Word: walesa
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Workers at the Lenin shipyard, in the Baltic seaport of Gdansk, laid down their tools on Aug. 14 and refused to leave. As news of the strike spread, an unemployed electrician named Lech Walesa climbed over the shipyard's iron-bar fence and into history. Under his leadership, the workers demanded higher wages, an earlier retirement age, better food supplies and, in a daring political challenge to the regime, the right to organize independent trade unions...
Since the imposition of martial law almost nine months ago, Solidarity has once more become the stuff of dreams, its organizational structure crushed and its leader, Walesa, under house arrest. While calling on Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev at his summer retreat on the Black Sea last week, Poland's leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, labeled the tattered remnant of the suspended trade union a "counterrevolutionary underground, whose activities are inspired and supported from the outside, mainly from the United States...
...might be lost in any upsurge of nostalgia on the second anniversary of the birth of Solidarity, security police turned Gdansk into an armed camp and quickly dispersed a crowd of 200 young demonstrators. In Warsaw, several hundred Poles braved water cannons to add flowers, greenery and pictures of Walesa and Pope John Paul II to the now famous cross laid out in Victory Square to honor the late Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski. But late last week authorities sealed off the square with a sturdy 6-ft.-high gray wooden fence. Still, as one veteran Western diplomat in Warsaw said...
...base of a ten-foot-high monument to the Home Army, the non-Communist resistance group that organized the 1944 revolt, about 1,000 supporters of the suspended Solidarity union sang hymns, raised their hands in V-for-victory signs and called for the liberation of Lech Walesa, the union leader who remains under detention in southeast Poland...
...residents had already begun to rebuild their cross. While government delegations laid wreaths to the solemn beat of drums, several hundred people gathered around the new cross, praying, flashing V signs and singing their own modified version of the national anthem. It includes such defiant lines as "Lead us Walesa, from the coast to Silesia/ Push on to victory, Polish Solidarity." The police removed the cross the next three days...