Polish President lauds hero of Georgia
late Lech Kaczynski
President Lech Kaczynski was a great friend of Georgia and like no other Polish politician understood perfectly how important Georgia's independence, freedom and sovereignty were to maintaining Europe's unity, President Andrzej Duda said in Tbilisi on Tuesday.
The Polish president called his Georgian visit "following the path set out in the political sense by Professor Lech Kaczynski".
Duda thanked Georgian President Georgi Margvelashvili for remembering Kaczynski, who "was a great friend of Georgia, not only in a personal sense, not only in the sense of his love for this beautiful country, but also as a great politician deeply convinced of Georgia's strategic importance as a friend and ally of Poland, of the European Union and of the states belonging to the North Atlantic Alliance.
Hence, Polish president pointed out, Lech Kaczynski's great support for Georgia's efforts to join the European Union and the North Atlantic Alliance.
"At a critical moment, in the summer of 2008, when Georgia was attacked by Russia, President Lech Kaczynski did not hesitate to gather Central Europe leaders and come here to Tbilisi in order to stand together and say 'no' to that hostile, treacherous attack" (see: NOTE). (PAP)
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NOTE: On 12 August 2008, during Russian - Georgian war President Lech Kaczynski gathered his fellow-heads of European states on a support rally in Tbilisi. Along with him and Georgian host-president Saakaszvili, addressing thousands-strong crowds that came to the main square that night were his colleagues from Estonia - Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Lithuania's Valdas Adamkus, Ukraine's Wiktor Yushchenko as well as Latvia's Prime Minister Ivars Godmanis.
In his memorable speech Lech Kaczynski uttered as much supportive as indeed prophetic words:
"We are here today because we cannot allow any restoration and prevalence of imperialism in Europe. (..) For today it is Georgia that is at stake, tomorrow it can be Ukraine, the day after the Baltic states, and then may be my own country Poland”.
President Lech Kaczynski perished in the April 10, 2010 air disaster near Smolensk, western Russia, together with the First Lady, the last President of Poland in exile Ryszard Kaczorowski and dozens of senior government officials and military commanders. The delegation was underway to Katyn to attend events marking the 70th anniversary of the 1940 Katyn Massacre (see: NOTE 2).
NOTE 2: The Katyn Massacre was a series of mass executions of Polish POW's, mainly military officers and policemen, carried out by the Soviet security agency NKVD in April and May 1940. The killings took place at several locations but the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest in west Russia, where some of the mass graves of the victims were first discovered.
The massacre was initiated by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria, who proposed to execute all captive members of the Polish officer corps. The victim count is estimated at about 22,000. The executions took place in Katyn Forest, the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons, and elsewhere. About 8,000 of the victims were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, the rest were Polish intellectuals, deemed by the Soviets to be intelligence agents and saboteurs.
In 1943 the government of Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in Katyn Forest. When the London-based Polish government-in-exile asked for an investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross, Stalin promptly severed diplomatic relations with the London-based cabinet. The Soviets claimed that the killings had been carried out by the Nazis in 1941 and denied responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it officially acknowledged and condemned the perpetration of the massacre by the NKVD.
Soviet responsibility for the Katyn killings was confirmed by an investigation conducted by the office of the Prosecutors General of the Soviet Union (1990–1991) and the Russian Federation (1991–2004), however Russia refused to classify them as a war crime or genocide.
In November 2010, the Russian State Duma passed a declaration blaming Stalin and other Soviet officials for having personally ordained the massacre. (PAP)
