As Advisor to the President of the Republic of Poland, when entering the Chancellery, I show my official ID, take metal objects out of my pockets, go through the gate and the SOP officer checks – manually – whether I have hidden anything. Even the buckles of the suspenders jingle.
On Tuesday, I learned that armed police officers, without informing the head of the President’s Chancellery and without identification, entered the President’s office to arrest the Head of State’s guests. My imagination is full of dark scenarios. What would happen if there were bandits dressed in police uniforms?
It turned out that the all-powerful representatives of the new government – apart from the management of the Chancellery – had instructed the State Protection Service (subordinate to the Minister of the Interior) to “protect” the president from allowing police officers inside.
So what does first person protection look like in the state? A similar situation is unthinkable in the seat of parliament, because protection there is guaranteed by the Marshal Guard, which is directly subordinate to the Speaker of the Sejm.
The common protection of all institutions of state administration is a remnant of deep communism, when all key positions were occupied by members of the leading force of the nation, namely the Polish United Workers’ Party. In democratic Poland this is no longer the case. After all, politicians from opposing political formations can head the most important institutions.
We had such a situation during the presidency of Lech Kaczyński. We remember well the differences in the approach to arranging the most important affairs of state between the then President and the Prime Minister, we remember the battle for the government plane. As a result, the thoughtlessness and ruthlessness of Donald Tusk and his acolytes led to the tragedy in Smolensk.
This drama, the largest in post-war Poland, was preceded by the words of the then Chairman of the Sejm, Bronisław Komorowski, spoken on April 29, 2009 during an interview conducted by Konrad Piasecki on RMF FM: “You know The presidential elections will come, or the president will fly somewhere and everything will change.”
The action organized by services subordinate to the government and which – euphemistically speaking – are not friendly to the head of state, forces us to think about how to provide effective protection to the president democratically elected by almost 11 million citizens. How can we prevent hostile actions from blocking the president’s evacuation from Belvedere on a supposedly broken public transit bus?
The first thing that comes to mind is the creation of a presidential guard solely subordinate to the head of state. But this requires financial resources, which are limited by the government anyway.
We know images from American films of presidential security covering the president with his own body. Heroes, ready to die to fulfill their role with honor. The Polish reality is much less romantic. President Andrzej Duda can no longer feel completely safe in his office after Tuesday.
Already after Tuesday’s police and SOP operation, when I entered the President’s Chancellery, I looked differently, without confidence, at the services that protected the President, and I saw in every officer and officer with a receiver in his ear a potential threat to the president. President. This will not change.
Tadeusz Deszkiewicz
Source: wPolityce