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The Polish Section of the Comintern (SH) condemns and abhors the currently exposed practices of selling visas to refugees by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
We need to explain the whole affair to our foreign comrades and to Polish citizens, who cannot count on simple and truthful information from the capitalist media.
The whole affair began on August 31, 2023. On that day, agents of the Central Anticorruption Bureau entered the Foreign Ministry in Warsaw. They questioned the leadership of the consular department, asking them about the MFA's Visa Decision Center in Łódź, specifically about the visa brokerage contract.
Such a contract the Łódź Center has concluded with VFS Global - a huge Indian corporation that makes money from intermediating the issuance of visas by 70 countries. The company blocks the external possibility of filling out a visa application (it uses bots for this, among other things), creating a monopoly on these activities. People who have been unsuccessful in their visa applications are approached by the company's employees, offering assistance for amounts between 500 and 800 euros. On the same day, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki dismissed Deputy Foreign Minister Piotr Wawrzyk, who was responsible for issuing visas, from his post. The reason for the resignation was said to be "lack of satisfactory cooperation." The politician also disappeared from the Law and Justice electoral lists.
Every day after that, new information appeared about corruption, the motherland of which became the aforementioned Visa Decision Center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Łódź. The originator of this facility was said to be Jakub Osajda, director of the Foreign Service Bureau and formerly an MP's assistant (moreover, most likely a member of Wawrzyk's family). Wawrzyk sent letters to consulates with the names of people who needed to be given visas "without a queue." Foreigners paid $4-5,000 for a Polish visa. "Clients" were not checked for background or problems with the law, so religious fanatics, for example, with the intention of arranging terrorist attacks, could enter Europe with confidence. The consular department of the Foreign Ministry was supposed to pressure diplomatic missions to increase the number of visas issued, in order to get the needed workers into the labor market, which was not necessary.
One anonymous ministry official said: "There were booths in front of our embassy where you could buy already stamped documents, all you had to do was enter your name." There were even more absurd situations, such as smuggling Indian immigrants into Mexico, presenting them as a Bollywood film crew! From this mystification, officials earned $25-40,000 for each refugee.
Often, the refugees were not helped to get to Europe despite paying the protection racket. Ugandan anti-visa fraud consultant Kwikriza Bruce, was approached by more than 200 people who lost up to $4,000 each, but did not get the documents needed to enter our country.
On September 8, the National Prosecutor's Office issued a statement:
"The subject of the investigation, conducted by the prosecutor's office in conjunction with the Central Anticorruption Bureau, is irregularities in the submission of applications for several hundred visas over a year and a half. The irregularities concerned Polish diplomatic missions in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates, India, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the Philippines and Qatar."
On the night of September 14-15, Wawrzyk was hospitalized after a failed suicide attempt, although an assassination attempt at the hands of government services cannot be ruled out. After all, government spokesman Piotr Müller himself said of the affair that "we will burn with a hot iron every example, every case of this type of activity." Wawrzyk left a farewell letter in which, he said that he nothing wrong, he tried to help people regardless of political colors, and he paid the highest price for it.
In the letter he was further to assure that he had not taken or received anything from anyone. "I tried to serve the motherland well," - he wrote.
And all this comes at a time of crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, violence against migrants by the Border Guard, imprisonment of refugees in inhumane camps, and a xenophobic campaign by the government!
We Communists know very well that for profit the bourgeoisie is able to temporarily sweep its prejudices and views under the rug. An example is the Hitler's fascists sparing Jews from the Holocaust and handing them over to Zionists such as Rezső Kasztner and Joel Brand in exchange for money or supplies for the army.
As our Programmatic Declaration on the Question of Migrants and Refugees says:
"People smuggler gangs are anything else than refugee helpers. They are unscrupulous criminals who enrich themselves in the fate of the refugees".
In this case, the smuggler turned out to be the capitalist state, but the reasons and goals for this action have remained the same. Nor has our approach and the means of solving this problem - the world socialist revolution - changed!
Long live the Programmatic Declaration on the question of migrants and refugees!
Long live the Comintern (SH) and its Polish Section!
Down with the capitalist human smugglers!
Let us humanize the inhuman world - by the violent, socialist world revolution!
