Polish Dissent Heats Up

An underground manifesto questions Poland's system

Off a crude homemade press in Warsaw last week rolled 1,000 copies of Poland's newest underground journal Glos (Voice). The issue should quickly become a collector's item. Tucked in among articles on philosophy and international affairs was a seven-page manifesto that constituted the boldest challenge to Poland's Communist regime since food strikes and riots paralyzed the nation in 1976. It may be one of the most important political documents to surface in Eastern Europe since the near revolution of October 1956.

The statement, called the "Manifesto of the Democratic Movement," attacked the "present economic disorganization, decay of authority and disintegration of society." The reason for this situation, it argued, was "the usurpation of the rights of citizens and the robbing of the nation's independence."

Though the manifesto did not say so outright, it was clear that its authors considered the Polish Communist Party to be the usurper and the Soviet Union the robber. Demanding the restoration of "sovereignty and democracy," the manifesto called for "freedom of belief, thought, speech, information, assembly and work." It insisted specifically on the right to strike, on free trade unions, abolition of censorship and complete reform of the electoral system.

Such freedoms have often been demanded by dissident Polish intellectuals in statements and open letters. But the Glos manifesto went much further in expressing outright resistance to the authority of the Communist Party itself. It differed in an even more significant way from the human rights appeals that have proliferated in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the past decade. Those appeals criticized Communist regimes for not putting existing laws into practice. The Polish declaration took issue with the laws themselves.

The manifesto was signed by 110 Poles, some of them active in the 23-member Workers' Defense Committee. The committee was founded last year to support the hundreds of workers arrested in the strikes against food-price hikes. Last month, the group was renamed the Committee for the Serf-Defense of Society, or KSS. Among the prominent KSS members who put their names to the manifesto last week were Historians Jan Yosef Lipski and Adam Michnik and Sociologist Jacek Kuron--plus a group of workers who were amnestied partly because of pressure from KSS.

The Glos manifesto is bound to embarrass and anger the regime of Party Chief Edward Gierek. Still, it seemed unlikely that the government would crack down on the signers so close to President Carter's scheduled visit to Warsaw in December. In Poland, such a move would only precipitate more protest.

In Prague last week, three signers of another manifesto, the Charter '77 human rights appeal, were tried for subversion. In the dock were Playwright Vaclav Havel, Journalist Jiri Lederer and Theater Director Frantisek Pavlicek. A fourth defendant, Otto Ornest, had not signed Charter '77 but was accused of handing documents to a foreign diplomat and was tried with the other three.

Prague's prosecutors presented no proof to substantiate the charge that manuscripts smuggled abroad had ended up in the hands of the CIA. In lieu of evidence, the prosecution referred to a bar of chocolate that Lederer's daughter had supposedly received from the CIA. After deliberating 1 1/2 days, the court meted out 3 1/2 years to Ornest, three years to Lederer, suspended sentences to Havel and Pavlicek. Said Havel: "It was a dress rehearsal for trials of many other signers of the Charter'77."

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