Vacationing Walesa Raps General’s Visit to Shipyard

Polish leader Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski today visited the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, the birthplace of the Solidarity free trade union. He did not meet Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, who was on vacation.

“I regret that I cannot personally meet Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski and ask him in the name of the real hosts of this shipyard--the workers--several questions,” Walesa said in a statement. “I would like to remind the general that it is exactly in this shipyard where Solidarity was created in August, 1980, by the will of the workers.”

Walesa, who is an electrician at the shipyard, led the 1980 strike which led to the establishment of Solidarity, since banned, as the first free trade union in the Soviet Bloc.

Contacted by telephone at his apartment, Walesa said shipyard officials did not notify him in advance of the general’s visit and had given him an early vacation leave to keep him away from the shipyard.

However, a government spokesman said Walesa left on vacation in order to avoid meeting Jaruzelski. A shipyard spokesman said Walesa could have entered the yard at any time.

The official Polish news agency PAP said Jaruzelski met with shipyard workers for four hours to discuss their “conditions of work . . . and problems in their day-to-day life.” Jaruzelski’s spokesman, Grzegorz Czernielewski, said the Polish leader toured the facility and met workers’ “activists,” including the chairman of the new officially sanctioned trade union and the head of the workers’ self-government organization.

Government spokesman Jerzy Urban told a Warsaw news conference that Jaruzelski had not been in the shipyard “for several years” because “the political situation at the Gdansk shipyard has been unfavorable for a long time.”