Lech Walesa, former President of Poland and founder of the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland, today paid tribute to the role of ‘a small group of journalists’ in helping to overthrow Poland’s communist dictatorship in 1989.

Lech Walesa, former President of Poland and founder of the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland, today paid tribute to the role of ‘a small group of journalists’ in helping to overthrow Poland’s communist dictatorship in 1989. ‘I am a person born through the media. I would never have achieved this without a free media and honest journalism,’ said the former Gdansk shipyard worker, who became a Nobel Peace Prize winner for his role in the overthrow of the Jaruzelski regime. He was speaking at a plenary session of the Caux Conference for Business and Industry, on the role of the media in ‘closing the gaps’ created by globalization.

While US President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had brought the Soviet era to an end, a group of journalists had also played their part by reporting and supporting Walesa in his struggle for democracy, he said. They included the veteran French journalist Bernard Margueritte, based in Warsaw, and now Chairman of the International Communications Forum, a media think-tank launched in Caux 11 years ago. Margueritte has interviewed Walesa 16 times in the last 20 years, for the Polish and international media.

Jerzy Klosinski, Chief Editor of Tygodnik Solidarnosc, the Solidarity trade union’s weekly magazine, said that his paper was the first freely published independent paper with a mass circulation in any communist country. ‘We broke the communist monopoly of information,’ he said. The paper's first editor-in-chief was Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who went on to become the first Prime Minister of free Poland, and at the height of the freedom struggle it had a circulation of 500,000. It now has a ‘faithful readership’ of 20,000, said Klosinski who became Chief Editor in 2001.

Reported by Mike Smith

Conference Summary

For more information on the conferences at Caux, please visit www.caux.ch.