A national tragedy is thought to bring a country together, but in Poland the opposite is true. Last weekend in Warsaw, Poles marked six years since the plane carrying the former president Lech Kaczynski and 95 others crashed near Smolensk military airport in Russia. It was the first anniversary of the disaster since the late president’s twin brother, Jarosław Kaczynski, returned to power as the leader of the right-wing Law and Justice Party. Unity was nowhere to be seen.
A heated conspiracy divides Poland, making a sincere remembrance of the crash virtually impossible. Kaczynski’s nationalist party rejects the findings of an independent investigation that ruled the crash was caused by pilot error in poor visibility. Instead, it maintains that foul play caused the accident, pointing the finger at the previous Polish government, led by Donald Tusk, now president of the European Council, and the Kremlin.
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