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Lech Walesa was born on September 29, 1943 in
Popowo, near Wloclawek,
Poland. The son of a carpenter, received only primary and vocational education
and in 1967 began work as an electrician at the huge Lenin Shipyard in
Gdansk. He witnessed the 1970 food riots in Gdansk in which police
killed a number of demonstrators. When new protests against Poland's Communist
government erupted in 1976, Walesa emerged as an antigovernment union activist
and lost his job as a result. On Aug. 14, 1980, during protests at the
Lenin shipyards caused by an increase in food prices, Walesa climbed
over the shipyard fence and joined the workers inside, who elected him
head of a strike committee to negotiate with management. Three days later
the strikers' demands were conceded, but when strikers in other Gdansk
enterprises asked Walesa to continue his strike out of solidarity, he immediately
agreed. Walesa took charge of an Interfactory Strike Committee that united
the enterprises of the Gdansk-Sopot-Gdynia area. This committee issued
a set of bold political demands, including the right to strike and form
free trade unions, and it proclaimed a general strike. Fearing a national
revolt, the Communist authorities yielded to the workers' principal demands,
and on August 31 Walesa and Mieczyslaw Jagielski, Poland's first deputy
premier, signed an agreement conceding to the workers the right to organize
freely and independently.
When some 10 million Polish workers and farmers joined semiautonomous
unions in response to this momentous agreement, the Interfactory Strike
Committee was transformed into a national federation of unions under the
name Solidarity (Solidarnosc), with Walesa as its chairman and chief
spokesman. Solidarity was officially recognized by the Polish government
in October, and Walesa steered the federation on a course of carefully
limited confrontations with the government in order to avert the possibility
of Soviet military intervention in Poland. The federation's gains proved
ephemeral, however; on Dec. 13, 1981, the Polish government imposed martial
law, Solidarity was outlawed, and most of the leaders of Solidarity were
arrested, including Walesa, who was detained for nearly a year. The awarding
of the Nobel Prize for Peace to Walesa in 1983 was criticized by
the Polish government; fearing involuntary exile, he remained in Poland
while his wife, Danuta, traveled to Oslo, Nor., to accept the prize on
his behalf.
As the leader of the now-underground Solidarity movement, Walesa
was subjected to constant harassment until collapsing economic conditions
and a new wave of labor unrest in 1988 forced Poland's government to negotiate
with him and other Solidarity leaders. These negotiations led to an agreement
that restored Solidarity to legal status and sanctioned free elections
for a limited number of seats in the newly restored upper house of the
Sejm (Parliament). Solidarity won an overwhelming majority of those seats
in June 1989, and after Walesa refused to form a coalition government
with the Communists, the Parliament was forced to accept a Solidarity-led
government, though Walesa himself refused to serve as premier.
Walesa helped his Solidarity colleague Tadeusz
Mazowiecki become premier of this government in 1989, but he ran against
Mazowiecki for president in 1990 and won Poland's first direct presidential
election by a landslide. As president, Walesa helped guide Poland
through its first free parliamentary elections (1991) and watched as successive
ministries converted Poland's state-run economy into a free-market system.
Walesa had displayed remarkable political skills as the leader of
Solidarity, but his plain speech, his confrontational style, and his refusal
to approve a relaxation of Poland's strict new prohibitions on abortion
eroded his popularity late in his term as president. In 1995 he sought
reelection but was narrowly defeated by Aleksander Kwasniewski, head of
the Democratic Left Alliance.
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