Havel and Walesa Meet in an Opposition Aerie

President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia and Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa met in the mountains on their nations’ border Saturday and pledged to work for European unity.

It was their first meeting, and the locale is where the opposition of both countries forged friendship during the years of Communist rule.

Hundreds of Czechoslovak and Polish tourists swarmed around the helicopters that brought Havel and Walesa to the top of Sniezka Mountain for an afternoon of meetings organized by activists from both sides.

Some now are members of the governments that took over when Communists in Poland and Czechoslovakia were swept from power.

“Today’s meeting on our common border is no accident. This way we want to refer to the traditions of many years when Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, often deprived of contacts, used to meet here in the mountains in order to exchange experiences,” said a joint communique issued after the meeting.

It called on the nations to “coordinate our strivings not only for democracy and order in our countries but also for our return to Europe as a friendly union of free nations and democratic independent countries.”

Members of the Czechoslovak human rights movement Charter 77 and the Polish Committee for the Defense of Workers began meeting in the mountains along the border during the late 1970s.

Those meetings were interrupted by the 1981 martial law that crushed Solidarity and landed many of the Polish participants in jail. At the same time, Havel and other Czechoslovak activists also were serving time for political activities.