Radical Farmers' Union To Blockade Oil Refineries

WARSAW, Sep 6, 2000 -- (BBC Monitoring) Text of report by the Polish news agency PAP.

Samoobrona [Self-defense radical farmers' union] leader Andrzej Lepper has announced a blockade of the Plock Petrochemical Plant and Gdansk Oil Refinery next week. In his opinion, it will be a protest "against the government, which is doing nothing to cut fuel prices".

"Next week we will blockade the Plock Petrochemical Plant and Gdansk Refinery. We will not be protesting against those plants, but against the government, which is doing nothing to cut fuel prices - on the contrary, fuel prices rise at least once a week," the Samoobrona presidential candidate told journalists on Tuesday [5th September].

In his opinion, "the entrances to these plants are not public roads, so the blockades will not cause traffic problems". "We are doing this not only in the interests of Polish farmers, but of the whole of society, for fuel prices have a very powerful effect on food prices," Lepper said.

In the Samoobrona leader's opinion, the [annual national] Harvest Festival at Jasna Gora [monastery in Czestochowa] was "Solidarity Electoral Action [AWS] leader Marian Krzaklewski's election campaign, organized by Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek and the Polish bishops".

"This was a campaign spectacle; it had very little in common with a harvest festival, with thanking God for the harvest; Krzaklewski was being promoted the whole time," Lepper said.

He also announced that Samoobrona representatives would not take part in the so-called presidential harvest festival, organized by Roman Jagielinski's People's Democratic Party [PLD] in Spala on 10th September.

"Who are we to thank for the harvest: the president, who, among other things, signed the law bringing in 3 per cent VAT on farm produce and who last year supported the use of force against the protesting farmers?" Lepper asked. According to him, "Kwasniewski has remembered the farmers in the presidential election year".

"Mr. Jagielinski no longer knows what to cling to, and now he is trying to please the SLD [opposition Democratic Left Alliance] in order to become a [parliamentary] deputy on the SLD ticket in next year's parliamentary elections," the Samoobrona leader thinks.

http://centraleurope.com/news.php3?id=196322

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), September 06, 2000