The Anti-Corruption Scheme Corrupted?
Warsaw, Poland, 17 Feb 2005 - The ruling, minority, Polish political party, Law and Justice (PIS), is bent on curing the ills of the past and ridding the country of any influence of or spillover from communism. One of their centerpiece programs is an Anti-Corruption office that has been given a huge budget and tasked with rooting out all the corruption in the country.
The appointment to the head of the Anti-Corruption office will, however, be, according to Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of PIS, political. The reasoning is that anyone who is not part of the PIS structure is steeped in the corruption of communism so that a non political appointment would not be effective. Only a political appointee can be trusted to carry on the task of finding all the corrupt people in Poland.
Opposition parties are hotly contesting this issue. They recognize that a political appointee will naturally make political judgments and corruption by members of favored political parties is liable to be ignored.
The concern of the opposition is highlighted by the shifting standards of PIS as to with whom it chooses to deal. For example, during the days that the leftist SLD ran the government, PIS denounced them for dealing with the Andrzej Lepper, leader of the political party Samoobrona, because of his legal problems. They were all denounced as criminals. But now that PIS is in power, all is forgotten and PIS has signed an agreement, the so called Stabilization Pact, that brings those that were formerly denounced as criminals into the PIS fold.
How effective will this anti-corruption scheme be? Will it be used against political enemies? Will it be fairly applied and will it look at corruption and abuse of power by political allies?
On the same day 16 February, 2006, that debate was hot in the Parliament concerning the politics of the appointment, it was reported that the license for a radio station of a political ally of the PIS was apparently issued without complete documentation. The reaction to this by PIS was telling. Jaroslaw Kaczynski complained that leftists and liberals only complain about free speech when it affects them but when it affects others, they are ready to cut it off.
The political ally turns out to be the Roman Catholic Priest Tadeusz Rydzyk, operator of the radio station Radio Maria. And the missing documentation appears to be permission from the Church authorities to operate a radio station.
Were this a leftist radio station, would PIS ignore equivalent missing documentation or would they jump on it and look for impropriety and corruption? If they ignore the matter of Radio Maria, are they corrupt themselves?
The direction that this process takes will set standards for the future. The leader of the main opposition party, Donald Tusk, commented that PIS has to remember that they will not always be the party in power and the rules they set will someday be used against them.
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