Cracks in the Truce

By Thomas A. Sancton

Walesa and Jaruzelski defuse one strike, but some burning issues remain

Solidarity Union Leader Lech Walesa was in high spirits as he marched up the steps of Warsaw's gray stone Council of Ministers building last week. Grinning and puffing on his pipe, he joked good-naturedly with the gaggle of supporters around him. But the walrus-mustached electrician was in no mood for levity when he emerged after nearly four hours of talks with Poland's Premier, General Wojciech Jaruzelski. Looking fatigued and depressed, Walesa said only that "we did some things--and we did not do other things."

What they did was defuse a series of strikes in Lodz that threatened to shatter the country's fragile month-old labor truce. The day of the Walesa-Jaruzelski meeting, Lodz factory sirens had blared at 10 a.m. to announce the start of a one-hour work stoppage affecting some 250,000 workers. That warning action was to have been followed by a series of province-wide sympathy strikes and sit-ins. But Walesa and Jaruzelski worked out a last-minute agreement that satisfied the Lodz workers' key demand: reinstatement of five sacked employees of an Interior Ministry hospital and a guarantee that local Lodz officials would not hinder Solidarity's organizing activities there.

What the two men did not do, however, was resolve other volatile issues that could at any moment erupt into a new wave of labor upheavals. In Radom the local Solidarity chapter was threatening strikes at 340 factories. In Poznan 490 farm delegates gathered from all over the country to join forces in a 2 million-member organization that was loudly demanding legal status as an independent agricultural union. In Warsaw and other centers, union members and their advisers claimed that they were being subjected to police harassment. Last week, for example, Dissident Leader Adam Michnik was detained by Warsaw police for three hours. Meanwhile, an ugly new outburst of anti-Semitic rhetoric was added to the apparent campaign to discredit the independent labor movement (see box). Faced with this array of potential flash points, Walesa and Jaruzelski agreed to resume their high-level dialogue possibly as soon as this week. As Walesa put it, "Let's talk before any fires spread."

Neither the popular labor leader nor the head of Warsaw's Communist government had much control over the most incendiary threat: the potential for armed Soviet intervention. If Moscow were to decide on such a move, a possible cover might be provided by the Warsaw Pact maneuvers scheduled to take place in and around Poland later this month. Though most Western analysts doubted that any imminent invasion plan was connected with the Warsaw Pact maneuvers, which are routinely held in the spring, Secretary of State Alexander Haig reiterated a sharp U.S. warning. A Soviet intervention, he said, would have "grave and long-term consequences on all hopes of improving relations between East and West."

Even as their tanks were being gassed up for the war games, Poland's East bloc neighbors intensified their warnings against further concessions to the workers. On a visit to Warsaw last week, East German Foreign Minister Oskar Fischer pointedly reminded his Polish comrades that their allies would never neglect their duty to enforce the principle of "socialist internationalism." Such warnings seemed all the more ominous in light of the new details that emerged last week about the stormy March 4 Moscow summit meeting between Polish and Soviet leaders. Led by Leonid Brezhnev and five Politburo members, the Soviet team reportedly called Polish Party Boss Stanislaw Kania on the carpet for letting the crisis get out of hand. Brandishing thick dossiers on the Polish labor movement, some of the Soviet officials read aloud from Solidarity union documents and speeches as though they were presenting a bill of indictment. One member of the Polish delegation was reportedly so shaken by the tirade that he told his colleagues that a Soviet invasion now seemed unavoidable, and that "the game is lost."

Perhaps not. But if the game could be saved at all, union and government leaders would have to work fast to resolve their remaining conflicts. The most immediate potential flash point was Radom, a grimy industrial city 60 miles south of Warsaw. On Thursday, members of the local Solidarity chapter unanimously voted to launch a two-hour work stoppage this week--and a province-wide genera strike on March 23--unless the government begins talks on a set of 19 demands. Foremost among them: the sacking of the provincial governor and other officials responsible for the brutal suppression of the price riots in 1976.

The Radom strike call was issued in spite of Walesa's personal appeal for moderation. After his meeting with the Polish Premier, Walesa assured Radom Union Leader Andrzej Sobieraj that the offending government officials would be dismissed within a few days. Replied Sobieraj: the Radom chapter would postpone its strike plans, if--but only if--those dismissals actually materialized. At week's end, the Communist Party newspaper Trybuna Ludu reported that one official, the Radom party chief, had secretly resigned ten days earlier.

Local authorities in Radom, however, often seemed to be doing their best to intimidate the restive workers. Police last week temporarily detained about 20 union members for putting up wall posters. Union officials also claimed that citizens were being fined by police simply for reading Solidarity leaflets, and that four Radom youths had been beaten up after telling a man to stop tearing down Solidarity posters.

Such incidents were part of what appeared to be a rippling campaign against Solidarity members and their supporters all across the country. A two-page report by Solidarity's national commission listed numerous cases of police harassment, ranging from unannounced searches of union offices to the temporary detention on March 5 of Dissident Leader Jacek Kuron, a regular adviser to Solidarity. Walesa raised this issue too during his meeting with Jaruzelski, who promised that a joint union-government commission would investi gate the charges.

No amount of harassment, however, seemed likely to break up a growing alliance between Polish workers, dissident intellectuals and students. Behind the wrought-iron gate of the University of Warsaw last week, 1,000 students, professors and union officials gathered to commemorate the anniversary of the 1968 campus riots. Speaker after speaker declared that workers and students would never again be split as they were 13 years ago. Yet for all its emotional underpinnings, the demonstration was also marked by internal discipline and control. Every one seemed to sense the limits and dangers of Poland's bold experiment. "A social movement must realize what can be achieved under certain circumstances," Jacek Kuron told the students. Evoking memories of Poland's 1956 riots, which very nearly prompted a Soviet invasion, the dissident leader warned, "We face the same tanks and we are aware that they can local roll in. " -By Thomas A. Sancton. Reported by Richard Hornik/West Berlin

With reporting by Richard Hornik

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.