During his tour of the United States last November, Lech Walesa underscored this point vividly.

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Lech Walesa, a shipyard worker, walked into her flower shop one day, and the rest is history.

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Lech Walesa and his fledgling reform movement, Solidarity, were making their bid for individual freedoms and economic liberty in Poland.

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Pope John Paul's engagement with Poland created space not just for the Catholic Church, but for labor leaders like Lech Walesa.

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Likewise with Lech Walesa and his Solidarity trade union in Eastern Europe.

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But market reforms haven't been kind to the historic shipyards of Gdansk, where the Solidarity Union movement began with union leader and future Polish president, Lech Walesa.

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Within a year Germany was reunited, the dissident playwright Vaclav Havel was president of Czechoslovakia and a union activist named Lech Walesa was Poland's head of state.

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She was sent because the fear was that if Lech Walesa, who was no longer imprisoned, had left the country, he would not be allowed back in.

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Poland was then under martial law, and Lech Walesa was being held in an internment camp, so the story would be that the Nobel winner was in jail.

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As the Commission report notes, Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel have made it clear that RFE still has an important role to play in the political life and information needs of their countries.

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