Poland's Holocaust law and the ghosts from the past

The news has been spread everywhere in Europe and not only: Poland’s Senate approved a highly controversial bill on Thursday that bans any Holocaust accusations against Poles as well as descriptions of Nazi death camps as Polish (source The Washington Post). If President Duda will approve it, the law will become effective with a penalty for the transgressors up to three years in jail.

It is a little bit difficult to understand why this law was issued.

During the II WW, six millions of poles died (the half were Jewish). Poland is the first country for number of Righteous Among the Nations (an honorific used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis): 6706. 

It is also true that some Poles helped Nazis during the occupation and the war like in the case of the Jedwabne pogrom, where 340 Polish Jews were killed by a group of Polish inhabitants of the town with the complicity of the Nazis.

US and Israel stated that this law is against the freedom of speech and also against the responsibilities of Poles during the II World War.

What I see is that it looks hard for all the countries take their own responsibility on the shame on the Holocaust and on the caused that originated the war. 

In a very interesting book - Origins Of The Second World War - the author, A.J.P. Taylor, in the Sixties was claiming how not only Germany was the cause of the war, but many other events under the responsibility of all the European Countries, UK and France of course, but also Poland and Czechoslovakia for instance.

Auschwitz was a Nazi camp and even if it is within the Polish border, it was created by the Germans during their occupation. But this doesn't mean deny the responsibility of everybody in what happened. 

An interesting article by Jonathan Freedland published on The Gardian explains well the Polish problem:

It’s not hard to see why this has happened. Polish nationalists want Poles to have been the untainted victims of Nazism: it’s hard to admit that too many were willing assistants to genocide. Like almost every nation occupied by the Nazis, and unlike Germany itself, Poland has not yet made a clear-eyed reckoning with its past. It has not fully wrestled with the fact that a Jewish community that once made up 10% of its population, and which was the largest in Europe, has gone, murdered en masse in just over three years. “Poland is not at peace with its Jewish ghosts,” says [Konstanty] Gebert. “These are phantom limbs. You amputate the limb and it still hurts.”

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Crimea: some information to understand the current situation

The Ukrainian crisis is at the center of the international attention. The 11th March Crimean Parliament has voted the annexation to Russia, position confirmed from a contested referendum five days later. The 18^th March finally, this decision has been formalized with an agreement between Putin and the Prime minister of Crimea, Sergey Akesenov, while the official Government of Kiev  and the International Community haven’t recognized the vote.

I didn't have enough information to understand the situation in Ukraine, but I really wanted to know something more about Crimea and its history. In particular, I wanted to answer to three questions: how is the population of Crimea make up? Which are the most important pillars of the Crimean economy? Why is this Region so strategic for Moscow? 

First of all, Crimea has a population of around 2 millions of people officially made up by the 58% of Russians, 24% of Ukrainians and 12% of Tatars. It is important to remember that in 1944 the entire population of Tatars was deported in Turkey, accused by Stalin of collaboration with Nazis. So the percentage of Tatars in Crimea doesn’t reflect the importance of this group in the history of the region. The wide majority of Russians can be considered obvious: the region belonged to Russia till 1954, when it was donated to Kiev by Khrushchev in occasion of the 300th anniversary of Ukraine becoming a part of the Russian Empire. 

Regarding the economy, Crimea is a quite poor territory: the most important sectors are tourism and agriculture, but the region is reach of natural gas. The GDP per capita is around the 66% lower of the average in Ukraine and the 80% of the Russian one. Some sources estimate that the economy of the region depends for the 75% directly from the Government of Kiev. 

Crimea doesn’t seem attractive enough to justify the interest of Russia. The economy in quite modest and about the population, there are larger Russian communities in Countries like Kazakhstan (4 million), Belarus ( 1,2 millions) and in Ukraine itself there are 8 millions of Russians.

So why is Crimea so strategic for Russia? There are at least two reasons: one military and one energetic. 

Sebastopol hosts the main military base of the Russian Navy in the Black See (and consequently in the Mediterranean). Russia has two other basis, Novorossiysk and Temryuk, but the deep waters of Sebastopol and the better position explains why Russia has assigned on Crimea the development of its navy. Moscow also has built port infrastructures ex novo: the lost of this region could represent the inability to use its navy in that area and also huge investments for the construction of new basis. 

Moreover, there is an energetic reason that makes Crimea so important: there are two pipelines crossing the Black Sea, the Blue Stream from Russia to Turkey and the South Stream from Russia to Europe. The control of the Black Sea means also the protection of two important energetic lines.

Finally, it is clear why Russia wants to get Crimea. I think it will be more difficult to comprehend if Moscow will be able to face the political and especially the economical sanctions of the International Community, while someone has estimated the annexation of Crimea for the Kremlin economy will cost around 3 billions of dollars per year.

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