Walesa target of campaign

Press, 20 August 1983, Page 10

Walesa target of campaign

NZPa Warsaw Communist authorities yesterday barred a meeting between seven United States congressmen and the former Solidarity chairman, Lech Walesa, and lashed out at the labour leader, calling him the “Yankee of Gdansk” for allegedly supporting American economic sanctions against Poland.

Mr Walesa said that the attack on him, published in

the Communist Party daily, “Trybuna Ludu,” was designed to discredit him as a possible negotiating partner in the days leading up to the third anniversary of the agreement that spawned Solidarity on August 31, 1980.

The Solidarity underground has called for a nation-wide show of support for the outlawed union on August 31, and endorsed a

threatened work slowdown in the Gdansk shipyards.

A clandestine union cell in the shipyards has set a Monday deadline for the authorities to open talks with Mr Walesa on reviving free trade unions or face a work slowdown. The official Polish news agency, Pap, heightened thecampaign against Mr Walesa yesterday, calling him a figure of farce and an

agent of alien interests hostile to Poland.

“Anybody who would start negotiations with the pitiful figure of Mr Walesa would render himself ridiculous politicially,” Pap said.

Solidarity, the first free trade union in the Soviet bloc, was suspended with the declaration of martial law, in December, 1981, and banned on October 8.