Alive, if Not Entirely Well

By Thomas A. Sancton

Its protest is mild, but Solidarity has surely survived the winter

For one brief moment last week, the heady days of Lech Walesa's Solidarity labor movement seemed to return to Poland. Heeding an appeal broadcast by the union's clandestine radio station, Warsaw motorists honked their horns at the stroke of noon and snarled traffic for 15 minutes in the city's busiest intersection. Several thousand onlookers, many flashing victory signs, cheered the drivers with chants of "Solidarity" and "Free Walesa" as part of the suspended union's efforts to protest the imposition of martial law five months before.

At Warsaw University some 5,000 students walked out of their classes and marched around the campus in silent protest. At the Huta Warszawa steelworks, the site of large-scale resistance following last December's military crackdown, a strike siren wailed at midday, and up to three-fourths of the workers laid down their tools for a quarter of an hour. Entire departments quit work at some other Warsaw factories, and employees at the F.S.O. car plant held a peaceful demonstration outside the plant's gates.

Hoping to keep people off the streets on the night of the five-month anniversary, the government showed the movie Easy Rider on state television. But the protests turned ugly that evening as about 50 young demonstrators in Warsaw's Old Town were cleared away by club-wielding policemen. In Cracow, meanwhile, about 7,000 people gathered near the Church of the Virgin Mary, chanting protest slogans and singing the national anthem. When the crowd ignored orders to disband, they were charged by about 1,000 members of the notorious ZOMO motorized police force, who cleared the streets with water cannons and tear gas. All told, some 700 demonstrators were arrested.

The protests were hardly a replay of the nationwide strikes of August 1980 that gave birth to Solidarity and catapulted Walesa to world prominence. Last week's brief and sporadic protests seemed more like a gesture of frustration than a show of force by the union. Still they were proof that Solidarity was alive--if not entirely well--after a harsh winter of repression.

There were other signs that the Polish people had not abandoned their yearning for freedom. At midweek about 1,000 farmers attended a special Mass in Warsaw's St. John's Cathedral to commemorate the official registration one year ago of Rural Solidarity, the now suspended agricultural union. Later, 5,000 Poles jammed the same cathedral for a Mass marking the 41th anniversary of the death of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, the nationalist and anti-Soviet military hero who led Poland between the World Wars.

The gatherings were peaceful, but authorities indicated that they would not hesitate to show force if necessary. Early last week police units broke up a religious gathering at Warsaw's Victory Square and removed a flower cross dedicated to the memory of Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, who had been a defiant symbol of Polish nationalism. Four days later, as worshipers prayed around a newly rebuilt cross, policemen moved into the crowd, checking identity papers and taking some people away for interrogation or searching. This time they let the cross remain.

Authorities last week also ordered the expulsion of two U.S. diplomats, Cultural Affairs Officer J. Daniel Howard and Science Attache John Zerolis. The two were visiting the apartment of a dissident Polish scientist, Ryszard Herczynski, when plainclothes policemen burst into the room. Polish authorities say that Herczynski, whom they arrested, was "handing over materials harmful to the interests of the Polish People's Republic." The State Department admitted that Herczynski had given the diplomats certain documents, including three Solidarity bulletins and proposals for scientific grants, but challenged Warsaw's claim that the two Americans' activities were prejudicial to the Polish state. The U.S. retaliated by expelling two middle-ranking diplomats from the Polish embassy in Washington.

Trying to win friends abroad, Polish Deputy Premier Mieczyslaw Rakowski last week paid an "unofficial" visit to Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky and emerged after a two-hour talk to tell the press: "Martial law is not the great love of our lives. We should have preferred to marry someone else." But he said that Solidarity's excessive demands for control over the nation's affairs had forced the government to react. Now, he charged, the union's demonstrations are delaying "the timetable of normalization." The Polish official did acknowledge, however, that the country could never again have a labor union completely subordinate to the government, as was the case before Solidarity sprang to life.

The continuing problems in Poland last week showed that neither propaganda nor shows of brute force will give the regime of General Wojciech Jaruzelski what it desperately lacks in its search for national stability: the confidence of the Polish people. That vital quantity still appears to belong to Solidarity, despite all the efforts to crush it. Indeed, the government has some startling proof of Solidarity's popularity. An opinion survey carried out in March and April by the official radio and TV polling institute showed that an astonishing 81% of the population still supported the suspended union. Understandably, the authorities have not printed that finding. Whatever Solidarity's ultimate fate, Poland's Communist leaders must somehow come to terms with its aspirations for a freer and better life. Only then can they gain the allegiance of the workers in whose name they claim to rule. --By Thomas A. Sancton. Reported by Richard Hornik/Warsaw

With reporting by Richard Hornik

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