GDANSK (Poland): It was 6 a.m. and Lech Walesa was late for an appointment with history. He was supposed to be at the Gdansk shipyard, rallying workers to go on strike and defy Poland’s Soviet-controlled communist government.
The shipyard’s former electrician, who had been fired for his attempts to form a trade union, says he was late on that August morning in 1980 because he was trying to shake off a secret police agent who was following him.
His colleagues waiting at the shipyard did not know that.
“I looked at the crowd which had gathered there and I was terrified,” said Jerzy Borowczak, another activist.
“‘Everything is lost,’ I thought. ‘We won’t do it’.”
But just as the shipyard’s manager was beginning to persuade some workers to resume work, Walesa turned up, vaulting over the shipyard’s gate to bypass security.
“We begin a sit-in strike,” he told the workers. Twenty-five years later, Walesa will take centre stage again next week as Poland celebrates the creation of Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc.
Solidarity toppled communism in Poland in 1989, dealing a first blow to Soviet authorities who would soon be overthrown in countries across eastern Europe and in Russia itself.
Since his union heyday and a difficult term as president, Walesa has spent several years in the political wilderness.
But the anniversary festivities — and his plans to use the event to hand in his Solidarity membership card — have brought the democracy icon back into the limelight.
Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, said his decision to hand in his card was a natural consequence of the changes since communism was overthrown — changes that include Poland’s entry into the European Union last year.
“I was a member of a freedom movement, not just a trade union,” he told Reuters. “I feel that Poland is safe now. I am confident of its place in history and in Europe.”
Walesa’s trade union colleagues and peers still praise the man with the walrus moustache who became a beacon of hope for millions in countries behind the Iron Curtain.
“He had the ability to unite workers and intellectuals which was unique,” Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Walesa adviser said.
The August 1980 strike at the Gdansk shipyard lasted two tense weeks. The authorities thought about sending in tanks to break it up but finally gave in to the workers’ determination.
The image of 37-year-old Walesa being carried on the shoulders of fellow workers through the shipyard’s gate towards a cheering crowd was beamed around the world.
The Solidarity movement was defeated a year later in a military backlash but it went underground and re-emerged in 1989 with a freedom march that brought about the collapse of communist states across the region.—Reuters
