Polish Church leaders have defended their country’s former Solidarity union leader and head of state Lech Walesa, after he was accused by President Lech Kaczynski of being an ex-agent for the communist secret police.“I’m sorry for this, since I know the President of the Republic is careful to control what he says. Nor do I understand it, since many people really had a hard time, but seldom as hard as Lech Walesa,” said Mgr Tadeusz Goclowski, the recently retired archbishop of Gdansk.
“I’ve been connected to this region for 48 years, and I remember well what happened here. As a person struggling with the communist system, Walesa did a huge amount, not only for Poland.”
The archbishop was reacting to a television interview, during which President Kaczynski claimed Mr Walesa had used the codename ‘Bolek’ while working as an agent for the communist regime’s Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, or SB, before the rise of Solidarity in 1980.
The president made the accusation as a new book was released by researchers at Poland’s official National Remembrance Institute, allegedly detailing documentary evidence of the Solidarity leader’s SB links in the early 1970s.
Meanwhile, another senior churchman accused the authors of the book, The SB and Walesa: Selected Issues, of attempting to “disavow Walesa’s role in dismantling communism” by choosing only incriminating material.
“This thesis is intellectually absurd, since it forgets the 15 years between 1976 and 1991 when Walesa became the main figure in bringing down this great empire,” Dominican Father Maciej Zieba, director of the Gdansk’s European Solidarity Centre, told the Catholic KAI newsagency.
Walesa, now 64, led the Solidarity union from Gdansk’s Lenin Shipyard and was interned under martial law in 1981-3, but later helped to bring about the peaceful collapse of communist rule and served as Poland’s first democratic president in 1990-5.
He was exonerated by Poland’s Lustration Court in 2000 after previous secret police allegations, and later awarded communist victim status. Lech Kaczynski, who fell out with him after serving as a close Solidarity aide, was ordered to pay damages and apologise in 2005 after being sued for accusing him of tolerating criminality.
In an open letter, Walesa said Kaczynski had “disgraced his name” as head of state, adding that he would go to court if the accusation was not withdrawn.
Meanwhile, the book was disowned by the vice-president of the National Remembrance Institute, Maria Dmochowska, who said she felt “regret, shame and anger” that her organisation had published it.
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