News

Cambridge Residents Slam Council Proposal to Delay Bike Lane Construction

News

‘Gender-Affirming Slay Fest’: Harvard College QSA Hosts Annual Queer Prom

News

‘Not Being Nerds’: Harvard Students Dance to Tinashe at Yardfest

News

Wrongful Death Trial Against CAMHS Employee Over 2015 Student Suicide To Begin Tuesday

News

Cornel West, Harvard Affiliates Call for University to Divest from ‘Israeli Apartheid’ at Rally

Polish Government Arrests Pinion, A Key Strategist for Solidarity Group

NO WRITER ATTRIBUTED

WARSAW. Poland The Communist government yesterday announced the arrest of a key underground Solidarity strategist the latest in a series of detentions apparently the union's call for May Day protests.

Jozef Pinior, one of five fugitive Solidarity leaders who met with former union chief Lecb Walesa on April 9-11, was taken into custody in his hometown of Wroelaw, according to a dispatch by the official Polish news agency PAP.

The report did not specify when Pinior was arrested. The announcement was made one day before Walesa was to return to his job as an electrician at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, where he helped lead the August 1980 strikes that created Solidarity.

The 39 sear-old labor leader said the decision to give him his job back was intended in part to help authorities keep track of him and thereby curtail his contacts with the under ground.

However Walesa's readmission to the shipyard also puts him in direct also puts him in direct contact with the 17,000 yard workers who are his most avoid followers. Little is known about Pinior, who was treasurer of the Solidarity chapter in Lower Silesia before the Dec. 13, 1981, declaration of martial law.

A few days before the military crackdown, Pinior withdrew 80 million zlotys--$940,000 at official exchange rates--from the union's coffers and is believed to have spent the money in the underground campaign to restore Solidarity once the only union in the Soviet bloc free of Communist Party control.

Solidarity was suspended with the martial law declaration and outlawed last October. Walesa, interrogated three times after his clandestine meeting with the Solidarity underground said police questioned him about Pinior and the money, but that be refused to answer.

Reports of Pinior's arrest--also broadcast by Warsaw Radio--said police found "antistate" documents and large sums of Polish and foreign money in his apartment hideout.

Penal proceedings are under way against Pinior in connection with his embezzlement of 80 million zlotys, "PAP said. It did not say if he would be charged with political crimes as well.

A few day after meeting with Walesa, Pinior and the four other members of Solidarity's fugitive "temporary coordinating commission" issued a call for protest marches to counter officially sponsored demonstrations on May 1, the international workers' observance that is a major holiday in the Soviet bloc.

The other members of the Solidarity commission, representing workers in major population centers, are Zbigniew Bujak of Warsaw, Bogdon Lis of Gdansk, Wladyslaw Hardck of Krakow and Eugeniusz Szurniejko of Katowice.

No other members of the commission are known to have been arrested, although authorities in recent weeks have announced the detention and arrest of more than 50 members of solidarity and affiliated organizations.

Want to keep up with breaking news? Subscribe to our email newsletter.

Tags