Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski (left) with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, February 2016 | Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
Polish foreign minister: No more ‘negro mentality’ toward US
Witold Waszczykowski’s words get him into trouble again.
By
JAN CIENSKI
3/30/16, 5:59 PM CET
Poland’s new government has shed the country’s “negro mentality” when it comes to relations with the United States, Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski said on Polish public television.
Waszczykowski’s use of murzyńskości, a phrase insulting in both Polish and English, was supposed to be his way of showing that Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) government has broken with the supposed servile attitude towards Washington demonstrated by the previous government.
Waszczykowski was defending the government’s foreign policy record at a time when President Andrzej Duda is under fire for not meeting one-on-one with Barack Obama during this week’s nuclear summit in Washington.
“There will be a short meeting because there isn’t time for more during a summit,” an irritated Waszczykowski told the television interviewer Tuesday.
Although Law and Justice has long seen the U.S. as Poland’s most reliable foreign policy ally, there is a strain in the relationship under the new government.
A crisis over the functioning of the Constitutional Tribunal, Poland’s highest court, and the government’s tightening control over public radio and television has prompted concern from Washington, but that has been brushed aside by Polish authorities as being uninformed or inspired by the opposition.
However, the political opposition has seized on indications of tension between Warsaw and Washington to criticize the government at a time when it hopes to strengthen U.S. commitment to beefing up NATO’s military presence in Central Europe.
“We will become a third-ranking country in NATO and the EU,” warned Ryszard Petru, leader of the Modern opposition party, in an interview with the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper. “We can see it already in international relations, including with our most important partner — the United States.”
Those kinds of attacks from the opposition have put the president and the government on the defensive. In his interview, Waszczykowski stressed that he and other ministers have met senior U.S. officials
Relations are “much better than when Radek Sikorski was Poland’s foreign minister,” Waszczykowski told Poland’s TVN television on Wednesday.
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It was Sikorski — foreign minister from 2007-2014 — who first used the term “negro mentality” when assessing relations with the U.S. during a 2014 private dinner with former Finance Minister Jacek Rostowki. The conversation was illegally recorded and splashed all over Polish media. That recording was one of the factors that disenchanted voters and led Civic Platform to its electoral defeat last October.
“Quoting illegally recorded conversations isn’t an activity for gentlemen,” Sikorski tweeted on Wednesday in response to Waszczykowski’s comments.
Waszczykowski’s vocabulary quickly turned into the main story. Even Stanisław Karczewski, the Law and Justice speaker of the Senate, the upper chamber of parliament, responded: ” These are words that should never be spoken.”
Waszczykowski’s boss, Prime Minister Beata Szydło, also stepped in, saying, “It’s a term which was once used by former minister Radosław Sikorski. In my opinion it’s an unfortunate term.”
It’s not the first time the minister’s language has gotten him into trouble.
In a January interview with German tabloid Bild, he denounced vegetarians, cyclists, racial mixing and renewable energy as hallmarks of a left-wing ideology that “has little in common with traditional Polish values.”
He tangled with the organizers of a Düsseldorf carnival parade that had a float poking fun at Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of PiS and Poland’s most powerful politician.
Waszczykowski has also been in trouble with Kaczyński for his decision to invite the Venice Commission, the legal advisory body of the Council of Europe, to Poland to examine the dispute around the Constitutional Tribunal. The commission’s report heaped blame on the government for the crisis, undermining Waszczykowski’s position in the cabinet.
He again made the news at the time of the report, comparing the president of the tribunal to “an Iranian ayatollah.”
