Word: walesa
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Solidarity Union Leader Lech Walesa was in high spirits as he marched up the steps of Warsaw's gray stone Council of Ministers building last week. Grinning and puffing on his pipe, he joked good-naturedly with the gaggle of supporters around him. But the walrus-mustached electrician was in no mood for levity when he emerged after nearly four hours of talks with Poland's Premier, General Wojciech Jaruzelski. Looking fatigued and depressed, Walesa said only that "we did some things-and we did not do other things...
What they did was defuse a series of strikes in Lodz that threatened to shatter the country's fragile month-old labor truce. The day of the Walesa-Jaruzelski meeting, Lodz factory sirens had blared at 10 a.m. to announce the start of a one-hour work stoppage affecting some 250,000 workers. That warning action was to have been followed by a series of province-wide sympathy strikes and sit-ins. But Walesa and Jaruzelski worked out a last-minute agreement that satisfied the Lodz workers' key demand: reinstatement of five sacked employees of an Interior Ministry...
...police harassment. Last week, for example, Dissident Leader Adam Michnik was detained by Warsaw police for three hours. Meanwhile, an ugly new outburst of anti-Semitic rhetoric was added to the apparent campaign to discredit the independent labor movement (see box). Faced with this array of potential flash points, Walesa and Jaruzelski agreed to resume their high-level dialogue possibly as soon as this week. As Walesa put it, "Let's talk before any fires spread...
...Radom strike call was issued in spite of Walesa's personal appeal for moderation. After his meeting with the Polish Premier, Walesa assured Radom Union Leader Andrzej Sobieraj that the offending government officials would be dismissed within a few days. Replied Sobieraj: the Radom chapter would postpone its strike plans, if-but only if-those dismissals actually materialized. At week's end, the Communist Party newspaper Trybuna Ludu reported that one official, the Radom party chief, had secretly resigned ten days earlier...
...Solidarity members and their supporters all across the country. A two-page report by Solidarity's national commission listed numerous cases of police harassment, ranging from unannounced searches of union offices to the temporary detention on March 5 of Dissident Leader Jacek Kuron, a regular adviser to Solidarity. Walesa raised this issue too during his meeting with Jaruzelski, who promised that a joint union-government commission would investi gate the charges...