Poland: Cracks in the Truce

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Walesa and Jaruzelski defuse one strike, but some burning issues remain

Solidarity Union Leader Lech Walesa was in high spirits as he marched up the steps of Warsaw's gray stone Council of Ministers building last week. Grinning and puffing on his pipe, he joked good-naturedly with the gaggle of supporters around him. But the walrus-mustached electrician was in no mood for levity when he emerged after nearly four hours of talks with Poland's Premier, General Wojciech Jaruzelski. Looking fatigued and depressed, Walesa said only that "we did some things—and we did not do other things."

What they did was defuse a series of strikes in Lodz that threatened to shatter the country's fragile month-old labor truce. The day of the Walesa-Jaruzelski meeting, Lodz factory sirens had blared at 10 a.m. to announce the start of a one-hour work stoppage affecting some 250,000 workers. That warning action was to have been followed by a series of province-wide sympathy strikes and sit-ins. But Walesa and Jaruzelski worked out a last-minute agreement that satisfied the Lodz workers' key demand: reinstatement of five sacked employees of an Interior Ministry hospital and a guarantee that local Lodz officials would not hinder Solidarity's organizing activities there.

What the two men did not do, however, was resolve other volatile issues that could at any moment erupt into a new wave of labor upheavals. In Radom the local Solidarity chapter was threatening strikes at 340 factories. In Poznan 490 farm delegates gathered from all over the country to join forces in a 2 million-member organization that was loudly demanding legal status as an independent agricultural union. In Warsaw and other centers, union members and their advisers claimed that they were being subjected to police harassment. Last week, for example, Dissident Leader Adam Michnik was detained by Warsaw police for three hours. Meanwhile, an ugly new outburst of anti-Semitic rhetoric was added to the apparent campaign to discredit the independent labor movement (see box). Faced with this array of potential flash points, Walesa and Jaruzelski agreed to resume their high-level dialogue possibly as soon as this week. As Walesa put it, "Let's talk before any fires spread."

Neither the popular labor leader nor the head of Warsaw's Communist government had much control over the most incendiary threat: the potential for armed Soviet intervention. If Moscow were to decide on such a move, a possible cover might be provided by the Warsaw Pact maneuvers scheduled to take place in and around Poland later this month. Though most Western analysts doubted that any imminent invasion plan was connected with the Warsaw Pact maneuvers, which are routinely held in the spring, Secretary of State Alexander Haig reiterated a sharp U.S. warning. A Soviet intervention, he said, would have "grave and long-term consequences on all hopes of improving relations between East and West."