany. But in 1941 Nazi Germany also waged war against the Soviet Union, which ended with the former’s defeat under the hands of the Allies and the Soviet Union four years later in 1945.
