Twenty-five years after the Solidarity crisis that engulfed Poland and marked the beginning of the end of eastern European communism, the country’s leader at the time, General Jaruzelski, is facing ruin. The hard-right government of the twin Kaczynski brothers — Prime Minister Jaroslaw and President Lech — is determined to strip him of his rank and pension, and may even evict him from his home, as punishment for the imposition of martial law in 1981 — even though in the 1990s Parliament cleared him of responsibility for deaths in the martial-law period.
The move comes at a time of growing extreme-right influence across eastern Europe, a trend echoed in the West. Since the early 1990s, public reaction to migration — especially from Muslim countries — has helped far-right parties, with their anti-Semitic, homophobic, anti-abortion agendas, make gains in Bulgaria, Romania, Austria, France and Italy. Poland has moved to ban discussion of homosexuality in schools; and Soviet memorials to the soldiers who died fighting fascism have been pulled down, particularly in eastern Germany and Hungary.
This is the context for a Bill in the Polish Parliament that seeks to demote all high-ranking military officials who were involved in imposing martial law after a series of Solidarity strikes came close to provoking armed intervention by the Soviet Union. These men — among them Poland’s first astronaut, Miroslaw Hermaszewski — may also lose pensions and the right to keep their homes.
Under martial law, which lasted from December 1981 to July 1983, Solidarity was banned and its leader, Lech Walesa, imprisoned. The government of the time claimed that 12 people died during the emergency, but a later commission ruled there had been 90 deaths, and thousands detained. Jaruzelski — who went on to negotiate the end of the communist system in Poland with Walesa — has always said he had no option but to invoke martial law, or see the country invaded by the Warsaw pact troops massing at Poland’s borders. He is probably right; the Brezhnev leadership had not hesitated to send troops into Afghanistan two years earlier, and Solidarity’s actions were paralysing vital transport links between the Soviet Union and other parts of Europe.
Jaruzelski — who had himself been deported to Siberia before helping to liberate Warsaw and other cities from the Nazis — also points to the 1990s investigation that found that martial law had been unavoidable, and that half of Poles approved of its introduction, as against the 25% who opposed it. “The accusation is that we ran an organised criminal association,” he told me. “I can only suppose that this is being used as smokescreens for the complex problems Poland is presently having to tackle.”
The Kaczynskis, fired by their rightwing brand of Roman Catholicism, have started to close clubs and gay bars in Warsaw; a gay pride march was banned last year. One of the victims was Le Madame, which housed the headquarters of the Green party. The EU Greens denounced the move: “The right-wing government wanted to shut down this meeting point for civil society where artists, political activists, homosexuals, feminists and globalisation critics met.”
But international protests, particularly from the EU, have been modest; outside Poland few see the link between the witch-hunt against Jaruzelski and an increasingly dangerous authoritarianism. By failing to speak out, Brussels is in danger of encouraging right-wing groups in the countries now waiting their turn to feed at the EU trough. — Â