Word: gdansk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After a two-day strategy session in the Baltic port of Gdansk, Solidarity called simultaneous press conferences there and in Warsaw to deliver a stunning announcement: the organization was moving back aboveground and would openly campaign for recognition. "We do not want to act clandestinely," said Solidarity Chairman Lech Walesa in announcing the formation of the Temporary Council of Solidarity, which will seek to persuade the government to permit independent trade unions. "It is necessary to work out and agree upon a new model of open and legal activity," Walesa added...
...mistakenly assesses its possibilities." To drive home the point, authorities summoned Walesa and five members of the seven-man council for weekend questioning. Walesa described his 30-minute interrogation session as "cultured and friendly," but noted that there was still a "lack of understanding" by Polish officials. Said the Gdansk shipyard electrician: "At the moment there is no good will on the other side. There is no reasonableness...
...perhaps the greatest threat to Communist rule in the East bloc since Czechoslovakia's uprising in 1968, had at last been all but crushed after the capture two weeks earlier of Zbigniew Bujak, the underground's mastermind. Former leaders who are free, like Lech Walesa, the sturdy electrician from Gdansk, have withdrawn from public life. Partly because of Solidarity's collapse, the Catholic Church has resumed its role as the sole counterweight to Jaruzelski's regime...
Inside the Gdansk courtroom, the judge began trial proceedings last week with a few routine questions. He asked the defendant's profession (electromechanic); his salary ($85 a month); and if he had any decorations. He did, including the Nobel Prize for Peace, and he had once been the leader of the banned Solidarity trade union. The defendant, Lech Walesa, was in court to answer charges that he had slandered members of several regional electoral commissions. His alleged crime: issuing estimates of voter turnout in Poland's parliamentary balloting last October that were lower than government figures...
...rural areas, entire villages, in a swirl of colorful peasant costumes, dutifully trooped to local election halls behind brass bands. In the northwestern hamlet of Szczecinek, voting was temporarily disrupted when a woman gave birth to a healthy son beside the ballot box. In Walesa's hometown of Gdansk, 3,000 people marched through the streets carrying a banner that proclaimed WE WON'T GO TO THE POLLS, and in the steel-mill city of Nowa Huta, hundreds of youths clashed with plainclothes police. The head of Poland's Roman Catholic hierarchy, Jozef Cardinal Glemp, was conveniently in Rome...