Mieczysław Maneli (born Moshe Meir Manela; 22 January 1922 – 9 April 1994) was a Polish lawyer, diplomat and academic best remembered for his work with the International Control Commission (ICC) during the Vietnam War, especially the 1963 "Maneli Affair". During the Holocaust, he survived the Auschwitz death camp, and then became after the war a prominent academic in Poland, serving as the Dean of Law at University of Warsaw.
The term "Maneli affair" is used by historians because the initiative first became known to the public on 18 September 1963 when it was revealed by the American columnist Joseph Alsop that Maneli had twice met Ngô Đình Nhu, the younger brother and right-hand man of President Ngô Đình Diệm of South Vietnam. The name "Maneli Affair", a proposal to end the Vietnam War by creating a federation of the two Vietnams that would be neutral in the Cold War is a misnomer as the proposal was actually a diplomatic initiative made by the French President Charles de Gaulle. Maneli later revealed more about the 1963 peace initiative in his 1971 memoir The War of the Vanished.
After the "March Events" of 1968, he was dismissed from his post as the Dean of Law at the University of Warsaw in July 1968 as part of the "anti-Zionist" campaign, causing him to go into exile in the United States. In his exile in New York, where he taught at Queens College, Maneli was the author of many books, such as Juridical Positivism and Human Rights, Freedom and Democracy and Perelman's New Rhetoric as Philosophy and Methodology for the Next Century dealing with the philosophical basis of a democratic society.
Early life Maneli was born into an assimilated middle-class Jewish family in Miechów and, unlike many other Polish Jews under the Second Republic, grew up speaking Polish rather than Yiddish. He was generally known to his friends as Mietic rather than as Mieczysław. Maneli's values were shaped by his youth in a left-leaning middle-class family who believed in the values of tolerance and democracy.
Fighting the Nazis and surviving the Holocaust Under the German occupation, Maneli lived at first in the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1942, while living in the Ghetto, Maneli joined a resistance group linked to the Polish Workers' Party. By the fall of 1942, Maneli's parents and nearly his entire family had been deported to Treblinka extermination camp and murdered.
In April–May 1943, he fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and after his capture by the SS in May 1943, was put on a train taking him to Treblinka. Maneli escaped from the train, but was recaptured by the SS in May 1943. The resourceful Maneli was able to escape a second time. Maneli attempted to join the Home Army, but was refused.
Later in May 1943, he was arrested by the SS for a third time, taken to the Umschlagplatz and deported to Auschwitz, where he was worked as a slave laborer building weapons for the Wehrmacht. While at Auschwitz, Maneli joined the Workers' Party.
As the Red Army advanced into Silesia in January 1945, the Germans forced the remaining inmates at Auschwitz into death marches to the Reich while preparing to execute the rest. Believing that he might be executed at any moment, Maneli escaped from Auschwitz. After escaping, he joined the Polish People's Army and fought against Nazi Germany until the end of the war.
By his own admission, an intense "Polish patriot", he believed that after all the carnage and suffering of World War II that a new society needed to be built on the ruins of the old that would be more just and humane. Maneli felt in the immediate post-1945 that the new regime in Poland offered the best avenue for achieving these goals. Maneli later explained his turn toward Communism as a reaction to the Holocaust, arguing the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" revealed deep flaws within the cultural edifice known as "Western civilization", making a return to the values of the pre-war era unacceptable for him.
Post-War activities After the Second World War, he joined the Polish United Workers' Party formed in 1948, studied law and economics and worked as an assistant to a philosophy professor, Czesław Nowinski. In 1949, he was awarded a Master of Arts in Economics and the Law. In 1950, he was made an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw and received his Doctor of Law degree in 1954. He married a woman named Zofia, by whom he had two children, a daughter in 1950 and a son in 1954. Described as an easy-going and pleasant lawyer, Maneli made friends very easily. Maneli became the Dean of Law at the University of Warsaw.
Despite his promotion, Maneli was criticized by the Stalinist leadership of the United Workers' Party as a "revisionist" who was sympathetic to "bourgeois liberalism", as a recurring theme of his writings was the need to respect human dignity and promote happiness, a message that implicitly criticized the party's policies. However, Maneli remained a Marxist all through the 1950s, and his implicit criticism of the Stalinist regime was grounded in the objection that the regime was failing to live up to the ideals of Marxism rather than being based on a rejection of Marxism.
ICC: 1st tour From 1954 to 1955 Maneli served as the legal adviser to the Polish delegation of the International Control Commission (ICC). The ICC was established in 1954 to monitor compliance with the Geneva Accords. The ICC comprised three delegations: from India, Poland and Canada, with the Indian commissioner always being the ICC Chief Commissioner.
Maneli later stated he had expected to be told to favor North Vietnam, but that in reality, a Soviet diplomat had told him "to behave as if we were neutral" because of "the historical need ... for peaceful coexistence", saying it had cost the Soviet Union a fortune in weapons to arm the Viet Minh during their struggle against the French, money that the Soviets would have preferred to spend on their own reconstruction, as vast areas of the Soviet Union were still devastated by World War Two. The Soviets stated that their interests were for peace in Vietnam, not more war.
A major issue for the ICC in 1954 and 1955 was the exodus of Vietnamese Catholics from North Vietnam to South Vietnam that eventually totaled 2 million people. The North Vietnamese officials were unhappy about losing so much of their population to South Vietnam, but the ICC, pressed by the Canadian delegation, ruled in favor of allowing people the freedom to relocate, should they wish.
Maneli wrote that the orders for the Polish delegation were to co-operate with the Canadians against the Indians in allowing the refugees to emigrate, on the grounds that the voluntary clearance of most of North Vietnam's Catholic population would eliminate the most likely source of future unrest and opposition to the Communist government. The Poles also persuaded the North Vietnamese that a violation of the freedom of movement provisions of the Accords could be used by the South as an excuse to cancel the elections, scheduled for 1956, that were intended to reunite the two administrations.
Maneli later wrote about his time on the ICC: "In this period of my work with my Indian and Canadian colleagues, I was struck by their loyal cooperation. It was a period when most of the cases were against the Southern authorities; whenever there was justifiable suspicion that the Southern authorities were treating their citizens in an inhumane manner, the Canadian delegates never hesitated in condemning the crimes. I always considered this to be extremely significant." Indeed, in its early years, the ICC had a measure of success, as neither regime wished to be seen violating the Geneva Accords, whilst the three ICC delegations made conscientious efforts to co-operate with one another.
By contrast, by the late 1950s the decision-making fell into predictable Cold War patterns, with the Polish delegation favoring North Vietnam, while the Canadian delegation favored South Vietnam, leaving the Indian delegation as the ultimate arbiter. The change in relations came in 1956, when South Vietnam announced that it would not hold the elections planned for that July, claiming that the French did not have the right to sign the Geneva Accords on behalf of the State of Vietnam in 1954.
Jurist Under the Communist regime, Maneli was considered to be a sort of quasi-dissident, a "liberal Marxist" who supported the aims if not the methods of the regime. In 1956, Maneli supported the Polish October revolution that saw the nationalist faction of the United Workers' Party led by Władysław Gomułka overthrow the Stalinist leadership in Warsaw over the objections of the Soviet Union. At a dramatic meeting in Warsaw at the party's politburo attended by Nikita Khrushchev, who had arrived unannounced to attend the meeting, Gomułka was able to persuade Khrushchev to accept his formula of a "Polish Road to Socialism" in exchange for which Poland would remain an ally of the Soviet Union. Maneli later remembered the "Polish October" as being almost an emancipation as it became possible within the party to doubt Soviet infallibility without having to worry about accusations of high treason. Though Poland remained a Communist dictatorship, after the "Polish October" of 1956 there was a greater freedom of expression, though not complete freedom.
In his article "On Tolerance" published in July 1956 in the youth magazine Po Prostu, he wrote: "To compel someone by force to change his ideas or to hide something in which he truly believes-this is contradictory to the most fundamental human feelings which have been formed and developed over the course of centuries....Every act of intolerance, every physical or moral persecution of those who think differently, results in demoralization of society and brings about hypocrisy". For running articles calling for freedom of expression, Po Prostu was banned in 1957, through Maneli was allowed to retain his position as Dean of Law at Warsaw University.
Maneli's lectures, calling for the rule of law for everyone and for the meaningful practice of the theoretical freedom of expression guaranteed by the constitution, made him popular with the students, but unpopular with the authorities. One of Maneli's friends was the Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki, who shielded him against reprisals for his lectures. Rapacki represented the more liberal side of the Polish Communist Party, in opposition to the "partisan" faction, under the Interior Minister General Mieczysław Moczar.
Between 1954 and 1968, Maneli wrote the 6 volumes of The History of Political and Judicial Doctrines, for which he was twice awarded the top prizes for scholarship by the Minister of Higher Education. At the University of Warsaw, Maneli founded the new department of the History of Political and Judicial Doctrines, of which he became the first chairman.