The majority of members of a council that represents Poland’s national and ethnic minorities in relations with the government have suspended their participation in protest against the education minister’s decision to cut teaching for the German community by two thirds.
“It is difficult to imagine in a democratic state ruled by law that the teaching of one minority would follow different rules than that of other minorities,” they wrote in a statement. “This leads to discrimination on the basis of nationality.”
“Discrimination against one national minority cannot be accepted by the others,” Bernard Gaida, chairman of the Union of German Social and Cultural Associations in Poland (ZNSSK), told the Opowiecie news service. “As a German, I would like to thank my colleagues for their solidarity.”
The dispute stems from a decision in February by the education minister, Przemysław Czarnek, to cut by two thirds the number of hours of German taught in Polish schools to children from the country’s ethnic German minority (which is around 148,000 strong, according to census data).
The move followed a decision by parliament to cut funding for German teaching and instead allocate the money to teaching the Polish language in Germany, where around two million Poles (plus more people with Polish heritage) live.
The cuts – which apply only to the German community, not any other recognised minority group – were condemned by ethnic German leaders and also by the German government’s commissioner for matters related to ethnic German minorities, Bernd Fabritius, who called them “discriminatory”.
The Polish education ministry, however, argued that the German federal government was itself failing to “ensure the organisation and financing of Polish language learning” for Poles in Germany.
At the start of April, the German representatives on the Joint Commission of the Government and National and Ethnic Minorities (KWRiMNiE) suspended their participation in protest at what they said was the government’s refusal to enter into dialogue with them over the issue.
The KWRiMNiE was established in 2005 as an advisory body to the prime minister. As well as its German members, it includes representatives of the Jewish, Belarusian, Lithuanian, Tatar Muslim, Ukrainian, Roma, Armenian, Slovak, Czech, Russian, Karaim and Lemko communities.
In a statement released on Monday, the KWRiMNiE announced that 14 of its 20 sitting members have now suspended their participation in “an act of desperation aimed at drawing attention to the scale of the problem of legal discrimination against minorities”.
“The commission is a body established for the purpose of dialogue on the state’s policies towards minorities,” they wrote. “It does not fulfil its role in a situation where there is no real dialogue on an issue as fundamental as open legal discrimination against one of the minorities.”
Last month, the CDU/CSU, Germany’s largest opposition group, also condemned the “drastic” cut in teaching, which it said was clear and unacceptable discrimination against the German minority that sends a negative signal for minority protection in the whole of Europe.
It submitted a parliamentary question asking the federal government to assess the situation of the German minority in Poland and whether the Polish government’s latest actions go against the terms of the 1991 Good Neighbourship treaty between the two countries.
Some in Poland’s conservative ruling coalition have, however, accused the German government of violating that treaty and discriminating against ethnic Poles by not providing funds for teaching them the Polish language.
That claim has been rejected by Fabritius, who notes that, while the federal government does not provide such funding, that is because education is administered by individual states. They together spend around €200 million annually on teaching Polish to almost 15,000 students.
Additional reporting by James Jackson.
Main image credit: Roman Rogalski / Agencja Gazeta
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
