The ‘NEVERAGAIN’ Association has published a REPORT - part of its ‘Brown Book’ monitoring activity - on incidents targeting Muslims in Poland in 2017-2018. The association calls for the condemnation of xenophobic violence and for solidarity with those who experience it.
Former Gdansk
mayor the late Pawel Adamowicz was viciously criticized for his
efforts to support refugees and to create a
migration policy based on respect for diversity.
Two weeks before his death, the public prosecutor discontinued
proceedings regarding
‘death
certificates’
that
the
ultra-nationalist All-Polish
Youth addressed
to Adamowicz and ten
other city mayors for
signing a declaration of cooperation aimed
at
the
integration
of migrants in Polish cities.
On 20
January,
Muslims
joined in prayer at the
ecumenical funeral mass to
mourn the assassination of the
Gdansk
mayor.
Examples of
events documented in the ‘Brown Book’
include, amongst many others, the following incidents:
A group of men
assaulted
a Pakistani citizen. According
to the victim,
‘They
shouted, <Osama, Osama!>. Then they asked if I was a Muslim.’
As a result of the incident he had a broken nose, broken teeth, as
well as head
and chest injuries.
(Ozorkow,
3
January
2017)
Two unidentified individuals beat
up a student from Saudi Arabia. The attacked man received several
fist blows to his face. (Zakopane, 8 January 2017)
Three men
attacked Pakistani workers of a restaurant. They shouted abusive
words, like ‘dirtbags’
and ‘terrorists’. Moreover, one of the assailants forced his way
behind the counter, hit one of the Pakistanis and pushed him onto a
hot grill. The two remaining perpetrators beat up the owner of the
facility as well as another employee. (Swidwin,
8
April
2017)
Four men took
part in an assault on a kebab shop. They verbally abused one of the
employees, a Bangladeshi
citizen, with words including ‘you turban’
and ‘you nigger’ and spat on him. The perpetrators also threw
chairs at the remaining employees and demolished the interior of the
shop. (Lodz, 17 April 2017)
An
unidentified man spat at a girl who wore a hijab. The teenage victim
was participating in an educational excursion for young people from
Germany. (Lublin,
21
June 2017)
A man and an
accompanying woman assaulted a Chechen woman dressed in traditional
Muslim garb. The assailant shouted at her, ‘You fucking Muslim!’,
‘To the gas chamber!’ and ‘Fuck off from here!’
He pushed her down to the ground and kicked her head and the rest of
her body. (Warsaw, 7 September 2017)
‘Unknown
perpetrators’
devastated a mosque. Surveillance cameras recorded two masked men
breaking a few dozen window panes in the building by throwing stones
and lumps of concrete. (Warsaw, 27 November 2017)
An
unidentified man attacked a student from Saudi Arabia; he punched him
in the face and shouted: ‘If you are to explode, do it where you
came from!’
(Lodz, 8 January 2018)
In a kebab
shop an assailant aimed a firearm at three Moroccan citizens and
shouted that they are to ‘get the fuck
out of Poland’ and that ‘Poland is for Poles’. (Gniezno, 12
February 2018)
An owner of a
similar shop, an Egyptian national, was beaten by three men with a
metal stick. (Warsaw, 13 May 2018)
Another
Egyptian victim, belonging to the Coptic Catholic Church, made the
following statement: ‘They were very aggressive. They said I was an
Islamist and an Arab. When I showed them the cross I was wearing and
said I was a Christian, one of the men spat on [my cross] and
attacked me with his fists.’
(Krasnystaw,
31 August 2018)
In
a bus two Turkish passengers were attacked by five apparent fans of
football club Legia Warsaw. One of the victims, a dual citizen of
Turkey and Poland, said, ‘They began to call us names, <Dirtbags,
get the fuck out of here>. They were getting more and more
aggressive. They sang a racist song (…) One of them severely
head-butted me in the face.’ (Warsaw, 15 December 2018)
At a railway
station, a group of a dozen or so men attacked three Arab students.
The assailants hit one of them on the back of the head and pushed him
down to the ground, forced the second onto the tracks just before the
departure of the train, and beat the third until he lost
consciousness. (Katowice,
22 December
2018)
-
‘This
carefree show of hatred towards Muslims or people perceived as
Muslims often stems from the rhetoric used by politicians,
celebrities and other public figures in the media. They use negative
stereotypes and derogatory expressions and this, in an unavoidable
manner, facilitates xenophobic attitudes towards representatives of
various minorities’,
said Dr Anna
Tatar, the author of the report.
The ‘Brown
Book’ gathers examples of such public rhetoric which contains
prejudice against Muslims or direct calls for violence towards them.
The monitoring activity noted words by
the regional curator of education Barbara Nowak
when she told the King Jan Sobieski Secondary School students,
‘The patron of your school was a wonderful king who managed to save
the whole of Europe from Islam. You
must follow
his example’
(Krakow,
11 September 2018). In turn, Wojciech Cejrowski (right-wing author
and commentator) posted an appeal on Twitter (19 October) to send in
photographs of Muslims living in Poland. In response, Internet users
began, without asking for permission,
to take photographs of women with hijabs and Arab men and to publish
them with derogatory commentaries: e.g. ‘Muslim savages’; ‘more
and more of them can be seen in Poland, they should be chased away
while it’s still possible because the plague spreads quickly’.
For many
years, xenophobic commentaries can be heard in broadcasts aired by
the nationalist Catholic radio station, Radio Maryja. The ‘Brown
Book’ for 2018 contains, amongst others, the words uttered by
Tadeusz Rydzyk, director of the Torun-based
station, who in a programme on the subject of ‘mixed marriages’
said, ‘I look, for instance, at Polish women who see some man and
they like him because he has a darker skin… and then with this
Arab, it’s like <go join the harem, go there>. So, it’s
like that, this is dramatic’.
(11 December). This statement failed to trigger any response from the
National
Broadcasting Council or
from Church authorities.
In 2018,
following an intervention by the ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association, the
Allegro online
e-commerce platform
removed T-shirts showing slogans and symbols derogatory to the Muslim
faith such as ‘Stop Islam’
and a drawing of a mosque crossed out.
In Poland there are, according to
various estimates, between 15 and 25 thousand Muslims which accounts
for less than 0.1% of the total population.
‘NEVER
AGAIN’
Association
is an independent anti-racist organization, founded by the late
Marcin Kornak (1968-2014) to monitor incidents of a xenophobic
nature. It also conducts educational campaigns such as ‘Music
Against Racism’ and ‘Let’s Kick Racism out of Stadiums’.
The
‘Brown Book’ is a monitoring activity, carried out by ‘NEVER
AGAIN’, of racist, xenophobic and antisemitic incidents since the
mid-1990s.
‘NEVER
AGAIN’s ‘Brown Book’ documentation of selected Islamophobic
incidents from 2017 and 2018: READ PDF
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