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The Krakow Post
R E G I O N A L N E W S
Latvia and Russia seal
long-delayed border treaty
Latvia and Russia sealed their long-delayed
border treaty in a public ceremony early this
week, 16 years after the Baltic state regained its
independence from the Soviet Union.
Latvian Foreign Minster Maris Riekstins exchanged
ratification documents with his Russian
counterpart Sergei Lavrov, who is on an official
visit to Riga.
The border accord between Latvia and its Soviet-era
overlord, which had been on ice for more
than a decade, had already been approved by lawmakers
and the countries’ leaders. The formal exchange
of documents was the final hurdle before
it could come into force.
Latvia broke free from the crumbling Soviet
Union in 1991, after five decades of Kremlin
control, and completed border talks with Russia
in 1997.
But the draft treaty was only signed by both
countries’ prime ministers in March, after being
held up by differences over territory which is now
in Russia but was part of independent Latvia before
World War II.
The spat compounded Moscow’s annoyance
with Latvia for joining NATO and the EU in
2004.
Latvia’s 276-kilometer (164-mile) border with
Russia has since 2004 become one of the easternmost
frontiers of the EU.
Latvia’s neighbor Estonia, which was also
ruled by Moscow until 1991, is now the only
post-Communist EU member state still to fix its
border with Russia, because of political differences.
(AFP)
Most EU states ready to
sign pact with Serbia
A majority of EU nations want to sign a pact
on closer ties with Serbia, perhaps as soon as next
month, Czech European Affairs Minister Alexandr
Vonda said late last week. He said that, with the
EU supporting moves by the Serbian province of
Kosovo to break away, the bloc was keen to demonstrate
that Belgrade has a European future to
stop it from turning toward Russia.
“I’m in favour of a political approach,” Vonda
told reporters on the sidelines of an EU summit in
Brussels. He said the EU should do its best to conclude
a Stabilisation and Association Agreement
“no later” than the end of January.
“Our interest is to keep Kosovo under European
influence ... and to keep Serbia under European influence
rather than Russian influence,” he said.
The only real obstacle to a signature of the accord
– a first step for Balkans states to join the
EU – is that former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan
Kardzic and his war-time military chief Ratko
Mladic are still at large.
The two have been indicted for genocide by the
UN war crimes tribunal over the 1995 Srebrenica
massacre of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys
– the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.
The EU has always insisted that Serbia’s EU future
depends on full cooperation with the International
Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, baseed
in The Hague, The Netherlands.
UN chief war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte,
whose mandate ends at the end of the month,
said this week that full cooperation meant getting
Mladic, whom she says has been hiding in Serbia,
behind bars. Del Ponte has been supported by The
Netherlands and Belgium.
But several countries, led by Italy, have been demanding
that the pact be signed quickly to staunch
Serbian anger as it parts with its ethnic-Albanian
majority southern territory, almost certainly by
May. Signing in January would provide a boost for
pro-European Serbian President Boris Tadic as he
confronts the nationalists in presidential elections
set for Jan. 20. If Dutch objections are overcome,
diplomats said that the trade and aid pact could be
signed at the next meeting of EU foreign ministers
on Jan. 28 in Brussels.
In an interview with Le Soir newspaper in Belgium,
Del Ponte expressed concern that Europe
appeared to be backing away from its past tough
stance on Serbia.
“Serbia only cooperates when it’s under pressure
and that must continue,” she said. “I am
stunned by the attitude of France, Germany and
Italy who want to soften their position.”
“As these decisions are taken by unanimity, I’m
counting on Belgium and The Netherlands,” she
said.
In conclusions from their summit, the EU’s
leaders expressed confidence that Serbia’s “progress
on the road towards the EU, including candidate
status, can be accelerated.” (AFP)
Ukraine parliament names
pro-Western foreign minister
Ukraine’s parliament named a strongly pro-
Western foreign minister early this week after
picking Orange Revolution leader Yulia Tymoshenko
as prime minister.
The parliament voted 227-0 for Volodymyr
Ogryzko, who has been serving as deputy foreign
minister and favours the ex-Soviet republic joining
NATO and the EU.
Opposition deputies, who oppose the NATO
bid and back closer ties with Russia, boycotted the
vote. Tymoshenko, who helped lead the pro-democracy
Orange Revolution in 2004, earlier won
the post of prime minister. The pro-Russian opposition
also boycotted that vote. (AFP)
P O L A N D
DECEMBER 20-JANUARY 9, 2008
German town becoming Polish suburb
GFDL 1.2:J23-007
Little by little, Loecknitz is being transformed into a cross-border suburb of Szczecin, as Poles go hunting for real estate bargains.
agence france-presse
Poland is bracing to join the Schengen
passport-free zone this week, but dozens
of its citizens have already helped melt the
frontier by snapping up property in a small
German border town.
Loecknitz, a 3,000-strong community in
northeast Germany, lies in the hinterland of
Szcezcin, a Polish port city of some 420,000
people.
Little by little, Loecknitz is being transformed
into a cross-border suburb of Szczecin,
as Poles go hunting for real estate
the krakow post
bargains. They now make up 10 percent of
the population.
“After joining the EU in 2004, Poles
started looking for apartments and houses
on the German side,” said estate agent Jan
Rybski, who is himself Polish.
“Loecknitz is turning back into what it
was before the war,” he told AFP.
Until 1945, Loecknitz was a well-heeled
district of the then German city of Stettin.
But the Polish-German border was shifted
westwards after Germany lost World War II.
Loecknitz found itself in Communist-ruled
East Germany. Poland also became part of
Assessments of teenage Polish students in 2006 showed that they
performed best in reading tasks, while they had difficulty applying their
mathematical and scientific knowledge to practical problems outside of
school. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) recently
published the results of tests taken by more than 400,000 15-year-olds
from 58 countries around the world. The research has been carried out by
PISA since 2000.
It gathers information useful for projects to improve the quality of educational
systems.
The tests, conducted every three years, are aimed at assessing the practical
skills of secondary school students in three main areas: reading comprehension,
mathematical skills and scientific literacy.
“In reading, Polish teenagers are above average, which is a significant
improvement within the last couple of years,” Michal Fedorowicz, the
manager of the PISA 2006 research team in Poland, told the daily newspaper
Gazeta Wyborcza. Polish students ranked 8th overall among the
58 countries.
In the remaining two categories, however, the Polish did not do as well.
Independent thinking by means of theoretical knowledge both in science
and mathematics are their weakest points, as reflected by the 23rd and
25th-place rankings, respectively.
“Our students have considerable knowledge, but they fail to use it in
their own reasoning or experiment planning,” Ewa Bartnik of the PISA
2006 team told the newspaper Rzeczpospolita.
She said the Polish educational system might be to blame.
Practical skills in science are hardly ever required at schools, and most
students don’t even have the opportunity to carry out experiments during
lessons. A similar problem concerns mathematics.
“Polish teenagers perform excellently as long as the task is imitative,”
Fedorowicz said. The conclusion is that Polish schools fail to teach problem
solving, which might cause problems when the students have to adjust
to the job market in the future.
the Soviet-dominated bloc, which collapsed
from 1989.
After East and West Germany were reunited
in 1990 – bringing the ex-Communist
state into the EU – the town felt the chill
wind of economic crisis. Its young people
left in droves to look for work in the west,
investors shied away, and today around a
quarter of the population is jobless. Across
the border in Poland, meanwhile, the onceshambolic
economy gathered steam in the
1990s, and has powered ahead since the
country joined the EU.
When Poland and seven other ex-Communist
EU newcomers join the borderless
Schengen zone from Dec. 21, it will boost
Loecknitz’s existing draws for Poles.
The town is only a 20-minute drive from
central Szczecin, and has schools, hospitals,
a gym and other leisure facilities, as well as
being set in the largely unspoilt Pomerania
region. Polish property hunters also get far
more for their money. Real estate prices have
spiralled in Poland in the past three years,
but have barely changed in Loecknitz.
Marek Fiuk, 30, bought a magnificent
red-brick farmhouse near Loecknitz with
his brother several weeks ago. The price tag:
under 50,000 euro ($73,000).
“For that, I’d have been able to buy a
studio apartment in Szczecin, around 32-35
square meters. In other words, nothing,” he
said, smiling.
“Here I’ve got a whole house. I always
dreamed of that.”
Fiuk is also planning to set up the headquarters
of his multimedia firm in his newfound
home.
“I travel a lot to Germany for work, and
now I’m going to live there. And from Dec.
21, there won’t be any border checks. You
won’t have to show your ID card, which is
sometimes pretty tiresome,” he said.
Maria Theresia Odentall, head of Loecknitz’s
municipal housing office, said that all
the homes bought by the newcomers had
been on the market for years.
“The Poles do these places up,” she said.
Less well-off Poles also opt to rent in Loecknitz.
“Three years ago, 15 percent of municipal
apartments in Loecknitz were empty. Now
it’s around one percent,” Odentall said. In
public, the Polish influx does not appear to
have caused bad feeling.
“At the beginning, we had to get used to
it. Now it doesn’t bother us at all,” said 83-
year-old resident Anne Marie Hedwig.
Nonetheless, Germany’s far-right NPD
party, which is hostile to Polish migrants,
won almost 21 percent of the vote in Loecknitz
in regional elections last year.
Secondary school students can read, not count
Officers arrest 29 in child porn swoop
agence france-presse
Polish police detained 29 Poles
on suspicion of possessing and
copying child pornography via the
internet, in an operation sparked
by a tip-off from the EU body Europol,
a spokesman told AFP late
last week.
“We’ve detained 29 individuals
following a search of 34 apartments,
private homes and businesses
across the country and the
seizure of 34 computers, 24 hard
drives and 5,000 CDs, videos cassettes
with paedophile content,”
police spokesman Robert Horosz
told AFP.
“We took action after receiving
a tip from Europol at The Hague,”
Horosz said. Europol is an EU
law enforcement organzation that
Assessments of teenage Polish students in 2006 showed that they performed best in reading tasks, while
they had difficulty applying their mathematical and scientific knowledge.
handles criminal intelligence and
helps to coordinate police work
across the EU.
Several of the suspects confessed
to acquiring child pornography
over the internet during police
questioning, he said.
In March of this year Polish
police detained 33 suspects in a
crackdown against an internet paedophile
ring.
Police have detained 29 Poles on suspicion of child pornography.
GDFL 1.2:Nevit Dilmen