11 April 2017 | Article by Valdemar Tomaševski
The 2018 Winter Olympic Games turn hotter as Lithuania declares it's boycott at last
WILNO - After six years of tensions and protests ever since the IOC declared Wilno, the fifth largest and one of the most northern cities in the Republic of Poland, as the host city of the 2018 Olympic Games, the government of Lithuania has finally grabbed onto the last straw and declared it's boycott of the games. The IOC was informed of the Lithuanian Olympic team's decision last evening with an official note, signed by the chairman of the tiny Nordic country's Olympic committee, Ringaudas Songaila, and the President, Vytautas Šapranauskas.
The Polish government responded to the official boycott by declaring to be a "real shame". The ambassador of the republic of Poland in the United Kingdom, Pawel Kukiz, added to the official statement by saying "Seventy years of reconciliation between the two countries, gone down the drain in six years".
Biathlon fans will be disappointed to hear that Diana Rasimovičiūtė, one of the most prestigious competitors in this sport, will not show up in Wilno
How did this conflict cone to be, and what potential consequences will this have in the future?
Historians are sure to inform that this Polish-Lithuanian conflict is nothing new and stretches for hundreds of years, and this act of boycott is merely the most recent resurfacing of this phenomenon.
"Poland and Lithuania have a common history which stretches for almost as long as these two countries have existed," says Lech Walesa, the professor of history from Jagiellonian University in Krakow - which, interestingly enough, is also named after a medieval Lithuanian dynasty. "It is a history full of everything from conflicts to cooperation to even an act of union. For 200 years, Poland-Lithuania, the first Rzeczpospolita, was a great power in Europe. In fact, the Lithuanian people were starting to Polonize and assimilate, but this natural process was cut off by Russian occupation."
Despite formerly being members of the same country, Poland and Lithuania came into conflict once both of them were reformed after World War I. "The conflict arose for the city of Wilno. Although Lithuania had a historical claim on the city, as it used to be the capital of the medieval Lithuania, the city and it's region has long since been a mix of anything but Lithuanians. Gudians, Jews, and obviously Poles." Mr Walesa states. After gaining control of the city and it's region in 1920, Poland has controlled it ever since, this Polish domination only once cut off by a brief period of Soviet occupation. Today, it is hard to argue that Wilno is a Polish city - the 2011 census states that 85% of the city's population declare itself to be Polish, the remaining 15% split between Jews, Gudians and other minorities. Lithuanians only make up 0.2%, most of them recent migrants.
Hard to argue, and yet Vytautas Landsbergis, the professor of Lithuanian history in Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, the "temporary" capital of Lithuania since 1919, tried to argue regardless once we contacted him on the issue on Wilno, or Vilnius, as the Lithuanians still call it.
"Vilnius is and has always been a Lithuanian city," Mr Landsbergis stated in a phone conversation. "Before the illegal occupation of Vilnius in 1920, the population of the region were either Lithuanians, Gudians or Polonized Lithuanians. It is only a near century of Polish-only education and colonization which has eradicated the lawful language and population there."
Indeed, the state of the Lithuanian minority in the Wilno region has always been something the government of Lithuania likes to complain about. Lithuanians make up around 3% of the population of the Wilno Voivodeship according to the 2011 census, the majority of then along the Polish-Lithuanian border, and yet there are only three Lithuanian language primary schools in the entire region and nothing above. As a counter to these allegations, Poland is usually quick to point out the similarly terrible situation of Polish language learning in Lithuania - there is only a single Polish-language school in the entirety of the Nordic country, the Michal Römer Primary School in Kaunas.
Elected in 2014, President Šapranauskas of Lithuania declared it a campaign promise to solve the "Wilno Olympics Crisis" in Lithuania's favor
Today, while Lithuania still maintains it's claim on Wilno, it is a paper claim, not supported by any country nor by the Union of Nations. The only country which ever continued to support this claim was the Soviet Union, so upon it's destruction after World War II, this hostility towards the "occupation of Vilnius" has become a hindrance. A potential end to the conflict at last seemingly came in 1992, when, in order to avoid a Polish veto while seeking membership in the European Concord, Lithuania and it's President Algimantas Čekuolis agreed to sign a treaty restoring normal diplomatic relations with it's southern neighbour - however, this treaty seems to have been forgotten already.
Regardless, seeing as the global response to the boycott has been almost overwhelmingly negative - the European Concord, the IOC, the United States and most Asian nations have reacted to it with clear disappointment - it appears that this will be a controlled incident rather than a global crisis from Wilno.
Could a continued diplomatic crisis, or even an outright war, be possible in Eastern Europe? Almost certainly no. Lithuania, which has reformed away from it's authoritarian dictatorship in the 1950s, after World War II and the death of dictator Antanas Smetona, may be a highly developed Nordic country with a HDI and GDP per capita nearing that of Scandinavia, much like the other Baltic states, but with a population of three million, it is twenty times smaller than the growing economic powerhouse which Poland is. Taking things to scale, this looks less like two dogs fighting and more like a puppy barking at a massive hound. In addition, prolonged conflict between members of the European Concord can and likely would result in one or both of them being removed from the organization, which, knowing the resurgent Russia next door, is neither in Poland nor Lithuania's interest.
However, what this conflict shows is that despite peace seemingly remaining across Europe ever since World War II, there is still a lot of bad blood left between the countries here. The conflict over Wilno may be no Balkan Wars, but it is still an unwelcome bell ring to a sleeping Europe.
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OOC: The name of the vignette is a Lithuanian version of the famous saying "Wilno nasze!" (Vilnius is Ours!) stereotypically used to describe OTL Polish irredentism in Lithuania.