A New Generation of Opposition

THE TAXI DRIVER pointed to the address above the doorway: "Zytnia 3." As I reached for my wallet, he asked in broken English if I could pay the fare in dollars. Relieved at having arrived and distracted by anxiety at what was to come, I handed him a five dollar bill, for which he was exceedingly grateful. I later learned that he could exchange the bill for 5,000 zlotys on the black market, an amount approximately equivalent to his weekly wage.

I was in Warsaw, Poland, for an international conference on peace and human rights that was denounced as illegal by Polish authorities. Before leaving, I had been well apprised I might arrive to find that the church where the conference was to take place had been closed off and the conference organizers placed under arrest. So with some apprehension, I rang the church doorbell.

I was greeted by a Catholic nun clad head to toe in a long, traditional black habit and starched headpiece, her face swathed in white. She was friendly but visibly nervous when she saw my large backpack and camera case, and she quickly discerned why I was there. With gestures she indicated that I was at the wrong place. She looked in both directions before she stepped out of the church to the sidewalk and pointed down the street. I headed off and glanced back to see her frantically directing me toward the courtyard to my right.

Down a stone staircase and through half-lit, damp, and dusty corridors, I found the conference in the basement of the Church of God's Mercy. Crucifixes hung from the ceiling and adorned the walls of the room. People squeezed together in rows on long wooden benches and stood in every available space. The scene made me think of the early Christians meeting together in the catacombs, hiding from the authorities.

THE CONFERENCE, TITLED "International Peace and the Helsinki Agreements," took place May 7 to 9, 1987, and was organized by a group of young, independent peace activists nicknamed "the children of Solidarity" who call themselves WiP, the Polish acronym for Wolnosc i Pokoj, which means Freedom and Peace. The event brought together 250 activists from East and West to discuss connections between peace and human rights, possibilities for a new detente, conscientious objection and nonviolent struggle in the East and West, and post-Chernobyl ecological issues.

The event was historic not only because it was the first time that activists from the West were able to meet with a large number of independent Eastern-bloc activists, but also because the conference took place on East European territory and was organized by an unofficial peace and human rights group from the East. In addition, the meeting represented an important step in crossing Cold War lines to forge an alliance that stands for peace and democracy, for human rights and disarmament, and stands against military domination by both superpowers.

About 65 representatives from 14 Western countries attended the conference, including participants from almost every major peace organization in Western-Europe. Ten Americans came, four of whom currently reside in Europe, representing the Campaign for Peace and Democracy/East and West, Helsinki Watch, War Resisters League, Peace Activists East and West, Neither East nor West, and Sojourners.

From the East about 100 WiP activists, several senior Solidarity leaders, and others came from Poland; Charter 77, the independent human rights movement in Czechoslovakia, sent a representative; and an activist from a peace and human rights group in Slovenia, Yugoslavia, participated. Activists in the Soviet Union, Hungary, and East Germany who were denied permission by their governments to come to Poland sent letters of support (see "Into the Public Eye: The Emergence of Independent Peace Movements in the Soviet Bloc," by Cathy Fitzpatrick, February 1987).

Conference attendance was remarkable in light of efforts by Polish authorities to keep people away. Twenty-two activists from the West who stated on their visa applications their intention to attend the conference were denied visas, and one Dutch man was turned back on arrival at the Warsaw airport.

TEN DAYS BEFORE the conference, police conducted a nationwide "preventive operation" against illegal organizations by holding warning talks with 537 people, including WiP activists. At that time police also confiscated printing equipment and illegal publications in various cities, searched apartments, and detained overnight at least 30 opposition activists. In the days immediately preceding the conference, 23 WiP activists from several cities throughout Poland and six members of Rural Solidarity, an organization of Polish farmers, who all intended to attend the conference, were rounded up by police and prevented from coming, some as they were boarding a train for Warsaw.

Jacek Szymanderski, a 40-year-old WiP leader from Warsaw, barely escaped police by jumping out of his window when they came to his door very early the morning before the conference. Other organizers who evaded arrest slept in the church before and throughout the conference. Szymanderski commented after the conference that the event's first success was that it was allowed to happen and attracted such broad participation, despite the detentions, harassments, and visa denials. Characterizing WiP's relationship with the authorities as a continual "game," an elated Szymanderski exclaimed, "This time, we won. We can say now that we did it!"

On a more sober note, Szymanderski, who was a delegate at the first assembly of Solidarity in Gdansk and a primary organizer and member of the Solidarity board in Warsaw, commented on the stress of living under constant surveillance and the threat of sudden arrest: "[WiP membership] is not only a political decision but it involves one's entire philosophy of life because it entails such risk. I decide to become a member and I have made a decision which greatly affects my wife, which greatly affects my daughter." Szymanderski has spent 20 months in prison for political activity since martial law was declared in December 1981.

The foremost success of the Warsaw conference was the opportunity it provided activists from the East and West to share their sometimes vastly differing views on the creation of a just, democratic, and peaceful world. The conference was essentially a continuation of a dialogue begun in the early 1980s between peace activists in the West, primarily from Western Europe, and independent peace and human rights activists in the East.

That discussion, which has been carried out mainly through letters that travel quite slowly over the East-West divide and sometimes reach their destinations only via hand delivery by infrequent travelers, has centered upon the complex relationship between issues of peace and security and issues of democracy and human rights.

WiP organizers structured the conference discussion around a memorandum titled "Giving Real Life to the Helsinki Accords," which examines that relationship in some depth. The Helsinki Accords, the product of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), were signed in Helsinki, Finland, on August 1, 1975, by the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union, and all the nations of Eastern and Western Europe except Albania.

The Helsinki Accords provide a framework for easing East-West tensions and promoting cooperation and progress in many areas, including military security, human rights, trade, science, technology, the environment, culture, and education.

Because the Helsinki process represents the only official East-West forum at which, human rights violations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are discussed, the accords have provided a rallying point for Eastern-bloc dissidents, and public interest in the West has tended to focus on only the human rights aspect of the accords.

The original version of "Giving Real Life to the Helsinki Accords" was drafted at the end of 1985 by a coalition of West European peace organizations known as the European Network for East-West Dialogue. The memorandum was written in response to the "Prague Appeal," a document released for discussion in March 1985 by 65 leading signatories of Charter 77. As described in Across Frontiers magazine, the Prague Appeal "emphasized the indivisibility of the struggles for human rights and for peace as well as the importance of the Helsinki process for overcoming the postwar division of Europe, which the Appeal identified as one of the prime causes of the arms race."

The final draft of the Helsinki memorandum was the result of almost a year of East-West discussion and revision. The memorandum, which has gained more than 5,000 signatories from 20 countries in the East and West, also stresses the indivisibility of peace and human rights concerns and provides the basis for East-West dialogue on how to achieve a "democratic peace," a term coined by Charter 77.

The memorandum emphasizes the need for improved contacts between citizens of CSCE countries who, acting in the spirit of Helsinki, "think about what they can do themselves to further develop detente from below and to build bridges across the rift dividing our continent." The document decries the ways in which civil liberties and basic political rights, confirmed in the Helsinki Accords, have been severely restricted or are non-existent in many CSCE countries. Included in this criticism are tendencies in the West toward "surveillance states."

In addition, the Helsinki memorandum lays out specific governmental measures toward disarmament and "common security," such as a comprehensive test ban, the withdrawal of medium-range missiles stationed in or directed at Europe, the establishment of nuclear-free zones, the withdrawal of all foreign weapons and troops from Europe, and the dissolution of the NATO alliance and the Warsaw Pact.

IN THE OPENING PLENARY of the Warsaw conference, Dieter Esche, a West German who represents the Green Party in the European Parliament, noted that the memorandum represents the first time activists from the East and West have drawn up together a common document, rather than signing documents written in either the West or the East. Esche said, "What we have achieved is that by talking with each other we have learned to understand each other and to overcome misperceptions which weren't created by us. This memo shows that we have done very good work. We have learned from each other, and learned to change our positions."

The conference addressed the difficulties of communication between the East and West and the lack of accurate information about their respective movements. Before the dialogue between activists began seven years ago, movements from both the East and West were inclined to divorce peace and human rights issues and to consider the concerns of their particular movement the most important and the most urgent.

The Western peace movement generally has tended to ignore movements for human rights and freedom in the East, sometimes out of genuine ignorance but usually from fear that addressing such issues would feed anti-Soviet, anti-communist sentiment and thereby both detract from and be detrimental to their disarmament goals. One theme in the Western peace movement that has been especially notable in the United States is the notion that disarmament should take precedence over all other issues because, as some have said, "in the event of nuclear war all other concerns, including human rights, will become irrelevant." That attitude reflects the general emphasis in the Western peace movement on the weapons themselves rather than on the political conditions surrounding the weapons.

Activists in Eastern countries, on the other hand, have viewed the peace movement in the West as naive and misguided at best and a very dangerous creation of Soviet strategists at worst. They have expanded the notion of peace to mean more than the absence of war, pointing out that the "peace of the concentration camp" is no peace at all.

PEOPLE ON BOTH SIDES of the East-West split have been victims of the common but erroneous notion that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Thus, human rights activists in the Soviet bloc have felt a great deal more kinship with the Thatcher and Reagan administrations than with the peace movements in Britain and the United States, a situation exacerbated by the very fact that the Western peace movement has neglected to address human rights violations in the East.

The tight control on information in the East further compounds this dilemma. Generally the only sources of information for people living in Eastern Europe are either the state-sponsored and -censored media, which paint a predominantly rosy picture of life in the East and an unsavory one of life in the West, or Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, which for the most part do the opposite. The natural inclination of dissenters in the East is to reject the former view and embrace the latter.

Furthermore, authorities in the West try to exploit the movements for human rights and democracy in the East to further their own policies, and authorities in the East use the existence of the Western peace movement for similar aims. As Dieter Esche put it, "We are victims of ideological loudspeakers on both sides."

The way out of this East-West divide, as elaborated on in the Helsinki memorandum and discussed at the conference, is first of all to recognize that issues of peace, freedom, and justice are interdependent and indivisible. East-West detente contributes to, and depends on, economic and political reforms in domestic policies both East and West. The memorandum asserts: "We oppose any tendency to play off peace against freedom or vice-versa. A lasting detente cannot be bought at the cost of playing down the question of civil liberties and human--political and social--rights. Peace and security, detente and cooperation, basic rights and self-determination of all peoples have to be achieved all together."

The possibility for a new East-West detente "from below" is evident in the increased cooperation and improved under-standing between independent activists working together for a democratic peace in East and West. A network is growing of people circumventing the bloc system and Cold War mentality by joining together across the East-West line for a better "third way," distinct from both Western and Eastern models. An appeal from European Nuclear Disarmament described the development of this new internationalism: "We must learn to be loyal not to East and West but to each other."

THIS INCREASED SOLIDARITY between movements East and West by no means indicates that differences in perspective were glossed over at the conference. For example, the value of arms control agreements between the superpowers, especially in the absence of progress on human rights issues, was debated in workshops and one-on-one discussions. A report from the workshop on "A New Detente" stated, "Arms control has meant more arms and less democratic control over all weapons."

Many Poles are skeptical about the Soviet Union's sincerity in its disarmament initiatives, such as the recent Soviet unilateral moratorium on nuclear weapons testing, and are inclined to believe that arms control talks only serve Soviet propaganda purposes. Consequently, the "double zero" option to withdraw U.S. and Soviet intermediate- and shorter-range missiles from Europe was a particular topic of controversy at the conference.

Another subject that made for lively exchange was superpower intervention in the Third World. Most Eastern activists, who are very concerned about problems of communism in the Third World, tend to be less critical of U.S. policy in Central America, for instance, than are Western peace activists. Janusz Onyszkiewicz, the current spokesperson for Solidarity, commented, "I think we're quite confused by the situation in Nicaragua" (see "Uniting for Independence," page 23).

In addition, Eastern participants questioned the general silence about Afghanistan on the part of the peace movement in the West. Though no conclusions were reached, hopes that an independent, genuinely non-aligned path could be opened for Third World countries were expressed by conference participants from both West and East.

Joanne Landy, an American participant from the Campaign for Peace and Democracy/East and West, observed that on these and other issues "there was no tidy East-West line-up of viewpoints, which is a very hopeful sign that progress was made toward the goal of building a new internationalism. Some Polish participants differed from other Poles and agreed with Western peace activists on certain issues, just as Western activists were not monolithic in response to subjects broached by participants from the East."

In a similar vein, Dieter Esche commented that the evolving understanding in East and West of the connections between peace and human rights issues need not create "an illusion that we have a common movement. In the Helsinki Memorandum we came to a position of saying both [ peace and human rights concerns] are important. That does not mean that for Poles in their immediate situation human rights don't have a priority."

TO UNDERSTAND FURTHER the significance of both the Warsaw conference and the existence of WiP, a sketch of Polish history and the Polish-Soviet relationship is helpful. Poland is a country that has suffered under centuries of foreign occupation and domination, with cycles of heroic but futile uprisings for independence. To this day Poland is occupied by 40,000 Soviet troops. The Polish state was effectively partitioned out of existence by Russia, Prussia, and Austria from 1772 until 1918, when the Polish Republic was proclaimed.

In 1939 the Nazi army conquered Poland. Under Nazi occupation from 1939 to 1945, six million Polish citizens were killed, half of them Jews. The Soviet army eventually drove the Nazis from Poland. In the postwar period in Poland, as in other Soviet-controlled territories, a Communist government was installed that guaranteed Soviet domination of Polish affairs. But Poland was always more independent than other Soviet-bloc countries. It was the only country in the Soviet bloc that never built a monument to Stalin and the first Soviet-dominated state to liberalize after 12 years of Stalinist rule.

In 1956 harsh working conditions caused workers' riots in Poznan that brought into power a new Politburo committed to the development of an independent Polish communism. In response, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev ordered troops dispatched to Warsaw, but he changed his mind at the last moment. In 1968, while the "Prague Spring" of democratization flowered under the government of Alexander Dubcek in neighboring Czechoslovakia, Polish students took to the streets proclaiming "All Poland is waiting for its Dubcek" and "Long live Czechoslovakia." But the movement never spread beyond the universities and was extinguished by the Polish authorities well before Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia.

In 1970 the Soviet Union again had reason to contemplate intervention in Poland when workers in Gdansk and other Baltic port cities rioted due to price increases and new incentive wage rules. Instead Polish troops brutally suppressed the demonstrations, resulting in hundreds of deaths. In 1976 governmental efforts at economic reform led to a general food price increase causing more riots by workers in Radom and Warsaw who burned down Communist Party headquarters and tore up railroad tracks. In reaction to these demonstrations, the precursor to Solidarity, KOR (the Workers Defense Committee), was born.

The KOR was the brainchild of Jacek Kuron, currently a leading Solidarity strategist. Realizing that in 1968 students were crushed when they acted on their own and that in 1970 and 1976 workers were crushed when they acted on their own, Kuron, a former Communist, spent his frequent detentions envisioning an alliance between workers and intellectuals. In 1979 the KOR published a declaration of workers rights and a program for achieving them. The document, which had 65 signatories including Lech Walesa, called for the establishment of free and independent trade unions, "a power the authorities cannot ignore and will have to negotiate with on an equal footing."

In July 1980 strikes in Gdansk shipyards burgeoned into a nationwide workers revolt that included workers who had not participated in the strikes in '56, '70, or '76. This movement came to be known as Solidarity.

As John Darnton pointed out in The New York Times Magazine in November 1980, one contributing factor to the initial strikes was the anti-Soviet sentiment that is felt by most Poles but is even more evident in the Baltic Coast area, where shipyards produce largely for a Soviet market in an economically exploitative relationship. In addition, the worker discontent was a reflection of the fact that the Polish people are worse off economically than the citizens in any other Eastern European country except the Soviet Union.

On August 30,1980, after two months of labor unrest, the Polish government met the demands of workers, including the right to form free and independent trade unions and the right to strike. Such developments were unprecedented in the Soviet bloc. In 1981 Solidarity had 9.5 million members, and in May of that year Rural Solidarity gained official recognition.

But on December 13, 1981, fearing the very real possibility of Soviet intervention, the government of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law. Communications within the country and to and from abroad were cut off, travel was restricted, curfews were imposed, and public gatherings, demonstrations, and strikes were declared illegal. Solidarity leaders were arrested.

Thus began the period of underground Solidarity, which has continued to the present. Freedom and Peace (WiP) emerged in 1985, two years after the lifting of martial law, and its campaigns of public protest and civil disobedience around issues of militarism and ecology have been carried out openly, though not without cost (see "Intent on Democracy," page 20).

A CRITICAL INFLUENCE on the birth of Solidarity and on the existence of WiP is the Roman Catholic Church. More than 90 percent of Poles are practicing Catholics. Since the Stalin years, when Polish schools were secularized and Catholic prelates were jailed, great tension has existed between church and state in Poland. Poles tend to associate the church with their fierce nationalistic pride. That sentiment has been magnified with the advent of a Polish pope, an event that has elevated the status of the Polish church.

When John Paul II visited Poland in 1979, his first visit after becoming pope, he inspired and empowered an oppressed and weary people. Throughout the strikes church officials served as a tempering influence on Solidarity, counseling nonviolent tactics and moderation, yet the church also provided great protection and support to the movement. Masses were celebrated and confessions were heard in the Gdansk shipyards.

During the martial law period, worker-priest and Solidarity activist Father Jerzy Popieluszko became a nationally honored martyr when he was killed by the government security forces in 1984. A visit to his gravesite, which has become a shrine to the Polish struggle for national dignity and justice, concluded the Freedom and Peace conference this May.

In Poland the church is a place where attitudes of nonconformity and independence, and basic values of human dignity and truth, are uplifted. In no other Eastern European country has the Church been able not only to exist side by side with the Communist Party in a totalitarian system, but also to retain overwhelming significance in the daily lives of most of the population.

Still the single greatest institutional force in Poland, the church has been the only powerful counterweight to the government since Solidarity was banned. Polish authorities tolerate the existence of the church in part because the current church hierarchy, most notably the conservative Cardinal Jozef Glemp, tends to remain aloof from political issues, unlike the days of Solidarity when Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski regularly advised Lech Walesa.

Parish priests, however, encourage their parishioners to get involved, and parish churches act as an umbrella for a variety of independent activities. Around the time of the WiP conference, the Church of God's Mercy housed an exhibit by an artists' union excluded from official galleries, provided a theater for a play by opposition filmmaker and playwright Andrzej Wajda, and served as a meeting place for a group of journalists.

The pope continues to be an inspiration for Poles, as his June visit to his homeland testified. Despite the preconditions set by Polish authorities regarding media coverage and political banners and slogans, the pope continually challenged government policy, calling for greater respect for human rights and restoration of an "independent and self-governing trade union."

In a sign of the government's helplessness in the face of the church, police beat demonstrators with riot sticks when more than 10,000 people marched beneath Solidarity banners through Gdansk after the pope celebrated an outdoor Mass drawing more than 750,000 people. Freedom and Peace leader Jacek Czaputowicz was detained by police during the pope's trip as the result of a letter he sent to the pope criticizing harassment of opposition activists during the papal visit.

Government authorities linked the pope's visit to the WiP conference, condemning the conference as an attempt by organizers to create tension before the papal visit. Certainly the government's desire to avoid bad publicity in the weeks before the pope's visit, as well as its wishes for diplomatic relations with the Vatican, afforded the conference some protection. In addition, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's new policy of glasnost, or openness, and his strong hopes for another superpower summit and an arms control agreement, Poland's $34 billion foreign debt to the West, and the presence of 65 foreigners probably also influenced the government's decision to allow the conference to take place.

But perhaps the most important factor in the overwhelming success of this event is the commitment, determination, and integrity of the new generation of Polish oppositionists, the WiP activists themselves. I can just hear them singing a verse from the Polish national anthem: "Poland is not lost yet, as long as we live."

Polly Duncan was associate director of Sojourners Peace Ministry and a member of Sojourners Community when this article appeared.