Word: gdansk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Riots in Gdansk and shock at the supermarket
...Poland's ill-fated democratic experiment had a capital city, it was surely the Baltic port of Gdansk. Solidarity, the independent trade union, was born in the city's sprawling Lenin shipyard in August 1980. When the government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski crushed that movement last Dec. 13, it died hardest in Gdansk. Three days after martial law was declared, protesters there engaged security forces in pitched battles that, according to the government, left at least nine civilians dead. Gdansk continues to resist. The government announced last week that new street clashes near the Lenin shipyard had ended...
Poland's military bosses call Poznan their model city. While the workers of Gdansk, Warsaw and Katowice resisted, rioting and striking, after martial law was declared on Dec. 13, not a ripple of unrest was reported in the industrial center 175 miles west of the capital. Indeed, Zdzislaw Rozwalak, the leader of the local Solidarity chapter, had promptly furnished the state radio with a statement of support for martial law and condemned the union's behavior. Thus the regime of Wojciech Jaruzelski last week confidently chose Poznan as the showcase site for the first officially organized foreign press...
...ZOMO, the Polish acronym for motorized police units. They take their orders directly from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In December's crackdown, while the army cordoned off the trouble spots, ZOMO units broke up most of the demonstrations that took place after Jaruzelski imposed martial law. In Gdansk they burst into the Lenin shipyards to end a sit-in by the workers who had launched the independent Solidarity trade union in August 1980. When coal miners in the Wujek pit near the Silesian city of Katowice resisted martial law, it was the members of ZOMO who opened fire...
TIME Correspondent Richard Hornik was in Gdansk on Dec. 13 when martial law was declared. He has watched General Jaruzelski try to subdue the country and has seen the Poles react and resist. Shortly after leaving Poland last week, Hornik filed this report on what life is like in Warsaw in the wake of the crackdown...