Former+Polish+president+harrassed,+Raw+Story+and+AFP

The Raw Story and Agence France Press, Tuesday April 17, 2007
=Former Polish president charged in 'communist' crackdown=

The drive by Poland's ruling conservatives to root out and punish former communists has ensnared ex-president General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who was formally charged Tuesday with the "communist crime" of declaring martial law in 1981.

Jaruzelski, now 83, faces up to 10 years in jail if he is found guilty of "having led an armed organisation of a criminal character" -- referring to the communist regime that imposed martial law on December 13, 1981.

He was head of the government and of the Polish communist party between 1981 and 1989 that declared martial law in a bid to stamp out a challenge to the communist regime from the Solidarity trade union, led by Lech Walesa.

Thousands of arrests followed and dozens of people were killed in clashes.

The National Remembrance Institution (IPN) formally filed charges Tuesday against Jaruzelski and eight other ex-communist officials.

"Our aim is to fulfill an obligation to the nation and the Polish state, as well as to all those who suffered injustice and humiliation during the period of martial law," said IPN official Andrzej Drogon.

The IPN was set up in 1998 -- nine years after Poland shed communism -- and has focussed on crimes committed by the Moscow-backed regime that ruled Poland from the close of World War II until 1989.

Jaruzelski is the latest target in the clampdown on communists by the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) Party, which came to power in late 2005 and is led by identical twins, Polish President Lech Kaczynski and Prime Minister Jaroslaw -- both former Solidarity activists.

Just months after taking office, following Poland's autumn 2005 general election, the PiS-led government took firm steps towards making good on its campaign promise to root out communists.

At the beginning of last year, a dozen ambassadors linked with the former communist regime were recalled, and the government began disbanding the communist-era military intelligence service.

Last month, the Kaczynski-led regime took the communist witch hunt a step further, when it extended the scope of a so-called "lustration" law.

The law, which previously affected only lawmakers, government ministers and judges, or around 30,000 of Poland's 38 million people, was exponentially broadened to include academics, journalists, managers of state-owned firms, school principals, diplomats and lawyers.

It now affects nearly three-quarters of a million Poles, who are required to fill out declarations saying whether or not they collaborated with the communist-era secret police, or face the sack.

Eight other high-ranking officials in Poland's communist government face similar charges to the aged general for their role in the martial law crackdown. They include the former boss of the Polish United Workers' Party, Stanislaw Kania.

Jaruzelski has long argued that he imposed martial law to avoid what he feared would be inevitable Soviet military intervention if communism collapsed in Poland, and many Poles tend to agree with him.

The bespectacled son of a Polish nobleman is already involved in another long-running court case, in which he is accused of the bloody crushing of a workers' uprising on Poland's industrial Baltic coast in 1970, when Jaruzelski was defence minister.

In February, President Kaczynski said he intended to demote Jaruzelski from general to simple private for his role in imposing martial law.


 * From: http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Former_Polish_president_charged_in__04172007.html**

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