Tightening Belts at Gunpoint

By Thomas A. Sancton

Riots in Gdansk and shock at the supermarket

If Poland's ill-fated democratic experiment had a capital city, it was surely the Baltic port of Gdansk. Solidarity, the independent trade union, was born in the city's sprawling Lenin shipyard in August 1980. When the government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski crushed that movement last Dec. 13, it died hardest in Gdansk. Three days after martial law was declared, protesters there engaged security forces in pitched battles that, according to the government, left at least nine civilians dead. Gdansk continues to resist. The government announced last week that new street clashes near the Lenin shipyard had ended in 14 injuries and the detention of 205 demonstrators.

The six-hour uprising began after shipyard workers placed flowers at the base of a 140-ft. steel monument honoring their comrades who were killed by government troops in Gdansk during the riots of 1970. Teen-agers and university students began chanting slogans against martial law and, according to Polish authorities, tried to storm public buildings. Independent witnesses, however, report that the incident began when ZOMO police suddenly charged the peaceful gathering. Police hurled tear gas grenades into the crowd and fired water cannons through the narrow streets of the city's old town to contain the demonstrators. The riots were the first violent protest against martial law since miners clashed with police at the Wujek mine in Silesia on Dec. 16.

In a show of summary justice, civilian courts promptly sentenced 101 youths involved in the Gdansk riots to jail terms ranging from one to three months. In the Silesian military zone, meanwhile, eleven miners charged with organizing strikes at the Ziemowit coal mine in December received harsh sentences of three to seven years. In the northern town of Slupsk, six Solidarity members were given one-to 4 1/2-year sentences for continuing their union activities.

The government blamed the Gdansk upheaval on the Reagan Administration's increasingly strident criticism of martial law. In particular, they attacked the U.S.-sponsored telecast Let Poland Be Poland, which was beamed by satellite to at least 50 countries last week. Complained Warsaw's party daily, Trybuna Ludu: "It is not by accident that the street demonstrations in Gdansk coincided with the so-called Solidarity Day [Jan. 30] proclaimed in the United States."

In fact, Poles had plenty to be angry about right at home. Consumer price hikes of up to 400% took effect last week, and stunned shoppers were grumbling bitterly about the soaring cost of living.

"We don't have to dress, but we do have to eat," complained a woman waiting in a long line at one downtown Warsaw supermarket. When shoppers there reached the white enamel butcher's counter, they found that the popular zwyczajna sausage had gone up from 40 to 190 zlotys (51-c- to $2.42 at the official exchange rate) per kg. A small canned ham had jumped from 200 to 600 zlotys ($2.55 to $7.75). A white-haired woman who had been hovering on the edge of the meat line turned away with only a loaf of brown bread in her wire basket. "I'm terrified," she confided. "I'm a widow on a pension. How am I going to live?"

There were good economic reasons for raising prices: food subsidies last year cost the government $4.6 billion (at current exchange rates), 21 times more than in 1970. With the Polish economy on the verge of collapse, the government argues that there is no alternative to severe belt tightening. At the same time, officials announced that wages and savings accounts would be boosted by an average of 20% to help soften the blow.

Attempts to raise food prices have sparked three major uprisings since 1970, so the martial-law regime was taking no chances this time. Riot police were quartered in downtown Warsaw hotels. At factory gates and checkpoints along the city's main roads, police and soldiers toting Soviet-designed AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles stood grim-faced in the 14DEGF cold. Despite the limited resumption of gasoline sales last week, drivers still needed special permits to travel between cities; as a result, highways remained almost deserted.

The government cannot, of course, orchestrate long-term economic recovery with tanks and guns. For that, it must win some measure of popular acceptance. Yet Jaruzelski's regime still has little support from key groups within Polish society. Many intellectuals and artists are quitting their jobs rather than submit to the vetting of loyalty that the government now requires. One Warsaw cardiologist reports that his intellectual friends have been "beseeching us for disability certificates so they can stay at home and avoid compromising themselves." In the past month, petitions bearing the signatures of more than a hundred prominent intellectuals and cultural figures have demanded an end to martial law and the liberation of some 5,000 interned Solidarity members and sympathizers.

The average age in Poland is 28, and young people are unreconciled to the sudden dashing of their hopes. A few days after the students in Gdansk rioted last week, teen-agers in Warsaw held silent protests at their schools, wearing dark clothes and refusing to speak as they walked through the corridors with bowed heads. In Wroclaw, students at a technical university chanted antigovernment slogans and banged on their windowsills for two consecutive nights.

Some workers support Jaruzelski's attempts to restore order, but the majority bitterly oppose the suppression of Solidarity. The union's active underground puts out weekly news bulletins bearing the instructions: READ! COPY! PASS ON! The underground called for a half-hour strike on Jan. 29 in Wroclaw, and the latest bulletin reports that the slowdown's effectiveness varied from 20% at some factories to 70% at others. One recent leaflet, titled Weekly News of the War, included instructions on staging production slowdowns. It also reminded workers that the authorities "have only tanks, rifles and clubs. We have Solidarity, which is more powerful."

In fact, no one really knows how powerful Solidarity is any longer. Reports circulated last week that Union Leader Lech Walesa, after being served with an indefinite detention notice, has agreed to begin talks with the government. But he was said to have requested the assistance of two key Solidarity aides, also under detention: Catholic Journalist Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Historian Bronislaw Geremek. According to some accounts, another adviser, Economist Romuald Kukulowicz, has volunteered to be interned with Walesa to keep him company in the government guesthouse north of Warsaw where the union leader is reportedly being held. A site and starting date for the talks have not been disclosed.

Meanwhile, Walesa's wife Danuta was reported to have given birth to the couple's seventh child, a girl, on Jan. 27. As of last week the infant was unnamed because authorities would not allow Walesa to be in formed of the birth.

What might come of negotiations, if any take place, is hard to predict.

Government Spokesman Jerzy Urban said last week that the future labor unions would probably be formed along individual industrial and professional lines, like the old party-controlled groups that Soli darity supplanted. Jaruzelski has promised to restore some form of independent trade union, but the government surely will not allow the sort of autonomous na tional organization that Solidarity had be come. Many Warsaw-based diplomats feel that the government will cynically try to use talks with Walesa to keep the lid on popular discontent while rebuilding the country's shattered Communist Party, which is being systematically purged of liberal elements.

The only major institution still outside the government's control is the Roman Catholic Church, to which about 90% of Poland's 36 million people belong. Led by Archbishop Jozef Glemp, the Polish Primate, the hierarchy has recently stepped up its criticism of martial law and reiterated its demand for the release of all internees. But Glemp, who urges peaceful dialogue between the authorities and Solidarity, has been careful not to attack the regime directly or incite the sort of popular violence that might prompt a Soviet invasion.

Glemp and other church leaders flew to Rome last week for consultations with Polish-born Pope John Paul II. It was Glemp's first meeting with the Pontiff since the crackdown, and church strategy in the face of martial law was high on their agenda. Also under discussion was John Paul's planned pilgrimage to the Czestochowa monastery, Poland's holiest shrine, next August. But Poland's Communist authorities may block that trip.

The Pope's last visit to his homeland in 1979 touched off an enthusiastic outpour ing of nationalist sentiment and helped create the moral climate from which Solidarity emerged. It was a performance that the Jaruzelski regime would rather not see repeated.

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.