Walesa appeals for values in tackling global problems

(WARSAW) - Poland's Solidarity hero and Nobel Peace laureate Lech Walesa Wednesday urged leaders to focus on the values which led to the peaceful demise of communism in Poland when tackling global problems.

"Let's get it right: values are more important than nuclear (threats), than everything. Try to build your economic and political solutions on values," Walesa, 65, told a special session of parliament held on the eve of the 20th anniversary of Poland's first semi-democratic elections in the Soviet bloc.

The ground-breaking ballot marked the beginning of the end of communism in Poland which in turn sparked the demise of the entire Soviet bloc by 1991 and paved the way for the European Union's eastward expansion.

"If we succeed, we'll make the world a better place. We'll preserve European unity and European wisdom and thanks to solidarity, European justice," Walesa said.

"If not, we'll -- and this has already started happening -- slowly fall back into nationalism, to isolation, to fighting minorities," he said.

Also addressing lawmakers, European Parliament president Hans-Gert Poettering said the June 4, 1989 elections, which were the first in which pro-democracy forces broke the communist party's monopoly on power in a Soviet bloc state, were like a "Copernican revolution" -- alluding to the Renaissance father of modern astronomy Nicolas Copernicus who first asserted that the Earth rotated around the Sun.

"It all began in Gdansk," with the strikes of August 1980 which spread from the city's shipyard across Poland, Poettering said. Lead by Walesa, the strikes mobilised 10 million Poles and gave birth to Solidarity, the Soviet bloc's first and only free trade union.

After being driven underground by the communist regime's 1981 martial law crack-down, Solidarity re-emerged in the late 1980s to negotiate a bloodless, peaceful end to communism.

"Without Gdansk, there would not have been June 4 elections and the process of the reunification of the European continent would have been much more difficult," he said.