ANALYSIS: Ukraine and Poland seek reconciliation over grisly history (05/21/06)

ANALYSIS

Ukraine and Poland seek reconciliation over grisly history

by Jan Maksymiuk
RFE/RL Newsline

May 12

When Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and his Polish counterpart, Lech Kaczynski, travel together to the Polish village of Pawlokoma, they will be taking another step toward coming to terms with their nations' common historical legacy.

One of the darker stains of that legacy is represented by the village of Pawlokoma, where ethnic Ukrainian inhabitants were killed by a Polish military group in 1945. The Ukrainian and Polish presidents will attempt to rectify that tragedy by unveiling a memorial to the victims during their visit.

Today, Pawlokoma is home to about 500 residents in southeastern Poland, 50 kilometers from the Polish-Ukrainian border.

But prior to the outbreak of World War II, the Polish village boasted a population of 1,200 - about 900 Greek-Catholic (Uniate) Ukrainians living among Roman Catholic Poles.

In March 1945 a detachment of Polish anti-Nazi guerrillas from the Home Army, or Armija Krajowa (AK), subordinated to the Polish émigré government in London shot to death hundreds of Ukrainian inhabitants of Pawlokoma. The Ukrainians were herded into a local Greek-Catholic church, interrogated and likely tortured, and then taken to a local cemetery where they were executed.

Presidents Yushchenko and Kaczynski were to travel to Pawlokoma to unveil a memorial dedicated to that tragic event. An inscription on the memorial places the number of victims of the 1945 massacre at 365.

However, this figure is questioned by some Polish historians, including Zdzislaw Konieczny.

Mr. Konieczny - who lives in Peremyshl some 40 kilometers from Pawlokoma - is the author of a book on the Pawlokoma massacre. According to him, the AK group killed some 150 Ukrainian men in Pawlokoma - while women and children were spared and ordered to march to Ukraine.

Mr. Konieczny argues that the massacre was retaliation for numerous killings of Poles from Pawlokoma and neighboring villages carried out by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

The UPA was created by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in Nazi-occupied Ukraine in 1942. The armed force pursued the ideal of an independent Ukraine, which led it to fight Polish, Soviet and Nazi forces at various times.

Mr. Konieczny said in an interview with the Polish daily Nasz Dziennik on May 10 that the immediate motive behind the massacre was the abduction by the UPA of a dozen Poles from Pawlokoma in January 1945. The then-Polish Communist police in the area, according to Mr. Konieczny, were too weak to react to the capture, while Soviet troops were not trusted by the local population.

"In this situation the Polish pro-independence underground decided to conduct a retaliatory action in Pawlokoma, which had been known for anti-Polish manifestations. The purpose of [this action] was to warn the OUN-UPA that Poles would not tolerate its further attacks against and killings of the Polish population in Pawlokoma and neighboring villages," Mr. Konieczny told Nasz Dziennik.

Petro Potichny, a Ukrainian emigre historian and UPA veteran, wrote a book on Pawlokoma in which he traced the history of the village back to the 15th century.

Poland's current eastern border with Ukraine and Belarus lies roughly along the Curzon Line. It originated as a demarcation line proposed in 1919 by the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, as a possible armistice line between Poland and Bolshevik Russia during the Polish-Soviet war.

Dr. Potichny told RFE/RL that the Pawlokoma massacre reflects a wider pattern of the behavior of Poles toward Ukrainians during World War II along the ethnic Ukrainian-Polish borderland on both sides of the Curzon Line.

"It was not an isolated episode. It was, so to say, a [purposeful] policy of the Polish nationalist underground," Dr. Potichny said. "But not only that of the nationalistic underground. The Communist authorities, too, did similar things. They primarily intended to finally remove Ukrainians from these lands. Therefore, Pawlokoma is just a symbol of all that."

But Dr. Potichny admits that Ukrainians, too, were responsible for the murderous Ukrainian-Polish war fought by the UPA and the AK during the Nazi occupation and afterward.

"If one is to attribute blame, one needs to say that the Ukrainians are mostly to blame for what took place east of the Curzon Line, while the Poles are mostly to blame for what took place west of this line," Dr. Potichny said.

In July 2003, the then-presidents of Ukraine and Poland - Leonid Kuchma and Aleksander Kwasniewski, respectively - met in the village of Pavlivka in the Ukrainian region of Volyn to commemorate ethnic Poles murdered by the UPA in 1943. Presidents Kuchma and Kwasniewski unveiled a memorial to several hundred Poles killed by the UPA in that particular village.

According to Poland's National Remembrance Institute, in 1943 the UPA murdered some 60,000 civilian Poles in Volyn, in anticipation of an independent Ukrainian state after the war and a plebiscite on which country, Poland or Ukraine, should possess the disputed area. The Polish AK subsequently resorted to retaliatory actions. According to Ukrainian estimates, the AK may have killed in retaliation as many as 20,000 Ukrainians in Volyn.

The post-war period only added to the Polish-Ukrainian record of mutual wrongs and prejudices. In 1947 the Polish Communist government forcibly resettled some 140,000 Ukrainians from their native areas in southeastern Poland to Poland's newly acquired northern and western territories. The official excuse for that mass expulsion was the desire to undercut the social base of support for the UPA in the area.

Will the Ukrainian and Polish governments manage to transfer their official determination to reconcile both nations over their history to ordinary Ukrainians and Poles? This may prove to be a tricky task. But as Polish historian Bogumila Berdychowska from Warsaw argued to RFE/RL, this task, if completed, could beneficially invigorate the development of Polish-Ukrainian relations, which in other respects are now almost exemplary.

"Closing historical accounts is very important for present-day politics," Ms. Berdychowska said. "The relations between independent Ukraine and Poland testify to one thing: There are no principal disagreements as regards contemporary politics [between the two countries]; there are no principal disagreements as regards economic relations. Actually, the only source of conflicts lies in history."

In 2002, President Kwasniewski officially condemned the forcible resettlement of Polish Ukrainians by the Communist authorities in 1947. Poles expected that President Kuchma in 2003 would respond with an official apology for the wartime massacres of Poles in Volyn. But Mr. Kuchma did not fulfill that expectation.

One should not expect any official apologies from President Yushchenko or President Kaczynski in Pawlokoma. However, their meeting there seems to be a significant, even if small, step toward Ukrainian-Polish reconciliation.

Natalia Tchourikova of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service contributed to this article.

Jan Maksymiuk is the Belarus and Ukraine specialist on the staff of RFE/RL Newsline.

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