Braced for the Struggle

By William E. Smith

Workers turn to passive resistance as a weapon against martial law

Tanks will not make us work."

So vowed Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa 16 months ago, when asked about the danger of Soviet intervention. He was right, even though the last important strike or sit-in against Poland's three-week-old martial law regime ended at the Piast mine in Silesia last week when 1,100 weary and hungry workers decided to give up their demonstration after occupying their mineshaft for 14 days. But across Poland, a wave of passive resistance was beginning to swell. In Szczecin, dockworkers were reported to be loading and unloading the same goods over and over again; at the Zeran auto plant in Warsaw, workers were said to be making parts that would not fit together.

As the new year began, the government announced that nine Solidarity leaders had been given prison sentences of up to seven years for organizing strikes or engaging in other illegal activities. The government also dismissed 90 provincial officials for failing to carry out their duties effectively under martial law. Responding to the challenge of passive resistance, the authorities distributed red-and-black posters calling on Poles to support the military regime by working hard. "Help the forces of law-and-order combat anarchy and lawlessness," declared the signs.

In reply, an underground Solidarity group in Silesia published a sort of manual of passive protest. Samples: "In organizing strikes, do not elect leaders, so as to avoid later police action. Work slowly, complain about the mess and the inefficiency of your superiors. Flood the army and the commissars with questions and pretend to be a halfwit. Follow meticulously the most ridiculous instructions." Every worker, it concluded, should remember these words: "I know only what I need to know." Nobody outside Poland knows to what extent these opposition efforts are succeeding, but even the government admitted last week that production has declined since the imposition of martial law on Dec. 13.

The country remained in stalemate.

Outwardly, at least, Poland was calmer than at any time since martial law was imposed. Poles from the countryside told a TIME correspondent that their villages had never really been touched by martial law. But most Poles were still unable to move freely outside the region in which they live, make telephone calls or receive uncensored mail. Every evening at 10:45 the streets and highways were suddenly transformed into speedways as thousands of Poles rushed toward home to beat the 11 p.m. curfew. A considerable number--5,500 according to the government, and as many as ten times that number according to other sources--did not get home at all because they were still being held at one or another of the 78 detention camps reportedly set up throughout the country.

An information center was said to be operating at St. Martin's Church in Warsaw, where people could learn what happened to relatives and friends and could even arrange to send them parcels. Priests were being allowed into a few of the camps. Some detainees told horror stories of the brutality of the militia, whose members sometimes carry special steel-cored nightsticks capable of breaking bones.

When the militia broke up a sit-in at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk three weeks ago, according to the reports of detainees, armored vehicles charged against the gates of the yard to the accompaniment of the recorded and amplified voices of women and children screaming. This in turn caused workers to rush out of the shipyard buildings, thus making it easier for the militia to round them up.

As the holiday approached, the government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski lifted the curfew for New Year's Eve as a sign of growing confidence. It also announced a plan to increase the prices of consumer goods and energy, an inevitable step, considering the economic chaos Jaruzelski inherited, that will bring prices to more realistic levels but that will also undoubtedly meet with resistance from the public.

Behind the scenes, Warsaw was beginning its efforts to reach a political solution to the present impasse. According to the government, Lech Walesa was in good health and in contact with representatives of the regime and the church, and with his family. He was reportedly being held in Warsaw in a government complex that houses the interior ministry and general army staff headquarters. Walesa was said to have set three conditions for negotiating with the government: that the talks be held in a neutral place, and that his three closest advisers as well as the rest of the 18-member union presidium be present.

On Thursday the newspaper Trybuna Ludu reported that the military council had asked the Sejm (parliament) to set up a state tribunal to try those former officials who were responsible for leading Poland into its present economic crisis. The creation of such a tribunal had been one of the demands made by Solidarity at its Gdansk congress a few months ago.

For the future, the government appointed at least three groups to present programs of social, economic and political reform. One of the groups, led by the relatively liberal Hieronym Kubiak, is believed to have proposed the outright dissolution of the discredited Polish Communist Party, and its replacement by a broadly based party that would include church and union groups as well as reform elements from the existing party. Another group advocates decentralization of the economy, with more autonomy for factories and other enterprises, but less than Solidarity had been seeking. The third group is said to feel that, in the future, trade union activities should be carefully controlled. A government spokesman did not confirm these reports, but noted that it was Jaruzelski's style to listen to advice from various quarters.

In the meantime, the Roman Catholic Church is playing an increasingly visible role in the Polish crisis. In his New Year's message, Pope John Paul II called for the survival of Solidarity, saying that it had become part of the "heritage of the workers of Poland and of other nations." Privately, however, the Pope is said to have concluded that both the Polish church and Solidarity have lost much of the freedom they had gained in the previous 16 months. The Pontiff therefore was taking a restrained line toward the Jaruzelski regime, hoping to soften the effects of mar-:ial law and limit the permanent damage to the country's nascent freedom. His aim, said Vatican observers, was "salvare il salvabile"--to save what can be saved.

Archbishop Luigi Poggi, a Vatican diplomat-at-large whose primary function is to maintain contact between the Holy See and the Polish government, returned to Rome following a week-long visit to Poland. While there, he had met with Jaruzelski and delivered a papal message urging an end to martial law. Poggi professed to see "some rays of hope" and even "the possibility of a reconciliation." Mediation with the Jaruzelski regime is being conducted not by the church directly but through a "social council" made up of Catholic laymen. Among them is a close friend of the Pope, Jerzy Turowicz, editor of a Catholic publication in Cracow.

The church has no illusions about restoring the "Polish Spring" of Solidarity, but it is seeking to make life under martial law as bearable as possible for the Polish people. The church is also trying to ease conditions for the detainees and to improve the arrangements for distributing relief supplies. According to Vatican sources, the Pope realizes that the church and the people are powerless against the regime's tanks and guns, and that violent resistance would only lead to a bloodbath and probably to a Soviet invasion.

The Vatican is said to have given up whatever hope it formerly held of transforming Poland into a Western-style democracy. As things now stand, the Pope simply hopes that Poland can evolve into a kind of Yugoslav-style Communist state. Some diplomats in the Vatican believe Jaruzelski has the makings of a Tito. The Vatican's strategy thus is to approach the crackdown as an internal Polish matter, and to seek to avoid making it an international crisis.

As Poland's tumultuous year drew to a close, the ranking Solidarity leader still at liberty sent a message of "holiday greetings" to members and "to all our friends in Poland and abroad." Zbigniew Bujak, 27, the underground leader of Solidarity's Warsaw branch, appealed to soldiers and policemen to "listen to their consciences" and "not allow themselves to be used in the waging of war against the nation." Then, addressing himself to the families of the detainees, including Walesa's pregnant wife and six children, Bujak expressed a New Year's wish on behalf of his silent countrymen "that out of your suffering will come a Poland without prisons and internment camps, a Poland without police roundups and without constant fear. "

-- By William E. Smith. Reported by Roland Flamini/Bonn and Richard Hornik/Warsaw

With reporting by Roland Flamini, Richard Hornik

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