Walesa Sees U.S. Role as Showing Democratic Way

America’s role as a superpower should be to offer the world a working model of democracy, former Polish President Lech Walesa told a gathering at a bay-side hotel Saturday.

“Right now we are asking America, being a power in the world, not to help us financially, but to help us provide a vision, a conception,” Walesa, the leader of Poland’s Solidarity labor movement, said to a midday gathering of the American Polish Congress at the Hyatt Newporter hotel.

“I invite you to cooperate with me in the construction of peace and prosperity.”

The world came to know Walesa, a former electrician at a Gdansk shipyard, in the early 1980s as the determined leader of a labor union bent on bringing down Poland’s Communist government.

The movement largely succeeded--Walesa won the Nobel Peace Prize for his Solidarity efforts--and in 1990 he became Poland’s first democratically elected president and a universal symbol of the struggle against Communist oppression.

But with economic hard times over the past two years, frustrated Poles and others in Eastern Europe have turned to political parties dominated by former Communists. Aleksander Kwasniewski, leader of Poland’s Democratic Left Alliance, orchestrated his party’s takeover of the Parliament and then defeated Walesa in a close contest in November.

Walesa is now in the midst of a two-week tour that includes speaking engagements in London, Atlanta and Maine, where he met with former President George Bush, and Chicago, where he met with presumptive Republican presidential candidate Sen. Bob Dole. He will visit Los Angeles today and then meet with President Clinton in Washington on Monday.

In Newport Beach, Walesa met with members of the American Polish Congress, a group that represents the 10 million people of Polish descent in the United States. The congress was concluding a three-day conference at the hotel.

Walesa took a conciliatory stance toward his successor.

It is time for Poles, he told about 100 listeners, to observe the basic tenets of democracy and support and work with Kwasniewski.

Kwasniewski and other Polish officials today may be former Communists, “but since they were democratically elected, we cannot deny their existence,” Walesa said.

“A new plurality is Poland,” he said. “We may not like it, but we have to accept it because we have fought for so many years for democracy. . . . Our ideals can only come within the framework of a democracy.”

Those in attendance, including Maciej Krych, Poland’s consul general based in Los Angeles, praised his views.

“He likes to spread the image of American democracy,” said Krych, noting that there are efforts to begin a Walesa library in Poland, modeled after libraries of former American presidents.

Sophie Janczur of Tustin characterized Walesa as a “very warm and pleasant speaker.”

“He was very positive, and it’s hard to be that way,” Janczur said.