Polish Parliament Rejects Anti-Communist Measure

A decade after the fall of Communist rule, Poland’s parliament on Friday quashed a bid by Solidarity to settle scores with the old regime by banning its officials from public posts for 10 years.

Opponents said the measure was too harsh. Even Solidarity founder Lech Walesa, a symbol of Poland’s struggle against communism, said the authors of the ban had a misguided sense of justice.

“They should act like Solidarity did in its early days: Conquer lawlessness with law, conquer lack of democracy with democratic actions--not bans, but the ballot card,” Walesa said after Friday’s vote.

The 460-member lower chamber, or Sejm, voted 215 to 176, with 23 abstentions, to reject the bill.

Solidarity, which toppled the Communist regime in 1989, is the largest faction in the Sejm. But its coalition partner in the government, the Freedom Union, joined former communists in rejecting the ban.

Proposed by about 100 Solidarity members, the law would have banned former Communist officials from public posts for 10 years from the day it took effect. Although it would not have applied to elective offices, it could have forced hundreds of other officials from their jobs.

Even though the law clearly was doomed, Solidarity deputies demanded a chance to air it in public. The debate reflected Poland’s difficulty in coming to grips with its Communist past even after 10 years of democracy.

“This law is the last chance to cut the umbilical cord still linking democratic Poland with the totalitarian, collaborating state that was communist Poland,” said Mariusz Kaminski, who presented the bill.

Another Solidarity deputy, Stefan Niesiolowski, pledged to try again. “This is a lost battle, not a lost war,” he said.

The liberal Freedom Union, which includes a few former Communists, said the law went too far in an effort to assign collective guilt for past grievances that should be decided in the courts.

A member of the ex-Communist Democratic Left Alliance, Marek Borowski, called Friday’s vote “a great triumph of reason over partisanship.” He said the Communist past is a “part of our history and it cannot be deleted.”

A former Solidarity leader, newspaper editor Adam Michnik, sounded an ominous warning for the party.

“The debate revealed a skeleton in Solidarity’s cupboard, a skeleton of a deeply undemocratic conviction that the freedom is only for the supporters of the Solidarity-rooted parties,” he said. “We should consider why so many people vote for the ex-Communists.”

Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek, a leader in Poland’s influential Catholic Church, said he believed the law was needed to ensure “moral cleansing.” He said its opponents “should not exult in triumph today, because justice will reach them anyway.”

Other Eastern European countries have tried with varying degrees of success to address the issue of how to settle scores from the Communist era.

The Czech Republic, for example, has a law that bans former high-ranking Communist officials and secret police from public posts. It does not apply to elective office, however, and will expire next year if it is not amended.