’Pact armies prolong Polish exercises Cable briefs

Press, 31 March 1981, Page 8

’Pact armies prolong Polish exercises

Cable briefs

NZPA-Reuter East Berlin More troops have been brought into the Warsaw Pact military manoeuvres in and around Poland to ensure that the exericse, which had been scheduled to finish about the middle of last week, could be further prolonged as. the Polish crisis continues. Yesterday the East German news agency, A.D.N.. reported that the troops had practised the extermination of an assumed enemy. It said the main exercise of the day took place at a training ground in Poland, where Soviet. East German, and Polish units mounted an attack to eliminate “enemy forces” assumed to have been dropped by. parachute. The Soviet news agency, Tass yesterday accused the Polish independent trade union Solidarity, of embarking on an open struggle against State power and the Communist Party in Poland. Tass said “counter-revolu-tionaries” from the Self-De-

fence Committee (K.0.R.) dissident group had entrenched themselves in the Solidarity leadership and were ‘'doing everything they could to complicate negotiations with the Government” to prevent an indefinite general strike from today. The agency quoted a Solidarity instruction leaflet as calling for the seizure of all factories and necessary communications and transport for Solidarity use when the strike began. "Local organisations of Solidarity are doing all they can to discredit the security organs and the police and are trying to intimidate people working for these bodies,” Tass said. “These provocative instructions and the even more provocative activities of opponents of the Socialist system show that the leadership of K.0.R., which has ensconced itself in Solidarity, is taking measures without "any regard to legal power in the republic.” Tass said.

In Warsaw. Konin. Ciechanow and other cities, workers had tried to seize post offices. These forces had seized a television transmitter in Warsaw for some time but were eventually removed, the agency said. “Subversive elements" in the Kielce region had set up road blocks and in one area all road signs had been destroyed. Tass gave no more details of any of these incidents. The report appeared to be in line with increasing Soviet hostility to Solidarity. On Sunday Tass said the trade union was making deliberately unacceptable "antiSocialist" demands of the Government. Western diplomatic sources in Moscow said yesterday they thought recent press comment on Poland indicated that the Kremlin believed little could be achieved through negotiations with Solidaritv.