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Poland yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of a plane crash in Russia that killed president Lech Kaczynski and dozens of other high-profile Poles, amid bitter domestic divisions and sparring with Moscow. At 8:41 am (Warsaw time), the exact time of the April 10, 2010, tragedy in Smolensk, western Russia, a visibly emotional Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski paid silent tribute to his predecessor and the 95 other victims at a memorial in a Warsaw church. Komorowski and Prime Minister Donald Tusk placed candles at the foot of the memorial, a traditional sign of mourning in Catholic Poland. Later, at a monument in Warsaw's Powazki cemetery where many of the crash victims lie alongside past Polish icons, Komorowski honored the dead. "A year has gone by, a whole year since the moment when, for many of us standing here now in Powazki cemetery, the world collapsed," he said. He appealed for the tragedy not to be a source of strife. Underlining deep splits, however, the late president's identical twin and former premier, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, boycotted official events. Russia yesterday stoked the flames of a new diplomatic flare-up with Poland by expressing "bewilderment" at Polish anger over its decision to replace a plaque marking the death of the president. The new shorter version is written in both Polish and Russian and makes no mention of Katyn – a tragedy that was covered up until the late Soviet era by Moscow and which remains a source of friction between the two countries. A Russian foreign ministry official angrily dismissed the Polish complaints. "The Russian foreign ministry expects Polish officials to know that Russian is the state language of the Russian Federation," the unnamed Russian official told local news agencies. He added that the Russian side had informed Poland in advance that the plaque would be replaced with one in Russian and Polish. "In this connection, the comments of the official representative of the Polish foreign ministry cause bewilderment," he said. AFP |
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