Radosław Sikorski
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Radosław "Radek" Sikorski (born February 23, 1963 in Bydgoszcz) is a conservative Polish politician and journalist.
Sikorski was much involved in the Solidarity unrest in the late 1970s, and chaired the student strike committee in Bydgoszcz in March 1981. Stranded in Britain when martial law was declared in his homeland in December 1981, he studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Pembroke College, University of Oxford. While at Oxford he was a member of the infamous all-male dining society The Bullingdon Club, whose members included the leader of the British Conservative Party David Cameron.He then worked as a freelance journalist. In 1984, he took British citizenship. In the mid-1980s, Sikorski worked as a war correspondent in Afghanistan and Angola. For a photograph taken in Afghanistan he won the World Press Photo prize in 1988. From 1990 he was an advisor to Rupert Murdoch on investments in Poland.
Returning to Poland, in 1992 he briefly became deputy defence minister in the Jan Olszewski government. From 1998 to 2001 he served as deputy minister of foreign affairs in the Jerzy Buzek government. During the latter appointment, Sikorski became notorious in the Polish expatriate community, Polonia, for designing and promoting a particularly strict policy regarding Polonia's citizenship status in Poland.[1] [2] As a result of that policy, Poland refused to recognize the acquired citizenships of Polish emigrants, including hundreds of thousands of recent refugees from Communism and their children, and insisted that they be subject to all obligations of Polish citizenship, while at the same time making it impossible to renounce such citizenship because of an extremely cumbersome administrative procedure. This policy became known as the "passport trap" because it was mainly implemented as harassment of departing travellers (primarily citizens of the United States, Canada, and Australia) who were prevented from leaving Poland until they obtain a Polish passport.[3]
From 2002 to 2005 he was a resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. and executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative. He returned to government in Poland as Minister of National Defence in 2005. He resigned on February 5, 2007 allegedly due to conflicts with the Polish PM Jaroslaw Kaczynski and the chief of military intelligence Antoni Macierewicz.
He is married to the American journalist and historian Anne Applebaum; they have two children, Alexander and Tadeusz.
[edit] References
- ^ Wirtualna Polska: Radek Sikorski, Internet Chat Transcript from April 11, 2001
- ^ Rzeczpospolita, Spór o wizy i paszporty, Nov 19, 2003
- ^ Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada: Travel Report, Poland, accessed on Feb. 5, 2007
[edit] External links
Henryk Samsonowicz • Piotr Kołodziejczyk • Jan Parys • Janusz Onyszkiewicz • Piotr Kołodziejczyk • Zbigniew Okoński • Stanisław Dobrzański • Janusz Onyszkiewicz • Bronisław Komorowski • Jerzy Szmajdziński • Radosław Sikorski • Aleksander Szczygło
Original members
Ludwik Dorn • Anna Fotyga • Grażyna Gęsicka • Roman Giertych • Przemysław Gosiewski • Wojciech Jasiński • Antoni Jaszczak • Jarosław Kaczyński • Anna Kalata • Stanisław Kluza • Andrzej Lepper • Tomasz Lipiec • Jerzy Polaczek • Zbigniew Religa • Michał Seweryński • Radosław Sikorski • Jan Szyszko • Kazimierz Ujazdowski • Zbigniew Wassermann • Rafał Wiechecki • Piotr Woźniak • Zbigniew Ziobro
Joined later
Zyta Gilowska • Andrzej Aumiller • Aleksander Szczygło • Janusz Kaczmarek
