Round Table laid out course for freedom

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The Warsaw carpenter received the mysterious instructions from the highest ranks of the Communist regime to build a piece of furniture of unique design and purpose: a plain wood table, perfectly round, nine metres in diameter, capable of seating 58 people, with nothing that could be considered a head, a foot or a centre.

In previous uprisings here, carpenters had been ordered to build gallows. This time, as the economy ground to a halt and strikes froze the nation, the solution would be less bloody, more symmetrical, and without precedent in history: The Communists at one end, Lech Walesa and his dissidents at the other, a dictatorship negotiating on live television with people whose names had been illegal to utter on TV for eight years.

By the time the Berlin Wall collapsed on Nov. 9, 1989, an event whose 20th anniversary will be the subject of fervent celebrations in Germany next week, the Polish-style Round Table had become not only a metaphor for peaceful change and an emblem of tolerance, but an actual instrument of transformation, first in Poland, then in Hungary, then in Germany and Czechoslovakia.

The Berlin events this month are proving a quiet reminder to Europeans that the non-violent nature of their transition to democracy owes much to the oft-neglected innovations of Poland.

"We did not expect much from these talks - it was entirely unexpected by anybody in Poland that as a result of the Round Table discussions, a Solidarity-led government would be holding power in Poland by September of 1989, and Communism would be gone," says Wladyslaw Findeisen, the quiet, methodical computer-science professor who was the chairman of the Solidarity side of the table.

Mr. Findeisen was typical of the figures who populated the table: An acclaimed scholar and veteran of Poland's anti-Nazi resistance, he had been expelled from his position as university chairman in the 1980s and driven into the underground. Then, in January of 1989, he suddenly found himself on television as a figure of national prominence.

"The most we really hoped for was that our union would be made legal again, and that we might have some chance of winning some role in government perhaps by the mid-1990s," Mr. Findeisen, now 84, says.

Yet seven months after the talks began, and two months before the Berlin Wall fell, the Warsaw talks had restored democracy, had caused the Communist regime to hand over power and had given Solidarity a national government with a majority mandate, with Mr. Findeisen, to his surprise, elected to the Senate.

For many of those who sat around that table 20 years ago, the experiment was even riskier than an armed revolution, its potential outcome more dangerous.

For the Communists, who had banned the Solidarity union under Moscow's orders in 1981 by imposing martial law, it meant publicly treating an explicitly anti-communist group, whose 10 million members had been forbidden for eight years from meeting, as complete equals. For Solidarity, it meant compromising with a regime that had imprisoned, banished and sometimes killed its members.

Yet for both sides, there was no doubt that sitting down and talking was the only option left.

"We had to negotiate with the authorities, because through the whole of the '80s, our slogan was 'don't talk, just fight,' " says Wojciech Maziarski, who ran Solidarity's underground information office through the 1980s.

"And besides, the society was very tired. Everybody was so tired, the people needed hope, and the possibility of negotiations meant some kind of hope," he said from his office at the Polish edition of Newsweek, which he edits. "The leaders of Solidarity couldn't reject it."

To maintain the guaranteed employment and housing that was at the core of its legitimacy, Poland's military-run government had borrowed tens of billions of dollars and imposed rigid rationing of food, fuel and other necessities.

Western banks had refused to extend any more credit unless sharp reforms were undertaken - reforms that would entail shutting down factories and laying off hundreds of thousands of workers.

Those workers were members of the illegal Solidarity movement. In 1988, they held a general strike, which Communist leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski repressed with tanks, soldiers, water cannons and beatings.

That summer they held another, larger strike, and Gen. Jaruzelski invited Mr. Walesa for secret meetings.

"It was an ordeal, thinking about how to resolve the situation," Gen. Jaruzelski said in an interview this year. "I knew that no matter how it ends - and I believed it would end with the situation stabilizing - that a large part of society will be hostile toward me."

The talks would have been unthinkable even two years before. But Mikhail Gorbachev had become leader of the Soviet Union, and in an address to the Soviet congress that summer, he declared that Moscow's tanks would not be sent to crush reform movements in Eastern Europe - as had happened in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Talks suddenly became a solution that seemed reasonable: For Solidarity, to get their union legalized again. For the regime, to get the imprimatur of Poland's opposition on economic reforms that would prove painful and contentious.

When the ragtag gang of Gdansk shipyard workers, Silesian mine union leaders and long-banned professors took their seats across from the men in big suits, they did not expect much. It seemed that economic reform would be the limit of the discussions.

"The Communists realized that they would have to introduce unemployment, for the first time in Poland, and they could not do this without some kind of endorsement on the part of Solidarity," Mr. Maziarski said.

But the increasingly open and liberal behaviour of Moscow emboldened both sides. As the weeks went on, Solidarity began demanding full and free elections. And the Communist officials, especially Gen. Jaruzelski, became open to reform, even democracy.

"In 1981, I would say that Moscow was kind of a wall behind Gen. Jaruzelski's back," Mr. Maziarski said.

"At the end of the '80s, he suddenly realized there was no wall behind him. He's only pressed from in front by the Polish opposition and the people."

When elections came, on June 4, 1989, Solidarity would win 99 of the 100 newly created Senate seats. Gen. Jaruzelski realized within weeks, after a national debate, that he would have to hand over power to a Solidarity-led government, with the caveat that he would be president and that two of the 20 cabinet positions would be held by his deputies.

Within two years, Mr. Walesa himself would be president. By then, the astonishing success of the Round Table had inspired similar handovers, with a minimum of violence, in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and East Germany.

It was, in the end, a triumph of the roundtable over the wall.

First in a series

POLAND: Doug Saunders visits the surviving participants of the Round Table talks, innovative and risky discussions in Warsaw that became a template for Europe's non-violent transition back to democracy.

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