obel prizewinner and free non-communist trade union organizer Lech Walesa was born on September 29, 1943 in Popowo, Poland. His working class background included time spent as a car mechanic, corporal in the Polish army, and electrician in the shipyards of Gdansk. Starting in 1970 with food price demonstrations, Walesa's shop steward activities and activism marked him as a troublemaker in the eyes of the Polish government. In 1976 Walesa's drive to have a memorial erected to those shipyard workers killed in the 1970 food demonstrations ultimately caused him to be fired from the Gdansk shipyards, suffer through a series of arrests and survive for a time on friends' charity, odd jobs, and help through the Worker's Defense Committee, an organization founded to support striking Polish workers.
Although Walesa was continuously detained by the police and under surveillance when freed, he helped organize the Gdansk shipyard strike against yet another round of governmental increases in food prices in August 1980, which encouraged a series of workers' strikes throughout Poland. By the end of that month, the local Gdansk authorities bowed to Walesa's worker demands and negotiated the Gdansk Agreement. Based on the platform of the Worker's Defense Committee, the Gdansk Agreement recognized the workers' right to strike and form a union free from communist influence.
In September 1980 workers' groups from around Poland formed Solidarity, the first free trade union of the Soviet Bloc, and Walesa was elected as their chairman. The following year Walesa traveled outside of Poland to the Vatican to meet Pope John Paul II and then onto Italy, Switzerland, France, Sweden, and Japan. Frightened by the burgeoning freedom movement in Poland in 1981 and worried that the Soviets would invade, then Polish Prime Minister and former Defense Minister General Jaruzelski declared martial law, shut down Solidarity, and arrested its leaders either imprisoning them or, in Walesa's case, sending him to a remote country estate under house arrest.
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"We are fighting for the right of the working people to association and for the dignity of human labour. We respect the dignity and the rights of every man and every nation. The path to a brighter future of the world leads through honest reconciliation of the conflicting interests and not through hatred and bloodshed. To follow that path means to enhance the moral power of the all-embracing idea of human solidarity.
I feel happy and proud that over the past few years this idea has been so closely connected with the name of my homeland.
In 1905, when Poland did not appear on the map of Europe, Henryk Sienkiewicz said when receiving the Nobel prize for literature: "She was pronounced dead - yet here is a proof that She lives on; She was declared incapable to think and to work - and here is proof to the contrary; She was pronounced defeated - and here is proof that She is victorious".
Today nobody claims that Poland is dead. But the words have acquired a new meaning. (Excerpt from 1983 Acceptance Speech for Nobel Peace Prize by Lech Walesa) |
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Walesa was released in 1982 and returned to the Gdansk shipyards under police surveillance but still managed to maintain ties to the Solidarity workers. In 1983 Walesa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which energized his nation's underground freedom movement. In 1988 General Jaruzelski's continuing socialist mismanagement of Poland caused his popularity to drop to the point where he had to negotiate with Walesa and the Solidarity leaders in order to run Poland. This lead to elections where a coalition of communist and non-communist Solidarity members formed the first non-communist government of Poland since the end of WWII.
Once again Walesa received worldwide recognition and in 1990 was elected not only Chairman of Solidarity but also President of the Republic of Poland. He remained President until his defeat in 1995 and has since gone into political retirement.
