Polish President Lech Kaczynski stated, on the 20th anniversary of the Round Table Talks that ended communism in Poland, that, from today’s perspective, could not have been better negotiated.
“From today’s perspective, I beleive that there was a possibility to negotiate more. However, that kind of thing is only obvious months or years later,” he wrote in a statement published in the daily Rzeczpospolita.
The Round Table Talks took place on 6 February 1989 in the President’s Palace on Krakowskie Przedmiescie Street in Poland’s capital. The President will welcome various historians and people who took place in the talks twenty years ago to the Palace today. The conference will begin today at 2:23 local time, the exact time when participants sat at the table and began negotiations in 1989.
The President, in his letter, recalled the situation that brought about the negotiations – the pilgrammage of Pope John Paul II to Poland in 1987 and his words that spurred on the Solidarity unionists to oppose the then-government.
“The intelligence of the opposition helped at the time – they were able to take advantage of the situation and start a real road to freedom at the Round Table. [The talks] were an enterprising tactic that created an agreement between the government and society’s representatives embodied by the opposition,” writes Kaczynski.
The President told Polish Radio that the Round Table Talks were not at all an agreement amongst the elite, at the cost of society. But rather, exactly twenty years ago, communist leaders and Solidarity opposition leaders started a dialogue that resulted in an agreement and common resolution to the social conflicts of the 1980s.
Kaczynski added that the pre-Round Table Talks that took place in Magdalenka from the 16 September 1988 between the leader of the Polish People's Republic and Solidarity leaders, on the outskirts of Warsaw, were not a conspiratorial plot by the communists. (mmj)