Lepper pulls a sickie
The news was released via a San Diego radio station in an interview with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who in his days before public office actually sold chemical weapons to Iraq in the first place.
Rumsfeld claimed to have been told of discovery by the Polish defense minister, but was unable to cite the exact number of warheads, saying only that there were "16 or 17." Rumsfeld also expressed a belief that the pit where they were hidden "was big enough to contain enough WMDs to kill hundreds of thousands of people." Finally, he added, "I have not seen and I have not tested these warheads," before asserting that "this discovery has been made in the last period of days."
The San Diego revelations came on the same day that Saddam Hussein faced the first day of his trial for, among other things, genocide. But, strangely, CNN and other American media seemed to ignore the WMD story, at least at the time it was reported on the cover page of Gazeta Wyborcza, the largest daily newspaper here.
What added poignancy to this curious coincidence was that the two events came on the heels of the official termination of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, with power being transferred to the transitional government led by two former Ba'ath party officials (the party which Hussein led) three days earlier. But closer to home, there was a similarly intriguing coincidence.
The day before Rumsfeld's announcement and the start of the Hussein trial, Andrzej Lepper, the leader of Samoobrona (Self-Defense), booked himself into hospital, apparently for a serious heart operation. One tabloid daily even suggested that the flamboyant populist leader "feared for his life," as he has just reached 50, the age at which his own father died of heart failure. A broadsheet newspaper, Rzeczpospolita, turned its attention to growing discontent in the Samoobrona ranks, especially among failed candidates to the European Parliament.
After paying tens of thousands of zloty to secure the party's backing, these candidates now say that "we expect to get our money back in one way or another." The promise of fat salaries and expenses that would entail from sitting in Europe has now faded, and the party's waning support in polls could spell trouble for getting into Parliament here.
These candidates have signed in-blanco bills of exchange that state they would have to pay the party zł.690,000 should they leave the ranks. While it is clearly enlightened of Lepper not to shoot deserters but merely bankrupt them, one does wonder what was going through these people's minds when they signed on the dotted line. Allegedly, they are now demanding these documents to be returned to them, but are meeting with little response. How very queer.
Anyway, dig deeper and the possible reasons for Lepper's heart problems multiply. What about his trial that began last Tuesday? The Self-Defense leader is used to the courtroom, having launched his political career in 1993 with a suspended sentence for assault, but this time he has been accused of slander by a group of distinguished politicians from the Civic Platform (PO) and the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), whom, during a speech in Parliament last year, he accused of taking bribes. At the time, Lepper claimed to have evidence to back him up, but he has made similar claims on many previous occasions.
Take the famous 'Taliban in Klewki' story, when Lepper said he would prove that Afghani fundamentalists had been flying anthrax into a bankrupt collective farm (PGR) in Klewki in the east of the country. The virus was then used for experiments on animals, and the Self-Defense leader claimed to have seen the infected cattle with his own eyes. If his evidence of bribery is as strong as in the Klewki case, then nicking off to hospital for a few days to undergo "serious surgery" might be, so to speak, just what the doctor ordered.
But the media seem to have missed one interesting angle on this story. When the U.S. Army was gearing up for the invasion of Iraq, Andrzej Lepper volunteered to go to that country as an observer to attest to the fairness of a ballot that returned almost unanimous support for the then Iraqi dictator. And only a month ago, Lepper's party called on President Aleksander Kwaśniewski to resign, citing his support of an "armed assault on Iraq" as one of three reasons for making the demand. Now the two friends go on trial in their respective countries, and Rumsfeld makes the revelations about Iraqi WMDs. Perhaps Lepper is scared. Maybe he thinks that, knowing American interrogation techniques, the authorities could actually get Hussein to confess to where all those weapons have really gone. What if the answer turns out to be Klewki after all?
Rumsfeld claimed to have been told of discovery by the Polish defense minister, but was unable to cite the exact number of warheads, saying only that there were "16 or 17." Rumsfeld also expressed a belief that the pit where they were hidden "was big enough to contain enough WMDs to kill hundreds of thousands of people." Finally, he added, "I have not seen and I have not tested these warheads," before asserting that "this discovery has been made in the last period of days."
The San Diego revelations came on the same day that Saddam Hussein faced the first day of his trial for, among other things, genocide. But, strangely, CNN and other American media seemed to ignore the WMD story, at least at the time it was reported on the cover page of Gazeta Wyborcza, the largest daily newspaper here.
What added poignancy to this curious coincidence was that the two events came on the heels of the official termination of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, with power being transferred to the transitional government led by two former Ba'ath party officials (the party which Hussein led) three days earlier. But closer to home, there was a similarly intriguing coincidence.
The day before Rumsfeld's announcement and the start of the Hussein trial, Andrzej Lepper, the leader of Samoobrona (Self-Defense), booked himself into hospital, apparently for a serious heart operation. One tabloid daily even suggested that the flamboyant populist leader "feared for his life," as he has just reached 50, the age at which his own father died of heart failure. A broadsheet newspaper, Rzeczpospolita, turned its attention to growing discontent in the Samoobrona ranks, especially among failed candidates to the European Parliament.
After paying tens of thousands of zloty to secure the party's backing, these candidates now say that "we expect to get our money back in one way or another." The promise of fat salaries and expenses that would entail from sitting in Europe has now faded, and the party's waning support in polls could spell trouble for getting into Parliament here.
These candidates have signed in-blanco bills of exchange that state they would have to pay the party zł.690,000 should they leave the ranks. While it is clearly enlightened of Lepper not to shoot deserters but merely bankrupt them, one does wonder what was going through these people's minds when they signed on the dotted line. Allegedly, they are now demanding these documents to be returned to them, but are meeting with little response. How very queer.
Anyway, dig deeper and the possible reasons for Lepper's heart problems multiply. What about his trial that began last Tuesday? The Self-Defense leader is used to the courtroom, having launched his political career in 1993 with a suspended sentence for assault, but this time he has been accused of slander by a group of distinguished politicians from the Civic Platform (PO) and the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), whom, during a speech in Parliament last year, he accused of taking bribes. At the time, Lepper claimed to have evidence to back him up, but he has made similar claims on many previous occasions.
Take the famous 'Taliban in Klewki' story, when Lepper said he would prove that Afghani fundamentalists had been flying anthrax into a bankrupt collective farm (PGR) in Klewki in the east of the country. The virus was then used for experiments on animals, and the Self-Defense leader claimed to have seen the infected cattle with his own eyes. If his evidence of bribery is as strong as in the Klewki case, then nicking off to hospital for a few days to undergo "serious surgery" might be, so to speak, just what the doctor ordered.
But the media seem to have missed one interesting angle on this story. When the U.S. Army was gearing up for the invasion of Iraq, Andrzej Lepper volunteered to go to that country as an observer to attest to the fairness of a ballot that returned almost unanimous support for the then Iraqi dictator. And only a month ago, Lepper's party called on President Aleksander Kwaśniewski to resign, citing his support of an "armed assault on Iraq" as one of three reasons for making the demand. Now the two friends go on trial in their respective countries, and Rumsfeld makes the revelations about Iraqi WMDs. Perhaps Lepper is scared. Maybe he thinks that, knowing American interrogation techniques, the authorities could actually get Hussein to confess to where all those weapons have really gone. What if the answer turns out to be Klewki after all?
