Pat Dollard

Tweet

The Wall Street Journal:

What should a democratic state do with an ex-dictator, the leader of a military junta, who, due to a shady political deal with dissidents, has gone unharmed for twenty years after the collapse of his regime, and suddenly a document gets revealed providing hard evidence that the dictator committed treason?

This question has stopped being theoretical and begs an answer in Poland, whose ex-dictator Wojciech Jaruzelski, in the light of an archive document, appears to have begged the Soviet Union to occupy his nation to save his junta.

Until now, Jaruzelski and his defenders have insisted the ex-dictator is a tragic figure who deserves pity, but not contempt for quenching a democratic movement and introducing the martial law in 1981 that led to imprisonments and deaths because he wanted to prevent the greater evil, a Soviet military intervention.

But according to an archived document that has just been released by a state-financed historical institute, in 1981, just days before introducing the martial law, Jaruzelski had a long conversation with a Soviet military leader, in which he begged for that very intervention if the situation gets out of hand.

“Strikes are the best option for us,” he told Viktor Kulikov, the Soviet marshal and the Warsaw Pact’s commander-in-chief at the time. “Workers will stay in place. It will be worse when they leave their workplaces and start devastating the party committees [of the communist party], organize street demonstrations etc. If this spreads to the entire country, you will have to help us. We can’t handle this alone.”

According to historians, Kulikov was eager to step in, but the communist party in the Soviet Union was decidedly against it.

And still Jaruzelski introduced the martial law because, as the above quote shows, he was afraid the public would put “party committees,” the outposts of his criminal organization, on fire, oust him, and, possibly, try him for his communist crimes. But after the collapse of communism he and his supporters have claimed he was a hero who averted a Soviet invasion.

Now, even Jaruzelski’s archrival in the communist era, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, who has previously expressed his belief the ex-dictator is a complicated figure who doesn’t necessarily have to be guilty, agrees the communist general and apparatchik should be tried for treason.

What was the punishment for high treason back in the communist times? Death. Now the 86-year-old could be sentenced to at least ten years in prison — effectively, the rest of his life.

The judiciary of the democratic Poland only one and a half years started prosecuting Jaruzelski for the martial law. Now it received a piece of evidence that topples Jaruzelski’s line of defense, and the question remains — what will it do with it?

I once said here Jaruzelski should be banned from doing normal shopping to get the experience of communist-era shortages he missed his chance to experience back then. But this is different — this is evidence of one of the gravest crimes one can commit.

Defendants in Poland, if suspected of serious crimes, quite often endlessly sit in jail awaiting trial and sentencing. So why does this particular defendant enjoy his freedom?