Apparently, the city of Nowa Sól is now the safest town in Poland, if not in Europe. Because how otherwise it could be explained that the main focus of the local prosecutors is a cat named Lucjan?
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Lucjan is a fluffy, grey, striped tabby cat with white socks. Footage of him walking the corridors of the local prosecution office was shown to the surprised prosecutors during an important meeting. Apparently even despite the fact that the feral cats are taken care of by the city (they are fed, sterilized, and provided with shelter), the presence of the cat in the building is unacceptable. But how the presence of the cat has become a top subject of the important meeting?
Gazeta Wyborcza speculates, that the discovery of the car roaming the prosecution’s offices is not a coincidence. “Someone had to spend a lot of time browsing CCTV footage to bump onto this” – says the paper’s informer. So can it be that somebody is desperately trying to find some dirt on one of the prosecutors, a member of the Lex Super Omnia association that opposes submitting the prosecution to the prosecutors? Apparently despite both the prosecutor and his wife – also a clerk in the prosecution’s office – are being demoted and bullied at work he was not willing to give up, so someone became desperate and finally found the crime: the prosecutor is feeding a stray cat!
Strangely enough, the prosecutor Maciej Wiącek from Świdnica who got drunk and walked around the city completely naked does not spark such outrage. Yes, he got suspended, but the chief prosecutor’s office is busy implying that he was appointed by the previous government – which is a lie: he was personally appointed by Zbigniew Ziobro in 2016.
I don’t know if the counter-intelligence is tracking stray cats or running naked around the town, but one thing is sure: they are utterly shit at their jobs. During reporting from the economic forum in Karpacz the journalists, to their amazement, spotted Yuri Voskriesienski, a KGB agent from Belarus believed to be Lukashenko’s man responsible for “dirty jobs” such as torturing the political prisoners. Voskriesenski claims he was invited by the “members of the Polish establishment” who are “fed up with confrontation” and reached to him to “build bridges”. Meanwhile, the Polish government denies any of that, saying that he was invited “by mistake”. Let that sink: a dangerous agent from high up the Lukashenko’s regime known to be responsible for illegal actions against the opposition has been “mistakenly” let into the country by the government that introduced a state of emergency on the Belarussian border and he roams freely in the hotel where Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is also present… This is a total compromisation of the government.
And as if that was not enough, Makary Malachowsky, a Belarussian citizen who sought refugee in Poland after being harassed by Lukashenko’s regime has also been arrested on Sunday. The police quotes a Belarussian warrant (he was since released). It’s a shame that the police is not so quick when it comes to arresting true criminals, like an infamous crazy driver who repetitively filmed his crazy escapades and published them on social media (see more here). He was finally for 2.5 years of jail and five years ban on driving, but haven’t turned up to listen to the verdict and police can’t find him since – and it has been 9 months since he is on the run. According to the reporters, he is still active in the circles of illegal street racers.
With the state institutions unable to perform their basic tasks no wonder, that citizens seek alternative ways to get justice. After a tenant refused to pay his rent and bills for over two years, the landlord moved a couple of thugs and a pit bull dog to his flat. When the man called the police, the newcomers showed a valid rental agreement. Apparently, the crude method works, as the man is slowly removing his possessions from the flat so he might finally leave and stop living at the expense of others. This is not a unique case, a similar situation took place before and it’s blamed on the fact, that the landlord’s rights are not protected sufficiently: the tenant who fails to pay their bills can’t be evicted until the court ruling (which might take years) and even then they have to be granted another accommodation, either by the landlord (which means that he still has to provide them free flat) or by the council (which can take even decades).
So where are the people who should protect citizens? Like, I don’t know, the police? Well, they have more important tasks to do, like guarding the Smoleńsk monument in Warsaw or the nearby statue of the late Lech Kaczyński. But some citizens are also well protected – the house of Jarosław Kaczyński is, for example, guarded 24/7 (more on that here), and the monuments are protected FROM citizens. Who knows, perhaps the government thinks it’s the same thing, like in that joke about the guy who stole something, or perhaps had something stolen from him, never mind, the important thing is that he was somehow mixed in theft…
Being prevented access to the Smoleńsk monument (shaped as the stairs to nowhere), the opposition activists decided to build their own one – from cardboard boxes. I find this one more fitting, after all some say that the Polish state is a state made of cardboard. But its creators provide different interpretation: “This is a citizen’s construction” – said Włodek Ciejka, one of the activists – “we were told several times, if you don’t like health service, go privately, if you don’t like public school, send your kids to a private one. So since we were denied access to state-owned stairs, we had to build our own”.
But not all is bad. For example, Jacek Międlar, a former Catholic priest who turned to become a neo-nazi hate preacher had been sentenced to a year of 30 hours per month of unpaid work for hate speech. But what of that if his nazi colleagues apparently work in the police force, if we believe a Wrocław University professor who report that two German students had been harassed and humiliated by the police officers from the infamous police station at Trzemeska street in Wrocław, where Igor Stachowiak had been tortured to death. And that would not be the only case – in 2019 a police officer had to be reprimanded for displaying a symbol of a Polish fascist movement.
The religious indoctrination also progressed at an amazing pace. In Kraków parents of teenagers who don’t attend religious classes were called by a headteacher who demanded an explanation. Not to mention that he already broke the law by demanding that parents who don’t wish their children to participate in religious education filled some forms – while according to the law it’s those, who want their children to go to those non-mandatory classes who need to fill an application to sing them in. The infamous Education Ombudsman for Kraków district Barbara Nowak (whom you might remember from this series for being an ultra-Catholic radical) instead of doing her job and reprimanding the director who breaks the law attacked an opposition MP who protested against religious indoctrination, accusing her of “neo-Marxism”. And all that Christianity happens in the country that for over a month now keeps the refugees trapped at the border in Usnarz Górny (although we no longer know details, as media are not allowed in there anymore – see the older piece on the situation on the border here).
Meanwhile, conflict with the EU progresses. Kaczyński, Ziobro, and Morawiecki can’t pretend any longer that they can win that war: breaking the rule of law will end in ceasing the flow of the European funds to Europe. Will that prevent them from further destruction of democracy? I don’t think so. Now even the most important politicians of PiS – like Ryszard Terlecki – openly speak about Polexit being a possibility…
Picture of the cat: Alvesgaspar via Wikipedia (CC 3.0)
This text was written for Britské Listy
