Letter to the Polish Prime Minister. The appeal of the ambassador from Prague is a disgrace – HlídacíPes.org
The Czechia and Poland have been and will be neighbors throughout the history of Europe. For better or worse. Your legendary father understood this as a student, when in 1968 he distributed leaflets in Wroclaw against the participation of the humiliated Polish army in the occupation of Czechoslovakia, writes Jan Urban in an open letter to Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.
Two days before the announcement of the current situation in December 1981, I brought Charter 77 messages from Prague to Wroclaw, including information about the gathering of Czechoslovak tank units at the border with the task of occupying your hometown of Wroclaw in the Warsaw Pact invasion.
That secret journey for your father’s colleagues from Wroclaw’s Solidarity ended with a public announcement of support for Czechoslovak dissent in front of hundreds of students at three striking faculties. I had two small children at home, and this decision could only end in prison. I was lucky. Only a few days later, your father had to start hiding and led the Fighting Solidarity illegally for seven years. Do you remember? “Some things just can’t be done,” he said, “and the price doesn’t matter.”
Miroslav Jasinský also has one unique quality – deep respect and gratitude to Czech society, which therefore listens to his views, even though they can sometimes be unpleasant.
Wroclaw was a promised city for Czechoslovak dissidents. It was here that the Polish-Czechoslovak Solidarity was established. Miroslav Jasinski, whom you are proposing to remove from the post of ambassador to the Czech Republic today, has been its key organizer since the very beginnings of cooperation between opposition activities in our countries.
Without Polish help, our small dissident ghetto in Czechoslovakia would not have succeeded. We met in the mountains on the border, smuggled messages, literature and radio broadcasts from the Fighting Solidarity, we printed our magazines in your underground printers. And we wanted to believe that relations between us and our countries have once and for all closed past misunderstandings with this test.
Against the dictatorship of fear and cowardice
When your father bravely came up with a demand and prediction of the end of communism in all the states of the Soviet bloc, the expulsion of Soviet occupation forces and the unification of Germany, in the 1980s, few people believed him. He saw the truth before the others. Forty years later, nineteenth-century revivalist issues are being discussed in our free societies, and our policy again needs the enemy to prove itself. Where do we want to go?
The appointment of Miroslav Jasinský as ambassador to Prague was a wise and bold decision. He is a great negotiator with exceptionally good contacts in Czech politics and society, he knows our culture and understands the media. But he also has one unique quality – deep respect and gratitude to Czech society, which therefore listens to his views, even though they can sometimes be unpleasant.
When solving certainly unpleasant current problems, such as disagreements over mining in the Turów mine or the construction of a lookout tower in the Jeseníky Mountains, the Polish interest could not have wished for a better qualified digester. No foreign diplomat has received as many Czech awards since 1989 as Mr. Jasinski. The František Kriegel Award, the Václav Benda Award or the Medal of Merit for the Diplomacy of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic speak more of Czech respect for his person than anything else.
EVERY MORNING TO THE BEST OF WATCHING.ORG
It started a long time ago, with those advance payments, the backpacks still look like the exact time of a “random” meeting at a pre-arranged boundary stone in the mountains. It was a ritual built on absolute trust. We joked that we were like test pilots. We could not make a single mistake, because each could be the last. There was no Czech “we” and no Polish “they”. We were just a common “we” against the dictatorship of fear and cowardice.
We are only some forty years away and I probably would not even have to agree with some of Mirek Jasiński’s views today. This happens among friends and neighbors. But I will never stop respecting and listening to him.
Your father would understand
I remember how shortly before November 1989 he decided to test the stubbornness of the Czechoslovak communist authorities, and as a messenger of the new times – Solidarity was already in power in Poland after the winning elections – he flew to Prague. He was detained at the exit of the plane and refused to enter the country. And so he had to wait long hours for the return flight to Warsaw only in a closed departure hall.
I followed him to the airport and we wrote messages on pieces of paper through a large glass wall. Gentlemen in bad suits still stood around him inconspicuously. They were gone in a few weeks.
Since then, he has probably gained some weight and aged a little. But he lost nothing of his courage and ability to build Polish-Czech-Slovak friendship. Maybe you decide not to pursue the best interests of your country and insist on the intention to remove Miroslav Jasinský from Prague just because you said it once. It will be a mistake.
Prague would listen to his tough arguments – just because he has shown the courage and ability to seek and find common solutions in crises. Your father Kornel would understand.
With respect
Jan Urban
Charter 77
Polish-Czechoslovak Solidarity
Representative of the Civic Forum
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