Tusk Attacks his Base (and then some!) - by Gavin Rae

Gavin Rae on the ongoing protests in Poland:

Map of anti-ACTA protests in Poland.

 Donald Tusk has managed to do something truly amazing. He has riled his own political base and brought them out onto the streets to demonstrate with his opponents. He has managed to cause such social anger over his decision to sign the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) that for the first time in a generation’s memory Poland is standing at the forefront of an international protest movement. [Read more]

Young Poles outraged by ACTA

Demonstration against ACTA in Warsaw, photo by Joanna Erbel.

2011 was a year of discontent throughout the world, but apparently not in Poland. Poland's political class was spared the challenge of massive protests that blossomed in many places, from Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, through the Indignados of Spain, to the US Occupy movement. There is much to be angry about, to be sure. Life in Poland is getting harder, the privatisation-by-stealth of health service and education is going on, schools and kindergartens are being closed down, which makes it especially difficult for young parents, there's no affordable housing, the prices of municipal services and staple foods are rising (both at least partly due to recent changes in tax rates). Poland is now the leading country in Europe in terms of non-permanent job contracts (having outrun Spain), and the vision of having a decent retirement in the future is becoming increasingly remote.

There have been plenty of reasons to get angry, and yet nothing happened -- at least nothing comparable to the Indignados or Occupy phenomena. And now, all of a sudden, we have a protest movement against ACTA -- Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, international treaty aiming to protect "intellectual property." The treaty is hermetic enough for professional lawmakers to get confused as for its consequences. And yet it was precisely this treaty that proved capable of sparking protests throughout the country.

The protests started the previous week, when it was announced that Poland is to sign ACTA on Thursday, 26th January. Activists and NGOs working in the fields of human rights, open culture or privacy protection sent protests to the government. They demanded that the government refrained from signing the ACTA and organized genuine public consultations of the document. At the same time tens of thousands of people discussed on the internet, sharing information and analysis concerning ACTA. On Saturday, 21st January, the Anonymous attacked the websites of the Parliament, Prime Minister and Minister of Culture, among others. On the PM's website the hackers left the following message: "Prime Minister Donald Tusk is an evil man!" Oddly enough, the government proved unprepared to defend themselves against a cyber-attack, but at the same time they felt enough self-assured to raise the possibility of announcing a state of exception.

A couple of days later, the protesters flew out of the cyberspace and onto the streets. The first street demonstration against ACTA was organized on Tuesday in front of the European Parliament Office in Warsaw. Three thousand people came to express their discontent. Both left-wing and right-wing activists, free market libertarians, communists, human rights liberals, football supporters and teenagers of both genders gathered together. For many teenagers it was apparently the very first time they ever took part in a political event. They cried against ACTA, against censorship, and against the government. The event may well have marked the end of uncritical euro-enthusiasm among Polish youth; "Union, Union, rub your penis!" ("Unio, Unio, zwal se ch...!") was one of the most ear-catching exclamations of the day. Clearly, for many people the case of ACTA means that the equation "European Union = freedom = modernity" no longer seems to be self-evident.

On Wednesday, there were protests in many other Polish cities, gathering between a few hundred and fifteen thousand participants (fifteen thousand protested in Kraków). On Thursday, a major protest was organized in Poznań. Five thousand people gathered on the Liberty Square, and then some of them went to the regional office of the Civic Platform to smash a few windows. It is estimated that up to 100,000 people took part in a street protest during this three days.

Meanwhile, both the Polish Ombudsman Irena Lipowicz and the General Data Protection Supervisor Wojciech Wiewiórowski expressed serious concerns with the ACTA and summoned the government not to sign it.

The PM tries to play the role of a tough guy, but this time it does not seem to work. When the hackers revealed how they broke into the PM Office's website (login: admin, password: admin1), it made Donald Tusk's situation all the more vulnerable. Many people find it ridiculous that those who lack basic computer skills should create laws in this domain. The government lacked a consistent PR strategy: when the Minister of Culture Bogdan Zdrojewski was assuring the public that the document had been indeed properly consulted, the Minister of Administration and Digitization Michał Boni expressed regret that it had not, and promised to consult it... after the signing ceremony. Let's add that the Pirate MEP Christian Engström exposed serious misinformation in Boni's reassuring statement (see: Polish Minister Telling Lies to Get ACTA Signed). And that the goverment had 7,774 comments removed from the PM Office's fanpage on the ground they were "vulgar" (an independent investigation proved that only as much as 1.49% of them contained any vulgar words whatsoever, whereas 6.5% were weird or off-topic).

The whole situation may be a shock for the ruling Civic Platform party. In the previous years, they succeeded in strengthening the powers of the state: they gave the police more powers against citizens, built major data bases containing sensitive data about citizens (System of Information in Education, System of Information in Health Care), enabled the Supreme Chamber of Control to collect any data about the citizens, including those concerning their sexual orientation or their genetic features. Some of those changes encountered opposition, and some did not. But nothing prepared them for the resistance they have to deal with right now.

And yet, in some way, this should be obvious. All of the previous reforms effectively deprived people of some of their entitlements, but they were consistent with the overall message of the present-day system: the state is not responsible for your good life, you have not got a right to the good life, you have got only the right to be let alone. Like it or not, the internet policy is the ultimate test of this promise. The internet users, especially the youth, understand that, with ACTA, the "System" is breaking even its modest promise to let people alone. And now they got into the streets and discover how it feels to be a "we." Will this experience empower a new generation of activists? The issue remains open, but the hope is out there.

Adam Ostolski

Of drugs and men

Last Wednesday, we had a discussion panel in the Krytyka Polityczna on possible changes in Polish drug policy. With three MPs representing major political forces: Joanna Mucha (Civic Platform), Bolesław Piecha (Law and Justice), and Marek Balicki (independent left-wing MP, former Minister of Health) as well as our special guest, Ethan Nadelmann from the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance, we debated if it is desirable to change drug policy in Poland, and what sort of reform we actually need. Ethan pointed to two sorts of harm that good drug policy should aim to minimize: harm caused by the use of drugs and harm caused by drug policy itself. So, one good thing is that we broadened the scope of issues discussed, to the standard question of how drugs as a social problem should be addressed adding a fresh one: how drug policy as a source of social problems can be reformed.

But, frankly, is drug policy reform in Poland possible?

The climate on the political scene does not seem open for change. Earlier this year, the Sejm added BZP and 17 other substances used as recreational drugs to the list of prohibited drugs. Only 5 MPs voted against (another 2 abstained). The policy is widely popular. Both in the political elite and in the masses the dominant feeling is that we need more, not less, repression. The majority seems to desire not a departure from, but a continuation of the trend started in 2000, when Jerzy Buzek's government criminalized the possession of even smallest amounts of illegal drugs. At that time, repressive drug policy was part and parcel of general backlash in politics, but it provoked some resistance. Now, it is considered by many the only reasonable option.

On the other hand, the public discourse has been slowly changing. The consensus over the repressive status quo begins to weaken. In Spring, when we published our book Polityka narkotykowa (Drug Policy: A Reader), the climate of opinion was almost entirely hostile to drug reform, even among liberal journalists. Everyone seemed to be basically happy with the status quo. Critical voices focused on the need to make the repressive policy more strictly enforced. But something has changed since. Inspired and supported by Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch from Global Drug Policy Program, we published the book, we organized about 30 public discussion panels in towns and cities, we started to gain allies... Mainstream media began to be interested in the topic, and a few dozen of press articles appeared during last six months. Not all of them are in favour of drug reform, to be sure, but at least there is discussion.

How much effort will it take to convince the wider public? How long will it take to get with the idea of change into the Sejm? We cannot expect to have a progressive law passed soon, but I hope there will be, after next elections, a political force in the Sejm strong enough to make drug reform recognized as a reasonable idea. Even a small change in the climate of opinion would be a great achievement. Thus we would undo at least part of Buzek's heavy legacy.

Adam Ostolski

Human Rights and Beaux Arts

Friends from the Austrian city of Graz have published a book entitled Land of Human Rights: Artistic and Activist Strategies of Making Human Rights Visible (edited by Laila Huber, Judith Laister, Anton Lederer, Margarethe Makovec and Oliver Ressler). It is an international collection of essays dealing with one of the most salient problems of today's world: how to make human rights visible. There are chapters devoted to issues of migration, labour, exploitation, precarity, and so on. The editors of the book state their purpose on the cover: In a world of images, visibility has become a political necessity. Whoever wants to achieve changes in society, must not only make him or herself heard but also seen.

Obviously enough, we live in the midst of a "visual turn" in our culture, social communication, and theory. It goes far beyond the notion of the "society of the spectacle." Images are neither friends nor enemies by themselves. It is rather the visual culture that constitutes another field of struggle, wherein we encounter images as our possible, or impossible, allies. We not only find ourselves enslaved in, manipulated by, or alienated into images, but also empowered by them. Wherever there is alienation, there can also be intimacy. And even visionary politics is ultimately about vision, and its visibility.

No wonder it is so urgent to think about human rights and their visibility in this new context. We need art and artistic practices as a vehicle of social change we are striving for. And I would contend that in the realm of human rights artistic practice is not just a vehicle -- it is a site of strategic intervention. We need to make human rights visible not because we do not hear about them enough. Quite the opposite, we are all too often overflooded with corrupted "human rights" discourse.

How can images be a remedy for corrupted speech? We saw it a few years ago on the occasion of Abu Ghraib. The war in Iraq was thouroughly decorated in "human rights" concerns. In Poland, many liberal intellectuals such as Adam Michnik considered the invasion as a "war to end torture in Iraq." And there was no word, no speech capable of contradicting this conviction. Only after a dozen of months, when the photographs of Abu Ghraib saw the light, did the speech of warmongers become slightly less self-assured.

We need more visual interventions of this sort. We urgently need to scatter the smokescreen of "human rights" discourse clouding the European Union's border and migration policies, especially the activities of the Frontex agency. We need to countervail the newspeak of those "free to choose" with images of actually existing neoliberalism. So we need activist and artistic strategies, and we have to further our strategic reflection. The reader Land of Human Rights is an impressive contribution to this task.

Adam Ostolski

PS. There is also a modest contribution by Joanna Erbel and myself: "The Artist-Citizen: New Directions in Political Art in Poland." We write about transformations in artistic practices accompanying the political and economic transition in Poland. We record a recent shift from a liberal and individualistic understanding of human rights to a broader vision of rights implicit in social and artistic struggles. Enjoy!