Video: "One of Europe's last primeval forests crumbles in the hands of the Polish government"

"For two and a half years, environmentalists have waged a war with the Polish authorities for Białowieża Forest, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of Europe's last and largest remaining patches of Europe's original primeval forest.

In April 2018, the European Court of Justice, the EU's highest court, ruled that Poland violated EU laws by logging in the forest, imposing fines of a minimum of 4.3 million euros (five million US dollars), potentially rising to 100,000 euros a day, if the felling doesn't stop.

In March 2016, former Polish Environment Minister Jan Szyzko, a member of the [right-wing] Law and Justice party who's backed by forester lobbies, approved tripling the amount of wood that could be harvested from Białowieża, allegedly to combat  an infestation by the bark beetle. 

In July, a handful of Polish environmental organizations filed a formal complaint to the European Commission, which then sued Poland in the EU Court of Justice.

Straddling the border between Poland and Belarus, Białowieża includes extensive undisturbed areas and is home to a rich wildlife of which 59 mammal species, including the European bison. 

But while on the Belarussian side over 80 percent of its extension is circumscribed under a national park, only 17 percent of Poland's forest enjoys a similar level of protection.

Watchdog environmental organizations say at least 160,000-180,000 trees have been felled since Szyzko's 2016 new management plan.

Neglect for the environment is an issue touching all corners of Eastern Europe. In Romania, Greenpeace estimates that three hectares of trees are lost every hour in the Carpathian mountains, also home to one of Europe's last patches of primeval forest. In Slovakia, official declarations that forests are growing undermined by aerial photography.

In Poland, Szyzko was eventually sacked in January 2017, only days after another controversial bill which he had sponsored was approved in parliament. The bill removes the obligation for private landowners to apply for permission to cut down trees or to inform local authorities that trees have been or will be removed.

The new environment minister, Henryk Kowalczyk, agreed to comply with the EU’s decision, but controversy still surrounds his administration. In May, he established a team to envision a long-term plan for the forest, including plans to replant the logged areas, which environmentalists claim could do more harm than good.

The protests

In May 2017, protestors established a permanent camp in the forest, often chaining themselves to harvest machines. The settlement, organized on a bottom-up basis, encouraged the development of online petitions and international awareness.

The situation detonated when some protestors were forcibly removed from the area, in handcuffs, by the Forestry Corps, and a legal ban was put in place to forbid entry to certain parts of the land. By the height of 2017 Summer, the Environment Ministry had declared any opposition to logging would be seen as political opposition.

As Poland’s state media, which had been increasingly subject of intervention by the government of the conservative Law and Justice party, began to attack these protests with vitriol, campaigners decided to season their message with patriotic sentiment, promoting a message of national heritage that is in line with the party's ideas.

A digital 3D model of the forest, produced by a collaboration between Greenpeace and Minecraft, allows players to explore Białowieża complete with biodiversity and weather patterns. Called “To the Last Tree Standing”, the game eventually removes the trees from players’ sight without warning, leaving them scrambling to find the last one."

Source at Global Voices here.

Civil war in Poland?

[Protesters demonstrate in support of the sacked Supreme Court judges.Photo: Getty] Photo: Getty

 "On Monday, the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, referred the case to Europe’s highest court, but Poland has a month to respond, and any ruling might come too late to stop the overhaul.

When [the] Law and Justice [party] came to power, it campaigned against what it saw as a corrupt bureaucracy, calling for Poland to “get up from its knees”. But for Mr Kaczynski, transforming the courts was always a central goal.

When his party was in power from 2005 to 2007, many of its legislative efforts were blocked by judges. He came to believe that the transition to democracy that started in 1989 was flawed because many former communists were allowed to hold on to their positions. Although the number of people from the communist era still in judicial positions has dwindled, the party says that communist thinking still infects the system.

So when the party returned to power in 2015, it moved swiftly to rebuild the judicial system. It stacked the Constitutional Court, which decides if legislation violates the constitution. Once that court was under the party’s control, its lawmakers passed a series of measures aimed at other parts of the court system.

But their first effort to reshape the Supreme Court, a year ago, was met with widespread protests. The government backed down.

Last winter, it proposed new measures, slightly watered down, that critics said would have the same effect — turning the Supreme Court into an instrument of the party.

In December, after a devastating report by the Venice Commission, which monitors rule-of-law issues for the European Union, the bloc of nations invoked Article 7 of its founding treaty to take action against Poland. It became the first country in the history of the union to be threatened with losing its voting rights.

This time, however, the government would not be deterred.

Under the legislation, Mr Duda can grant exemptions to the mandatory retirement age, but judges must ask him to do so. The president did so for Mr Iwulski on Tuesday.

Ms Gersdorf and many colleagues refused, setting the stage for the standoff on Wednesday morning.

The country’s deputy minister of justice, Michal Wojcik, told the Polish Press Agency that Ms Gersdorf had been allowed into the court because no citizen is barred entry, but he said she would not be allowed to rule on cases."

– New York Times  [sourced from The New Daily here.]

"Most EU states drifted backward on gay rights"

(Photo: Miguel Discart)

 "Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland still show the least respect of all EU countries toward sexual minorities, with activists calling for political “courage” and “backbone” by EU institutions. 

The three member states all scored below 20 percent on a map of human rights compliance in Europe published by Ilga-Europe, a pressure group in Brussels.

The NGO ranks countries on the basis of laws and policies that impact LGBTI people’s rights in six areas, including equality and non-discrimination, family, and hate speech and violence.

At the other end of the scale, Malta (88%), the UK (76%), and Belgium (72%) led the way, with France (71%) not far behind. 

The map, as in previous years, showed more red (non-compliant) or shades of red and orange in the east, compared to green (compliant) in the west. 

The rating did not always correlate with religious mores - Italy, a Roman Catholic country, scored just 27 percent, but Ireland, Portugal, Spain, which are also Catholic, scored between 52 percent and 69 percent.

Even though Italy scored low, it improved by 7 percent from 2016. 

Denmark, Finland, France, and Slovenia also improved slightly, but the group-of- five were the only ones to do so, while most counties eroded slightly and a few others stayed the same.

Meanwhile, the worst places in Europe to be gay were Azerbaijan (5%) and Russia (6%), where gay people have been rounded up, jailed, abused, and, on some occasions murdered in Russia’s Chechnya province despite EU outcries. 

Ilga-Europe said legal gender recognition in France, civil unions in Italy, and a ban on conversion therapy in Malta “made global headlines” last year, but it said LGBTI people in other parts of Europe were “literally living in fear of their lives”. 

It said marriage equality was “not the only marker of improvement” and the new frontier in Europe is the rights of trans and intersex people"

Read more from source at EU Observer here.

"Polish Pro-Choice Protest Movement Prepares Nationwide Strike [today] 'Black Monday' "

"Poland is readying for a massive general strike on October 3, as part of the next stage of a protest movement against legislation strengthening the national ban on abortion. Activists in Germany are also preparing solidarity actions.

Polish women's rights activists announced a nationwide strike of female workers intended to bring Polish society and the economy to a standstill on October 3.

The strike is a continuation of the “Black Protest”, a massive reaction to the government's latest plan to increase the severity of the anti-abortion law by including stipulations such as five-year prison terms for both women abortion patients — including rape victims — and doctors.

The first phase of the protests involved digital activism, with people expressing their disagreement with the proposed law by posting photos of themselves dressed in black, using the hashtags #czarnyprotest (“#BlackProtest,” found here on Facebook and Twitter) and #blackprotest (Facebook, Twitter).

After the Polish Parliament proceeded with consideration of the controversial legislative proposal on September 23, activists responded with massive demonstrations in tens of Polish cities as well as in several other cities around the world the following weekend.

Right-wing national-conservative party PiS (“Law and Justice”) holds a majority in the parliament and has the backing of the Catholic Church. 

Its lawmakers also voted to dismiss another piece of legislation that would have liberalized existing laws. Proposed by the “Save Women” pro-choice coalition, and supported by a petition with 150,000 signatures, it would have allowed for legal abortions up until the 12th week of pregnancy."


Read more from source at Global Voices here.

"East of interest" - My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

[A man passing by the “light border” installation along the remains of the Berlin Wall. Photo: AFP.]

How little we know about the culture of that 'area of darkness:' Eastern Europe. 

Living within a few hundred kilometres of this region, most of us would be hard pressed to give the names of more than a handful of directors, actors or music groups from somewhere as close as the Czech Republic or even from the former East Germany. Communism blotted out an entire world of creative expression to those who lived in the so-called free West of Europe and tastes in cultural fashion have hardly reclaimed any of it.

Reading Polish writer Agata Pyzik's recent ironically titled book "Poor But Sexy" helps to uncover some of what she calls the 'culture clashes' between the two sides of the continent. 

She argues that twenty five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe is as divided as ever. Only occasionally using too much post-modernist academic jargon, she makes the highly convincing case that the Western 'democratic' world has maintained an arrogant assumption that everybody wants to 'buy into' their capitalist belief systems. As well as this, she acknowledges that conservative political failures (including missed opportunities on the left) have meant that market forces and greed have also triumphed over social or collective responsibility in the East, just they clearly have triumphed in the West.

But what Pyzik also does is give the reader a new insight into the arts in a part of the planet when all creative action had a political edge to it. Russian films of the post-war era obviously had a propagandist purpose (very often) but the Sots Art movement also got away with mocking 'unberaable, ritualised Soviet life' while simultaneously showing how the average person could attempt a normal existence among the ruins of the old world.

As well as this, writers such as György Lukács used a kind of Brecht-like critical realism to 'inspire and activate the reader.' In his earlier book "Man Without Qualities" - a superb title - he largely rejects modernity, seeing 'the tragedy of the modern artist as someone who lost the ground under their feet.' Surprisingly, he views this as 'an advance rather than a difficulty.' 

Again and again in Eastern Bloc culture Pyzik points out examples of the contradictions and paradoxes of the kind that seem to me to be a big part of French thinking but are so often overly simplified into the black-and-white certainties of Iberian habits of mind.

Another strength of this book is that it recognises the unheralded contribution of women in the East. 

It took the feminist film director Agnieska to accurately predict how female activism in Poland's Solidarity movement would be wiped from popular memory and when this is combined with how sexuality was restricted and banned in the movies across Communist nations, it is alarming how the idea of feminine purity was so dominant. In a patriarchal Catholic Poland 'full of open sexism' precious few women characters of equality got through to be seen.

And in this book there are countless references to the culture from the West so that we are not lost in unfamiliar names. Everyone from David Bowie to Ken Loach to Art of Noise gets a mention. There are plenty of relevant comparisons with contemporary Eastern culture, Pyzik finds. She ends with the disturbing statement that the populace of Eastern Europe "so strongly believe we don't deserve the normal conditions of a social democracy that we hardly fight for it." Let's not make that same mistake in other parts of the planet.


[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2016.]

A Polish view on Spain’s difficulties

"It is hard to see how the stifling austerity measures are going to get the Spanish economy out of recession and decrease unemployment. What is certain is that even if the EU manages to save Greece from bankruptcy-- something which most economists agree is at best doubtful-- in the case of a similar crisis involving Spain there will not be enough money for a bailout."

Text of article by Krzysztof Kęciek from 'Przegłąd' magazine.

Translated by blogger Czarny Kot, a former Spanish resident.

Read more here.

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This article makes some pretty valid points. The use of computers is a bit behind the times...though that is now changing. Mentalities are more often the problem but it is the old fashioned nature of this country that can sometimes be its best points.

The only point I would dispute in this article relates to the claim that "the [construction] boom was fuelled by mortgages." This is only partly true because it does not acknowledge the pushing up of land/property prices by those who bought up big time despite living outside Spain.

Equally, the author does not mention share prices and other financial market speculation as a major factor in overheating the economy. His suggestion that the protestors have largely stopped protesting is also incorrect.

Spain's heroes and Poland's heroes

A Polish blogger posts an enjoyable rant and rave that expresses so well the completely understandable outrage with a place of great culture and history being used as nothing more than a background for ignorant tourists to treat with indifference. A new statue in Krakov of Michael Jackson? (An (unpunished) child molester who could once sing and dance very well and is even respected by some (younger) people here in Spain.)

The Polish blogger provides a picture of semi-undressed "girls in Zywiec T Shirts." An image that reminded me of those living human mannequins in Kubrick's awful "Eyes Wide Shut" film: ready to serve as fleshy robots. In the town where I live not far from Barcelona there is even a cinema named in Kubrick's honour! The world picks some strange people to make heroes of.