WARSAW, Poland -- It's been seven years since Poland lost its president in a plane crash in Russia. His twin brother, who effectively runs the Polish government today, remains in mourning, only wearing black suits and black ties in public -- and determined to punish those he blames for the crash.
The identical and inseparable Kaczynski twins Lech and Jaroslaw were in the Polish public eye for a half century -- childhood actors, then advisers to President Lech Walesa, then rising to the country's highest offices. Lech Kaczynski served as president from 2005 to 2010, and Jaroslaw Kaczynski served as his prime minister for 16 months in 2006 and 2007.
Tragedy struck when President Lech Kaczynski died in a plane crash on April 10, 2010, along with his wife and 94 others, many of them members of Poland's political and military elite. They were flying to an airport near Smolensk, Russia, to pay tribute to some 22,000 Polish officers killed in the Katyn massacres by the Soviet secret police during World War II.
Poland will mark the anniversary of the crash today with state observances.
Seven years later, Jaroslaw Kaczynski still thinks many questions surrounding the crash need to be answered, not the least by Russia, which has refused to return the wreckage and the plane's flight recorders, and Donald Tusk, the then-Polish prime minister who led the rival Civic Platform party and who is now one of the European Union's top officials.
Kaczynski has used his position as leader of the ruling Law and Justice party to direct state bodies to try to debunk official findings that the crash was an accident. Early on, Polish investigators concluded the crash was an accident resulting from several factors, including pilot error and heavy fog.
The allegations of a multinational conspiracy have deepened Poland's isolation in Europe, evident last month when the government's objections to the re-election of Tusk as president of the European Council failed.
Kaczynski accuses Tusk and his allies of not doing enough to clarify all facts surrounding the crash and of failing to ensure proper security for the flight of a president who was in an opposing political camp.
Tusk has denounced the accusations as absurd, saying at first they could be attributed to Kaczynski's deep grief, but later calling them a "nasty" and "cynical" ploy for power.
Even in 2014, when Tusk was still prime minister and Kaczynski led the opposition, he said, "What Jaroslaw Kaczynski is doing with the catastrophe is already a problem for the whole state."
Along with his brother and sister-in-law, a large swath of the ruling elite perished in the crash, including the head of the central bank and the army's chief of staff. That a patriotic president was on a mission to honor an atrocity inflicted by the Soviets only deepened a sense of continued Polish suffering at Russia's hands.
"I lost a twin brother," Kaczynski, now 67, said months after the disaster. "You need to have one to understand what kind of loss that is."
While his loss elicited widespread sympathy, Kaczynski's opponents have grown extremely critical of how he has responded to it in office.
The Polish government, now 17 months in power, has come under international censure for steps that have eroded its system of checks and balances. While Kaczynski holds no government post, he is widely considered the real power behind both the prime minster and president, each of whom he chose.
The main anti-government protest will rally in defense of constitutional freedoms and against "an emerging Catholic-nationalism in Poland, which we see as very close to fascism," said Pawel Kasprzak, one of the organizers.
Law and Justice officials have suggested the Russians created fake fog or placed an explosive device on board. Since the party took power, a new investigation into the plane crash has been launched. It cost the government $900,000 in 2016 alone, leaving an opposition party to ask state auditors to review whether the expense is justified.
But government officials say the concerns are real and they must press on. Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski said Thursday that Poland would enlist an international law firm to pursue claims against Russia, and that Polish officials would keep asking Russia to return the plane.
A Section on 04/10/2017