Word: walesa
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TALK ABOUT U-TURNS. WITH A PEN'S STROKE, PRESIdent Lech Walesa set in motion legal machinery that within weeks will transform Poland from a country with virtually no legal limits on abortion to one that possesses (next to Ireland) Europe's strictest laws on terminating pregnancies. Under the new measure, doctors can perform abortions only when there is proof of rape, incest, genetic abnormality in the fetus or an imminent threat to a mother's health. Noncomplying physicians are liable to two-year prison sentences...
NORWAY'S NOBEL COMMITTEE HAS never been reluctant to use the immense prestige of its Peace Prize to make a political point. Over the years it has found timely reason to honor such powerful figures as Martin Luther King Jr., Willy Brandt, Lech Walesa and Bishop Desmond Tutu. Few of those were more calculatedly controversial than this year's Nobel Peace laureate, Rigoberta Menchu. The award to the 33-year-old Guatemalan Indian-rights activist was announced in the week marking the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World...
...unions that have broken away from the change-minded Solidarity union. These workers grew used to communism's guaranteed employment at relatively high wages, and fear they are falling behind employees in the fast-growing private economy. They have struck for wage increases that, in the opinion of Lech Walesa, the founder of Solidarity who is now President of Poland, could be met only by "printing money." That, says Walesa, would "ruin all our achievements so far." Suchocka's government has resorted to the hard-boiled capitalist expedient of threatening to fire strikers at an auto-parts plant...
According to U.S. intelligence sources, the Pope had already advised Walesa through church channels to keep his movement operating underground, and to pass the word to Solidarity's 10 million members not to go into the streets and risk provoking Warsaw Pact intervention or civil war with Polish security forces. Because the communists had cut the direct phone lines between Poland and the Vatican, John Paul II communicated with Jozef Cardinal Glemp in Warsaw via radio. He also dispatched his envoys to Poland to report on the situation. "The Vatican's information was absolutely better and quicker than ours...
...communications with the noncommunist world were cut; 6,000 leaders of Solidarity were detained; hundreds were charged with treason, subversion and counterrevolution; nine were killed; and the union was banned. But thousands of others went into hiding, many seeking protection in churches, rectories and with priests. Authorities took Walesa into custody and interned him in a remote hunting lodge...