Polish Police Break Up Strike at Steel Plant

GDANSK, Poland — Paramilitary riot squads stormed striking steelworkers in southern Poland on Thursday, and a heavy police cordon was thrown around the strikebound Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk as Polish authorities opted for force to end a wave of labor unrest.

Solidarity leader Lech Walesa held out inside the locked shipyard gates with fewer than 1,000 of the striking workers. And he vowed that he would “stay to the end” despite mounting indications that the government was prepared to eject the strikers by force, as it had hours earlier at the nation’s largest steel mill at Nowa Huta.

“They can kill me,” Walesa said, “but they cannot overcome me.”

Hundreds of riot police were positioned in the vicinity of the shipyard, the birthplace of the now-outlawed Solidarity trade union, where workers have been on strike since Monday.

The government said its pre-dawn raid to end the 10-day-old strike at the Lenin Steelworks near Krakow was carried out because the work stoppage threatened “the fundamental interests of the society and the national economy.”

Government spokesman Jerzy Urban said “the whole thing took place without a bruise.” But opposition figures who said they witnessed the raid asserted that anti-terrorist police units used concussion grenades, tear gas and truncheons against the strikers, some of whom were said to be asleep when the assault began.

Father Tadeusz Zaleski, a priest who was with the strikers, said some of them were bleeding from beatings inflicted by the police, and some were forced, on their knees, to sign pledges that they would return to work.

The government declared the strike officially over and the plant ready for normal operations beginning with the morning shift. It said 38 strikers were arrested, including 13 of the 15-member strike committee. But opposition sources said four members of the strike committee had eluded arrest.

Almost simultaneously, announcements were broadcast to workers in the shipyard declaring that operations there had been suspended.

The strike committee at Krakow, in its first statement after the attack, called on workers to stay home today in protest, the Associated Press reported.

“The brutal actions by the ZOMOS (riot police) and the SB (secret police) did not break our strike,” the committee declared.

Strike committee sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Andrzej Szewczuwaniec, chairman of the 16-member committee, escaped along with five other members. The rest were detained, the AP said.

The blow against the strikers came within hours of a warning issued by Urban, who accused unionists of “terrorist actions.”

“These wildcat strikes have degenerated,” he said, “and, I am warning, may result in serious consequences.”

‘Meager Economic Potential’

On Thursday, Urban described the raid as “a normal restoring of order when the law was being violated.” He called the use of force inevitable and added: “The majority wanted to work, and a minority (wanted) to strike. We must protect our meager economic potential.”

Solidarity activist Adam Michnik, released Thursday after two days of detention in Gdansk, described the government’s use of force as “the last nail in the coffin” of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the head of Poland’s Communist Party.

“This is another attempt at solving social conflict and economic crisis through force and police,” Michnik said. “It is the most stupid thing the authorities could do.”

News of the raid reached the striking Solidarity activists at the Lenin Shipyard quickly and with what appeared to be a dispiriting effect. Beginning at 2:30 a.m., recorded announcements on the shipyard’s public address system told strikers that operations had been suspended indefinitely. Radio announcements in Gdansk informed shipyard employees that leave pay would be issued during the suspension and that workers who were at home should not report to their jobs.

At 9 a.m., special riot policemen began to cordon off the square in front of the shipyard’s main gates, where striking Solidarity workers in 1981 erected three intertwined steel crosses as a memorial to workers killed there in a 1970 labor uprising.

Initially Defiant

Inside the shipyard the mood was initially defiant as workers chanted slogans to a crowd of relatives and supporters standing behind the police lines. After about two hours, the police cleared the area and sealed off sidewalks and streets approaching the gates. Telephone lines from the shipyard were cut.

As the morning wore on, the strikers prepared for the assault that virtually all of them felt was certain to come. The workers who remained, about 400 around the main gate and several hundred others scattered around the sprawling yards, were generally the youngest of the work force, mostly in their late teens and 20s. Workers said that most of the older strikers had been urged to go home.

“Now we can only count on the young ones,” one of those remaining said. “The old ones aren’t here. They are sick of this, and they are more afraid.”

In the commissary building adjacent to the gate, still flying Solidarity banners, some strikers slept on floors or chairs, while others sat in small groups talking. Most were unshaven and weary-looking after four days of sleeping on makeshift beds. One worker with a guitar, sitting in the center of a group of about 20, sang songs dating from the 1980 strikes.

Walesa spent the night in the yard, holding meetings with the Solidarity strike committee but emerged at intervals to talk with reporters. As the hours passed, his tone became increasingly defiant.

He said he believed that the authorities would arrest him when the assault finally came. There are “no sacred things here,” he added.

He agreed when a questioner suggested that the strike was “a premature explosion.”

“It wasn’t the right moment,” he said, “but I had no choice. I had to stay here. It came up spontaneously. I had no choice.”

Using force, he said, “won’t gain them anything--it will only delay (another outbreak) by a few months.”

Asked why the government was using force, he replied: “Fear. They have committed so many mistakes that they are simply afraid.”

Tadeusz Mazowiecki, one of two prominent Roman Catholic intellectuals dispatched to the shipyard by Catholic bishops Wednesday in an effort to mediate the strike, decided to remain with the strikers inside the shipyard.

He spoke sharply against the government’s decision to use force and said another team sent from the episcopate to mediate the deadlock at Nowa Huta had been promised at midnight Wednesday that negotiations would resume there at 8 a.m. Thursday. The police raid came, he said, two hours after that assurance was given.

“I think the bishops will be very much shocked,” Mazowiecki said. “This is not fair play.” The church, he said, had hoped to achieve a peaceful settlement in both conflicts.

In response to the government’s action at Nowa Huta, work stoppages were reported in the northwestern port of Szczecin, and shipyard workers at the Paris Commune Shipyard at Gdynia halted work briefly. It could not be determined immediately how many workers were involved.

Students at Warsaw University, who had planned a daylong sit-in in support of the strikers, ended their protest late Thursday, apparently after being warned by the university rector that continuation of the strike would have “incalculable consequences for the university.”