On Friday, a 50-year-old former employee of Poland’s Central Bureau of Investigation and more recently of the State Tax Office, taped a letter addressed to the prime minister to a park bench, doused himself in solvent and set himself alight, across the street from Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s office in Warsaw.
The man, Andrzej Z. as he’s known since Polish law prohibits divulging the full identity of anyone under investigation, is now in serious but stable condition, the prime minister reported at a press conference after speaking with doctors. The man will likely recover enough to be able to answer some questions next week, including what exactly drove him to make such a dramatic attempt on his own life.
The prime minister said that Andrzej Z.’s letter “suggests that his grievance was with the overall landscape in which he lived.” He added that evidence points to the fact that his motives were much more complicated than some politicians want to make them out to be. The reference, of course, is to the fact that opposition politicians have been dropping hints that the victim was upset with Tusk’s government.
“But whoever wants to base their campaign on a drama like this—that’s their business, their style, and their shame,” he said.
As politicians began to comment on the incident, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski saw fit to remind them in an interview with the Polish Press Agency not to cross the line of civilized, good taste.
“I hope that everyone can show restraint and not take advantage of one man’s tragedy instrumentally.”
The tragedy comes as Poland is gearing up for parliamentary elections Oct. 9.
Commenting on the incident during a televised political talk show “Kawa na Lawe” on TVN Sunday morning, Opposition MP Pawel Poncyliusz said the message Andrzej Z. was trying to send should be heeded.
“We should all forget about Tusk-buses, peppers, and staged photo-ops during this election campaign and start dealing with serious problems facing Poles,” Poncyliusz said. “This man wanted to tell us politicians something.”
The Tusk-bus is a tongue-in-cheek name for Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s campaign bus and buzzword of the campaign trail.
For all the criticism meted out to Prime Minister Tusk for —in the words of the opposition—“hyperactive PR yet inactive governance”— the prime minister, to his credit, put off campaigning to personally look into the self-immolation incident and provide answers to everyone’s questions.
Also on Sunday’s “Kawa na Lawe,” opposition MP Zbigniew Girzynski, responding to insinuations that his faction was doing what the president said not to, alleged, “The only politician, who has exploited it for political gain is Prime Minister Tusk. First of all by interrupting his visit and making a big show of going to the hospital. Second, by claiming that the matter has been clarified and claiming that there were no irregularities.”
The irregularities Girzynski referred to were that Andrzej Z. had informed the Ministry of Finance about illegal practices he witnessed while employed in the State Tax Office, and that he was then fired. According to Andrzej Z.’s correspondence with politicians, he lost his job for being a whistle-blower, and afterwards was further stigmatized to the extent that he couldn’t find work in public administration.
According to the prime minister, several investigations of the Tax Office that Andrzej Z. had indicated had been ordered, but no evidence of wrongdoing was found.
Andrzej Z., a father of three, eventually found employment as a low-paid security guard, but driven to desperation by an unmanageable debt load, he did the unthinkable.
A glimmer of hope, perhaps, lies in the voices of those calling for a system of independent monitors of public institutions, since according to “Kawa na Lawe” discussant MP Ryszard Kalisz, “in Poland there exists no system of keeping government institutions in check to make sure they respect citizens’ rights.”
The level of animosity is currently high in Polish politics and the hotly contested parliamentary election has seen more than its fair share of mud slinging. Opposition party leader and former Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has blamed the government for mishandling the investigation into the tragic death of his twin brother, Lech Kaczynski the then president of Poland, in a plane crash in Smolensk Russia last year, and for exploiting the tragedy for political gain.
The ruling party, in turn, accuses Kaczynski of the same—namely of preying on voter’s emotions by using the tragedy that killed the first couple and 94 others in his campaign.
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