Tightening Belts at Gunpoint

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 4½-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¢ 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?"