Union chief latest victim of East German protests

Press, 2 November 1989, Page 8

Union chief latest victim of East German protests

NZPA-Reuter East Berlin The head of East Germany’s official trade union movement is quitting, the latest Communist Party hard-liner swept aside by grassroots pressure for greater democracy. News that Harry Tisch is to resign came as a fresh wave of more than 20,000 demonstrators marched in three cities yesterday after half a million did so the previous day. They demanded free elections and legalised opposition groups. Mr Tisch’s departure is almost certain td cost him his seat in the 17-member Politburo, which could see a purge of hard-liners at next week’s meeting of the party’s policy-making Central Committee, political analysts said.

The East German leader, Egon Krenz, who replaced the hardliner Erich Honecker last month, meanwhile arrived in Moscow for talks with the Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev. Discussions were expected to focus on reforms needed to defuse his country’s unrest. More than 20,000 people marched in the cities of Weimar, Meissen and Meiningen yesterday. Their demands included censorship-free arts and entertainment and improved environmental safeguards against industrial pollution. Mr Tisch is bowing out as the long-time head of the. official Free German Labour Federation (FDGB) after coming under attack from workers for neglecting their interests, the State-run news

agency ADN said. Mr Tisch, aged 62, planned to tender his resignation to the FDGB governing board when it convenes today, three days after it postponed a decision on calls for his dismissal, ADN said. He had led the 9.5-million-member FDGB, the Communist Party’s most important mass organisation, since 1975 and has been a member of the ruling Politburo over the same period. Under Mr Tisch, East Germany’s trade unions. had been used mainly to persuade workers to accept production targets and wages decreed by state-con-trolled management boards. Mr Tisch acknowledged at Monday’s FDGB meeting that the official unions had lost the confidence of workers.