photo - Lech Walesa Institute
The Nobel Prize-winner writes in an open letter that “it is difficult for me to even express the level of indignation, disgust and pain” that the allegations cause him.
The decision to write an open letter was taken, he says, as he hoped that his opinions would reach “as wide a range of people who are not indifferent to the legacy of Solidarity,” adding that he also hoped that his words would reach the young.
The former president singled out the “cynical staff and supporters of the media empire of Father Director Tadeusz Rydzyk, the founder of the ultra-conservative Radio Maryja as the main source of the so-called “propaganda” against both him and the Solidarity movement.
“The result of such manipulation of people by the media is the emergence of increasingly common un-Christian attitudes, full of hatred and condemnation towards those who have had the finger pointed at them by the aforementioned Father Director,” he wrote.
Walesa also specifically referred to allegations that he was Agent “Bolek,” a figure who according to communist secret police files from 1970s, was a regular informer in Gdansk, northern Poland, several years prior to the founding of the Solidarity Movement.
The theory that Walesa was an informer has dogged him for years, and he has always refuted the charges.
In the open letter, he gave the last word to a 2000 appeal court ruling that concluded that “no original documents exist confirming that Lech Walesa was a secret collaborator of the Security Services of the People's Repubic of Poland.”
However, in spite of the 2000 ruling, the state-sponsored Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), published a weighty tome in 2008, claiming that Walesa had in fact been an agent (The Security Services and Lech Walesa)
Walesa has acknowledged that he had spoken with the secret police, but stressed that he had not collaborated.
“It was all a clever game,” he told a UK daily last year.
“It was important to play it to give the impression I was weak, so as not to be eliminated,” he added.
“Not for a moment was I on the other side,” he claimed. (nh/pg)