Conspiracy theory over crash that killed president and more than 90 other leading Poles deepens emotional divisions in Poland
Every evening, come snow, wind or rain, a small crowd gathers for an outdoor mass by a cross made of red and white candles laid before the presidential palace in central Warsaw.
The Catholic mass is for President Lech Kaczynski, his wife and 94 other leading Poles killed a year ago when their plane crashed in fog while landing at the Russian city of Smolensk. With the first anniversary of the disaster looming on Sunday, it is clear that for many Poles the grief is still raw.
The president and his entourage had been on their way to commemorate another national tragedy: the Soviet murder of 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals in 1940. The Polish-Russian ceremony was to have acknowledged a crime long denied by Moscow. It was intended to salve decades of pain, but instead the crash just opened a new wound on top of an old scar.
Worse still, instead of uniting the country the crash has deepened emotional divisions in Polish society to the point where normal politics has become almost impossible. A small but vociferous minority of Poles insist the Smolensk crash was no accident, but a Russian conspiracy involving artificial fog and deliberately misleading information from Smolensk air traffic control. From that viewpoint, the prime minister, Donald Tusk, and the new president, Bronislaw Komorowski, are at best dupes, and at worse traitorous accomplices of Moscow.
That is why the vigil is kept up, night after night, in public in front of the palace just outside Warsaw's old town. It signifies not just grief, but accusation.
"For many people, it looks like assassination, which is high treason and that is why they want to cover it up," said a man at the vigil on a recent cold spring night. He gave his name only as Jerzy, saying he could lose his job by publicly airing his views.
Jerzy's mostly elderly group call themselves the "Defenders of the Cross" because they had held mass by a three-metre wooden cross erected by scouts after the disaster. Its removal by security guards to a chapel inside the palace last September is another cause of bitterness and distrust.
Jeering and occasional scuffles between the "Defenders" and younger counter-demonstrators making fun of them has brought an inter-generational conflict – between conservative Catholic nationalists and modern secularists – into the open.
The poison has leaked straight into mainstream politics. The conspiracy theorists represent no more than 20% of the population, but they are represented by the main opposition party, Law and Justice. Led by the late president's twin brother, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, it has focused on Smolensk to the exclusion of virtually everything else.
The rift is not fading with time. Marta Kaczynska, Lech's daughter, restated her suspicions about the crash earlier this week. "I am not a conspiracy theorist. But the many inconsistencies and puzzles surrounding the case mean that it is not possible to rule out an assassination attempt," she told Germany's Focus magazine.
"It is still unclear why the airport in Smolensk was not closed during such bad weather conditions," Kaczynska said. "The maps the Polish pilots were given were old. There is no explanation for that sort of sudden fog."
The official Russian investigation, published in January, said that the plane's captain, Arkadiusz Protasiuk, was in fact repeatedly warned about the fog, but pressed on regardless, appearing to feel under pressure from his powerful passengers to land.
The report suggested that Protasiuk had been influenced by an incident in 2008. He had been the co-pilot in the presidential plane when the captain had defied an order from Lech Kaczynski to make a risky landing in Tbilisi, Georgia. According to Polish reports of the incident, the president was furious and declared: "If someone decides to become a pilot, he can't be a coward." The captain in question never piloted the presidential flight again.
Adding to the silent pressure of that memory, the Russian report said, was the presence of the head of the Polish air force, General Andrzej Blasik, who walked into the cockpit two minutes before the Smolensk crash appearing to be slightly inebriated.
According to opinion surveys, most Poles are prepared to accept that pilot error played a role. Nevertheless there is widespread anger at the Russian report, which makes no criticism of the Smolensk air traffic controllers, who seem to have fallen silent for many of the crucial minutes, apparently on the phone to Moscow asking for guidance in such a diplomatically tricky situation.
"The Russian commission has a tradition of blaming the pilot," said Eugeniusz Smolar, a senior fellow at the Polish Institute of International Affairs. "If they had put half a page on Smolensk not being able to accept planes in bad weather, and on how the air traffic controllers were on the phone to Moscow, the report would not have made such a really bad impression in Poland."
Konstanty Gebert, a Polish journalist and essayist, believes the continuing national divisions over Smolensk will never be resolved by a public inquiry, however transparently it is conducted, because they reflect a well of long-standing anger and resentment in modern Poland.
"The problem is we never had a party to celebrate throwing out the commies. We were working so hard to be part of the post-nationalist transatlantic norm, we robbed millions of Poles of the right to a celebration," Gebert said.
"Now it's not going to happen. The young generation doesn't want to know, and a generation that wasted half its life under communism and then went through the pain of transition feels like it was robbed. This thing has a grip on a minority but it's an extremely mobilised minority. It's something that is here to stay."