Polish opposition wants to amend disputed Holocaust bill

WARSAW, Poland — The main Polish opposition party on Tuesday tables an amendment to the government’s controversial Holocaust bill, which was meant to defend Warsaw’s image abroad but instead stoked tensions with Israel, Ukraine, and the US.

However, the liberal Civic Platform (PO) party’s proposal has no chance of being adopted since the governing right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party controls both houses of parliament.

“The political crisis triggered by clumsy and disastrous diplomacy, by thoughtless remarks, has brought us to a point where we politicians are forced to react,” PO leader Grzegorz Schetyna tells reporters.

“We are proposing a draft amendment that should correct the mistakes.”

Poland’s opposition suggests replacing the bill’s controversial passage with penalties against “anyone who, publicly and contrary to the facts, attributes to the Polish state responsibility or co-responsibility for the German Third Reich’s creation of concentration and death camps, as well as for the genocide that took place there, or who minimizes to a flagrant degree the responsibility of the real authors of these crimes by using the terms ‘Polish death camps’ and ‘Polish concentration camps.'”

The PO also suggests deleting a passage concerning crimes committed against Poles by Ukrainians, which according to Kiev presents Ukrainians as nothing but “nationalist criminals” and “Third Reich collaborators.”

— AFP