Our patience is running out, govt tells strikers

Press, 30 August 1980, Page 8

Our patience is running out, govt tells strikers

NZPA-Reuter Gdansk; The Polish authorities have issued what appears to! be their strongest warning to date in a bid to force strikers in northern Poland; to - back off their demands for free trade unions. The union issue, which would involve an unprecedented surrender of power by an East European Communist State, has resulted in a virtual stalemate in peace talks at Gdansk between the Government and militant strikers. The strike leaders, whose 16-day-old • movement is beginning to hamper industry throughout Poland, broke off talks with the chief Government negotiator on Thursday and said they would . not return to the negotiating table until they had received firm proposals for free trade unions. The authorities in Warsaw, in apparent response,

said that their patience was fast running out and that they had concluded they were now facing what amounted to an open challenge to the Communist system.

Miroslaw Wojciechowski, editor of the official Interpress news agency, told foreign reporters that the strike leaders demanding free trade unions were ,anti-Socialist and extremists. . He said the'’situation was getting worse by the day and could not continue for much longer. “The number of factories where work is being interrupted because of stoppages of material is also growing. The situation. is very serious.”

Dissidents said solidarity strikes were taking hold in Poland’s second-largest city of Lodz, where transport had been stopped for three days.

In Wroclaw, a city close; to the Silesian coal mining region. 50 enterprises had been closed by strikes, the dissidents said. The official P.A.P. news agency reported that garbage was piling up in the strikebound port of Szczecin to such, an extent that it threatened to start an epidemic. A spokeswoman for the Polish dissident group K.O.R. made a dramatic appeal yesterday to the international press for eight comrades imprisoned early last week in conditions she called “frightful.” Anka Kowalska said the police had skirted the legal requirement that detainees be freed within 48 hours by transferring the dissidents from one police station to another.

Meanwhile, Soviet troop units have set up combat

positions throughout central East Germany in preparation foi a big Warsaw Pact military exercise next month, the official daily “Neuus Deutschland” reported yesterday. It said soldiers had begun camouflaging temporary camps and overhauling tanks and other equipment for the manoeuvres, dubbed “Broth-erhood-in-Arms-80,” which will involve 40.000 troops from all seven Warsaw Pact member States. Army units from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria have already arrived in East Germany to take part in the manoeuvres, the first joint-command exercise in East Germany since 1970. The Soviet Union has more than 380,000 troops stationed in East Germany. “Neues Deutschland” gave no details of how many would take part in the exercise.