Police Clash With Marchers on Anniversary of the Polish State

Riot police attacked demonstrators Friday night in Warsaw and three other Polish cities as thousands of people joined in rallies and marches on the 70th anniversary of the rebirth of the Polish state.

More than 20,000 people, chanting “Solidarity!” and “Independence!” and waving Solidarity banners, marched from St. John’s Cathedral in the capital’s Old Town area to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier following a Mass at the church, at which participants prayed, “May our Motherland achieve a true freedom.”

Later, police fired tear gas and charged about 1,000 young people gathered at the tomb when some of the youths threw sticks at officers, witnesses reported. They said demonstrators scattered and at least 10 were detained.

The violence came after Polish leaders put on the most elaborate celebration ever under Communist rule to mark the establishment of the non-Communist independent state that existed between the two world wars.

Rallies also were held in at least six other cities--Gdansk, Krakow, Wroclaw, Lublin, Lodz and Poznan--and opposition activists said police battled demonstrators in Gdansk, Poznan and Krakow.

In Gdansk, the Baltic port city where the now-outlawed Solidarity union movement was born, more than 25,000 people attended a Mass.

When the Warsaw march began, police at first directed traffic around the crowd, which included more than 2,000 students who had marched earlier from Warsaw University and passed near the Opera House, where Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski and other dignitaries attended a gala concert.

Poland emerged after World War I as a free country following 123 years of partition among Russia, Prussia and Austria. On Nov. 11, 1918, it proclaimed independence, which lasted until World War II, when Nazi Germany invaded its eastern neighbor.

The anniversary was ignored after the Communist takeover of Poland in 1944.

But in a series of firsts Friday, Jaruzelski, in his general’s uniform, reviewed Polish troops in a noon ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw as a military band played a song forbidden until recently. The tune, “We Are the First Brigade,” was sung by the legions of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, which defeated Soviet troops in the Battle of Warsaw in 1920 and pushed them back as far as Kiev in the Soviet Ukraine.

In another unprecedented event Friday, the news agency PAP announced that the tomb contained the ashes of a soldier who died in a battle against Russia in 1918.