The General Wins a Battle

By John Kohan

Jaruzelski swiftly puts down the protest against the banning of Solidarity

It was a makeshift sign hanging over the entrance to the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, but the message in black letters was plain and specific: SOLIDARITY LIVES. Three days before, Poland's parliament had passed a law formally abolishing the independent trade union, yet, as the simple banner at the union's Baltic birthplace made eloquently clear, Solidarity supporters were not yet ready to bury all the aspirations and hope that had been inspired by the reform movement, however powerful the suasions and muscle of Poland's military regime. In Gdansk and other cities across the country last week, the union's supporters protested Solidarity's demise and ten months of martial law with a spontaneous wave of strikes and demonstrations.

For a brief moment, at least, the scenes of defiance and hope recalled the exhilarating mood of August 1980, when Solidarity was born. In recent months Poles had staged symbolic work stoppages and street demonstrations to protest the imposition of martial law last December. This time the angry workers arriving for the first shift at the Lenin shipyard wanted action: they called a wildcat strike. Before long, Gate No. 2, scene of so much activity two years earlier as Solidarity grew into a force that shook the Communist bloc, was once again covered with red-and-white national banners, papal portraits and flowers. As strikers in drab blue overalls and hard hats chanted slogans, Poles massed outside to cheer them on, tossing bouquets, cigarettes and food through the iron fence. Emboldened by the crowd, workers renamed the shipyard Solidarity, daubing the union's name in a crude graffiti scrawl across the bottom of huge white letters spelling LENIN on a sign above the entrance.

A brave beginning, and one that surprised U.S. analysts by its strength, but despite the evident similarity to the events of 1980, history did not repeat itself in Gdansk last week. General Wojciech Jaruzelski, head of the military regime, made it clear from the first flicker of protest that his government would not give an inch.

To prevent the Solidarity supporters from coordinating activities with other groups across Poland, the generals quickly cut telephone and telex lines to the troubled port. Convoys of police and ZOMO, the paramilitary police force, roared into Gdansk, turning the city into an armed camp. When the strikes stretched on for two days, riot police used water cannons and tear gas to disperse crowds that gathered on the square outside the shipyard. As flames lighted the night sky, police battled youths who blockaded streets with bonfires and trash cans.

Under attack in the streets and besieged in the shipyard, the strikers had no leader of the caliber of the imprisoned Lech Walesa to organize an effective challenge to Warsaw's might. Working through clandestine committees, union activists drafted a list of demands for the government, calling for the release of Walesa and other internees, an end to martial law, and the revival of Solidarity. Without a formal strike committee to coordinate activities, the initiative faltered.

Even the shipyard workers who had given Solidarity its start seemed to have little relish for a prolonged strike. Rather than seize control of the plant, they decided to leave peacefully at the end of their shift and return the next day to continue the work stoppage. After attracting some 8,000 to a rally on Monday, organizers of the protest drew half that number the following day. Said a frustrated striker, recalling Walesa's dramatic entrance two years before: "We need someone to jump over the fence and lead us."

Then the military regime decided to play its trump card and announced that the Lenin shipyard would be "militarized." As sullen workers entered the plant Wednesday morning, they were handed white leaflets signed by the shipyard manager, who was now identified as "commandant." Under the decree, the workers could be imprisoned for as long as five years for failing to obey orders.

By noon it was clear that the strike had been broken. As many as 50 workers were summarily dismissed from their jobs, and hundreds of others lost their year-end bonuses, so-called thirteenth-month wages. Said a former striker: "How can you do anything if they put a pistol to your head?"

Even so, as tensions eased in Gdansk, violence flared up some 300 miles to the south in Nowa Huta, a model working-class city near Cracow. When 3,000 workers carrying Solidarity banners attempted to march from the Lenin steelworks to a nearby church, riot squads turned the procession aside with tear gas and jets of water. A night of pitched fighting took the life of one worker.

Demonstrators gathered the next day before a makeshift me morial to the slain Solidarity supporter, and police moved in again to break up the crowd. Unrest was also reported in the western industrial cities of Wroclaw and Poznan. By week's end, however, the wave of protest had all but ebbed.

The latest tremors from Poland provoked by now predictable expressions of outrage in Western capitals. The week's events, said a U.S. State Department spokesman, underscored "the depth of President Reagan's feelings about the repressive measures that have been taking place in Poland." French President Franc,ois Mitterrand condemned the banning of Solidarity as a "new and dramatic blow at the rights and liberties of Polish man." During his first major policy address to the Bundestag, West Germany's new Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, drew a sustained burst of applause when he called for a lifting of the ban on Solidarity, which he termed "a cold blow against the Polish people." Still, there were no signs that the Western alliance was any closer to agreeing on a common approach to the Polish question, or that, indeed, it had much leverage on the Jaruzelski regime.

Reflecting the growing frustration of Poland's powerful Roman Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II rebuked the regime for abolishing Solidarity. Archbishop Jozef Glemp, the Polish Primate, described the edict as a "trampling of man, of disrespect for man's dignity." But all he could offer was a hope: "We wish we could free our country from such evil."

While protests poured in from around the world and unrest rocked cities across Poland, Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov assured Jaruzelski that Poland's "internal counterrevolutionaries" were "doomed to failure," and promised "the full support and help of the Soviet Union."

For the moment, Poland's military leader does not appear to need any big-brotherly aid from across the border. If anything, Jaruzelski's military regime seems increasingly confident that it is gaining the upper hand against tattered opposition groups. Last week, despite the unrest in Gdansk, the government pointedly kept its promise to release 308 detained Solidarity activists, leaving some 700 in internment centers. But obstinate resistance from supporters of the crushed union is still strong enough to thwart the program of "reform" that Jaruzelski has in mind for Poland. After the Lenin shipyard flare-up, martial law will probably remain in force for some time to come.

The showdown in Gdansk also raised key questions about whether there was, indeed, life after death for the independent trade union. Clearly, any protest that falls short of a complete shutdown of the Polish economy will only provoke a show of force from the state and further prolong the present stalemate. There were also indications last week that group unity was wearing thin in the union.

The Gdansk strike seems to have gone on independently of Solidarity's national leadership in the underground. Despite a letter from nine Solidarity activists in Warsaw's Bialoleka Prison last week that warned against joining new government-sponsored trade unions, some Solidarity supporters talked privately of trying to take over the new labor organizations from within.

Still, as the government and the defunct union measured gains and losses in the continuing war of attrition, U.S. State Department officials expected that the stubborn and independent Poles might well continue to stage sporadic street clashes and strikes. Reflecting on the latest paradox to develop from the Polish crisis, a Warsaw intellectual noted, perhaps too pessimistically: "The Solidarity chapter is closed. Only the ideals remain." As Poland's military rulers learned again last week, ideals do not yield easily to concussion grenades, tear gas canisters and water cannons. --By John Kohan.

Reported by Richard Hornik/Gdansk

With reporting by Richard Hornik

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