An interesting pair of Ambassadorial letters to newspapers have appeared in recent days.
First, HM Ambassador in Poland Ric Todd wrote in July to the Polish paper Rzeczpospolita about the death in a plane accident in 1943 in Gibraltar of General Sikorski.
Various Poles continue to insist that this death was suspicious, with one latest theory being that the conniving British persuaded some Poles to effect sabotage. Huge efforts have been made down the years to investigate this tragedy, but the fact that nothing suspicious is ever found makes those who have suspicions even more suspicious.
Ambassador Todd aims once again to put the record straight:
The facts are sad but simple. Plane travel was more dangerous then than it is now. People who travelled by air during the war took risks. General Sikorski was a brave man who took those risks to see his troops and died in a plane crash. The British Government has already released all documents in its archives relating to the circumstances of General Sikorski’s death, including the report of the 1943 Royal Air Force Commission of Inquiry and 1969 Report of the investigation into the accident, carried out by the then Co-ordinator of Intelligence, Sir Dick White.
Nothing has been found in the Secret Intelligence files to link Kim Philby or anyone else with General Sikorski’s death. There is nothing to indicate that his death was not accidental. All the documents are in the public domain and are accessible to all researchers in the National Archives in
Separately the Polish Ambassador in London Barbara Tuge-Erecinska has written to the Times about an article about Poles in the UK by Giles Coren, which in his usual bruising style takes up the theme of Polish anti-semitism:
… I thought how interesting it was, at a time when many of the current generation of Polish immigrants are said to be returning home because the construction work is drying up, that we were all still here – dozens of us descended from a single Pole who came in 1903 – more than 100 years later. Not one of us has gone back. Even to visit.
That is the difference between the two kinds of migration, you see. The economic and the humanitarian. We Corens are here, now, because the ancestors of these Poles now going home used to amuse themselves at Easter by locking Jews in the synagogue and setting fire to it. Harry didn’t leave in the hope of finding a better life. Just a life. The option to return was not there for him, for obvious reasons, and by 1945 the Poland he had left did not exist anymore.
My sympathy for the plight of the modern Polack is thus limited, and if England is not the land of milk and honey it appeared to them three or four years ago, then, frankly, they can clear off out of it.
The Polish Ambassador replies:
… The issue of Polish-Jewish relations has been unfairly and deeply falsified in his emotional text. During the Second World War Poland was the target of the Nazi Germany’s aggression, and the Poles themselves were treated as the race of sub-humans. Any sort of assistance given to Jews was punished by death. Such assistance required heroism, as it was not only one’s own life that was put at stake, but also the lives of one’s family. Still, it is the Poles that make up the most of those awarded Israel’s Righteous Among the Nations honour.
I will not make detailed references to the remaining aggressive remarks on Poland, unsupported by any basic historic or geographic knowledge. What I find most important is that the general public, as result of similar publications, should not lose an understanding of what the Holocaust was and who the perpetrators were.
In short, Nazi Germany decided to wipe out the whole nation. This was unprecedented in human history. Poland’s role in the tragedy of the Holocaust consists in the fact that the extermination of the Jewish people happened to take place on Polish territory. The author seems to have forgotten that Poles were not responsible for devising and perpetrating this hideous crime…
In each case sensible and dignified letters, giving the readers of the two newspapers concerned (and thereby in effect putting on the public record) a clear official view but with a personal touch.
The general professional issue for Ambassadors is this.
On any given day in the country where one is posted there will be all sorts of annoying, tendentious and even untrue/stupid things being said about one’s own country. A few of them bubble up to a wide readership or otherwise gain some public prominence.
Even if there is no reason to think that these views are held or in any way supported by one’s host government, the very fact that they circulate potentially affects the ‘climate of opinion’ in the bilateral relationship.
So, when to write something in response? And what to write?
No good answer.
Not writing has a cost. It may allow erroneous or malign opinions about one’s own country to circulate indefinitely, perhaps in ever more lurid fashion.
But writing a letter for publication also has a cost. It somehow dignifies and gives weight to the views being expressed, maybe thereby drawing even more attention to them. And it invites all sorts of further weary sniping from people who have an axe to grind or who just want to poke back at Ambassadors.
The Polish Foreign Ministry has something of a policy to respond firmly every time anything appears in the foreign media implying that the Holocaust was a Polish invention (phrases like ‘Polish death camps’ prompt a fierce and often successful response).
The British FCO leaves it to an Ambassador’s discretion when and how and if at all to respond to annoying local views on official British positions.
I wrote to various Bosnian/Serbian/Polish newspapers on different occasions. I suspect my letters made not a scrap of difference one way or the other.
In especially scandalous or ridiculous cases where material consistently wrong had been published by ostensibly serious papers to the point of suggesting a dishonest campaign against British positions, I went to meet the Editor to offer an official view as and when one was needed.
I used the line that of course they could write what they liked when it came to comment/interpretation, but could we at least try to agree to get the facts (eg of what a British Minister or I myself had actually said) accurate?
That worked in a sporadic way. But often the newspapers concerned just did not care.
All in all, writing an Ambassadorial letter to a newspaper is best done sparingly. But even if you know that it is unlikely to change many minds, you feel better after sending it.
Which is part of the story too.
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