Poland Imposes Curfew in Strike, Calls Parliament

The Polish government imposed a curfew Tuesday on Jastrzebie, the center of strike activity by Silesian coal miners, and announced a special session of Parliament to review national economic policies.

The moves seemed to be designed to underscore a get-tough policy aimed at halting a wave of about 20 strikes that began Aug. 15, while at the same time acknowledging some government responsibility for the economic complaints of the strikers, who are also demanding legalization of the banned Solidarity trade union.

The nationwide strike situation appeared uncertain and perhaps had reached a decisive moment. A dozen Silesian coal mines remained closed Tuesday night--workers at two additional mines joined the strike earlier in the day--although there were signs that some holdouts occupying the struck mines might be weakening.

News programs on Polish television Tuesday night included extensive coverage of the collapse of one strike, at the Andaluzja mine, where a Solidarity activist shouted to departing strikers that they had “destroyed the morale of all Silesia” and were “running away” in fear.

At least two other strikes ended Tuesday, one at a locomotive factory in Wroclaw and the other at a turbine factory in Poznan.

However, port workers remained on strike in Szczecin and Gdansk, where railway cars of coal were backed up waiting to be unloaded.

At Gdansk, Lech Walesa, founder of Solidarity, remained inside the Lenin Shipyard with about 250 generally youthful followers and succeeded in keeping the shipyard closed. The neighboring Northern Shipyard was also idled by an undetermined number of strikers. And two small units of a steel mill at Nowa Huta were reported to be on strike, along with workers at the Lenin mine in Myslowice-Wesola and the Marcel mine in Wodzislaw Slaski, who went out Tuesday.

The day’s score card--with two new strikes reported and four ended, including one halted by force--appeared to give the government the upper hand, at least temporarily.

Nevertheless, the government’s tattered economy and faded political credibility have still been further eroded by the latest round of strikes, the worst to hit Poland since the martial-law period of 1981. The loss in coal exports is estimated by the government to amount to about $1.5 million a day in badly needed hard currency. The strikes have also forced the government to admit that its economic reform plans have so far failed.

“There is no doubt,” government spokesman Jerzy Urban said Tuesday, “that the government bears an essential part of the burden for the situation of the economy.”

There is growing speculation that next Wednesday’s special session of the legislature, which was first suggested by the official Trade Union Federation of Poland, could result in the dismissal of some senior government officials. The target most often suggested is Premier Zbigniew Messner.

Hopes to Halt Strikes

Before the session begins, the government clearly hopes to put the clamp on further strikes and end those now in progress, employing, if necessary, more curfews, heavy contingents of police and stepped-up legal pressure on opposition activists.

The curfew at Jastrzebie was imposed on the morning after a television address by Gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak, the minister of the interior, who said he was empowering district officials in Katowice, which includes the Jastrzebie area, Szczecin and Gdansk to invoke a curfew if necessary to ensure public order.

Also Monday night, riot police in Szczecin stormed three bus and tram depots occupied by strikers. The strikers were ejected and hauled away in police vans.

The government said that buses were running normally Tuesday in Szczecin, although some vehicles were imported from neighboring communities and some military personnel were being used to ferry the vehicles.

Kiszczak, who is, in effect, the country’s chief law enforcement officer, also announced instructions to the courts to employ summary proceedings to speed the prosecution of persons arrested for “law and order” violations. Special police contingents will be used, he said, to protect “selected work establishments.”

“Let us not allow Poland to become a country of lawlessness and anarchy,” he said.

Kiszczak’s stern address was widely condemned by Solidarity activists, who charged that the authorities are resorting to force in order to solve the nation’s problems.

“The just protest of the workers must not be ignored,” Walesa said in a statement issued at the Lenin Shipyard. “The present situation cannot be solved by the repressive administrative measures announced. Political solutions are necessary. I am ready to take part in the search for such solutions for the good of Poland.”

Walesa’s willingness “to take part” has been a recent theme of the Solidarity leadership, which said last week that Walesa had been approached by an intermediary from “the highest echelons” of government. He suggested to reporters Tuesday that the door “has not been slammed” on the possibility of talks between him and government officials.

Similar suggestions have surfaced before, and government spokesman Urban seemed to scorn them Tuesday.

“What are we supposed to do?” he asked. “Jump over the shipyard fence?”

Urban said that contacts between the opposition and the government had “never been more dynamic” and had been getting “more and more rich” until the present wave of strikes.

“Certain gentlemen, living in the past, started to reverse this process,” he said. “No one has created the future by running backward.”

In Moscow, meanwhile, the Soviet government expressed its concern over the growing unrest in Poland, which the official press has reported cautiously but with increasing candor.

“We are closely following the situation in Poland,” Gennady I. Gerasimov, the chief Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman, told journalists Tuesday. “We are very attentive to developments, and we are, of course, concerned by events in Poland.”

The situation in Poland was also discussed at last week’s meeting of the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party, according to informed sources in Moscow. The continuing Soviet concern is not only over the stability of a key member of the Warsaw Pact but also over the effect of Polish developments on Soviet politics.

“The continuing Polish crisis has an impact on our policies, both at home and abroad, and what they do in Warsaw has implications for what we do in Moscow,” a Soviet official remarked. “Thus, our concern is very real, but it is the concern of one brother for another. Do not read anything deeper into it.”

But Izvestia, the Soviet government newspaper, urged Polish leaders to “adopt a more combative stand” and to drop their “vestments of penance.”

“The political enemies are just criticizing and rejecting everything,” Izvestia said, “but they have no positive program to offer--nothing at all.”

The official Soviet news agency Tass described the spreading strikes as “heightening social tensions” and described the strikers as “groups of extremists” against whom Polish authorities had taken action in an effort to restore order.

Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party newspaper, described the strikes as illegal and irresponsible, but it avoided naming Solidarity or spelling out the demand of the strikers that it and other independent trade unions be allowed to operate legally.

Michael Parks, chief of The Times’ Moscow Bureau, contributed to this article.