Aid agencies say that refugees caught on the Polish and Belarus borders are subject to brutal pushbacks. Graphic: IPS

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, Apr 25 2024 (IPS)

As the refugee crisis on the Belarus/EU borders approaches its fourth year, a crackdown on activism in Belarus is worsening the situation for migrants stuck in a “death zone” as they attempt to leave the country.

Groups working with refugees say the repression of NGOs in Belarus has led to many organizations stopping their aid work for migrants, leaving them with limited or no humanitarian help.

And although international organizations are operating in the country providing some services to refugees, NGOs fear it is not enough.

“There have been elevated levels of violence [against refugees from border guards] since the start of this crisis. But what has got worse is that before there were more people willing to help these refugees in Belarus, but now there is pretty much no one there helping as activism can be punished criminally in the country,” Enira Bronitskaya, human rights activist at Belarussian NGO Human Constanta, which was forced to pull out of the country and now operates from Poland, told IPS.

Since the start of the refugee crisis on the Belarus/EU border in the summer of 2021, rights groups have spoken out over brutal refugee ‘pushbacks’ by guards on both sides of the border.

Some have accused Minsk of manufacturing the crisis as a response to EU sanctions. They say Belarusian authorities actively organize, encourage, and even force migrants to attempt crossings over the border, but at the same time sanction violent and degrading treatment of those same migrants by border guards.

But others have also raised issue with what they say are equally violent and inhumane methods used by EU border guards in Poland, Latvia and Lithuania against those same migrants, as well as systematic breaches of their rights to claim asylum.

“These people are subjected to numerous forms of violence, both by Belarusian and Polish border guards. We’ve seen bruises, black eyes, knocked-out teeth after blows, kicks or hits with the back of rifles, irritation of skin and eyes after being sprayed with pepper gas, and teeth marks after dog bites,” Bartek Rumienczyk of the Polish NGO We Are Monitoring (WAM), which helps migrants who arrive in Poland from Belarus, told IPS.

“We also tell people they are entitled to ask for international protection in Poland, but in practice, these pleas are often ignored by border guards. We have witnessed numerous situations when people were asking for asylum in our presence and still they were pushed back to Belarus,” he added

These practices leave people stranded between the two borders in terrible conditions. Some aid workers describe it as a “death zone”.

“Refugees who manage to make it over [into the EU] talk about the ‘death zone’ between fences on the EU border and razor wires on the Belarus side and border guards who will not let them back into Belarus. They are therefore stuck there,” Joanna Ladomirska, Medical Coordinator for Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) in Poland, told IPS.

“This death zone runs all along the Belarus/EU border, and it is huge—maybe tens of thousands of square kilometers—and no one knows how many people might have died there, or might be there needing treatment. My worry is that no one has access to this zone—not NGOs, no one,” she added.

At least 94 people have been known to have died in the border area since the start of the crisis, according to Human Constanta’s research, although it is thought many more may have also lost their lives.

Those that do manage to cross the border are invariably injured, some seriously. Exhaustion, hypothermia, and gastrointestinal affections because migrants have been forced to drink water from swamps or rivers are common, while almost a third of them have trench foot, and many have suffered serious injuries from razor- and barbed-wire fences. Some have also had to have parts of their limbs amputated due to frostbite, according to aid groups providing medical care to them.

Although both international and local organizations continue to work to help migrants on the EU side of the border, this is much more limited on the Belarusian side, say those working directly with migrants.

Since mass protests following his re-election in 2020, autocratic Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has implemented a sweeping crackdown on dissent. This has seen, among others, widespread prosecutions of workers in civil society.

Many NGOs, including some that had previously helped migrants, have been forced to close, leaving only a handful of major international organizations to do what they can for migrants.

However, questions have been raised about how effective their operations are.

“There are international organizations like the ICRC that are working with the Red Cross, but the Belarus Red Cross is only handing out food parcels in certain areas; it’s not a regular, stable supply,” said Bronitskaya.

“Basically, there is no one there giving [the migrants] the help they need. It is very possible there will be even more deaths than before,” she added.

But it is not just those stuck between the borders who are struggling to get help.

Anyone who fails to get into the EU and finds themselves back in Belarus is classed as an irregular migrant, is unable to access healthcare or benefits, and cannot legally work.

Many quickly find themselves in poverty, living in constant fear of being discovered by immigration authorities, and vulnerable to exploitation. Some aid workers told IPS they had heard of migrants in Minsk and other Belarussian cities forced to turn to prostitution to pay to support themselves.

Facing such problems, many decide they have little choice but to attempt the crossing again despite the risks.

Aid organizations and global rights groups say governments in EU countries and in Minsk must adhere to their obligations to protect the rights of these migrants.

“It’s not the best approach to the situation if the EU makes it difficult or impossible to cross its border by building walls or putting up legal barriers, nor is it good if Belarus creates a situation where people are stranded,” Normal Sitali, Medical Operations Manager for Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) in Belarus, told IPS.

“There must be unhindered access to the border area for independent humanitarian organizations and for international and civil society organizations to respond to the dire situation there. Governments need to look at ensuring access to healthcare for these people so that international organizations do not need to provide and pay for it; they also need to look at legal protections for them; and they need to examine how these people can be ensured the space and protection to claim their rights as individuals while in transit,” he added.

MSF, which helped thousands of migrants during the crisis, last year stopped providing services to them after deciding migrants’ medical needs were outweighed by their need for protection and legal support, which MSF says can only be provided by dedicated organisations with specific expertise.

But some doubt the situation will improve any time soon with political relations between Belarus and the EU badly strained.

“Governments need to do something but the political situation makes things complicated. EU governments will not negotiate with Lukashenko because of the repressions going on in Belarus. Unless there is some significant change, nothing is going to get better,” said Bronitskaya.

However, others are hopeful of change.

Officials in Poland’s new government, which came to power in December last year, have claimed the number of pushbacks has fallen under the new administration and said a new border and migration policy is being drawn up that would treat the protection of human rights as a priority. Plans are also being put in place for the border forces to set up special search and rescue groups to stop humanitarian crises at the country’s borders, they have said.

“As a European country, [Poland] should respect European human rights laws and provide people with access to safety. You don’t need to negotiate with the Belarus regime to do that,” Ladomirska told IPS.

“I hope that with the new Polish government, something might change. We’re talking to them; change is feasible, and with the new government, there is an opportunity for that change.”

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The Abortion Dream Team (from left to right Natalia Broniarczyk, Justyna Wydrzynska, Kinga Jelinska) outside the Warsaw court after Wydrzynska's conviction. Credit: Abortion Dream Team

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, Apr 5 2023 (IPS)

“People want the abortion laws here liberalised. Society has changed; even the politicians can see it,” Kinga Jelinska, a Polish reproductive rights activist, says. “In four or five years, I believe, the abortion laws here will be liberalised, because it’s what the people support.”

Jelinska, a member of the Abortion Dream Team (ADT) collective, which provides assistance to women in Poland who need an abortion, spoke to IPS not long after her fellow activist and ADT co-founder Justyna Wydrzynska had been sentenced to eight months of community service for giving abortion pills to another woman.

She is disappointed by the ruling but, like her colleague, remains defiant and determined to carry on her work.

“The case against Justyna was politically motivated,” said Mara Clarke, co-founder of Supporting Abortions for Everyone, told IPS, pointing out that the judge in the case was promoted on the same day as she handed down the verdict and that the Christian fundamentalist group Ordo Iuris was allowed a role in the trial helping the prosecution.

“We’re just going to keep going. The court claimed Justyna was ‘guilty of helping’ someone have an abortion. Well, we have to help each other in cases where people are being systematically denied access to care.

Without people like Justyna, women are left to take their own decisions [on abortions], and they may take an unsafe option,” Jelinska says.

It is this public support which, Jelinska believes, may have stopped the court from handing down a jail sentence to the activist.
“Justyna’s case put even more focus on the issue and the ways women can access abortion services,” says Jelinska.

“People want access to abortions; public surveys have shown that. We see it too in the work we do every day,” Jelinska says, adding that during Wydrzynska’s trial, “public opinion was overwhelmingly pro-Justyna.”

Wydrzynska’s trial and conviction have, activists such as Jelinska say, highlighted problems connected with abortion access in Poland and the risks women needing the procedure – and those they turn to for advice – often face. Poland has some of the world’s strictest abortion laws – terminations are only permitted where the pregnancy threatens the mother’s life or health, or if it results from a criminal act, such as rape or incest – and while not illegal to have an abortion, it is illegal to help someone do so.

Many women in Poland who want an abortion self-administer pills bought online from abroad or travel to neighbouring countries with less restrictive legislation, such as Germany and the Czech Republic, for terminations. Some contact groups like ADT for help. It is not illegal to give out information about abortions, including advice on how to buy pills online.

In February 2020, at the start of the Covid pandemic in Poland, ADT had been contacted by a woman named Anya*, who was 12 weeks pregnant and desperate. She said she was a victim of domestic violence and was considering going abroad to terminate her pregnancy as the pills she had ordered online were taking too long to arrive.

Wydrzynska decided to give Anya her own pills, but the package she sent was intercepted by Anya’s partner, who reported what had happened to police. Anna later miscarried.  Wydrzynska was convicted of “aiding an abortion” – a crime under Polish law which carries a maximum sentence of three years in prison – by a Warsaw court in March 2023 in what is believed to be the first time in Europe that a women’s health advocate has gone on trial for aiding an abortion.

The conviction was immediately condemned by both local and international activists who said the case should never have been brought to court.

“We were disappointed that Justyna was convicted. We are happy that she is not going to jail, but her trial has dragged on for a year, in which time a lot of international organisations, including gynaecologists, said the case should be dropped. It should never have come to trial, and this would never have happened in another country,“ Clarke says.

Amnesty International described the court’s ruling as “a depressing low in the repression of reproductive rights in Poland”.

“This ruling is going to have a chilling effect and we are already seeing women who are worried about what they should do if they found themselves in the situation that they need an abortion,” Mikolaj Czerwinski, Senior Campaigner at Amnesty International, told IPS.

Others believe the trial was part of a wider campaign to crack down on women’s rights and those of the minorities such as the LGBTQI community, by the right-wing government and its conservative religious allies.
The ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party has long been accused by critics in Poland and abroad of systematically suppressing women’s rights, and it was instrumental in pushing through a tightening of abortion laws in 2021 which banned abortions even in cases where the foetus was diagnosed with a severe birth defect.

Meanwhile, the European Commission (EC) has raised serious concerns over judicial independence in the country under the PiS, with some judicial bodies seen as being under the control of the ruling party.

Czerwinski said that following the trial, there were now “questions over the independence of the judiciary in Poland and what impact that [lack of independence] might have on women’s rights, and human rights in general, in Poland”.

But while anger remains at Wydrzynska’s conviction, activists such as Jelinska and Clarke believe that the trial has only highlighted how out of touch Poland’s government is with society on abortion laws.

Since the abortion laws were tightened even further in 2021 – a move which was met with massive street protests – surveys have shown strong support for liberalisation of abortion laws. In one poll last November, 70% of respondents backed allowing terminations on demand up to 12 weeks.

“People want access to abortions, public surveys have shown that. We see it too in the work we do every day,” she says, adding that during Wydrzynska’s trial “public opinion was overwhelmingly pro-Justyna.”

In a public opinion poll carried out in February for Amnesty International, 47% of respondents said they would have done the same as Wydrzynska. The survey also found that people were overwhelmingly against punishment for helping to access an abortion in Poland.

Meanwhile, some opposition politicians have suggested they would introduce legislation which would allow for abortion on demand if they get into power, pointing to public support for such a measure.

It is this public support which, Jelinska believes, may have stopped the court handing down a jail sentence to the activist.

“This is an election year, and the government knows it would be political suicide to give her a harsher sentence with so many people in favour of liberalising access to abortion,” she explains.

It may also be behind Polish parliament’s rejection in early March of a bill, proposed by an anti-abortion group as a citizen’s legislative initiative under a special parliamentary procedure, which would have criminalised even providing information about abortions. Government MPs voted against it with some reportedly saying they did back it for fear of fuelling protests just months away from elections.

“Even they know that would have been going too far,” said Czerwisnki. The trial, which was reported extensively in Poland and widely in international media, has also helped raise awareness of the work of groups like ADT and others with some organisations, including the Abortions Without Borders network, which has a Polish helpline reporting a three-fold rise in calls since the trial began.

“Justyna’s case put even more focus on the issue and the ways women can access abortion services,” says Jelinska.

If the conviction was designed to put activists off their work, it seems to have backfired, said Czerwinski.

“A lot of activists have been re-energised by this because they have seen Justyna and her response to the ruling,” he said. “They are aware of the risks, but at the same time, will not stop helping women.”

Wydrzynska has appealed her conviction and insists that she has done nothing wrong. She has also vowed to continue her activism.

Speaking on public radio after her trial, she said: “Even if I should leave the country, I will never stop. In the same way, I know that there are thousands of people who’d do the same for me.”

*NOT REAL NAME

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A Warsaw protest in solidarity with Ameer Alkhawlany. The banner reads 'Free Ameer'. Credit: TV Kryzys

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Apr 8 2017 (IPS)

Ameer Alkhawlany moved to Poland in September 2014 to pursue a Master’s in biology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland’s second largest city. Two years later, the Polish state awarded him a scholarship to complete a PhD in the same faculty.

Pawel Koteja, his professor at the institute, told Polish media that Alkhawlany was “very committed to his scientific research, to which he dedicated a lot of time and effort, and was determined to pursue an academic career.”Law and Justice, the party governing Poland since 2015, has a nationalistic and ultra-Catholic discourse, presenting itself as a defender of embattled Poles against its various 'enemies': the European Union, globalisation, Islam.

According to activists in contact with Alkhawlany, the student had an uneventful life in Poland until last summer, when he was allegedly approached by Poland’s secret services (ABW) with the offer to inform on Muslims residing in Poland. He would have to report back from mosques and actively seek out contact with specific people.

Alkhawlany refused. He said he was an atheist so he didn’t attend religious services and that some of the people he was asked to contact were from non-Arabic speaking countries so he might not have a common language with them.
In July, when the man was allegedly approached by ABW, Krakow was hosting the annual Catholic ‘World Youth Day’, attended by the Pope and an estimated three million people. Polish authorities were tightening security.

On October 3, the student was suddenly arrested in the center of Krakow by officials from the Polish Border Guard. He was given no reason for his apprehension. Hours later, during which time he was not allowed to contact a lawyer, a court sentenced Alkhawlany to 90 days of detention followed by deportation to Iraq.

In a letter written from detention by Alkhawlany and published in March by website Political Critique, the man said the court justified its ruling by the fact that the Polish secret services considered him a security threat. Despite the man’s questions, the judge did not offer any explanations as to why he was considered a threat.

“I have been living and studying in Poland since 2014. I have never broken the law ever,” Alkhawlany said to the court, according to his published letter. “I never crossed at the wrong light, never been in the bus without ticket! I did my master’s degree and I started my doctoral studies without any problem. I don’t want to leave Poland!”

At the time of his deportation, Alkhawlany had been detained for six months without break in the detention center for foreigners in Przemysl, in the southeast of Poland.

Polish authorities never explained publicly the reasons why the man was considered a security threat. However, anonymous sources quoted by Polish media claimed the secret services had information that Alkhawlany had been in touch with ‘radicals’ from abroad monitored by other countries’ services.

“The provisions of Polish national law do not provide solutions for a foreigner to defend themselves when the decision of return has been issued on the basis of undisclosed circumstances,” commented Jacek Bialas, a lawyer with the Helsinski Foundation for Human Rights. “This raises doubts as to compatibility with the Polish Constitution, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.”

“It’s as if a controller gave a citation to someone waiting at the bus stop, being sure the person would go on the bus without a ticket,” Alkhawlany commented in a February interview with Wirtualna Polska.

At the time of his arrest, Alkhawlany had just renewed his residence permit in Poland, which was valid until January this year. During his detention, he applied for asylum in Poland arguing that it was unsafe for him to return to Iraq, where the Iraqi military is battling ISIS in the north. He was denied asylum (the final decision following an appeal came April 4) because of confidential information provided by the security services which indicated he was a security threat.

Yet on April 5, after reviewing the same evidence provided by the secret services, the regional court in Przemysl ruled that Alkhawlany should be released from detention as he had been residing legally in Poland and there had been no solid reason for his arrest. The ministry in charge of the secret services retorted that the court ruling ‘did not undermine’ the evidence presented by ABW.

To the surprise of his lawyer and those engaged in a campaign to get him released, Alkhawlany was not released from detention but instead deported on the evening of April 5. Neither his lawyer nor his brother also residing in Poland were informed about the deportation decision.

Alkhawlany himself called from Iraq upon arrival to inform he had been transported to Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Speaking to Polish media April 6, Marek Ślik, the student’s lawyer, said “The deportation is illegal because I have not yet received any notification about his deportation. The procedure of appeal (after asylum was denied) was never completed as I never got a final notification.”

The Polish Border Guard did not respond to a request to justify the legality of the deportation.

An image from the official website of the Polish Border Guard. It says: ‘We defend Polish men and women. We do not agree to the influx of Muslim migrants.’ Credit: Police Border Guard

“The way the Polish secret services dealt with this case was absurd: they just picked a random person because he came from a specific country and expected him to inform on the moves of others,” said Marta Tycner from leftist party Razem, who was engaged in the campaign to free Alkhawlany.

“They think that any person coming from a Muslim country is a suspect of anti-state activity,” Tycner told IPS. “They were incompetent and now they are trying to cover it up by deporting him fast.”

Law and Justice, the party governing Poland since 2015, has a nationalistic and ultra-Catholic discourse, presenting itself as a defender of embattled Poles against its various ‘enemies’: the European Union, globalisation, Islam. It has overblown fears of a potential terrorist attack by Islamists – although no incidents of this kind or actual threats of it were recorded in Poland – to strengthen its control over society.

Last year, Law and Justice adopted a new anti-terror law which gives authorities the power to fingerprint foreigners or listen to their phones and check their emails without any court order. It also imposed restrictions on the right to protest and online activity.

The right-wing and Catholic media, which are essential in harnessing popular support for the party, routinely associate Muslims with violence. The leader of Law and Justice, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, infamously declared last year that migrants carry ‘very dangerous diseases long absent from Europe’. Alongside Hungary, Poland has been staunchly opposed to hosting refugees under the European Union’s system of relocation quotas.

Poland is one of the world’s most homogeneous countries, with over 97 percent of the population declaring themselves ethnically Pole. Despite very low rates of migration to the country, the most recent ‘European Islamophobia Report‘ showed that over 70 percent of Poles want to see migration of Muslims to Europe restricted, the highest rate among all European countries surveyed. Negative attitudes to refugees increased significantly in the last years.

Former President Lech Kaczyński at an energy conference three years before his death. Credit: Archive of the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland/GNU license

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Dec 23 2016 (IPS)

Despite the pain to victims’ families, critics say the Polish government is turning the Smolensk plane crash into a macabre reality show for political gain.

The remains of former president Lech Kaczyński and his wife Maria were exhumed Nov. 14 from Wawel Castle in Krakow as part of a state-sponsored investigation into whether the plane crash that killed them in Apr. 10, 2010 was an accident or foul play."This catastrophe ...initially united us in mourning [and] later became a tool in the political fight between Law and Justice and Civic Platform.” --Barbara Nowacka, whose mother Izabela Jaruga-Nowacka, a former deputy prime minister, died at Smolensk.

A state-owned Tupolev plane went down while taking Lech Kaczyński and top Polish military and political figures to Russia to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre in which more than 20,000 Polish soldiers and intellectuals were killed by the Stalinist secret police. Ninety-six people died in the crash.

An investigation conducted under the previous government — the center-right Civic Platform — concluded that the crash was an accident caused by adverse weather conditions and pilot error.

But Jaroslaw Kaczyński, leader of ruling party Law and Justice and twin brother of Lech, has an alternative reading. “The one interpretation that clarifies everything is an assassination,” Kaczynski said, as quoted by the web portal natemat.pl. “If that’s not 100 percent sure, then it’s 99 percent.”

Victimisation

Since the Kaczynski twins founded the party in 2001, Law and Justice has represented a counterbalance to the pro-European, liberal direction of the Polish post-communist transition. Law and Justice are Euro-skeptic and nationalist, Catholic and socially conservative, and advocate for a statist economy.  They speak to those left behind by the transition.

To build up political support, Law and Justice relied on a vision of a Poland under persecution by foreign enemies (especially Russia and Germany) and of Poles as victims of political elites at home, an alleged alliance of communists and liberals.

The Smolensk plane crash happened right at the start of the campaign for the 2010 presidential elections in which incumbent Lech Kaczynski faced Civic Platform’s Bronislaw Komorowski. During the previous three years, Lech’s presidency had been marked by conflicts with Donald Tusk, the head of Civic Platform and prime minister since 2007.

The shock of the tragedy was absorbed into the Law and Justice grand narrative, answering the needs of the campaign: Lech Kaczyński, claimed Law and Justice, was a national hero who fell victim to a lurid alliance between his foreign and domestic enemies, as had happened to Poles many times before.

While Jaroslaw Kaczyński did not win the 2010 presidential election (he ran instead of his brother) nor did his party win the parliamentary election in 2011, Law and Justice spent the next four years in opposition building up a cult of Smolensk which contributed to it winning last year’s election.

The party organised monthly commemoration events and its message was echoed by the Polish Catholic Church and the influential media empire centered around Radio Maryja.

Civic Platform’s strategy of waiting it out and letting Law and Justice politicians make fools of themselves by endorsing a conspiracy theory was a mistake.

According to an October poll by Ipsos, 27 percent of Poles believe Smolensk was not an accident, at least twice as many as five years ago.

Ireneusz Krzeminski, from Warsaw University’s Institute of Sociology, who has looked into responses to Smolensk in Polish society, said the Law and Justice version of the air crash resonated with Poles who “felt unhappy in their lives for different reasons.”

The feeling of perceived injustice was fertile ground for Law and Justice’s rhetoric about a Poland martyred by its enemies, said Krzeminski. The result was hatred towards the alleged enemies, especially Russia and Civic Platform.

Escalation

Since it got to power in 2015, Law and Justice intensified the instrumentalisation of Polish history. Sociologist Krzeminski notes that commemorations of historical events where Poles have suffered (like the 1944 anti-Nazi Warsaw uprising) are a bigger deal now. School curricula have changed to include more on the traumatic episodes. Krzeminski argues that Law and Justice keeps Poles “in a state of permanent mourning” – it brings support for the party.

This year, Poland announced that it would not back Donald Tusk for a second mandate as President of the European Council. Law and Justice members have mentioned the possibility of putting Tusk on trial for treason over Smolensk, once his Brussels term finishes. With Law and Justice moving to control the justice system in Poland, Tusk’s prospects if prosecuted could be bleak.

The focus on Smolensk is a useful distraction from socio-economic woes. Law and Justice remains popular among its voters because of measures such as subsidies for families with children or lowering the retirement age, but the economy has been slowing down this year and foreign investments are dropping.

Crossing the line?

In a country with a strong cult of the dead, unearthing bodies and examining them breaks the biggest taboo.

“The (planned) exhumation of my wife represents for me a big trauma and pain, it destroys the peace of my family, it affects our privacy, and it encroaches on our personal wellbeing, which is based on the cult of the memory of our dead,” said Pawel Deresz, whose wife Jolanta Szymanek-Deresz, a lawyer and politician, died in the crash.

Before answering a single question, Deresz pulled out a large photo of his wife and a copy of the Polish Constitution, before reading out Article 47 about “the right to the legal protection of private and family life.”

Deresz had written to Poland’s prosecutor general Zbigniew Ziobro asking him not to exhume his wife. He said he was prepared to sue the Polish government if needed.

He’s not the only relative angered by the decision.

Last month, Izabella Sariusz-Skąpska, the daughter of Smolensk victim Andrzej Sariusz-Skąpski, published an open letter to President Andrzej Duda, asking for the exhumations to be halted.

“We stand alone and helpless against this ruthless and cruel act: our beloved are to be dragged out of their graves despite the sacred taboo of not disturbing the dead,” Sariusz-Skąpska wrote in the letter, which was signed by 238 family members of 17 victims.

Other families, however, want their loved ones dug up and given a proper burial. In six of the nine exhumations carried out under the previous government, there was evidence that Russian authorities had mixed up body parts or coffins in the chaos after the crash.
 Others share the government’s suspicions that the crash was no accident.

“This catastrophe …initially united us in mourning [and] later became a tool in the political fight between Law and Justice and Civic Platform,” said Barbara Nowacka, whose mother Izabela Jaruga-Nowacka, a former deputy prime minister, died at Smolensk.

“What is most difficult for me is that now Smolensk has become a kind of religion for some core Law and Justice supporters and they would do anything to prove it was more than a plane crash,” said Nowacka. “And on the other hand the majority of society is either getting tired or trying to get rid of the topic by turning it into a joke, which is painful.”

The Ipsos poll in October showed that only 10 percent of Poles are in favour of the exhumations.

The government is treading carefully and has sought the official backing of the powerful Polish Catholic Church. The unearthing of Lech and Maria Kaczyński was accompanied by a religious mass.

However, the Catholic Church warned that Smolensk should not be exploited for political purposes. Some individual priests have publicly objected.

The government wants to unearth all the bodies by the end of next year, but the investigation could last years.

Unearthing the remains of those whose families think the dead should rest in peace will be hard to justify to the public, especially if nothing suspicious is found upon inspecting the first coffins.

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jan 27 2016 (IPS)

The rich and the powerful, who meet every year at the World Economic Forum (WEF), were in a gloomy mood this time. Not only because the day they met close to eight trillion dollars has been wiped off global equity markets by a “correction”. But because no leader could be in a buoyant mood.

Roberto Savio

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is losing ground because of the way she handled the refugee crisis. French President Francois Hollande is facing decline in the polls that are favoring Marine Le Pen. Spanish president Mariano Rajoy practically lost the elections. Italian President Matteo Renzi is facing a very serious crisis in the Italian banking system, which could shatter the third economy of Europe. And the leaders from China, Brazil, India, Nigeria and other economies from the emerging countries (as they are called in economic jargon), are all going through a serious economic slowdown, which is affecting also the economies of the North. The absence of the presidents of Brazil and China was a telling sign.

However the last Davos (20-23 January) will remain in the history of the WEF, as the best example of the growing disconnection between the elites and the citizens. The theme of the Forum was “how to master the fourth revolution,” a thesis that Klaus Schwab the founder and CEO of Davos exposed in a book published few weeks before. The theory is that we are now facing a fusion of all technologies, that will completely change the system of production and work.

The First Industrial Revolution was to replace, at beginning of the 19th century, human power with machines. Then at the end of that century came the Second Industrial Revolution, which was to combine science with industry, with a total change of the system of production. Then came the era of computers, at the middle of last century, making the Third Industrial Revolution, the digital one. And now, according Schwab, we are entering the fourth revolution, where workers will be substituted by robots and mechanization.

The Swiss Bank UBS released in the conference a study in which it reports that the Fourth Revolution will “benefit those holding more.” In other words, the rich will become richer…it is important for the uninitiated to know that the money that goes to the superrich, is not printed for them. In other words, it is money that is sucked from the pockets of people.

Davos created two notable reactions: the first came with the creation of the World Social Forum (WSF), in 1991, where 40,000 social activists convened to denounce as illegitimate the gathering of the rich and powerful in Davos. They said it gave the elite a platform for decision making, without anything being mandated by citizens, and directed mainly to interests of the rich.

The WSF declared that “another world is possible,” in opposition to the Washington Consensus, formulated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Treasury of the United States. The consensus declared that since capitalism triumphed over Communism, the path to follow was to dismantle the state as much as possible, privatize, slash social costs which are by definition unproductive, and eliminate any barrier to the free markets. The problem was that, to avoid political contagion, the WSF established rules which reduced the Forums to internal debating and sharing among the participants, without the ability to act on the political institutions. In 2001, Davos did consider Porto Alegre a dangerous alternative; soon it went out of its radar.

At the last Davos, the WSF was not any point of reference. But it was the other actor, the international aid organization Oxfam, which has been presenting at every WEF a report on Global Wealth.

Those reports have been documenting how fast the concentration of wealth at an obscene level is creating a world of inequality not known since the First Industrial Revolution. In 2010, 388 individuals owned the same wealth as 3.6 billion people, half of humankind. In 2014, just 80 people owned as much as 3.8 billion people. And in 2015, the number came down to 62 individuals. And the concentration of wealth is accelerating. In its report of 2015, Oxfam predicted that the wealth of the top 1 per cent would overtake the rest of the population by 2016: in fact, that was reached within ten months. Twenty years ago, the superrich 1 per cent had the equivalent of 62 per cent of the world population.

It would have been logical to expect that those who run the world, looking at the unprecedented phenomena of a fast growing inequality, would have connected Oxfam report with that of UBS, and consider the new and immense challenge that the present economic and political system is facing. Also because the Fourth Revolution foresees the phasing out of workers from whatever function can be taken by machines. According to Schwab, the use of robots in production will go from the present 12 per cent to 55 per cent in 2050. This will cause obviously a dramatic unemployment, in a society where the social safety net is already in a steep decline.

Instead, the WEF largely ignored the issue of inequality, echoing the present level of lack of interest in the political institutions. We are well ahead in the American presidential campaign, and if it were not for one candidate, Bernie Sanders, the issue would have been ignored or sidestepped by the other 14 candidates. There is no reference to inequality in the European political debate either, apart from ritual declarations: refugees are now a much more pressing issue. It is a sign of the times that the financial institutions, like IMF and the World Bank, are way ahead of political institutions, releasing a number of studies on how inequality is a drag on economic development, and how its social impact has a very negative impact on the central issue of democracy and participation. The United Nations has done of inequality a central issue. Alicia Barcena, the Executive secretary of CEPAL, the Regional Center for Latin America, has also published in time for Davos a very worrying report on the stagnation in which the region is entering, and indicating the issue of inequality as an urgent problem.

But beside inequality, also the very central issue of climate change was largely ignored. All this despite the participants in the Paris Conference on Climate, recognized that the engagements taken by all countries will bring down the temperature of no more than 3.7 degrees, when a safe target would be 1.5 degrees. In spite of this very dangerous failure, the leaders in Paris gave lot of hopeful declarations, stating that the solution will come from the technological development, driven by the markets. It would have been logical to think, that in a large gathering of technological titans, with political leaders, the issue of climate change would have been a clear priority.

So, let us agree on the lesson from Davos. The rich and powerful had all the necessary data for focusing on existential issues for the planet and its inhabitants. Yet they failed to do so. This is a powerful example of the disconnection between the concern of citizens and their elite. The political and financial system is more and more self reverent: but is also fast losing legitimacy in the eyes of many people. Alternative candidates like Donald Trump or Matteo Salvini in Italy, or governments like those of Hungary and Poland, would have never been possible without a massive discontent. What is increasingly at stage is democracy itself? Are we entering in a Weimar stage of the world?

(End)

Excerpt:

Of the 69 journalists who died on the job in 2015, 40 per cent were killed by Islamic militant groups like Al-Qaeda and Islamic State. Startlingly more than two-thirds were targeted for murder, according to a special report by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said in its annual report that nine of those killings took place in France, second to Syria as the most dangerous country for the press in last year.

Globally 69 journalists were killed due to their vocation, including those slain for their reporting and those caught in crossfire or in conflict. The total for 2015 is higher than the 61 journalists killed in 2014.

The CPJ says it is investigating the deaths of a further 26 more journalists during the year to determine if they too were work-related.

In 2012, 2013, and 2014, those killed in Syria exceeded those than anywhere else in the world. But the fewer number this year dying on the job in Syria only means it is so dangerous that there are fewer journalists working there, said the report. Many international news agencies chose to withdraw staff anf local reporters were forced to flee, said the CPJ.

The report cited difficulties in researching cases in conflict including Libya, Yemen and Iraq. CPJ went on a research mission to Iraq last year investigating reports that some 35 journalists from the Mosul area had gone missing, were killed or being held by Islamic State.

The militant group has a grip on the city so the CPJ said it could only confirm the deaths of a few journalists. The committee’s report said it had received reports of dozens of other journalists killed but could not independently confirm the deaths or if indeed, journalism was the reason. It said several of these journalists are currently on CPJ’s missing list.

A mural for Avijit Roy in Dhaka, one of four bloggers murdered by extremists in Bangladesh this year. Credit: AP/A.M. Ahad

The Charlie Hebdo massacre that took place in Paris last January was claimed by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Eight journalists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were targeted.

Islamic State in October murdered two Syrian journalists living in exile in Turkey, Fares Hamadi and Ibrahim Abd al-Qader. Abd al-Qader was given CPJ’s 1015 International Press Freedom Award as he was an early member of Raqaa is Being Slaughtered Silently, a Syrian citizen journalist group.

“In Bangladesh, members of an Al-Qaeda affiliate or another local extremist group, Ansarullah Bangla Team, were suspected in the hacking or stabbing murders of a publisher and four bloggers, including U.S.-Bangladeshi writer Avijit Roy, who was attending a book fair when he was killed,”said the report.

The Taliban in Pakistan claimed responsibility for the shooting of Zaman Mehsud, president and secretary-general of the Tribal Union of Journalists’ South Waziristan chapter and reporter for the Urdu-language Daily Ummat and Daily Nai Baat newspapers.

A security officer investigates the murder of Somali journalist Hindia Haji Mohamed, who was killed by a car bomb in December. Credit: AFP/Mohamed Abdiwahab

In Somalia, Hindia Haji Mohamed, a journalist and the widow of another murdered journalist, was killed in December when a bomb blew up her car in an attack claimed by the Islamic militant group al-Shabaab.

Governments around the world were jailing at least 110 journalists on anti-state charges. This is out of 199 total jailed, according to CPJ’s most recent annual prison census.—It shows how the press is being cornered and targeted by terrorists and also squeezed by the squeezed by authorities saying there were committed to fighting terror as well, it said.

More than two thirds of the journalists killed in 2015 were targeted and murdered as a direct result of their work.

The report said about one third of journalists’ deaths worldwide were carried out by criminal groups, government officials, or local residents who were, in most cases, drug traffickers or those involved in organized crime. They included Brazilian Gleydson Carvalho, shot dead by two men while he was presenting his afternoon radio show. He was often critical of politicians and police Brazil had six killings last year, the highest since CPJ began keeping records in 1992.

But Brazilian judicial authorities have made headway in combating impunity by getting six convictions in murder cases in the last two years, said the report.

South Sudan registered for the first time on CPJ’s index of slain journalists when unidentified gunmen attacked an official convoy killing five journalists traveling with a county official. The motive is still unknown but there have been various accusations. Some say this could have been the result of the power struggle between former Vice President Riek Machar and President Salva Kiir which set off the civil war in 2013.

The murders of the five landed South Sudan on CPJ’s Global Impunity Index, which highlights countries where journalists are murdered and there is no one held responsible so their killers go free.

South Sudan, Poland and Ghana appeared on CPJ’s killed database for the first time. In Poland, Łukasz Masiak, was fatally assaulted in a bowling alley after telling colleagues he feared for his life. He was the founder and editor of a news website and reported on crime and drugs and pollution. In Ghana, radio reporter George Abanga, was shot dead on his way back from covering a cocoa farmers dispute.

CPJ cites these trends from its research:

• Seventeen journalists worldwide were killed in combat or crossfire. Five were killed on a dangerous assignment.
• At least 28 of the 47 murder victims received threats before they were killed.
• Broadcast reporting was the most dangerous job, with 25 killed. Twenty-nine victims worked online.
• The most common type of reporting by victims was politics, followed by war and human rights.

CPJ, in 1992, began compiling detailed records on all journalist deaths. If motives in a killing are unclear, it is possible that a journalist died in relation to his or her work and CPJ classifies the case as “unconfirmed” and continues to investigate. CPJ said its list does not include journalists who died of illness or natural causes or were killed in car or plane accidents unless the crash considered hostile action.

(End)

By Andreas Sieber
BONN, Sep 6 2015 (IPS)

Less than 100 days before the U.N. climate change conference (COP21) in Paris in December, there are now only few who believe that the conference will not produce a treaty. But for most countries involved, this is rarely the question.

Andreas Sieber

The key concern at this stage is: will a deal in Paris really shape climate justice and keep global warming below 2^oC?

An agreement in Paris will not be enough to keep to this target, but such a deal should at least offer a perspective for effective climate protection. This depends heavily on the process of creating a regular built-in review that would enable countries to improve the agreement made in Paris.

The emission cuts which will be agreed in Paris will not be enough to reach the 2^oC objective and this is where many NGOs say that a five-yearly “review and improve” process would come in, with the aim of making climate targets more ambitious over time and catching up with the pace of climate change.

Last week in Bonn, formal negotiations ahead of COP 21 continued with little progress – while there was support for long-term goals, short-term commitments seemed to be far less popular.“An agreement [on climate in Paris in December] with an ambitious long-term goal but no effective short-term measures would allow countries to fall far behind with their greenhouse gas reductions and many would just not be able to catch up after 2030”

“There is long list of countries supporting a long-term goal for reducing emissions. But how much faith can we have in promises for 2050 or 2100? We need to focus on the substance to understand if the signal is real,” said Jaco du Toi, a policy expert from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

However, some observers and diplomats appeared to believe that a long-term goal such as aiming for decarbonisation by 2050 or 2070 would bring everyone on the right track.

Du Toi stressed that a long-term goal and short-term commitments are not contradictory. They are complementary, he said, and an effective climate treaty should contain both. A long-term goal would serve as a lighthouse on the way towards a clean future.

However there is no point in having a lighthouse if you are not moving fast enough to reach your end – and only a short-term review mechanism would enable this.

An agreement in Paris with short-term commitments and five-year cycles without a concrete long-term goal might not be perfect. It would lack a perspective beyond 2030, but it would enhance climate protection and greenhouse gas reduction in the next 15 years.

On the other hand, an agreement with an ambitious long-term goal but no effective short-term measures would allow countries to fall far behind with their greenhouse gas reductions and many would just not be able to catch up after 2030.

Ministers already agreed to review climate targets on a five-year basis in July. However, the formal negotiations in Bonn last week showed only little momentum for actually agreeing on such a mechanism.

Climate talks need to catch up with events happening outside conference centres – sea levels are rising faster, storms are become stronger and more frequent, and the temperature is rising.

Many expected the European Union to take the lead and promote short-term commitments in Bonn. However, it only announced a 10-year target and did not offer additional intermediate goals.

Inside the European Union, Poland in particular is blocking more proactive short-term ambitions but other countries such Germany and the United Kingdom have also been surprisingly passive.

According to Martin Kaiser from Greenpeace, “unfortunately the times are over in which the European Union was a front-runner in climate politics. Europe is trailing behind the progressive actors right now.“

There are only five more days of pre-negotiations left before the conference in Paris. It is time that the European Union once again becomes a key player in climate politics.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jun 9 2015 (IPS)

Only 50 years of Cold War (and the fact that German Chancellor Angela Merkel grew up in East Germany) can possibly explain the strange political power of the United States over Europe.

After a bilateral meeting between Merkel and U.S. President Barack Obama (so much for transparency and participation), the Jun. 7-8 G7 summit opened in Germany and we found out that there had been a trade-off.

Roberto Savio

Merkel agreed that Europe should continue the sanctions against Russia – and so the other members of the G7 duly agreed – and Obama toned down the U.S. position on Greece.

That position had been forcefully expressed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew a few days earlier to European leaders: solve the Greek problem, or this will have a global impact that we cannot afford. This had suddenly accelerated negotiations, with the hope then that everything would be solved before the G7 summit.

But Greece did not accept the plan of the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, which was suspiciously close to International Monetary Fund (IMF) positions.

At the G7 summit, Obama softened the U.S. position on Greece, and even said that “Athens must implement the necessary reforms.”

Obstinacy on sanctions against Russia ignores the fact that, in a very delicate economic moment, Europe has lost a considerable part of its exports because of Russia’s retaliatory block on European imports. It is also difficult to see what advantage there is for Europe in pushing Russia into the arms of China. We will soon be seeing joint naval exercise between the two countries, which will only escalate tensions.

But let us look at Greece given that its tug of war with Europe has now been going on for five years.

Let us recall briefly. Greece had been spending much more than it could by distributing public jobs under any government, by giving easy pensions to everyone, and so on. Then, in 2009, the centre-left Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) won the elections and we found out that the figures Athens had been giving Brussels were false.

The real deficit stood at almost 12.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), confirmation of what the European Union and its bodies had long suspected but which it had done nothing about.“Europe is now led by Germany and the Germans are convinced that what they did at home is valid everywhere. Together with the countries of northern Europe, they look on the people of southern Europe as unethical, people who want to enjoy life beyond their means”

To avoid going into the agonising details of the continuous negotiations between Greece and the European Union, I jump to the January elections this year which the left-wing Syriza party won and its leader Alexis Tsipras was named Prime Minister on a clear programme: stop the austerity programme imposed by the “Troika” – IMF, EU and the European Central Bank (ECB) – on behalf of the European countries, led by Germany, Netherlands, Austria and Finland.

Greece is on its knees. Officially, unemployment has gone from 11.9 percent in 2010 to 25.5 percent today, but it is widely considered to be around 30 percent. Among young people, it is close to 60 percent. GDP has gone into a 25 percent decline, Greek citizens have lost about 30 percent of their revenues and public spending has been slashed to the point that hospitals have great difficulty in functioning.

Yet, the request (order) of the “Troika” is simple – cut everything the deficit has been eliminated.

So, for example, cut pensions, which have been already been cut twice. In any case, this would reap a paltry 100 million euros but would cripple people who are living on less than 685 euro a month. Or, raise VAT on tourism, from the present 6.5 percent to 13.6 percent, which would be a deadly blow to Greece’s only important source of income.

This is the plan presented by Juncker, whose arrival as head of the European Commission was accompanied by a grandiose Marshall Plan for Europe, a plan which has since disappeared totally from the scene.

In an article a few days ago titled ‘Europe’s Last Act?”, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, argues that the idea of austerity as a uniform recipe for Europe is missing reality.

“The troika badly misjudged the macroeconomic effects of the program that they imposed. According to their published forecasts, they believed that, by cutting wages and accepting other austerity measures, Greek exports would increase and the economy would quickly return to growth. They also believed that the first debt restructuring would lead to debt sustainability.

“The troika’s forecasts have been wrong, and repeatedly so. And not by a little, but by an enormous amount. Greece’s voters were right to demand a change in course, and their government is right to refuse to sign on to a deeply flawed program.”

It is on austerity that the paths of the United States and the European Union divide.

The United States has embarked on investing for growth, despite pressure from the Republican party for austerity, and the U.S. economy is picking up again.

But Europe is now led by Germany and the Germans are convinced that what they did at home is valid everywhere. Together with the countries of northern Europe, they look on the people of southern Europe as unethical, people who want to enjoy life beyond their means. As The Economist put it in an article on the Greek crisis: “In German eyes this crisis is all about profligacy”.

It did not help that another very minor crisis – that of Cyprus between 2012 and 2013 – confirmed Germany’s view about the profligacy of the south of Europe. In the case of Cyprus, the “Troika” settled the crisis at a cost of 10 billion euros.

There is widespread agreement that the crisis of Greece, which represents just two percent of the total European budget, could have been settled at the beginning with a 50-60 billion euro loan. But only since Tsipras became prime minister, and with popular support started to refuse to accept the creditors’ plan, has Greece has become a very important issue.

There is now talk of a “Grexit”, or Greece’s exit from the European Union. This would have a cascade effect, and it would mean the end of Europe as a common dream, of a Europe based on solidarity and communality.

In the G7, Obama has insisted on investments and demand as a way out of the crisis. Merkel has again repeated that Europe does not need stimulus financed by debt, but stimulus coming from the reform of inefficient economies. At this point, perhaps “everything is always about something else”, as the late award-winning Sri Lankan journalist Tarzie Vittachi once told me.

An enlightening comment on the Greek situation has come from Hugo Dixon writing in The New York Times of Jun. 7. The Greek prime minister “will have to choose between saving his country and sticking to a bankrupt far-left ideology. If he is smart, he can secure a few more concessions from creditors and a goodish deal for Greece. If not, he will drag the country into the abyss.”

And then, it is interesting to note that one of the main reasons for being so hard with Syriza is that the citizens of Spain, Portugal and Ireland, who were the first to swallow the bitter pill of austerity, would revolt if they saw a different path for Greece, and it just happens that those countries have conservative governments.

The entire European political system reeled with shock at the victory of Syriza, and again a few days ago at the victories of the left-wing anti-establishment Podemos party in municipal elections in Spain.

For some reason, the very authoritarian and conservative government of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the victory of the very conservative Andrzej Duda as president in Poland, as well as the rise of Matteo Salvini’s anti-European and anti-immigration Lega Nord party in Italy create no panic, not even if Salvini looks to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s right-wing Front National, as figures of reference.

So, the real issue now in the case of Greece is to punish an anti-establishment figure like Tsipras and show that the radical left cannot run a country.

Who really believes that there will masses of citizens in Madrid, Lisbon or Dublin taking to the streets to protest if Europe does a somersault of solidarity and idealism, and lowers its requests or dilutes them over more time? (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 19 2015 (IPS)

For a long time, citizens of the United States have firmly believed that their country has an exceptional destiny, and continue to do so today even though their political system has become totally dysfunctional.

The three pillars of U.S. democracy – legislative, executive and judicial – are no longer on speaking terms,  so dialogue or the possibility of bipartisan policy has virtually disappeared.

In this context, to please his opponents, and with a view to the U.S. presidential elections in 2016, President Barack Obama is increasingly being pushed to act as strong guy.

Roberto Savio

This is the only reasonable explanation on why he has suddenly declared Venezuela a security threat to the United States, just months after starting the process of normalisation of relations with Cuba, a long-time U.S. enemy in Latin America and ally of Venezuela.

The country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, is extremely happy because his denunciations of a U.S. plot with Venezuela’s opposition to have him removed have now been officially justified – by no less than the United States itself. Even the New York Times, in an editorial on Mar. 12, wondered about the wisdom of such move.

The problem is that, behind Obama’s back, U.S. Republican senators are doing unprecedented things, like writing an admonitory letter to the Supreme Guardian of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, indicating that any nuclear agreement made with Obama would last only as long as he remained in office.

That letter must have made Khamenei and Iran’s hardliners very happy, because they have always said that the United States cannot be trusted, and that the ongoing nuclear negotiations make no sense."This escalation [over Ukraine] has already taken a direction that clear heads should exam with a long-term perspective. Are the members of NATO – an institution that needs conflict to justify its new life now that the Soviet Union no longer exists – ready to enter a war, just to keep making the point? "

We are now facing an extension of the concept of the exceptional destiny of the United States, in which its foreign policy can also be exceptional, not subject to logic and rules.

Across the Atlantic, what is certainly exceptional is that while Europe has practically always followed U.S. foreign policy, even when it is against its interests as is the case of the confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, the United Kingdom – which has a special relationship with the United States – is now indulging in some divergent action.

Through its Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, the United Kingdom has announced that it intends to join the Chinese initiative for the creation of an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), in which Beijing is investing 50 billion dollars. This has raised the ire of the United States because the AIIB is seen as an alternative to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, in which the United States (and Japan) have powerful interests.

Shortly after Cameron’s move, France, Germany and Italy followed, while Australia will also join and South Korea will have to do so. This will leave the United States isolated, opening up a new “exceptional” dimension – economic might (China) is more attractive than military might (United States).

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron has responded to U.S. irritation by declaring that the United Kingdom is joining the AIIB because “we think that it’s in the UK’s national interest”.

Of course, Cameron is playing up to his financial constituency, which is very aware of its interest, even when it does not coincide with U.S. interest. After all, China’s share of global manufacturing output, which was three percent in 1990, had risen to nearly 25 percent by 2014.

Even worse is that Cameron has also decided to cut spending on defence and while the U.K. government currently meets the two percent of GDP target that the United States expects all members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to pay into the alliance, it has only committed itself to continuing that until the end of the current Parliament in May.

For the U.S. administration, this could be taken as a sign of weakness by Russian President Vladimir Putin who, it argues, should be put under growing pressure and shown that the confrontation over Ukraine will escalate until he backs down.

This escalation has already taken a direction that clear heads should exam with a long-term perspective. Are the members of NATO – an institution that needs conflict to justify its new life now that the Soviet Union no longer exists – ready to enter a war, just to keep making the point?

The signals are those that precede a war.

U.K. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has declared that Russia is “as great a threat to Europe as ‘Islamic States’.” Troops are amassing in the Baltic States to serve as a deterrent for a possible Russian invasion. The U.S. Republican Congress is overtly asking for the supply of massive and heavy weapons to the Ukrainian army.  Hundreds of U.S. troops have been assigned to Ukraine to bolster the Kiev regime against Russian-backed rebels in the east. The United Kingdom is sending 75 military advisers.

Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, the Polish government is supporting the creation and training of militias, and plans to provide military training to any of the many Poles who are increasingly concerned that “the great Russian behemoth will not be sated with Ukraine and will reach out once again into the West.” The same is happening in the Baltic States, which all have a sizable Russian presence and think Putin could invade them at any moment.

Media everywhere have engaged in a frenzy of personal vilification of Putin and in the popular pastime of using Putin and Ukraine to justify military expansionism – to advocate tit for tat what Putin is doing.

It is difficult to look to Putin with sympathy, but this confrontation has again pushed the Russian people behind its leader, and at an unprecedented level that now stands at around 80 percent.

The Guardian has reported veteran Russian leftist Boris Kagarlitsky as commenting that most Russians want Putin to take a tougher stand against the West “not because of patriotic propaganda, but their experience of the past 25 years”, and it would be a mistake to underestimate the role that humiliation can play in history.

It is commonly accepted that Hitler emerged from the frustrations of the German people after the heavy penalties that they had to pay the victors after the First World War. The same sense of humiliation made the war of Slobodan Milosevic against NATO popular with the Serbian population.

It is the humiliation of the Arabs divided among the winners of the First World War which is at the roots of the Caliphate, or the Islamic State, which claims that Arabs are finally going to be given back their dignity and identity.

And it is also humiliation over the imposition of austerity which is now creating a strong anti-German sentiment in Greece, to which Germans respond with a sense of righteous indignation (52 percent of Germans now want Greece to leave the Euro).

Has anyone considered who is going to take over Russia if Putin goes away? Certainly not those who are now in the opposition. Has anyone considered what it would mean to take on responsibility for a very weak state like Ukraine?

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has now approved a 17.5 billion dollar relief fund for Ukraine but warned that the country’s rescue “is subject to exceptional risks, especially those arising from the conflict in the East.”

In fact Ukraine needs to plug a hole of at least 40 billion dollars in the immediate term, and economists all agree that the country does not have a viable economy. It will require many years of consistent help to reach some economic equilibrium – if there is no war.

Europe is close to recession and apparently unable even to solve the problems of Greece, but goes headlong into supporting Kiev against Russian-backed rebels. NATO can support Ukrainian soldiers up to their last man, but it is impossible that they will beat Russia. Will the West then intervene or back off and lose face, after many deaths and much waste and destruction?

A widespread view now is that sanctions should starve Russia, which will have lost its revenues from oil. What if Putin does not back down, sustained by the Russian people? Are Europeans ready to go to war to please the Republican Congress in the United States? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Billboard for the referendum called to strengthen a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption in Slovakia in February. It says: WE ARE DECIDING ABOUT CHILDREN'S FUTURES. LET'S PROTECT THEIR RIGHT TO A MOTHER AND FATHER. Credit: Pavol Stracansky/IPS

By Pavol Stracansky
BRATISLAVA, Mar 15 2015 (IPS)

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) groups in Central and Eastern Europe, which still faced mixed prospects as they fight for rights and acceptance, are now taking some heart from the “failure” of a referendum in Slovakia, a member of the European Union.

Last month, a referendum called to strengthen a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption in Slovakia was declared invalid after only just over 20 percent of voters turned out.

The controversial plebiscite was heavily criticised by international rights groups, which said it pandered to homophobic discrimination and was allowing human rights issues affecting a minority group to be decided by a popular majority vote.

The campaigning ahead of the vote had often been bitter and vitriolic, including public homophobic statements by clergy, and a controversial negative commercial about gay adoption, which Slovak TV stations refused to broadcast and eventually only appeared on internet.The reasons behind the relative societal intolerance towards LGBT groups in Central and Eastern Europe vary from entrenched conservative attitudes rooted in countries’ isolation under communism, to local political aims and the influence of the Catholic Church.

The commercial showed a child in an orphanage being told that his new parents were coming to collect him and, after two men appear at the door, asking: “Where’s Mum?”

Activists here say that the referendum’s outcome was a sign that, despite this campaigning, Slovaks know that LGBT people pose “no threat” to society and has positively furthered discussion about allowing registered partnerships in the country.

Martin Macko, head of the Bratislava-based LGBT rights group Inakost, told IPS: “The referendum showed that people consider the family important, but that they do not see same-sex families as a threat to traditional families. The long-term perspective regarding discussions on registered partnerships in Slovakia is positive.”

Importantly, the result has also been welcomed in other parts of Central and Eastern Europe where many LGBT groups still face intolerance and discrimination.

Evelyne Paradis, Executive Director of international LGBT rights group ILGA-Europe told IPS: “LGBT activists across Europe have welcomed the outcome of the Slovak vote … hopefully the referendum will lead to a constructive discussion about equality in Slovakia. At the same time, we know that there is a broad diversity of views in the region which means that much work remains to be done before full equality is realised.”

Compared with Western Europe, attitudes in many countries in Central and Eastern Europe to LGBT people and issues are often much more conservative and in some states actively hostile.

The Czech Republic, whose larger cities have relatively open and vibrant gay communities, is the only country in the region which allows for registered partnerships of same-sex couples.

In other countries, such as Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia and Poland, marriage is defined constitutionally as only between a man and a woman. In January this year, Macedonia’s parliament voted to adopt a similar clause in its constitution.

Adoption by same sex couples is banned in all states in the region while other important legislation relating to LGBT issues is also absent. In Bulgaria, for instance, inadequate legislation means that homophobic crimes are investigated and prosecuted as ‘hooliganism’. This, activists claim, creates a climate of fear for LGBT people.

Poor records on minority rights in general in places like, for instance, Ukraine, mean that while the state may ostensibly be committed to LGBT rights, such communities are in reality extremely vulnerable.

In Russia, legislation actively represses same-sex relationships, with federal laws criminalising promotion of any non-heterosexual lifestyle, while Lithuania has legal provisions banning the promotion of homosexuality.

Deeply negative attitudes towards homosexuals are widespread in some societies. A 2013 survey in Ukraine showed that two-thirds of people thought homosexuality was a perversion, while a study in the same year in Lithuania showed that 61 percent of LGBT people said they had suffered discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Isolated verbal and physical attacks and passive intolerance among more conservative groups are common across the region. But in some countries, specifically Russia, anyone even suspected of being non-heterosexual faces open, organised and sometimes lethally violent persecution.

Natalia Tsymbalova, an LGBT rights activist from St Petersburg, was forced to flee Russia in September last year after receiving death threats. Now claiming asylum in Spain, she was one of at least 12 LGBT activists who left Russia last year.

Speaking from Madrid, she told IPS about the continuing repression of LGBT people in her home country.

She said that although state propaganda campaigns had “switched to ‘Ukrainian fascists’ and the West” being portrayed as the public’s greatest enemy instead of LGBT people since the annexation of Crimea and the start of the Ukraine conflict, “state homophobia has not disappeared”.

“It has just faded into the background,” she added, “no longer making top headlines in the news, but it is still there and it has never left. The number of hate crimes is not falling, and they are being investigated as badly as before.”

The reasons behind the relative societal intolerance towards LGBT groups in Central and Eastern Europe vary from entrenched conservative attitudes rooted in countries’ isolation under communism, to local political aims and the influence of the Catholic Church.

In Slovakia, a strongly Catholic country where the Church’s influence can be extremely strong in many communities, supporters of the referendum welcomed Pope Francis’ personal endorsement of their cause.

It has been speculated that the conservative Alliance for Family movement, which initiated the referendum, is funded by Slovakia’s Catholic Church and that the Church was the driving force behind moves to bring about the vote.

In Lithuania, another strongly Catholic country, Church officials have supported laws restricting LGBT rights and have openly called homosexuality a perversion.

However, some rights activists also say that politicians in countries struggling economically or looking to entrench their own power can often use minorities, including LGBT people, as easy political targets to gain voter support.

ILGA’s Paradis told IPS: “Unfortunately many political leaders use the LGBT community as scapegoats … from activists we often hear that they do this to hide ‘real problems’ in countries, such as youth unemployment, access to education and healthcare. They promote ‘traditional family values’ as the way to rescue society. Sadly, in doing this, political leaders build a climate of intolerance and hatred.”

Saying that Russian politicians are now using homophobia to push wider agendas, Tsymbalova told IPS: “Homophobia plays an important role in the anti-Western rhetoric of President [Vladimir] Putin and his fellows. It is one of the main points of the conservative values that they try to promote and the public still has negative attitudes toward LGBT communities.”

The outcome of the Slovak referendum has left activists there more optimistic about the future for LGBT people in their country.

They are now pushing for discussions with the government about introducing registered partnerships and they hope that LGBT communities in other countries in the region will be heartened by the result or that, at least, people hoping to organise similar referendums will reconsider what they are doing.

Macko of Inakost told IPS: “Religious groups in some Balkan and Baltic countries are considering organising similar referendums and we really hope this will discourage them.”

Paradis told IPS that while the Slovak referendum had already been welcomed by many of its member groups in Central and Eastern Europe, progress on LGBT issues in many countries, including registered partnerships, was unlikely to be swift. “There indeed is more discussion in the region on granting rights to same sex partnerships, but what we see is a very mixed picture.”

However, the outlook for LGBT people in some places remains grim. Tsymbalova told IPS that many LGBT people in her home country have given up hope of any positive changes in the foreseeable future.

“In our community, there is almost no one who believes that the situation for LGBT people in Russia will seriously change for the better any time soon. Under the existing regime, which promotes and exploits homophobia, these changes will not happen and there is almost no hope of a regime change, so expectations are gloomy.”

She added: “Many LGBT activists have either left Russia, like me, or are going to. [As] for same-sex registered partnerships, it would take several decades to be accepted in Russia and I don’t believe I will see this in my lifetime. It is completely out of the question for the next 20 or 30 years.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

Stop Elektrownia Północ campaigners trying to stop investment in Europe’s biggest new coal power plant. Credit: C. Kowalski/350.org

By Diana Maciaga
WARSAW, Oct 27 2014 (IPS)

Pomerania in northern Poland is famous for its unpolluted environment, fertile soils and historic heritage. So far, these valuable farmlands have been free from heavy industry but that situation might change as a shadow looms over the lives of Pomeranians.

Its name is Elektrownia Północ, also known as the North Power Plant and, ever since we learned about it, we have been determined to stop Elektrownia Pólnoc.

If built, this coal-fired power plant would contribute to the climate crisis with 3.7 million tons of coal burnt annually, and lock Poland into coal dependency for decades.

It threatens to pollute the Vistula River, Poland’s largest river, with a rich ecosystem that is home to many rare and endangered species.“The [Polish] government’s energy scenario, ironically labelled as sustainable, is based on coal and nuclear power. It promotes business as usual and hinders any development of renewable energy”

The threat of soil degradation and inevitable drainage keeps local farmers awake at night, not to mention the air pollution from the plant that will be a major health hazard, making the situation in Poland – already the most polluted country in Europe with more people dying from air pollution than from car accidents – even worse.

But this is not just about stopping one of a dozen fossil fuel projects currently under development. This is part of a much broader struggle.

While unemployment soars, the Polish government fails to stimulate green jobs and dismisses renewable energy as too expensive. At the same time, it is pumping billions into the coal industry. Unprofitable and un-modern, it thrives thanks to hidden subsidies that in the past 22 years added up to a mammoth sum equal to the country’s annual GDP.

The government’s energy scenario, ironically labelled as sustainable, is based on coal and nuclear power. It promotes business as usual and hinders any development of renewable energy.

The current government continues to block European Union climate policy, without which we can forget about a meaningful climate treaty being achieved in Paris next year.

All this takes place while we face the greatest environmental crisis in history and leaves us hopelessly unprepared for everything it brings about.

But Poland’s infamous coal dependence is all but given and the policy that granted our country the infamous nickname “Coal-land” is strikingly incompatible with the will of the Polish people. All around the country people are fighting coal plants, new mines and opposing fracking. We want Poland to be a modern country that embraces climate justice.

I went to New York to be part of the People’s Climate March, observe the U.N. Climate Summit and bring this very message from hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens whose voices had been ignored on domestic grounds to the international stage. Yet what I had not expected was how powerful an experience it would be.

With 400,000 people in the streets and thousands more all over the world, New York witnessed not only the largest climate march in history on Sep. 21 but a true change of tide: a beautiful, unstoppable wave of half a million representing hundreds of millions more – the stories unfolding, forming an epic tale not of loss or despair but of resilience, strength, responsibility and readiness to do what it takes to save this world.

For decades world leaders have been failing us, justifying their inaction with the supposed lack of people’s support, their talks poisoned by a ‘you move first’ approach.

The voices of those who marched echoing in the street and in the media, impossible to be ignored, left their mark on the Summit and resounded in many speeches given by world leaders. The march showed it more clearly than ever how strong the mandate for taking action is and, even more importantly, where the leadership truly lies.

Opening the Summit, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appealed to politicians to take action to ensure a low-carbon, climate resilient and better future. “There is only one thing in the way,” he said, “Us”.

The march proved that there is a counter-movement challenging this stagnation. From individuals to communities, from cities to neighbourhoods and families, millions are working to make a better world a reality. Against all adversities, people around the world embrace the urgency of action and lead where the supposed leaders have failed.

For me this is the single most important message and a source of hope to take back home. A new chapter of climate protection has opened written by the diverse, powerful stream which flooded the streets in New York and beyond – not to witness but to make history.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

* Diana Maciaga works with the Polish NGO Workshop for All Beings (Pracownia na rzecz Wszystkich Istot), which specialises in protection of the wildest treasures of Poland. She has participated in Global Power Shift and Power Shift Central & Eastern Europe and is sharing her experience through campaigns and coordinating a training for local Polish leaders – “Guardians of Climate”. She is currently one of the organisers of the Stop Elektrowni Północ (Stop the ‘North Power Plant’) campaign against a new coal-fired facility in Poland.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

By Helge Luras
OSLO, Sep 18 2014 (IPS)

New military measures to deter what NATO perceives to be a direct threat from Russia were adopted at the alliance’s Heads of State meeting in Wales (Sep. 4-5). A few days earlier, President Barack Obama made promises in Estonia that the three tiny Baltic NATO member states would “never stand alone”. 

Since early 2014, Russia has done practically all that Western leaders have warned President Vladimir Putin in advance not to do. Crimea was occupied and annexed. Pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine were encouraged and given practical support. Later, Russian personnel and equipment came more and more openly into conflict with Ukrainian forces.

Helge Luras

But the West’s warnings to Russia did not stop there. Already several months ago, establishment figures and the media began to associate events in Ukraine directly with the situation in the Baltics and in Poland. NATO has responded to the Russian offensive against Ukraine, a non-NATO country, by shifting military resources towards the areas of NATO that it claims, but only by conjecture, are threatened by Russia.

But did anyone at the NATO summit warn that the alliance might create a self-fulfilling prophecy? Did anyone have the foresight to consider how tensions between Russian speakers and Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians might increase as a result of the hyperbole of the Russian threat? One should not assume hostile intentions in today’s ethnically-charged world without good reason.

That some Western minds consider themselves, and by extension NATO, to be an idealistic force for peace, human rights and democracy, is beyond dispute. But the reality is that NATO countries – that is, the West – represent the world’s most powerful military force, both conventional and nuclear.

Up to now, NATO has not challenged another nuclear armed entity and therefore has survived its own political-military escalation tendency. But in the case of Russia, the erroneous Western perception of self could cause a catastrophic and total war.

Since the Cold War, the West has swallowed up a large area formerly under the influence, if not outright control, of Soviet Russia. The hegemonic mind saw this as just natural and of no business to an anachronism like Russia.“The problem is that Russian and NATO leaders are not drunken poets pathetically fighting with untrained fists at a literary reception. They may act so, but are in fact front men of substantive and institutional systems that can wipe out all human civilisation in a short time”

The future of humanity when expansion started in the 1990s was a Western future: liberal, democratic and free-market. Spheres of influence were the hallmark of others, exemplified by “reactionary” and authoritarian forces like Russia under Putin. Western influence is in another category – it is natural if not God-given.

In Russia, there is a clear and evolving bias in news reporting which the West characterises as “propaganda”. In the West, there is less need to instruct the media directly, there is a reverse bias due to cultural indoctrination. Evidently the West is a keeper of the right values. There is no cause and effect. Evil just pops up. All things Russian are bad, deceitful, not to be trusted. But in Russia this feeds an undeniable paranoia in the psyche.

The West has retained one “acceptable” bogeyman in the atmosphere of religious tolerance that creates such cognitive dissonance as it struggles to come to grips with core tenets of original (radical) Islam. The Western “liberal mind” has at least one cultural object left to legitimately hate: Russian political culture and the strong man it produces.

The problem is that Russian and NATO leaders are not drunken poets pathetically fighting with untrained fists at a literary reception. They may act so, but are in fact front men of substantive and institutional systems that can wipe out all human civilisation in a short time.

Western leaders undoubtedly perceive that their power is waning. No more state-building in faraway countries for us. The end of omnipotence, indeed of paradigm, is obviously traumatic and difficult to consider with a cool mind. But the diminution of Western political power occurs with no corresponding weakness in pure military muscle.

This leaves the temptation of a “Mad Man Doctrine”. If you can convince your opponent that you are willing to react disproportionately to what is at stake for you, he will fear you beyond the otherwise sensible. Everyone treats a mad man with caution.

In Ukraine, there is more at stake for Russia than for the West. Therefore Russia, as it has also shown, will not give up or allow itself or its allies to lose. In the Baltic countries, there is also more at stake for Russia than for the United States and for most other NATO countries as well.

For, in the post-Cold War, Russia has no ideology beyond nationalism. Its most ambitious claims, even if unopposed, would come to a halt at the geographical outer limits of the ethnic Russian nation.

This is not to say that Russian nationalism could not become a factor of instability beyond Ukraine. Trouble is latent. The partly Russian-populated Baltic countries are now in NATO, and NATO is an institutionalised form of the Mad Man Doctrine. The danger of miscalculating the reaction for NATO as well as for Russia is therefore significant.

Little suggests that the West understand how risky the games in progress really are. NATO and Russia are nuclear powers. Sensible leaders on both sides understood as much during the Cold War. Nuclear powers must not go to war with each other. If at all, the conflicts must remain by proxy. Such insights must be rediscovered today.

NATO should concentrate on finding a way to downplay the conflict with Russia, compromise on Ukraine, and not follow what the United States seem intent on doing; escalating, increasing defence spending across the bloc, sending more troops to the Baltic countries. Appeasement, if the starting point is dumb-headed NATO-expansionism, can be a virtue as well as a vice.

Military means are already at play in the conflict between NATO and Russia. Some call for even more. Before pushing Russia further in the direction they claim not to want – ethnic expansionism – politicians in the West must remember that nuclear arms are the last weapons in the arsenal of both.

Luckily, Putin seems quite sane, with superior rationality to many of his Western counterparts. The irresponsible comparison between Putin and Hitler is therefore wrong in many respects, but not least because Hitler never had the bomb. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

Anti-coal human chain crossing the Niesse river which separates Poland and Germany, August 2014. Credit: Courtesy of Greenpeace Poland

By Claudia Ciobanu and Silvia Giannelli
GRABICE, Poland / PROSCHIM, Germany, Aug 26 2014 (IPS)

“People have gathered here to tell their politicians that the way in which we used energy and our environment in the 19^th and 20^th centuries is now over,” says Radek Gawlik, one of Poland’s most experienced environmental activists. “The time for burning coal has passed and the sooner we understand this, the better it is for us.”

Gawlik was one of over 7,500 people who joined an 8-kilometre-long human chain at the weekend linking the German village of Kerkwitz with the Polish village of Grabice to oppose plans to expand lignite mining on both sides of the German-Polish border.“It's high time to plan the coal phase-out now and show the people in the region a future beyond the inevitable end of dirty fossil fuels" – Anike Peters, Greenpeace Germany

They were inhabitants of local villages whose houses would be destroyed if the plans go ahead, activists from Poland and Germany, and even visitors from other countries who wanted to lend a hand to the anti-coal cause. The human chain – which was organised by Greenpeace and other European environmental NGOs – passed through the Niesse river which marks the border between the two countries, and included people of all ages, from young children to local elders who brought along folding chairs.

At least 6,000 people in the German part of Lusatia region and another 3,000 across the border in south-western Poland stand to be relocated if the expansion plans in the two areas go ahead.

In Germany, it is Swedish state energy giant Vattenfall that plans to expand two of its lignite mines in the German states of Brandenburg and Saxony; state authorities have already approved the company’s plans. In Poland, state energy company PGE (Polska Grupa Energetyczna) plans an open-cast lignite mine from which it would extract almost two million tonnes of coal per year (more than from the German side).

On the German side

Germany has for a long time been perceived as an example in terms of its energy policy, not in the least because of its famous Energiewende, a strategy to decarbonise Germany’s economy by reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95 percent, reaching a 60 percent renewables share in the energy sector, and increasing energy efficiency by 50 percent, all by 2050.

Today, one-quarter of energy in Germany is produced from renewable sources, and the same for electricity, as a result of policies included in the Energiewende strategy.

Expanding coal mining as would happen in the Lusatia region contradicts Germany’s targets, argue environmentalists. “The expansion of lignite mines and the goals of the Energiewende to decarbonise Germany until 2050 do not fit together at all,” says Gregor Kessler from Greenpeace Germany.  “There have to be severe cuts in coal-burning if Germany wants to reach its own 2020 climate goal (reducing CO₂ emissions by 40 percent).

“Yet the government so far is afraid of taking the logical next step and announce a coal-phase-out plan,” Kessler continues. “So far both the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats keep repeating that coal will still be needed for years and years to provide energy security. However even today a lot of the coal-generated energy is exported abroad as more and more energy comes from renewables.”

Proschim, a town of around 360 people, is one of the villages threatened by Vattenfall’s planned expansion. Already surrounded by lignite mines, this little community has one feature that makes its possible destruction even more controversial: nowadays it produces more electricity from renewable energy than its citizens use for themselves.

Wind farm in Proschim, Lusatia, Germany. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

But Vattenfall’s project to extend two existing open cast mines, namely Nochten and Welzow-Süd, would destroy Proschim along with its solar and wind farm and its biogas plant.

“It is such a paradox, we have so much renewable energy from wind, solar and biogas in Proschim. And this is the town they want to bulldoze,” says former Proschim mayor Erhard Lehmann.

The village is nevertheless split on the issue, with half of its citizens welcoming Vattenfall’s expansion project, including Volker Glaubitz, the deputy mayor of Proschim, and his wife Ingrid, who came from Haidemühl, a neighbouring village that was evacuated to make room for the Welzow-Süd open-cast mine. The place is now known as the “ghost-town”, due to the abandoned buildings that Vattenfall was not allowed to tear down because of property-related controversies.

Abandoned buildings in Haidemühl, Lusatia, Germany. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

Lignite undoubtedly played a major role in Lusatia’s economic development, creating jobs not only in the many open-cast mines spread over the territory, but also through the satellite activities connected to coal processing. Lehmann himself was employed as a mechanic and electrician for the excavators used in the mines. Ingrid Glaubitz was a machinist at ‘Schwarze Pumpe’, one of Vattenfall’s power plants and her son also works for Vattenfall.

“There must be renewable energy in the future, but right now it is too expensive and we need lignite as a bridge technology,” Volker Glaubitz told IPS. “The mines bring many jobs to the region: without the coal, Lusatia would be dead already.”

Johannes Kapelle, a 78-year-old farmer of Sorb origin and at the forefront of the battle against Proschim’s destruction, sees coal in a completely different way: “Coal is already vanishing, it something that belongs to the past.”

His house, right in front of the Glaubitz’s, is covered in solar panels, and from his garden he proudly shows the wind park that provides Proschim with an estimated annual production of 5 GWh.

Johannes Kapelle in his courtyard, with roof covered in solar panels, Proschim, Lusatia, Germany. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

According to Kapelle, lignite extraction has been threatening the Sorb culture, which is spiritually connected to the land, since the beginning of industrialisation over a hundred years ago. “When a Sorb has a house without a garden, and without farmland, without forests and lakes, then he’s not a true Sorb anymore, because he has no holy land.”

On the Polish side

Poland is Europe’s black sheep when it comes to climate, with 90 percent of electricity in Poland currently produced from coal and the country’s national energy strategy envisaging a core role for coal for decades to come. The Polish government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk has over the past years tried to block progress by the European Union in adopting more ambitious climate targets.

For Polish authorities, the over 100,000 jobs in coal mining in the country today are an argument to keep the sector going. Additionally, says the government, coal constitutes a local reserve that can ensure the country’s “energy security” (a hot topic in Europe, especially since the Ukrainian-Russian crisis).

Coal opponents, on the other hand, note that the development of renewables and energy efficiency creates jobs too (according to the United Nations, investments in improved energy efficiency in buildings alone could create up to 3.5 million jobs in the European Union and the United States). Environmentalists further argue that coal is not as cheap as its proponents claim: according to the Warsaw Institute for Economic Studies, in some years, subsidies for coal mining in Poland have reached as much as 2 percent of GDP.

“In Poland, the coal lobby is very strong,” says Gawlik. “I also have the impression that our politicians have not yet fully understood that renewables and energy efficiency have already become real alternatives and do not come with some mythically high costs.”

The future of coal in Europe

In Europe as a whole, coal has seen a minor resurgence over the past 2-3 years, despite the European Union having the stated goal to decarbonise by 2050 (out of all fossil fuels, lignite produces the most CO₂ per unit of energy produced).

Access to cheap coal exports from the United States, relatively high gas prices, plus a low carbon price on the EU’s internal emissions trading market (caused in turn by a decrease in industrial output following the economic crisis) led to a temporary hike in coal usage. Yet experts are certain that coal in Europe is dying a slow death.

“In the longer term the prospects for coal-fired power generation are negative,” according to a July report by the Economist Intelligence Unit. “Air-quality regulations (in the European Union) will force plant closures, and renewable energy will continue to surge, while in general European energy demand will be weak. The recent mini-boom in coal-burning will prove an aberration.”

“Additional coal mines would not only be catastrophic for people, nature and climate – it would also be highly tragic, as beyond 2030, when existing coal mines will be exhausted, renewable energies will have made coal redundant,” says Anike Peters, climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace Germany.

“It’s high time to plan the coal phase-out now and show the people in the region a future beyond the inevitable end of dirty fossil fuels.”

* Anja Krieger and Elena Roda contributed to this report in Germany

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Organic farmer Slawek Dobrodziej with volunteers from Warsaw helping on his farm. Credit: Courtesy of Malgosia Dobrodziej

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Aug 21 2014 (IPS)

Polish farmer Slawek Dobrodziej has probably the world’s strangest triathlon training regime: he swims across the lake at the back of his house, then runs across his some 11 hectares of land to check the state of the crops, and at the end of the day bikes close to 40 kilometres to and back from a nearby town for some shopping.

That Dobrodziej would still want to enter the triathlon, despite working daily in the fields from dawn until well into the night, speaks volumes about his supra-human levels of energy.

But it takes this kind of stamina to succeed as an ecological farmer in Poland.Community-supported agriculture “could help promote farm biodiversity because consumers buy different types of vegetables and products in this scheme, and it could also help to spread the certified organic model, which is only marginally developed in Poland today” – organic farmer Sonia Priwieziencew

Today, around 3.5 percent of Poland’s agricultural land is taken up by organic farms. Their number has been growing steadily over recent years, yet farmers complain of obstacles. Of the country’s some 1.8 million farmers, just 26,000 have organic certification (though some of these farms are just meadows and do not necessarily produce food), and only 300 of these are vegetable producers.

Under the most recent national policies (adopted in parallel to the new European Union’s 2014-2020 budget, which will finance Polish agriculture), Polish authorities have been cutting subsidies for medium and large organic farms, and they have practically eliminated public support for organic orchards.

Smaller organic producers have to struggle with complicated bureaucratic procedures in place for obtaining national or European funding.

Slawek Dobrodziej and his wife Malgosia clearly have the determination to penetrate these procedures. Over the past eight years, the couple have managed to build up a successful organic farm in the village of Zeliszewo, near the western city of Szczecin. They sell some 100 types of fruit and vegetables to consumers in several Polish major cities, including the capital Warsaw.

According to Malgosia, the book-keeper of the family farm, the first years were particularly rough. Selling large quantities of one product to food processing companies did not pay off: organic farming, which uses no pesticides, is labour-intensive, and the prices paid by the companies were not enough to cover costs.

The family managed to access some national and European funds, but the amounts were barely sufficient to buy some basic machinery. European money must often be co-financed by the recipient, meaning that obtaining more funds would be impossible without becoming heavily indebted to banks.

The Dobrodziej’s fortunes improved once they diversified their vegetable production and found opportunities to sell their produce directly to consumers in big cities. Selling to a bio bazaar in Warsaw was a turning point.

Additionally, for the first time this year, they started selling to consumers via two community-supported agriculture (CSA) schemes in the cities of Szczecin and Poznan, through which the roughly 30 consumers in each scheme pay them in advance for vegetables they will receive weekly throughout the summer and autumn months.

The CSA model is based on the idea that consumers share risks with the farmers: consumers enter the scheme agreeing to take whatever vegetables the farmer is able to produce given weather conditions. They are also able to volunteer on the farm, which provides an understanding of seasonality and farm work that few city inhabitants have. Malgosia says that CSA is an excellent way of offering financial stability to a small farm.

The first CSA was created in Poland in 2012 in Warsaw, and this year six such schemes are operational in the country, including the two served by the Dobrodziej. More schemes are expected to be launched next year, given the warm welcome the model has received from city consumers and the farming community.

At the moment, the Dobrodziej’s week is a mad rush among various cities in Poland, with night-long drives to deliver fresh products, followed by days in the field. Yet Malgosia hopes that next year, once the bank credits are paid, they will be able to rely only on the two CSA schemes and sales to bio bazaars in Warsaw and Katowice. Meanwhile Slawek dreams of setting up an organisation to promote the model nationally.

“We do absolutely too much work right now, and we spend too much time packaging half kilos of vegetables to sell to small organic shops,” explains Malgosia. “The CSA model seems very promising, because we get rid of the packaging ordeal and we also get money in hand at the start of the season from which we can make investments in the machinery we need.”

“I think many Polish farms could go this way, because the model is really economically viable for farmers,” says Sonia Priwieziencew, who together with her partner Tomasz Wloszczowski, runs a 6 hectare organic farm in the village of Swierze Panki, 120 km northeast of Warsaw, which has been serving the first CSA in Poland for three years.

Priwieziencew and Wloszczowski had been active for years in NGOs promoting organic farming in Poland and they wanted to put theory into practice.

“CSA could help promote farm biodiversity because consumers buy different types of vegetables and products in this scheme, and it could also help to spread the certified organic model, which is only marginally developed in Poland today,” says Priwieziencew.

After years of experience with advocacy work and promotion of the organic model among farmers, Priwieziencew is quite critical of the authorities’ approach to ecological farming. According to her, despite the fact that the vast majority of farmers in Poland today have small plots of land, the policies issued both by the Polish government and the European Union are more favourable to large-scale industrial farming.

Despite the new Common Agricultural Policy adopted this year in Brussels, which is supposed to provide guidance to farming in the European Union for the coming years, paying much lip service to organic farming and small-scale agriculture as means to ensure food security, limit climate change and preserve biodiversity, national policies and financing do not necessarily follow this direction, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe.

Yet, over recent years, citizens in these regions have become increasingly aware of the faults of industrial food production and numerous initiatives intended to safeguard small farming and promote ecological agriculture have been created across both regions.

This month, Warsaw saw the opening of the first cooperative shop bringing vegetables and other foods directly from producers, most of them local, and selling them at a discount to members of the cooperative who volunteer work.

Cooperatives and vegetable box schemes exist in most big Polish cities and are even developing at the level of neighbourhoods. A newly discovered passion for urban gardening in the country has led museums in Warsaw and other cities to open up their green areas to local inhabitants who want to grow vegetables.

Other countries in the region are not lagging behind. At least 15 CSA initiatives exist in the Czech Republic and, in addition, vegetable box schemes and urban gardens are continually appearing. In Romania, CSA groups exist now in at least six different cities, with some of the farms explicitly employing people from marginalised social categories.

”Every such new initiative gives small-scale ecological farmers a new chance to sell more and develop in Poland,” says Warsaw-based food activist Piotr Trzaskowski, who set up the first CSA in Poland. ”These farmers must survive because they are real caretakers of the land and the environment, unlike large-scale conventional producers who commodify the land, buying it, using it up and ignoring the impact on biodiversity, people and the environment.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Jänschwalde open cast lignite mine, close to Atterwasch, Germany. Credit: Christian Huschga

By Melanie Mattauch
LUSATIA, Germany, Aug 20 2014 (IPS)

Johannes Kapelle has been playing the organ in the Protestant church of Proschim since he was 14. The 78-year-old is actively involved in his community, produces his own solar power and has raised three children with his wife on their farm in Proschim, a small village of 360 inhabitants in Lusatia, Germany.

Now the church, his farm, the forest he loves dearly and his entire village is threatened with demolition to leave space for expansion of Swedish energy giant Vattenfall’s lignite (also known as brown coal) operations to feed its power plants. Nearly all of the fuel carbon (99 percent) in lignite is converted to CO₂ – a major greenhouse gas – during the combustion process.“What we’re seeing today is the result of putting economic thinking at the forefront. Our mantra is to just continue doing things as long as they generate profit. We need to counteract this trend with ethical thinking. We need to do what’s right!” – Protestant pastor Mathias Berndt

For Kapelle, this is inconceivable: “In Proschim, we’ve managed effortlessly to supply our community with clean energy by setting up a wind park and a biogas plant. Nowadays, it is just irresponsible to expand lignite mining.”

The desolate landscape the giant diggers leave behind stretches as far as the eye can see from just a few hundred metres outside Proschim.

“It’s only going to take about a quarter of a year to burn the entire coal underneath Proschim. But the land is going to be destroyed forever. You won’t even be able to enter vast areas of land anymore because it will be prone to erosion. You won’t be able to grow anything on that soil anymore either. No potatoes, no tomatoes, nothing,” says Kappelle.

Some 70 km northeast of Proschim, Protestant pastor Mathias Berndt also sees his community under threat. His church in Atterwasch has been around for 700 years and even survived the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century. Now it is supposed to make way for Vattenfall’s Jänschwalde Nord open cast lignite mine.

The 64-year-old has been Atterwasch’s pastor since 1977 and refuses to accept that his community will be destroyed: “As Christians, we have a responsibility to cultivate and protect God’s creation. That’s what it says in the Bible. We’re pretty good at cultivating but protection is lacking. That’s why I’ve been trying to stop the destruction of nature since the days of the German Democratic Republic.”

“Vattenfall’s plans to expand its mines have given this fight a new dimension,” Berndt adds. “This is now also about preventing our forced displacement.”

Berndt is currently involved in organising a huge protest on August 23 – a human chain connecting a German and Polish village threatened by coal mining in the region. He has also been pushing his church to step up its efforts to curb climate change.

As a result, his regional synod has positioned itself against new coal mines, lignite power plants and the demolition of further villages. It is also offering churches advice on energy savings and deploying renewable energy. The parsonage in Atterwasch, for example, has been equipped with solar panels.

Parsonage in Atterwasch with solar panels. Credit: Christian Huschga

Despite Germany’s ambitions for an energy transition, its so-called Energiewende, the country’s CO₂ emissions have been rising again for the past two years, for the first time since the country’s reunification. This is primarily due to Germany’s coal-fired power plants, and brown coal power stations in particular.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recently confirmed that it is still possible to limit global warming below 2° C. But there is only a limited CO₂ budget left to meet this goal and avert runaway climate change.

The IPCC estimates that investments in fossil fuels would need to fall by 30 billion dollars a year, while investments in low-carbon electricity supply would have to increase by 147 billion dollars a year.

As a result, more and more faith leaders are calling for divestment from fossil fuels. One of the most powerful advocates has been Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former South African Anglican Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, who recently called for an “anti-apartheid style boycott of the fossil fuel industry”.

Tutu’s call to action has been echoed by U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres, who has urged religious leaders to pull their investments out of fossil fuel companies.

Protestant pastor Mathias Berndt. Credit: Christian Huschga

Many churches have taken this step already. Last month, the World Council of Churches, a fellowship of over 300 churches representing some 590 million people in 150 countries, decided to phase out its holdings in fossil fuels and encouraged its members to do the same.

The Quakers in the United Kingdom, the Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, the United Church of Christ in the United States, and many more regional and local churches have also joined the divestment movement.

The Church of Sweden was among the first to rid itself of oil and coal investments. It increased investments in energy-efficient and low-carbon projects instead, which also improved its portfolio’s financial performance.

Gunnela Hahn, head of ethical investments at the Church of Sweden’s central office explains: “We realised that many of our largest holdings were within the fossil industry. That catalysed the idea of more closely aligning investments with the ambitious work going on in the rest of the church on climate change. ”

Meanwhile, from the frontline, pastor Berndt calls for putting ethics first: “What we’re seeing today is the result of putting economic thinking at the forefront. Our mantra is to just continue doing things as long as they generate profit. We need to counteract this trend with ethical thinking. We need to do what’s right!”

*  Melanie Mattauch is 350.org Europe Communications Coordinator

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Polish conservatives protesting against a reading of Golgota Picnic in Warsaw. Credit: Maciej Konieczny/Courtesy of Krytyka Polityczna

By Claudia Ciobanu
WAESAW, Jul 8 2014 (IPS)

A mix of conservative Catholicism and nationalism has become the predominant view in Polish public debate, with some worrying effects.

These were the values around which the opposition to communism led by trade union Solidarity built itself up in the 1980s but, after the fall of communism, opinion makers in the media and politicians continued to depict them as part and parcel of being Polish.

Observers note that the Polish Catholic Church has also grown increasingly conservative since 1989, in apparent contrast to an opening up of the Church worldwide.Conservative Catholicism and nationalism were the values around which the opposition to communism led by trade union Solidarity built itself up in the 1980s but, after the fall of communism, opinion makers in the media and politicians continued to depict them as part and parcel of being Polish.

Last month, the director of a theatre festival in the city of Poznan decided to cancel showings of a play fearing he could not ensure the safety of viewers in the face of threats by conservative and far-right groups. The play – “Golgota Picnic” by Argentinian director Rodrigo Garcia – describes the life of Jesus using striking depictions of contemporary society, including some with a sexual meaning.

Among those asking for play to be cancelled were representatives of Poland’s main opposition party, Law and Justice, the main trade union Solidarity, and the far-right Ruch Narodowy (National Movement), all of which stand for traditional Catholic values. The Church also voiced its opposition to the play.

In itself, protesting against the play was unremarkable (it has also been met with opposition from Catholics in other countries, for example in France), but the Polish response was interesting: even if the festival was largely financed from public sources, the show was cancelled and there was hardly any resistance from public authorities to the decision. The public, however, made itself heard and readings of the play were organised in major Polish cities, with hundreds attending.

Meanwhile, the dynamics surrounding “Golgota Picnic” are being replicated over other issues in Polish society, among which the most striking is women’s reproductive rights. Poland is one of only three countries in the European Union where abortion is prohibited, unless the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest, there is a serious threat to the mother’s health or foetal malformation has been detected.

Abortion had been legal in communist Poland but was outlawed in 1993 after pressure from the Catholic Church. Ever since, attempts to make abortion legal have failed. In 2011, the Polish parliament came close to further tightening the law on abortion by prohibiting it no matter the circumstances.

At the time, it was not only the political forces explicitly standing for Catholic values that endorsed a total ban, but also many members of the governing centre-right Civic Platform, which depicts itself as Poland’s main liberal political force.

De facto, even the current restrictive law is not being implemented. In a series of high profile cases over the years, Catholic doctors in public hospitals have refused to perform abortions even if girls were pregnant as a result of rape, had serious health conditions or malformation had been detected in foetuses.

In May, in an escalation of the situation, over 3,000 Polish doctors, nurses and medical students signed a “Declaration of Faith” in which they rejected abortion, birth control, in vitro fertilisation and euthanasia as contrary to the Catholic faith. Signatories included employees of public clinics and hospitals. One of them was the director of a Warsaw maternity hospital who said he would not allow such procedures to take place in his institution.

The “Declaration of Faith”, which has been endorsed by the Polish Catholic Church, is contrary to Polish law and Prime Minister Donald Tusk has spoken out against it.

State authorities have been carrying out check-ups at those institutions in which signatories of the Declaration work to establish whether the law is being respected, and one fine has been imposed on the Warsaw maternity hospital whose director prohibits legal abortions. Yet more determined measures are still pending.

“Lack of massive resistance [to the Declaration] is not a sign of approval on the part of the general public,” comments Agnieszka Graff, writer and feminist activist. “It is rather a question of resignation: for 20 years we have seen politicians court the Church while ignoring public opinion on matters that have to do with reproductive rights. The pattern of submission has emboldened the radical anti-choice groups.”

Political power in Poland is firmly in the hands of conservatives. Law and Justice, the party with the best chance of winning next year’s parliamentary elections, is staunchly pro-Catholic and nationalist, and has in the past allied in government with far-right politicians. The governing Civic Platform, the choice of many liberals in this country, is bitterly divided between social conservatives and liberals, meaning it cannot enforce the constitutional secularity of the Polish state.

As Graff explains, in this political context, those who oppose the Catholicism-nationalism nexus find it difficult to coalesce into a strong movement. And ultra-conservatives continue to advance.

Far-right elements breeds in this environment and, in an ethnically and racially homogeneous country, their main targets are feminists, the LGBTQ community and leftists (the same groups that the Church condemns). Their strength is most visible in Poland during the annual Independence March on November 11, when tens of thousands of far-right youth take to the streets of Warsaw and other cities wreaking havoc.

According to June polls, the third strongest political force in Poland is the New Right Congress, which has a neo-liberal far-right agenda. The party, whose leader Janusz Korwin-Mikke has declared that women have lower IQs than men and that they enjoy being raped, gathered 7.5 percent of the vote in the May elections for the European Parliament.

“There is no clear demarcation between the Polish extreme right, the populist right and the mainstream right,” notes political scientist Rafal Pankovski of anti-racist group Nigdy Wiecej (Never Again). “The notion of a cordon sanitaire against the far-right does not seem to have been accepted in Polish politics and the media.”

Over recent years, civic mobilisation by progressive forces has nevertheless grown, and political parties with a strong liberal, secular and anti-nationalist message have been forming, but they still lack consolidation. Faced with the constant accusation of being “communists”, leftist forces that might counterbalance the conservative, nationalist and far-right trend are slow to grow in Poland.

Environmentalists protesting against coal outside the Polish Ministry of Economy. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS.

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Apr 20 2014 (IPS)

A European ‘energy union’ plan proposed by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk as an EU response to the crisis in Ukraine could be a Trojan horse for fossil fuels.

On account of Poland’s proximity and deep historical ties to Ukraine, the country’s centre-right government led by Donald Tusk has assumed a prominent position in attempts to ease the crisis in Ukraine. Notoriously, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski helped negotiate a February deal between then Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and opposition leaders of Euromaidan, the name given to the pro-EU protests in Kiev.Asking for a prominent role for coal and shale gas is mostly a Polish game.

The Polish government’s assertiveness came with quick electoral gains. According to a poll conducted in early April by polling agency TNS Polska, Tusk’s Civic Platform for the first time in years took a lead in voters’ preferences over the conservative Peace and Justice Party of Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

“Not only is Civic Platform back in the lead, but also more Poles are ready to vote and vote for the government,” Lukasz Lipinski, an analyst at think tank Polityka Insight in Warsaw, told IPS. “All opposition parties now want to move the debate [ahead of the May 25 European elections] to domestic issues because on those it is much easier to criticise the Civic Platform after six years of government.”

Yet Tusk’s executive insists on Ukraine because of the benefits the topic can still bring. In the last weekend of March, the prime minister announced a Polish proposal for a European energy union that would make Europe resilient to crises like the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

“The experience of the last few weeks [Russia’s invasion of Ukraine] shows that Europe must strive towards solidarity when it comes to energy,” said Tusk speaking in Tychy, a city in the southern coal-producing Silesia region.

He went on to outline the six dimensions of the ‘energy union’: the creation of an effective gas solidarity mechanism in case of supply crises; financing from the European Union’s funds for infrastructure ensuring energy solidarity in particular in the east of the EU; collective energy purchasing; rehabilitation of coal as a source of energy; shale gas extraction; and radical diversification of gas supply to the EU.

“It is very disappointing to note the total absence of energy efficiency measures from this vision, even though it featured centrally in the March European Council on Crimea conclusions,” Julia Michalak, EU climate policy officer at the NGO coalition Climate Action Network (CAN) Europe, told IPS. “If the Crimea crisis did not make the government realise that energy efficiency is the easiest and cheapest way to achieve real energy security for Europe, I’m not sure what would.”

While some of the measures proposed by Tusk would indeed lead (assuming they could be implemented) to increased European solidarity in the energy sector, asking for a prominent role for coal and shale gas is mostly a Polish game.

At the moment, the EU has no common binding EU policies on shale gas – various EU countries such as France and Bulgaria even have moratoriums on exploration. And the EU’s long-term climate objectives, primarily the 2050 decarbonisation goal, make a true coal resurrection unlikely.

According to Michalak, the coal and shale gas elements of the Polish six-point plan must be understood, on the one hand, as aimed at domestic audiences who want to see their government play hard ball and, on the other, as a negotiating tool meant to draw some specific gains out of Brussels.

The Tusk government has made herculean efforts to persuade foreign companies interested in shale gas to stick to the country, including firing environment minister Marcin Korolec during the climate change talks COP19 last year for reportedly not being shale gas friendly enough. Nevertheless, in April this year, France’s TOTAL became the fourth company to announce dropping exploratory works in Poland, as shale gas here is proving more scarce than initially thought.

The Polish national consensus on coal too is starting to show minor cracks.

Nearly 90 percent of electricity used in Poland comes from coal, and the government’s long-term energy strategy envisages a core role for coal up to 2060. Tusk’s executive has been unsuccessfully trying to torpedo the EU’s adoption of decarbonisation targets, so at the moment it is unclear how authorities will reconcile EU commitments with a coal-dependent economy.

Last year, the chief executive of state energy company PGE resigned, arguing that an expansion by 1,800 MW of Opole coal plant in south-western Poland is unprofitable. The government chose to go ahead with expansion plans anyway.

Despite the generalised perception in Poland that coal is a cheap form of energy, this month saw leading newspapers (including the conservative Rzeczpospolita) discussing externalities of coal following a study by think tank Warsaw Institute for Economic Studies showing that, between 1990-2012, Polish subsidies for coal amounted to 170 bn PLN (40 billion euros).

In 2013, a series of international financial institutions, including the World Bank and the European Investment Bank, announced significant restrictions to their financing of coal – lending to Polish coal, for instance, would be impossible for these institutions under the new guidelines.

Poland also has to implement the EU’s Industrial Emissions Directive which calls for stricter pollution standards at energy producing units as of 2016 or closure of plants which do not comply. And it is potentially in this space that some of the benefits of Poland’s tough game on coal in Brussels could be seen.

In February, the European Commission allowed Poland to exempt 73 of its energy producing units from the requirements of the Directive, including two outdated units at Belchatow coal plant in central Poland, Europe’s largest thermal coal plant (5,298 MW) and biggest CO2 emitter.

Additionally, it has emerged this month that Poland intends to use regional funds meant for tackling urban air pollution from the next EU budget (2014-2020) to finance modernisation measures at the country’s biggest coal and gas producers, both private and state-owned.

Environmentalists protesting Monday morning outside Polish Ministry of Economy as the coal summit kicks off inside. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Nov 18 2013 (IPS)

An International Coal and Climate summit organised by the Polish Ministry of Economy and the World Coal Association kicked off Monday in the Polish capital Warsaw in parallel to the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP19, amid outcry from environmentalists who accused COP host Poland of bias in favor of the coal industry.

The presence of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres at the coal summit was also broadly criticised.

Speaking at the opening of the summit on the morning of Nov. 18, Figueres said the coal industry must clean up if it wants to have a future.

“I am here to say that coal must change rapidly and dramatically for everyone’s sake,” Figueres said to a room full of industry representatives. “By now it should be abundantly clear that further capital expenditures on coal can go ahead only if they are compatible with the two degrees Celsius limit.”

Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels, accounting for over 40 percent of global CO2 emissions coming from fuel combustion, according to the International Energy Agency.

During the coal meeting on Monday morning, the Polish Ministry of Environment and the World Coal Association collected endorsements and formally presented to Figueres a document called The Warsaw Communiqué.

It contains three main calls: “for the use of high-efficiency, low-emission coal combustion technologies wherever it is economically and technically feasible at existing and new coal plants”; for governments to push for moving the industry towards state of the art technology and support research and development in that direction; and for “development banks to support developing countries in accessing clean coal technologies.”

The document adds up to a call for public support for an industry that is feeling the heat from climate policies adopted around the world.

While the fate of the coal industry varies globally, in Europe and the U.S. coal producers are certainly under pressure. In the EU, revenues from coal have been plummeting over the past years, on account of diminished demand during the crisis and rising supply of electricity from wind and solar as the block is moving ahead on its target to have 20 percent of its energy needs met from renewables by 2020.

At a global coal industry conference that IPS attended in October in Berlin, Germany, the mood was gloomy: coal plant operators in Europe were complaining of severe losses, while utilities in the continent spoke of plans to shut down coal units and move increasingly towards gas and renewables.

During 2013, the two biggest international financial institutions, the World Bank and the European Investment Bank, have significantly tightened their lending to coal, and the U.S. administration and Nordic countries in Europe decided to put an end to financial support for coal plants abroad.

Poland is one of the few countries in Europe to maintain a bombastic pro-coal rhetoric. Less than two months before COP, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk infamously declared, “The future of Polish energy is in brown and black coal, as well as shale gas. Some wanted coal to be dispensed with, but energy independence requires not only the diversification of energy resources, but also the maximum use of one’s own resources.” Almost 90 percent of the country’s electricity comes from coal.

Yet, even in Poland, the reality is shakier than the rhetoric. Speaking in November to news agency Bloomberg, Krzysztof Kilian, head of the Polish state power company PGE which plans to add two 900 MW units to its existing 1,500 MW Opole coal plant in the southwest of the country, said there was one way for PGE to avoid making losses from the new units: if it secures state-backed guarantees for prices of the type nuclear producers in the UK are obtaining – in practice, that would mean that the state would guarantee as much as twice the market rate.

The coal industry, at least in Europe, has of late engaged in an offensive for drumming up public support and for diminishing the amount of public resources going to renewables. But given the ascension of climate policies around the world, for public support for coal to continue one crucial argument needs to be made: that coal can be clean. And this is the focus of the Warsaw coal summit.

“This summit is not an attempt to distract from the important work done during the COP negotiations,” said Milton Catelin, World Coal Association chief executive, during the opening of the conference. “We want to figure out ways in which the world can retain the benefits of coal but at the same time reduce and even eliminate the costs in terms of CO2 emissions.”

On the agenda of the coal summit were three main ways put forward so far for “cleaning up coal”: carbon capture and storage, underground gasification, and efficiency improvements at plants.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) – the biggest hope of the industry and mentioned by Figueres herself in the coal summit speech as a way forward for coal – would involve capturing CO2 from coal units before it is emitted into the atmosphere, and storing it underground.

Yet despite significant investments being made in the development of CCS, its deployment on a commercial scale has to date not been proven feasible. This September, Norway gave up a large-scale CCS project at Mongstad deeming it too risky; the country’s auditor general had criticised Norway’s spending over one billion dollars on CCS projects between 2005 and 2012.

Another “clean coal” scenario involves what is called underground coal gasification. The technology is based on partially burning coal underground instead of extracting it. Yet the combustion process used in this method results in high carbon emissions, not only of CO2, but also of methane, which has 23 times the warming potential of CO2. As a consequence, underground gasification would still need CCS deployment.

Another idea for cleaning up coal involves improving the efficiency of plants. Yet existing coal plants are generally less efficient than gas ones, and making them more efficient (46 percent efficiency for a coal plant is considered the best possible, compared to 60 percent for gas) is costly – given the current energy price context in Europe, this does not yet make business sense.

Co-generation – that is, using the heat released when burning coal for electricity to produce heat – would be another way to improve efficiency. In this scenario, however, units would have to be smaller and closer to communities – which raises the dilemma of social acceptability.

“The fact that the industry is here right now handing in a plea for subsidies to COP in a way shows that they are not as strong as we may have thought, that without subsidies there may not be any future for coal,” Mona Bricke from the German NGO Klimalianz commented in Warsaw. “The Warsaw Communiqué is in a sense the coal industry’s last big plea: they know that if they want to have a future they have to say that coal is clean – which is a lie – and they have to ask for money to build new expensive plants.”

The coal-fired thermoelectric plant in Belchatow, Poland, the largest of its kind in Europe. Credit: Pibwl de Pl:Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Nov 12 2013 (IPS)

These are busy days in the Polish capital Warsaw, even if it doesn’t show. The United Nations Climate Change Conference COP 19 has opened at the National Stadium, while on the other side of the river Wisla the Polish far right gathered for their annual march on Independence Day on Monday.

But bar a large banner on the National Palace of Science and Culture in the centre of the city, one of the venues for the COP, hardly any signs inform local residents that an important meeting about the fate of the planet is taking place these days in their city.

Poland is organising this year’s COP because it is the only country in Central and Eastern Europe interested in the job when the region’s turn came to host the U.N. conference. Yet many question Poland’s ability to play a constructive role in the negotiations given the country’s recent history of blocking EU progress on climate targets.Poland is this year hosting COP because it is the only country in Central and Eastern Europe interested in the job when the region’s turn came to host the UN conference.

In the spring of 2012, Poland single-handedly blocked the adoption of an EU low-carbon roadmap for 2050, meant to introduce across the bloc a 40 percent cut in carbon emissions by 2030, a 60 percent cut by 2040 and an 80 percent cut by 2050, compared to 1990 levels.

This fall, Poland announced its intentions to also prevent Europe from setting 2030 climate goals. A bigger emissions cut commitment from the EU could play a positive role in the advancement of climate negotiations.

The reason for Poland’s stance is coal. Almost 90 percent of the electricity used in Poland comes from coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, and the country’s energy strategy does not envisage a significant shift away from this source of energy.

Speaking in September at a mining fair in the southern city of Katowice, Prime Minister Donald Tusk famously said, “The future of Polish energy is in brown and black coal, as well as shale gas. Some wanted coal to be dispensed with, but energy independence requires not only the diversification of energy resources, but also the maximum use of one’s own resources.”

Controversially, the Polish Economy Ministry is organising Nov. 18-19, in parallel to the COP and together with the World Coal Association, an International Coal & Climate Summit. The Warsaw Communique, a document co-authored by the coal lobby group and the Polish ministry, will be delivered to U.N. representatives during the event; it contains a call to invest public resources in ’clean coal’ technologies in order to maintain high coal use around the globe.

Despite sticking strongly to its pro-coal agenda, the Polish government insists it is not opposed to the progress of climate talks. “I am not sceptical about climate change, I am sceptical about some European ways to address it,” twitted Polish Environment Minister Marcin Korolec in the run-up to the COP.

The Polish government’s current attempts to prevent the EU from heightening its own climate ambitions is much to the liking of the Polish and European far right, it was revealed Nov. 10 during an ’anti-climate summit’ organised in Warsaw by the Polish far-right party Ruch Narodowy (Polish National Movement), the Solidarity trade union and the U.S. climate-denialist think tank Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).

According to Greenpeace research, CFACT has been receiving almost half of its funding over the past years from the Donors Trust, a secretive funding vehicle which between 2002 and 2011 has channelled 146 million dollar to climate denialist groups.

While many of the figures financially propping up the Donors Trust are unknown, Greenpeace has been able to establish that two foundations linked to Charles Koch, the oil and chemical industry baron infamous for bankrolling climate sceptic voices, have been putting money into the Trust.

During the Warsaw conference, CFACT representatives Craig Rucker and David Rothbard made presentations arguing that climate change is not caused by human activity and claiming that climate policies would mean further impoverishment of the poor around the world.

Against this background, the Polish far right represented by Ruch Narodowy outlined their vision of Poland’s climate and energy policy, having at its core a concept of sovereignty understood as rejection of EU and U.N. policies and a reliance on domestic coal.

“We are against de-carbonisation because the Polish economy is a carbon-based economy and we are against climate regulations in the EU,” Michal Putkiewicz, an energy expert at Ruch Narodowy, told IPS. “The Polish government first signed the EU climate and energy package and now they want to prevent the EU from making it more ambitious. The policy of the Polish government now is correct, but we think it should go further and get rid of any EU regulations on emission reductions.”

The EU’s climate and energy package stipulates that by 2020 the block must reduce emissions by 20 percent compared to 1990 levels, give renewables a 20 percent share in the energy sector and improve energy efficiency by 20 percent. Poland’s two biggest political parties, the governing Civil Platform and conservative Peace and Justice party, have been recently engaged in a public game of throwing responsibility on to one another for committing to the package.

On Nov. 11, far-right groups attending the anti-climate conference joined the Independence March organised by two of the most important far-right organisations in Poland, the All-Polish Youth (Młodzież Wszechpolską) and the National-Radical Camp (Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny), which in 2011 joined to form Ruch Narodowy. Over 10,000 people joined Monday’s march. The demonstration has become a yearly show of strength by the Polish far right.

Some of the participants got involved in scuffles with one another and the police; a squat in the centre of Warsaw was attacked by participants; and a rainbow flag symbolising diversity was burnt.

“Climate change denialism is becoming a new part of the identity and narrative of right-wing extremists in Poland,” Polish climate activist Michalina Golinczak told IPS. “So the Polish climate movement should start to collaborate not only with trade unions but also with other progressive social movements, anti-fascist, anti-war, LGBT, feminists etc., to push back the alarming rise of right-wing extremists.”

Villagers from Zurawlow protesting in Warsaw. The banner says "Shale gas = the death of farming". Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS.

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Jul 24 2013 (IPS)

Since Jun. 3, inhabitants of the village Zurawlow in Grabowiec district in southeastern Poland have been occupying a field in their locality where the U.S. company Chevron plans to drill for shale gas. The farmers’ resistance is just the latest blow to shale gas proponents in the country.

Chevron, one of the world’s top five publicly owned oil and gas companies (the so-called “Big Oil”), owns four out of the 108 concessions for exploration for unconventional gas currently awarded by Poland (data from Jul. 1, 2013).

Over the past years, Poland has been perceived as one of Europe’s most promising locations for shale exploration. The U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration estimated two years ago that the country holds 187 trillion cubic feet shale gas resources, 44 trillion of which are in the Lubin Basin where Zurawlow lies. This year, the body revised those estimates downwards, to 148 trillion cubic feet for the country and nine trillion for the Lubin region, after applying tighter methodology.“If they go ahead with drilling thousands of metres underground, our water will be affected and there will be no more life in our fields." -- villager Stefan Jablonski

Given Poland’s annual gas consumption (currently over 600 billion cubic feet annually), the original EIA estimate has been translated to mean that shale gas resources would be enough to meet the country’s needs for 300 years, a figure often quoted by media and politicians.

The Polish centre-right government headed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk has been depicting shale gas as a way to both reduce Poland’s dependency on Russian gas imports (two-thirds of Polish gas demand is covered from Russian imports) and to make a transition away from dirty coal, which at the moment covers 60 percent of energy demand in the country.

Past the political rhetoric, facts on the ground are less rosy. Despite around 40 wells being drilled in the country since 2010 (including by Halliburton contracted by Polish state company PGNiG S.A.), no company has to date announced that it can extract gas for commercial purposes.

Over the past year, ExxonMobil and two other companies, Marathon Oil and Talisman, announced they would withdraw from Poland, doubting the gains they could make. The government appears to be in damage control mode, telling international media that Exxon still holds on to one out of six concessions and that Marathon has not yet submitted official requests to pull out.

Tusk’s team is also working on legislative changes to make the companies’ lives easier: in addition to tax breaks until 2020, firms would have the possibility to turn exploration licences into production licences automatically as well as to increase the depth of drilling without extra permits.

Yet the shale gas lobby thinks changes do not go far enough. According to the Polish Exploration and Production Industry Organisation (OPPPW), clearer wording is needed to ensure those who explore can automatically exploit (without the fields being put up for tender if gas is discovered), longer exploration permits are necessary, and too big a role is envisaged for a state company which is planned by Poland to have a stake in all exploitations.

“OPPPW members all wish to progress their projects in Poland,” Marcin Zieba, the industry group’s executive director told IPS. “But, as demonstrated by ExxonMobil, Talisman and Marathon stopping their operations. they can change their minds. We have yet to see a project in Poland that has demonstrated commercial flow rates – so this activity remains high risk, with no guarantee of success.”

Meanwhile, local opposition to fracking (pumping water and chemicals into the underground to release gas from rocks) is posing unexpectedly strong obstacles.

In 2012 already, Chevron had to stop operations in Zurawlow because locals successfully argued in courts that the company’s operations at the time were breaching the EU Birds Directive.

The occupation this year started when the company renewed attempts to begin work, beginning with trying to fence off one area. Protesters say that Chevron is treating the concession like private property while according to them “the concession was awarded for public purposes – searching for hydrocarbons – and activities in the area must be conducted with the knowledge and acceptance of society.”

In a controversy that might be telling of the murkiness of the Polish legislative framework, villagers argue that while Chevron has the concession, it has not received supplementary approvals from local authorities to do anything more than seismic testing in the region. Chevron retorts that they do have all necessary approvals.

In a response to protesters, the ministry of environment says the right to build (including wells) on the concession land must be further regulated by state authorities and does not derive automatically from the concession.

The legalistic battle, however, is just a facet of the fundamental conflict between villagers and Chevron: in the predominantly farming area of Zurawlow, people fear fracking will forever destroy their water and lands, endangering their livelihoods.

“If they go ahead with drilling thousands of metres underground, our water will be affected and there will be no more life in our fields,” villager Stefan Jablonski told IPS during a protest in Warsaw last week. “Not to mention that we might end up with no gas and no water too.”

Villagers complain that an assessment of environmental impacts for shale exploration has not been conducted for Zurawlow. According to Polish legislation, state authorities can decide on a case by case basis if such an assessment is required.

Asked to respond to the claims of the protesters by IPS during a press conference Jul. 15, Polish Minister of Environment Marcin Korolec said: “Shale gas constitutes an enormous opportunity for Poland. The majority of environmental issues are extremely emotional, as we see with the people of Zurawlow, but we have to keep our route and realise our policy.”

“Unfortunately, our ministry of environment is behaving like a representative of companies,” Agnieszka Grzybek from the Polish Green Party told IPS. “In the legislative pack discussed at the moment, there is a proposal that says that new NGOs cannot send comments and engage in the debate unless they have existed for more than a year. This would effectively exclude groups like the farmers from Zurawlow from having a say on shale gas.”

Poland has been identified as having hosted a secret CIA prison. Cuba is host to the notorious Guantanamo Bay. Pictured here are protestors during the 10-year anniversary of Guantanamo Bay detention center, in January 2012. Credit: Amnesty International/Christoph Koettl/CC By 2.0

By Robert Stefanicki
WARSAW, Jul 21 2013 (IPS)

The only sign of life at Szymany’s “international airport” are mosquitoes eager to suck blood out of a rare visitor. The gate is locked with a rusted chain and a padlock.

Evidence suggest that some of the last passengers at this site were CIA officers and their prisoners. That was in 2003. Soon after, the airport about 180 km north of Warsaw inside the picturesque Mazury forests went out of service.

Bounded by the Freedom of Information Act, Polish Airspace authorities have revealed that at least 11 CIA aircrafts landed at Szymany, and some of their passengers stayed on in Poland. The European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation (Eurocontrol) was not informed about those flights.

From Szymany the prisoners were driven to a nearby intelligence academy in Stare Kiejkuty, where the CIA had a separated facility. In 2006, a few months after Poland was first identified as having hosted a secret CIA prison, Polish ombudsman Janusz Kochanowski visited the CIA villa – only to see that its chambers have been freshly renovated.

According to a U.S. intelligence source quoted by The New York Times, the prison in Poland was the most important of the CIA’s black sites, where terror suspects were subjected to interrogation techniques that would not be legal in the United States. The source claimed that Poland was picked mostly because “Polish intelligence officials were eager to cooperate.”

Two other European countries with known but unconfirmed black sites are Romania and Lithuania; the rest were in Asia and North Africa.

Human rights groups believe about eight terror suspects were held in Poland, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Two other men currently detained at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility have been granted “injured person” status in the ongoing investigation.

The first is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi national alleged to have organised the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. He has claimed that he was often stripped naked, hooded, or shackled during seven months at Stare Kiejkuty, and subjected to mock execution with a gun and threats of sexual assault against his family members.

The second, a stateless Palestinian known as Abu Zubaydah, said he was subjected to extreme physical pain, psychological pressure and waterboarding – mock drowning.

Any Polish leaders who would have agreed to the U.S. programme would have been violating the constitution by giving a foreign power control over part of Polish territory, and allowing crimes to take place there.

Former prime minister Leszek Miller, now chairman of the opposition Democratic Left Alliance has been the prime target of criticism. There are demands he should face a special tribunal charged with trying state figures.

In March 2008, the Polish authorities opened a criminal investigation. “This indicates that Poland is a country with a rule of law,” Senator Jozef Pinior told IPS. “But the protraction is a reason for concern. The investigation has been moved to the third consecutive prosecutor’s office, in what looks like playing for time.”

Pinior, one of the leaders of the Solidarity opposition movement during the 1980s, and more recently a member of the European Parliament, has for long been lobbying for a full investigation into what the CIA was doing in Poland. Twice he was called in as witness in the investigation. He claims to have seen a document on a CIA prison with PM Miller’s signature."Poland is no banana republic, our security services do not do such things behind the back of the government.” -- Polish Senator Jozef Pinior

“The Polish government, especially Leszek Miller, must have had knowledge that such sites existed on Polish territory without any legal basis,” Pinior said. “They must have known about the torture too. Poland is no banana republic, our security services do not do such things behind the back of the government.”

It is still not clear how much knowledge the Polish leaders had about the black site in Stare Kiejkuty. Some have vehemently denied the prison’s existence, but some admit it between the lines, though denying responsibility.

“Of course, everything took place with my knowledge,” said former president Aleksander Kwasniewski in an interview with leading daily Gazeta Wyborcza.

“The President and the Prime Minister agreed to secret service co-operation with the Americans, because that is what was required by national interest…the decision to co-operate with the CIA carried a risk that Americans would use unacceptable methods. But if a CIA agent brutally treated a prisoner in a Marriott hotel in Warsaw, would you charge the directors of that hotel for the actions of that agent?”

For now Poland is the only country with investigation into the secret jails still open (Lithuania closed its case inconclusively). The officials blame delays on lack of cooperation on the U.S. government.

According to a public opinion poll by SW Research released in June, 82 percent Polish respondents said that the issue of CIA secret prisons should be clarified, and 78 percent that those responsible for human rights abuses and breach of constitution should be held liable.

“In the U.S. there is a stamp of approval that even though torture did happen, they are unwilling to go after the criminals. So Poland has tremendous responsibility to pursue the investigation and hold people accountable. It could be an inspiring example for the rest of the world,” Ramzi Kassem, attorney for some Guantanamo prisoners told IPS.

Otherwise, Kassem said, Poland will prove to be “a puppet regime willing to do the dirty work for the U.S. in much the same way that Jordan, Egypt and other dictatorships were doing at the time, imprisoning people and torturing them because the U.S. asked them to.”

Although no major political party in Poland wants the truth about Polish cooperation with the CIA to come out, Senator Pinior is “cautiously optimistic”.

“Any attempt to cover up would result in colossal shame,” he said. “I believe Polish democracy and institutions are too strong to be manipulated.”

During recent flooding in Budapest, the Danube rose to 8.9 metres. Credit: Zoltán Dujisin/IPS

By Zoltán Dujisin
BUDAPEST, Jun 15 2013 (IPS)

Record floods in Central and Eastern Europe have highlighted some of the challenges of climate change for the continent, as well as the floods’ potential to spur populist politics.

An extraordinarily long winter followed by weeks of intense rains has saturated soils and caused large rivers, such as the Danube and the Elbe, to overflow. The floods have wreaked havoc in the region, killing 21 people and forcing the evacuation of several tens of thousands.

In Halle, Germany, 30,000 people were forced to leave their homes, after the Elbe reached its highest levels in 400 years. In Austria, mudslides brought about the closure of roads and train lines. The Polish capital of Warsaw was partially flooded, and in the Czech Republic, 20,000 people were evacuated from 700 different localities.

Most of the flood victims – 10 out of 21 – are Czech, having been hit by heavy rains that at one point brought down hail stones of the size of ping-pong balls.

Czechs feared for the fate of their medieval capital Prague, as authorities mobilised heavy machinery to sustain one of the city’s oldest symbols, the Charles Bridge, dating from the 14th century. Hospitals and even the city’s zoo were evacuated.

The Czech government has estimated the damage at 800 million Euros, promising to waive the income tax for companies affected by the catastrophe.

None of this drama was apparent in the Hungarian capital Budapest, where the Danube rose to 8.9 metres, the highest water level ever recorded.

In contrast to the chaos and fear seen elsewhere in the region, the floods became a hotspot for what authorities call “catastrophe tourism”, in reference to the masses of locals and foreign visitors who gather around the riverside, taking pictures and often obstructing authorities’ efforts to contain the flood.

In a city whose bridges are usually a prime location for suicide attempts, many were surprised to see a few daring tourists using them to dive into the flooded river. Citizens appeared equally unconcerned; youths drove skim boards into the water while the wealthiest water skied.

The calm and surreal atmosphere in Budapest nevertheless reflected a situation firmly under control, in the capital as well as in the countryside.

Testing governments

The differences in responses to the floods have highlighted the need for comprehensive and preventive strategies in a region where extreme weather phenomena are likely to increase as a result of climate change.

“Floods such as these put to test the ability of affected societies to adapt,” Sergio Tirado, a researcher at the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Policy in Budapest, told IPS.

“The impact of climate change will be more or less severe depending on the region’s response, namely in terms of developing early warning systems or improving physical protection barriers against water rises,” he said.

Yet while many activists have directly blamed global warming for the recent events, Tirado was cautious about making direct causal links. “It is likely that as a result of climate change, the frequency of such extreme weather events is increasing, and this problem may grow in future decades.”

The smooth handling of the floods by Hungarian authorities has been hailed as a victory by its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, which in the last few years has become the European Union’s (EU) most controversial politician due to his authoritarian tendencies.

Orbán has been criticised by European officials for his heavy-handed approach to governance. He has been accused of challenging the independence of the judiciary, conducting widespread purges in the public administration and endangering freedom of expression.

As a result, the conservative prime minister, under attack at home and abroad, saw the floods as an opportunity to stoke citizens’ patriotic feelings and regain lost popularity.

Orbán capitalised on the efforts of the 10,000 soldiers, volunteers and even prisoners that were involved in placing some 10 million sandbags along the 700 kilometres of Danube riverside located in Hungarian territory.

During the floods, TV and online coverage constantly showed the prime minister in action: Orbán was always at the site of events, wearing rubber boots and a vest, walking against the river current, flying in helicopters, discussing hydrographic maps with experts and cracking jokes with workers.

Looking extremely tired, the prime minister made frequent live updates on the spot to keep citizens informed on what he called “the worst floods ever”.

Opposition politicians, alarmed by Orban’s successful show off of his leadership abilities, rushed to imitate the prime minister and were seen setting up dikes along flooded areas. Pro-government media were quick to show one of these dikes breaking.

While Hungarians were relieved that only 1,500 people required evacuation and that not a single victim was reported, many of Orban’s opponents will be concerned that his stunts against the forces of nature will convince many that he is strong enough to endure another onslaught of criticism from the European Union.

Poland wastes at least 8.9 million tonnes of food every year. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Jun 14 2013 (IPS)

Twenty-nine-year-old Andrzej W. and his partner lived for almost a year off of food found in the trash bin of the upscale supermarket Piotr i Pawel in Muranow, a neighbourhood near the centre of the Polish capital Warsaw. And they ate in style.

“I can hardly name now the expensive cheeses and chocolates we found there, because I never buy them normally, they are luxury goods,” he says. “There was everything in these bins — vegetables, fruits, dairy, sweets, eggs, some close to expiry date, others past, eggs thrown away only because one or two were cracked, just like you see in American movies about dumpster diving.”"Europe ignores the waste it generates abroad just as it ignores polluting emissions created by its outsourced industries.” -- Tristram Stuart of Feeding the 5000

When he discovered Piotr i Pawel, Andrzej had occasionally retrieved vegetables and fruits thrown away at other markets in the city, but this was a whole new experience.

“I felt like Ali Baba finding the secret treasure!” he says. “I was so happy to find all this great food, but at the same time I felt angry that so much gets wasted and sad that I cannot take it all away with me.”

So he told friends, who told other friends, and the bin gradually became the go-to place to get food for squatters, as well as homeless and poor people. When the managers of the store caught on to the practice earlier this year, they locked the bin and refused to discuss its reopening with Andrzej.

The ambit of two categories of people – activists and the poor – dumpster diving is not common in Poland. But the practice probably has a future this country: with a population of 38.5 million, Poland, the largest among the post-socialist states which joined the European Union, already ranks fifth in the EU when it comes to food waste.

According to data from the European Commission, 89 million tonnes of food are wasted yearly in the EU, equalling 179 kilogrammes per person. Poland alone wastes 8.9 million tonnes every year, followed by the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and France. This data, the most recent available, is from 2006 and some food activists argue that it is a gross underestimation.

At the same time, explains Maria Gosiewska from the non-profit Polish Federation of Food Banks, recent years have seen a serious push by the EU to reduce waste levels: at the end of 2011, the EU executive (the European Commission) called for reducing edible food waste by 50 percent by 2020; the European Parliament also passed a resolution setting a reduction target of 50 percent of all food waste by 2025. With time, national governments will have to take on such objectives.

Gosiewska’s organisation coordinates 29 food banks operating across Poland which collect rejected food from producers and intermediaries and pass it to the needy. She hopes activists in her country will be able to use this European wind of change to push through legislative reforms.

For example, her organisation argues for a scrapping of the VAT tax for food donations. While NGOs have been calling for this measure for 10 years, for the moment only producers who donate food are spared the tax, while retailers are not, so the untapped potential is huge.

Tristram Stuart, founder of the UK anti-food waste movement Feeding the 5000, says his group is working in partnership with the U.N. and the EC to replicate their campaign globally, including in Central and Eastern European locations such as Budapest and Prague.

“Food waste in these countries may become more of a problem as consumption increases,” he said, “so it might be a good idea to nip the worst effects of Western food systems in the bud before they take root.”

Consumers in rich countries are wasting as much as 10 times more food than those in poor countries.

According to Stuart’s book Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal (Penguin, 2009), the U.S. and Europe have twice as much food as needed to meet the nutritional needs of their people and up to half of this food is wasted. The approximately 40 million tonnes of food wasted annually in the U.S., claims the book, would be enough to feed the world’s one billion malnourished people.

Irrigation water used to produce food that is wasted globally would be enough for the domestic needs of nine billion people (as many as we are expected to be in 2050).

According to a report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, between 1.2 and 2.0 billion tonnes of food are wasted annually in the world: in poorer countries, lack of infrastructure and supermarket demands on producers cause field waste, the primary component of food waste there; in rich countries, consumer waste is the greatest culprit.

The report recommends intervening at all levels where waste is produced – on the farm, and on the side of retailers and consumers. It also advises specific technological fixes that could be implemented to reduce waste on farms in developing countries.

Stuart’s group, meanwhile, focuses on Western consumers, businesses and decision-makers. For one, they work on persuading supermarkets to relax their own esthetic standards (i.e., accept for sale products that do not have perfect shapes), which despite public perception are tougher than those imposed by the EU. At the same time, they conduct public awareness campaigns to teach consumers that “ugly” produce has the same nutritional value as the perfectly shaped sort.

Importantly, Feeding the 5000 wants Western countries and commercial actors to take responsibility for producer-level food waste in countries that export to Europe.

“The esthetic standards imposed by Western supermarkets on their suppliers in countries like Ecuador, Kenya and others generate farm waste there, and this is something that Europe needs to include in its food waste accounting,” Stuart tells IPS. “At the moment, Europe ignores the waste it generates abroad just as it ignores polluting emissions created by its outsourced industries.”

Finally, the group is working on changing EU legislation related to animal feed. The focus of a campaign launched Jun. 5 called The Pig Idea is on making it legal again in Europe to feed pigs with catering food waste. The current model, whereby European meat producers import cereals for animal feed (the EU imports 40 million tonnes of soy products annually, most for animal feed) is unsustainable, claims the group.

It is causing deforestation and biodiversity destruction in exporting countries, and contributes to the increase and overall volatility of global prices for staples. In turn, this makes it too expensive for poorer consumers around the world to afford food and for producers outside of Europe to feed their own stock.

A Polish official investigation into the existence of a secret CIA prison on its territory is being stalled, according to official sources, while pressure on the country to tell the truth mounts.

Various public sources, from Dick Marty’s 2007 Council of Europe report to the recent Globalising Torture study of Open Society Foundations, claim Poland hosted a secret CIA prison used in the extraordinary rendition programme from the end of 2002. Under this programme, the U.S. detained and interrogated terrorism suspects in Europe.

Evidence comes from official sources. The 2004 CIA Inspector General report, which discusses CIA’s treatment of prisoners thought to be linked to Al-Qaeda in the period 2001-2003, details the case of Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, alleged leader of Al-Qaeda in the Persian Gulf and suspected of organising the bombing of warship USS Cole. Seventeen US servicemen were killed in the attack on the ship in the Yemeni port Aden in October 2000.

According to the report, by November 2002 Al-Nashiri had been detained by the CIA and enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT) were applied on him “through to 4 December 2002.” A heavily redacted further section reads, “two waterboard sessions in November 2002 after which (…) Al-Nashiri was compliant. However, after being moved (…) Al-Nashiri was thought to be withholding information.”

These fragments show Al-Nashiri was moved immediately after Dec. 4 to a new location, where EIT were applied on him again.

Poland seems to be this new location. Documents disclosed by the Polish Border Guards to the Polish Helsinki Foundation show that flight N63MU landed at Polish Szymany airport on Dec. 5, 2002, coming from Thailand (where CIA prisoners were thought to have been taken at first) via Dubai with eight passengers and four crew members; it left Poland with only the four crew.

No other flights – but N63MU to Poland – on which Al-Nashiri could have been moved have been discovered: “We have comprehensive data for 200-300 planes suspected or known to have done renditions – all U.S. registered private jets,” Crofton Black, investigator at UK NGO Reprieve, told IPS. “Having surveyed all these planes, it does appear there is no other relevant movement from Thailand on or around Dec. 5.” Black, however, adds that relevant flights might still be discovered.

In addition to such evidence (which can be brought for other terrorism suspects too), officials from governments and intelligence services of various countries, including Poland and the U.S., interviewed by UN and EU bodies, NGOs and journalists, point to the fact that the Polish site was key to the CIA scheme.

Those sources continue to speak under the condition of anonymity because both Poland and the U.S. refuse to officially reveal details about how rendition functioned.

In Poland, a prosecutors’ investigation started in 2008 has recently taken a dubious turn.

Until a year ago, the investigation was conducted by the Warsaw prosecutors’ office, under two successive prosecutors. In 2011, Poland’s main daily Gazeta Wyrbocza reported that the first prosecutor reached the point of asking legal experts about the implications of Poland hosting a site where foreign agents tortured prisoners.

In 2012, Polish media reported that the second prosecutor assigned to the case told Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, Poland’s head of intelligence services between 2002 and 2004, that charges would be brought against him for violating international law by allowing the unlawful detention of prisoners in Poland. Siemiatkowski confirmed the charges.

After this news came out, the case was moved to Krakow.

Mikolaj Pietrzak, the Polish lawyer for Al-Nashiri, has won the right to be updated on the investigation since his client was granted victim status by Polish authorities in 2010. Pietrzak told IPS that he had enjoyed good cooperation with the Warsaw prosecutors, having even been granted access to the entire file (including to classified information) by the second investigator. Since the case moved to Krakow, he has seen solely non-classified information and only after significant pressure from his side.

“It is extremely irregular that a case be shifted to three different prosecutors,” Pietrzak said. “And the fact that in the last year nothing has gone forward apparently is a very sad statement about the investigation.”

Piotr Kosmaty, a Krakow prosecutors’ office spokesperson, confirmed to IPS that the case which was supposed to be finalised this February has received a set extension, but the new timeline is not public.

According to Adam Bodnar, head of the legal division at Helsinki Foundation, “all the steps to prolong the investigation are meant to avoid making a formal and conclusive decision in this case.”

“This is a hot potato situation for Polish prosecutors and politicians,” Bodnar told IPS. “They cannot just redeem Poland, that would cause an outcry, but pressing charges against Siemiatkowski or Leszek Miller (former prime minister of Poland between 2001 and 2004) is also impossible in the current political configuration. So they try to prolong it as much as possible.”

Yet sweeping this case under the rug might be impossible for Poland.

Al-Nashiri opened a case against Poland at the European Court of Human Rights, and lawyers for Abu Zubaydah, the first “high value detainee” in the CIA programme who was also allegedly brought to Poland on the same N63MU flight, are preparing a similar case.

According to Pietrzak and Bodnar, even if Poland does not disclose any information to the ECHR (it has refused to do so until now), there is enough evidence to prove the country violated the Geneva Conventions, for not having offered protection to these individuals on its soil and for allowing them to be transferred to the U.S., where they are vulnerable to the death penalty.

Pietrzak, who has at one point seen the full file of the Polish investigation, claims: “This case is going to be very difficult to overturn, becase there is a lot of evidence, and you simply cannot pretend that what is there in the prosecutors’ file doesn’t exist.”

The lawyer says that in case the Polish investigation is closed with no result, as a representative of a victim he has the procedural right to appeal in front of a Polish court. In that case, he can bring all the confidential information he has seen as evidence. (end)

Immigrants in the Biala Podlaska detention centre say that living conditions, food and medical treatment are inadequate. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Dec 18 2012 (IPS)

Twenty-two years ago today, on Dec. 18, 1990, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families.

Today, “As budgets tighten, we are seeing austerity measures that discriminate against migrant workers, xenophobic rhetoric that encourages violence against irregular migrants, and proposed immigration laws that allow the police to profile migrants with impunity,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a message commemorating international migrant’s day.

As the world attempts to deal with this increasingly common phenomenon – the number of international migrants has gone from an estimated 150 million in 2000 to 214 million today, making migrants “the fifth most populous country in the world”, according to the U.N. – the spotlight is on the European Union, whose migration policies have recently elicited criticism from various corners.

Since joining the bloc in 2004, Poland has had to guard a 1,200-kilometre-long border with non-EU members, Belarus and Ukraine. Given that this stretch has been one of the main land entry points for migrants flocking to the EU, Poland has been forced to play its part in ‘securing’ the Union.

In preparation for becoming an EU member, Poland recanted old ‘free movement’ agreements with former Soviet republics: in 2003, visas for Russians, Ukrainians and Georgians were reintroduced after 24 years of free movement.

Warsaw is also toughening up on the number of asylum requests it accepts. Since the 1990s, the country has seen a gradual increase in asylum seekers, from 3,400 in 1998 to over 10,500 in 2009.

Since 2009, however, numbers of asylum seekers have decreased, with roughly 6,500 applications for international protection being lodged in 2010 and around 6,900 in 2011.

In 2010, the numbers of people receiving international protection dropped as well: according to the the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Poland recognised only 82 people as refugees in 2010, a 38 percent decrease compared to 2009. In 2012, by the middle of November, 83 people had received refugee status and 372 had gotten a secondary form of protection, although application numbers grew again this year.

In 2008, one year after joining the Schengen Area, Europe’s free movement space, Poland modernised or opened the six detention centres for migrants it is now operating.

Despite new barriers, migrants desperate to get out of their countries still find ways to enter Poland, often at high costs. It is estimated that around 150,000 migrants perform illegal construction work in Poland during the prime season, most of them Ukrainians.

Numbers for those working in agriculture or doing domestic work are tougher to estimate. Rights are equally difficult to guarantee for these people.

Georgians and Russians of Chechen nationality currently constitute the largest groups applying for asylum in Poland and 2012 has seen over 4,800 asylum applications from Russian citizens, most of them Chechens, and almost 3,000 applications from Georgians.

Blamed for seeking a better life

Asylum seekers, especially from the East, are met with little sympathy from Polish authorities. No Georgian has to date received refugee status in Poland.

According to officials, migrants are often ”guilty of lying” when they ask for political asylum, because in fact they are pursuing jobs in Western Europe.

“If the migrants come here for purely economic reasons, it is better to provide as best as possible for them in our centres and then return them to their home countries, otherwise they can put their lives and health at risk trying to move further to the West,” Colonel Andrzej Jakubaszek, director of the Department for Aliens at the Polish Border Guards Headquarters, told IPS.

“We always get them back in days, a week, a month. And then we are asked by the EU what we do to protect the Union’s external borders.”

The EU Dublin II Regulation – which requires migrants to be fingerprinted as soon as they enter the EU, and returned to the first country of access if caught in another place – is on the minds of all Polish authorities dealing with migration.

Detention before alternatives?

But immigrants’ rights activists have criticised the government’s use of a sweeping detention policy before exploring alternatives.

According to Aleksandra Chrzanowska from the Association for Legal Intervention, a non-governmental organisation working with migrants, detention should only be used as a last resort.

She believes that for populations entering Poland in search of work, as seems to be the case with most Georgians, the Polish state ought to consider issuing work permits.

The hype about migrants coming to ‘steal Polish jobs’ is largely a result of scaremongering, activists say. In a country with a population of 40 million, the thousands of migrants entering the country annually could hardly make a significant difference to employment rates.

Detention, meanwhile, takes a huge toll on migrants’ lives. Migrants detained in various Polish centers told IPS that food is of inadequate nutritional value, basic medicines are missing, and they also lack much needed psychological care.

In addition, they say they have no access to information about their rights in languages they understand, and that the one or two hours of time allowed for walking outside are insufficient.

“One of the most important things for us would be to receive proper medical treatment,” says Osman Rafik, a Pakistani who has been detained at the Bialystok detention center since March.

“I receive calcium tablets for both the flu and my stomach ulcer. But perhaps even bigger than this is the need to change the border guards’ behaviour and to put an end to detention, at least to very long detention.”

The management at camps like Biala Podlaska, located close to the border with Belarus, and Lesznowola, 15 kilometres south of Warsaw, deny most claims.

Major Wojciech Rogowski, director at Biala Podlaska, told IPS, “We are aware that the people (detained) here have committed only administrative offences and are not criminals and we do our best to improve the conditions, but we must take into account security concerns.”

Yet these so-called ‘security concerns’ can be invoked too often, especially when detention is the primary means to address migration: they are used to deny migrants the right to use mobile phones or the internet; to justify a policy of round-the-clock monitoring of all corridors; to restrict outside visits; and to reduce time spent outside the rooms.

Rights groups warn that the economic crisis in Europe is leading to a backlash against migrants.

In Central and Eastern European countries like Poland, which are keen to follow EU trends but lack the capacity to implement more complex migration policies, there is a risk of increased use of detention.

“More and more asylum-seekers are being detained (in Central and Eastern Europe), whether through tougher policies at national levels or through the inadequacy of open accommodation facilities through which asylum-seekers are sent to detention centers,” the UNHCR noted in a 2011 report.

“This is, after all, European politics,” Chrzanowska said. “Detention centres are built with EU money and there is huge pressure to (secure) European borders. But all of this should not prevent us from seeing that these people are not criminals and from continuing to look for alternatives for them.”

*This story is the second of a two-part series on immigration in the European Union.

The immigration detention centre of Lesznowola, situated in a forest about 15 kilometers south of the Polish capital Warsaw in a former military compound, is notorious for its poor conditions. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Dec 16 2012 (IPS)

A recent hunger strike, involving over 70 migrants detained in heavily guarded centers across Poland, is forcing the country to face its new responsibilities as a migration hub within the European Union.

Poland currently has six detention centres, which host ‘irregular migrants’, or foreigners caught living illegally in Poland, awaiting deportation after their asylum claims have been rejected or after getting caught trying to cross the Polish border that leads deeper into the EU.

At the end of October, an estimated 375 migrants were being held in these centres. Among them were 33 children, including at least one year-old baby; three of the children were unaccompanied.

Georgians and Russians of Chechen nationality currently make up the bulk of migrants in Poland, though more recently Syrians, too, have had a significant presence in detention centers.

The hunger strikers, mostly Georgians and Chechens, were demanding better conditions in the camps, but also disputed the use of detention as a means of addressing the thorny issue of migration.

The protest was coordinated across four camps: Lesznowola, Bialystok, Biala Podlaska, and Przemysl. It lasted only a few days, ending when humanitarian organisations visited the camps and promised to work with the institutions’ management on improving living conditions.

The detention camps in Poland have functioned under the authority of the National Border Guards since 2008 and conditions inside vary widely.

Lesznowola, situated in a forest about 15 kilometers south of Warsaw in a former military compound, is notorious for its poor conditions. Biala Podlaska, located in the eastern town by the same name, close to the border with Belarus, is a modern facility constructed in 2008 and funded almost entirely by the European Union.

At first glance, the two camps could not differ more. The narrow corridors at Lesznowola are replaced by shiny, freshly painted spaces in Biala Podlaska.

The non-English, non-Russian-speaking management staff at Lesznowola stand in stark contrast to a highly communicative management team – equipped with translators – at Biala Podlaska, where staff in perfectly pressed uniforms roam around the corridors wearing professional smiles.

Biala Podlaska is equipped with a green football field, while Lesznowola only has plans to eventually build one on part of its cemented courtyard surrounded by barbed-wire-topped walls.

But upon entering the halls of either institution, it quickly becomes clear that, for those living behind bars almost round the clock – with the exception of mealtimes, exercises and the occasional educational activity – the situation is exactly the same.

At the first sound of visitors approaching, adults and children stick their heads out of the cells that line the hallway, their hands and faces pushed against the bars, curious, waiting. Even a mundane visit becomes a noteworthy event in a place where nothing happens.

Kicked around “like a ball”

Thirty-six-year-old Iranian Leila Naeimi, who was released in early October after spending two months in Lesznowola, has harsh words about the conditions there.

“Everywhere you see only walls, everywhere the guards are with us, they treat us like animals,” she told IPS, adding that guards make daily inspections at 6 a.m., entering the rooms without even knocking on the door.

Naeimi, who she fled Iran fearing prosecution for her work as a women’s rights activist, says that she has often been the target of sexually abusive comments from border guards, both when entering Poland and also in the detention centre.

She claims basic hygiene products were never sufficient and that the food served in the centre was of poor quality.

Her greatest grievance, however, has to do with the EU’s attitude towards migrants in general.

“They can send you from country to country whenever they want, they think they can play with people’s lives…as if I was a ball they can just kick around.

“We need normal lives, we wouldn’t have left our countries if things had been good there. I’ve had too many problems just because I’m Iranian, just because of my nationality,” Naeimi lamented.

Osman Rafik, a 33-year-old Pakistani man who was detained in Bialystok at the time of this interview, has already spent eight months in the camp, but decided against joining the migrants’ hunger strike, claiming its goals were too “ambitious” and “diverse”.

While he did complain about conditions in the camp and even asked IPS for help with securing medicines, his primary concern was not with everyday life in the camp but with the arbitrary nature of migration policies.

“We keep being asked why we came to this country if we are from Pakistan, but they must understand that we are not criminals just because we crossed the borders into Europe.

“I would like to stay here in Poland if I (am) released,” he continued. “After all, it has been almost one year since I have been in this country and life is not so long, people live about 50 years on average. They (the immigration authorities) have already taken away one year of my life.

“We cannot go back to Pakistan, we have problems there, but authorities here do not understand that, they treat us all the same, whether we have problems back home or not,” he concluded.

*This story is the first of a two-part series on immigration in the European Union.

Lack of family planning has led to a surge in unsafe abortions in Eastern Europe. Credit: William Murphy/CC-BY-SA-2.0

By IPS Correspondents
PRAGUE/WARSAW, Nov 14 2012 (IPS)

Pressure from the Catholic Church, social stigma, a lack of information about sexuality and reproductive health and limited access to reproductive healthcare services are putting the lives of hundreds of thousands of women across Eastern Europe at risk.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), “Women are over four times as likely to die in childbirth in the newly independent states of the former USSR as in the European Union.

“In some countries unsafe abortions cause over 20 percent of all registered maternal deaths, and Eastern Europe has the highest abortion rate in the world.”

In the ‘State of World Population 2012’ report, released Wednesday, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) urges all developed and developing countries to “increase financial support and political commitment” to reproductive health and “promote family planning as a right” to ensure women’s health and safety.

But far from heeding the calls of the international community, Eastern Europe appears to be sliding further away from these goals.

“The reproductive health situation in Eastern Europe and Central Asia is quite dire. The contraceptive prevalence rate in some countries is as low as (the rate) in least developed countries,” Werner Haug, director of the UNFPA’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia regional office, told IPS.

While governments drag their feet on implementing national reproductive health policies, women are left at the mercy of a conservative society that offers very little space or support for family planning.

The last few years have seen a push, in many cases driven by the Church, to reinforce or tighten abortion legislation and deter access to or discussion of contraception.

This and other factors such as poverty, say women’s rights groups, have already led to a thriving underground abortion industry riddled with health risks and, in some countries, a growing practice of do-it-yourself terminations that are dangerous at best, but often fatal.

Poland: a laboratory of unsafe practices

Poland has some of Europe’s tightest restrictions on abortions, only allowing termination of pregnancy in the case of rape, incest or if the mother or baby’s health is at serious risk.

Yet even when those conditions are met, doctors in this staunchly Catholic society often refuse to carry out abortions for their own moral reasons, says Dr. Dorota Pudzinowska, a lawyer at the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights in Poland.

“In principle, the law states that abortions should be allowed in certain circumstances,” she told IPS. “But the law also protects doctors’ rights to refuse certain procedures,” which means women are often forced to seek illegal abortions or go abroad to terminate their pregnancies.

“Approximately every third private gynaecologist provides abortion services illegally, which cost between 400 and 700 euros, but women have no control over the conditions in which these termination are provided” nor can they determine the skill level of the so-called doctors who carry out these operations, according to Aleksandra Szymczyk, an activist belonging to a prominent women’s rights group in Poland that organises an annual demonstration on Mar. 8 to demand reproductive justice.

Under the constant threat of being caught and potentially jailed for assisting women to terminate their pregnancies, doctors generally carry out these procedures hastily, in unsterile conditions, away from the gaze of the medical establishment or law enforcement officials.

Several women in Poland unable to receive any kind of operation at all have taken their cases to the European Court of Human Rights.

One was the case of a 14-year-old rape victim from the southeast Polish town of Lublin, known only as ‘P’, who was turned away from a number of clinics where she sought a termination. Church leaders would wait at the clinics to try to persuade her not to terminate the pregnancy.

The Court condemned the Polish state for the inhumane and degrading treatment of the girl, and ordered it to pay compensation.

That case, say campaigners, was just an extreme example of a climate around reproductive health in Poland that puts moral strictures laid down by the church ahead of women’s well-being.

“A major issue is that nobody knows how many abortions are conducted every year and in what conditions. Official data indicates just over 600 legal terminations annually, but it is common knowledge that many more abortions happen every year – women’s groups estimate that the number could be anything between 100,000 to 200,000 annually,” Elżbieta Korolczuk, another activist from the ‘March 8’ group, told IPS.

“Most abortions are carried out at home without any medical assistance, and judging from the content of Internet forums, many of the women do not use abortion pills but drugs that cause abortion as a side-effect,” she said.

“As a result, they expose themselves to a number of other side-effects and health problems, which they often don’t report afterwards out of fear and shame.”

Family planning is an issue that desperately needs to be discussed in Poland, said Karolina Wieckiewicz, a lawyer at the Polish Federation for Women and Family Planning.

“There is no counselling, no family planning advice available as part of primary health services,” she told IPS. “Even if a woman knows about the possibilities of avoiding pregnancy, she often does not have access to contraception.”

Contraceptives are available on prescription, but not every doctor will prescribe them. “And often pharmacists will refuse to hand over contraceptives because they say it is against their conscience,” Wieckiewicz said.

The problem is not limited to Poland, but is widespread throughout the region.

Reports in the former Soviet state of Armenia last month stated that there was evidence suggesting that the last few years have seen an upsurge in dangerous home abortions using freely available pharmaceuticals for the treatment of ulcers.

The pills have a contraindication of causing bleeding and miscarriages, and women have been using them to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

But doctors have reported that this method often results in severe bleeding and incomplete abortions, with many women being admitted to hospital needing emergency surgery.

Surgical abortions at a hospital cost up to 50 euros while these over-the-counter pills cost closer to 50 cents. The average monthly wage in Armenia is around 400 euros, effectively making professional surgical abortions cost-prohibitive.

No official record of mortality rates or serious health problems resulting from these illegal abortions can ever be obtained because of their clandestine nature.

However, the WHO has stated that even today up to 30 percent of maternal deaths are still caused by unsafe abortions in some countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

*Pavol Stracancsky contributed to this report from Prague and Claudia Ciobanu and Chloe Arnold from Warsaw.

Coal has brought its own compulsions for Poland, as it has for many other countries in the call to move to more renewable and cleaner sources of energy.

According to analysts, Poland’s staunch refusal of European emission targets is caused by its domestic reliance on coal. Data gathered by the European Commission shows that Poland is the largest hard coal producer in the EU. Currently the country has hard coal reserves totalling more than 16 billion tonnes. As a result, Poland’s import dependency is lowest in the EU, and its electricity generation is based more than 90 percent on coal.

“The country simply doesn’t want to lose sovereignty over its own energy strategy,” Daniel Fraile, senior energy policy officer of Climate Action Network-Europe, told IPS. “And they don’t see how they could move to a higher level of renewable energy. The country is economically too dependent on its coal industry. Even out of principle, they would never support moving to renewables.”

“The Polish economy is indeed largely based on coal, but doesn’t mean there’s no space to consider renewables,” Esther Bollendorff, policy officer at Friends of the Earth Europe, told IPS. “There’s tremendously strong resistance in the country to consider an energy transition. Partly because the Polish government is very much infiltrated by the coal industry. But also because of the personality of Prime Minister Donald Tusk. He wants to get his opinion through in the EU, only to show his country is a strong player.”

But recent data shows that resistance to renewables might soon become disadvantageous to the Polish economy. According to Poland’s own energy road map, this is essentially because coal is expected to remain the main fuel for electricity generation until 2030.

Although the government road map foresees a general reduction of energy consumption in the Polish economy and a 19 percent share of renewables by 2020, electricity consumption is expected to increase by 30 percent by 2030.

As a result, although Poland has always been an exporter of coal, according to data by the European Association for Coal and Lignite (EUROCOAL), in recent years it has become a net importer of coal. Two years ago, imports of coal already amounted to 13.4 million tonnes.

“Energy consumption is increasing at such a rate that domestic sources cannot fulfil the demand anymore. The costs will get higher. So the country might want to reconsider what it is going to do in the future,” Bollendorff said.

Poland has isolated itself by refusing to decarbonise its energy system by 2050. During the latest talks between EU energy ministers, the heavily coal-reliant nation argued it would not accept carbon reduction targets without an international agreement. But this could be to their own disadvantage, analysts point out.

EU energy ministers gathered in Luxembourg on Jun. 15 to discuss the energy road map, an ambitious set of measures which would lead to close-to-zero carbon energy production by the middle of the century. The ministers from 26 EU member states backed the plan; only Poland opposed it.

In an official statement, the country’s economy minister said that “Poland cannot accept regulations concerning reduction targets after 2020 without reaching a global agreement on climate issues, and technologies reducing emissions at industrial scale are not implemented.”

In March, the country also refused to support a low carbon road map which sets targets for greenhouse gas emissions. According to the plan, these targets would be a 25 percent reduction by 2020, a 40 percent reduction by 2030, a 60 percent reduction by 2040 and an 80-95 percent reduction by 2050. Poland agreed with the 2050 targets but deemed the intermediate targets unnecessary.

The Danish EU presidency tried to prevent a Polish veto and cancelled out all reference to the 25 percent emission reduction by 2020, but Poland still refused.

At last week’s meeting, Poland requested that the word ‘decarbonisation’ in the document be redefined so it would also account for coal-fired power plants that use carbon capture and storage technology.

It also asked if a section on financial support for renewables could be changed to “financial support for low-carbon technologies”, so that nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage would also be eligible for support. When several states refused to accept this last change, Poland decided to veto the road map.

Because of Poland’s refusal to support both plans, no formal conclusion came out of the discussions, as all EU proposals need to be backed by a unanimous vote. Nevertheless, with the other 26 member states strongly supporting the bloc’s zero-carbon plans, the EU is determined to push its ambitious plans ahead.

Speaking at a press conference after the meeting, European Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger suggested that legislation for emission targets in the future should only require a majority vote. The spokesperson for the Danish EU presidency said: “The resolution was supported by 26 EU countries, and that is a clear signal to the Commission that it can start working on legislative proposals for 2030.”

Despite pushes from international bodies such as the United Nations (UN) or the European Union (EU) to promote gender equality in Central and Eastern Europe, access to funding for such initiatives remains largely conditional upon national governments’ willingness to embrace this agenda.

Immediately after the fall of communism in 1989, Central and Eastern European (CEE) NGOs working on gender equality got most of their funding from U.S. or Western European private foundations or governmental agencies; following these countries’ entry to the EU, non-EU donors withdrew considering the region well covered by EU funds.

CEE NGOs, however, noted that following EU accession, it has become ironically more difficult to access funding, primarily because EU funds must generally be co-financed from national budgets and also get distributed according to priorities set at the national level. As a consequence, NGOs find themselves limited by their governments’ agendas that are not always progressive.

“Before EU accession it was paradoxically easier to get money for more radical actions and publications,” says Alina Synakiewicz from Polish NGO Feminoteka. “Now, even though money is available, it is given out via governmental intermediation, meaning that the government channels it the way it wants.”

In the best case, NGOs “get creative” and manage to fit their priorities into the governmental agenda; in the worst, they are simply denied funding for themes deemed unacceptable.

The most striking example of such marginalisation of a core gender equality theme as a result of a conservative national agenda concerns reproductive rights in Poland. In 1993, abortion was made illegal in this country and, to date, access to contraceptives and sexual education is limited, and doctors are free to invoke a “conscience clause” to refuse writing prescriptions for birth control. Gender equality activists argue that such limitation of reproductive rights in the country is primarily caused by the strong hold that the Polish Catholic Church has on both the state and society as a whole.

Last year, activists attempted to introduce a reproductive rights bill in the parliament, having as main points the legalisation of abortion, making contraceptives affordable and more accessible, introducing fact-based sexual education in schools, and state support for in-vitro fertilisation.

Their effort to gather the 100,000 signatures needed to bring the civic law proposal into the legislative failed because of a media blackout on the initiative alongside a lack of funds and help for the activists. Even some NGOs working on women’s issues steered away from supporting this effort as they did not trust the initiative can succeed.

“What has unfortunately changed in the last 20 years in Poland is that the whole public space is dominated by the terminology propagated by the Church,” says Elżbieta Korolczuk, one of the activists promoting the initiative. “Not only the general public but quite a big part of our activist circles do not believe it is possible to change the law when it comes to reproductive rights in Poland in the foreseeable future.” Korolczuk, however, says the fight will continue, even in such an unfavorable climate.

And, across CEE, gender equality activists are winning battles every day regardless of resistance or indifference from national authorities.

Some of the most difficult themes to address across the region over the past two decades have been violence against women and domestic violence. Funding from national sources remains scarce for groups working on violence against women which results not only in limited NGO capacity – highly problematic considering that it is NGOs that do most of the work on this issue — but also in an insufficient number of shelters for victims of violence.

Legislation regarding domestic violence has also advanced with fits and starts. Most CEE countries have passed such laws, yet often the texts lacked provisions for imposing restraining orders on the aggressors; arguably, this reluctance has to do with a “sanctification” of private property across the region after 1989 and hence an unwillingness to take men (usually the aggressors) out of their homes (of which often they are the owners).

But this week (Feb. 28), following over two years of intense campaigning by NGOs, the Romanian parliament finally introduced an amendment in the national legislation regulating the use of restraining orders against the perpetrators of domestic violence.

Two years back, Cristina Horia from Sensiblu Foundation, one of the main groups working on domestic violence in Romania and organiser of a strong public campaign on the theme in 2009, was telling IPS that “the involvement of state institutions with the issue of domestic violence is limited, being at most supporters and partners, but not initiating campaigns.”

Over the past two years, Horia says, national and local authorities have improved their attitudes, yet “systematic gaps” continue to prevent a proper engagement with domestic violence.

Among these gaps, Horia lists “the under-financing of the social assistance system, the insufficient number of shelters for battered women, the lack of a national strategy to address domestic violence, the authorities’ failing to assume the role of protecting victims and to implement measures to punish aggressors, insufficient training of the police and public services staff to deal competently with victims and aggressors.”

There is a sense that NGOs active in CEE are operating in quite a different reality than that described by their national authorities in reports to international bodies, full of good intentions and commitments to gender equality.

A possible test of this statement could be to look at how one of the most advanced gender mainstreaming tools proposed by the UN, gender budgeting, fares in the region. Gender budgeting means analysing and transforming national and local budgets in such a way that they allow for the advancement of women or at least that obstacles to gender equality are eliminated. It does not mean giving more money for women, but rather, using existing resources more cleverly.

According to economist Elizabeth Villagomez, who has worked for years with various UN agencies on training and assessing possibilities of introducing this tool in CEE, “gender budgeting is not strong in these countries because the idea and principles of gender equality are still weak there; in former communist countries, the idea of equality as a value in general, including when it comes to gender, is not yet very much welcomed or still misunderstood because of the recent socialist past.”

Gender budgeting has been attempted in several places across the region, from municipalities in Poland (Gdansk) and Albania (Elbasan), to the national level in the Czech Republic, but its implementation remains patchy and has not brought the results seen in the West. Villagomez adds another reason for this lack of success: “using gender budgeting depends on the real capacities of governments to use results-based budget management and also on how the political priorities reflected in the budgets are set.” (END)

Following numerous warnings issued by geologists, health scientists and environmental experts throughout the United States, Europe is now well aware of the high ecological and health risks associated with the exploitation of shale gas fields.

Shale gas extraction releases high amounts of methane, which contributes significantly to global warming. Credit: ProgressOhio/CC-BY-2.0

Yet, despite ample knowledge and strong public opposition from various local communities, the recently discovered shale gas deposits across Europe – in particular in France, Germany, and Poland – are highly coveted and will likely soon be exploited by the traditional oil, gas and mineral multinationals.

This year, test drillings are expected to begin in more than 150 locations in Poland, which allegedly contains the richest shale gas fields in Europe. In Germany, local electricity providers have obtained rights to drill in numerous localities in the Northern federal state of Lower Saxony. The French government, meanwhile, has chosen more than 70 sites for drilling, mostly along the Mediterranean coast, around the southern city of Marseille.

Similar projects are under way in Switzerland, Britain, Sweden, and other European countries.

Local communities and environmental groups opposed to the projects argue that the geochemical procedures necessary to liquefy shale gas pose such grave threats to human health and surrounding ecologies that governments should prohibit them.

The recent Oscar-nominated documentary film Gasland by U.S. journalist Josh Fox has fuelled opposition against this burning issue by laying bare the health and environmental risks associated with the oil extraction process.

A week ago, the film was screened in the picturesque Provencal village of Moissac Bellevue, some 650 kilometres south of Paris and just north of Marseille, for an audience of several hundred people. Among the viewers were mayors of numerous neighbouring villages, mobilised by the growing concern within their own constituencies.

“Exploitation of shale gas fields in the region constitutes an enormous risk of ground water contamination due to the massive use of chemicals in the process,” Pierre Jugy, mayor of Tourtour, another Provencal village near Marseille, which will eventually be affected by the drillings, told IPS.

“Given the ambiguity of national legislation on the matter, and the health risks for our citizens, I ask all mayors in the region to prohibit the drillings within their jurisdictions,” he added. “It is our responsibility as elected representatives of our region to guarantee that such risks do not (become a reality).”

The ‘ambiguity’ Jugy was referring to arose from a government decision to suspend its own drilling permits, and commission yet another study on the health and environmental impacts of shale gas exploitation.

Similar studies are under way in Britain, Germany, and other European countries.

No more ‘fracking’

The most controversial procedure associated with shale gas is hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. In order to liquefy the gas, wells are dug and then injected with millions of litres of water, sand and chemicals under high pressure, in an attempt to ‘fracture’ the geological masses containing the shale gas.

Benzene is one of the many highly dangerous chemicals used in the process, while similar chemical compounds mix with, and finally contaminate, underground water supplies.

The health and environmental claims against fracking and similar procedures are well founded: In a recent case study, benzene was found in ground water in the north German region of Allerdorf, in Lower Saxony, near a drilling station.

“Last December, we took water samples at a location just above the pipelines of the drilling,” Heinrich Cluever, a local farmer, told IPS. “We found benzene in a concentration of 4,000 microgrammes per litre of water.”

A benzene concentration of as few as five microgrammes per litre is considered carcinogenic, according to Hermann Kruse, professor of chemistry and toxicology at the university of Kiel, located some 300 kilometres west of Berlin.

“Benzene is one of the most dangerous chemical materials we know,” Kruse told IPS. “It is one of the very few chemicals we definitively know causes cancer.”

Benzene has also been found in other regions in Lower Saxony, where local populations have been experiencing extremely high rates of cancer. In Allerdorf alone – a village of less than 30 households – dozens of cases of cancer have been detected.

These ominous signs are widespread and have led to calls for a complete ban on fracking in Germany. So far, however, the government has only pledged to establish strict rules for the projects but stopped short of imposing a ban.

Apart from localised health risks to communities living in the surrounding area, shale gas extraction is also hazardous to the planet as a whole, since fracking releases high amounts of methane, which contribute significantly to global warming. In general, fracking is believed to produce a highly negative greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions balance.

Environmental activists believe that, if the European Union is serious about reducing the region’s contribution to climate change, it will stop drilling altogether.

Experts also predict that the shale gas projects will fail in Europe for a host of other reasons.

“On the one (hand), the geology is extremely complicated,” Ingo Kapp, researcher at the German Geological Centre in Potsdam, near Berlin, told IPS. “On the other side, Europe’s high population density makes the drillings much more difficult. Finally, the environmental rules are stricter (here) than in the U.S.”

Kapp added that the European geological structures containing gas lay much deeper than in the U.S.

“They are also smaller, and of a different geological nature, which makes drilling much more expensive,” Kapp told IPS.

Such data is corroborated by GASH, a joint venture funded by leading energy multinationals for coordinating corporate research on shale gas in Europe.

“Western Europe is a region that has been said to have only minor shale gas resources,” GASH said in a communiqué. “One reason for this is Europe’s strong compartmentalisation of the geological setting compared to the large sedimentary basins in the U.S.”

For such reasons, Kapp predicted, “A gas revolution (similar to the one) in the U.S. won’t happen here.”

However, some troubling cases should serve as a reminder to the European activist community that they still face a long battle against multinationals and governments with vested interests in extraction projects.

For example, in Poland, where well over a hundred drilling projects are slated to commence in 2012, environmental activists’ efforts to discuss the risks with local populations have been hindered by the fact that government officials have branded their public education campaigns “national treason”.