Participants of the Second Congress of Ukrainians in Poland, which took place in late April in the Polish town of Przemysl, issued a statement in which they demanded from the Polish authorities to give political and legal assessment of the Operation Vistula and recognize it as repression, Ukrainian information agency UNIAN reported.
According to the author of the statement, the communist government “of a totalitarian and non-sovereign state” is responsible for the operation during which about 200,000 ethnic Ukrainians were forcibly resettled from the southeast to the west and northwest of Poland. "The Ukrainian community expects from the democratic Poland an unequivocal legal and political assessment of the Vistula Operation as reprisals against us which is based on ethnic-national principle," the statement said.
The participants of the congress also called “inadequate” measures of the current Polish government to compensate for losses inflicted on the victims of Operation Vistula and called to create a special government program to solve these issues.
Operation Vistula, which began on April 28, 1947, was conducted to eliminate the mobilization base of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Organization of Ukrainian nationalists, who continued the armed struggle against the Soviet Army in the western regions of Ukraine and in some areas of Poland where Ukrainians lived. After the operation the armed struggle of nationalists in Poland ended.
On August 3, 1990, the Polish Parliament condemned the forcible resettlement of the Ukrainian population.
