The Pope's hardest journey
Timothy Garton Ash
`T he atmosphere is remarkably free', says the Professor just back from Warsaw. Food is:no problem': at least, he always had plenty to eat. You think for a Moment you are listening to Sidney Webb, just back from Moscow in 1935.
Then a senior intellectual adviser to General Jaruzelski: Poland is well on its way to a 'Historic Compromise', he sug- gests, not the one between Party, Church and Solidarity they talked about so busily for 15 months after August 1980; no, a new one between the Church and State: the Cross and the sword. Later, he explains that today is the best chance for people like himself and Mieczyslaw Rakowski (Spec- tator, 13 March), the Party reformists since October 1956. On 22 July, Communist Poland's official birthday, we are to expect a dramatic gesture of reconciliation from the authorities: an amnesty for most political prisoners, the release of more in- ternees, perhaps the restoration of something which the Government will call `Solidarity', a union purged of 'extremists', with a 'voluntary' ban on strikes and wage demands for, say, two years.
You try to match these Establishment views with everything else you have heard from Poland in the six months of the 'state of war'. Less visible food shortages in War- saw? Yes, it makes no sense to queue if you can't afford the new prices anyway; your ration card for most food products is now only valid for one particular shop; and pro- bably the military have regulated what sup- plies there are from the countryside. A new deal between Church and State? Yes, Car- dinal Glemp seems to be prepared for something of the kind. There are more Jokes than ever, says the Professor. Yes, those marvellous Polish political jokes (so good for Professors to tell at high tables) returned with the dictatorship. During the Solidarity period people had other outlets for their political energy, ingenuity and frustration.
But what about the tens of thousands of People who demonstrated on the streets of Warsaw and Gdansk in May? What about the youths fighting police a few days ago in Wroclaw? What about the unemployed some half a million and rising, as industry is caught between the scissors of western economic restraint (denying hard currency for vital spare parts and raw materials) and an economic reform which demands that enterprises pay their way? What about the students who still consider they are 'at war'? What about the great majority of the critical intelligentsia who still point-blank refuse to collaborate with the military regime? What, in short, abOut the greater Part of the Polish nation which is now more profoundly alienated from its rulers than at any time since the Communists took power?
Well, yes, says the senior source, 'we are living on a barrel of dynamite'; but we must not forget the Pope! After much haggling the authorities have now publicly welcomed the Pope's projected visit, presently scheduled to begin on 26 August. He will therefore, DV, be back in his homeland for the 600th anniversary of the Black Madon- na shrine of Czestochowa and the second anniversary of the Lenin Shipyard strike. Yet John Paul II is the white hope of General Jaruzelski and his collaborators. If he meets with the General at the Belweder Palace in Warsaw, as he met with Edward Gierek in June 1979, this, they hope, will make the regime half-way respectable in the eyes of many currently hostile Poles. By this single gesture he may clear them of the charge of treason, and unblock the road to a new national understanding.
1 do not need to rub in the irony. Poland's Communists now depend on the Pope to make their rule acceptable to the Poles. And why should he do that? Because the alternative is an explosion of popular anger which might end in armed Soviet in- tervention — what officials call the 'na- tional tragedy'.
It will be the most difficult journey of his Pontificate. Britain and Argentina were child's play by comparison. On the British and Argentinian precedent he need not meet General Jaruzelski, who is not head of state, as General Galtieri was (indeed Jaruzelski's position as head of the Military Council for National Salvation has no con- stitutional status at all). The nominal head of state is a bland, elderly Politburo member called Henryk Jabonski. Yet not to meet Jaruzelski would be a gesture of non- recognition which would confirm and strengthen countless Poles in their rejection of the regime. The Primate, Cardinal Glemp (though perhaps not all his fellow- bishops), will be urging the Pope to 'render unto Caesar ...'
The Pope, however, is the spiritual father Of Solidarity. There is a clear causal connec- tion between his first visit to Poland in June 1979 and the birth of Solidarity in August 1980. On the evidence of his homilies, the word 'Solidarity' has come to mean more to him than just the independent workers' movement led by Lech Walesa, the best hope of spiritual regeneration for Poland. Ode of his closet KrakOw associates, the theologian .16zef Tyszner, has written a book entitled The Ethics of Solidarity. For Karol Wojtyla, as for Tyszner, Solidarity has become an ethical key-word, a key to the (re-) entry of the Church into the world of labour, and the key to the common ground where Christians and atheists com- bine in the defence of basic human rights. No, he cannot not preach Solidarity in Poland this August.
But he can, perhaps, preach Solidarity (the value) without explicitly demanding the restoration of Solidarity (the independent trade union),. with the right to strike, and Lech Walesa, together with all the currently interned national leadership, at its head.
What he will certainly preach, as in Bri- tain and Argentina, is the message of peace: which means, in the Polish context, the command of non-violence to Solidarity underground and the youths on the streets, as well as to the thugs of the ZOMO and riot police. The peaceful self-discipline of the vast crowds was not the least extraor- dinary feature of his 1979 visit: no one was trampled under foot, no one was killed, the police and the drunks disappeared from the streets, two million people were quietly mustered on the Krak6w meadows by church stewards, and for ten days the state virtually ceased to exist, except as a censor doctoring the television coverage. At that moment everyone saw that Poland is not a Communist country — just a Communist state. Can Poland repeat the miracle this August? And what then?
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