Truth is a better pill
In Polish political history, August has a habit of being a crisis month, commencing with the Solidarity strikes of 1980. In the 1990s, rarely has a year gone by without some scandal or political sensation in a month that normally should be reserved for the silly season. This year is no exception, with the sensational news that both post-1990 Polish presidents former President Lech Walesa and current President Aleksander Kwasniewski are facing serious legal problems over their declarations that in the past they were not collaborators of the communist secret police. Although it is unlikely, there is a possibility that one or both men might be disbarred from the upcoming presidential elections, due in October.
The whole affair is rooted in the presidential election law, which requires candidates for president to make a written declaration as to whether or not they co-operated with intelligence or secret police services during the communist period. Interestingly, the law does not state that there are any penalties for having done so, but there are severe consequences for any candidate who states that he did not cooperate, but in fact did. Thus, former Foreign Minister Andrzej Olechowski, who is running as an independent, has openly stated in his declaration that he had been a collaborator of Polish intelligence while working in Geneva in the 1980s, with no repercussions, either legally or in terms of his small but solid popularity.
To check whether or not these statements are true, the Polish electoral law tasks the Warsaw appeal court with checking the truth of these statements against records held in the current ministries of defense, foreign affairs, interior, as well as in the current State Security Office (UOP). Last week, few observers were expecting any surprises as successive candidates obtained positive court verdicts, until the day of the hearings for Kwasniewski and Walesa. Yet instead of being given the all-clear, the court learned from the State Security Office that Kwasniewski had been registered in the 1980s as a secret police collaborator, with the code name of "Alek." Supporting documents were provided, and more have been forwarded to the court since. Similarly, Walesa's hearing turned into a quasi-trial of Walesa, as evidence was put forward by the UOP that in the 1970s he had collaborated with the secret police and had the code-name "Bolek." Currently, the court is reviewing the evidence presented and has announced further hearings. Were either candidate to be found to have lied in his statement, he will be banned from standing and the disbarred from public office for 10 years.
The bizarre prospect of Poland's first two democratically elected presidents facing such a fate caused the camps of both candidates to momentarily panic. Kwasniewski's campaign head accused the ruling Solidarity Election Action (AWS) party of orchestrating the affair for political purposes, while Walesa stuck to his story that the documents presented were forgeries. Much of the Polish and international press has been critical of the affair, claiming that it might lead to "instability" or that the disbarring of a popular candidate is undemocratic, or that the very principle of lustration is somehow unjust. Yet it was only a few years ago that the careers of politicians could be seriously damaged by accusations by political opponents that they had been collaborators of the communist special services, and it was precisely to prevent such accusations from being bandied about without any possibility of recourse that the current Parliament introduced the so-called lustration law, placing the final verdict in the hands of a special court. Unlike the Czech Republic or former East Germany, the Polish law remains relatively liberal insofar as the fact of collaboration has no legal consequences as long as it is admitted, and that only attempts to conceal it bring with them punishment.
It remains to be seen what the court will declare in the case of both Kwasniewski and Walesa. The truth is that probably neither sets of evidence will be strong enough to push the court into negative verdicts, since in each case the documents presented are either fragmentary or consist of copies.
Walesa has stated in the past that after the first Gdansk shipyard strikes of 1970, he "signed one or two documents"; at a time when there was no anticommunist organized resistance, it is not difficult to imagine a young shipyard worker called Lech Walesa being frightened into cooperation. In the case of Kwasniewski, the 1980s saw him in a high-profile job as the editor in chief of leading Polish newspapers and youth magazines. Again, those familiar with the workings of communist censorship and media in the years immediately after martial law would have been amazed had he not from time to time had to interact with the communist security services.
So it is probable that whatever evidence has been presented is a reflection of these inevitable contacts, and it will be up to the court to decide whether such contacts cross into the area of "Cupertino" that has been denied in the statements of both men. As politicians such as Richard Nixon or Helmut Kohl have discovered, politics is sometimes painful, and that the truth will inevitably emerge. The true test of democracy is how these challenges are faced by the politicians concerned, and by the political and media establishments that report them.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl
