Time to lay the past to rest

   Land is an emotive issue in Poland, the main reason being that Poles have had a lot of it taken from them over the centuries.

   Throughout the years of partition and occupation, the country's borders have been shifted, often at a whim by a bureaucrat in Berlin or Moscow, and whole communities have been displaced in an instant.

   During World War II, hundreds of thousands of Poles were uprooted by the Nazis and packed off elsewhere leaving the land free for incoming German settlers. This happened again at the end of the war when huge swathes of Poland were suddenly designated Soviet territory and the country's borders were shifted West into old Prussian territory.

   There's one famous case when the population of Lvov, now in Ukraine, was relocated to what is now Wroclaw and Poznan – formerly the German cities of Breslau and Posen. The trauma involved with such sudden demographic shifts can only be imagined, and many victims of these circumstances are still alive.

   So last week's call by German residents of former German territories demanding special rights under European Union (EU) law hit a raw nerve in Poland. It also, again, raised questions about EU membership and land use rights when Poland joins the club.

   The pressure group of expelled citizens of Eastern Europe said that as "casualties of human rights infringements" members should be given special privileges once the countries they previously lived in become members of the EU. The group called for expelled citizens to be exempt from any EU accession agreements on transition periods for land purchases. This means that anyone expelled from Poland after 1945 would be given the immediate right to settle in the country once it has joined the EU. Along with this claim, the organization also wants Poland to annul acts passed in 1945 under which expelled citizens were denied compensation for their lost property.

   There are already ongoing legal suits concerning the restitution of property rights for Polish Jews, among others, who lost their property during the Nazi and communist eras. Along with this is the general confusion over who actually owns much of the land in Poland and there are calls from Polish farmers unions for agricultural land to be exempt from purchases for up to 18 years after EU accession.

   Borderland areas around Germany are particularly sensitive about this issue, with many farmers worried that their richer German neighbors will snap up land as soon as Poland has joined the club of nations.

   Most clear thinking politicians in Poland and Germany understandably view the latest pressure group demanding their land back as a noisy irrelevance in the scheme of things, especially compared with the real issues at stake over land use rights. But farmers in the Lower Silesia voivoidship on the German border will be far more wary of such vocal minorities. The EU must be seen to be working for the common good while closing the lid on divisive issues that once tore Europe apart. Open borders and free trade promise one day to end the historic spiral of arguments over who owns what land. Time to move on.