Walesa, Wife Won’t Seek Permission to Visit L.A. Area for Award, She Says

Solidarity leader Lech Walesa has decided not to apply for a passport to travel to the United States to receive an award he is to be given this month, his wife said Friday.

He has concluded that the “situation (in Poland) is not right” for seeking permission to visit the United States, Danuta Walesa said in a telephone conversation from their apartment in Gdansk. She also said that she had no plans to apply for a passport to appear on her husband’s behalf.

The John-Roger Foundation, an organization in Santa Monica, named Walesa earlier this month as one of three recipients of its annual “integrity” award, which includes a prize of $10,000. Walesa has said that he plans to donate the money to a West European group that supports medical projects in Poland.

Foundation officials have indicated that Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 for his leadership of postwar Eastern Europe’s first independent trade union, had already applied for permission to travel to Los Angeles to receive the organization’s award.

Foundation in Touch

(George Cappannelli, the foundation director, said Friday in Santa Monica that foundation officials had been in touch with Walesa as recently as Wednesday and that their impression is that he has applied for permission to leave, that the application is under consideration, and that he intends to accept the award in person in the United States.)

The foundation has also suggested that, if Walesa appeared, President Reagan might present the award and use the occasion to announce the lifting of some or all the U.S. sanctions that were imposed after the Polish government’s 1981 suppression of the Solidarity trade union movement. Solidarity itself is now officially an illegal organization.

But Danuta Walesa said that circumstances ruled out applying to visit the United States at this time. She did not elaborate, and Walesa himself was not available for comment.

The proposal to bring Walesa to the United States for an award, let alone one to be handed over by Reagan, comes at a delicate moment in U.S.-Polish relations. Prospects for an improvement are the best since 1981, but a similar thaw in early 1985 ended abruptly when Poland expelled three U.S. diplomats on what the State Department said were fabricated charges.

Political Prisoners Freed

A broad amnesty last month cleared Poland’s jails of political prisoners for the first time since martial law was imposed in December, 1981. On Oct. 7, Rozanne L. Ridgway, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European affairs, told a congressional committee that the remaining sanctions were under “active review” and indicated that they were likely to be lifted.

In the past, the Administration has conditioned the end of sanctions not only on the release of political prisoners but also on what it called positive steps by Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski’s regime to open a dialogue with the political opposition and to allow a measure of trade-union pluralism.

In response to the amnesty, Walesa and seven other prominent Solidarity activists announced the formation on Sept. 30 of a new public council to work for the restoration of independent trade unions. Encouraged by an attack on the new council in Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party newspaper, the government quickly declared it an illegal organization and a threat to public order.

Beyond summoning several of its members for questioning, however, the authorities have taken no steps to suppress it.

Lifting of Sanctions Urged

This week, Walesa and nine other prominent Polish figures, widely respected for their independent views, issued a statement urging President Reagan to lift the remaining U.S. sanctions on Poland. Walesa has said previously that he favored ending the sanctions, but he had not done so before in a formal statement.

The statement said that Poland’s worsening economy, burdened by falling exports to the West and a $32-billion Western debt that is still growing from unpaid interest, made it clear that “the time is right” for lifting the sanctions, which included revocation of Poland’s most-favored-nation trade status. It added that Western economic aid to Poland is now “indispensable.”

Although the appeal was made available to Western news organizations, government censors barred its publication by the Krakow Tygodnik Powszechny, an independent Catholic weekly newspaper. Opposition sources speculated that publication was blocked because it was signed by Walesa.

Opposition activists have said privately that the U.S. Embassy encouraged Walesa and the others to issue the statement, to help deflect conservative criticism of a White House decision to abandon the sanctions.

An embassy spokesman refused on Friday to confirm or deny this assertion. Another U.S. official, however, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that while embassy officers may have acknowledged in casual conversations with Polish activists that such a statement might be useful in fending off conservative criticism of a policy change, the embassy did not promote the idea.