Polish Leader’s Visit to Italy Sets Off Protests

Greeted by placard-waving protesters on his first formal visit to the West since imposing martial law in Poland five years ago, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski on Monday began a two-day round of official meetings in Rome that will include a private talk with Polish-born Pope John Paul II and a confrontation with hostile Italian labor union representatives.

The 63-year-old Polish leader, accompanied by his daughter, Monika, 22, appeared nervous as he was greeted at Rome’s Ciampino military airport by Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi.

An hour later, a small group of demonstrators from Italy’s Radical Party tried to block Jaruzelski’s motorcade as he left a hotel in central Rome en route to lunch with President Francesco Cossiga at the ornate Quirinal Palace. The Radical Party leader, Marco Pannella, hurled a placard supporting Solidarity, the banned Polish labor union, at the motorcade.

On Sunday, six Italian Radicals were expelled from Warsaw after protesting Jaruzelski’s visit in front of St. John’s Cathedral in the Polish capital.

A more ambitious torchlight parade against the visit was planned for tonight by Polish refugees who live in Italy, and the pro-Solidarity Radical Party secretary, Giovanni Negri, urged Italians to place lighted candles in the windows of their homes as a gesture of protest.

Craxi met with Jaruzelski three times Monday--at the airport, in a longer session together with Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Andreotti and at a formal dinner--but no details of their conversations were made public.

Craxi’s office said Jaruzelski was invited as a part of Italy’s policy of encouraging East-West contacts, but the visit was delayed last year because of Warsaw’s poor human rights record. An amnesty last fall under which Poland freed 225 political prisoners led Craxi to renew the invitation.

Except for a brief and unofficial stopover in Paris a year ago, the Polish leader has been shunned in the West since imposing martial law and cracking down on Solidarity, the Communist world’s only independent trade union, in December of 1981. Martial law was lifted in 1983, but some Western sanctions against Poland remain in force, and the country has had difficulty with its $31-billion burden of debt to the West.

The Polish leader will have a private audience with the Roman Catholic pontiff in Vatican City today and is expected to invite the Pope formally to visit his native Poland in June. The trip would be John Paul’s third papal visit to his homeland.