Two capital cities, poles apart on the issue of conservation

Published on Thursday 9 October 2008 21:21

I HAVE just returned from Warsaw where, at the headquarters of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), I spoke at their annual meeting on "The Rule of Law".

The OSCE is the organisation created by the Helsinki Final Act, of 1975 to monitor progress in matters of democratic practice – especially in relation to legal and political rights – in sovereign states in and around Europe.

Each year, ambassadors, diplomatic and legal representatives of 56 countries – some, including the USA and the five central Asian republics, lying well outside Europe – gather in the city to hear assessments by member states and by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and a host of smaller non-governmental organisations (NGOs) of progress – or the lack of it – in implementing international agreements governing the standards to be applied in upholding the human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Reports, both critical and supportive, are presented, describing what is happening in courts and prisons and in relation to the freedom of the press, the treatment of minorities and many other topics vital to the creation and preservation of a civilised society. Oppressed minority groups are to be found in almost every country, because history, wars, ethnic cleansing, deportations and flight from persecution have scattered millions far from their traditional homes to lands where they are disliked and treated as enemies by the locals.

Typically, what happens is that NGOs, such as Amnesty International, that keep track of what is really happening present evidence of alleged violations of the agreed standards. Their reports may be supported or supplemented by personal and detailed accounts of the ill-treatment of, for example, the Roma/Gypsy people in Italy, the "Macedonians" in Greece, foreigners in Russia, asylum seekers in western democracies and peoples returning from exile in Stalin's Soviet Union, seeking to reclaim the lands and properties that the Soviets expropriated from their families, before deporting them in cattle trucks to Siberia or Central Asia.

The states accused of mistreatment are allowed to reply and usually defend what they have done. Occasionally, some admit serious departures from civilised standards and promise to do better in future. Similar promises made in previous years are examined critically by those who are dissatisfied with progress, or the lack of it.

It is difficult to assess the true and verifiable results of these public confrontations. But one thing is clear: the ambassadors of the participating states find themselves compelled to use the language of liberal democracy and of fundamental human rights to explain and justify what is happening in their countries; and they are required by the format to face their critics in a very public forum.

So, even if progress in many countries is painfully slow, the pressure to make, and convincingly to claim that they have made, improvements in the treatment of their inhabitants undoubtedly drives states to move some way to comply with the standards that they all agreed to in treaties and conventions.

Few adopt the policy of Turkmenistan, – a member state that accords almost no rights to its citizens: their policy is simply not to turn up to try to justify, or even to deny, repressive practices that they do not intend to change.

Warsaw is an appropriate city in which to conduct this part-accusatory and part-confessional exercise. Poland has vast experience of persecuting its own minorities, particularly the Polish Jews, and of being the victims of persecution.

Poland itself was repeatedly erased from the map of Europe by its eastern neighbours. It regained its independence only in 1918, and then fell victim to the German conquest in 1939. It did not regain its true independence until 1989.

The German occupation of the country, and particularly of Warsaw itself, was as cruel as any in Europe. It culminated in 1944 when the Soviet army's advance ground to a halt east of Warsaw and did not resume until after the Germans destroyed first the Jewish ghetto, which they had created in 1940, and then the rest of Warsaw – 85 per cent of the city was razed to the ground.

Hitler had decided expressly that Warsaw should not survive. When the Warsaw risings were crushed, the German army systematically destroyed the old castles, the palaces, museums, libraries, the university, most of the schools, the government buildings, the statues of national heroes, including Chopin and Copernicus, and all the houses that they could blow up or burn to the ground. Some 650,000 Poles, more than half of them Jews, perished.

If the same destruction had happened in Edinburgh, we would have lost the castle, the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the National Gallery and all other galleries, St Giles', Register House, Parliament House, Princes Street, the Scott monuments and the historic hotels.

The Poles decided that Warsaw would survive. Starting soon after the war ended in 1945, they began to rebuild everything, using plans, photographs, paintings and people's memories to help them to recreate what Hitler had destroyed.

They reused the rubble that was all that the Germans left behind. The result is quite incredible. The old city has been reborn. It is stunning. You can hardly believe it is only half a century old.

So well and caringly was this work done that Unesco granted the city World Cultural and Natural Heritage status.

There is a lesson for Edinburgh here. We are systematically vandalising our built heritage. We are demolishing old stone buildings and replacing them with glass and concrete hotels and commercial and retail developments that will be monuments indeed – but monuments to how callous, how lacking in taste and bereft of respect for our heritage it is possible for a city to be.

The Poles rebuilt Warsaw, and the reborn city gained World Heritage status. We appear determined to pull down Edinburgh – and lose it.