Warsaw Feeling Growing Pains of Democracy

Miroslawa Glowacka, a nurse who is angry about hospital reforms, says she wouldn’t bother to journey to Warsaw to join protests if her grievances could be solved by administrators in her central Polish city of Lodz.

But the only way to win better working conditions--and improve patient care--is to get the national government to revise its health reform policies, she says. So when 30,000 demonstrators--farmers, miners, teachers, nurses and others--marched through Warsaw late last month, Glowacka, 36, was there.

“Warsaw, the capital, is our capital too,” she said. “If we can’t get things done where we live, of course we’ll come here.”

Reforms by the government of Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek--including downsizing of inefficient state industries and market-oriented changes in health care, agriculture and pensions--have sparked about 100 protests in Warsaw this year. Some have been violent, and all the large ones have triggered massive traffic jams, much to Warsaw residents’ dismay.

Until now, a post-Communist law guaranteeing protesters’ rights virtually without restriction and a generally tolerant attitude by citizens and authorities have allowed demonstrators to act much as they please. Particularly troublesome has been anti-police violence at roadblocks set up in provincial areas by angry farmers protesting food imports.

When a fed-up Warsaw Mayor Pawel Piskorski tried to ban last month’s march, his action--overturned by higher authorities--triggered a widespread public debate over how to balance freedom to protest with the rights of Warsaw residents facing seemingly endless disruption.

“Demonstrators who have chosen Warsaw as the place of their protests probably don’t realize that they are abusing my rights,” said Katarzyna Janowska in a typical reader comment published by the daily newspaper Zycie.

“Those who want 100,000 people protesting in Warsaw should first pay for mobilizing the police force and then for all the damage done by the demonstrators,” said a reader identified as Marta.

On the other side of the debate, a reader declared: “I don’t support [protest leader Andrzej] Lepper, but everyone should have the right to express their views.”

Mayor Piskorski, defending his attempt to ban the protest, said he sees the issue as whether Polish democracy will be marked by rules of peaceful behavior or plagued by routine resort to violence.

Now that Poland has free speech and democracy, it should be careful not to allow a pattern to develop where “we are not able to treat people beating a policeman during a demonstration equally with a criminal beating a policeman on the street,” he said in an interview.

“Using force, declaring that you won’t obey the rules or the law--this is something I don’t want to have in Polish political life,” he said. “This is a crucial time because the next year, or half-year, will show what sort of Polish political life we’ll have: a radical one, or a peaceful and quiet one.”

While Piskorski’s attempt to ban the most recent big protest was overturned, that doesn’t necessarily mean his effort was a failure. He won political points with many Warsaw residents. He triggered warnings by police that any violence would be punished. He’s still pressing for a legal change that would give city authorities new rights to negotiate with protest organizers over routes and conditions.

And the late September march--which many had expected to result in violence--went off peacefully. That was at least in part because Piskorski’s actions and all the public debate had affected marchers’ attitudes.

The protesters burned an effigy of Buzek. But as marchers toward the end of the procession passed by the main government offices, an organizer with a loudspeaker bragged: “This is proof we can demonstrate in peace.”