Polish leader sees no hope

Press, 2 December 1981, Page 8

Polish leader sees no hope

NZPA-Reuter Warsaw Amid. continuing strikes and growing political opposition, the Polish Government’s chief union negotiator has said he sees little, hope for the future. “I would' not like to be accused - of pessimism but there are no major grounds for optimism,” Mr Mieczyslaw Rakowski, a Deputy Prime Minister, told the official news agency, Pap. His interview ’ was published as cadet firemen defied the authorities and refused to end an occupation of their officer-training academy despite an official announcement that the school had been dissolved? Farmers also continued sit-in strikes in at least five cities and more than 100,000 students continued a nationwide campus strike. Mr Rakowski accused the Solidarity free trade union of' adopting a generally negative attitude to Communist proposals . for a front of national accord and- said there was ;■ ample . evidence that so-called union revolutionaries were* seeking to destroy Communist authority. Poland was in the grips of strike madness. Riot police ringed the Firemen’s Academy in a northern Warsaw suburb but an Interior Ministry spokesman insisted on State television yesterday that there were no plans to use force to dislodge the 340-odd strikers. The cadets began their protest last Wednesday to press demands for their school to come under civilian

instead of Interior Ministry regulations. The Interior Ministry spokesman said the police were there to prevent , political activists from'joining the strikers. . Crowds gathered- outside the . academy : compound earlier' yesterday, to hear bulletins broadcast over a loudspeaker and read leaflets tossed into the street by strikers. One leaflet said the cadets never wanted their water cannons to be * directed against demonstrators, as in 1968 when batons, tear-gas and. fire hoses were used against student protesters. Another said, that parents of some of the cadets, apparently summoned to Warsaw by the authorities; were being used to pressure their sons into surrendering. ■The official news media stepped up a propaganda offensive on strikes on Monday with the publication of a list.of protests and stoppages Staged in Poland after the meeting on November 4 of Church, Government, and Solidarity leaders which first proposed the idea of a national front. Solidarity says that the country is relatively calm, and has reacted with surprise to Communist Party assertions that the situation is perilous enough to justify emergency measures.

These could include equipping the Government - with the power to ban strikes, public meetings and a free press by decree?