Candles in the Night

By William E. Smith

The leaders of the Western world were preoccupied with a common question last week: How should they respond to the Polish government's declaration of martial law and crackdown on the independent trade union movement Solidarity? In a Christmas address to the American people, President Reagan proposed a number of economic sanctions against Poland and one sweeping, symbolic gesture of support. Recalling that the Polish people were demonstrating their opposition to martial law by placing lighted candles in their windows, the President declared he would light a candle in a White House window "as a small but certain beacon of our solidarity with the Polish people." He asked Americans "to do the same, on Christmas Eve, as a personal statement of your commitment to the steps we are taking to support the brave people of Poland in their time of troubles." In Vatican City, Pope John Paul II lit a candle in the window of his study. Around the world, millions of candles flickered in the long night of Poland's anguish.

Angered over the repression in Poland and the suspected role of the Soviet Union in bringing it about, President Reagan pondered what to do for more than a week. He sent Assistant Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to Europe to try to sell America's allies on the idea of imposing joint sanctions against Poland and perhaps the Soviet Union as well. He received Poland's Ambassador to the U.S. Romuald Spasowski, who sought political asylum in the U.S. last week, and hailed Spasowski and his wife Wanda for their courage. In his Christmas ad dress, Christmas President expressed the concern with people." Administration over the events in Poland and declared, "If the outrages in Poland do not cease, we cannot and repression not conduct 'business as usual' with the perpetrators and those who aid and abet them. Make no mistake: their crime will cost them dearly in their future dealings with America and free peoples everywhere."

Reagan considered a long list of measures that the U.S. could take against the Polish government, including a trade boycott. In the end he settled on a set of largely symbolic sanctions: a cutoff of Poland's $25 million in credit insurance at the U.S. Export-Import Bank (which would discourage private banks from lending far greater sums), a suspension of the Polish national airline's right to land in the U.S., and a declaration that American territorial waters would be placed off limits to Polish fishing boats. The effect of these measures, the President hoped, would be to encourage the Polish government to bring a quick end to its state of emergency. Like Reagan, Western European leaders were concerned about the Polish crisis but deeply divided over how to deal with it. French President Francois Mitterrand was outraged over the repression in Poland and convinced that the Soviets were behind it. He disagreed, however, with Reagan's view that Western governments should retaliate by suspending food shipments to Poland. "After all," Mitterrand told a French newspaper, "those who are hungry aren't the ones who are running the government."

The West Germans opposed the imposition of sanctions and planned to go ahead with their aid commitments to Poland, which include $17 million in food. The Bonn government is anxious to preserve whatever is left of detente. So it took the position that General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Polish armed forces commander and Premier, had declared martial law not because he was ordered to do so by the Soviet Union, but because he was seeking to ward off Soviet intervention. This view was essentially shared by the British government, which believed that the Soviets had pressed Warsaw to crush Solidarity and restore the authority of the Polish government and party, but were not directly involved in Jaruzelski's crackdown. As Eagleburger quickly learned, the Western Europeans were not yet prepared to take concerted action against Poland, though European bankers did decide last week not to lend Poland the additional $350 million it had requested in an effort to stave off bankruptcy.

Throughout the week, Pope John Paul deliberately muffled his criticism of the Warsaw government, appealing for "a peaceful solution to the mutual collaboration between authorities and citizens." But at the end of his annual Christmas message, the Pope declared, in Polish, that he was sending an embrace to "all of Poland, our common homeland," including "those here in the square who represent Solidarity and all those listening on the radio."

In the meantime, the Pope sent a special envoy, Archbishop Luigi Poggi, to Poland to meet with the military government, which in turn was holding talks with a committee of leading Catholic laymen. Poggi delivered a letter from the Pope to Jaruzelski and had a long discussion with him. The Pope also received a personal report on the Polish situation from Polish Bishop Bronislaw Dabrowski, who had twice visited Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa in detention. What was most interesting about these diplomatic contacts between the Warsaw government and the Vatican was the implication that Poland's present rulers would welcome the support of the church in the event of future negotiations between the government and Solidarity.

As the second week of martial law ended in Poland, the Jaruzelski government appeared to be in fairly firm control in much of the country. In a Christmas Eve address, Jaruzelski claimed that "the process of disintegration of the state has been halted, and an end has been put to anarchy." The government eased its ban on travel within Poland, restored telephone service in some provinces and quietly removed the armored personnel carriers from Warsaw's Victory Square. It also reduced the length of the curfew in the capital and in some other cities, thereby permitting people to attend midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. At the holiday meal, the extra place at the dinner table that is traditionally set for an unexpected visitor had a special meaning in many homes this year: it marked the absence of Solidarity members and other citizens who were in detention or hiding.

If the government's modest concessions were aimed at getting negotiations started between the country's military rulers and Walesa, they did not appear to be succeeding. Walesa was still in custody in the Warsaw area. He was said to be in good health, to have access to newspapers, television and radio, and to have been visited by his wife and children, as well as by Bishop Dabrowski. One Solidarity supporter said Walesa had gone on a hunger strike, but there was no proof of this claim. Walesa has refused to issue an appeal for cooperation with the regime while so many of his colleagues are detained. He was prepared to negotiate only if the Polish Primate, Archbishop Jozef Glemp, was also present. But so far, at least, the government has shown no inclination to revive the three-way discussions that had seemed so promising only a few weeks ago.

In his Thursday night speech, Jaruzelski stoutly denied the rumors that large numbers of people had been killed in clashes between strikers and police. "I state with all resolution that reports alleging hundreds of fatalities and thousands of people arrested, held in the frost, beaten up and tortured are a lie." Jaruzelski had good reason to be on the defensive. The rumors had flourished during an almost total news blackout that he himself had imposed. But more than that, they reflected the unrest that persisted in widely scattered parts of the country.

The government still insisted that only seven people had been killed; some foreign observers in Warsaw thought the real number was considerably higher. Similarly, the estimates of people placed under detention ranged from 5,000 to 50,000 or more. Many were reportedly being held in large camps in the Mazurian lake district in northeast Poland, near the Soviet border. Others were detained in an enclosed arena built for Nazi rallies in the 1930s in the former German city of Wroclaw. Some Solidarity activists and intellectuals from the Warsaw area were first imprisoned in subfreezing cells at a camp in Bialolesa but were later moved to somewhat better quarters. A few were said to have been transferred to Czechoslovakia in order to ease the pressure on Poland's overcrowded jails.

In Silesia, along the Baltic coast and elsewhere, the skirmishes continued. In Gdansk, an unknown number of shipyard workers were said to be holed up in a building filled with highly explosive acetylene tanks. A visitor to the Baltic port city reported seeing hundreds of tear-gas canisters abandoned in the streets. In Silesia, where one mine shaft had reportedly been blown up by striking workers the week before, some 1,300 miners were still occupying another mine and were threatening to blow it up if security forces tried to break up their sit-in. The government's apparent strategy was to allow the miners to stay underground until they came out of their own accord because they were famished, cold or ill. A stalemate prevailed throughout the land. Solidarity's call for a general strike had not succeeded, but neither had the government's drive to break the strikes and sit-ins at factories and mines around the country.

Late last week the Warsaw branch of Solidarity released a clandestine news bulletin calling on workers to maintain their campaign of resistance. Referring to the talks under way between the church and the military government, the union bulletin declared that the campaign would "strengthen the position of representatives of the church" during the discussions. "If we display our intention to fight against the regime," it continued, "these negotiations can make possible a way out of the blind alley in which the Polish state finds itself." The bulletin also congratulated the workers at Warsaw's giant Ursus tractor plant who, it said, had been so successful in their passive protest campaign that they managed to produce only one tractor during the first week of martial law.

What happens next? In Warsaw, an adviser to Jaruzelski, Captain Wieslaw Gornicki, outlined to a TIME correspondent the aims of the military government. Soon, he said, "there will be a gradual lifting of the state of martial law. Already there are signs of an easing of the regulations. Martial law is not a situation that can last very long in any country, and in Poland less than any other. There is no place in Poland for a military dictatorship." He stressed that the ruling military council believes "in the long run, not a single Polish problem can be solved by means of compulsion." But he added, "This was not a playground exercise. The threat was serious, and so was the answer. We were forced to choose between two evils," one of which was "quasi anarchy."

Referring to the large number of people employed by Solidarity, Gornicki continued: "We cannot afford to have 42,000 little kings and princes, each with his own prescription for how to save Poland. They were unwilling to compromise, not only with the government but even within their own ranks." He insisted that the existence of "independent and autonomous trade unions" is a "basic issue that cannot be retracted." But trade unions will merely serve to defend the interests of workers in enterprises managed by the state, and workers will not choose their managers: "Solidarity was as partial in choosing directors as the party was. Political qualities were more important than managerial skills. There will be no return to central bureaucratic overplanning. We are seeking a marriage between a market economy and the original intent of socialist planning. This marriage works pretty well in Hungary." But the first step was to reimpose order on Polish life, and that step, said Gornicki, had been just about completed.

As always, the most uncertain factor in Polish affairs was the Soviet Union. Radio Moscow was quick to denounce the Reagan speech as "a show of impotent wrath," and on Christmas Day Pravda published a 4,000-word article that blamed the troubles in Poland on U.S. intelligence agencies. The international support Solidarity has received over the past 17 months, it alleged, was all part of a plot "to undermine the socialist statehood and to create conditions for a counterrevolutionary coup." For the most part, however, the Soviets have been exceedingly cautious in their comments about Poland, in part because of a sort of ideological refusal to admit that 10 million Polish workers could revolt against a workers' state. But they have repeatedly protested their innocence in connection with the Polish crackdown. A Soviet official told TIME Moscow Bureau Chief Erik Amfitheatrof: "We had nothing to do with it. But of course the truth doesn't suit your President. He is using Poland to try to harm the Soviet Union. Under Carter it was human rights; under Reagan it is Poland." Asked what he considered to be the most important Soviet aim regarding Poland, he replied, "The preservation of its political system."

If such comments mean that Poland's period of repression will not be prolonged, there may be some reason for hope. But the martial-law declaration has unleashed forces of resistance that may be beyond the government's power to control. The danger is that the crackdown will lead to more and more repression, and that the armed forces will have increasing difficulty keeping a rebellious population in check. The country is bankrupt; food is in short supply. Some people are on strike; others show up for work but merely go through the motions. At best, Poland faces a long period of economic privation, which in turn could cause greater unrest. At worst, the rising pressure could lead to civil war and Soviet intervention. In his Thursday night speech, General Jaruzelski did not talk about the future, except to say that the only road open to Poland was "socialist democratization"--in other words, a return to a system with which the Soviet Union feels comfortable. --By William E. Smith. Reported by Richard Hornik/Warsaw and Frank Melville/ London

With reporting by Richard Hornik/Warsaw, Frank Melville/London

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