Word: walesa
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...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...
...elected. Jaruzelski was among 50 nationally prominent candidates who ran unopposed. Before the election, he had hinted that if 75% of the country's 26 million eligible voters turned out, he might offer amnesty to 280 political prisoners, although he did not specify when that might be. But Lech Walesa, leader of the banned Solidarity labor union, and other opposition figures called for a boycott of the elections, which they claimed would not even begin to reflect public opinion...
...polls had closed. In 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...
...star witness in Poland's latest courtroom drama arrived wearing a T shirt emblazoned with the logo of Solidarity, the outlawed labor union he helped found. Lech Walesa had been summoned by the prosecution to testify in the trial of three Solidarity supporters, Bogdan Lis, Wladyslaw Frasyniuk and Adam Michnik, charged with trying to organize strikes to protest food-price increases. Walesa's testimony was as defiant as his dress. "Three innocent people are in the dock," he told the court...
...year. Since then, however, according to dissidents, it has arrested about 100 activists. Last week's trial was another sign that the truce is over. The court prohibited the defendants from meeting privately with their lawyers and barred Western journalists and international observers from the proceedings. The trial, declared Walesa in a letter to the Polish parliament, represents "an escalation of lawlessness." After eleven days of court sessions, the three dissidents were found guilty and given prison terms ranging from 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 years. The U.S. reacted angrily, saying it might impose new sanctions on Poland...