“I will oppose lawlessness and I will not back down from the fight for freedom of speech – even if I have to go to prison for it. It is time for a shock that will wake those who have been lulled to sleep,” writes Tomasz Sakiewicz in Gazeta Polska Codziennie.
The authorities’ attack on TV Republika, which has been ongoing for a week, is merely an escalation of what has been happening around us for the past 2.5 years. Constant “shutdowns” by various operators, the humiliation and intimidation of its journalists, a series of false alarms that triggered interventions by services around the editorial office and journalists’ homes, as well as threats of my arrest, show that the authorities now have only one culprit for their failures: us.
The strength of TV Republika – with over a dozen million viewers in Poland and several million abroad, mainly in the United States – means that people who care about these voters take it into account. On the other hand, the current authorities’ fear of the station’s effectiveness fuels their desire to destroy it. We are approaching the final stage of this war.
The manner of the summons for questioning – on the one hand I was called as a witness in the case of Zbigniew Ziobro, and on the other there were suggestions from the illegal leadership of the prosecutor’s office that I would be questioned as a suspect under a completely different provision – raises my gravest concerns. “I will oppose lawlessness and I will not back down from the fight for freedom of speech – even if I have to go to prison for it. It is time for a shock that will wake those who have been lulled to sleep.”