TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/82/82wins

Text File | 1992-10-05 | 8.7 KB | 170 lines

                                                                                October 25, 1982 

POLAND

The General Wins a Battle

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
memorial 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.

That 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
Francois 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 over 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 notes, 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