Poland: Country mourns loss of leader

A grief-stricken Poland came to a standstill yesterday as the body of Lech Kaczynski, the president, was returned home to Warsaw after Saturday’s aircraft crash in Russia in which he and dozens of Poland’s political and military elite died.

The red and white national banner fluttered over the president’s coffin, while a guard of honour stood at attention.

His weeping daughter, Marta, and the president’s twin brother, Jaroslaw, leader of the opposition Law and Justice party, looked on. Elsewhere in the Polish capital, thousands of people crowded in front of the presidential palace, laying flowers and lighting candles, as boy and girl scouts kept order.

The country came to a halt for two minutes at noon as sirens sounded to remember the dead. Polish flags decorated with black ribbons flew from houses and balconies.

The shock to the country has been immense. The crash of the Tupolev Tu-154 airliner near a foggy runway in the city of Smolensk killed all 96 people aboard, among them the central bank governor, and the country’s most distinguished officials, including senior military figures, politicians, ministers, bishops and other dignitaries.

“The modern world has not seen such an event,” said Donald Tusk, prime minister, who flew on Saturday to Smolensk where he met Vladimir Putin, his Russian counterpart, and laid flowers at the wreckage of the Polish government aircraft.

The delegation was on its way to a remembrance service at the Katyn forest where the Soviets had executed 4,000 Polish officers, of the 22,000 Poles killed in 1940 on the orders of Josef Stalin.

The linking of the historical tragedy, which wiped out much of prewar Poland’s elite, with the current calamity has made the impact even greater.

“Then they shot our intelligentsia in the back of the head, now we’ve lost part of the intellectual elite of our nation in an airplane accident. It is Katyn part two,” Lech Walesa, Poland’s former president and Nobel laureate, told the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper.

The dead included Kaczynski’s wife, Maria; Ryszard Kaczorowski, the last president of the London-based Polish government-in-exile; Slawomir Skrzypek, the governor of the central bank; Jerzy Szmajdzinski, presidential candidate for the leftwing Democratic-Left Alliance; and Anna Walentynowicz, the former dock worker whose sacking helped to inspire the Solidarity strike that led to the overthrow of communism.

Kaczynski was the first of the dead to be returned to Warsaw. The other bodies have been retrieved from the wreckage and taken to Moscow for identification before being sent home.

Investigators are analysing evidence from the flight recorders.

Poland is in a week of mourning, which was declared by Bronislaw Komorowski, speaker of parliament and acting president. He must set a date for presidential elections. Scheduled for the autumn, they will probably take place in late June.