Warring with history

President Lech Kaczyński is preparing a bill concerning the communist military officials responsible for imposing martial law in 1981, Wprost weekly has reported. Under the bill, those officers and generals who were members of the Military Council of National Salvation (WRON), the junta that ruled during the period of martial law, would be automatically downgraded to the lowest rank in the Polish army. The bill would also strip all decorations received as well as reduce their relatively robust pensions to the minimum.

The law would affect such top-ranking communists as Generals Wojciech Jaruzelski and Czesław Kiszczak, but also General Mirosław Hermaszewski, the first Polish astronaut, who claims to have been involuntarily added to WRON.

"This is a very difficult issue," commented Dr Radosław Markowski from the Institute of Political Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences (ISP PAN) "This would be a valid decision if either recognized historians or the majority of society agreed that the martial law was something condemnable. However, both historians and society are divided on the issue, with the larger part supporting the imposition of martial law," he said. Markowski agreed that higher-ranking communist authorities should be stripped of their privileges regardless of whether or not they took part in the imposition of martial law.

In the view of Dr Łukasz Kamiński from the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), an organization that prosecutes crimes against the Polish nation, this sort of downgrade would merely be a substitute for real justice. "Such a step should be preceded by other legislative actions that would punish those responsible for martial law," he told WBJ, and added that WRON was an illegal group even from the point of view of the communist constitution.