Walesa freed to join Church in refusal to compromise

MR LECH WALESA, who has come to symbolise the ordinary Catholic worker of Poland, emerged from eleven months' internment this week, cautious but unconverted in his opinions.
Mr Walesa said that he felt like "a man let out on a tightrope beneath which is the exercise yard of a prison — and the tightrope is greased. I don't intend to slip off."
Though the Church has been cast in the role of intermediary in attaining Mr Walesa's release, there is no evidence that either he or the Church had to compromise their position to gain it.
It is thought that Mr Walesa's release was the outcome of talks between Archbishop Jozef Glemp and General Jaruzelski, Poland's military ruler. Archbishop Glemp was also able to agree with the government a date for the Pope's visit.
It is fairly clear that the governmtnt has changed its tactics, if not its ultimate objectives, which must include suppression of any uncontrollable aspirations to free trades unions. It is also clear that the Church called for restraint last Wednesday, but it has never countenanced street violence as a defensible policy. If it contributed to the muted protests on last week's anniversary of Solidarity's registration, it was more by coinciding with the government's aim than by colluding with it.
Mr Walesa was photographed by the authorities as he packed his bags in his place of detention. He was wearing the lapel badge of Our Lady of Czestochowa that he had worn at the signing of the Gdansk agreement two years ago. It was to Czestochowa, to give thanks, that Mr Walesa was thought to have gone on his release from detention.
Mr Walesa was reunited with his wife, Danuta, and his seven children. He revealed that he had been able to see a priest on Sundays during his internment. With the Walesa family in their Gdansk flat while Mr Walesa spoke to press was Fr Henryk Jankowski, a chaplain to the Lenin shipyards which saw the birth of Solidarity.
Picture — page 2.