The Past As Prologue
Poland's communist leader Jaruzelski is again on the docket
It is hardly anyone's idea of justice. The crime is 31 years old. The defendant is 78 and ailing. His accusers have been pushing to try him for a dozen years--but they had a different crime in mind. It could be another dozen years before a verdict. And yet the trial that got underway in Warsaw last week may well go down as one of the most important landmarks in the history of post-communist states.
Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the last communist leader of Poland, is on trial for allegedly giving shoot-to-kill orders that cost 44 striking workers their lives in 1970. He and his 11 codefendants, if convicted of manslaughter, face possible jail sentences of eight years to life. All of them were highly placed officials when the killings occurred. Jaruzelski himself was defense minister, and that's the hitch: The orders to use force to break up demonstrations in three Baltic port cities initially came not from him but from Poland's leader at the time, Wladyslaw Gomulka.
Different crime. According to the latest poll figures, most Poles do not believe Jaruzelski should be tried for the 1970 killings. Indeed, the politicians who pushed for the trial had something else in mind: They wanted to see Jaruzelski prosecuted and punished for the imposition of martial law in December 1981.
The long struggle to bring Jaruzelski to justice testifies to Polish society's continued efforts to come to terms with the legacy of communism. A number of post-Soviet countries, such as Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, entered the 21st century with their old communist leaders at the helm. Others, like the Czech Republic and Germany, have largely completed the legal process of identifying and punishing those responsible for crimes of the old regime. Still other countries chose shorter routes: Romania's communist dictator was summarily executed, while Russia quickly aborted the attempted trial of Communist Party leaders and allowed many of them to retain high posts. But Poland, perhaps because it has sought the middle ground, seems little closer to resolving its past than it was a decade ago. The process started resolutely enough. In 1989, the country's first noncommunist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, called for "drawing a thick line" to separate the country from its past. But any effort to do so was probably doomed because of the country's split legacy: On one hand, the Polish regime had dealt harshly with its opponents at several historic junctures. On the other hand, its transition to post-communism was the earliest and arguably the smoothest of all its neighbors.
No one person is more responsible for that conflicted history than Jaruzelski, who is viewed by some as a bloody dictator and Soviet stooge and by others as a reformer not unlike Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1981 he decided to introduce martial law in a country swept by a months-long wave of strikes and protests that gave birth to the Solidarity movement. The move imposed unparalleled restrictions on the Polish people and left the country's already hobbled economy in shambles.
Still, Jaruzelski's supporters believe that by imposing martial law the general prevented the bloodier alternative--a Soviet military invasion like those that followed reformist moves in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. In 1989 Jaruzelski was instrumental in organizing negotiations between communists and Solidarity activists that led to the Round Table Accord that same year, which paved the way for the Eastern bloc's first partially free elections. In June of that year Jaruzelski became Poland's president--a post he was to cede to Solidarity's Lech Walesa once election laws were reformed.
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