Protests Over Polish President's Final Resting Place
Decision to bury Kaczynski next to historical leaders riles many Poles.
WARSAW, POLAND, April 14, 2010— -- Throughout Polish state television's coverage of the plane crash that killed the country's president and 95 others on Saturday, there has been a graphic on the screen with a black ribbon and the words "Badzmy Razem," meaning "Let's Stick Together."
But Tuesday's announcement that President Lech Kaczynski and wife Maria will be buried at Krakow's Wawel Cathedral, where several of Poland's kings and most famous historical figures are buried, has fractured the national unity that followed the crash.
"The final decision is that the most dignified place is Wawel, where he can rest together with those who have achieved so much for our fatherland kings, heroes, commanders," the archbishop of Krakow, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, declared Tuesday.
The decision was met with protests in Krakow, hundreds gathering late Tuesday night with banners reading "Not Krawkow, not Wawel," and "Is he really worth of the kings?"
Others took to Facebook, forming a group Tuesday called "NO to Kaczysnki's burial in Wawel," amassing over 30,000 members by Wednesday afternoon.
"Emotions are speaking for people," Edita Zalewa, a Warsaw lawyer, said. "I don't think he was one of the most honored people. There are so many places he could be buried. Leaving emotions aside, I don't think he should be buried there."
Kaczysnki was considered a controversial and divisive leader with polls showing approval ratings of around 20 percent at the time of his death. He was running for re-election but was widely expected to lose in October's election. However, Poles have prided themselves on the way the country has come together in the days following the crash, a unity now being threatened.
"Instead of having us united as long as possible, we have the first kind of real division which is unnecessary," political commentator Tomasz Lis told ABC News, adding that he hopes the country will move past the debate over Kaczysnki's final resting place soon in favor of more civil politics.
"To prolong the discussion will not change anything, it will only deepen the divide," he said about
But to many, Wawel is sacred ground, akin to London's Westminster Abbey. Oscar-winning film director Andrejz Wajda wrote an open letter published by one of Poland's biggest newspapers, calling the burial plans "misplaced.""President Lech Kaczynski was an ordinary and good man, but there is no reason for him to lie in the Wawel among the kings of Poland and Marshal Jozef Pilsudski," he said, referring to the founder of modern-day Poland.
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