Word: crackdowns
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Difficult months of bargaining preceded the Pope's visit to Poland. John Paul was originally supposed to return home in August 1982 for the celebration at Czestochowa but the military crackdown intervened and Jaruzelski postponed the trip. When the government finally invited the Pope, he asked Jaruzelski to grant a general amnesty. The authorities adamantly refused. Warsaw also balked at including the cities of Gdansk and Lublin in the papal itinerary, fearing that supporters of the banned union, which was particularly strong in those two cities, might use the Pope's visit to stage demonstrations. The Vatican...
Western governments are reluctant to link a religious pilgrimage to East-West diplomacy, but the papal visit will doubtless prove a pivotal event in shaping the alliance's attitudes toward Poland. Support for the economic sanctions that were imposed after the military crackdown has been eroding slowly but inexorably. The West German government argues that trade restrictions have not influenced Jaruzelski's policies and that, if anything, they could further diminish what little leverage the West had. In Italy, business with Poland goes on as usual. Even U.S. diplomats feel uneasy about the continuing deadlock and have quietly...
Various observers suspect that the Sandinista directorate, seeking a new excuse for a domestic crackdown, invented the plot. Last week several leaders of the country's Conservative Democratic Party were jailed. But political opponents have been arrested in the past without recourse to elaborate spy charges. A plausible explanation is that radicals within the leadership trumped up the charges to dramatize concretely their alarm over U.S. efforts to destabilize the government...
...University officials announced that Polish labor leader Lech Walesa had accepted an invitation to speak at this year's Commencement exercises. An acceptance would have marked the dissident's first trip out of Poland since the crackdown on Solidarity in December 1981, and his first trip to the United States ever. But the University's hopes were dashed when later that same day. UPI reported that Walesa could not make it, a fact it confirmed later in the month through secret intermediaries. (For a detailed account of the Walesa invitation, see page...
Faced with the nagging question of what really happened to at least 6,000 people who mysteriously disappeared in the government's 1970s crackdown, the junta finally went public with an answer. In a masterwork of avoidance, the military claimed that from 1973 to 1979,2,050 civilians were killed. But it said nothing of how, when or where the victims died. The report denied the contention of government critics that many of the missing were still in detention. Anyone not known to be in exile or hiding, declared the report, is now "for judicial purpose considered dead." Conceding...