More Good News Via ANCAPS: Polish judge upholds convictions of police officers in killings of Solidarity miners

WARSAW: A Polish appeals court Tuesday upheld the convictions of 14 police officers for their involvement in the killings of nine miners protesting a government crackdown on the Solidarity movement in 1981, and increased most of their sentences.

The presiding judge, Waldemar Szmidt, said the ruling closed the book on "events that had a tragic result, events that caused deaths, the crippling of some victims and suffering for the victims and their loved ones." The ruling cannot be appealed.

"Glory to those who fell, because they fell in the right cause," Szmidt said in the ruling, broadcast on national television. "Punishment for those whose guilt could be proved beyond doubt."

The decision from the court in the southern mining hub of Katowice was the final word in a 15-year case that included three trials of the former police officers.

A regional court acquitted the officers in 1997 and 2001, but an appeals court overturned both decisions on procedural grounds.

Then in May 2007 a court found the officers guilty of shooting to death 9 miners and wounding 25 during protests in December 1981 at the Wujek and Manifest Lipcowy mines. The defendants appealed the decision.

The victims were among several hundred workers who barricaded themselves in the mines to protest the imposition of martial law on Dec. 13, 1981, and the jailing of Solidarity union leaders.

They were the first of the 100 fatalities in the period of martial law that ended in July 1983.

The officers argued that they fired over the protesters' heads and that army troops also present may have been responsible for the deaths and wounds.

The Katowice appeals court lowered the sentence of Romuald Cieslak - a police commander convicted of giving the order to fire on the miners - from 11 years to 6. The court said Cieslak did not intend to kill the workers.

But the court increased terms for 11 police officers by one year, to three and a half years, and for two other officers from three to four years. The court overturned one officer's conviction and sent his case back to a lower court.

Since the fall of Communism in Poland in 1989, the country has prosecuted a few low-ranking officers for Communist-era crimes, but no former top officials have been convicted.

A verdict is pending in the retrial of General Czeslaw Kiszczak, the interior minister at the time of the shooting, for authorizing the police to fire at the protesting miners.

In another reminder of the Communist past, Poles on Tuesday snapped up the last copies of a book alleging that the labor hero Lech Walesa was a secret police informer. Walesa, a Nobel Peace prize laureate and one-time leader of the Solidarity movement that toppled Communism in 1989, has repeatedly denied the claims against him and branded the book as "lies, lies and lies."

The book's authors are linked to the conservative party led by President Lech Kaczynski and his twin brother, Jaroslaw, one-time aides of Walesa's who became his ardent critics. Many of Walesa's old comrades say his enemies are out to destroy his place in history.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/24/europe/poland.php

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