Poland is proud of its small and medium-sized enterprises, its system of local administration, but is concerned about the fact that Polish specialists go abroad to work and continues to mourn following the plane crash that killed most of the country’s leaders. The issues were developed by Poland’s Ambassador to Moldova Bartlomiej Zdaniuk in an interview for IPN Agency given on the occasion of the national holiday of Poland that is celebrated on May 3.
Among Poles’ accomplishments, the ambassador highlighted the building of a solid sector of small and medium-sized enterprises. “The Polish success was namely due to the SMEs. These firms, some of which are very small, contribute about two thirds to the Gross Domestic Product of Poland. Surely, the people of other nations are also very hard-working, but, besides this wish to have a firm, there should be a legal formwork that at least does not affect the development of this firm,” he stated.
“Decentralization is the second success and a big pride of Poland. In March 1990 already, there was adopted the first decentralization law. In 1997, there was passed another package of laws. In particular, the number of voivodeships or regions (Polish “województwo”) deceased from 49 to 16 at present. The “powiat” or district is the middle level of the local administration system in Poland. This is followed by the level of communes “gmina”. Our achievements are primarily due to the efficiency of these bodies that should be given not only powers, which is relatively easy, but also a budget. This is much more difficult. That’s why the finances should be decentralized and this contributed substantially to our success,” said Bartlomiej Zdaniuk.
He noted that the changes experienced now by his country are the other side of the coin. “First of all, a lot of people left Poland, as many people left the Republic of Moldova to work abroad. What kind of challenge is this? First of all, a very important factor of our development left. We witness massive arrivals of people from other countries, especially Ukraine. They say over 1 million people come to work in Poland. People from the Republic of Moldova also come and I’m convinced that they find jobs here easily,” stated the Polish ambassador.
“What other challenges do we face? The say in Polish, as actually in Romanian too, that the appetite grows with eating. I’m glad that we managed to build highways, to renovate some of the railways, but we surely want to go on. So, the challenges are probably there where we didn’t yet manage to complete the country’s modernization as regards infrastructure as this thing affects the development of the economy, the attraction of investments and other things.”
Bartlomiej Zdaniuk referred in particular to a tragedy that hit Poland eight years ago, when a plane crashed in Russia’s Smolensk and claimed the lives of almost all the country’s leaders.
“Regrettably, we cannot yet say that light was shed over all the existing questions. To begin with, the wreck of the plane is not yet in Poland. The Polish authorities do not have access to this wreck and to the original flight recorders. We have the copies, while the originals are not in Poland. All these things are a serious obstacle and we cannot say that we discovered the truth. Eight years passed and the wreck continues to rust. So, we don’t know when we will be able to find out more, even if we gain access to the wreck that is actually property of the Polish state. The wound will continue to bleed. The mourning will not end until we analyze what’s left of the plane and the original black boxes. We are still waiting for a more constructive position on the part of our Russian partners. I’m convinced that we made progress in the investigation, but each conclusion is only preliminary until we do not have access to the most important piece in this case, which continues to be in Smolensk. This situation surely revealed particular shortcomings in the functioning of the Polish state and we had to deal with them attentively and to learn the lesson,” the ambassador said in the interview for IPN entitled “My dream is to build a strong connection between people here and those in Poland”.
