Polish daily says Foreign Ministry sidelines top diplomats suspected
of disloyalty

Gazeta Wyborcza website, Warsaw
2 Jul 07

[Report by Jacek Pawlicki: "Fotyga’s Dunce Bench" – first paragraph
published in boldface]

They write official memos, although often for themselves. They come to
work, although no one needs them. The greatest experts, whom no one at
the Foreign Ministry listens to.

This is not about any retired diplomats’ club, but rather the dunce
bench of the Polish Foreign Ministry, which includes experience
diplomats, former ministers and deputy ministers. For various reasons,
they have fallen out of favour with those in power. No other country in
Europe would allow itself to ignore such individuals. Yet in Poland,
this is being done by a party whose reserve bench of personnel – as
concerns foreign policy – is essentially empty. And by the foreign
minister from this party, who is experiencing difficulty in finding the
right people to man embassies in such key countries for Polish foreign
policy as France, Italy, and Spain.

Expert Paying Social Visits to the Foreign Ministry

The term "dunce bench" is said to have been coined by former Foreign
Minister Stefan Meller, at the birthday celebration of another former
foreign minister, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski. The salon diplomats rejected
by PiS do stick together. They share Solidarity backgrounds, a desire
to serve the country, and often a dislike for what is going on in
Polish politics. And one more thing: almost all of them lost their
previous positions at the Foreign Ministry in an atmosphere of
innuendos, without any clearly stated accusations, frequently being
suspected of disloyalty. Now most of them are employed as low-level
clerks. All of them collect their salaries, although without any
managerial bonuses.

The Foreign Ministry leadership does not expect much from them. And
were it not for the fact that they are experts whose qualifications are
going to waste, we might say that PiS has granted them excellent
vacations. The dean of the dunce bench, Stefan Meller, himself stepped
down as foreign minister in the PiS government in May 2006, as a sign
of protest against Andrzej Lepper’s joining the cabinet. He retained a
job at the Foreign Ministry – in the Eastern European department, where
he is officially responsible for Armenian-Turkish relations. He
essentially pays social visits to the ministry, since he has been
relieved of the obligation to come to work.

Stanislaw Komorowski, a physicist, diplomat, and former ambassador the
Hague and London, also stepped down as deputy foreign minister of his
own volition, in spring 2006. He did so, as he explained to Gazeta
Wyborcza, because he felt awkward as undersecretary of state given the
political situation at the time. He could be an excellent ambassador in
any European capital, yet he is a rank-and-file employee at the
ministry’s Asia and Pacific department (of which he was once director).
Officially he is responsible for Europe’s relations with Asia, but
everyone in the Foreign Ministry corridors knows that is fiction.

Off the record, President Lech Kaczynski is known to hold it against
Komorowski that he resigned via Gazeta Wyborcza (we were the first to
write about his decision). That is why he allegedly told Komorowski
that as long as he was president, Komorowski would never be sent out on
any diplomatic posting.

Disappearing From the Minister’s View

The Foreign Ministry’s archives, whose buildings are located in a
different part of Warsaw than the main ministry building on Sucha
Street, has become an extension of the dunce bench. The talk in the
corridors is that this is where the current leaders send people whom
Minister Fotyga does not want to set eyes on. Henryk Szlajfer,
dismissed from the post of director of the North American department in
autumn 2006 due to suspicions that he had lied on his vetting
statement, has just become head of the archives.

Szlajfer, a former oppositionist and a participant in the March 1968
events, was slated to become ambassador to the United States when
allegations publicly appeared in June 2005 that he had cooperated with
the SB [Communist-era Security Service]. Szlajfer denied this and
wanted to have his name cleared by the vetting court. Yet the court
refused, since he did not hold any post that was subject to vetting
requirements. The case has not been cleared up to this very day, and
Szlajfer’s skills and experience have been locked up in the archives.

Also waiting on the dunce bench is Pawel Dobrowolski, former director
of the information system department, Foreign Ministry press spokesman
during Meller’s time, and former ambassador to Ottowa. He lost his post
as director during the uproar of the so-called potato affair (in July
2006, the German daily Tageszeitung called President Kaczynski a
potato). What Dobrowolski had done wrong was to place that article on
the Foreign Ministry’s publicly accessible web page reviewing foreign
press articles writing about Poland. That site is now no more, and
Dobrowolski is a rank-and-file employee of the department where he was
previously director. Albeit only on paper – in reality, no one requires
anything from him.

A Leak and the Deputy Minister Is Gone

One special case is that of Ryszard Schnepf, former secretary of state
and foreign affairs adviser to Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz,
forced to resign in May 2006. Officially because, as he himself said,
"the concept he was developing of having EU countries, including
Poland, join the Baltic gas pipeline construction project did not win
his superiors’ recognition, and his idea itself was regrettably
publicized." Off the record, he is known to have become a scapegoat: he
said something too early, something Marcinkiewicz was meant to publicly
announce, something the Kaczynski brothers did not want to consent to.

Schnepf wanted to be ambassador in Madrid (he knows Spanish and the
Spanish political scene) or one of the countries in Latin America (he
was ambassador to Uruguay). He stands no chance, since he once fell
afoul with Jan Kobylanski, a controversial businessman from Uruguay now
influential at the Foreign Ministry. As consolation, a special position
for global problems was created at the Foreign Ministry for Schnepf.
His colleagues from the Foreign Ministry joke that he is "fighting bird
flu." In his free time between fighting global threats, Schnepf teaches
Spanish studies.

Deputy Foreign Minister Witold Sobkow has also been pushed onto the
dunce bench. In October, this experienced diplomat and former
ambassador to Ireland became deputy foreign minister responsible for
European affairs. But his contacts with Minister Fotyga did not go very
well. And so Sobkow ceased to be deputy minister in December. The
Foreign Ministry took advantage of a leak made to a certain daily,
which wrote that he allegedly had difficulty with gaining clearance
from the Internal Security Agency [ABW] for confidential documents.
Sobkow denied that, but Fotyga asked the ABW to check the deputy
minister in detail.

Ultimately the ABW decided that Sobkow was clean as a whistle, but he
did not come back into favour. He became a rank-and-file employee at
the department for foreign policy strategy and planning. Sometimes he
travels abroad to various conferences and seminars. He himself has
imposed discipline on his work – setting himself the goal of writing
two analytic notes per week, to stay in shape. As an Italian studies
specialist he would be an excellent candidate for the post of
ambassador in Rome, but the Foreign Ministry does not have anyone to
send there.