5 Years After Crackdown : Martial-Law ‘Wounds’ in Poland Are Slow to Heal

On a bitterly cold morning five years ago today, a stunned Poland awoke to the sound of tanks in the streets and the vision of a broken dream.

With a swiftness and precision no one had imagined possible, the first independent trade union movement in post-World War II Eastern Europe, with 10 million members, was paralyzed in its tracks by a newly militarized Communist regime. Poland’s borders were sealed and telecommunications were silenced.

As martial law took hold in the early hours of Dec. 13, 6,000 key activists of the Solidarity union were interned in prison camps, ending 16 chaotic months of burgeoning democracy under the whimsical red-and-white banners of “Solidarnosc” and the improbable leadership of an unemployed electrician named Lech Walesa.

The Polish leader, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, appeared on television to declare that the nation stood poised at the edge of an “abyss” and that military rule was merely the lesser evil--the greater one, implicitly, being Soviet intervention.

In the days preceding the anniversary, the government continued to justify the imposition of martial law. Government spokesman Jerzy Urban said that while no official observances are planned, today “is an anniversary of Poland’s salvation from a chain reaction of dangerous events and from another historical tragedy.”

Former Deputy Premier Mieczyslaw Rakowski, who had been the key government official involved in negotiations with Solidarity, said of the anniversary: “The past five years have been a kind of political university. Society now evaluates events more realistically. Martial law brought Poles back down to earth.”

In the minds of most Polish workers, however, the government had declared war on its own people, although, as it turned out, it was a war with remarkably few deaths and injuries.

Five years later, the 19-month period of martial law remains a deep wound on the Polish psyche. But Poland itself is as paradoxical a place as ever.

Today, still under Jaruzelski’s unchallenged leadership, this is in many respects the Soviet Bloc’s most liberal country, yet the one with the highest level of popular discontent. On paper, at least, the government has all the power and Solidarity has none. But a political impasse persists.

Censorship remains, but the official press, even by comparison with relatively liberal Hungary, is vigorous and disputatious. Poland (as before Solidarity) boasts Eastern Europe’s only independent newspaper and its only independent university, both under the protection of the Roman Catholic Church, whose own independence remains undimmed.

Unusual Degree of Autonomy

Even the state universities, despite the removal of a number of popular rectors identified with the opposition, retain an unusual degree of autonomy for this part of the world.

“When you sit in on some of the lectures in these universities, you expect the police to raid the place any minute. But it doesn’t happen,” says a Western diplomat who follows higher education here.

Travel to the West is the freest in the Soviet Bloc. More than 90% of Poles who apply for passports to travel in the West receive them, which helps explain why discontented Poles, rather than fleeing over borders in a hail of bullets, East German style, tend to defect during vacations in Western Europe.

The church, moreover, concurs with government claims that, following an amnesty last summer, Polish jails have been cleared of political prisoners.

Yet for all of this--which adds up to a measure of liberality that Soviet dissidents, for example, find almost incomprehensible--Poland remains a deeply polarized nation, perfused with a sense of stagnation, more conscious of its limits than its latitude.

Vigorous Underground Press

Anger, to a large extent, has burned itself down to apathy. Solidarity exists, but chiefly in hearts and minds, and in the seemingly endless flow of news bulletins, books and even video cassettes churned out by the Communist world’s most vigorous underground press.

But neither Solidarity nor the government is able to mobilize the population.

Amid worsening economic problems led by its still-expanding debt, the government remains unable to stir a distrustful work force from its torpor, unable to win the confidence and support of the nation’s brightest intellectuals, unsuccessful so far in persuading a wary Catholic Church, with its enormous reservoir of moral authority, to accept the authorities’ assurances that they have the best interests of Poland at heart.

“There is no question that Poland is a very different country from what it was before Solidarity,” a militant activist notes. “Compared to the 1970s, the limits have expanded.”

But as almost any Pole will quickly and forcefully remind a foreigner, the limits remain. In the colorful phrase of a commentary last week in the independent Catholic newspaper, Tygodnik Powszechny, the Polish nation resembles a “medium-size mongrel . . . sitting peacefully in a tangle of leather straps designed to give it maximum comfort but limited freedom of movement.”

‘Teeth Knocked Out’

Or, as Adam Michnik, a Solidarity adviser and dissident writer who was among those freed in last summer’s amnesty, has expressed it, “Instead of having socialism with a human face, we live under a communism which had its teeth knocked out.”

Beginning with the lifting of martial law in 1983, the government has made a series of concessions to popular pressure in an effort to win faith in its promises that, this time, hard work and austerity will eventually pay off in a higher standard of living. To Poles who heard this before under Jaruzelski’s predecessors, this promise has not made a deep impression.

“This government is not promising a rose garden,” a senior Western diplomat notes. “All they are promising is a return to 1978 (levels of prosperity) by sometime in the 1990s.

“That’s not very inspiring. The general (Jaruzelski) gets credit for not promising pie in the sky. But now the reaction has set in, reinforcing the feeling that no one knows how to move this country forward.”

The availability of consumer goods has improved significantly since the days of empty shelves in 1981, but the same basic problems in the economy that led to economic crisis of 1979-80, and the rise of Solidarity on a wave of strikes, persist.

Locked in Downward Spiral

Poland appears locked in a downward spiral of export earnings, which leaves progressively fewer dollars to buy the imported industrial materials it needs to sustain its export industries and pay interest on its Western debt.

In the first 10 months of this year, Poland’s trade surplus with the West amounted to $737 million, or just under half what the government hoped to earn and far less than it needs to service a debt that now stands at $33 billion. This means that consumers and industry alike face even tighter supplies of foreign goods next year, and probably another downturn of the spiral.

Jaruzelski’s latest initiative to win popular confidence has taken the form of a personal “consultative council” designed to provide a platform for independent and moderate opposition views. But few of the 56 people named to the council last week carry the kind of popular stature that the authorities had hoped to recruit, and the council has been widely written off as a failure.

Jaruzelski has made more headway winning acceptance abroad than at home. Last summer’s amnesty, which so far has not been undermined by a new wave of arrests has paid off in gradually improving relations with Western Europe and the United States.

Solidarity activists are busy testing the limits of the amnesty, which Walesa, in an interview Friday from Gdansk on ABC’s “Good Morning, America” called a “step in the right direction.”

Meeting With Pope Set

Jaruzeslski is scheduled to make a state visit to Italy next month that is to include a meeting with Pope John Paul II. The United States has lifted its ban on high-level political contacts with Polish officials, and next month Washington and Warsaw are expected to exchange drafts of a new science and technology exchange agreement. But the United States has yet to restore Poland’s most-favored-nation trading status.