Gdansk workers plan more strikes against regime

Press, 13 October 1982, Page 8

Gdansk workers plan more strikes against regime

NZPA-Reuter Warsaw Shipyard workers at Gdansk, who staged a mass demonstration and strike yesterday in protest against the banning of the Solidarity trade union, planned another strike today. Western reporters in the Baltic port said.

The workers said that they had formed a strike committee and demanded the restoration of Solidarity and the release from detention of the union’s leader. Lech Walesa. Gdansk was the scene of the shipyard protests in August, 1980. which led to the birth of Solidarity and the subsequent imposition of martial law on December 13. After an eight-hour strike in the Lenin Shipyards yesterday there was a demonstration by more than 10.000 outside. State television showed pictures of the demonstrators and said that they had been dispersed with force. Eye-witnesses said tear-gas and' water-cannon had been used.

It was the first reaction by workers to the dissolution of Solidarity under a new trade

union law passed on Friday which scrapped all old unions and opened the way for a more strictly-controlled structure.

The police allowed the crowd gathered outside the shipyard gates, at the end of the first shift yesterday afternoon, to chant pro-Solid-arity slogans, including calls for the release of Mr Walesa. But when the gathering jroke up after several hours, :hey moved to disperse the smaller groups and scattered street clashes broke out in several parts of the city centre. Reporters had to leave the city to dispatch their reports because telephone and telex links with Gdansk had been severed. The Polish Government has embarked on a campaign to persuade workers that new legal unions will be truely independent and will represent them, but interned and underground Solidarity leaders have called for them to be boycotted.

The authorities have said there is still a chance that martial law can be suspended by the end of this

year, but only if the country is calm. This is evidently meant to persuade people not to take part in demonstrations.

They also yesterdav announced that 308 Solidarity internees would be released, leaving more than 500 still in camps, many of whom have been held since martial law was declared.

The Kremlin yesterday signalled its approval of the banning of Solidarity through State-controlled television, which said that the move was seen in Poland as an important step towards normalisation. A newsreader on Moscow television's main evening news programme said that Friday's law on trade unions passed by the Polish Sejm (Parliament), “is being assessed as an important step on the road of normalisation of public life." It was the first direct comment of the Soviet news media on the Polish Government’s action, although the Kremlin had railed against the Solidarity movement before the military clampdown.