Shaky Command for the General

By Thomas A. Sancton

As spot disorders spread, Jaruzelski struggles to restore order

The five blue police cars rolled into Katowice's bustling Market Square just after midday and surrounded a van. Its occupants: three members of the independent Solidarity trade union who were hawking what authorities later described as "antistate, anti-Soviet" materials. Their wares included gruesome photographs of the exhumed bodies of Polish officers killed in the Katyn forest during World War II in a massacre widely blamed on the Soviets. When the unionists refused to follow the officers to the local police station, agents broke the van's windshield with a hammer and pulled out the driver. A crowd of angry onlookers, which swelled to about 5,000, suddenly turned against the police officers, pelting them with stones gathered from a nearby streetcar trackbed and shouting "Gestapo!" as they sped away with their prisoner.

The ugly incident threatened to explode into a full-blown riot when the mob marched on the police station a few blocks away and began smashing windows with rocks. Local Solidarity officials eventually managed to calm the crowd and negotiate the release of the arrested man. But by the time things quieted down nine hours later, a police van had been overturned and helmeted riot police had fired tear-gas grenades at the protesters.

The clash at Katowice reflected the tensions in the country as General Wojciech Jaruzelski took over the leadership of Poland's Communist Party. Jaruzelski, 58, who already held the posts of Premier, Defense Minister and General of the Army, was chosen to replace Party Boss Stanislaw Kania on the third day of a stormy Central Committee meeting. The 200-member ruling body also issued tough resolutions threatening stiffer action against "antisocialist" elements within Solidarity, a suspension of the right to strike and a declaration of martial law if the unrest continued. At week's end the government announced that it was sending special military units around the country to prevent economic disruptions and "street provocations." Declared Government Spokesman Jerzy Urban over national television: "Endangering the internal life of the country forces the government to take unpopular decisions."

But the protests showed no sign of dying down. On the contrary, the Poles were getting angrier over a worsening economic crisis and pervasive food shortages. In Zyrardow, southwest of Warsaw, 12,000 textile workers, mostly women, entered the second week of a sit-in to demand increased food supplies. In Zielona Gora, 180,000 workers staged a one-hour warning strike over the sacking of a Solidarity farm manager. And in Wroclaw, local Solidarity officials were threatening new protests over the jailing of three activists who had broadcast union information from a sound truck. By week's end local strikes or strike threats had been reported in more than half of Poland's 49 provinces.

As the protests continued to mount, Solidarity's national commission held an emergency session in Gdansk to draw up a unified course of action. Seeking to counter the extreme demands of union radicals like Jan Rulewski, who called for an opposition political party, Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa warned of the dangers of being goaded into a confrontation. Said he: "Someone wants to draw us into a fight because we are winning." The union boss added that he would soon meet with Jaruzelski to discuss the crisis face to face. Walesa said his first question would be: "Shall we save the country, or shall we lock ourselves up in different doctrines? I will tell the general, 'Let us not worry about doctrines. What we need is food.' " But the moderates failed to hold the line. Over Walesa's objections, the 107-member commission voted overwhelmingly to declare a one-hour nationwide warning strike on Oct. 28 to protest the "crisis in every field."

Against this background, the rise to power of a military man raised unsettling questions. Did it signal an imminent use of force? Did Jaruzelski's elevation mean the end of Kania's policy of seeking a peaceful accommodation with Solidarity? Was the Soviet-trained officer chosen to lay the groundwork for an eventual Soviet-Warsaw Pact military intervention?

The answers lie in the days and weeks ahead, but Jaruzelski's record was reassuring. In 1976, and again last year, he refused to use troops to crush riots against the rising costs of food. As he reportedly said in 1976: "Polish soldiers will never fire on Polish workers."

Nor did Jaruzelski appear bent on any radical departure from Kania's moderate policies, which he had publicly supported as Premier. Noted a U.S. State Department official: "Jaruzelski believes the same thing Kania believed, that you have to deal with Solidarity." Nonetheless, Jaruzelski's party comrades clearly expected him to show more resolve than his predecessor in restoring discipline to the party, the economy and the public at large.

Traveling in France early last week as the guest of French labor unions, Solidarity's Walesa said he "got along well with Jaruzelski" and that the Premier's elevation did "not cause worry." Added Walesa optimistically: "The government now is grouped under one person, so that should be more practical in terms of finding solutions. Thus the situation is better now than before."

Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev greeted Jaruzelski's appointment with a cordial telegram urging him to use his "great prestige" to rally the Polish party against "counterrevolution." There was no indication that the Kremlin had imposed Jaruzelski on the Poles; indeed, it probably would have preferred Politburo Hard-Liner Stefan Olszowski. But the Soviets apparently found the general an acceptable replacement for Kania, in whom they had lost all confidence.

In his first meeting with Westerners since assuming the party leadership, Jaruzelski promised resolute action during a 45-min. discussion with a group of TIME editors and businessmen. Dressed in an olive-drab uniform, and wearing the dark-tinted glasses he needs because of a chronic eye inflammation, Jaruzelski joked briefly about the fact that he was First Secretary of the party, Premier, Defense Minister and general of the army, but received "only one salary--and much smaller than that of the President of the U.S."

But his tone was somber as he spoke about the crisis that he insisted was generated by practical problems, not by any protest against the Communist system. Echoing Walesa, Jaruzelski declared: "We don't live in medieval times when people fought wars over ideas. To pull the country out of the crisis it is in, we need stability, law and order, and security. We'll pay special attention to law and order, and we'll do everything necessary to preserve it."

Jaruzelski admitted the government had made mistakes. Without naming Solidarity, he also denounced "the actions of those forces in the country that are destructive and are deepening the crisis, and that treat the crisis as a forum for gaining power. I don't know if there is any other country in the world where the opposition is destroying the economy in order to gain power. I don't know if this is being done consciously. But objectively, that's what is happening."

Addressing that point in a Paris meeting earlier last week, Walesa admitted that the workers were intentionally dragging their feet in order to pressure the authorities into practical economic reforms. "Not until we get a government that gets back to governing the way people want can we get back to working," he said. "That's why when people tell us it's time to get back to work, we respond no." But Walesa insisted that Solidarity was not using such tactics to gain political power. Said he: "We know we cannot topple the government, we cannot replace it. Rather, we have to establish relations with it."

The workers were well aware, said Walesa, that any attempt to wrest political control from the Communists or withdraw from the Warsaw Pact could bring on a Soviet invasion, "so we're not about to violate those principles." But even if the Soviets did invade, he added, they could not force the Poles to work: "Someone can make me do something with a pistol to my head, but I can destroy ten other things when they are not looking." The stocky union leader also revealed his secret for holding up under the pressures of his position: "Life is so hard and complicated that one must try to smile even in the toughest moments. For me, I just grin and bear it."

As Jaruzelski deals with Walesa, say the general's associates, his first initiative may be a peace overture: an appeal to Solidarity and the Catholic Church to join with the party in a national salvation front. The aim of this proposed alliance would be to rally popular support for the stiff economic measures, including higher prices and continued food rationing, necessary to pull Poland out of its crisis. But the price of that support may be more than the party is willing to pay. For one thing, the union and the church would have to be given access to classified economic data in order to win the cooperation of a skeptical public. Explained one Solidarity official: "If we are to assure the people that there really is a shortage of meat, then we must be able to say that we have checked it ourselves." Solidarity has also been insisting on a direct role in the decision-making process, something the party has consistently refused to consider. Indeed, the union's own plan for labor-government cooperation, a social-economic council, was categorically rejected by the government on Oct. 16. Whatever form it takes, a national unity effort may be the country's last hope for peaceful accommodation. High Polish officials concede that the alternative could be a declaration of martial law. This would involve imposing military control over key sectors of the economy, local administration and law enforcement. But most authorities still hoped to avoid that drastic step, since it carried with it the danger of violent civil strife and Warsaw Pact intervention. Referring to the bloody suppression of the 1970 Baltic riots, in which several hundred workers were killed, Gdansk Party Leader Tadeusz Fiszbach told TIME: "I don't want to imagine the consequences of such a course of action. We say here in Gdansk, 'Never again should we have that experience.' " It will be Jaruzelski's challenging job to prevent it from happening again

--By Thomas A. Sancton.

Reported by Richard Hornik and Strobe Talbott/Warsaw

With reporting by Richard Hornik, Strobe Talbott

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