Exiles and experts say no and blame the party's intransigence
"We protest the brutal breaking of workers' strikes by the police and army, the shooting of people, beatings, the internment of many thousands of people in prisons and camps." With those searing words, more than 100 prominent Polish intellectuals and artists last week denounced the martial law regime of General Wojciech Jaruzelski in a petition sent to the nation's parliament and Archbishop Jozef Glemp, the Roman Catholic primate.
In an open letter that circulated in Warsaw last week, ex-Communist Party Member Stefan Bratkowski, the former head of the Association of Polish Journalists, called for a "ceasefire" in the "civil war" launched by "the authorities against their own population."
Poland's Catholic bishops, meanwhile, drafted a strongly worded message of their own, to be read from 12,300 pulpits. Demanding an end to the military crackdown, and the liberation of some 5,000 Solidarity union members and sympathizers, the bishops warned the authorities that "infringement on the right of freedom leads to protests, rebellion and even to civil war."
It remains to be seen what effect such admonitions can have on a regime that cited protests, rebellion and impending civil war as its reasons for declaring martial law in the first place on Dec. 13. That argument could easily be dismissed as the rationalization of a cynical and brutal Communist regime. But the view that Solidarity went too far has been echoed by some respected Western observers and commentators.
"Change, too, has its limits," charged Bundestag Member Freimut Duve, a member of West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's Social Democratic Party. "Lech Walesa should have recognized them long ago." Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau stated that martial law "isn't bad" if it prevents civil war. George Kennan, a former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, suggested that Poland's latest tragedy might have been avoided if only Solidarity had been content "to rest for a while on its laurels" instead of pushing the "semiparalyzed Communist government" to the wall.
Even in Poland, some Solidarity sympathizers have expressed doubts about the wisdom of the union's course. Sitting in a comfortable country house near Warsaw, a group of affluent Polish farmers last week discussed the union's fate with a mixture of pity and reproach. "We are still for Solidarity," said one man, "but unfortunately they should have had more patience." His wife agreed: "It was too much, too fast."
Last week, as the martial law regime decreed the biggest consumer price hikes in Poland's postwar history and Jaruzelski prepared to outline his future programs before parliament, Solidarity activists operating abroad angrily defended the union from charges of extremism. Said Severin Blumstein, 35, a member of a Paris-based group of Solidarity exiles: "It's amazing! To have democratic countries question the right of other countries to that very same democracy they take for granted strikes me as a cynical viewpoint."