Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki led a tribute to Solidarity's 10th anniversary Saturday filled with nostalgia for the days when the movement united workers and intellectuals.
"Ten years ago, the alliance between workers and intellectuals was so strong. . . . These values cannot be wasted," said Mazowiecki, marking the start of his second year as the East bloc's first non-Communist prime minister.The Solidarity movement that led the democratic upheaval in Eastern Europe begins its second decade deeply divided. The split is between workers backing the trade union and leader Lech Walesa on the one hand, and intellectuals surrounding Mazowiecki and the Warsaw government on the other.
The two camps have been observing the anniversary separately. The events began Aug. 15 in Gdansk, where Walesa led a commemoration of the shipyard strike that spawned the movement.
Walesa did not attend Saturday's forum at Warsaw University but sent a warmly received letter that began, "Thank you for those 10 years."
"We won because we were united . . . but today, there is no need to hide . . . that we don't agree on everything," he wrote.
Mazowiecki is expected to go to Gdansk on Aug. 30 to meet with shipyard workers and join Walesa in celebrating the accords Solidarity signed with Communist authorities to create the first free trade union in the Soviet bloc.
It was during those negotiations that Mazowiecki, then a Catholic journalist, brought a letter to Walesa expressing the support of intellectuals in Warsaw and Krakow for the workers movement being born on the Baltic coast.
The united front formed by the two forces, joined by farmers, is given significant credit for Solidarity's ability to survive martial law and eight years underground before toppling the Communists last year.
Historian Bronislaw Geremek, chief of the Solidarity-based parliament caucus, joined Mazowiecki in early support for Solidarity.
On Saturday, he recalled Walesa receiving the intellectuals' letter and then asking, "But can you help us?"
"The fact that striking workers accepted this alliance . . . began from the simplest things - apples brought by farmers, the presence of intellectuals on both sides of the shipyard fence," Geremek said.
Although the dissolution of Solidarity's united front has been a painful development, participants suggest it is the start of a multiparty political system that must emerge after four decades of Communist Party rule.
Calling Solidarity "a strong partner," Mazowiecki said, "Today we are divided . . . it is what democracy is about . . . With all our differences, we will be all responsible for this historic moment."