Poland accuses Germany of playing isolation politicsPublished: Tuesday, 4 September, 2007, 01:50 AM Doha Time

Poland accuses Germany of playing isolation politicsPublished: Tuesday, 4 September, 2007, 01:50 AM Doha Time

BERLIN: Germany is seeking to isolate Poland within the European Union, while paying lip service to bilateral co-operation, a senior Polish diplomat said in a newspaper yesterday.
“Look at the Germans’ Poland policy of recent months: the laborious, stubborn efforts to isolate Poland within the EU on the one hand and on the other political rhetoric about real co-operation on bilateral matters,” Mariusz Muszynski, Poland’s top foreign policy aide for relations with Germany, wrote in the German business daily Handelsblatt.
He said Germany’s attitude towards its eastern neighbour had taken a turn for the worse since the departure of former conservative chancellor Helmut Kohl and criticised his two successors, Gerhard Schroeder and Angela Merkel.
“The most recent governments have lacked Helmut Kohl’s moderation,” he wrote. “It is clear that under Schroeder, Germany failed to cement integration and find fields of joint co-operation.”
He accused Merkel, the current chancellor and one-time protege of Kohl, of being dismissive when Warsaw seeks closer ties. “After two years one cannot say that Chancellor Angela Merkel has taken the same road as her mentor.”
He said Berlin displayed “coldness and distance” last year when Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski proposed the formation of a joint European Union army. “Stepping up military co-operation is after all one way of really conducting a joint foreign policy within the EU.”
Muszynski had levelled similar criticisms six months ago as Merkel was about to visit Warsaw, when he said the German government was “essentially nationalistic and egotistical and right now it is not friendly towards Poland”.
Six decades after World War II, resentment over Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland still lingers and the Kaczynski brothers exploited these historic grievances in the run-up to 2005 elections to win support.
In June, the prime minister invoked the carnage wrought by the Nazis to score a point in the row over EU voting rights, saying that without the war Poland would today be a nation of 66mn people instead of 38mn.
A German foreign ministry spokeswoman said Muszynski’s remarks may be linked to domestic political considerations and the prospect of anticipated elections in Poland.
She told reporters: “We do not want to go into this because we do not want to contribute to the election campaign in Poland.” – AFP