The UK Legend of Solidarność

 

It is now exactly 40 years since that glorious August in 1980 when the striking workers in the Baltic shipyards of Northern Poland organized a strike over the creation of a free trade union and, under the eyes of an astounded international media, brought a totalitarian state to its knees without a single drop of blood.  While the ruthless riot militia stood watching, while the army stayed in its barracks, while the Kremlin fulminated with impotent rage, the Polish Inter-factory Strike Committee covering 700 different plants in the Gdansk region, accompanied by its advisers and lawyers, negotiated with the Communist government on behalf of the whole of Poland’s work force. Their famous 21 demands, political, economic and social, headed by the right to set up a free trade union and the right to strike, handwritten onto wooden boards almost as iconic as the Ten Commandments, were agreed by a terrified government and are now a UNESCO protected artefact.

I was active at the time in Polish media circles, in the UK Information Centre for Polkish Affairs, that were concerned with propagating the struggle for democracy and human rights in Poland. So, I was used to acting in the rarefied atmosphere of journalists and academics specializing in Eastern European affairs. I was also a Labour Councillor at a time when party members’ main foreign interests were an obsessive anti-Americanism and an abhorrence of South African apartheid. Suddenly, there followed the successful culmination of the strike in Poland in August and the subsequent registration in October followed by 15 months of alternating drama and carnival and 3 bitter years of martial law. During that momentous time, I was amazed now to find myself the centre of attention of countless trade union branches, left wing organizations and academic bodies throughout the country inviting me to come and explain this extraordinary phenomenon.

As early as the beginning of August 1980 a group of ideological left wingers had set up an organization called the Polish Solidarity Campaign in order to campaign among trade unions to support the striking workers in Poland. Along with others, I was drawn into supporting this organization and becoming one of their major speakers. By an extraordinary piece of good fortune in mid-September the newly formed structure of the independent trade union in Poland had constituted itself under the name Solidarność, as if echoing our earlier modest organization in name. It struck a chord. That is why in the last week of August alone I had chaired a well-attended international press conference in the Atheneum which included the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, the economist Włodzimierz Brus and Electricians’ Union boss Frank Chapple; addressed a meeting of Labour Party members at Conway Hall in London; and travelled to Leeds to address a crowd of 1600 left-wing activists at the “Beyond the Fragments” conference. Everywhere I travelled this hitherto obscure East European country called Poland had now become front page news greeted with wonder and delight in left and right wing media alike.

Sympathy for Poland and the new Solidarność movement seemed universal.  We found that the Polish Solidarity Campaign had little problem gaining funds from the sale of Solidarność T-shirts, pullovers and badges at Jumble sales and cultural events. We were equally welcome at Conservative Party meetings and at CND rallies, in Catholic churches and Methodist halls. Within a week of the imposition of martial law we had organized a march of 15,000 people which had been announced by the BBC news following our press conference in the Houses of Parliament. The demonstration was attended not only by the massed ranks of the Polish community young and old but also by a massive range of British organizations ranging from church groups to student unions, Afghan Mujaheddin to  Latvian youth organizations, as well as branches of trade unions and political organizations from Conservative to Communist and all stops in between, proudly displaying their banners as they marched from Hyde Park past the Polish Embassy to Regent’s Park. We held demonstrations regularly twice a year for the next 5 years, occupying Jubilee Gardens or Trafalgar Square. Solidarność was a magic word that opened all doors to political party leaders, to trade union bosses and to university lecture rooms. It even assisted us in convincing the Labour Party National Executive not to invite any more Eastern European Communist Party representatives to their annual conferences. In 1989, when Lech Wałęsa finally visited a highly polarized UK, he was the only person imaginable who could kiss Margaret Thatcher on the hand and Glenys Kinnock on the cheek in the same day, and he was actually the person who introduced that fiercely anti-trade union British prime minister to Norman Willis, her British T.U.C. counterpart, as they had never met before.  

In fact, apart from outright Soviet sympathisers like Arthur Scargill, everyone saw in the Solidarność movement an idealized image of what they were trying to achieve in this country. Conservatives saw an organization challenging Communism and demanding a more market orientated economy, liberals saw an organization that was democratic and progressive in a totalitarian environment, democratic socialists saw here a challenge to dogmatic Stalinism, Trotskyists supported the struggle of  Solidarność for workers’ councils running factories and regional government, trade unionists admired the ability of Solidarność to recruit 10 million members in 3 months and fight so successfully for workers rights using sympathy strikes to achieve progress for weaker organizations. Religious leaders welcomed the moral God-fearing challenge to an atheist Marxist state, peace movements saw Solidarność as their partner for peace in the Soviet bloc and admired their ability to conduct a bloodless peaceful revolution. The multi-faceted profile of Solidarność, as both a social movement and as a trade union, gripped the imagination of such a disparate range of supporters, each viewing Solidarność through a skewed and subjective ideological telescope of its own, that it spun a legendary narrative of a universal moral crusade cut off in its prime. It became in time, subconsciously or not, a model for many mass popular and peaceful resistance movements throughout the world in places as diverse as Brazil, Senegal, Ukraine or Belarus.

However in the UK, popular interest in the resistance of Solidarność to martial law somewhat faded in the summer of 1982 as the UK went to war over the Falklands and only found itself restored in the public consciousness in 1989 after Poland created the first non-Communist government in the Eastern bloc, headed by leaders of the Solidarność. The legend is tempered now by reality. It is also somewhat tarnished by the challenge to normal liberal values of the present Polish government, which includes some elements of the old Solidarność ideas. Yet the main social and political movement which is seeking to recover the values of solidarity, tolerance and participatory democracy is hoping to lay claim to the glorious past by recasting itself as the Nowa (New) Solidarność. Its leaders hope that it too will capture the imagination of the democratic world once again against the background of a world-wide illiberal nationalist challenge to democratic values more sinister and more potent than it had been during the cold war.  

Wiktor Moszczyński       23/09/2020      www.polishlondoner.blogspot.co.uk

Perfidious Albion Internal Market Bill

 

 

First, as a retired export documentation officer I recognized at once, when the Withdrawal Agreement was reached with the EU by Boris Johnson last year, that it would require some border checks to be viable, however much the Prime Minister may want to pretend it would not. As his chief negotiator David Frost, who had previously had responsibility for the issuing of certificates of origin, must have explained to him, Northern Ireland being now both in the UK and EU had become de facto a separate legal entity in trade terms. Without documentary checks, whether on the Irish Sea or elsewhere, EU or Irish goods crossing into Northern Ireland could then possibly be re-exported duty free to the United Kingdom, and also on to those countries like Japan or USA with whom the UK was planning to have a trade treaty. Similarly, goods in free circulation in the UK could then freely enter the EU via Northern Ireland. By advocating no customs controls in the Irish Sea to enforce its dual status the PM was facilitating the creation of an eventual fraudsters' paradise in Northern Ireland. The EU, which will defend its precious single market to the death, could not tolerate any attempt by the UK to subvert it in this way. Nor is such a solution in the interests of the UK's internal market.

 

Secondly, as a former Chairman of the Polish Solidarity Campaign, who has campaigned and continues to campaign for democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, let me assure "Sunday Telegraph" readers that were a bill that states "have effect notwithstanding any relevant international or domestic law with which they may be incompatible or inconsistent....." be passed through the Mother of Parliaments it will be quoted unremittingly by any tinpot authoritarian leader in that area to justify their own future breaches of their international UN or EU legal obligations. How shameful that would be for Britain.

Yours faithfully

100 year commemoration of Battle of Warsaw

 

It is a 100 years ago that the army of the newly restored Republic of Poland was able to hold back the invading Bolshevik hordes at the gates of Warsaw and destroy their army with a bold countermanoeuvre by Marshal Pilsudski from the south on August 16th 1920. Bolshevik commander Tukhaczevesky had predicted he would be feeding his horses in "red" Paris that same year and most of Europe was still in social and political turmoil crippled by World War One destruction and the flu pandemic. The Polish Army saved Europe from the Soviet invasion and prevented for 20 years the Communist takeover of Central Europe. Polish workers and peasants joined in the fight against the Bolsheviks. It was a true test of fire for the newly nascent Polish nation and according to British diplomat and historian Lord D'Abernon it was "the eighteenth decisive battle in world histroy." The Polish-Bolshevik War of 1920 was the only war that Soviet Russia lost until the war in Afghanistan in 1982.

It is now Polish Army Day in Poland.

On Facebook 15th August 2020

Polish government accused of risking “a serious breach” of the rule of law

In the October 2015 elections for the Polish parliament, the Law and Justice Party (PiS) won an outright majority with an ambitious Poland First programme of so-called “good renewal”, which included a generous social welfare programme and a desire to overturn their predecessors’ social and economic policies.

PiS is ultra-nationalist and socially conservative, opposing (indeed reversing) LGBT rights and women’s rights (for example, they have said they will take Poland out of the Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence). They also opposed taking a share of Syrian refugees because they didn’t want to undermine Poland’s Catholic identity. Their leaders are obsessed with exposing the supposed criminality of the post-communist political and economic establishment and its failure to challenge the EU’s liberal social agenda.

 

In particular, they blamed a self-perpetuating independent judiciary that they claimed to include judges from former communist Poland. In fact, there were barely three former communist lawyers left in the Supreme Court out of a total of 125 members, as the remainder had long been retired. PiS’s self-declared mission to brook no opposition to their economic and social programme led it to uproot democratic conventions and cut legal corners with a series of measures that subjugated the judiciary and the state media to their party political “control”.

 

Since 2016, a number of EU and even UN institutions have criticised the changes to the political framework by the PiS government, but with only a limited effect. On 20 July 2020, the committee on civil liberties, justice and human affairs (a committee of the European Parliament) issued its latest interim report, urging the EU Commission to take punitive measures against Poland because of “a clear risk of a serious breach by the Republic of Poland of the rule of law”.

 

The report recounts in great detail the measures taken by the PiS government to erode fundamental human rights and subvert the independence of the judiciary in Poland. This has taken place not in one fell swoop, but as a result of a thousand cuts, each moving forward the agenda despite attempts to prevent each transgressions by either an outvoted and demoralised internal opposition, or by the various EU relevant institutions.

 

 

In a 20-page document, the committee lists the abuse of powers by the new parliament from December 2015 onward when it assumed powers to revise the constitution and curtail the independence of the civil service, the police, the Public Prosecutors’ Office, the ombudsman for human rights, the National Media Council and the judiciary. In particular, the committee criticised the merging of the hitherto non-political office of prosecutor general with the political post of justice minister. The new parliament also redesigned the judiciary by politicising the appointments to the Constitutional Court and by introducing new institutions. These new institutions included the Chamber of Extraordinary Control, the National Council of the Judiciary, and the Disciplinary Chamber, all staffed with the justice minister’s nominees in order to control and even purge judges both in the independent supreme court and in local courts.

 

This has led to a dangerous duality in the Polish justice system where, for example, the current Supreme Court passed a resolution refusing to recognise the validity of pronouncements by the government-controlled Disciplinary Chamber, while the government-controlled constitutional tribunal declared the Supreme Court’s resolution as unconstitutional. The committee acknowledged that the organisation of the justice system is a sovereign national competence, but EU members are still required to ensure their legislation does not breach EU law, and in particular the separation of powers between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary.

Other aspects were criticised too, such as the work of the National Media Council changing the state television into a crude propaganda outlet for the ruling party and for its candidates in the ensuing elections. The committee also highlighted concerns over new legislation that has curbed: academic freedom; freedom of assembly; freedom of association; privacy and data protection; religious indoctrination in schools; the right to a fair trial; the right to information; and freedom of expression in the conduct of public life in Poland.

The committee found that legislative changes brought in by the ruling party have also encouraged hate speech, public discrimination, violence against women, domestic violence and intolerant behaviour against minorities. It concluded that these measures in Poland “amount to a serious, sustained and systemic breach of the rule of law”. These, and other crucial pieces of legislation, were passed with excessive haste and little chance of adequate public consultation or parliamentary scrutiny, mainly late at night, in an atmosphere fraught with tension and anger where bullied opposition MPs had their mikes switched off after one minute of debate.

The committee has called on the EU Commission to use all tools at its disposal including budgetary controls and voting rights under Article 7 the Lisbon Treaty, to ensure “all EU countries respect the common values of the EU”.

In view of the narrow victory of its candidate in the presidential election on 12 July, the ruling PiS shows no inclination to comply with the resolution of the committee. The EU Commission is also currently not in a position to lay down the law, because it needed a unanimous vote at the European Council summit that concluded on 21 July, to pass through an ambitious package of 750bn euros to combat the Europe-wide economic crisis following the Covid-19 lockdowns on the continent. The Polish government would only give its consent to this package of measures, through which it would receive a generous provision, if it was agreed that there would be no curtailment on Poland’s access to these funds because of its breach of European law.

The wording of the final agreement was something of a fudge. The distribution of funds would be subjected to majority voting and not unanimity, but the Polish prime minister was assured that the EU Commission would design the new budgetary safeguards so that the funds would not be threatened by any disciplinary measures against Poland. The European Parliament has already passed a resolution expressing concern at this ambiguity. At the same time, the Polish justice minister has bitterly criticised the prime minister for not clearing up the ambiguity at the summit, as it appeared to threaten the continuation of his party’s authoritarian “good renewal”.

The EU Commission is to publish the budgetary mechanism for issuing the funds at the end of September and then we shall see, in the resulting confrontation between the EU Commission and the Polish government, which side will blink first.

Republic of Two Polands

The second tier of the presidential election in Poland has consolidated the painful existence of a Republic of Two Polands. The one is conservative, Catholic, elderly, with a Poland First siege mentality, frightened at losing the social benefits introduced by the Law and Justice Party, such as a decent minimum wage and a sizable drop in poverty. The other is young, entrepreneurial, socially liberal, Europe friendly, tolerant and frightened of losing the civic benefits of living in a western democracy, such as independence of the courts, freedom of the press and tolerance of minorities.

 

The current direction of travel of the present government suggests a deepening conflict over those civic rights even as the post-covid recession erodes the economic gains. Only true statesmanship by an uncharacteristically independent President Andrzej Duda and by a courageous opposition leader Rafał Trzaskowski, ready to shed his Civic Platform anchor, could prevent the coming confrontation between the two Polands from exploding into civil conflict and mass unemployment. Their cooperation could unify the country around new national and local climate-friendly and family-friendly infrastructure projects and around a common policy of cooperation with a post-Trump USA in strengthening European security against Russian and Chinese interference.     

Letter to The Economist  

Letter to Russian Ambassador - Denial of Katyn in Russia

P R E S S S T A T E M E N T

The Federation of Poles in Great Britain C.I.O, based in London, which has represented Polish organizations in the UK since 1947,has sent a letter this weekend to the Russian Ambassador in London to protest at the removal by Tver city authorities in central Russia of plaques which commemorated the mass execution by the NKVD in April and May of 1940 of 6311 Polish military and civilian officials.
The local prosecutor and mayor in Tver have claimed there is no documentary evidence of the massacre despite all evidence to the contrary and despite acknowledgement of the crime by the Russian government. Prime Minister John Major recognized in 1991 that the British government held the Soviet government responsible for this wartime massacre. The Federation asks the Russian Ambassador to forward the protest both to President Putin and to the local authorities in Tver and urges that the plaques are restored in a public ceremony.
The executions at Tver have been public information in Russia since 1990 and the site of the killings was initially open to the public. The executions at Tver were part of the "Katyn massacres" of more than 22,000 Polish military and civilian personnel who had been captured by the Red Army after the joint invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in September 1939. It was one of the most heinous crimes of the Second World War which the Soviet government had blamed for many decades as being a Nazi crime even though overwhelming evidence showed that the executions were carried out by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, at the express instructions of Joseph Stalin and the Politburo.

"Katyn denial, like Holocaust denial, is a standard feature of the growing radical nationalism in the Russian heartlands, and it is vital, in tthe interests of the survival of democracy in Russia, that the plaques are restored and due respect is paid to the memory of those Polish prisoners of war killed in Tver, Katyn, Kharkov and other places of execution in Russia as well as of all other victims of the Red Terror in the Soviet Union," said Federation spokesman and trustee Wiktor Moszczynski.

Issued by the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, 240 King Street, London W6 0RF

For futrther information please contact Wiktor Moszczynski, tel. 07786471833




His Excellency Mr Andrei Kelin, 16 May 2020
Russian Ambassador,
6/7 Kensington Palace Gardens
London W8 4QP

Your Excellency,
This week we have seen a film showing the illegal removal of plaques commemorating the mass murder of Polish citizens in the former NKVD headquarters in Tver between 4th April and 16th May 1940. This follows reports of a grotesque statement by the local mayor in June last year that there is no documentary evidence for this crime, and a subsequent letter from alocal prosecutor’s office to the Chancellor of Tver State Medical University (current landlordof the former NKVD building) to have the plaques removed.
It has been known since 1942 that 6311 Polish officials had been held in a prisoner of war camp at Ostashkov following the joint invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the USSR in 1939. Since 1990 we also know that they had been brought to the black panelled cellars of the NKVD in Tver to be executed at a rate of 250 every day with a single shot in the back of the
head and then their bodies were dumped in an unfenced site in Miednoye, 30 kilometres from Tver, where they were buried unceremoniously in long trenches. Their bodies had been discovered in 1990 and initially unearthed by Memorial, a local human rights group. The bodies are now reburied in an official commemorative site visited each year by relatives of the victims, Polish consular authorities and local officials. For a short period, the site of the executions was even open to visitors.
As you are aware, in October 1992, at the request of President Boris Yeltsin, Professor Rudolf Pikhoia, Director of the National Archives of the Russian Federation, presented President Lech Wałęsa with original documents showing, first, a motion by Lavrenty Beria, Commissar for Internal Affairs, arguing for the shooting of 25,700 interned Polish officers and, second, a positive response approving the motion at a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee, signed by Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and others. In the meantime, Russian military prosecutor Colonel Anatoly Yablokov, in charge of the Katyn case, concluded a 3-year investigation in 1993 that named Stalin and members of the Politbureau as guilty of the mass execution of Polish officers. This evidence and these findings were entirely consistent with all the evidence on the case held by the wartime Polish government and by the U.S.House of Representatives Select Committee in 1952. They were further supported by masses of later evidence from NKVD and other Soviet state institutions gathered by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. Soviet guilt for the crime of Katyn is now the common conclusion held by every government and every independent historical institute throughout the world.

At the site of the Katyn massacre in 2010, at the 70th Anniversary, your Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, now President of the Russian Federation, rightfully acknowledged the Soviet authorship of the Katyn crimes when he stressed the common suffering of Russians, Poles and other ethnic groups under Stalin’s rule. He said that “with decades of cynical lies, they tried to blot out the truth about the Katyn shootings.” and appealed that all parties “should come to terms with a common historical truth and realise that we cannot go on living in the past alone”.
We must protest therefore at the removal of the plaques commemorating the 6311 Polish victims of the Tver massacres. We see this act as an insult to the memory of these victims, to the victims’ families and to countless millions of other victims of Stalin’s terror, as well as a rejection by the local authorities in Tver of the “common historical truth” which the Russian government had previously acknowledged. We urge that the plaques be restored immediately in a public ceremony as this would be in the interests of good future Russian-Polish relations and an acknowledgement of international concern at such a blatant attempt to revise the truth about Russia’s past.
We request that you forward our protest both to the President of the Russian Federation and to the local authorities in Tver.
Yours sincerely,

Włodzimierz Mier-Jędrzejowicz
Deputy Chairman, Acting Chairman, Federation of Poles in Great Britain

Kay Burley - Sky News seeking partisanship over Covid

Why is Kay Burley of Sky News so determined to undermine a two party consensus on the broader strategy of tackling the covid-19 epidemic?
I think both Conservative and Labour politicians should complain when a news presenter seeks to politicize constructive criticisms by politicians such as Angela Rayner into hostile declarations of responsibility on deaths which should best be delayed until the public enquiry on the coronavirus pandemic in the UK os held next year.
For now we have to combat the virus together.

Polish democracy in crisis

As someone who has spent more than 50 years of his life campaigning for a free democratic Poland in a free democratic Europe, I am especially saddened by the current attempts of the Polish government to take advantage of coronavirus restrictions to ram through parliament a total ban on abortion, the banning of sex education in schools, reintroducing children into blood sports and conducting presidential elections on May 10th by an improvised untested method of universal postal voting. This dramatic change in the voting system was introduced with barely a month's notice, contrary to the constitutional requirements that any changes to electoral law should be made at least 6 months before the next election. Also this election disenfranchises all Polish citizens living abroad in countries where there is also a lockdown and social distancing measures.
These proposals are very controversial while the obsessive obstinacy in holding the election in the middle of a universal lockdown is justified solely by a need to retain power and reimpose by the back door "traditonal Polish values" on society. It forms part of the government's unilateral attempt to self-exile Poland from all aspects of EU traditions and values while still retining its access to generous EU regional and agricultural subsidies.
The sad thing is that I recognize these so-called "Polish values" as being outdated values common in the UK and other Western countries only 30 years ago, but long since abandoned as outdated.. There is nothing innately "Polish" about them. They are in contradiction to Poland's traditional call for "Your Freedoma and Ours" and are not shared by a large section of modern Polish society. They signify not the indigenisation of political culture in Poland but its anachronism.
Unfortunately pursuing this election and this controversial legislation while the Sejm is not fully functioning could also undermine public confidence in those vital measures rightly taken by the same government to combat Covid-19.