Conversations

The Walesas are detained

Former Union Leader Lech Walesa was in a combative mood last week when three policemen turned up at his apartment in the Polish seaport of Gdansk. The cops wanted to detain him for questioning, but the folk hero of the country's now outlawed Solidarity movement refused to go. His reason: the police could not produce an arrest warrant. Said Walesa: "You should abide by the laws." Momentarily nonplussed, the police retreated, but they returned almost immediately to tell Walesa that they would take him away by force if necessary. Finally, Walesa was whisked to a militia headquarters for five hours of "conversations." Then, just as abruptly, he was released.

The enigmatic confrontation was brought on by Walesa himself. A day earlier, he dramatically announced that he had just held three days of clandestine meetings with the underground leaders of the banned Solidarity union. The purpose of the meetings, said Walesa, was to examine "the present situation in Poland and to coordinate a common stand."

Polish television announced Walesa's release, saying only that he "did not confirm" the fact of his clandestine meetings. Walesa's wife Danuta, who was later ordered to report for a 2 1/2-hour interrogation session, gave Polish authorities no further information beyond the fact that her husband had been absent from their home for three days and that he was "a grownup person." Even Mieczyslaw Wachowski, Walesa's occasional chauffeur, was called in for questioning by the suspicious police.

But in the end, the Polish government seemed reluctant to press the matter much further. After his release, Walesa told journalists that he had cited to his interrogators a declaration by official Government Spokesman Jerzy Urban, to the effect that meetings with ex-Solidarity leaders were not in themselves illegal unless the purpose was to plan an illegal act. Said the defiant Walesa: "I'll do it again. I will have another meeting."

At week's end Polish television further reported that police in Warsaw and eight other cities had also seized at least 26 Solidarity supporters, together, with their radio transmitters and printing presses. Among the captives: Zbigniew Belz, one of the 107 elected members of Solidarity's National Commission. Polish authorities allegedly claim that Belz, having been in hiding since the declaration of martial law 16 months ago, had been helping to organize May Day protests around his native city of Gorzow Wielkopolski.

Ever since his release last November following eleven months of detention, Walesa has been uncharacteristically subdued. Solidarity has been equally quiescent, even though its underground leaders have issued a number of vague appeals for popular defiance to the military rule of Premier Wojciech Jaruzelski. For its part, the debt-ridden Polish government is eager to project a veneer of normality, a task that is becoming increasingly important with the impending June visit of Pope John Paul II.

Last week's game of cat-and-mouse may be a small sign that the veneer is about to crack. Following Walesa's brief detention, Solidarity leaders issued a call for widespread protest demonstrations in Poland on May Day. As the most important festival in the proletarian calendar neared, the question also loomed of whether Polish workers and the Polish "workers' state" were once more on a collision course. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.