Warsaw's New Crackdown

By Thomas A. Sancton

Prodded by the Kremlin, Poland moves to "reverse the course of events

The Kremlin's patience seemed to be running out faster than sugar in a Warsaw supermarket. After a surprise meeting with Polish Party Boss Stanislaw Kania and Premier Wojciech Jaruzelski in Moscow last week, Soviet leaders issued their toughest statement on Polish affairs since the outbreak of labor unrest eight months ago. The communique said that the Soviets expected their Polish comrades "to reverse the course of events and liquidate the perils looming over the socialist gains of the nation." The participants in the minisummit, which was presided over by Leonid Brezhnev and attended by five Soviet Politburo members, also declared the "defense" of socialism to be "a matter not only for every single state but for the entire socialist community as well."

The sum of those two statements was a clear message: unless Poland's Communist leaders moved quickly to restore the party's control and to resist further concessions to the workers, their Soviet-bloc allies reserved the right to go in under the Brezhnev Doctrine and do it for them.

As East bloc newspapers bannered the Moscow communique on their front pages, tensions rose palpably in Western capitals. For the first time in five weeks, Reagan Administration officials publicly warned of the "grave consequences" of outside intervention. State Department Spokesman William J. Dyess expressed concern over Warsaw Pact maneuvers, due to take place in and around Poland in late March and early April. Though such war games are regularly held in the spring, Dyess said the Administration was "watching [the situation] very carefully" in light of the new Soviet pressure on Poland.

British officials saw considerable significance in the Soviets' failure to formally notify NATO countries of the impending maneuvers, as they are supposed to do under the 1975 Helsinki agreement. Whitehall analysts speculated that Moscow did not want any NATO observers around at what could be a critical moment in East-West relations. Most Western experts, including those in the U.S. State Department, doubted that armed intervention in Poland was imminent, but Moscow's words were a pointed reminder of the dangers that still threatened Poland after two weeks of tenuous labor calm.

Warsaw's leaders got the message. Less than 24 hours after Kania's Moscow meeting, the first signs of a new crackdown began to emerge. Shortly before 6 a.m. on Thursday, police arrested Jacek Kuron, 46, a leader of the KOR dissident group and a regular adviser to Solidarity, the independent union federation. Officials at the state prosecutor's office released Kuron seven hours later, after informing him that he was under investigation for slandering the state. He was also told to report to his local police station every Tuesday and Thursday--the days he is usually in Gdansk to work for Solidarity. Said Kuron's wife Grazyna: "Someone wants a row."

So it seemed. Next day police in Wroclaw attempted to serve a summons on another Solidarity adviser, Adam Michnik, a co-founder of KOR. Michnik, 38, refused to accept the document, which ordered him to appear at the state prosecutor's office in Warsaw in three days. In a move that heralded a possible direct worker-government confrontation, Solidarity's Wroclaw branch took Michnik under its own protection and provided him with a 30-man "workers' guard."

Not content to harass those two prominent dissident leaders, Polish authorities charged four members of an obscure right-wing organization with seeking to overthrow the state. The accused men, who were already serving jail terms, belonged to the Confederation of Independent Poland (KPN), a nationalistic group formed in 1979 with the avowed goal of ousting the Communists. Their leader, Leszek Moczulski, was arrested last September on charges of slandering the state in a magazine interview. The regime may not want to seek the maximum death penalty for the four, but it could decide that a show trial against them would be useful in appeasing Moscow.

Solidarity's national commission, meanwhile, called an emergency session in Warsaw on Saturday to shape its response to these antidissident moves. As it had done in the past, the commission seemed likely to issue a sharp warning against government harassment of its advisers. It might also launch scattered peaceful protests, such as putting up posters or handing out leaflets denouncing the police action. Having tacitly accepted Jaruzelski's Feb. 12 call for "90 days of calm," however, Solidarity's national leaders were probably reluctant to resort to provocative strikes at this juncture --particularly in the wake of Moscow's menacing communique.

But national union leaders were having trouble reining in restive local chapters. Even before Kuron's arrest, workers in the textile center of Lodz declared a strike alert over the firing of five hospital employees. On Saturday, Lodz union officials scheduled a series of warning strikes for this week unless the five are rehired. The Solidarity chapter in Plock, meanwhile, prepared to issue a strike alert to protest censorship of their local union bulletin; entreaties from Warsaw union leaders, however, convinced them to hold off.

Then the first real crack appeared in Poland's shaky labor truce: Solidarity members in Radom, 60 miles south of Warsaw, laid down their tools for five hours at several plants. They were protesting the government's failure to prosecute officials responsible for repression against local workers following the 1976 food price riots. In an apparent effort to head off a spiraling new round of labor upheavals, Jaruzelski invited Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa to meet with him in Warsaw on Saturday.

Further labor-government friction seemed likely to arise over the long-awaited draft of a new trade-union law that was published last week. As stipulated in the historic Gdansk agreement that ended last summer's strikes, the new law would provide a statutory basis for the first independent trade unions in the East bloc. Yet the draft contains provisions that are certain to anger Solidarity. Among them: strikes will only be legal if approved by a majority of the workers and only after negotiations and Supreme Court arbitration have failed; strikers will get only half pay following any work stoppage unless and until lost production is made up; once every twelve months, parliament may declare a binding 60-day moratorium on strikes if it decides that an economic "emergency" exists. The last point gives the regime a powerful antistrike weapon, since Poland's debt-and shortage-ridden economy has been in trouble for months. Only last week the regime announced a drastic new sugar-and meat-rationing plan.

Perhaps the most serious defect in the proposed law is its failure to mention Rural Solidarity, the independent farmers' union. It was a potentially dangerous omission; peasant leaders were persuaded to end a seven-week sit-in in Rzeszow two weeks ago largely because Walesa assured them that the new labor law would provide for the legalization of their union.

Before it takes effect, the draft law will be subjected to a month of public debate and labor-government negotiations. Those promise to be stormy, since the union will surely push for further concessions--and the government, under Moscow's latest caveat, would be most unlikely to allow them.

--By Thomas A. Sancton.

Reported by Richard Hornik/West Berlin

With reporting by Richard Hornik/West Berlin

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