Unknown secrets of the communist past (Part I)
Warsaw, Poland: On Monday, February 11, 2008 I met General Wojciech 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 of
criminal charges that had been filed against him on account of his conduct as a 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.
From the exile in Siberia to the Communist Party leadership
An extract from his biography published in
the West: “Born July 6, 1923, into a family 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 Soviet-sponsored 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 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.”
More from other Source:
“However, neither the imposition nor lifting of martial law solved Poland's economic 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. “
Wojciech Jaruzelski remained president until being succeeded by
Lech Walesa in December 1990. Subsequently, the last communist leader of Poland has faced 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.
The never-ending trials
The Economist wrote about General Jaruzelski in 2000: “Once in a while, a glimpse 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. Some 3,500 witnesses have been called in and only 600 have been heard by the court--95 percent of them are ordinary people.
Recently, the court sessions have been taking 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” and I could feel “guilty in the moral sense” - because he could not prevent the use of the Army against the workers, protesting in December 1970. “The riots of 1970 were not politically motivated” he told me “these were spontaneous protests against sharp rises of food prices.” When the communist leadership of Edward Gierek repeated the same mistake in 1976, General Jaruzelski did not allow the use of the Polish Army against the workers in Radom and Ursus. He supposedly asserted in 1976, "Polish troops will not fire on Polish workers."
The trial of the “December 1970 events” certainly has a historical significance, but one 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 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. It is a criminal trial, in which the accused face charges of “communist crimes”, “conspiracy” and “breach of the Constitution of the Polish People’s Republic.” The trial was supposed to be held in the Warsaw City Center Court of Primary Jurisdiction and the indictment was 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 ready to conduct this trial. Why? As this is not a 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 a 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 introduced the martial law (called “a state of war”) under the conditions of “higher necessity.” The criminal indictment against them, prepared by the IPN, opposes the decision approved by the Parliament in 1996.
In his
Landon lecture at the Kansas University (March 11, 1996), Wojciech Jaruzelski explained his decision to impose martial law in the following words:
“The introduction of martial law was the most dramatic decision I had ever taken (…) 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 responsibility for the fate of the nation and country (…) I spent the weeks prior to 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 unworthy of an old soldier.
You might well ask -- why was another way out of the situation not found? Who 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 realities of the internal situation and erstwhile international conditions (…) what were 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 been a rational picture (…) I am saying this to avoid any suspicion that I want to 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 country in 1981 was simply a “communist crime.” But it’s easy to jump to 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 assess their political responsibility, with the consideration of the conditions prevailing in the 1980s.
Meeting General Jaruzelski
Since leaving the President’s office, Wojciech Jaruzelski shared his time between 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 for over a hundred foreign journalists, including my dear American friend – Ms. Georgie Anne Geyer. More frequently, I met the spokesman of his government, Jerzy Urban and his close diplomatic adviser, the late Lt Col Wieslaw Gornicki – a known Polish international reporter and writer. In spring of 1987, Gornicki was to arrange for me a meeting and an interview of the General … but on March 20 I had been arrested by SB (the communist secret police), only a few months before my planned trip to the Soviet Union and an interview of Mikhail Gorbachev. While interrogated in a Rakowiecka special prison ward in Warsaw, I wrote a paper addressed to Jaruzelski, proposing talks with Solidarity leaders and reinstating of Solidarnosc, the workers’ trade union declared illegal. 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 these former communist high officials – a hard-liner Stefan Olszowski – is living 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 the good life and high pensions. I am going to expose them in my articles. There will be more in store, soon.
(Editor’s note: In March of 1987, Warsaw-based journalist David Dastych, then a CIA operator was arrested and imprisoned by Communist secret police in Poland.
In a series of articles for Canada Free Press, Dastych throws a beam of light on “Communist traitors of Poland living the high life on generous pensions and tells readers their names.) 
