Cleaning house
Cleaning house
Marek Matraszek
As the government draws closer to what many regard as its judgment day the ability (or not) to undertake a radical revamp of the way in which it works and decide who will be a minister and who will not tension is palpably mounting.
The best sign of this nervousness came last week with the astonishing saga of the sacking, followed by a very public battle between the two, of the head of the elite anti-terrorist force, GROM, by acting Interior Minister Janusz Palubicki, also chief coordinator of the intelligence services. Even this dramatic battle was but part of an even larger clearout of the Interior Ministry after the sacking a few weeks ago of Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister Janusz Tomaszewski.
The saga began dramatically enough late last week, when Palubicki made a public statement that he had summarily sacked Gen. Slawomir Petelicki, GROM commander, after an impromptu investigation had revealed "massive wrongdoing" in the unit, which the minister described as "a swamp." According to Palubicki, GROM had procured surveillance equipment worth "millions," without permission and without tenders. Petelicki gave as good as he got: going public on radio and television, he described Palubicki as "that bearded man in a dirty sweater" who had brought shame on a NATO-standard military unit. Palubicki, he said, should get a shave, put on a suit, and stop damaging Poland.
That's about as strong as it gets in Polish politics, at least publicly. Yet there was more to come. A day later, Palubicki was forced to retract the claim of financial wrongdoing, on the basis that the investigating team had uncovered more documentation seemingly putting matters to rights. Nonetheless, he upheld Petelicki's dismissal, and followed up with a further purge of GROM deputy commanders. Parliament weighed into the battle, with the Defence Committee declaring that Petelicki should be reinstated. Governing politicians in turn called for the sacking of Palubicki and his Interior Ministry deputy, Freedom Union (UW) politician Bogdan Borusewicz.
There remains much confusion about the entire affair, which has yet to be satisfactorily explained. One view was that Palubicki and Borusewicz, both former Solidarity trade union anti-communist activists in the 1970s and 1980s, were taking revenge on Petelicki, who in the 1980s was a serving officer of Polish military counter-intelligence stationed in Stockholm. There his operational brief was to sabotage transports of aid and equipment to the Solidarity underground during Martial Law. It is indeed an anomaly that a man with such a past should have risen so far in Poland's new democratic armed forces. But the dismissal of Petelicki has to be seen against a broader background of a general purge of the Interior Ministry following the removal of former Minister Janusz Tomaszewski.
Almost as soon as Palubicki took supervisory control of the Interior Ministry, he acted quickly to remove Tomaszewski's old networks. First he shut down the special lustration department that Tomaszewski had established to filter documents on the possible links of current Polish politicians to communist intelligence and secret police officers, on the grounds that Tomaszewski had used the department to collect more intimate information as well for his own purposes. Then he sacked Krzysztof Bondaryk, deputy Interior minister and right-hand man of Tomaszewski. He also sent on leave another close Tomaszewski associate, Deputy Minister Wojciech Brochwicz. Palubicki also put on hold the creation of a national criminal registry, Tomaszewski's pet project, again on the grounds that in fact this had been a cover for the creation of a completely new private surveillance office, outside of statutory control.
Quite a week's work for Palubicki. Petelicki had for many been seen as close to Tomaszewski, and indeed Tomaszewski had been a close patron of GROM, fighting hard to prevent its transfer from the control of the Interior Ministry to the Defence Ministry. Now, with both Tomaszewski and Petelicki gone, Palubicki obtained the Prime Minister's signature on a decree shifting GROM to the Defense Ministry.
But the dismantling of Tomaszewski's old interior ministry empire will not stop there. After a couple of weeks of debate, Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek announced that he has decided that in the new government make-up, the old interior ministry will be split into two new ministries. One will look after more mundane issues such as housing, planning and state administration, while the other would focus on crime, one of the main priorities for the next two years of the current government.
In a few weeks, it will not only be Tomaszewski who will be yesterday's news the networks he created and the people, like Petelicki, of whom he was patron, will be no more as well.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw Director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed on director@cec.com.pl
