Word: unionizers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...country and to discuss a political settlement for the struggle in neighboring Afghanistan. In an interview with TIME, the Prime Minister said she believes that Afghanistan should have a neutral government "which reflects the aspirations of the people of Afghanistan and which is neither hostile to the Soviet Union nor hostile to us." With support from the U.S., Pakistan has been the main arms distributor to the Afghan mujahedin rebels ever since Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The Soviets withdrew their forces early this year, but contrary to predictions, the mujahedin have not been able to topple the Soviet...
...contrast was stupefying. In December 1981, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa was arrested along with more than 6,000 fellow union members in a martial-law crackdown that seemed to shatter their movement and, with it, all hope of freedom and reform in Communist Poland. Last week Walesa found himself at the center of a very different situation. His forces had just whipped the Communist Party in the country's first truly democratic elections since 1947, causing a constitutional logjam that for the moment left unclear exactly how and by whom Poland would be governed. Walesa, 46, his trademark mustache...
Perhaps so. But it was not too early for the world to recognize Poland's remarkable political performance for what it was: in the year of Communism's historic identity crisis -- a time of glasnost in the Soviet Union, brutal repression in China and political unease in the rest of Eastern Europe -- Poland had launched a democratic experiment unique in the Communist world. "It makes us rethink the proposition that Stalinism is eternal," said a U.S. official. "Now we don't know for sure that Stalinism is above being reformed...
...official results announced at midweek showed a Solidarity landslide. Union-backed candidates won 92 of 100 seats in the newly created Senate and 160 of 161 Sejm (lower house) seats set aside for opposition and independent candidates. Although the remaining 299 Sejm seats were automatically allotted to the Communists and their allies, only five of their candidates garnered the required 50% of the vote. Most of those unfilled seats will be decided in runoff elections on June...
...Thursday, Communist and union officials held an emergency closed-door meeting aimed at breaking the impasse. Determining how to fill the 33 vacant seats was at the top of the agenda. One proposal called for a new vote on those seats in the second round of elections. But many union supporters argued that they should remain unfilled...