Govt-in-exile welcomes Mazowiecki nomination

Press, 21 August 1989, Page 8

Govt-in-exile welcomes Mazowiecki nomination

NZPA-AP London Expatriate Poles, including the “government-in-exile” that has been based in Britain since World War 11, welcomed Saturday’s historic nomination of a non-commun-ist Prime Minister for their homeland.

But they did not minimise the difficulties that lie ahead for a Government led by the Solidarity activist, Tadeusz Mazowiecki.

Ryszard Kaczorocki, current president of the exile government, said, “We are quite happy that everything is going in the right direction. “We hope the Government of Mr Mazowiecki, as soon as possible, will hold general elections for the representation of the Polish people,” he said in a telephone interview.

The government group claims its legitimacy through a clause in Poland’s 1935 Constitution, which allowed the last pre-war President to nominate a successor while outside Polish territory — during his wartime internment in Romania. His Paris-based successor government, with General Wladyslaw Sikorski as prime minister, controlled • some halfmillion free Polish paratroopers and seamen during the war and was recognised by the Allies until 1945, when recognition shifted to the post-war Government in Poland.

The group since has operated as a govern-ment-in-exile, each president nominating the next. It moved to London in 1940.

“We will only return to Poland when the Red

Army leaves Poland, all Soviet influence is removed, and the Polish people are free to elect, in free and unfettered election, the representatives to the Sejm and the Senate, which will freely elect a president,” said Sygmunt Szkopiak, the government’s minister of foreign affairs. “Then the exiled president with, the government will return to Poland and hand over to the newly elected President, the Presidential seals and emblems, and we will cease to exist.

Solidarity’s leader, Lech Walesa, in an apparent attempt to assuage Soviet worries over events in Poland, has said the Defence and Interior Departments, including police, will be controlled by Communist Ministers in the new Government.