Letters
Peace and human rights
Sir: How does Mr Garton Ash know that not 'a single "unofficial person" from END' went to Warsaw during Solidarity's overground period (21 August)? This one certainly did, in August last year. It is quite true, so I found, that Poles are glad about NATO on the grounds that without it the shadow of Soviet dominion would be even bigger and worse. Opposition to NATO on- ly makes sense when there is comparable opposition to the Warsaw Pact. I took the point. The problem, then, is to mount a campaign that is equally opposed to the Kremlin and the Pentagon — which is ex- actly what Edward Thompson is calling for in the very excerpts used by Mr Garton Ash.
In Warsaw I never heard a single Pole talk about questions of foreign policy and defence — it would be asking for unnee- cessary trouble. First freedom, democracy, justice, then the renegotiation of their post' tion vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. One thing at a time and in proper order — that is the Polish view. On their record since 1974 theY are the most long-suffering and politically sophisticated people in Europe and we have a lot to learn from them.
The longer-term Polish view of their 010 future came out very clearly at the massive rally, attended by some 5000 Poles in exile' in the Albert Hall, at the beginning of this year. The message there was: 'Implement the Yalta Agreement'. Under that agree- ment the Russians pledged themselves to ac- cept free elections in Eastern Europe and 00 that Stalin and his successors have reneged' We are party to that fault as we are, also, t° the non-existence of a German peace treaty and the continued foreign military occupa- tion of both Germanies 37 years after the war. The post-war settlement is now ram" shackle and out-of-date and the whole thing needs now to be recast without the alien la' trusion of the militarism of the super:• powers whose days of superiority are now' numbered. The Poles are showing the vvaY' Theirs is the first revolt against the Soviet system not to be crushed — for Jaruzelski tI not winning and if the Russians invade (as expect they will) they will not win either. In dozens of places throughout Warsaw there are little monuments, set in the walls' to the men and women who died in those places in the course of the amazing single' handed 70-day battle against the Wehrmacht in 1944. The Red Army was half-a-mile away, on the other side of the A Vistula, doing nothing. Modern Poland was born of that trauma, of a whole peoPle in arms against impossible odds. WI betide anyone who takes them on! What
they and the peace movement in the West have in common is not peace but self- determination. One does not have to be a great philosopher, however, to see that in the long run a just and proper peace and self-determination amount to essentially the same thing. Peace and human rights are in- separable.
Peter Cadogan Bast West Peace People, 1 Hampstead Hill Gardens,
'London NW3
Previous page
