On Monday, February 11, 2008, I met General Wojciech Jaruzelski, a former President of Poland and the last Communist leader in this country. It was not our first meeting as we met several times before in the last few years. General Jaruzelski, almost 85 now, is standing in the docks in spite of enjoying his old age years in peace. The first of the trials is about the Gdansk massacre of workers in December 1970, 38 years ago. At that time, gen. Jaruzelski was Minister of Defense in the Polish government. The shooting of workers was not on his orders. But 44 people died and over 1500 were injured.

A recent good news: the present Polish government assigned one time pensions of 50,000 PLN (US $ 20,000) to the living victims of the massacre and to the families of the fallen workers. The trial itself lingers on over 25 years already. From the 3,500 witnesses only 600 have been heard in court up to now. Most of the communist leaders responsible for that tragedy are dead. Why Jaruzelski? Because he is still alive.

The second trial couldn’t begin yet. It’s about the martial law in Poland, imposed by the Army under Gen. Jaruzelski’s command in December 1981. General was exculpated by a special commission of the Parliament and by the Parliament itself several years ago. All evidence have been examined and the final verdict was that he and other leaders and military commanders “acted under higher necessity” to save the country from chaos, civil war and probably also from a Soviet military intervention. Now some revengeful former Solidarity activists press for a criminal trial, claiming the martial law was a “communist crime” still unpunished. It’s absurd. The trial should have begun long time ago but the courts are refusing to take the case. It looks like a politically-motivated revenge.

Jaruzelski was calm and he told me sadly: “I won’t live up to the verdict”. He wrote several books and now he is writing a detailed statement to be presented to the court. As he says, “for the sake of history.”

I am going to write an article about General Jaruzelski and about some still unsolved secrets of the communist past. It will be first posted on the CFP, perhaps still in this week.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Poland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.