Volume 8 Number 3

Summer 1999

Feature: Humanitarianism or raison d'etat?

Eastern Europe After Kosovo
     Splintered Unity: Polish Politics and the Crisis
     Konstanty Gebert

The timing could not have been better. The Belgrade agreement, which put an end to the war against Yugoslavia, was signed just two days before Pope John Paul II arrived in Poland. The Pope had been publicly, though indirectly, critical of the war, and the government must have feared that he might express his position again, from Polish soil, just as the government would be reiterating its support for the air campaign. Though there were some hiccups before the final deal was struck, a relieved Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek told former president Lech Walesa, just before the start of the Papal Mass: The NATO air raids on Yugoslavia were called off six hours ago. This is a good sign, especially with the Holy Father in Poland. Prayers were surely answered.

Barely two weeks after joining NATO, Poland found the alliance at war. Seen from Warsaw, this was not only a threatening development but also an ironic one. NATO membership was an achievement long sought. Membership was seen as ensuring Poland' stability and security, both symbolically and in actual fact, confirming that it had rejoined the West. The new concern, however, made Poland look not west but south, and instead of basking in the comfort of security guarantees, the country was asked to do some guaranteeing of its own.

Political Warsaw took the Kosovo crisis in stride, certainly at first. The government immediately declared its full solidarity with the other NATO allies. Demonstrating suprapartisan unity, both Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek, from Solidarity, and President Aleksander Kwasniewski, from the ex-communist Democratic Left Alliance (DLA), endorsed the bombing as a necessary evil and a test of NATO resolve. There were, in the beginning, no vocal dissenters. To some degree, this lack of hesitation resulted from the efforts of two leading politicians (Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek and former prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki) who had been deeply involved in previous failed attempts to resolve the Balkans crisis and had emerged scathed. Mazowiecki, who had been appointed UN special rapporteur for human rights in the former Yugoslavia in 1992, had been a consistent critic of the international community's unwillingness or inability to stop the war in Bosnia. After the UN safe haven of Srebrenica was overrun by Serbian troops in the summer of 1995, Mazowiecki resigned in protest, one of the few top-ranking UN officials ever to do so. After Srebrenica, I as a Pole, feel less safe in Europe, said the former prime minister.
Bronislaw Geremek had been very active in Kosovo throughout 1998, when Poland held the rotating chairmanship of the OSCE. Earlier, as a member of the Carnegie Commission on the Balkans, he advocated negotiated solutions, but as his direct experience with the Milosevic regime developed, he grew reluctantly convinced that imposing a settlement would probably be the only way out. Both of these men endured World War II in Poland (Geremek as a child in the ghetto and Mazowiecki as a Polish adolescent under
Nazi terror) and their experiences have marked them for life.

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The war as seen by the public

The Polish public, for its part, had followed previous events in the Balkans with markedly less interest and passion than was the case in the West. The nineties, for Poland, was a period of intense internal transformation and turmoil, and the nation, exhausted after the previous decade of martial law, could hardly be expected to become emotionally involved in a foreign war, the more so as nothing much was expected of Poland in connection with it. One of the UN's premier contributors of blue-helmet troops, Poland did send a contingent to the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) and later to the Operation Joint Guard and Joint Forge Stabilization Force (SFOR) and the Operation Joint Endeavor Implementation Force (IFOR); and the government and Polish NGOs sent convoys into Bosnia to aid refugees, but that was the extent of the country's participation. The violent breakup of Yugoslavia was never a burning issue in public consciousness.

Responses to public-opinion surveys on Kosovo were contradictory. Almost without exception, the media ascribed most or all of the blame for the war to the Serbs. This author, for instance, endorsed the campaign on its first day as the first war in defense of human rights in an editorial published in Gazeta Wyborcza, and maintained this position throughout the campaign. The plight of the refugees also elicited universal sympathy. But a vocal segment of the public remained adamant in their support of the Serbian cause. The pro-Serb group was heterogeneous, composed of old and new leftists, Catholic pacifists, right-wing Slavophiles, anti-Western militants of all stripes, as well as those whose sympathies for Belgrade were dictated by personal considerations or experiences. Memories of World War II (when Yugoslavia took a gallant if doomed stance, as Poland had done, and the Serbs had fought mainly on the Allied side, while Croats fought mainly for the Axis) were also a significant factor. Historical memory, in fact, proved more important than religious solidarity. Croatia's Catholicism did not much allay Poles' historical mistrust of the former German ally, nor did the Serbs' superficial similarities to Russians, in creed and script, reduce Polish sympathies. When Polish troops joined UNPROFOR, Belgrade expressed concern that their Catholicism would make them biased. They need not have worried. Accusations of bias soon poured out of Zagreb. The Serbs' one-against-all stand also endeared them to Polish hearts.

At the outset of the NATO bombing campaign, however, the first survey found slightly more than half of the population endorsing it, and an even more surprising one-third supporting the dispatch of Polish troops to Kosovo. As undecideds made up a sizable chunk of the remainder, it seemed that Polish public opinion, in rejecting its previous stance, had set out on the warpath against the Serbs. Interestingly, more than half of those polled feared that the war might proliferate into a global conflict. The fear of global war is, understandably enough, deeply rooted in the Polish psyche and reemerges when international tensions are extreme. Given this, it may strike one as even more surprising that Poles seemingly turned so strongly anti-Serb.
Support for the NATO action was greater among urban educated groups than among rural residents, but it decreased among older city dwellers. Poland's best and brightest supported the war, unless they were old enough to have personally witnessed a war themselves. These trends remained rather constant throughout the campaign, but the overall proportions shifted. The percentage of those supporting the war grew to 63 percent after the first two weeks of the bombing, but the percentage of those fearing a world war increased by the same proportion. These proportions then receded to their original levels by the end of the campaign. What remained constant, however, was the extraordinarily high degree of support for aiding Kosovar refugees and granting them refuge in Poland. In one poll, a full 95 percent of respondents held that Poland should help Kosovo refugees, and most also believed that individual citizens should not leave that task to governments and international organizations alone. Eventually, more than 20 relief convoys were sent into Kosovo, while over a thousand refugees were flown to Poland.
Unfortunately, no polls were conducted on the subject of Polish sympathies with the combatants in the Kosovo conflict. The televised stream of images of the Kosovars' cruel exodus undoubtedly helped sway public opinion in Poland, as elsewhere. I would nevertheless venture the hypothesis that Poles were motivated in their choices less by their opinions about the Kosovo conflict itself than by allied solidarity. Poland had joined an alliance that had gone to war and thus had to prove itself a reliable ally by supporting the alliance and contributing troops if needed. This sort of thinking was pervasive. In the previous weeks, the Polish media was full of positive comments about Poland reprinted from the American press. A quotation from an anonymous Washington source (If I were to show the three greatest allies of the CIA, the Poles would have been included) proudly made the rounds, as did a Wall Street Journal editorial comment that, of the three new NATO allies, Poland allied itself most faithfully with the NATO position on Kosovo. The public seemed to be thinking: here is a reputation to which we should aspire.

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The war as seen by the parties
Support for NATO bombing varied substantially among the political parties. Whereas a full three-fourths of those who voted for the Solidarity-led center-right ruling coalition supported the bombing, only 45 percent of the opposition Polish Peasant Party (PPP) electorate did. Interestingly, 58 percent of those who supported the opposition postcommunist DLA endorsed the raids less than the proportion among coalition supporters but more than the national average. The center-right waved the banner of Poland's NATO membership, PPP was critical of it, while DLA was of two minds. Its leadership enthusiastically endorsed NATO strikes, sensing that, by supporting them, the party could shed the taint of its decades-long affiliation with Moscow. The rank-and-file, however, for so long steeped in a political culture of anti-NATO sentiments, was thoroughly displeased with the leadership's decisionÑand showed it. The DLA's internal differences were not kept secret long, and it seems that, again, attitudes toward the bombing dovetailed with those toward NATO, regardless of opinions on the Kosovo conflict itself.
ÒIt is normal that the NATO action wins the greatest support among government supporters, explained DLA secretary-general Krzysztof Janik. If the DLA were the ruling party today, its electorate would give the NATO action its fullest support. Diametrically opposed to this realpolitik approach was the position taken by Trybuna, the DLA-affiliated daily, and its editor-in-chief, Janusz Rolicki. Though not formally a DLA publication, Trybuna is the only nationwide outlet in the hands of the former communists. Rolicki's attacks on NATO's raids were filled with vintage accusations against warmongers striving for world domination while trampling Yugoslav sovereignty and international law. Widely divergent from the official DLA position and somewhat embarrassing to its leaders, such opinions were nevertheless to gain popularity among segments of the rank-and-file, and eventually forced a policy shift. In the meanwhileÑand not for the first timeÑthe extreme right-wing press took a similar stance. While the mainstream right-wing media supported the government position, fringe publications, such as Nasza Polska (Our Poland), condemned the air raids as an expression of Washington's desire for world supremacy. As if this were not bad enough, the paper warned that dark, satanic, Masonic, and globalistic forces were at play, trampling the independence of a sovereign Christian state. Soon afterward, similar opinions were heard at the parliamentary rostrum.
In milder form, PPP Supreme Council chairman Alfred Domagalski stated, slightly perversely: Our electorate is distancing itself from NATO's intervention in the Balkans, for it is the most sensitive to aggression and harm done to people. This sensitivity results from the country dwellers great attachment to the Church. Apparently, the Peasants sensitivity to harm done to people was highly selective, since it did not seem to include harm done to the Kosovar Albanians. Domagalskis reference to the Church might have been an attempt to compel it to take a more radical position against the war, but the hierarchy did not follow his lead. The Catholic Church repeated Pope John Paul II's well-known position and busied itself, extremely efficiently, in organizing humanitarian relief. The Orthodox Church, which in previous Balkan wars had taken the role as spokesman for the Serb side, kept a low profile this time.
In a way, just as the government's decision to endorse the raids seemed at that moment to go beyond the expressions of public opinion, so its subsequent declarations were tamer than what the public seemed to endorse. In a newspaper interview after the first two weeks of the war, Prime Minister Buzek, speaking on Kosovo, stressed that every mediation is worthy of support, and Poland will support any such mission. But at that time, no mission was on the horizon. In the same interview, Buzek refused even to discuss the possibility of Polish troops being sent to Kosovo, an eventuality supported by one-third of the public.
There might have been extrapolitical reasons for Buzek's caution. Once proudly touted as top-notch, the Polish military has been woefully ignored since 1989. As a result, when push came to shove, it proved unprepared to cope with a potential combat situation. Poland did send a battalion to SFOR in Bosnia and maintained a second battalion in battle readiness as backup. After Belgrade accepted the plan of President Martti Ahtisari of Finland, Poland responded positively to a NATO request to send a battalion to the Kosovo Force (KFOR). But the government chose the SFOR reserve battalion, thus incurring the displeasure of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), because it bit into the country's SFOR commitment. No other Polish battalion was deemed battle-ready or battle-worthy. Earlier, when the government decided to fly in a thousand Kosovo refugees to Poland, it had to charter aircraft from LOT, the national carrier. The air-force transport wing was unable to help. A leading daily reported that Poland's only operational military transport plane had already been allocated to the NATO Kosovo operation and was flying the Tirana- Bari shuttle. The military did not deny the report.

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The war as seen by parliament

Political controversy notwithstanding, parliament took up debate on Kosovo only two weeks into the bombing campaign. Foreign Minister Geremek opened the debate quoting John Donne and invoking universal principles of human rights and human solidarity: The aggression was born in the minds of ideologists of Greater Serbia and implemented through the deeds of its practitioners. The government of Slobodan Milosevic is responsible for preparing and perpetrating crimes against its own citizens. He called on parliament to give nonpartisan backing to the government on Kosovo. He did not get it. Predictably, his coalition colleagues, led by Mazowiecki, endorsed the government position. But they were supported only by DLA. Polish membership in NATO has become the test of our allied credibility, said party leader Leszek Miller, representing his parliamentary club. This was the last time DLA demonstrated any unity on the increasingly vexed Kosovo issue.

The rest of the opposition, from left and right, launched a broadside against the government position. The PPP's Janusz Dobrosz denounced not only the alliance's policy but the alliance itself. NATO's character is changing, he said. No longer solely a defensive alliance, it is also an instrument of building a new world order, a tool of American politicians. He hinted darkly that NATO might attack other states, too, and suggested that it had had a hand in provoking the crisis in the first place.

Nationalist Jan Lopuszanski, of a small Catholic right-wing group, made his warning even more explicit. If, today, NATO's putative right to be a judge of other nations and their governments and to enforce these decisions by way of violence is recognized, this right may tomorrow be directed against any nation in the world, Poland included, he warned. He apparently forgot, among other things, that Poland was now a NATO member.

The government did win broad majority support, but most of the opposition voted against its pro-NATO stance, and even part of the DLA abstained. A month later, a group of 62 DLA MPs and senators sent an open letter to President Clinton, calling for a bombing pause to give peace a chance. The initiative was spearheaded by two well-known DLA radicals: Izabella Sierakowska, an ardent admirer of the achievements of the Polish People's Republic, and Piotr Ikonowicz, a former leftist opposition activist during the period of martial law, who has since joined the ranks of his erstwhile enemies. Their position, adopted against the party line, resulted in a break in the leadership, with top leader Marek Borowski supporting the position of the dissidents. The Polish foreign office criticized the reasoning of the letter's authors, responding that they had put the cart before the horse by demanding a bombing break to enable a Serb withdrawal, while the proper sequence would be the reverse.

But criticism of the campaign, as the weeks dragged on and collateral damage caused by the raids increased, ceased to be confined to the ranks of the former communists. While the mainstream media continued to take the approach that the bombing was both justified and necessary, they also published opinion pieces by leading intellectual figures who distanced themselves from the campaign. In a particularly strongly worded article in the liberal Catholic Powszechny, a highly respected Jesuit, Father Stanislaw Musial, condemned the bombing as wantonly cruel and arrogant, provoking a polemical response from the Gazeta Wyborcza editor-in-chief, Adam Michnik. The exchange was the first time the two men, personifying the Catholic and lay wings of Polish liberal opinion, clashed in public. But Michnik's paper also published critical articles by liberal-opinion leaders, such as Professor Jerzy Jedlicki, who saw the campaign as increasingly untenable on both political and moral grounds.

The credibility of NATO's critics was somewhat undermined in mid-May, when Ikonowicz and SierakowskaÑacting against the explicit instructions of their party undertook a fact-finding mission to Belgrade and the refugee camps in Macedonia, returning with a full condemnation of both the raids and their rationale. Ikonowicz reported that he had failed to find any eyewitnesses to Serb atrocities among Albanian refugees, while according to himÑrefugees said that they had fled not the Serb army but the KLA and NATO bombs. The two DLA MPs were criticized for falling prey to Serb propaganda and undermining Poland's credibility as a NATO ally. By the end of May, however, opposition to the raids began to coalesce in parliament. A group of 119 DLA and PPP MPs and senators adopted a draft resolution that called on NATO to suspend the raids and on Belgrade to withdraw its troops from Kosovo. This time the DLA leadership went along with the initiative, which the party's ranking foreign-affairs representative thought of as supporting a similar proposal by Prime Minister Massimo Alema of Italy. Criticism of the initiative was rather muted, and the spokesman for the ruling coalition's junior partner, Freedom Union the party of Geremek and Mazowiecki complained that the initiative's sponsors had failed to consult with other parliamentary clubs. They also worried that the draft's wording was insufficiently balanced. Only relatively few politicians, such as Solidarity's Aleksander Hall, criticized the project outright, saying that its authors had adopted a position definitely divergent from Polish foreign policy, adding that suspending the raids would mean a defeat for NATO.Ó Parliamentary debate over the initiative was scheduled for June 17, just after the planned conclusion of the Pope's visit. But the negotiated end of the war, on June 10, eliminated the need for it.

Thus a facade of political unity over an issue that had become, during the campaign' 79 days, a deeply divisive factor on the Polish political scene, was maintained. On the other hand, at least if one trusts the polls, the populace at large was less conflicted.

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Konstanty Gebert is the editor-in-chief of Midrasz, a Jewish monthly in Poland, and a reporter and commentator for Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's largest daily newspaper. In 1992 and 1993, he accompanied Tadeusz Mazowiecki, UN special rapporteur on human rights, on his missions to the former Yugoslavia. He is the author, most recently, of Obrona poczty sarajewskiej (The Defense of the Sarajevo Post Office) (Proszynski and Co., 1996), based on his reporting from the front lines of the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

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