Union go-slow collapses, leader surrenders

Press, 25 August 1983, Page 10

Union go-slow collapses, leader surrenders

NZPA-Reuter Warsaw

Poland’s Solidarity opposition has suffered a serious set-back with the surrender to the police of a key underground leader as workers prepare to mark the third anniversary of the trade union’s birth.

Wladyslaw Hardek, underground leader in Krakow and a member of the fiveman national provisional coordinating commission, read a statement on television yesterday saying that further struggle was pointless and urging fellow fugitives to give up too. The announcement coincided with the apparent collapse of plans to stage a go-

slow in the Lenin shipyards, birthplace of the Solidarity union after strikes at Gdansk three years ago.

The slow-down was intended to start yesterday and go on until August 31, anniversary of the union’s foundation. But workers reported a negligible response and a shipyards spokesman said that work was normal. After the call for the protest by a secret workers’ committee senior Communist and Government officials visited the yard. Gdansk authorities ordered tighter discipline in all enterprises and new measures to deter demonstrators. Officials said that a Deputy Prime Minister, Mieczyslaw Rakowski, the

Government’s chief negotiator with Solidarity, was due to visit the Lenin yards late today. Solidarity’s leader, Lech Walesa, yesterday issued a six-point rebuttal to a fierce propaganda onslaught on him by the Polish news media, denying allegations that he had received large sums of money from the West.

He also denied suggestions that he had called for the shipyards’ go-slow and countered allegations of working against his own people. Mr Hardek had been a member of the co-ordinat-ing commission since it was formed in April, 1982, four months after the military

take-over which suppressed the Solidarity union.

He said that he had reported to the authorities under an amnesty declared when martial law was lifted on July 22 and which ensures. him freedom from prosecution. Less than a month ago his name appeared on a commission statement declaring that the lifting of martial law was a propaganda gesture and pledging to fight on for Solidarity’s ideals.

Mr Hardek was a union leader from the southern city of Krakow, and led a brief strike in the Nowa Huta steelworks, Poland’s biggest factory, in the days after the military take-over.