The scope and irony of this tragedy cannot be overstated:
On Saturday, all members of a Polish delegation – comprised of political, military, and religious leaders – were killed in a plane crash on their way to a memorial service in the Katyn forest of Russia, where Josef Stalin’s secret police executed thousands of Polish military officers 70 years ago. In fact, there were no survivors among the 97 passengers on board.
All of Poland is now in the midst of a week of mourning, which will culminate on Sunday with a state funeral for the president, Lech Kaczynski, and his wife Maria.
Kaczynski was held in such esteem by his peers around the world that President Obama interrupted a plenary session of the summit on nuclear security in DC yesterday to lead the 49 world leaders assembled in a moment of silence in his honor.
Indeed, there can be no greater tribute in this respect than Obama usurping Vice President Biden’s ceremonial role by announcing that he will be leading the US delegation to attend Kaczynski’s funeral.
Meanwhile, Poles can be forgiven their suspicions that “Russia engineered this crash,” given the Katyn massacre and, moreover, the post-war dominion the Russians (as masters of the Soviet Union) exercised over them. After all, they only managed to break that dominion in 1990, when the Solidarity Movement led by Lech Walesa won political self-determination for the Polish people after a decade of non-violent civil agitation. But no one remained more leery of Russia’s totalitarian and imperial machinations, which continually fed these suspicions, than Kaczynski who:
… vocally opposed what he branded as Russian “imperialism” in ex-Soviet states such as Georgia and Ukraine, even braving bullets during Moscow’s short war with Tbilisi in 2008 to show his solidarity with President Mikheil Saakashvili. (Reuters, April 11, 2010)
Nevertheless, I have been impressed by the outpouring of sympathy among Russians. And their sympathizer-in-chief has been none other than their neo-Stalinist prime minister, Vladimir Putin, who rushed to the crash site to join the Polish prime minister in paying respects and has vowed to oversee the investigation himself.
This is our tragedy as well. We are grieving with you, our hearts go out to you. (Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Reuters, ibid)
More to the point, though, the irony of ironies is that this tragedy appears to have been caused, not by Russian treachery but by pilot error. Specifically, the pilot made several attempts to land in dense fog near a Smolensk airport. Reports are that he was determined to land because of pressure from the president himself to get his delegation to the ceremony on time.
In doing so, however, the pilot was pointedly ignoring warnings by Belarusian air-traffic controllers to land elsewhere. Polish Prosecutor General Andrzej Seremet effectively confirmed this fateful error when he reported that:
Polish investigators talked to the flight controller and flight supervisor and “concluded that there were no conditions for landing.” (ibid)
An ironic tragedy indeed; but all indications are that it was just an accident.
My thoughts and prayers go out to my Polish friends in America as well their compatriots back home in Poland during this week of national mourning.
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