Polish democratic leader, 86, dies

Ex-prime minister led separation from communist past

WARSAW, Poland - Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Eastern Europe’s first democratic prime minister after communism, key adviser to Poland’s Solidarity freedom movement and United Nations human-rights envoy to Bosnia in the 1990s, has died. He was 86.

Mazowiecki’s personal secretary, Michal Prochwicz, said the former prime minister died early Monday at a hospital. Prochwicz said Mazowiecki was taken to the hospital Wednesday with a high fever.

As prime minister, Mazowiecki called for drawing a “thick line” to separate the communist past from new Poland, a much-criticized position that contributed to his ouster after a year in office.

He made a crucial decision in August 1980 to join thousands of workers on strike at the Gdansk Shipyard to demand restitution of a job for a fired colleague, Anna Walentynowicz; better pay; and a monument to workers killed in the 1970 protest.

Within days, their action grew into a wave of strikes that gave birth to Solidarity,Eastern Europe’s first freetrade union and a nationwide freedom movement, led by a shipyard electrician, Lech Walesa, whose name quickly became known around the globe.

Walesa later said that “everybody was very glad that the intellectuals are with the workers. It was a very important signal for the authorities.”

From the days of the strike until well into Poland’s democracy in the 1990s, Mazowiecki was among Walesa’s closest counselors. He advised Walesa in the tough yet successful negotiations with the communists, who granted union and civic freedoms in 1980.

Politicians and friends said Monday that his death was a great loss to Poland’s politics.

Fighting back tears, President Bronislaw Komorowski said the Poles should think with gratitude about everything that has happened in Poland since 1989, when Mazowiecki took office. National flags on government buildings were lowered to half-staff.

Walesa said it was a “pity that such great people are dying. We could have used his wisdom today, when democracy is not so perfect.”

Poland’s last communist leader, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, who was president when Mazowiecki was prime minister in 1989-90, said he“appreciated Premier Mazowiecki’s wisdom, moderation and presence of mind in assessing difficult situations, and his stubborn insistence on things that he considered to be key.”

“He was prime minister at a very difficult time. It required a lot of wisdom and tact to lead Poland through the great reforms.”

Like Walesa, and many Solidarity activists, he was detained for months under martial law that Jaruzelski imposed Dec. 13, 1981, to curb the freedom that had irritated Moscow.

After one year in confinement, Mazowiecki returned to Walesa’s side and wrote reports about the stagnation of social and economic life under martial law.

The hardships inspired a new wave of strikes in 1988. Mazowiecki walked arm in arm with Walesa at the head of angry workers in Gdansk.

The renewed protests brought the communists to the negotiating table with Solidarity, to discuss the terms of democratization. Mazowiecki authored many of those terms.

The outcome was Eastern Europe’s first partly free parliamentary election June 4, 1989, which gave Solidarity seats in parliament and paved the way for the first democratic government in the cracking communist bloc.

In September, Mazowiecki became the region’s first democratic prime minister. His V-for-victory sign to the chamber on appointment became the symbol of Poland’s triumph over communism. Poland’s peaceful revolution initiated changes in the region - climaxing in the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

In a message of condolences, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in communist East Germany, said that Mazowiecki made “an unforgotten contribution to overcoming authoritarian injustice and to the unity of Europe.”

Mazowiecki was born April 18, 1927, in the central city of Plock to the deeply religious family of medical doctor Bronislaw Mazowiecki. His father died in 1938.

Under the Nazi German occupation of Poland during World War II, in which 6 million Polish citizens were killed, Mazowiecki worked as a messenger for a hospital and for a trade company.

After the war, Mazowiecki studied law at Warsaw University but did not obtain a degree, engaging instead in journalism and politics.

He was twice widowed.

His first wife, Krystyna, died of tuberculosis within a year of their marriage.

His second wife, Ewa, the mother of his sons Wojciech, Adam and Michal, died in 1970.

Front Section, Pages 2 on 10/29/2013

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