Forces ring city

Press, 4 September 1982, Page 8

Forces ring city

NZPA WarsawPolish security forces yesterday virtually sealed off the western copper-mining city of Lubin after three days of street disturbances during which two workers were shot dead.

Travellers from the city, who passed through a road block manned by police and troops on the way out, said that an 8 p.m. curfew had been imposed, telephone lines cut, private cars banned from the streets, and petrol sales suspended. The police used tear-gas during the late afternoon to disperse groups of youths who gathered after the authorities had used watercannons to wash away flowers and candles laid in memory of the victims of the shooting on Tuesday.

The Lubin incidents were the most serious reported in a wave of street unrest which swept across Poland 6n Tuesday. It followed a call by underground members of the suspended Solidarity. trade union to hold demonstrations to mark the second anniversary of the union’s foundation.

Lower Silesia, in which Lubin is situated, was one of the areas worst affected by Tuesday’s country-wide street violence. An official statement said that the two men killed in the street

clashes were workers, one aged 32, the other 25. The Communist Party’s ruling Politburo issued a communique yesterday condemning the demonstrators. But it also said that “normal work went on in all factories and institutions.” The official line has been that workers have ignored the underground appeal and that most of those involved in the clashes were young people manipulated by “political gamblers." Warsaw radio reported

that a curfew was imposed for people under 21 in Czestochowa, the southern city where the Catholic Primate (Archbishop Jozef Glemp) issued an appeal last week for people nbt to take their grievances on to the streets. The radio said that disturbances went on on Tuesday and Wednesday in the city, site of Poland’s holiest shrine — the Jasna Gora Monastery — where the Black Madonna icon, a national symbol, is kept.