Poland seeks apology from Obama over "Polish death camp" remarks
US President Barack Obama has sparked a diplomatic row with an angry Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk Wednesday seeking an apology from him over his reference to a "Polish death camp" at a high profile White House event the previous day.
Tusk said the remarks by Obama were "a distortion of history" and smacked of "ignorance, lack of knowledge, bad intentions".
"When someone says 'Polish death camps', it is as if there were no Nazis, no German responsibility, as if there was no Hitler - that is why our Polish sensitivity in these situations is so much more than just simply a feeling of national pride," Tusk said in statement, a day after Obama spoke at the White House.
Obama was honoring Polish resistance hero Jan Karski and others with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honour.
"Jan served as a courier for the Polish resistance during the darkest days of World War II. Before one trip across enemy lines, resistance fighters told him that Jews were being murdered on a massive scale, and smuggled him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself," Obama said.
National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor expressed "regret" for the remarks.
But Tusk refused to accept Vietor's regret and demanded his nation would accept an apology from none other than Obama himself.
"I am convinced that today, our American friends are capable of a stronger reaction - a clearer one, and one which perhaps eliminates, once and for all, these types of mistakes - than just the correction itself and the regret which we heard from the White House spokesperson," the prime minister said.
"The words uttered yesterday by the President of the United States Barack Obama concerning 'Polish death camps' touched all Poles We always react in the same way when ignorance, lack of knowledge, bad intentions lead to such a distortion of history, so painful for us here in Poland, in a country which suffered like no other in Europe during World War II."
Source: United States News.Net
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