From Free Life, Issue 27, September 1997
ISSN: 0260 5112

A serious Polish daily, Rzeczpospolita, said recently that "private security guards are to replace sentinels in some military installations."

This was repeated in the right-wing weekly Nowe Panstwo. It added that, "according to a General Staff inspection, armed sentinels are rather dangerous".

Polska Zbrojna, an official military newspaper, said that engaging private guards "would make more time for training soldiers in their duties". These guards are to be armed with firearms.

Of course, this does not mean that the Polish Government wants to privatise its army. It means rather the creation of possibilities of government contracts (from taxpayers' money of course) for high government and military officials' friends who own protection agencies (among the owners of these agencies there are many former military and political police men from the Communist Nomenklatura). But it is a fact that there were recently some criminal attacks on military units and quite a large number of guns was stolen after military guards had been overpowered by the criminals.

Piotr Solinski in Nowe Panstwo ironically but quite accurately comments, that in the 18th century the Polish army was equally inefficient, but that at least a citizen (all nobles in those days) did not have to pay for it if he did not want to.