Twenty-five years after Polish shipyard workers began a strike that changed the world, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa complains about missed chances since the fall of communism.
The candid views of the 61-year-old former Lenin Shipyard electrician reflect the disappointment with economic reforms over the past 15 years -- but they're also a sign of how far Poland has come.
"I would have never believed we'd see Poland in the EU 25 years ago," Walesa said ahead of ceremonies planned for yesterday to mark 25 years since the Solidarity trade union achieved legal status.
Solidarity's battle ended communist rule in Poland in 1989 and sparked its demise in the rest of eastern Europe, ending the continent's Cold War division.
Last year, Poland became the largest of 10 new, mostly ex-communist members to join the EU. But after the post-communist economic upheavals, many Poles are still waiting for the promised prosperity, with a jobless rate of around 20 percent.
"I'm pleased with the success of freedom for Poland, for Europe, for the world, but unhappy with all the wasted and missed opportunities," Walesa said.
In the "hot summer" of 1980, Walesa was a sacked electrician at the shipyard in the Baltic port of Gdansk. He and others banded together to protest the indignity and oppression of Soviet-backed rule in Warsaw.
"We're staging an occupational strike" -- those simple words uttered by Walesa on Aug. 14 that year came to mean much more as the stoppages rippled through Poland.
After only 15 days of strikes involving almost 20 percent of the country's workforce and negotiations between strikers and communist party officials, an accord allowing the Soviet bloc's first free trade union was signed on Aug. 31 by Walesa and Deputy Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Jagielski.
The first mass strike behind the Iron Curtain -- involving an unheard-of coalition of workers, dissident intellectuals and peasant farmers -- culminated in the adoption of human rights and civil liberties no communist state had ever allowed.
The bloodless victory was partly fueled by public outrage at deadly crackdowns by communist authorities against protesting workers in 1956, 1970 and 1976.
But by December 1981, Warsaw's communist rulers struck back. General Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law and jailed Solidarity's leaders, including Jaruzelski. Communist militia shot and killed nine miners during the crackdown, and Solidarity was driven underground.
Jaruzelski still argues the alternative was Soviet intervention, though many historians believe no such move was imminent.
"We were fighting a peaceful, bloodless battle from the very beginning, but this was absolutely not the case on the communist side," former Polish prime minister Jerzy Buzek, a key 1980 Solidarity activist in Poland's southern Silesian coal basin, told reporters this week.
In October 1984 -- with martial law already lifted -- Solidarity priest Jerzy Popieluszko was killed by communist secret police. His bound and gagged body was fished out of the Vistula River. The grisly death undermined what little was left of the regime's legitimacy.
Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and in 1990 become Poland's first democratically elected president after communism, credits the late Pope John Paul II with inspiring the uprising in his deeply Roman Catholic homeland.
"Poles saw they were many," Walesa said in Warsaw this week, commenting on John Paul's electrifying first homecoming as pope in 1979.
"Before his visit there were only a few of us. After he came, we were 10 million," Walesa has said.
In 1980, Solidarity blossomed over little more than a year from August into a 10-million-strong powerhouse. Eight years after the bloody setback of martial law, it rose again to demand a negotiated end to communism, a peaceful transition to democracy and a market economy.
In historic round-table talks with Solidarity leaders in the summer of 1989, the communist leaders conceded partially free elections -- a breakthrough followed in November by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Since those heady days, the Solidarity trade union has seen a sharp decline in popularity and membership as well as bitter divisions among former friends and comrades.
With dwindling membership, the union is now fighting for survival by rallying a new generation of Polish retail workers employed in modern, Western-owned hypermarkets and chain stores, while also trying to retain its communist-era base in the heavy industrial sector of coal and steel.
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