speak truth to power series in ki-media - zbigniew bujak (poland) “political participation and...

8/6/2019 Speak Truth To Power Series in KI-Media - Zbigniew Bujak (Poland) Political Participat ion and Life Undergroun d

1/5


2/5

The wave of democracy that started in Polandinspired change in Hungary, East Germany,Czechoslovakia, and eventually throughout theentire region. Bujak decided not to run for office in this electoral contest,instead choosing, like Lech Walesa, to stay focused on the trade union

movement. He also worked in the political arena, and helped to found the CitizensMovement-Democratic Alternative, later the Demo cratic Social Moveme nt, and the

Union of Labor . Elected to Parliament in 1991, he served until 1997.There he spoke eloquently on behalf of womens rights and against anti-Semitism,incurring the wrath of many who were once his ardent supporters. He served as

Minister of Customs, one of the most important posts in the Polishgovernment until his retirement from politics in 2002.

Interview

In the Solidarity Movement, though we didnt realize the army would be used onsuch a scale, we knew there would be some sort of martial law introduced. Wepreparedhiding the money, all the machines, the fileswe hid it all. On December 12,1981, on the very day when the Solidarity Trade Union held a national meeting atGdansk shipyard, news was coming in that ZOMO, a special unit of military police usedin street fighting, was mobilizing. We thought, "This is it. Even if there is very little wecan do at this point, we just have to go. We have to finish the meeting of the nationalcommittee."

This particular meeting was being very closely monitored by the secretservice. Entering the Gdansk shipyard and arresting us there could have beendangerous because it was a big factory, with a lot of people around and it could haveturned into a direct confrontationwith consequences. It was clear from the very

beginning that General Jaruzelski was trying to avoid that. He used a tremendous


3/5

number of police and army units to intimidate us. He wanted to paralyze us with this

massive force. Tactically speaking, he did it all very well. They decided to wait andarrest us in our hotels, which was much easier to do. We could see theMonopol Hotel being surrounded, and people being taken away. When we gotthere, the receptionist told us that Janusz Onyskiewicz, the Solidarity spokesperson, hadbeen arrested. The moment had come.

Zbyszek Janus, another activist, and I went directly from the shipyard tothe railway station. From there Zbyszek went to his friends in Gdansk, and Istayed that first night in a monastery; then, the next day, I moved to aprivate apartment. From the windows I could see the tanks, one afteranother, entering the shipyard. We managed to get in touch with the peopleof the strike committee inside to figure out whether we should join them,

but they suggested that we should stay out, that all the leadership shouldscatter to different hiding places. I got an engineers uniform and rode thetrain back to Warsaw.

In Warsaw, the most important problem was figuring out who was in hiding, and how toget in touch with them. I had a very clear-cut strategy. I went to my friends family and

asked them to ask their neighbors to go to a very trustworthy priest namedFather Nowak to ask for help in contacting others in the underground.Nowak already knew where my deputy, Wiktor Kulerski, was hiding in a

private house. I met Kulerski the same day. Another priest from aneighboring parish helped us out. Wiktor then got in touch withEwa Kulik and Helena Luczywo, and now we knew that ourproblems had been solved. With those two women, we would be

able to build the entire underground network.We organized three separate structures. The editorial committees publishedand distributed underground newspapers and leafletsour most importantfunction. A separate structure existed for all these people who organized Pularskis,Januss, Zbigniew Tomaszewskis, and my activities. Every single one of us had to have a

separate crew of people who organized safe houses for us where we could live,have meetings, and work. The others didnt know where we lived or which people were

organizing for us. So if somebody got caught by the secret service, thatperson would know as little as possiblejust one cell would be

disrupted. Every month we had to change apartments and ourappearance. The way the secret police did their surveillance was bycompiling details about the kind of hat, coat, bag you carried. If youswitched what you wore, you could easily lose the police. At one point Iremember having this jacket that was very light on one side and very dark on the other,so I could turn it inside out and unbutton it and it would look like a coat.

In one place, where we were for a month, we had about sixteendifferent apartments at our disposal to move to at any time,

apartments of complete strangers. We avoided both our own families and


4/5

those of other activists. We avoided our friends. That meant we had to completely putour trust in strangers. At the beginning we had this fear that these people would sell usout. The reward for doing that was huge: twenty thousand dollars and a permanent exitvisa to leave the country. But only once was someone betrayed.

"Lets not get caught" was our slogan. The general belief in Polandwas that the secret police were omnipotent. The whole system was based

on the myth of their "terrible efficiency." When people were shown that a year hadpassed and the opposition was still not captured, was flourishing underground, the mythof efficiency began to show cracks. This was our convictionthat remaining free wouldcompromise the system. And we were right. Today we still get calls from former secretpolice agents who say, "You know, you son of a bitch, if we had caught you then..." andyou can see they are still angry.

There are two kinds of courage. I have a deep conviction that militarystruggle (though this is certainly a paradox) does n o t require that muchcourage. I myself was in the army and knowits easier to just point, shoot, and

run. When I read about the dissidents in Russia, I realized "civilianscourage" is much harder. I dont know how to prove this, but when youhave to make a decisionwhether to sign a petition, or whetherto participate in a demonstrationwhen you know you can be putinto jail, sentenced, or sent to Siberia for years, the way that the Russians have been,

this is real courage . When you read about Mandela in South Africa, youcan see that it requires a different courage to be ready for this type of activity.

In politics, you can call it courage to express your trueopinions. It may turn out that you lose friendsthat somebody in the family turnsfrom you. I experienced it. I know I stopped being a hero to all Poles when I expressedmy opinions aloud. A lot of people said, "You have disappointed us, you betrayed us.We thought you would be with us, the Nationalists, you would be leading us."And a lotof anti-Semites said, "We thought you would be a true Pole, and that we would dealwith those Jews and Communists." Or all those people involved with the antiabortionmovement, when I said I believed that its the womans decision to choose, turned meinto enemy number one.

Look, I believe all of my dreams are coming true. I was afraid that my wife and I wouldbe childless. Then we had a son and we are happy beyond belief. If he hadnt been born Ithink I would have been a frustrated, bitter person, thinking Id wasted my family life for

something abstract. But he came. And I have this feeling that whatI am leavingfor my son is the best Poland I could possibly havehelped create. You know what we are doing now is going to become the stuff oflegends, the same way as it was for us when we talked about our parents lives. I have

the sense of participating in a huge victory: the end of


5/5

martial law, and later the roundtable, and then Tadeusz Mazowieckis success. Our ideahas won, in the sense of helping fulfill a big political vision, and I was part of it.

- Kerry Kennedy, Speak Truth To Power, 2000President of Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights

* With my emphasis. - Theary C. Seng, CIVICUS Cambodia founding president

** Please contact us at CIVICUS Cambodia if your newspaper, website, Facebook etc. cancarry this series.

The RFK Centers S p e a k T r u t h T o P o w e r (Courage Without Borders) project in

Cambodia is funded by The Charitable Foundation (Australia). For more information,

please visit: www.civicus-cam.organdwww.rfkcenter.org/sttp.

Next Baltasar Garzon (Spain) International Law

speak truth to power series in ki-media - zbigniew bujak (poland) “political participation and...

Documents