INSIDE THE GDANSK SHIPYARD
For a moment it looked like August 1980.
Gdansk `CICHO! Quiet!' shouts a tired and earnest-looking worker, The boss wants to sleep!' And sure enough, here is Lech Walesa, lying flat on the floor, his unmis- takable moustache framed by an impro- vised pillow and his feet up on a chair. Negotiations are at a critical stage. Riot police surround the shipyard. All Poland watches. But within five minutes Lech is sound asleep. His steward carefully, almost tenderly, draws the curtain to protect 'the boss' from the bright afternoon sun. Around the wooden tables of the strike committee room, beneath the crucifix, workers and their intellectual advisers sit drafting texts, listening to the latest news from Radio Free. Europe on a short wave transistor radio and chewing dry bread. Others sleep under the tables, exhausted and oblivious.
Look at the main blue-grey gate, fes- tooned with flowers, flags and images of the Pope and the Black Madonna; look at the young workers perched atop it, strip- ped to the waist but never shedding their red and white armbands; half close your eyes and you might just imagine that you were back in August 1980, with Solidarity about to be born. Not just Walesa but many of the faces around him are familiar. Here is the melancholy-humorous face of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the Catholic editor whom he asked to advise him in August 1980 and who has been doing so eversince. There are the four-square features of Andrzej Celinski, a sociologist advising then as now.
Yet everything is changed, changed utterly. Then, a vast cheerful crowd of wives and wellwishers milled around be- fore the gates, passing in food and dona- tions through the bars. In their midst stood a crude wooden cross, with pinned to it some lines from Byron's `Giaour' in the translation by Adam Mickiewicz:
For Freedom's battle once begun, Bequeath'd by bleeding sire to son, Though baffled oft is ever won... .
But whoever wrote this dedication had omitted the word 'bleeding'. Now, in place of the wooden cross there are the soaring metal crosses of the Solidarity monument; but around it there is an eerie emptiness, with only the riot police and the blue marias of the Milicja visible some hundred yards away. Then, the gate was constantly opening to admit strike committee dele- gates from all over Poland, as well as Western journalists, ample food and sun- dry visitors. Now, Western journalists have to evade the police cordon and scramble in through obscure back corners of the vast yard. Scant food and messages are smug- gled in by the same precarious routes. On the eighth day of the 1980 strike there were many thousands of workers occupying the yard, not to mention the hundreds of delegates from other striking factories across the land. A Deputy Prime Minister was soon to open direct and public negotiations with the 'Inter-factory Strike Committee'. On the eighth day of this strike (Monday) the number of work- ers inside the yard has dwindled from thousands to hundreds. No 'Inter-factory Strike Committee'. No Deputy Prime Minister. No direct or public negotiations.
Some of these strikers were here in August 1980. But most of those that now remain are very young, in their late teens or early twenties. Their formative experi-
ence was martial law rather than 'August' or the 500 days of overground Solidarity. They interrupt Walesa's speeches with the hard, rhythmic chants characteristic of the post-martial law period: `sol-i-darnafe! sol- i-darno.§e!"nie ma wolnaki bez solidarnog- ci' (there's no freedom without Solidarity). He can barely restrain them. Unsurprising- ly, some Polish offical sources hint that Walesa planned this strike. So far as one can determine, this is the opposite of the truth. He certainly did not start it and he almost certainly did not want it. These workers started the strike themselves. If the Nowa Huta steelworkers came out, they say, how could they — in the birth- place of Solidarity — do less?
They hung five demands from the gate: a 15-20,000 zloty pay rise to compensate for the price rises, restoration of the Indepen- dent Self-Governing Trade Union 'Solidar- ity' in the shipyard, the release of all political prisoners, the re-employment of all those sacked for political reasons and no reprisals against the strikers. In conversa- tion they mention some of the underlying grievances which were there in 1980, and indeed.are chronic. 'I've waited 14 years for a flat,' 'says one blond, mustachioed welder. 'When I go to the accommodation department they say: "Do you belong to the official trade unions? Do you belong to any official organisation? No? Well that's too bad."' The injustice hurts as much as the material deprivation. His mate says simply: 'Forty years of socialism and there's still no toilet paper!'
Many Western governments and obser- vers agree with the Polish government (and the IMF) that the wage demands are unrealistic and irresponsible. Indeed, a decline in real wages is a necessary (though by no means a sufficient) condition for economic recovery or reform. But Solidar- ity leaders and advisers see this too. Even the strikers partly see it. When Walesa asked them whether they would abandon the wage demand if they got a genuinely independent trade union in the works they shouted back 'yes'. (What that union would then do is another question.) For those that remained on Monday there was essentially only one demand: the restora- tion of Solidarity in the shipyard where it was born. But the irony is this: inflationary pay rises are precisely what the authorities are prepared to concede. For several years now wages have leapfrogged ahead of prices, as frightened managers bought off potential discontent. This happened again last month with striking transport workers in Bydgoszcz. It has happened in the neighbouring yards, with large pay rises granted to pre-empt solidarity strikes. It has happened here, where management has agreed to a 15,500 zloty rise. The one thing the authorities refuse even to discuss is the one thing that the strikers really want: the restoration of Solidarity.
Sitting in the sunshine near the gate, an older striker, a technician, points up the
contrast with 1980. Today, he says, the external conditions are better but the inter- nal conditions are worse. In 1980 there was a real fear of Soviet invasion. With Gor- bachev, that has disappeared. 'The prob- lem of the Eastern border', as the old striker rather quaintly puts it, is no longer there. He also notes with pleasure the reaction of the American, British and German governments. This helps. On the other hand, there was in 1980 a real hope of a genuine agreement with the author- ities. He mentions the goodwill of the then Gdansk Party Secretary, Tadeusz Fisz- bach. There was hope of an historic com- promise. But today....
Today the authorities wage what Walesa calls 'psychological war'. There is the police siege. There was the news from Nowa Huta, where the strike was broken up with gratuitous violence not just by police but by a special anti-terrorist bri- gade. And then, every few hours, the factory radio broadcasts a communiqué from the managing director which explains that in the light of recent developments the National Bank has said it cannot extend any more credit and the Finance Ministry has said it cannot give any more subsidies, and therefore he has asked the Industry Minister for a decision on the future of the yard. In short, a threat of permanent closure. There have also been fraught and tortuous negotiations: between the Church-appointed mediators (Tadeusz Mazowiecki and the lawyer Wladyslaw Sila-Nowicki) and the management inside the shipyard, between the Bishop of Gdansk and the head of the Gdansk police, 'I thought their soccer hooligans were bad enough.' and at the highest level between the church and the authorities in Warsaw. But no one can square that circle: strikers who want Solidarity, authorities who will talk about everything except Solidarity.
And Walesa? Walesa insists that he is not the leader of the strike. Formally speaking he is not even on the strike committee. 'I'm an adviser to both sides,' he jokes. But of course he's 'the boss'. When Timothy Garton Ash described the August 1980 strikes in these pages he saw a `funny little man with a droopy moustache and ill-fitting trousers' (The Spectator, 30 August 1980). Today, Walesa is a portly figure, with neatly trimmed hair and mous- tache, a rather smart sports jacket (though still with the Black Madonna and Solidarity badge on the lapel), well-fitting pin-striped trousers and, somewhat incongruously, leather house-slippers. He chews vitamin C tablets and has a doctor in attendance, a charming elderly lady professor in a white coat. He is calm and authoritative, sum- moning advisers like a king. In 1980 he was surrounded by an excited crowd of blue- overalled workers wherever he dashed he was one of them. Today, the young strikers treat him almost with awe — he is twice their age, and a world celebrity. But he has not lost the gift of the gab. On Monday afternoon he lifts their spirits and stiffens their morale with a characteristic, quick-fire speech. 'There aren't so few of us,' he says. 'It's enough.'
It looks like intransigence. But it isn't, for Walesa is a natural politician and he knows exactly what he's doing. He knows perfectly well that he can't get Solidarity back with 500 lads and a prayer. But as the national leader and worldwide symbol of Solidarity he cannot be seen to settle for less. So he encourages the negotiations — `Panie Tadeuszu,' he exclaims to Mazo- wiecki, 'you're the man for negotiations, you're for wisdom' — at least partly playing for time to see whether after all, against all the odds, other big factories will come out again in solidarity as they did in 1980. Meanwhile, he'll keep ahead of the crowd so that he can be sure to lead them out the only other possible way: that is, in a dignified voluntary withdrawal, without agreement. Just for a moment on Monday afternoon it looks as if the miracle might happen: `Ursus is out!' someone shouts, and indeed Radio Free Europe brings the news that the Ursus tractor works near War- saw have gone on strike. But it is at best only half-true, and by evening Walesa and his advisers can see — as they expected — that history does not repeat itself. So on Tues- day they march out through the gates, arm in arm, Father Jankowski to Walesa's right hand, Tadeusi Mazowiecki to his left, and off to St Bridget's church for a thanksgiv- ing Mass. In front of them someone carries the new wooden cross that had been planted just inside the yard gates. It bears the words 'God, Honour, Country', and underneath '1970, 1980, 1988....'
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