First Published: Frontline, Vol. 4, No. 8, October 13, 1986.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The way the U.S. media tells it, the general amnesty for political prisoners recently declared by the Polish government is the result of pressures exerted by the Catholic Church and Western governments, plus the Polish government’s desperate desire for trade and aid from the United States.
In reality, the release of the last 225 political prisoners in Poland signifies the qualitative decline of the outlawed Solidarity underground movement and its transformation into a tiny dissident grouping whose principal audience is the Western media. The prisoners were released because they no longer pose any major threat to socialism. Poland has already left behind the Solidarity years and has entered a new stage of national reconciliation and reconstruction in which the focus has shifted toward bringing the Polish economy in line with the developed members of the socialist camp.
Within days of the prisoners’ release, Lech Walesa, Solidarity’s main public figure, and Zbigniew Bujak, leader of the underground, announced that the organization was giving up its underground activity and was setting up a council to openly seek its re-establishment as a union. The two attributed the change to the opportunity afforded by the amnesty. In truth, the move demonstrated that while Solidarity could, for obvious reasons, continue to attract the attention of the Western media, it had become totally ineffective in Poland itself.
All this will come as a surprise to those whose information about Poland comes solely from the Western press which has continued to portray Solidarity as a powerful movement enjoying the sympathies, if not the outright support, of the majority of Poles. In fact, the tiny clandestine network identified with Solidarity has been little more than a shadow game with no political backing for some time now.
No longer able to sustain the fiction that the Polish government was worried to the point of paranoia about the underground, the U.S. media now explains the amnesty by saying, as the New York Times editorialized (Sept 14) that the government “heeded the wise advice of Polish church and human rights leaders.”
Ignoring the absence of any widespread show of sympathy for the released prisoners, the Western media “discovered” that a small group of Solidarity supporters turned up at a religious pilgrimage in the Polish town of Czestochowa and started chanting Solidarity slogans. According to the New York Times, the gathering of 45,000 was “a reaffirmation of the democratic ideals of the Solidarity labor movement.” The report neglected to say, however, that the Czestochowa pilgrimage is traditionally the largest religious event in the country, drawing people from all over Poland, and existed long before Solidarity, or socialism, in Poland.
Another “explanation” offered by the Western media is that the amnesty was aimed at getting the U.S. to drop its economic sanctions against Poland, and that U.S. trade and aid were seen as necessary for the revitalization of the Polish economy.
But most U.S. economic sanctions have already been dropped – not because of any U.S. policy to improve ties with socialist Poland but because Washington has been isolated in its attempts to maintain the sanctions. Most West European nations have maintained economic links with Poland and greater intransigence by the U.S. only hurt U.S. banks and corporations eager to do business there.
At this point, U.S. harassment of Poland consists principally in witholding “most favored nation” status and opposition to additional credits. Washington recently dropped its opposition to Polish membership in the International Monetary Fund and negotiated a restoration of air travel between the two countries.
While the Polish government has pressed for an end to the remaining sanctions, and release of the political prisoners helps to neutralize one of the major rationalizations used by the Reagan administration for maintaining them, Poland’s overall emphasis in its foreign policy has shifted decidedly in the past half decade towards firming up ties with the socialist camp, especially the Soviet Union. Not only is trade with the socialist camp increasing, but new technology needed to modernize Polish industry is coming more and more from the East and not the West. Still, Poland requires active trade with the West – especially Western Europe – because it must repay a large foreign debt accumulated in the late 1970s, and because, due to its location, it plays a central role in promoting peaceful trade and relations between Eastern and Western Europe.
Aside from the fact that the political prisoners pose little danger to Polish socialism, their release flows naturally from the policy of national reconciliation put forward by the Polish United Workers Party (PUWP) in recent years. This policy seeks to bring together all sectors of Polish society, no matter what their role in Solidarity was, to solve the serious economic problems still plaguing the nation. It acknowledges that many of the problems identified by the Solidarity movement were real and the impulse to protest against abuses was legitimate, but that the only way problems can be solved is through the cooperation of all strata in Polish society.
A sign that the policy of reconciliation has been working is that even those elements with known ties to Western intelligence agencies, many of whom were in the Solidarity underground, do not pose a serious threat to national unity at this point. The social and political mechanisms, including mass organizations and local political bodies, exist to monitor the activities of the “underground” as well as to form the building blocks of a renewed socialist democracy.
Wojciech Jaruzelski, general secretary of the PUWP, signaled that Poland had turned the corner in its efforts at national reconciliation in his speech at the 10th Party Congress in June of this year. He said that the Congress opened up “a qualitatively new phase” in Poland’s development. “Today’s situation in Poland is marked by spreading agreement, stronger public order and discipline, and progressive decomposition and isolation of anti-state groups. That provides the basis for easier legal measures on those who have let themselves commit certain crimes.”
Jaruzelski noted that the Polish party had started to increase in membership after a long period of decline, and that it was now in a position to be more assertive in negotiating with the Catholic Church and the West. Membership in trade unions and other mass organizations is growing steadily, and in general it is the PUWP and not the anti-socialist opposition that has gained the initiative in Polish political life.
It is this internal dynamic, and not economic or political pressures from the West, that has produced the amnesty and progress towards national reconciliation.