The Lithuanian attorney general has opened an investigation into alleged calls for ethnic unrest voiced by country’s MEP Waldemar Tomaszewski.

Tomaszewski is also the leader of the Polish Election Action in Lithuania.

The  accusation was filed by the Lithuanian Centre Party after Tomaszewski said in an interview for the Respublika daily that, “It is Lithuanians in the Vilnius region who you should try to integrate and not Poles.”

The attorney general’s office is thought to consider the statement in breach of Art. 170 of the Lithuanian Penal Code, which carries a potential two year prison sentence.

Commenting on negative consequences for the Polish minority in Lithuania introduced by amendments to Lithuania’s Education Act for Respublika in mid April,  MEP Tomaszewski further said that, “We [Poles] have always been living here. The Lithuanians should integrate, as they are the ones who arrived to this region. This is our land. There are only Polish names at old cemeteries in Vilnius.”

In the 2001 national census, 234,989 persons identified themselves as having Polish ethnicity in Lithuania.

Poland has questioned Lithuania’s implementation of the Friendship Treaty signed by both countries in the early 1990s, which declared that Poles should be allowed to use the Polish spelling of their surnames. The treaty also said that the Polish minority should have access to a Polish education, something that the government in Warsaw questioned last month after changes to Lithuania’s education law.

Last October, the European Voice magazine, published in Brussels, described relations between Poles and Lithuanians as “the worst in Europe”.

A large ethnic Polish minority was left behind in Lithuania following border shifts in 1945 agreed by the Allies. Before 1939 the mostly Polish-speaking city of Vilnius was part of Poland, a fact which was contested by the Lithuanian state.   (ss/pg)