Poland’s foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski has been caught in a secret recording saying that Poland’s relationship with the United States was worthless, and that any feeling of security it gave was “complete bullshit.”
Wprost, a Polish news magazine, said on Sunday it had obtained a recording of Sikorski, who has been mentioned as a candidate to become the European Union’s foreign affairs representative, in private conversation earlier this year with former finance minister Jacek Rostowski.
According to excerpts from a transcript of the recording, the foreign minister told Rostowski: “You know that the Polish-U.S. alliance isn’t worth anything.”
“It is downright harmful because it creates a false sense of security … Complete bullshit. We’ll get in conflict with the Germans, Russians and we’ll think that everything is super because we gave the Americans a blow job. [We are] losers. Complete losers.”
“The problem in Poland is that we have very shallow pride and low self-esteem,” Sikorski said. He described his country’s attitude towards the US using the Polish word “murzynskosc.”
According to Reuters, “That derives from the word ‘murzyn,’ which denotes a dark-skinned person and someone who does the work for somebody else, according to the PWN Polish language dictionary.”
However, Google Translate offers a different meaning of the word: ‘n***er’.
Neither aides to Sikorski nor a government spokesman were willing to make any comment on the tapes. The US State Department did not offer immediate comment, according to press reports.
The publication of the recording comes after President Obama visited Poland on June 3, when he announced he would be asking Congress for $1bn to increase American presence in Eastern Europe. In March, Pentagon officials announced that in response to the Ukraine crisis the US would send a dozen F-16 fighter jets along with 300 military personnel to engage in a joint training exercise with Polish forces.
The Sikorski-Rostowski recording is the latest in a series of secret recordings between politicians published by Wprost, causing a scandal which may push the government into an early election.
The magazine published the first portion of the tapes a week ago. According to EU Observer: “They appeared to reveal that in July 2013 internal affairs minister Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz asked the head of the central bank for support in financing the budget deficit if the economic situation and ruling party polls were to worsen. Central banker Marek Belka, in turn, asked for the dismissal of Rostowski (which happened in November).”
Wprost did not say who made the recordings or how they had obtained them, but the magazine did say there were hundreds of hours of recordings and they were made in restaurants. Prosecutors raided the offices of Wprost on Wednesday and attempted to seize the tapes but were held off by journalists. Wprost is reported to have passed the tapes to prosecutors the following day.
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