Court Clears Solidarity Hero

Lech Walesa, founder of the Solidarity movement that toppled Polish communism, was cleared Friday of allegations that he was an agent for the old regime's secret police.

A court ruled that the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Poland's first democratically elected president was not an informant.

The decision followed revelations of a communist plot to discredit Walesa in the eyes of the Nobel committee and cleared the way for his bid for the presidency—an office he held from 1990 to 1995—in October.

"I won against those who used false arguments, engineered forgeries. It was an incredibly repulsive game," Walesa told reporters after leaving the courtroom.

The court said it had come into possession of Interior Ministry documents that pointed to efforts by the security services in the early 1980s to undermine Walesa's chances of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize by casting him as an informant.

Walesa—a shipyard electrician—became peace laureate in 1983, a year later than expected. He set up Solidarity in 1980 and was instrumental in ending communist rule in 1989.

"The court…has determined that the declaration of the presidential candidate Lech Walesa is compatible with the truth," the court said in a statement.

Under a recent vetting law, senior officials, including presidential candidates, must declare past links with the communist security apparatus. Those caught lying are barred from public posts for 10 years.

The court said the Interior Ministry documents showed that the old secret services doctored files on Walesa.

"There was a plan to send a letter to the members of the Nobel prize jury. They (the security services) decided to attach to the letter information revealing (Walesa's) secret collaboration," Judge Pawel Rysinki told the court.

The prosecutor had based his case against Walesa on old Interior Ministry files that allegedly linked him to an agent code-named "Bolek," who informed for the security forces in the mid-1970s.

The case provoked an outcry among many commentators and politicians that such a figure should be forced to defend himself in court. They said the investigation compromised Poland internationally.

Many analysts said the case showed the absurdity of the 1998 vetting law, which the ruling AWS party drafted to enable Poland to come to terms with its past and clear the political scene of people vulnerable to blackmail.

Walesa was elected head of state in 1990, but lost much of his popularity, mainly due to the quarrelsome style of his politics.

Poll ratings give him less than a 5 percent of public support and he has little chance of election in the presidential ballot, which is expected to be won by popular incumbent Aleksander Kwasniewski.

By MARCIN GRAJEWSKI