The amnesty for Poland's political prisoners announced on July 21 is a victory for the four leaders of KOR.Daniel Singer
The amnesty for Poland’s political prisoners announced on July 21 is a victory for the four leaders of KOR. They had turned down a bargain to exchange freedom for political silence, negotiated under the auspices of the church, and now, after thirty months, can leave jail with heads held high.
It is a victory for Solidarity, whose 658 imprisoned members and sympathizers will be freed. Lech Walesa has foiled the officials, attempt to divide it into good proles and evil intellectuals by paying warm tribute to the members of KOR.
Yet it might also be a victory for General Jaruzelski. The authorities can claim that they are strong enough to be magnanimous- and respectable enough to receive needed foreign credits from the West. For his part, the general has been spared an awkward performance. Today in Warsaw, or anywhere else in Eastern Europe, it is impossible to stage a trial on the ghastly model of the Moscow trials of the 1930s.
A Jacek Kuron or an Adam Michnik would have used the dock not as a confessional box but as a political platform. Could the amnesty also mark the victory of common sense and the timid resumption of the process of change dramatically interrupted by the military coup in December 1981? The situation is one of stalemate. Solidarity, still able to publish papers galore, can no longer paralyze the country with a general strike. The regime, for all its power, has failed to attract the intelligentsia or regain the vital support of the mass labor movement. That equation reveals both the necessity and the difficulty of a compromise.
Foreign credits will not be enough for genuine economic reform, which stands a chance only if it is backed by the working people of Poland. That will require a revival of the Gdansk agreements, in terms reflecting the new conditions. Such collaboration would be perilous at best and would involve some sharing of power. Why should Jaruzelski accept now what the regime rejected three years ago?
Indeed, the amnesty itself contains the seeds of discord. The political prisoners are being freed conditionally. If they repeat their “crimes” before the end of 1986 they will have to serve the remainder of their sentences. Perhaps the terms will be interpreted loosely, pleasing those who saw in the resurgent Polish labor movement and in the Gdansk agreements the first signs of a socialist resurrection. But if Jaruzelski uses the amnesty merely to impress the West or to reach an agreement with the Catholic Church above the heads of the workers, his will be a Pyrrhic victory.
Daniel SingerDaniel Singer, for many years The Nation's Paris-based Europe correspondent, was born on September 26, 1926, in Warsaw, was educated in France, Switzerland and England and died on December 2, 2000, in Paris. He was a contributor to The Economist, The New Statesman and the Tribune and appeared as a commentator on NPR, "Monitor Radio" and the BBC, as well as Canadian and Australian broadcasting. (These credits are for his English-language work; he was also fluent in French, Polish, Russian and Italian.) He was the author of Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (Hill & Wang, 1970), The Road to Gdansk (Monthly Review Press, 1981), Is Socialism Doomed?: The Meaning of Mitterrand (Oxford, 1988) and Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? (Monthly Review Press, 1999). A specialist on the Western European left as well as the former Communist nations, Singer ranged across the Continent in his dispatches to The Nation. Singer sharply critiqued Western-imposed economic "shock therapy" in the former Eastern Bloc and US support for Boris Yeltsin, sounded early warnings about the re-emergence of Fascist politics into the Italian mainstream, and, across the Mediterranean, reported on an Algeria sliding into civil war. The Daniel Singer Millennium Prize Foundation was founded in 2000 to honor original essays that help further socialist ideas in the tradition of Daniel Singer.