President Komorowski signs Katyn memorial book, Monday, in western Russia; photo - epaThe process, normally applied to those unjustly sentenced in court, would clear the executed men of any stain on their honour under Russian law.
There have been some apparent complications over the matter as technically, the 22,500 Poles, largely reserve officers, were executed without trial.
Members of the Association of Katyn Families have long petitioned for rehabilitation, as has Russian human rights group Memorial.
“All the Poles shot here should be rehabilitated under the Russian law on rehabilitation,” declared Arseny Roginsky, founder and chairman of the International board of Memorial, in the wake of the Smolensk air crash last year, a disaster that prompted much soul-searching in Russia.
“And it is untrue that rehabilitation is difficult because the Polish prisoners were shot without trial,” he argues, citing the example of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenburg, who died in Russian detention in 1947, and was fully rehabilitated in 2000.
“The Russian side has nothing to fear in this,” Roginsky postulates. “The law is such that it does not provide compensation, only a moral 'compensation' in the sense of a posthumous recognition of those who died as innocent victims.”
Moscow officially admitted guilt for the crime in 1990. However, until recently, it was still commonplace to find articles in Russian newspapers rehashing the wartime propaganda that it was the Germans that had conducted the crime. Likewise many of the victims were described as spies, with little prominence given to the varied professions of the murdered, amongst whom were artists, professors and doctors.
Roginsky believes that the matter could be cleared up, once all names of the executed are formally declared:
“The rehabilitation of the executed Poles could simply be done by means of a decree issued by the president of Russia. To do this, he would merely need a complete list of victims.”
(nh)Source:
Polskie Radio, Rights in Russia