Polish Regime May Have Second Thoughts on Putting Walesa on Trial for Slander

After months of playing a game of legal cat and mouse with Solidarity founder Lech Walesa, the Polish authorities now seem to be having second thoughts about putting the most popular man in the country on trial for slander.

Having ordered a six-day trial beginning on Tuesday, the government has been suggesting informally that a trial might not be necessary after all if Walesa offers sufficient assurances that he intended no malice when he questioned the official results of last October’s parliamentary elections.

One of the 12 election officials who brought the slander charges, Ryszard Mlotek, said last week that he was now satisfied with a statement Walesa made Feb. 2 that it has never been his purpose to insult anyone, but that he would continue to express his views.

Whether the other 11 plaintiffs might also withdraw their charges is not known. Polish lawyers said that even if they do, a court hearing would now be required to dispose of the case.

Diplomatic observers said it appears that the authorities have belatedly begun to appreciate the effect that a Walesa trial would have on Poland’s image abroad and on its urgent quest for new Western credits. They said the government now seems to be angling for a graceful way out of the judicial spectacle it had originally planned.

Failing that, it may proceed with a more modest and perfunctory trial in the hope of minimizing damage to its slowly improving relations with Western Europe.

“Perhaps, on sober reflection, they realize this case is too thin to expect a credible conviction, even in a kangaroo court,” one diplomat said.

The government, he added, may fear that subjecting the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize winner to a political trial would jeopardize Poland’s chances for admission to the International Monetary Fund.

Poland is seeking membership in the IMF as an avenue to new credits in its struggle to meet interest payments on its $29.3-billion dollar debt to the West. The country’s economic growth slowed to 3% last year, according to recently published figures, and its trade surplus--the source of funds for its interest payments--fell by almost 30%, compounding its troubles.

The U.S. State Department has condemned the decision to put Walesa on trial, calling the charges brought against him “frivolous and clearly politically motivated.”

Since November, the government has threatened to bring him to trial for allegedly defaming officials by suggesting that government figures for the turnout in the October election were inflated.

The government contends that 79% of the electorate voted, but Walesa said that a monitoring of the polling places by Solidarity, the outlawed free trade union movement, showed an embarrassingly low 66% turnout--indicating that fully a third of the voters heeded Solidarity’s call for an election boycott.

Walesa has received a summons to appear in a Gdansk provincial court for a six-day trial beginning Tuesday. Ordinarily, slander trials are concluded within two or three hours, according to experienced Polish lawyers. They said that a lengthy proceeding for Walesa indicated that the government plans an elaborate political show trial.

Diplomats, along with a number of Polish lawyers, believe that Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski’s regime, perhaps under pressure from Communist Party hard-liners or from Moscow, or both, expect to use the trial as a forum for blackening Walesa’s public image.

These observers recalled that when four secret police officers were tried last year for the murder of an immensely popular pro-Solidarity priest, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, the court permitted long, irrelevant statements from the defendants and other government witnesses questioning the priest’s moral character.

Strong and Confident

Putting Walesa on trial would presumably demonstrate that the authorities are now strong and confident enough to deal with the leading symbol of Poland’s political opposition. The idea, apparently, “would be to show that no one was above the law,” one diplomat said.

In addition, months of skirmishing over whether, and in which court, to try him have saddled the 42-year-old Walesa with a legal burden that has done nothing to soothe his chronic ulcer.

Suggestions that a trial might not be necessary after all have come from the government spokesman, Jerzy Urban. Last Friday, Urban summoned an Associated Press reporter to say that a statement from Walesa that he intended no slander might induce the plaintiffs, ostensibly independent election officials, to drop their charges.

“Perhaps it would be sufficient to bring those people to withdraw their complaints,” Urban said. He added that he was only passing this idea on from one of the plaintiffs and maintained that the government had no role in the matter.

On Sunday, Walesa issued a verbal statement to reporters that “I did not insult anyone, and I will not in the future.”

“I will continue doing what I have been doing--that is only taking advantage of my democratic rights,” he said. “Nothing, and no one, will stop me from presenting my opinions.”

Under Article 178 of the Polish Criminal Code, Walesa could be sentenced to a maximum of two years in prison, fined up to 500,000 zlotys ($2,900, or two years of average wages) or required to spend up to two years doing “social” work such as cleaning streets.

According to Polish observers, the authorities may have begun to sense that even without a prison sentence, the political trial of a man with Walesa’s prestige at home and abroad carries the seeds of a propaganda disaster.

“They couldn’t have picked a worse article in the Criminal Code to try him on,” one lawyer said, explaining that in ordinary circumstances slander is very hard to prove. Truth and justified belief that one is acting in the public interest are grounds for acquittal under Polish law.

Speculation that Walesa would be let off with a heavy fine has conjured up images of hundreds of churches and thousands of school children collecting the Polish equivalent of nickels and dimes to pay it.

Or Walesa could refuse to pay all or part of a fine and force the authorities to jail him at the rate of one day for every 1,000 zlotys.

Some observers believe that Jaruzelski agreed to a trial partly to pacify hard-liners in the Communist Party leadership before an important party congress in June.

Putting Walesa in the dock, diplomats noted, might also be a way of making up for the public drubbing the security police took last year when four of its officers were convicted in the Popieluszko murder.