Curfews, arrests in bid to stop strikes

Press, 24 August 1988, Page 12

Curfews, arrests in bid to stop strikes

NZPA-Reuter Warsaw Poland’s Communist leaders have authorised curfews and summary arrests in three regions to smother the worst strikes since martial law crushed unrest in 1981.

The Interior Minister, General Czeslaw Kiszczak, announced the measures on television, saying, “Let’s not allow Poland to become a land of lawlessness and anarchy.” He was speaking after riot police stormed three transport depots in the north-western city of Szczecin and dragged away strikers who had been occupying them. Strikes by workers demanding official recognition of the outlawed trade union Solidarity spread to Warsaw and other cities yesterday. The stoppages began a week ago. Workers, including the Solidarity leader, Lech Walesa, downed tools at the Lenin shipyard at

Gdansk, the movement’s birthplace, to march round the yard with a Polish flag and chant Solidarity slogans. Strikes hit the city’s Northern and Gdansk ports and unrest disrupted plants in Wroclaw and Poznan. Western diplomats said the strike wave was the most serious in Poland since stoppages in 1980 toppled the then Communist Party leader, Edward Gierek, and gave rise to Solidarity. General Kiszczak sat in Army uniform with the national emblem of a red flag bearing a white eagle behind him. He said he had given

authorities in the Katowice region, where 11 coal mines are on strike, and the Gdansk and Szczecin regions the right to impose a curfew. Solidarity sources said some Solidarity activists had been detained round Katowice and in other cities. General Kiszczak called on the military and prosecutor’s office to enforce the law “especially rigorously when necessary.” Poland’s National Defence Committee, led by the Polish leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, and including Army and security chiefs, agreed on measures against the unrest on Saturday, accord-

ing to the official Pap news agency. Adam Micknik, a top Solidarity adviser, regretted the action and said it would achieve nothing. “Nothing important will be solved in Poland through more curfews and summary procedures,” he told reporters in Gdansk. Pap said on Friday the strikes had cost the State more than SUS 3 million in lost coal exports. Coal is Poland’s main source of foreign currency. Regional committees responsible for defence and security had met in Katowice, Szczecin, Gdansk, the western city of Poznan, and the southwestern city of Wroclaw.