Poland: the terror
Timothy Garton Ash
ut General Jaruzelski is a patriot isn't 1.1 he?' I have more than once been asked over the Christmas brandy.
It is true that Wojciech Jaruzelski is a Pole by birth. It is true that he wears the uniform of a Polish officer. And it is true that he has dressed up the operation which began on Sunday 13 December in patriotic uniform.
Yet the real nature of this operation becomes clearer with each fragmentary report reaching us from the blockaded country. Poland, it emerges, is being sub- jected to a rule of terror. The General's conscript army is deployed to seal the fron- tiers, curtail movement within the country, cut off all internal communications, en- force the curfew, patrol the streets and sur- round factories. But the really dirty work is being done by the thugs of the police and security services. We know too little about these swarming denizens of a twilight world to say precisely who they are and from whom they take their orders. We can however be certain that the UB (literally `Security Office') has its own direct links with the KGB. General Jaruzelski's army holds the fort while the Security thugs go in and beat up the prisoners.
Adam Michnik, a man of infectious courage, humanity and integrity who has inspired a generation of young Poles, is reliably reported to have been so viciously beaten that a close friend scarcely recognis- ed him afterwards. The tireless organiser of the opposition Social Self-Defence Com- mittee, KOR, Jacek Kuron, has been as badly treated. In Wroclaw three hundred Solidarity activists were forced to spend the night out of doors, where they were repeatedly doused with water — in temperatures well below freezing. Tens of thousands more are 'interned' in camps across the country, often in inhuman condi- tions. Units of the police and (probably) the regular military Internal Security Corps are used to break occupation strikes and disperse peaceful demonstrations, dragging people out of churches and killing at least two hundred to date.
'It is September 1939 all over again', comments a Warsaw writer who woke up one day in New York to find his name on the list of those imprisoned in Poland. He suggests that the current terror is almost a carbon copy of the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, by agreement with the Nazis, at the outbreak of World War II.
The mass arrests of the academic and in- tellectual elite are justified by a lying pro- paganda which plumbs the lower depths of Stalinism. Thus Radio Warsaw 'reveals' the Jewish origins of Professor Bronislaw Geremek, one of Solidarity's wisest and most moderate counsellors, and alleges links with 'International Zionism'. Thus it is claimed that only 'extremists' and `counter-revolutionaries plotting the violent overthrow of the Polish state' are detained, while in fact writers and journalists who played no role at all in Solidarity are known to have been carried off.
This, the General will have us (and the Poles) believe, is 'the lesser evil': the classical argument of the collaborator through the ages, of Petain and Quisling and Hitler's civil servants, as well as of Kadar and Husak. But we have to ask: the lesser evil for whom? For the Kremlin and for Poland's Warsaw pact allies certainly. The appearance of an 'internal' Polish solu- tion throws the Western alliance into pathetically predictable disarray, with the West Germans fearing to introduce any sanctions in case they precipitate Soviet in- tervention. As if the Soviet Union was not intervening massively already! They should tell that to the President of the Polish Academy who returned from a short intern- ment to find a senior Russian officer occu- pying his office. (A story we have on unusually good authority.) There is further evidence of direct Russian involvement at the command level. But ultimately the strict ethnic nationality of the men who give the orders is largely irrelevant. The second Soviet takeover of Poland, in 1944-45, was also fronted by Poles who called themselves Patriots. In effect, this is already the third Soviet takeover.
The hope that the Soviet-Polish junta will be deflected by the scale of workers' and peasants' passive resistance back on to the path of negotiation, via some miraculous bridge of compromise engineered by the Church, is now so faint as to be almost in- visible.
The General must still be hoping for what is called in Soviet newspeak `normalisation'. 'Normalisation', as prac- tised in Hungary after 1956 and Czechoslovakia after 1968, means the use of terror to force a European society back to Soviet norms which are fundamentally alien to it. The terror in Hungary, it will be recalled, lasted more than three years and involved, among other infamies, the execu- tion of Imre Nagy after he had been pro- mised a safe conduct from his refuge in the Yugoslav embassy. Only then did Kadar feel secure enough to start introducing the reforms which have given Hungarians their present state of well-fed stagnation.
But what are the chances of 'normalisa- tion' in Poland without the Red Army? Considering that Solidarity was caught un- prepared, and in the deep frozen winter before Christmas, the passive resistance is
already considerable. In the new year, with skeleton Solidarity leaderships regrouping underground and perhaps milder weather, it is hard to imagine the workers on the Baltic coast or the miners of Silesia going docilely back to work over the graves of their murdered comrades. Those that do go back will certainly not work hard for this regime. Nor can the army force them to, even if its own morale does not disintegrate first. There are already reports of local in- subordination, desertions, and conflicts with the Security thugs. The profound transformation of popular consciousness wrought by 16 months of Solidarity finds no parallel in the post-war history of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Moreover, Polish society has in the Catholic Church and the private peasantry two immense bulwarks against totalitarian rule. The Poles, unlike the Hungarians and Czechs, have a two centuries' old tradition of resistance to oppression. And there are 35 million of them.
We must therefore face the probability that the Polish apparatus of terror will pro- ve, in the longer term, incapable of keeping the lid on the cauldron. The present, creep- ing Soviet military intervention would then be escalated. Poland would again become a Soviet Zone of Occupation. There might even be a de facto administrative partition of the territory between East Germany and the Soviet Union. The clock would not simply be set back to 1945. This time there would not be a snowball's chance in hell of reconstructing a government which had the confidence of the people. It is questionable if it would be possible even to reconstruct a plausible communist party. There would be a chronic economic go-slow. Young Poles would draw on the example of their ancestors to resist, and to build an underground state as their fathers did dur- ing the German occupation, though today they could have no illusions about eventual victory with western allies' aid.
If the worst happens, then historians will surely find it incredible that intelligent, men ever paused to praise General Jaruzelski for `patriotically' choosing the lesser evil. If the present Soviet-Polish 'normalisation' operation does not fail, then the General will still have filthied the language of Polish patriotism by his act. For the man who was himself deported to the Soviet Union aged 17 in 1939, and returned with the Red Army in 1944, must have known full well how the Security thugs would behave in the name of `National Salvation' when he unleashed them. Today Poles refer to the Military Council of National Salvation as 'the crow' (a play on its initials, WRON — the word `wrons' in Polish means crow), the crow picking at the mutilated body of Solidarity. The Military Council has indeed as much to do with true patriotism as the black crow with the white eagle.
'If', I must answer over the New Year champagne in the safety of England, `if a patriot is a man who agrees to preside over the martyrdom of his nation, then General Jaruzelski is a patriot.'
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