Polish leader urges reconciliation over WWII massacre by Ukrainians

LUTSK, Ukraine: Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski on Sunday urged reconciliation at a ceremony in Ukraine marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre of tens of thousands of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists in World War II.
While little known outside eastern Europe, the bloodshed in the Nazi-occupied Volhynia and Galicia regions in July 1943 has strained ties between Ukraine and Poland.
Neither government wants history to cast a shadow over their current relations, with Warsaw encouraging Ukraine to move away from Russian influence and realise its ambition of joining the European Union.
Komorowski, joined at the ceremony in the northwestern city of Lutsk by Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Kostyantyn Gryshchenko, said the past should not endanger their ties.
“An honest interpretation of the past should serve reconciliation and cooperation between our peoples and our two independent states,” said Komorowski.
“I hope that this wound between our brotherly nations heals quicker,” he said. Komorowski hinted that Moscow was the only winner when Poland and Ukraine feuded.
“We should not forget that only a third party that has always threatened our independence and freedom has won when the Ukrainian and Polish peoples have been in conflict.”
Seeking to maintain good ties with Kiev, the Polish Parliament on Friday stopped short of calling the massacre a genocide, a move that could have caused a diplomatic row.
While a special resolution proposed by the conservative opposition called for the bloodshed to be defined as genocide, parliament opted instead for the more cautious wording of “ethnic cleansing characterized by signs of genocide.”
Most mainstream historians believe that tens of thousands of Poles were killed in Nazi-occupied Poland by nationalists from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
The UPA wanted to minimise the number of Poles in a future independent Ukrainian state, an ambition for which they waged guerilla warfare against Soviet forces into the 1950s.
At the time of the massacres, the northwest Volhynia region was part of Nazi-occupied Poland but became part of the Soviet republic of Ukraine after the war and then independent Ukraine in 1991.
The killings provoked bloody reprisals by Polish partisans grouped in the anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet Home Army (AK), who in turn killed thousands of Ukrainians.