Polish Police Break Up Steel Mill Strike

GDANSK, Poland--Riot squads stormed a strikebound steel mill in southern Poland yesterday and crushed a 10-day-old strike, and thousands of police surrounded a Gdansk shipyard in a tense standoff with defiant strikers.

Solidarity chief Lech Walesa vowed to be the "last to leave," as the deadlock continued into the night at the Lenin shipyard in this Baltic port city.

At the huge Nowa Huta steel mill in Krakow, riot police stormed sleeping steelworkers, hurled deafening percussion grenades and rounded up 38 people.

The government denied there were injuries, but opposition spokesmen said that strikers were beaten and that at least 32 people--including a man with two broken legs--required treatment.

At the Lenin shipyard, chants of "Solidarity! Solidarity!" could be heard inside the steelyard.

"The moment of the solution similar to that at Nowa Huta is approaching," Walesa said in a taped interview smuggled out of the yard.

As officials cracked down on the two major strikes, other work stoppages were reported in Poland. The strikes and stoppages represent the worst wave of labor unrest to hit Poland since the military crackdown in 1981.

Strikes and protests were reported among bus and steetcar drivers in the northwestern cities of Szczecin and Police, among students in Warsaw and Gdansk, and briefly by shipworkers in Gdynia, near Gdansk.

Riot squads stormed Nowa Huta just one day after Roman Catholic church mediators had persuaded plant directors to negotiate with the strikers.

Government spokesman Jerzy Urban told a news conference that the decision to storm the steel mill was inevitable. "The majority wanted to work...We must protect our meager economic potential," he said.

"This was a normal restoring of order when the law was being violated," he said.

Recent events proved that Walesa and his followers want to "evoke crisis and a confrontation," Urban said. And the government "has not, does not and shall not talk" with such people.

Police entered the strike center in the steelwork's pressing department at 2 a.m. Only hours earlier, the strike committee, which said it represented 15,000 of the 32,000 employees, was told it would have its first talks in a week with management.

As police came in, they set off percussion grenades, terrorizing the "paralyzed, defenseless and sleeping people," said Krzystof Kozlowski, a senior Roman Catholic journalist in Krakow.

Most strike committee members were detained immediately. Later, special riot police entered and ordered all strikers to leave.

"The whole thing took place without one bruise," Urban said in a telephone interview. "Nobody suffered any harm or injury."

But Zygmunt Lenyk, of the conservative opposition group Confederation of Independent Poland, said 32 people suffered cuts, eight people were left unconscious and one man had two legs broken.

The state-run news agency PAP said some departments in the steel plant resumed work yesterday while others remained idle for maintenance.

But workers emerging from Nowa Huta yesterday afternoon said some people inside had resumed striking. PAP reported that the rate of absenteeism at the plant was between 30 and 40 percent.

In Gdansk, the area around the Lenin shipyard was cordoned off by thousands of police. The shipyard went on strike Monday, its fourth strike since April 25.

Walesa joined the strikers on Wednesday and has remained in the plant ever since.

"Once again the possibility of logic and necessary solutions are being ruined," Walesa said in the taped statements. "They are sinking our country into ruin."

He continued: "It's certainly obvious that I'll be the last to leave."