Dirty politics in Poland
July 4th 2008 04:38
Lech Walesa in March, 2008
Picture: Reuters
Lech Walesa once strode the front pages of the world's newspapers like a colossus of right. His was the small, human face of a giant truth: the moral imperative of freedom. Like Nelson Mandela, the mention of his name made the spirit soar. A time to kill, and a time to heal ...
Times have changed. Today Lech Walesa is involved in another fight, of the grubby political kind.
It started last year when Pawel Adamowicz, the mayor of Walesa's old stamping ground, Gdansk, asked Poland's central bank to mint a commemorative coin to mark the 25th anniversary of Walesa's winning of the Nobel Peace Prize.
The bank said no. The bank said that, upon due reflection, it had decided not to put the images of living people on coins. It had done so in the past, it admitted, specifically in the case of the Polish-born Pope John-Paul II. But, changing times and all that, no more.
What the bank didn't say is that Lech Walesa, erstwhile iconic leader of the newly free and independent Poland, now sits on the opposition benches, and doesn't get on very well with the current President, Lech Kaczynski.
Mr Kaczynski, in fact, claims that Mr Walesa is no hero at all, and was really a spy for the secret police during the bad old days of the early 1970s.
Eeps, said the central bank. This is a political row and we won't get involved in political rows.
Garbage, says daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. The paper points out that the central bank governor Slawomir Skrzypek is an appointee of President Kaczynski. Further, decisions on the minting of coins in Poland are taken by the central bank's executive board after a recommendation by a panel of historians. The paper said the bank's management had restructured the panel by appointing five historians who shared Kaczynski's views.
What's that view again? Oh yes - that Lech Walesa has been living a grotesque lie ever since 1989 when he and Solidarity won one of the most popular human uprisings the world has seen.
Right. And Nelson Mandela was no doubt a closet white supremacist.
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