Lech Walesa Faces New Accusations of Communist Collaboration
By JOANNA BERENDT

WARSAW — Lech Walesa, the former shipyard worker who helped bring about the collapse of Communism in Poland and then served as the country’s president, faces new accusations that he was an informant for the secret police during the Communist era.

For many years, accusations of collaboration have dogged Mr. Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity movement, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and served as president from 1990 to 1995. A special court cleared him in 2000.

But he faces new allegations from a trove of documents that prosecutors confiscated on Tuesday from the home of the widow of Gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak, who as interior minister helped crush Solidarity in 1981, when martial law was imposed, and was briefly, in 1989, the country’s final prime minister under the Communist regime.

The documents include 350 pages of secret-police files that have never been open to public view. They mention a man called Bolek, which is said to have been Mr. Walesa’s code name, according to Lukasz Kaminski, the head of the Institute of National Remembra nce, a government-run commission established in 1998 to investigate crimes committed during the Nazi occupation and Soviet domination.

“In the files, there is an envelope, and in it there is a handwritten agreement to cooperate with the Secret Service signed ‘Lech Walesa, Bolek,’ ” Mr. Kaminski said at a news conference on Thursday. “There are also handwritten money receipts signed ‘Bolek.’ ” The files suggest that Mr. Walesa was a paid informant from 1970 to 1976.

Mr. Kaminski, a historian, said an archival expert who examined the materials “is certain of their authenticity.” But he did not say if he believed that the allegations in the documents were true. It is conceivable that the extent of Mr. Walesa’s involvement — if any — might have been exaggerated as part of an effort to intimidate, harass or blackmail him.

General Kiszczak died on Nov. 5. His widow, Maria Kiszczak, offered to sell the documents to the institute for 90,000 zlotys, or about $27,000, according to Agnieszka Sopinska-Jaremczak, a spokeswoman for the institute.

Mrs. Kiszczak, in comments to reporters this week, denied trying to sell the documents; she said it was the institute that offered to pay for them. In any event, the authorities seized the papers on Tuesday, asserting that the documents belonged to the Polish state. It was not clear how long General Kiszczak held onto the documents, or why.

The first time that the Polish public heard allegations that Mr. Walesa had collaborated was in 1992, when Antoni Macierewicz — then the interior minister and now the defense minister in the new government of the conservative Law and Justice Party — released two lists of 66 high-ranking officials who had supposedly collaborated with the secret services. The name of Mr. Walesa, who was Poland’s president at the time, was on one of the lists.

A special court in 2000 found insufficient evidence to conclude that Mr. Walesa had been a collaborator. A former head of the secret police in the early 1990s, Piotr Naimski, has long maintained that he was a collaborator.

Mr. Walesa, in interviews, has said that as a dissident, he “played a game” with the Communist authorities, but that he never actively served them.

This year, Mr. Walesa even proposed a public debate about the accusations at the Institute of National Remembrance. Later, though, he withdrew the offer.

Mr. Walesa, who was in Venezuela this week to show solidarity with political prisoners there, denied the latest accusations on his blog.

In a post on Thursday on Wykop, a Polish social media website, Mr. Walesa wrote: “There cannot be any materials written by me. If there were any, there would be no need to forge them. I will prove it in court.”

The right-wing Law and Justice Party has talked of reopening Communist-era cases. Although collaborators would not face criminal charges, the party says it wants to expose people who have never acknowledged their moral responsibility.

Antoni Dudek, a historian and a member of the council of the Institute of National Remembrance, said in a phone interview on Thursday that he believed the documents to be genuine, but that they should not tarnish Mr. Walesa’s reputation.

“These files are related only to Walesa’s activities in the ’70s, not in the ’80s, when the whole world came to know him as the leader of a revolution that brought down the Communists,” Mr. Dudek said. “There is this image of a perfect hero without any flaws. That’s absurd. The fact that Walesa may have had a shameful moment in the ’70s does not make his accomplishments from the ’80s any smaller.”

He added: “I don’t think it will affect greatly how Poles think of Walesa. They are already very much divided when it comes to him and his legacy, so I imagine these documents will appeal mostly to those who already believe that Walesa was a Communist informant.”

反駁當過共黨線民 波蘭前總統華勒沙：從沒拿錢

波蘭專門調查納粹與共產黨罪行的官方機構18日根據新發現的文件指出，反共領袖、前總統華勒沙曾是波蘭共產黨的線民，華勒沙19日否認當過線民，並說他從沒跟秘密警察拿錢。

「國家記憶研究所」最近取得一些1970到76年的秘密警察檔案，包括：華勒沙承諾要提供情報的手寫簽名文件（其上註明線民代號為「波萊克」）、華勒沙提供的情資、向秘密警察領錢的收據等。

現年72歲的華勒沙在部落格上寫道：「我從未與秘密警察合作，從未向秘密警察拿錢，從未以口說或手寫文件舉發任何人。我相信真相不證自明。」

國家記憶研究所所長卡明斯基說，這些文件看起來是真的，但仍有待歷史學家確認。華勒沙說，當年秘密警察多次搜索他的家和工作場所，帶走他手寫的文件，那些文件現在「都可以當作我告密的證據」。

觀察家指出，這些文件存放在一名已故共產黨時期內政部長的家中數十年，現在才公諸於世，右派執政黨可能有意用來攻擊華勒沙，國家記憶研究所還沒確認文件真假就公布，動機可疑。

華勒沙幾年前承認，曾簽下一份擔任波蘭共產黨安全機構線民的承諾，但強調從未執行線民任務，從沒舉發任何人，也不曾為此收錢。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/world/europe/lech-walesa-faces-new-accusations-of-communist-collaboration.html

2016-02-20．聯合報．A15．國際．編譯李京倫