Solidarity with the ANC?

Iohannesburg—I have often been struck how many times cycles of strife and reform in Poland and in South Africa have coincided. Both countries fought gallantly on the Allied side in the war and each got scant reward for its sacrifices. (Their fates met briefly in August and September 1944 when South African pilots flew supplies from Italy to Warsaw during the tragic uprising. They took appalling casualties because the Soviets refused landing rights on their territory.) The year 1948 was decisive in both: the Communists consolidated their grip on Poland and eliminated all legal opposition (the last non-Communist prime minister for forty years fled the country in the trunk of the American ambassador’s car), while in South Africa a triumphant National Party under Dr. Malan and later Dr. Verwoerd codified apartheid as the official ideology.

For the next forty years periods of deceptive calm were punctuated by revolutionary challenges in both countries. Poznan, Radom, and Gdansk in our Polish anti-Communist folklore are the symbols of martyrdom comparable to Sharpeville and Soweto for anti-apartheid South Africans. By the 1980s in both Poland and South Africa the ruling regimes had resorted martial law, during which leaders of the resistance in both countries—Walesa and Tutu—were rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize. In another uncanny coincidence, 1990 is proving a watershed in both countries, a year in which both ruling elites seem finally to be conceding their monopoly of power. Poland is governed by a Solidarity prime minister, and only a mop-ping-up operation is still required to rid the country of the Communist cancer. In South Africa President F. W. de Klerk has lifted martial law, legalized the African National Congress, and promised to release Nelson Mandela.

RS

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Radek Sikorski

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Iohannesburg—I have often been struck how many times cycles of strife and reform in Poland and in South Africa have coincided. Both countries fought gallantly on the Allied side in the war and each got scant reward for its sacrifices. (Their fates met briefly in August and September 1944 when South African pilots flew supplies from Italy to Warsaw during the tragic uprising. They took appalling casualties because the Soviets refused landing rights on their territory.) The year 1948 was decisive in both: the Communists consolidated their grip on Poland and eliminated all legal opposition (the last non-Communist prime minister for forty years fled the country in the trunk of the American ambassador’s car), while in South Africa a triumphant National Party under Dr. Malan and later Dr. Verwoerd codified apartheid as the official ideology.

For the next forty years periods of deceptive calm were punctuated by revolutionary challenges in both countries. Poznan, Radom, and Gdansk in our Polish anti-Communist folklore are the symbols of martyrdom comparable to Sharpeville and Soweto for anti-apartheid South Africans. By the 1980s in both Poland and South Africa the ruling regimes had resorted martial law, during which leaders of the resistance in both countries—Walesa and Tutu—were rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize. In another uncanny coincidence, 1990 is proving a watershed in both countries, a year in which both ruling elites seem finally to be conceding their monopoly of power. Poland is governed by a Solidarity prime minister, and only a mop-ping-up operation is still required to rid the country of the Communist cancer. In South Africa President F. W. de Klerk has lifted martial law, legalized the African National Congress, and promised to release Nelson Mandela.