Institute says Walesa collaborated with communist secret police!

WARSAW: Poland’s government-affiliated history institute said on Tuesday it had new evidence that Lech Walesa, who led protests and strikes that shook communist rule in the 1980s, had been a paid informant for the secret police in the 1970s.
A lawyer for Walesa, whose leadership of the Solidarity trade union contributed to the fall of communism throughout eastern Europe, said the evidence could be faulty and asked to question the assessors.
The Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) said a handwriting study had proved the authenticity of documents suggesting that Walesa, who was awarded the Nobel Peace prize and became Polish president, had collaborated with communist rulers.
It said he had provided at least 29 reports signed “Bolek”, a codename long ascribed to Walesa, but did not say what they contained.
“There is no doubt,” investigator Andrzej Pozorski told a news conference. “A handwritten agreement to collaborate with the Security Police from December 21, 1970, was written in its entirety by Lech Walesa.”
Pictures of the moustachioed former electrician being borne aloft by workers occupying the Gdansk shipyards became an inspiration for anti-communist movements across the Soviet bloc.
Walesa, now 73, has acknowledged once signing a commitment to inform, but he insists he never fulfilled it, and a special court exonerated him in 2000.
The issue has flared up again since the conservative, nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, also a former anti-communist activist who fell out with Walesa in the 1990s, won power in 2015.
The PiS argues that Poland lost sight of its Catholic national identity and of social justice in the transition to democracy and eventual membership of the European Union.
Any suggestion that Poland remained under communist influence despite ending totalitarian rule in 1989 — notably that Walesa might have been controlled by former secret police as president in 1990-95 — strengthens the PiS narrative.
“We don’t want to remove Walesa from history books,” IPN head Jaroslaw Szarek told reporters. “What changes is how he can be evaluated.”
“Starting today, we can ask a new question: …to what extent Lech Walesa’s collaboration in the early 1970s determined his subsequent decisions… in the 1980s and after 1989. This question remains open.”
Pozorski said the IPN, set up in 1998 to investigate crimes “against the Polish nation”, had reviewed 17 cash receipts and concluded they were written by Walesa.
— Reuters