The Cold Turns Colder

It looked for a while as though Poland’s Communist government was finally ready to pull its relations with the United States out of the deep freeze. Then came the disclosure that Solidarity trade-union founder Lech Walesa will be put on trial for “slandering” Polish election committees.

For a time after Solidarity emerged in 1980 to press for political pluralism in Poland, there was hope that the regime would tolerate real economic and political reforms. The hope died with the imposition of martial law and the smashing of Solidarity.

Martial law was terminated in the summer of 1983. But contrary to the hopes of the Reagan Administration, which eased some of the economic sanctions that it had imposed in response to martial law, the screws have actually been tightened.

New controls have been clamped on universities and publishing houses. Solidarity activists have been jailed. The Roman Catholic Church has come under renewed attack. Moscow-style orthodoxy is on the rise within the once-flexible Polish Communist Party, and the regime has gone out of its way to pick quarrels with Washington.

The party line is that normalcy has returned to Poland, but the truth is far different. The Polish economy is still a basket case. Living standards remain near the levels of 1973, and Poland’s foreign debt has reached $30 billion.

Solidarity cannot mount general strikes or large-scale demonstrations, but it remains the core of underground resistance. The Communist Party, meanwhile, has lost whatever legitimacy it ever had in the eyes of the Polish people.

Despite all this, there is a good case for removing the remaining U.S. economic sanctions against Poland. The regime could no longer use the sanctions to excuse its failure to get the economy moving.

The sanctions initially were favored by the Polish people, but have become less popular as economic hardship has continued. Removal of the sanctions has been favored for some time now by the Roman Catholic Church and Walesa himself. However, Washington, still hoping for signs of give in Warsaw, has been biding its time.

After the Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting in November, there were some faint signs of a Polish desire for improved relations with the United States. Propaganda attacks on President Reagan eased noticeably, and criticism of U.S. economic sanctions against Libya were comparatively mild.

What the Administration needed was a more overt signal that the Polish government was interested in improving relations. What it got instead was the arrest of several Solidarity activists and the announcement that Walesa will be tried for challenging the official voter turnout figures in the parliamentary elections last October.

These actions obviously will reinforce Reagan’s disinclination to remove the economic sanctions. The Polish authorities knew that. The fact that they went ahead anyway makes the mere thought of life in Poland today even more chilling.