Poland's Walesa defends ex-foe Jaruzelski

[Jaga]

ROME – Polish democracy icon Lech Walesa said on Thursday that plans to put his former arch-foe, communist strongman Wojciech Jaruzelski, on trial smacked of a 'vendetta' which defied national reconciliation.
Jaruzelski imposed martial law in 1981 to crush the Solidarity trade union, imprisoning its leader Walesa and thousands of activists. Hundreds of people were killed by security forces.

The communist regime collapsed eight years later, with resurgent Solidarity taking power and propelling Walesa to the post of president in 1990.
'I fought for a democratic state, a state that can come to terms with its past but is not bent on score-settling,' Walesa said in an interview for Italian daily Corriere della Sera.

'Therefore I am against any vendetta or summary justice.'

On Tuesday, prosecutors filed charges against Jaruzelski, 84, for illegally imposing the martial law, which they said was a 'communist crime' punishable by up 10 years in prison.

On Wednesday, Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski compared Jaruzelski to Nazi official Adolf Eichmann who planned the extermination of the Jews.

Jaruzelski has defended his decision to order the crackdown against Solidarity, the first free trade union in the Eastern Bloc, saying it spared Poland from a Soviet military invasion.

An opinion poll conducted in 2001, 20 years after the crackdown, showed 51 percent of Poles believed the general's decision was right, with 25 percent saying he was wrong.

In 1988, he launched talks with Solidarity which a year later produced a national reconciliation government led by the group, triggering a collapse of communism across the bloc.

Walesa said Jaruzelski's willingness to surrender power peacefully had to be recognised.

'It is known that I have always opposed Jaruzelski, but I must say he was under no obligation to come to an agreement with Solidarity, but he did,' Walesa said.
www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/20070419-1019-poland-jaruzelski-walesa.html

[pieter]

Jaga,

I think I aggree with the 51 procent of Poles who believed the general's decision was right,
because the Sovjets had a large troop concentration on the Sovjet-Polish Border.
1981 was not 1989, in the Kremlin harliners were stil in control of power.

Pieter

[joanzaniskey]

In hindsight. appears that Lech and the general did the right thing. Unless the "Twins" want to try Jaruzelki for crimes against humanity, then Lech is correct in his Vendetta take.

Joan

[ludikundera]

Actually, most historians have, since the late 1990s, pretty much thrown out Jaruzelski's "the lesser of two evils" argument for imposing martial law.

There is plenty of evidence, including lots from Soviet sources, which show that the Soviet Union had no intention of moving its troops into Poland.

A look at Soviet officer Anoshkin's notebook, for example, proves that Jaruzelski was in telephone contact with the USSR on December 10th, 1981 and was told, point blank, that no Soviet military help was coming. This was a line the Soviets had adopted some time earlier.

Jaruzelski knew about it, bemoaned it, and almost pleaded for the Soviets to change their minds. The imposition of martial law has quite often been viewed as a last-gasp effort on the part of Jaruzelski to actually force the USSR's hand, and force their intervention.

When a Polish leader actually pleads with the Soviet Union (a country that had invaded Poland in 1939, forced its own ideology on an occupied Poland starting in 1945, and had exploited Poland like a colony up until 1981) to invade Poland, I wouldn't hesitate in calling him a traitor.

Anyone who believes that martial law avoided the spilling blood is quite ignorant of the truth. He or she is just like the American who, in twenty years, will still believe that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction.

Incidentally, that Walesa and Michnik now support Jaruzelski probably says more about them than it does about Jaruzelski.

[troubledgoodangel]

I do not get involved in politics, except that one time in 1980, when I was filmed by ABC in front of the Warsaw UB Headquarters, telling Brezhnev that the Polish people were sick and tired with the talk of the "Soviet invasion." I was on vacation and I may have drank one cognac too much, but the footage of that impromptu street interview was carried throughout the world (I was told about this when I returned to Orchard Lake). I do think that Jaruzelski, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin were transitional figures from a very dangerous regime. As such, all they did was by the very nature of the choices available to them, controversial. For this reason, I would leave them alone; let history be their judge. No one knows with certainty what would have happened had someone else been in their shoes. Had Jaruzelski, Gorbachev, or even Yeltsin overreacted, we might have now been deep into the Third World War! But, as far as I see it, they all did the best they could under the circumstances! And this also goes for Lech Wa³êsa.