Reporter Kabalinski Says Poles Still Mistrust U.S.

In spite of strong American support for Solidarity, the independent Polish trade union, in its challenge to Communist domination, the Polish people mistrust both the United States and the Soviet Union, a leading Polish journalist said yesterday.

The Poles fear that the Reagan administration will play the "Polish card," Jacek Kabalinski, president of the 5000-member Warsaw Journalists Association, added in an interview given after he spoke at an off-the-record seminar at the Center for International Affairs (CFIA).

Though he sympathizes with the Solidarity movement, Kabalinski is not a member of the union, and the association which he has headed since his election in August, 1980, is independent of both the government and the union.

A major factor preserving the peace in Poland, Kabalinski said, is the presence of moderate mediating forces, a role which his organization tries to perform.

The journalists' group is "trying to persuade both parties that freedom of information is in both their interests. If people are informed, they know the motives of their opponents," Kabalinski said.

Kabalinski criticized Solidarity, singling out the recent call for other Warsaw Pact nations' workers to follow its lead as "idealistic" but "politically counterproductive."

In a recent Op-Ed page article in the New York Times, he said the rank-and-file are "becoming more radical than their national or regional leaders, more radical even than the former dissidents now active in the union."

Kabalinski reserved his harshest statements for the Polish government. In his New York Times piece, he argued that "the crux of the problem is the government's failure to understand that a heavy-handed approach has always hardened the stubborn Poles instead of making them more compliant."

Defending the union against charges that it is unnecessarily pushing confrontation with the government after it has gotten so much, Kabalinski said yesterday the Communist leadership has yet to fulfill many of its earlier promises. "If the [August, 1980 political reforms of the] Gdansk agreements were carried out, that would be enough," he said.

Kabalinski has been on a speaking tour in the United States for three weeks. Last night, after leaving the CFIA, he spoke before two area labor unions.