It is one thing for a nation to lose a leader in a singular event, as in the assassination of John Kennedy; or to lose thousands of citizens in acts of war – as in the raid on Pearl Harbor, or the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. But the twisted ironies that led to the death of President of Poland, his wife, and 94 other senior members of the Polish political elite in a forest near Smolensk airport are of a different kind again.
This is a tragedy whose prologue took place in 1940 with the invasion of Poland by the Nazis. The execution in Katyn Forest of some 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals by the Soviet secret police was for years blamed on the Nazis. For generations, Poles have had to live with the knowledge of this historic atrocity, at the same time enduring official denial of responsibility by the real perpetrators. The ceremony at Katyn was to be both commemoration and healing. Now, instead of final resolution, the anniversary has brought Poland to this almost unthinkable tragedy.
Everyone in Poland is staggered by the gravity of the catastrophe. Deepest sorrow is shared by everyone irrespective of the political divides which had been tearing apart the society for the past two democratic decades. People are united in their grief.
Unofficially, however, everyone is asking the question unavoidably swelling under the universal sorrow. The question is: What were the causes of the crash which beheaded the Polish state in one go?
Some things seem already quite clear. In the first place, there was no particular problem with the plane. Yes, it was older than comparable Boeing or Airbus craft; even though this Russian-made TU-154 has flown in the service of the Polish government since 1972, it was carefully serviced and was in good condition.
While it is true that Smolensk is a military airport opened only for special occasions, blame cannot lie there. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk flew there only three days earlier to meet the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at the Katyn graves of the Polish and Russian victims of the Soviet terror. This movingly symbolic meeting was a great step toward the Polish-Russian reconciliation.
It may not even have alone been the fog which covered ground around Smolensk in the early hours of this fatal day, although there is no denying that it contributed greatly to the drama. The airport was not equipped with the ILS system allowing the planes to land in the fog, which certainly did not help too.
Any of these facts can be said to have contributed to the catastrophe; but were alone insufficient to cause it.
It may well be that an underlying and more human cause of this tragic drama is the personal sense of President Lech Kaczynski that he had been left out from the ceremonies which had taken place in Katyn three days earlier between the Polish and Russians Prime Ministers. He wanted to be there to emphasize the Polish patriotic perception of the long suppressed drama of the Katyn mass murder. He could not reconcile himself with the fact that his political arch-rival Donald Tusk stole the whole show three days earlier.
President Kaczynski’s trip was not an official presidential visit, but a purely Polish celebration of a sad anniversary on Russian territory, and it took place after months of his prolonged and staunch insistence. He had insisted on taking a substantial, respectable entourage with him onto this plane: dozens of members of the parliament, the highest ranking commanders, ministers, administrators, and other staff.
Earlier in his term President Kaczynski pursued his radical anti-Russian policies and tried to extend his hand to the isolated president of Georgia, Michael Saakashvili. On August 12, 2008 he flew to Georgia to express his support to Saakashwili together with the presidents of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Ukraine. On that occasion he had demanded from pilot to land directly in the Georgian capital Tbilisi despite the threat of ground fire from Russian forces. The pilot refused to endanger the plane and the President himself, and decided to land in the distant Erevan, Azerbaijan, instead. This angered the Polish President and a row ensued on board of the plane. Yet the pilot was adamant: he did not yield.
Could it be that in this case there was a pressure on the pilot to disregard the ground services in Byelarus not to land in foggy Smolenk, and go onto Moscow or in Minsk instead? Diversion would have been a reasonable decision. Both of these airports are, however, located quite far from Katyn monument, and in the end the President and his entourage would have been very late for the scheduled ceremonies at the mass graves.
We hope the black boxes will tell the whole story, but pilot might have felt unable to resist the pressure of the President and of the top brass of the Polish military behind his shoulders.
Polish pilots of the famous British Royal Air Force Division 303 distinguished themselves in combating the Nazi air raids during the Battle of England in 1940. Ever since there is among Poles a popular, if rather self-congratulatory saying that Polish pilot are so good as to be able to fly on the barn door. The truth of this saying received a boost from an incident in 2003 in which the life of the former Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller has been saved by the brave and experienced pilot during a helicopter crash.
Yet slightly more than two years ago there was an another crash of the Polish plane which involved a terrible loss of life of important people of the state. On January 23, 2008, a reliable Spanish-made military plane CASA C-295M had crashed while approaching the airfield in Miroslawiec (northwestern Poland). All 20 people on board died: four crew and sixteen high ranking officers of the Polish Air Forces. The greatest irony was that they were returning home after a conference devoted to... “The Security in Air Traffic”!
No one among the Polish officials had learned the lesson of this so recent tragedy. There remains instead something suggesting grave irresponsibility involved in this ill-fated trip. Too many people of rank loaded onto a single plane, all determined, so it seems, to attend the Katyn event, despite evident risks. The obvious procedure demanding that the President and so many people occupying the highest positions in the state should not travel on the same plane has not been observed. It all seems to have been an extreme act of recklessness and political irresponsibility on the part of those who made the decisions.
There is something else still. As in most democratic countries, the Polish politicians live in a mortal fear of the media and the opposition. Realizing the inadequacy of the air transportation at their disposal, for the past decades some of them were only mumbling about the necessity of buying several new planes for the government. Yet no one has had enough guts to make the decision to do so, in fear for what the media and the opposition would say. And they were irresponsibly saying that the government officials wish to enjoy the luxuries of the new planes at the cost of the impoverished tax-payers. The ruling elites of all political persuasions had no qualms in spending over one billion US dollars to buy forty eight F-16 fighter planes because they thought this purchase would be seen as a proof of their concern for the Polish security, even if the sophisticated planes are now mostly grounded in Poland and are largely useless. They did not dare to spend a fraction of the sum to secure the safe operation of the government itself.
One thing that has become strikingly clear in the aftermath of this disaster is the extent to which the Russian people feel sorrow for this Polish tragedy. That has not stopped Polish commentators on websites pulling out the predictable suggestions that the event was engineered by the Kremlin. Conspiracy theories seem by now to be a permanent feature of the human discourse, and they can do nothing to help in the improvement of Polish-Russian relations.
We are staggered; we share the grief; we are devastated. But most of all we feel a growing anger and anxiety at what might be done to a democratic state by its own officials.
Adam Chmielewski & Denis Dutton
Wroclaw-Canterbury, April 11, 2010.
Adam Chmielewski is a professor of political philosophy at the University of Wroclaw, Poland, the author of The Psychopathology of the Political Life (2009, in Polish) and of the last interview with Sir Karl Popper, former philosophy teacher at the Canterbury University, New Zealand. He wrote this paper in collaboration with Dennis Dutton, professor of philosophy at the Canterbury University, New Zealand, the author of The Art Instinct (2009). Though geographically distant, they both share an interest in the evolutionary aesthetics, and a deep concern for the future of democracy.
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