Spectator's Journal

...There were Crimean Tartars, deported en masse by Stalin, and mothers of Russian soldiers missing in Afghanistan...

...Zbigniew Romaszewski, once leader of Solidarity's Lawfulness and Intervention Commission and today a senator, was once again the principal organizer...

...There we held an ecumenical service with prayers said by a Polish priest, a Protestant minister from one of the Scandinavian countries, and a Muslim insurgent from Soviet-occupied Afghanistan...

...After the conference ended I went to a less formal gathering on the outskirts of Warsaw, at the home of Monika and Danik...

...Ninety percent of Poland's Jews were murdered by the Nazis and the remainder were expelled by the Communists...

...At the conclusion of our tour, we repaired to a church at the corner of the Birkenau death camp, in a building that had once housed the S.S...

...Ten years before, Poland had hosted the First International Human Rights conference, under very different circumstances...

...Yet the surrounding architectural drab serves as a reminder that Warsaw has undergone the two worst things that can happen to a city: It was destroyed by the Nazis and rebuilt by the Communists...

...They invited activists from all over Poland, as well as Western human rights advocates and dissidents from other Communist countries, to convene in the Krakow suburb of Nowa Huta ("New Steelmill...

...At the conclusion of the Krakow conference, we piled into rented buses and headed for the nearby town of Oswiecim, which the Germans renamed Auschwitz...

...know was a comestible) and wash it down with Gallo...

...At street level it is a spare but definitely post-Communist pizzeria...

...Cuba Libre," they echoed with gusto...

...To the mingled sounds of kids bouncing a basketball, dogs barking, and someone strumming a guitar, the Caucasian guests demonstrated the art of roasting skewered sashlik on an open fire —and took in Monika's and Danik's demonstration of how people build a life once they've won their freedom...

...Her speech, titled "Torture: a Worldwide Phenomenon," stressed that "torture and ill-treatment by law enforcement officials can occur in any country," and she testified to having personally worked on the issue in "the USA, the English-speaking Caribbean, the U.K., Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Iran, Israel and the Occupied Territories, and the Gulf countries...

...We had wished also to visit striking Polish miners in Silesia, but no bus would take us, and the leader of the secret police contingent warned that if we went there anyway, some of us would fall into ditches or have other accidents...

...We toured Auschwitz unmolested...

...In honor of the occasion, the Polish National Symphony performed Gorecki and Beethoven...

...Gebert edits a substantial Polish Jewish magazine, Midrasz...

...They represent, roughly, the former Communists, the Solidarity rank-and-file, and the Solidarity intellectuals...

...Yet the conference tarried little on celebrating old triumphs, focusing instead on the unfinished human rights agenda in the East...

...After several elections, two major and one minor party have emerged as the main competitors...

...Over the past five years the former Communists have been voted into power and then out again, without the least hint that democratic procedures would be breached...

...That church has since been one focus of Jewish-Catholic controversy over the proper disposition of Auschwitz, and I often wonder whether I am the only Jew who has ever led prayers in it...

...Up and down Nowy Swiat, Warsaw's Fifth Avenue, the kiosks were plastered with posters bearing Machadow's smiling likeness and the inscription "Poland welcomes the president of Chechnya...

...Jan Maria Rokita, then leader of the Krakow branch of Freedom and Peace, denounced the principle of state sovereignty as a shield for tyrants, but he was rebutted by Juan Mendez, an officer of the Washington-based group Americas Watch, who insisted that sovereignty was a vital principle of international law...

...Now, however, a couple of synagogues have been restored, a Jewish school opened, and a hot-line has been organized for Poles who suddenly confront the fact—from a discovered document or a dying parent or a buried memory or a change of heart—that they are Jewish...

...You can order yours topped with shrimp or even squid (which before 1989 most Poles did not JOSHUA MURAVCHIK is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...In the plenary sessions, fiery anti-Communist speeches and solidarity messages from throughout the Communist world alternated with serious debate...

...As the pastor of Lech Saint Brigida church in Gdansk, Jankowski was a patron to Solidarity...

...Defiantly, the walls and corridors of the church were covered with a display of underground printing—I counted 278 Polish titles, and there was a smaller similar exhibit brought from Hungary...

...The restaurant Mazowsze on Marszalkowska Street is its own time-warp...

...Gebert, a prolific author in the underground press, is now one of the leaders of the effort to revive a Jewish community in the country that was once the center of European Jewry...

...The very next day, the regime decided to open negotiations with the still-banned Solidarity...

...They have worked to improve the local school for their two children and strengthen municipal services...

...Few Poles have any hesitation despising Castro, and, besides, the birthday revelers were at the point of welcoming any toasts...

...A thirty-something professional couple (he in computers, she a translator), four years ago they bought a bit of woodland with a garage built on it and have been adding a room to it each year...

...Each one of these three parties includes advocates of free markets along with advocates of the welfare state...

...The Poles are fond of these Russian dissidents...

...The secret police, whose presence there seemed only fitting, posed as tourists but gave themselves away by training their cameras on us instead of the surroundings...

...One group comprised ordinary Poles, mostly in their forties, celebrating a birthday...

...Well lubricated, they belted out round after round of song punctuated with good-natured laughter...

...Representatives of the human wreckage of Soviet Communism recalled their suffering and appealed for justice...

...Some of the more interesting arguments pitted the Poles against representatives from the Western human rights movement...

...In general, however, Poles are not so fond of Russia...

...What divides the parties are questions of religion, nationalism, and how to come to terms with the Communist past...

...Yet the alignments of Polish politics match no Western model...

...I led a recitation of Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning...

...My cab driver could not find their dirt road until he called on his cell-phone for directions, but I feel certain that in another generation this will be a prime commuter route...

...These differences cut deeper than the economic issues that define politics in western Europe...

...The erstwhile youth-group leader Jan Maria Rokita was also in attendance...

...The American Spectator • January 1999 59 Despite shibboleths about how slowly democratic traditions develop, democracy has sunk its roots quickly in Poland...

...60 January 1999 The American Spectator...

...The Russian foreign ministry formally protested these "provocative" acts, and complained that Ingushetia and Dagestan were also listed at the conference as independent nations...

...In 1990, the Second International Human Rights Conference, organized by the same sponsors as the first, took place in what was then still called Leningrad...

...Key leaders of the Soviet dissident movement were on hand: Yelena Bonner, Sergei Grigoryants, Vladimir Bukovsky, Yuri Kovalev, Father Gleb Yakunin —all of whom had been blocked, in spite of glasnost, from attending the 1988 conference...

...One of the Poles at our table decided that bridges should be built, so she stood, tapped her glass with a spoon, and called out to the other party to join in a toast to two men among us who had spent between them fifty years in Fidel Castro's prisons...

...A few of us were Poles or Americans, but most were activists from countries languishing under Communism, or faltering on the path from Communism to democracy...

...Before we had toasted our way through the rest of the suffering former Soviet Republics, the birthday group was showing visible signs of what we might call liberation fatigue...

...Like Poland itself, they were eager to return to the ordinary pursuit of happi58 January 1999 • The American Spectator ness, but could not get free entirely of the legacy of a half-century of totalitarian conquest and the struggles against it...

...There were no couples or families dining the night I was there last October, only two large parties...

...Up one flight, the cavernous full-menu dining room has the pre-1989 feel, with its threadbare white linen, bars= (borscht) and flaki (tripe) and Bulgarian wine, and six staff members lounging around the cashier's desk...

...Part of the opening ceremonies was the presentation of plaques to Westerners, including former AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland, who had stood by Solidarity in the old days...

...A gruesomely detailed account of the abuse of prisoners in North Korea, based on the testimony of former inmates and guards who had defected, formed a discordant counterpoint to the presentation by an Englishwoman representing Amnesty International...

...On the last day the delegates voted to hold the Fourth International Human Rights Conference in Peking...

...That conference, on which I reported in these pages at the time, was a landmark in Poland's struggle for freedom...

...Aclandestine film from Cuba featured interviews with the families of political prisoners...

...This was reflected at the conference by two of the notable figures from Solidarity's heroic days, Father Henryk Jankowski and Konstanty Gebert...

...Although the authorities cut the phone lines into the conference site, Nowa Huta's massive Mistrzejowice church, and sent the secret police inside to make a show of taking notes, the regime in its advanced stage of decrepitude lacked the resolution to shut the meeting down...

...The Communists intended only partial concessions, but the momentum of change proved irresistible, and a year later the Poles had won their freedom...

...Monika works with the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe, and she had invited the Georgian and Azeri delegates for a cookout in her yard...

...now he is a member of the Seim (parliament) and, I am told, the political kingpin of Krakow...

...His vicious outbursts during the 1995 Polish presidential election, when he blamed the Jews for World War II and excoriated their "satanic greed," led to his punishment by church superiors...

...With this encouragement, they were invited next to join in a toast to freedom in China, then Tibet, then Georgia, and then Azerbaijan...

...The biggest star at this year's conference was Aslan Machadow, the "president" of Chechnya, who attended with his "foreign minister"— both of them decked out in tall Astrakhan hats...

...They didn't mind toasting, but they had had enough inspiring messages and wanted to get back to their ballads...

...While some old alignments still bind, others have busted apart...

...Conference organizers were embarrassed by his presence, but they had used the 1988 invitation list...

...The recently exiled Chinese political prisoner Wei Jingsheng was a major attraction, his theme reinforced by representatives of the Laogai association (named for the Chinese gulag) and the Dalai Lama, along with advocates of less celebrated victims of the PRC such as the Uighurs...

...In 1988, Solidarity's Intervention and Lawfulness Commission and a youth group called Freedom and Peace, sensing that Gorbachev's reforms had robbed Poland's Communist satraps of their confidence, decided to test the limits...

...S o it was that this year's International Human Rights Conference met not semi-clandestinely, as at Mistrzejowice, but in the chamber of parliament in Warsaw, with the prime minister and the speakers of both houses present...

...T oday on Marszalkowska Street, Warsaw's main drag, fast-food stands jostle for sidewalk space, tony boutiques show off imported wares, while more mid-scale establishments offer domestic goods...

...The other group, of which I was part, consisted of delegates to the Third International Human Rights Conference...

...The idea seems fanciful, but not more so than it would have seemed in 1988 to suppose that the third conference would meet in the chamber of the Polish parliament...