Anti-Draft Efforts : Poland--Peace Drive Under Fire

For the first time, a small, unofficial peace movement is taking root in Poland, to the clear distress of the Communist authorities, who have quietly begun prosecuting some of its members.

One activist, a 21-year-old schoolteacher from Gdansk named Wojciech Jankowski, was sentenced in late December to 3 1/2 years in prison for refusing to serve in the Polish army. Twelve others who are over the draft age have been fined heavily for turning in their military identity cards, which Polish men are obliged to carry until the age of 60.

In Warsaw last week, as a manifesto outlining the movement’s nonviolent philosophy was being circulated underground, the police raided a news conference called by the unofficial peace activists and detained two of them for questioning.

Publicity Avoided

The official press has avoided openly denouncing the movement--probably to avoid giving it publicity--but the authorities have reason to be concerned about the spread of pacifist ideas. With 340,000 men under arms, more than half of them draftees, Poland’s armed forces are the largest in Eastern Europe and, next to East Germany’s, the most important strategically to the Soviet Union.

As it is, political officers in the Polish army face an uphill struggle in instilling a Leninist sense of loyalty and discipline in teen-age draftees brought up in the Roman Catholic Church and steeped in Solidarity’s struggle for democratic reforms. The Polish church is as much a patriotic as a religious institution, and the Poland it idealizes is the one that threw the Bolsheviks back from the gates of Warsaw in 1920 in a victorious war for independence.

Polish political officers “do not hide the importance of this question,” the Soviet armed forces newspaper Red Star noted with some delicacy last fall in a report on ideological problems in the Polish navy. The newspaper added that “unfortunately, there are still people in the country . . . dangling rotten ideological bait” in the path of its impressionable youth.

Tough Prison Terms

Like the Soviet Union, Poland does not recognize conscientious objectors to the draft. Prison sentences for those who refuse to serve usually run longer than the two years most conscripts serve in the military.

An outgrowth of the banned Solidarity trade union, the unofficial peace movement so far has concerned itself less with the larger issues of nuclear arms than with the morality of serving in the Polish army, which Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski’s military regime used to suppress Solidarity four years ago under martial law.

“In view of the discrepancy between the goals of the government and the goals of the nation, the legal obligation of military service is an act violating the human conscience,” an organization calling itself the Group for Freedom and Peace said in the seven-point manifesto that was circulated underground.

It urged the creation of a nuclear-free zone in Central Europe and said the eventual demilitarization of the region would reduce the danger of war. But the statement said this could happen only “under conditions of the democratizing of Eastern Europe.”

In recent months, the budding Polish peace movement has taken up the cause of young men who have been jailed for resisting the draft or for refusing to take the Polish army’s loyalty oath, which Polish courts consider an equivalent offense. The oath requires allegiance not only to Poland but also to the Soviet Union and other members of the Warsaw Pact.

Backed by Walesa

Among those who have endorsed the idea of an alternative service for conscientious objectors, and a new, purely Polish loyalty oath for those who do serve, is Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, the winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize.

Unofficial peace activists have also begun reaching out for contact with West European anti-nuclear groups, partly in the hope of convincing them that demands for freedom of expression and other human rights in Soviet Bloc countries are inseparable from the cause of world peace.

“For us, peace is not only the absence of war, it is a moral social order,” said Jacek Czaputowicz, one of the new Polish activists. “Peace, freedom, democracy--they are all joined and inseparable.”

Czaputowicz, 30, a Warsaw economist and a longtime student activist, is a member of Freedom and Peace, the Polish movement’s most visible salient. The name, he said in an interview, is meant to reflect the indivisibility of its two ideals.

He said the group has gathered a core of about 100 active adherents since last spring, in Warsaw, Gdansk and the southern cities of Wroclaw and Krakow. Among its members is Maciej Kuron, whose father, Jacek Kuron, is a longtime adviser to Solidarity and one of Poland’s most prominent opposition intellectuals.

Several Thousand Readers

Although its active nucleus is still small, members of the group estimate that their printed materials regularly reach several thousand readers, most of them university students, mainly through the underground news bulletin of KOS, the Committee for Social Resistance.

KOS, an opposition group that sprang up after martial law was imposed in 1981, is composed of small, decentralized cells scattered across the country. Its membership overlaps with Solidarity, but its anonymous leadership differs in outlook, especially in the stress it puts on seeing Poland’s problems in the larger context of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. The illegal bulletin that KOS publishes every two weeks has a press run of between 6,000 and 15,000 copies.

10,000 Signatures

As an indication of the peace group’s reach in Poland, Czaputowicz said it has managed to gather 10,000 signatures, mostly from draft-age students, protesting the imprisonment of Marek Adamkiewicz, 29, a student activist from the northern city of Szczecin. Adamkiewicz was sentenced in December, 1984, to 2 1/2 years for refusing to take the oath of military service.

Adamkiewicz, whom Freedom and Peace has put forward as an example to others, objected to a line in the oath that says the Polish army “stands constantly on guard for peace in brotherly alliance with the Soviet and other fraternal armies.”

These “fraternal armies,” Polish peace activists emphasize, have been used not for national defense but to suppress national aspirations in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, in Poland in 1981 and in Afghanistan, where Soviet troops have fought Muslim nationalists since 1979, longer than they fought the Germans in World War II.

Official Sounding Board

Like the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries, Poland has an officially organized peace movement that serves as a sounding board for Moscow’s arms control proposals and its criticism of the West.

The officially sanctioned movement has kept a low profile, but has recently shown new signs of life, notably in the form of an international Congress of Intellectuals that was organized in Warsaw last week. Most prominent intellectuals chose to boycott it.

Freedom and Peace tried to hold a session of it own for Western journalists at Kuron’s apartment during the congress, but the police broke it up.

Internal Turmoil

An unofficial movement was slow in starting in Poland, activists say, partly because people have been preoccupied with the country’s internal turmoil and partly because many Poles suspected that all such movements were little more than Communist-inspired efforts to hamper Western defense programs.

“When a Pole sees (Western) demonstrations every day on television against the United States government, when they see this presented as good because it is anti-American, he thinks they must be manipulated by Moscow,” one Polish activist said.

“These groups have given some reason for believing this, like the slogan, ‘Better Red than dead.’ This irritates the Poles.”

The underground’s first effort to make contact with Western anti-nuclear groups came in the form of a public statement in July, 1983, that sought to add balance, as Polish activists saw it, to the emphasis Western peace movements placed on the deployment of American missiles in Europe.

‘Defense of Peace’

“The threat to world peace comes from nations with totalitarian regimes,” the widely publicized message said in part. “We are fighting and will continue to fight against totalitarianism, and this is how we understand our contribution to the defense of peace.”

American, French and British groups responded, and KOS has since been represented at international conferences of anti-nuclear groups in Europe. Polish activists said that over the last year or so, West European groups have begun to show greater understanding of the Polish situation, and that this made it easier for Poles to accept the idea of a legitimate peace movement.

“We want to exist within the larger world peace movement, if, of course, our attitude is acknowledged,” Czaputowicz said.

It was not until last year, however, that an unofficial Polish peace group formed itself and began to take root. What prompted it was the discovery that a small but steady stream of young men were going to prison every year, unknown to all but friends and family, for refusing to serve in the army for religious or moral reasons.

Moral, Political Grounds

The Freedom and Peace group says it has been able to identify about 100 young Poles currently in prison for this offense. About 90 of them are Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose faith prohibits bearing arms, but others--Adamkiewicz was the first to come to the group’s attention--have refused on moral and political grounds.

To publicize the views of Polish draft resisters, the group began circulating some of their statements through the KOS bulletin. Then it gathered petitions and organized a weeklong protest fast at a church in Podkowa Lesna, near Warsaw, that brought the support of prominent opposition intellectuals.

In a further gesture last September, 28 members of the group turned in their military identification cards. Six agreed to take them back when military authorities informed them that “deliberately disposing of government documents” is against the law, but 22 others refused to do so.

Twelve so far have been ordered to pay fines of 50,000 zlotys ($360)--the equivalent of six weeks’ average wages in Poland. Most will probably refuse to pay and take the alternative of 50 days in jail, said Czaputowicz, who is among them.

Unusually Harsh Term

Then last December, two days before Christmas, a court in Gdansk sentenced another member of the group, Wojciech Jankowski, to the unusually harsh term of 3 1/2 years in prison for refusing his draft summons in October. According to a report in Tygodnik Mazowsze, Solidarity’s main underground bulletin in Warsaw, Judge Andrzej Grzybowski explained the severity of the sentence by citing the “social offensiveness of the crime and its growing frequency” in the Gdansk area.

Unofficial sources said at least 14 others refused the October call-up in Gdansk.

The Polish peace movement has stopped short, thus far, of directly urging young men to resist the draft. Instead, it asks for freedom of choice, and for young people to think about the ethical implications of military service.

With this in mind, Freedom and Peace is working to resurrect the memory of a young man named Otton Schimke, an obscure and unlikely hero of wartime Poland.

Killed by Firing Squad

Schimke, a 19-year-old Austrian conscript in Hitler’s occupation army, was executed by a military firing squad near the southern city of Tarnow on Nov. 17, 1944, for refusing to shoot Polish civilians. A Catholic Mass is celebrated twice each year in his memory, on the date of his execution and on his birthday, May 5.

Schimke’s relevance to modern times, peace activist Jaroslaw Dubiel said, is that “the refusal, dictated by one’s conscience, to obey an order means the end of totalitarianism--of fascism, communism, of any unacceptable regime.” Similar thinking seems to have motivated Wojciech Jankowski, the schoolteacher sentenced to prison in December.

The imposition of martial law in 1981, he said in an interview published in the KOS bulletin, was a personal “turning point, when Gen. Jaruzelski turned the soldiers against the society.”

“Then,” he said, “I understood that the army in Poland does not serve the defense of independence, but that its goal is to keep the society obedient to the U.S.S.R.”