WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Opposition politicians in Poland slammed police Saturday for detaining anti-fascist activists but failed to react to the appearance of a Nazi-era symbol during a march nationalist.
The detention of the activists took place during Friday’s annual far-right led independence march in Warsaw.
Many liberal groups opposing the march have for years accused police of displaying favorable treatment of nationalists while treating protesters at the event unfairly.
Counter-protesters held white roses and a banner reading “Nationalism is not patriotism” before police removed them from a location near the march route.
An opposition lawmaker, Michal Szczerba, of the centrist Civic Platform party, on Saturday accused the ruling Law and Justice party of creating “an oppressive state” with its treatment of peaceful protesters.
A Polish senator who is also a member of the political opposition, Krzysztof Brejza, tweeted a photo of the march of participants carrying a banner with the “Black Sun” symbol of Nazi Germany’s SS guards. Brejza noted that the police did not intervene.
The promotion of totalitarian ideologies is illegal in Poland.
“During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, thousands of Poles died at the hands of the German Nazis of the SS. I don’t know why the police did not respond to such criminal symbolism in Warsaw, which suffered so much during the World War 2. On the other hand, protesters with democratic views were forcibly expelled,” Brejza told The Associated Press.
Also on Saturday, the American Jewish Committee condemned an anti-Semitic event that came amid Independence Day events in the Polish city of Krakow, where speakers spoke out against Jews in a park on Friday. A speaker spoke of burning Jews and the crowd chanted, “Down with Jewish occupation.”
A police spokesman, Sylwester Marczak, said the activists detained in Warsaw on Friday, including some from the group Obywatele RP, which stands for Citizens of Poland, were detained for several hours because they had restricted the work of the police, and refused to show their identification. .
“These are grounds for detention,” Marczak told TVN24, an independent news broadcaster in Poland.
Hanna Machinska, the country’s deputy commissioner for human rights, went to the scene on Friday evening to intervene. She said the protesters did not provide their identification because they had no legal reason to do so.
Machinska told TVN24 that the protesters stood on a lawn and did not disturb the march or its participants. She said those detained included elderly people and her first job was to make sure they had the opportunity to use a toilet.
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