TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/82/82wins

Text File | 1990-12-01 | 9KB | 160 lines

                ÖÜ¢}┤¿w                                              ╨««The General Wins a Battle

October 25, 1982

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