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Massacre trial reopens in Poland

WARSAW, Poland (CNN) -- A trial against Poland's last communist leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, is set to reopen.

Jaruzelski, 78, has been charged with responsibility for a massacre of protesting workers in 1970.

Jaruzelski was defence minister when security troops shot dead 44 shipyard workers protesting against food price rises.

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The last court session in the trial was in 1999. The repeated delays were the result of Jaruzelski's declining health and legal wrangling over whether he should be tried in a military or civil court.

The Supreme Court ruled it should be conducted in a Warsaw provincial court.

Jaruzelski has admitted moral responsibility for the wrongs of the communist system, but has denied any direct involvement in criminal acts.

"I feel guilty in the moral sense, not only as the then defence minister, but as somebody who was working in the organs of power," the general said last year.

He escaped punishment for imposing martial law in 1981, when thousands of opposition activists were jailed and many killed, thanks to an act passed in 1996 by a parliament dominated by parties rooted in the communist system.

The governing right-wing parties, descendants of the Soviet bloc's first free trade union, have said Jaruzelski should be treated as a criminal, while the post-communist left wants bygones to be bygones.

"This is one of last attempts to do justice for communist crimes. Communist officials must be sentenced for what they did, just as Nazi German criminals were," said Miroslaw Styczen, leader of the rightist faction in the ruling Solidarity bloc.

The opposition party of reformed communists, the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), is riding high in the polls -- despite objecting to the Jaruzelski trial, which has gained little public support.

"The Jaruzelski case should be left to historians. These events took place in a completely different reality and no court is capable of judging them," said SLD spokeswoman Danuta Waniek.

"This old, ill man should not be harassed."

If convicted, Jaruzelski could face life in prison.

However, lawyers said the five-year-old trial, for which 90 volumes of testimony from 4,000 witnesses have been gathered, was unlikely to finish soon.

On Wednesday the trial re-opens against communist-era Interior Minister Czeslaw Kiszczak over his role in the killing of striking miners under martial law in 1981.



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