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Poland: Marching out of Step

5 minute read
John Kohan

Solidarity supporters stage a surprise May Day protest

As dawn broke on the first day of the month, long lines of blue-uniformed militia, armed with lead-filled white truncheons, spread out along the deserted streets of the Polish seaport of Gdansk. During the past two years, supporters of the outlawed Solidarity trade union had turned the annual holiday celebration into a demonstration against the government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski. As they were last year, the authorities appeared thoroughly prepared to handle any attempt to disrupt the May Day parade.

They did not, however, reckon with the nerve of the rotund, mustachioed man who suddenly appeared among the bystanders watching the parade only 200 yards from the official reviewing stand. Before security forces could decide how to react, he deftly slipped between the ranks of marching workers, accompanied by a phalanx of his followers. Then, as the local Communist Party leader and the police chief of Gdansk looked down from the tribunal in stunned disbelief, the cocky interloper flashed a V-for-victory sign. A visiting Soviet party leader failed to recognize him and returned his salute with a cheery wave. Shouted an astonished onlooker: “It’s Lech! Walesa is here!” Indeed he was.

The former Solidarity leader was one of tens of thousands of demonstrators who turned out in cities across Poland last week to mock official government ceremonies honoring the international workers’ day. Riot squads drenched Solidarity supporters in Warsaw and Czestochowa with water cannons. There were other demonstrations in Szczecin, Lublin, Wroclaw and Poznan. Government Spokesman Jerzy Urban brusquely dismissed the May Day protests as “pitiful” but announced that the police had detained 684 demonstrators for questioning.

Compared with the turnout for past demonstrations, the number of Solidarity supporters who were willing last week to face beatings, drenchings and possible arrest had significantly dwindled. But if Walesa and his followers could not hope to prevail against Polish riot squads, they did cause Jaruzelski considerable embarrassment on the eve of his trip to Moscow. Speaking to a May Day rally in Warsaw, the general sought to strike a cautious balance between repression and reform. Said Jaruzelski: “A storm has swept over our land. It cleaned some things and littered others as every storm does. We must extend the clean field. We must clean the littered field. That is what socialist renewal consists of.” Last week’s protests had added to the debris.

Warsaw riot squads had moved quickly to prevent major demonstrations from taking place in the capital and cordoned the Old Town, a traditional rallying point for Solidarity supporters. As churchgoers streamed out of St. John’s Cathedral after a morning Mass in honor of workers, someone in the crowd flung a sheaf of leaflets into the air that urged Poles “to ruin the attempt to make this holiday a show of obedience.” Only about 200 youths stood ready to battle the police, who chased them down cobblestoned streets with jets of water. When the protesters tried to regroup outside the church of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, an outspoken supporter of the banned trade union, the riot squads finally dispersed the crowd with water cannons.

Two days later Poles tried to gather again in Warsaw’s Old Town to mark the anniversary of the 1791 constitution, which granted Poles unprecedented freedom for two years before the country was partitioned a second time between Russia and Prussia. Police attempted to drown out the sound of hymn singing with sirens, then moved against the crowd, swinging clubs. The protesters rushed for shelter in nearby restaurants and cafés. Late into the evening, water cannons and police vans with blue flashing lights continued to patrol the streets of the capital.

Instead of challenging the government so overtly, protesters in Gdansk took a different tack. Solidarity supporters followed directions from leaflets and broadcasts over the union’s underground radio and gathered at a designated street corner where they were joined by others leaving morning Mass at St. Brigid’s Church. Normally the crowd would have surged toward the city center, but this time the demonstrators deliberately dispersed and slipped into the ranks of the official delegations of workers marching in the parade. In competition with propaganda placards extolling the Communist system, protesters’ banners were unrolled. FREE THE POLITICAL PRISONERS read one message scrawled in lipstick on a white-and-red Polish flag. Another sign, supporting a boycott of local elections next month, warned that IF YOU WANT TO go HUNGRY, GO TO THE POLLS.

The change in strategy seemed to catch the riot police off guard. If they fired tear-gas canisters at the marchers, the noxious fumes might have sent local party officials gasping from the reviewing stand. A direct assault on the demonstrators under the eye of party leaders would have provided an equally unsavory spectacle for television viewers and would have turned the parade into a fiasco. When the militiamen finally did begin to round up the Solidarity supporters in the crowd, most demonstrators, including Walesa, simply slipped away. Said the former union leader afterward: “I organized an independent demonstration. I showed them to their faces what we are capable of doing.”

Poles have begun to rely more and more on methods of subterfuge, which expose them to less risk in their struggle to make their message heard. Mimeographed journals are thriving in the underground. Supporters of Solidarity have set up a clandestine news service, relying on journalists who have been unemployed since the military crackdown. Taboo topics can be debated at secret seminars that often meet in church basements or private apartments. If last week’s demonstration showed that the banned union still has the power to draw Poles into the streets, it is ultimately such quiet forms of protest that will keep the ideals of Solidarity alive.

—By John Kohan.

Reported by John Moody/Warsaw

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