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Jaruzelski, 84, in his office of a former President of Poland. It was the last in a series

of meetings we held in several years. I came to discuss the trials he had to attend.

He complained of catching infections and told me he probably would not live long

enough to see the end of the trials. A few days later he was admitted to a Military

Hospital in Warsaw to be treated there for pneumonia and serious heart problems.

Now he is back at home but still weak and convalescent.

This was the latest in a series of stays in hospitals in recent years, where Jaruzelski

has been treated for lung and heart diseases. Barbara Jaruzelska, the general’s wife,

was quoted in the media as saying that, in her opinion, her husband did not have the

will to live any longer. Her statement referred to Jaruzelski’s resentment of a number

top figure in Poland’s communist regime, including his role in the quashing of

workers’ strikes in 1970 and the introduction of martial law in 1981. The general has

been accused of running a “criminal group of a military nature that intended to

commit crimes.” A strange accusation, indeed, against a politician and a supreme

military commander who never refused to take full responsibility for all his decisions

and actions in Poland.s communist past, admitting his mistakes and apologizing for

all unwanted but true hardships and tragedies inflicted upon Polish citizens by the

communist regime.

of landed gentry, Jaruzelski was educated at an exclusive Catholic school during the

1930s. During the German-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, Jaruzelski and his

family were captured by the Soviet army and deported to the Soviet Union. There,

Jaruzelski performed forced labor in the Karaganda coal mines in Kazakhstan before

being chosen by Soviet authorities for Soviet Officer Training School. He participated

in the liberation of Warsaw and Berlin as an officer in the First Polish Army, a Sovietsponsored

corps. He further credited himself in Soviet eyes by fighting against the

anti-communist Polish Home Army (AK) from 1945 to 1947. Jaruzelski joined the

Communist Party in 1947.

After graduating from the Polish Higher Infantry School and General Staff Academy,

Jaruzelski rose quickly through the ranks. He became minister of defense in 1968,

shortly before the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in which Polish troops

participated. In 1970 and 1976, when riots broke out due to government-imposed

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increases in food prices, Jaruzelski did not use the army to shoot at striking workers.

He supposedly asserted in 1976, “Polish troops will not fire on Polish workers.”

However, he has since been charged in Polish courts with partial responsibility for the

1970 shooting of demonstrators by the secret police. Jaruzelski rose in party ranks,

becoming a candidate member of the Politburo in December 1970 and a full member

in 1971.

By the end of 1980, the Polish Communist Party came under increasing pressure

from Solidarity, which threatened strikes, and in turn from the Soviet Union, which

massed more than 20 divisions on the Polish border for the stated purpose of

regularly scheduled maneuvers. In addition to his position as minister of defense,

Jaruzelski was appointed to the highest positions in both the party and the state as

prime minister of Poland (February 1981) and first secretary of the Communist Party

(October 1981). On December 13, 1981, after 10 months of high tension between the

government, Solidarity and the populace, Jaruzelski declared martial law, arresting

thousands of Solidarity members as well as Solidarity leader Lech Walesa. Martial

law was not lifted until July 1983, although Solidarity remained outlawed..

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problems, which continued to plague the government. By the close of the 10th

plenary session in December 1988, the Communist Party had decided to broach

leaders of Solidarity for talks. These talks, which became known as the “roundtable

talks,” with 13 working groups in 94 sessions from February 6 to April 15, radically

altered the shape of the Polish government and society. The talks resulted in an

agreement in which real political power was vested in a newly created bicameral

legislature and in a president who would be the chief executive. Solidarity was

legalized. After the elections, the Communists, who were guaranteed 65 percent of

the seats in the Sejm (the lower chamber of the parliament), did not win a majority,

and Solidarity-backed candidates won 99 out of 100 freely contested seats in the

Senate. Jaruzelski, whose name was the only one the Communist Party allowed on

the ballot for the presidency, won by just one vote. .

charges for a number of actions he committed while he was defense minister and the

head of state during the communist period. General Jaruzelski is to stand trial for

“communist crimes” 27 years after he tried to crush the Solidarity trade union,

declared a “state of war” in Poland and jailed tens of thousands of people.

The 84-year-old former military officer, who headed the Polish communist party and

served as defense minister, prime minister and president, has always argued that his

decision to impose martial law on Poland in December 1981, 18 months after the rise

of Solidarity sent tremors through the Soviet bloc, was the lesser of two evils — aimed

at preventing the greater despair and enormous human losses that could have

followed an eventual Soviet Army and other Warsaw Pact troops invasion of Poland.

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3

into history helps to concentrate the mind. Take the life of Wojciech Jaruzelski, the

apparatchik-soldier who ruled Poland under martial law. His has been an

extraordinary saga, filled with tough choices. His story is also that of Poland: a noble

birth, invasion, war, communism and its downfall–and perhaps retribution for its

crimes. For, as part of a wider effort to confront the past, Mr Jaruzelski now faces trial

for his part in the bloody quelling of the 1970 shipyard strikes that helped launch

Poland’s organised, anti- communist opposition..

This trial has a long history. The inquiry began in 1991, the indictment against 12

people held responsible for the December 1970 massacre of Polish workers at the

Baltic Coast was ready by April 7, 1995. In 1970, General Jaruzelski was Minister of

Defense. But he was not directly responsible for the use of firearms against the

protesting workers. Jaruzelski claims he was trying to prevent the engagement of the

Polish Army. The trial is not finished yet. It drags on fifteen years now, with

recessions as long as five years. 3500 witnesses have been called in and only 600

have been listened to at the court, 95 percent of them are ordinary people. Recently,

the court sessions take 2-3 days in each week. General Jaruzelski told me he would

not survive to the end of the trial. The chief decision-makers of that period are

already dead. Jaruzelski confessed: .I have felt bad, I have been tormented by that.

the Army against the workers, protesting in December 1970. .The riots of 1970 werenot politically motivated

same mistake in 1976, General Jaruzelski did not allow using the Polish Army

against the workers in Radom and Ursus. He supposedly asserted in 1976, “Polish

troops will not fire on Polish workers.”

could doubt if it could help to bring about justice and to pass judgment on the true

culprits. The only act of redress has been a recent decision of the Polish government

to pay compensation (worth about US $ 25,000) to each of the surviving victims of

the 1970 massacres in the Polish Baltic Coast cities and to the families of the fallen

workers.

The second trial — of the decision-makers of the martial law imposed by General

Jaruzelski on December 13, 1981 — so far could not have been even started. The

inquiry lasted three years, nine people are in the docks, including the principal

defendants: General Jaruzelski, Gen. Kiszczak and Kania, a former first secretary of

the Central Committee of the PUWP (Communist party), forced to resign in October

1981 under Soviet pressure. A joint indictment against Jaruzelski and other accused

people was made by the IPN (Institute of National Remembrance), under political

pressure of a part of the right-wing Polish politicians and former Solidarity activists. It

is a criminal trial, in which the accused face charges of .communist crimes.,

trial was supposed to be held in the Warsaw city center Court of Primary Jurisdiction

and the indictment had been sent to that court in April 2007. But the lower court

rejected it and sent it up to the higher District Court, which.returned it to the

previous court again. Then a Court of Appeals sent it back to the District Court of

Warsaw in December, 2007. It seems that neither the primary nor the higher court is

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4

ready to conduct this trial. Why? As this is not an ordinary criminal indictment but a

political one. The case of the martial law, imposed in Poland on December 13, 1981,

had been already thoroughly examined by Special Inquiry Commission of the Polish

Parliament (The Sejm), working from 1991 to 1996. The Parliament discontinued the

inquiry in October 1996 by ruling that General Wojciech Jaruzelski and other

decision-makers had introduced the martial law (called .a state of war.) under the

by the IPN, opposes the decision approved by the Parliament in 1996.

Jaruzelski explained his decision to impose martial law by the following words:

I often had to resolve complex dilemmas. But that dilemma of 1981 was of a quite

different dimension and of the very greatest specific weight since I bore the

taking the decision on martial law as in some horrible nightmare. I entertained

thoughts of suicide. So what held me back? The sense of responsibility for my family,

friends and country; the awareness that suicide would be a form of desertion

carries the blame for that? My reply is — everyone and no one. “Everyone” since all

parties: the authorities and “Solidarnosc” committed errors, though each evaluates

them to differing extents. “No one” — since such is the outcome of assessing the

the circumstances in which the history of 1981 was created? It was very much

something of a political, social and economic earthquake for which we were quite

unprepared. Government and “Solidarnosc” were miles apart. The high temperature

of the conflict raised an emotional barrier between us and darkened what could have

defend, at no matter what price, the decisions I took. Martial law was an evil which

resulted in various human vexations and sufferings which I very much regret. But

even so, they were a lesser evil than the multidimensional catastrophe which faced

us as a very real danger..

Over the last years, several times I discussed events of the martial law with Wojciech

Jaruzelski. I also read his books, articles and pamphlets. For many of his opponents,

in Poland and among the Poles living abroad, the .state of war. imposed on the

conclusions now, twenty seven years after that tragedy. There are many facts and

decisions that are still unknown. Documents of the KGB and the Soviet military and

government have not been disclosed until now. Many secrets of the communist past

remain undiscovered. In my opinion, shared by many people who personally

witnessed the martial law in Poland and also the developments in the former USSR,

there is no justification to try General Jaruzelski and other defendants in a criminal

court, under selective accusations. They should be tried by a Tribunal of State that

could properly asses their political responsibility, with the consideration of the true

conditions prevailing in the 1980s.

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5

writing articles, pamphlets and books and going to the courts. Occasionally he made

short trips abroad to lecture or to attend international conferences and other

meetings. I started to meet him in the late 1990s to talk about the recent Polish

history and politics, about his meetings with several world leaders and also about the

charges against him for his alleged crimes. During my journalist work in the 1970s

and the 1980s, I had several occasions to meet General Jaruzelski. But these

meetings were always official. In 1985, for example, I sat near him at a press

conference — organized by the Polish Foreign Affairs Journalists Club I was the

general secretary of — for over a hundred foreign journalists, including my dear

his government, Mr. Jerzy Urban, and his close diplomatic adviser, the late Lt Col

1987, Gornicki was to arrange for me a personal meeting and an interview with

communist secret police), only a few months before my planned trip to the Soviet

Union and an interview of Mikhail Gorbachov. While interrogated in a Rakowiecka

special prison ward in Warsaw, I wrote a paper addressed to Jaruzelski, proposing

declared illegal by a martial law court. I bet my paper never reached Jaruzelski or his

deputy prime minister, Rakowski. It was his government .propaganda minister. Jerzy

Urban, who contacted me to the last communist leader of Poland in the late 1990s.

* * *

In the next parts of this article series I will write about former communist leaders that

never have been accused of .communist crimes. they really committed. While

General Jaruzelski is being called a Polish .Pinochet. and stands in the docks, one of

quietly in Queens, New York City, and a former chief of the political police and

intelligence, plotting with the KGB, General Miroslaw Milewski, still avoids a trial for

his criminal acts. There are more of them — communists, traitors of Poland — who

enjoy good life and high pensions. I am going to expose them in my articles. There

will be more in store, soon.

Sunday, March 02, 2008

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