The trial against General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Czeslaw Kiszczak and Stanislaw Kania for imposing martial law in 1981 will start on 12 September.
The main defendants in the martial law case are generals Wojciech Jaruzelski, the then PM, and Czeslaw Kiszczak, the then minister of internal affairs, and the former First Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) Stanislaw Kania. All of the defendants plead not guilty.
Martial Law in Poland refers to the period from 13 December 1981 to 22 July 1983 when the communist authorities led by General Wojciech Jaruzelski drastically restricted normal life in an attempt to crush the political opposition led by the Solidarity trade union.
Thousands of people were arrested without charge and as many as 100 were killed.
I've got quite a bit of sympathy for Jaruzelski and Kania -- probably for Kiszczak, as well, but he was a side issue, a pawn. At the time the Poles were looking at something somewhere between Prague '68 and Budapest '56, with the Hungarian model the more likely.
They had the choice of a "crackdown" of their own, or a smackdown from the Russers. They chose the lesser of two evils, and I don't recall Jaruzelski being happy about doing so.
Just my $.02, of course, and my memory may be no better than anyone else's... |
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