Hero of workers now solitary man

Lech Walesa addresses Gdansk ship workers during the 1980 strike which changed the political face of Europe.

POLAND - First there were just grainy black and white newspaper shots of an impish-looking man sporting a huge walrus moustache and a tattered checked shirt.

A cigarette was permanently stuck in his fist as he addressed a vast crowd of dishevelled shipyard workers in a remote Baltic seaside town somewhere behind the Iron Curtain.

It was 26 years ago this month and it was only a matter of days before the world became wholly familiar with Lech Walesa and "Solidarnosc", the Solidarity trade union movement he founded in Gdansk.

The Polish port's odd-jobbing electrician with the gift of the gab went on to become one of the key figures of the 20th century. Under Walesa, Solidarity set a tide of popular protest in motion that eventually dragged Poland out of communism with the rest of Iron Curtain Europe in hot pursuit.

Walesa was subsequently rewarded when he was elected the first president of a post-war democratic Poland and awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1983.

But this week a chapter in his extraordinary biography was brought to a close with the announcement that he has finally left the Solidarity union he founded, for good.

His decision was not entirely unexpected: "This is no longer my union. This is a different era, there are different people and different problems," he said last year.

However this week the reasons for his departure became clear. Lech Walesa admitted that he had fallen out with two of Solidarity's former leading lights who nowadays just happen to be Poland's controversial president and prime minister - the twin brothers Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

The Kaczynskis have provoked a storm of protest because of perceived illiberal attitudes towards homosexuality, the European Union and Poland's communist past.

Walesa's decision to quit Solidarity was motivated by the Kaczynski Administration's disputed policy under which all files of Poland's former communist secret police are to be made public.

With fears that the new so-called "transparency law" will amount to a witch hunt, Walesa castigated the twins saying they'd always harboured "conspiracy theories".

As a snub to the brothers, Walesa will not be attending Solidarity's 26th anniversary celebrations in Poland this month.

Yet the debt the organisation and Poland owes to the union's founder is clearly immeasurable.

These days Gdansk is a lively, beautiful and tourist-packed town. It is almost impossible to imagine what it was like in 1980 when Walesa climbed over a wall at the city's dreary, smoke-blackened Lenin shipyard to launch Solidarity.

The endless queues outside near-empty food shops, the shabby buildings stinking of garbage and disinfectant, the putt-putting two-stroke cars and the constant fear of secret police informers have gone forever.

Walesa did not start the strike of 1980 that sparked Solidarity's birth. The dispute arose over a decision by management to sack a troublesome woman crane driver called Anna Walentynowicz who had been fighting the bosses over better pay and conditions and had been demanding the shipyard erect a monument dedicated to protesting workers shot dead by communist militia during the 1970s.

Small groups of workers backed Walentynowicz by putting up posters. Management tore them down. There was an uneasy standoff until a small, chain-smoking electrician climbed over the shipyard wall and got up on a crate to address the workers.

"Ladies and gentlemen, you know me, Lech Walesa. I was sacked for making the same protests as Anna. This time we will make sure she keeps her job."

It was August 14, 1980, and the Lenin shipyard strike - the first by what became the first free trade union in communist controlled eastern Europe - was under way.

Within days the strikes had spread throughout Poland. Walesa had stepped up claims to include the unthinkable demand to form free trade unions.

By the end of August the humiliated communist government of General Wociejch Jaruzelski was forced to capitulate and Solidarity had the unprecedented right in communist-controlled Europe, to strike and organise itself as an independent union.

For 16 months Solidarity enjoyed a heyday of freedom. Walesa travelled abroad as a guest of the International Labour Movement and in January 1981, he was received by Pope John II in the Vatican.

But by December, Jaruzelski's nerves cracked and Poland's communist government, now seriously worried about a Soviet invasion, imposed martial law, suspended Solidarity, locked up its leaders and put Walesa under "house arrest".

Yet Solidarity refused to die. Walesa remained its undisputed leader, even in captivity.

In November 1982, Walesa was finally released and reinstated at the Gdansk shipyard. But although martial law was formally lifted nine months later in July 1983, many of its restrictions remained in force.

In the same year Walesa was awarded the Nobel peace prize. The worsening economic conditions, and the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin, finally forced the increasingly unpopular Jaruzelski government to negotiate with Solidarity.

In August 1989, nine years after Walesa climbed over the Lenin shipyard wall, Poland held democratic elections which gave the country its first non-communist government in more than40 years.

It was inevitable Walesa would become democratic Poland's first President. By 1989, the man once dismissed by the country's former leadership as "the electrician" had become the nation's undisputed hero.

Yet Walesa did not shine in the post he held until 1995.

Deprived of his natural communist enemies, President Walesa's outspoken style did not seem to fit.

He stumbled delivering long speeches and was frequently portrayed in Poland's new free press as a coarse, blundering buffoon - not least because his closest adviser was his chauffeur with whom he played long games of table tennis.

In Poland's 1995 presidential election Walesa was defeated by the former communist Aleksander Kwasniewski and went back to Gdansk to live with his wife Danuta and his eight children.

Like Gorbachev and Churchill after 1945, he has found it difficult to accept he has now become an historical figure.

Yet it is unlikely Poland or the rest of former communist Europe would have become what they are without him.

- INDEPENDENT