Although Still Outlawed, Solidarity Sees Gains

Leaders of Solidarity, in agreeing to participate in more talks with the Polish government without a guarantee that their union will be legalized, have retreated from their most significant demand. But they have been encouraged, some of them said Saturday, that negotiations so far amount to the government’s implicit recognition of the union’s importance to the country.

Solidarity’s decision to take part in the government’s proposed “round-table” talks, beginning in mid-October, came at the end of an intense six-hour session Friday between about a dozen Solidarity leaders and a government team led by Gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak, minister of internal affairs.

The Solidarity team, headed by Lech Walesa, had hoped that the meeting would result in a guarantee by the government that it intends to legalize the union, in at least some form.

But Wladyslaw Frasyniuk, the union’s leader from Wroclaw who was present at the meeting, said that Kiszczak convinced Walesa, who in turn convinced the rest of the Solidarity delegation, that conservative forces in the Polish government and Communist Party are at present too strong to allow the immediate recognition of the union.

Frasyniuk, who had taken detailed notes at the meeting, briefed a small group of reporters and Solidarity activists early Saturday.

He quoted Kiszczak as saying that he saw “a place for Solidarity in the country” but that “my hands are tied because the apparatus reacts violently to the proposition of the return of Solidarity.” Kiszczak added, however, that the issue remains “an open affair” and urged that Solidarity participate in the round-table discussions as a way to “accomplish things that otherwise could not be done.”

Kiszczak, Frasyniuk said, told the Solidarity team that “it was a matter of time” for the government and party to accept the idea of a legalized Solidarity.

Walesa, Frasyniuk said, pressed Kiszczak for some concession.

“Solidarity can talk about anything,” Walesa reportedly said, “but we have to be a protagonist in those talks. We want a declaration. Truly, that is not too much. It is just a matter of good will.”

Stanislaw Ciosek, an alternate member of the party’s Politburo and Kiszczak’s partner in three preliminary meetings with Walesa, spoke bluntly, according to Frasyniuk’s account, but also accentuated the positive side for Solidarity.

“We have certain limits,” Ciosek said, according to Frasyniuk. “One is that it is not possible for the government to say that it is willing to register Solidarity. The fact that Solidarity is here, talking, is a reflection of the importance of the union . . . “

At another point in the meeting, Frasyniuk said, Ciosek broke into the discussion and said: “Look at what’s happening. Here’s Kiszczak talking to Frasyniuk! Two or three years ago, who would have believed that could happen?”

Ciosek’s comment was a reference to Kiszczak’s role as the country’s chief law enforcement officer during the imposition of martial law in 1981 and the banning of the union in 1982. Frasyniuk is well known as one of the union’s most hard-line activists.

At several points during the session, Frasyniuk said, the discussion broke off, and the Solidarity representatives held intense conversations among themselves. As the evening wore on, a consensus developed among them to move forward without the government guarantee.

It is uncertain how Solidarity members across the country will react to the leaders’ retreat on the legalization issue. Strikes that broke out in mid-August were halted by Walesa after the government proposed the round-table talks, but only after a major effort of persuasion by the union leader.

Zbigniew Bujak, the union’s influential Warsaw leader, voiced what is likely to be the leadership’s line in dealing with its activist members: “The authorities need time to get themselves organized.”

“If someone thinks that the legalization of Solidarity will be done in one act, they are wrong,” he went on. “It is not one act, it is a process. The important thing about this meeting was that the authorities realized there is a broad social consensus that Solidarity should exist.”