Albright Hails Solidarity’s Legacy in Visit to Poland

In an emotional visit celebrating Polish-American friendship, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Sunday honored the memory of this country’s anti-Communist strikers, received an honorary doctorate and helped christen a former U.S. frigate given to Poland.

The themes of exceptionally warm national ties and shared support for democracy ran through Albright’s visit to this Baltic Sea port--birthplace of Solidarity, the union that toppled communism in Poland in 1989.

The events in Gdansk and nearby Gdynia, where the frigate ceremony took place, set the stage for today’s opening in Warsaw of a two-day conference of more than 100 democratic states. The gathering’s “Community of Democracies” logo mimics the distinctive red script often used in posters to write “Solidarity,” and its goal is similar to the union’s: to strengthen democracy where it exists and encourage its spread where it is only a dream.

As part of Sunday’s symbolism, Albright wore an outfit of white and red, the colors of the Polish flag, to lay a wreath of red, white and blue flowers at a Solidarity monument to workers killed in 1970 while protesting rising food prices. Also symbolic was the choice of the submarine-hunting frigate’s new name: Gen. Kazimierz Pulaski, a Polish hero who sacrificed his life fighting for American independence.

Albright’s trip marked a return to old haunts. In 1981, she did scholarly research here about the Solidarity movement, and among the friends she made then was a dissident university professor, Bronislaw Geremek, who is now Poland’s foreign minister. The democracy conference was primarily their brainchild.

A three-day nongovernmental “World Forum on Democracy,” loosely linked to the official ministerial-level conference, opened Sunday in Warsaw.

“We will never forget that Madeleine Albright remembered Solidarity” even after Poland’s Communist government sought to crush the union under martial law, Geremek said in praising her at Sunday’s degree-awarding ceremony at the University of Gdansk.

“I would just like to say, ‘Madeleine, we love you,’ ” he said in concluding his speech.

A leading official of the strongly pro-market Freedom Union, Geremek will step down as foreign minister at the end of June because his party decided earlier this month to pull out from Poland’s ruling center-right coalition. Other Freedom Union members already have left the Cabinet, but it was agreed that he would stay on to host the international conference.

In awarding an honorary degree to Albright, the university’s senate cited three of her accomplishments as key. It said she has fought to eliminate “Western European prejudices against Slavs” from international politics; she promoted Poland’s admission to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization last year; and she has helped “unmask” how the former Communist regimes of Eastern Europe “used censorship to falsify modern history.”

Albright was born in Prague, then the capital of Czechoslovakia, and grew up speaking Czech, a Slavic language that is related to Polish. She listened to speeches in Polish on Sunday without the aid of translation.

In her speech at the university, Albright praised Poland’s struggle for democracy as a key step in building a “new Europe.”

“The movement launched here in Gdansk two decades ago, which I had the honor to witness, restored freedom to this great land,” she said. “It erased the artificial line that Stalin had carved across the heart of Europe, and lit lamps of liberty throughout the region.”

The transfer of the former U.S. frigate to the Polish navy marks another step in efforts to ensure that this transition is irreversible. The Pulaski is now the second-biggest ship in the Polish navy, and it greatly strengthens the Polish presence in the Baltic.

With major Russian military bases only 50 to 100 miles east of Gdansk in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, strengthened Polish patrols in the Baltic may be one of Poland’s greatest contributions to NATO.