NO 'HUMAN RIGHTS' FOR 'NAZIS'

 

Young Poles attacked
for giving the salute

 

Polish coalition under fire after Nazi salute
Reuters Friday, 1 December 2006

By NATALIA REITER

WARSAW — Human rights groups called on Friday for the youth wing of one of Poland's ruling coalition parties to be banned after a newspaper published photographs of a group giving Nazi salutes.

Daily newspaper Dziennik showed stills of an amateur video of what it said were members of the All-Poland Youth, a wing of the nationalist League of Polish Families, raising their arms in a Nazi salute around burning Swastika torches.

The youth group said the social gathering in the southern Polish city of Zabrze in 2004 was not organized by its members and had no connection to their organization.

The founder of the youth group is Roman Giertych, the deputy prime
minister and education minister.

Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski told reporters on Wednesday the incident was "a scandal" and said such behavior could not be accepted in a country "where millions were killed by Hitler's Nazi regime."

The prosecutors office in Zabrze is investigating the case. Under Polish law, the promotion of fascism is a crime which can carry up to two years in prison.

Opposition parties and human rights groups said they intended to file a request to a court to ban the youth group and called on the government to dismiss Giertych.

"This organization is promoting fascism ... We will request it is outlawed," said Katarzyna Piekarska, a member of the leftist Democratic Left Alliance. "It is a scandal that (Roman) Giertych is in charge of educating our youth."

Since joining a coalition with the League of Polish Families and the leftist Self-Defense Party in May, the ruling conservative Law and Justice Party has been criticized for turning a blind eye to racism in the ex-Communist EU member.

The European parliament condemned the League this year as one of the culprits behind a "rise in racist, xenophobic, anti-semitic and homophobic intolerance" in Poland.

The roots of the All-Poland Youth go back to the 1920s when the group had a strongly anti-Semitic and nationalist program, actively discriminating against Poland's Jewish community, which was then the largest in the world.

All-Poland Youth members attacked Jewish students and campaigned for them to be banned from attending public universities. Giertych reactivated the organization in 1989.