Riots switch to Krakow

Press, 15 October 1982, Page 1

Riots switch to Krakow

NZPA Warsaw The focus of pro-Solidarity opposition to Poland’s military rule has shifted from Gdansk to the southern city of Krakow, where police and demonstrators fought on the streets yesterday. In Krakow, the police scattered tear-gas and fired water cannon and flares to disperse hundreds of protesters who hurled stones and petrol bombs at security forces. The clashes went on for more than seven hours. The official news agency. Pap, said demonstrators “blocked streets and destroyed transport and other municipal facilities.” There was considerable damage and many people were detained but there were no immediate reports of casualties. Riot police moved in firing tear-gas grenades and water cannon when several thou-

sand people started marching from the Nowa Huta steelworks to a nearby church. The demonstrators carried a’red and white Polish flag and chanted “Solidarity” and "We will win.”

Residents of the suburb, established in the 1950 s as a model socialist industrial community, choked as the tear-gas billowed through the streets. The police sealed off the area around the steelworks and the demonstrators escaped through backyards and alleys as dusk fell. According to witnesses, police with armoured’personnel carriers and water cannon were also brought in yesterday to break up several hundred demonstrators in the south-west industrial city of Wroclaw. About 30 young people were detained after trying to lay flowers outside a tram depot which was the birth-

place of the local Solidarity branch, said the witnesses.

Solidarity sources said that Warsaw union organisers were considering calling stoppages similar to those staged by the Lenin shipyard workers in Gdansk — an eight-hour strike coinciding with the first shift. The workers who filed out of the yards yesterday looked sullen and in no mood to repeat the demonstrations and street clashes which left the city centre littered with barricades, stones, and teargas canisters on Wednesday.

Workers said the director had toured the shipyards with foremen repeating the new military rules, imposed on Wednesday, under which anyone organising a strike or disobeying an order could be jailed for five years. The message was hammered home in broadcasts over the internal communications service.

Underground leaders in the region made clear in a bulletin issued yesterday they did not want to expose the "secret factory commission” which has been organising Solidarity actions in the shipyard. They also said the time was not yet right for a general strike to press demands for the release of the Solidarity leader, Mr Lech Walesa, and other detainees, and for the restoration of Solidarity. The official Soviet news agency, Tass, has indicated Kremlin approval of the tough moves against the rioters in Gdansk, describing them as necessary to restore calm.

The agency, in a report from Warsaw, said that the Polish anti-socialist underground was trying to use the banning of Solidarity as a pretext for disrupting public order.