EAST BLOC IN TURMOIL : For Harried Polish Leaders, VIP Delegations Simply Magnify Woes

The Bush Administration is sending Poland’s new Solidarity-backed government just what some people say it doesn’t need--another delegation of high-level VIPs.

The visitors, who are scheduled to arrive late today on a special Air Force jet, include three U.S. Cabinet officers--Agriculture Secretary Clayton K. Yeutter, Commerce Secretary Robert A. Mosbacher and Labor Secretary Elizabeth Hanford Dole--and Michael Boskin, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Accompanying them will be AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland and a bevy of top U.S. business executives.

Administration officials concede privately that the visit was designed more for domestic political reasons in the United States than a pressing need on the part of the Poles.

Early in October, the White House was searching for a way to underscore its admonition to Congress that “throwing money” at Poland wasn’t the only way to help it solve its economic problems. Someone came up with an idea: Why not send a team of Cabinet officers and business leaders to survey the situation and provide the Poles with advice?

Even with the stiff transatlantic rates charged by the Air Force, it sounded like a bargain--compared to the extra $600 million that Congress wanted to appropriate for greater aid to Poland.

But the high-level visit will consume three full days and the personal attention of Poland’s key Cabinet ministers at a time when the Poles themselves urgently need to finish hammering out their special economic and domestic programs.

Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz is in the final stage of complex negotiations with the International Monetary Fund over a crucial economic loan that he hopes will be approved in late November or early December. The government’s new plan for privatizing the economy is due out in early December as well. And Poland is slated to start its sweeping new economic restructuring program in early January--only a few weeks away.

To add to the troubles, the new Solidarity government is paper-thin. It is composed of a handful of Cabinet ministers and aides who until recently were professors and labor activists, inexperienced in getting a new government off the ground.

“All we have is 10 ministers at the top, a few deputy ministers and no heads of departments,” said Jacek Szymanderski, head of the fledgling Solidarity Polish Peasants’ Party, an offshoot of Lech Walesa’s original group. The rest of Poland’s government are leftovers from the Communist days--men who have neither the training nor the inclination to carry out Solidarity’s programs.

Virtually all of the new Solidarity ministers have been working nearly around the clock to get their new policies in shape. Krzysztof Lis, the undersecretary of finance, who has been drafting the new industry privatization program, has been putting in 16- to 20-hour days.

This week’s American delegation isn’t the only one that the Poles have had in recent weeks. Since its start in September, the new Solidarity government has been distracted by a seemingly endless string of VIP visits from other donor countries, ranging from West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to Jacques Delors, president of the European Community. Last week, a delegation of Swiss members of Parliament was here.

“They are almost bumping into one another at the airport,” lamented a Polish official who helps arrange such official visits.

In addition to VIPs, there are visiting journalists. They require far less hoopla, but nevertheless take up ministers’ time.

Western governments “have so deluged Poland with delegations that we may end up killing the new government by giving its top ministers heart attacks,” wryly warned Gregory Vaut, director of the Warsaw-based Foundation for the Development of Polish Agriculture.

Vaut cited a string of visits by congressional delegations: “Each of them includes 12 members of Congress and their wives, and they all want to get Lech Walesa’s signature,” he said.

The Bush Administration itself is not united about the wisdom of this week’s mission. Back-corridor bureaucrats, borrowing the title of a novel and movie, already have irreverently dubbed the entourage the “Ship of Fools.”