Word: martially
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...second day of martial law, the capital exuded an eerie calm. Shoppers were out early, as usual, queueing up at bakeries, butcher shops and vegetable stands, where few goods were available, also as usual. A Solidarity banner, evidently neglected by police, continued to hang bravely from a building on Paris Commune Place. Young mothers dropped off their children at nursery schools-the only educational institutions left open in all of Poland...
...What is martial law in Poland? By week's end the Polish people faced more than 20 separate orders, some predictable, some startling. Among them...
...Summary proceedings will be undertaken against citizens violating martial law. Poles over the age of 17 may be interned at isolation centers if their past behavior gives rise to suspicion that they will disobey martial law or engage in activity that threatens the "interest, security and defense of the state...
That wry comment from a Reagan Administration official summed up all too well the initial U.S. response to the imposition of martial law in Poland. Secretary of State Alexander Haig admitted that the Administration was "surprised" by the crackdown. Other officials insisted that he referred only to the timing rather than the fact of the move. Nonetheless, Washington had apparently focused its planning on the contingency that has not yet happened. The U.S. and its European allies long ago had agreed to invoke stern diplomatic and economic sanctions if Poland were invaded by the Soviet army. But there...
...strident a reaction might yet give the Soviets an excuse for an outright takeover, Washington decided from the start that its responses would indeed be primarily words. Through the early days, Haig and other officials confined themselves to restrained expressions of "concern" and cautiously voiced hopes that the martial law crackdown would only be "a temporary retrogression, not a change in the overall historic trend toward reform" in Poland. As one top diplomat explained: "We want to tread the fine line between taking positions that would incite violence and bloodshed and perhaps [Soviet] intervention on the one hand, and avoid...