Unprepared on all fronts
By Chris
Mularczyk
The 24-hour Polish news channel seemed to have a major exclusive. It reported that a plane coming from Frankfurt had just landed in Kraków with 18 Asians on board who were suspected of suffering from the SARS virus. The crew of the plane had alerted Kraków before landing, and now all passengers were in quarantine. My wife looked concerned. I, the horrid cynic, laughed that probably someone had sneezed.
The news channel got itself a telephone interview with airport management, which quickly assured us that there was only one suspected case of SARS on board. Next the news channel presented a Polish passenger in a live telephone interview who told us how the rest of the passengers were now being released to go home with just a contact telephone number and advice to impose some kind of domestic quarantine on themselves.
Fortunately, none of this mattered. It soon transpired that the one SARS suspect was a Korean lady who had the misfortune of choking on some LOT food. The stewardess panicked and jumped to conclusions. Understandable in the current climate of concern over the spread of the disease. However, the reaction to the situation on the ground was less than impressive. What does self-quarantine mean? Staying indoors and infecting your family? Putting a mask on or a paper bag over your head?
The country is not prepared for SARS. Some, like the German magazine Der Spiegel and the former defense minister Bronisław Komorowski, think we are not prepared for our mission in one of the sectors in Iraq either. Prepared or not, you have to understand why Poland is doing this. We have never had an empire. That is a serious chip on the shoulder rather than a matter of pride for most of us. Now there is a chance to put that to rights. At last we have ended up on the side of the victors and must share in the spoils of victory.
What is amusing about the country's consent to running one of the sectors in Iraq is that it wants the United States to pay for it! Imperialism when someone else is footing the bill and providing logistics really is a new departure in colonialism. Never underestimate the Poles' capacity to do something very original. Shrewd business too.
It would be nice if our politicians could do something original on the domestic front. The latest dogfight over party political financing is hardly that. The SLD, desperate to cover up Rywingate, has produced one of the right's old skeletons from the cupboard. The whole thing goes back to the early 1990s when it was alleged that the FOZZ fund for managing the country's debt was used as a cash-point for the Kaczyński twins' Porozumienie Centrum (PC) party. The allegation comes from a former department director at the Supreme Board of Inspection (NIK) who got into a conflict with his old boss, Lech Kaczyński, when Kaczyński was NIK's director.
The SLD has used this to argue for an investigative commission into financing the PC. The PiS has hit back, filing a motion for the setup of two more investigative commissions. Its leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, has called the SLD a crime-based party and said it cares nothing for the country. The SLD has reported Kaczyński's comments to the public prosecutor.
One can understand the irritation that the Kaczyńskis must feel about this matter. Many years ago both the prosecutors and the spooks searched high and low to find some shred of evidence on this and never found any. The SLD brought this hoary chestnut back just before the last election in 2001 with an hour-long prime-time state TV special in which some Venezuelan called Pineiro made allegations for which he gave no shred of evidence but his word. It all looked more like a soap opera than investigative journalism. Nevertheless, it must have been annoying for the Kaczyńskis. But that is no excuse for a professional politico to lose his rag and call his opponents a bunch of thieving parvenus.
Miller failed to keep his cool over Zbigniew Ziobro's questions in the Rywingate hearings. Now Kaczyński is failing to keep control over his emotions. In turn, the SLD is trying to use a state prosecutor rather than sue for libel or defamation in a civic action.
It just all goes to show that our politicians are very unprepared for the profession that is politics. Little surprise then that so many doubt that the country as a whole is ready to administer even a small part of Iraq or that ground control at airports cannot act rationally when there is a suspected case of something as serious as SARS.
