I missed Lech Walesa, but I found the jewel of the Baltic Sea

GYDYNIA, Poland – Back home, I see, they’ve discovered another plot by the Islamic terrorists, the Jemaah Islamiyah, to blow up the US Embassy in Manila. The usual quarters will protest: Why are they always blaming the Muslims?

In any event, bombing American embassies, in Jakarta, in Tanzania, in Kenya, and years ago in Beirut, not to mention devastating Twin Towers in New York, seems to be in the "job description" of terrorists from Osama’s al-Qaeda to their sub-group, the Jemaah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia.

The bizarre report, apparently, did not faze American Ambassador Frank Ricciardone, nor did it prevent him from going up to Baguio City to join exiting Armed Forces Chief of Staff Narciso Abaya – who retires on his birthday Friday next week (October 29) – in being honored by a Farewell Parade in the Philippine Military Academy.

But what’s this? As soon as this writer got to Frankfurt, Germany, last Thursday morning after a marathon flight from Manila, my sources there confirmed to me that somebody who looks exactly like Interior and Local Government (DILG) Secretary Angelo T. Reyes had been in Europe a few days ago.

Indeed, when I got to Gydynia, Poland – a one hour and 30-minute flight from Frankfurt, my Warsaw correspondent rang me up with the same "sighting". He alleged that Reyes had been in Warsaw (Poland’s capital) negotiating an arms deal with businessmen with "good" connections. Since these gentlemen were look-alikes of well-known arms dealers in the Balkans, what is any suspicious journalistic busybody to suspect?

Are our DILG and police suddenly "sourcing" weapons, including sidearms for the PNP from Balkan manufacturers, i.e. manufactured in the former Yugoslavia, and Poland itself? Since our Armed Forces are suddenly talking about converting their official weapon from M-16s and other foreign-made firearms to a Toledo (Cebu) manufactured SAW9 "Safari" .45 automatic and automatic assault rifle, we may end up with the most garishly-armed Army and police in the world.

I hope these "sightings" of a ranking official and his subalterns in the cockpit of Europe are a mere mirage, or just a harmless but mysterious junket, not a fast-break operation to procure weapons outside of the official bidding process.

As the lurid scandal surrounding AFP comptroller Gen. Carlos Garcia indicates, there’s obviously big money in military procurement and military/PNP contracts – and the cause célèbre of the Garcia scam is apparently only "the tip of the iceberg". The names of other generals have begun surfacing. It’s like that Navy command: "Beat to general quarters!" Beating up the generals, rather.

I hope that, out of this mess, our President cum commander-in-chief will crack down at last, and determine to order the revamp, in truth the purge of our armed forces, before the rot destroys both morale and capability.

By the way, I was among those who backed General Efren Abu (it was nip and tuck between him and his classmate of PMA ’72, Vice-Admiral Ernie de Leon) since, commanding the Army of 75,000 men he was in a position to impose a "shape up or ship out" discipline on its officer corps – including its finance officers, comptrollers, and the star-rank wheelers and dealers in the DND "connection". However, Abu’s propagandists should not start off his tenure as AFP chief with a lie. The general has medals enough, and a reputation for grit and go – he doesn’t need to be touted as the general who "crushed" the Oakwood Mutiny in May last year. True, Abu as head of Army Task Force Libra (NCR command) had surrounded the "Fortress" Oakwood hotel in Makati with a ring of steel, as did the Marines. But the encircling forces were held back by the President from assaulting the booby-trapped building and its environs – Makati’s financial district would have ended up a bloody shambles and a pile of smoking rubble. In short, Abu did not "crush" the rebels. The Oakwood mutineers surrendered, after long and tense negotiations headed by former AFP Chief (retired General) Roy Cimatu and a team of officers and civilians, including myself, convinced them to give up.

I believe the hyperbolic word, "crush", is completely inaccurate.

Our friend General Abu now has an opportunity to use it with real effect – if he crushes the NPA, or the MILF (however, the government is also negotiating with both), or, more urgently, crush and corrupt conspiracy of "conversion", "substitution", kotong, and blatant fraternal cover-up which has made our military a sick joke, brought dishonor to the uniform, and destroyed the morale not only of our beleaguered soldiers, but of the civilian population.

When the bugle sounds, who will rally to it, when its peal ends in a cracked note? The English poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, once wrote a stirring poem which went, "Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying..." The echoes we’re getting today are not wild, but hollow and disappointing.

Give our soldiers, sailors, marines and air force personnel back their pride! That’s what we’d beg our President and our generals to do. And give them the right guns, ships and aircraft, too. No wonder our holsters are empty, and our PAF is grounded. The money went elsewhere – much of it to New York and Chicago, and – who knows? – where else.

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I made a 7,000-mile dash over here to Gdansk (the former city of Danzig) in Poland, in a failed effort to catch up with Lech Walesa, the former Polish President, and the hero of "Solidarity" revolt which overthrew Soviet rule. Walesha’s son had advised me to catch up since Walesa was leaving for Houston, Texas, but I missed him, alas, by a couple of hours. They asked me to come back in mid-November when Lech "will be back," but by that time it will be too cold out here on the Baltic.

Would you believe, even now the temperature outside is already down to four degrees centigrade – and the chill is creeping in even more relentlessly from the Baltic Sea, which simmers just outside my hotel window.

I’ll be headed down to Cracow and Warsaw day after tomorrow – and warmer climes, I kid thee not.

Anyway, it takes two and a half hours by Lufthansa to Bangkok, then another ten hours onwards to Frankfurt, Germany. Our Boeing 747 arrived at 6 a.m., a light rain gleaming on the tarmac, a very smooth landing it was, too. What kills you, and the reason I missed our hero. Mr. Walesa, was the stultilfing five-hour "wait" for a connecting Polish Airlines (LOT) flight to Gdansk’s "Lech Walesa International Airport" – yes, they’ve named the airport after Lech, in this city where he’s still much revered.

Walesa is rightly idolized since he was the man who was instrumental in forming the resistance movement which eventually overthrew Communist rule in Poland. He founded Solidarity – the former Soviet Bloc’s first independent trade union – which launched a series of strike actions in 1970 in his Gdansk Shipyard, which once had 8,000 workers.

When the authorities clamped down violently on the Solidarity militants, riot police killed 80 workers and seized Walesa. He was "convicted" for "anti-social behavior" and spent one year in prison.

In 1976, he finally lost his job in the shipyard for collecting signatures for a petition to build a memorial for the slain workers. Placed on the "blacklist", Walesa was unable to find another job and had to live on the charity of his friends and supporters.

Walesa, born on September 29, 1943, to peasant farmers in Popowa, Poland, was an electrician by training and became the foremost trade union activist in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk (Stoczni Gdansk in Lenin, now called Stocznia Gdansk). He worked there from 1967 to 1976, then 1983 to 1990. Together with Andrzej Gwiazda and Aleksander Hall, he organized the illegal underground Freedom Pommeriania in 1978, and the following year was arrested a number of times for mobilizing what the Communist regime dubbed an "anti-state organization". The court, however, found him "not guilty".

It was August 14, 1980, that proved to be Walesa’s finest hour. When the "occupational strike" erupted, he scaled the wall into the shipyard and emerged as the strike leader. He was chosen chairman of the Committee of Solidarity (Soidarnoso) and, when then Prime Minister Wojciech Jaruzelski declared "martial law", he was arrested and jailed for 11 months in eastern Poland, near the Soviet Border. Freed on November 14, 1982, he returned to Gdansk, where he was rehired as a simple electrician, but this was only symbolic since he remained under virtual house arrest from 1987 to the triumph of Solidarity in an 80-day strike – which forced the government to agree to round-table talks.

In 1989, Walesa led the Solidarity Trade Union, by then a political party, which won the parliamentary elections in 1989 with 48 percent of the seats in the Sejm (parliament). The Communists barely held on to power with the automatic 51 percent of the seats allotted them.

After parliament chose Tadeuz Macowiecki to replace the hardlining Jaruzelski, although still Communist in status, Poland began to move towards the free market system.

In 1990, Walesa was overwhelmingly elected President of Poland for a five-year term. Although he revamped the government, and instituted democratic reforms, Walesa’s unpredictable and eccentric style soon dismayed most of his supporters. He lost his temper frequently, quarreled with his formerly ardent supporters, and was accused of leaving the running of most projects and agencies to his "cronies", who were of a less than noble character than his. By 1995, alas, Walesa had lost most of the initial public support and the euphoria which had lifted him up on a wave of popular emotion to the highest office in the land.

In 1995, he lost his bid for re-election. In 1997, he came out of what he termed "political retirement" to organize a new party dubbed "Election Action Solidarity" which swept the parliamentary elections, but marginalized his own role in the party’s success.

To his humiliation, the unfortunate Mr. Walesa ran for the Presidency again and received less than one percent of the votes. After this terrible defeat, he finally left politics, and now confines himself to lecturing on history and the politics of Poland in a number of foreign universities.

After he won the Nobel Peace Prize he remains an "icon" but he is seen no longer fit to run the country. On May 10, 2004, maybe as a consolation prize the Gdansk-Tricity international airport where we landed has been renamed to Gdansk Lech Walesa international airport, just as we have the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA).

I think there’s an object lesson to be derived by our own La Emperadora, GMA, from the rise and fall of Lech Walesa. Do right, Mrs. President, and do your best – kindly stop appointing the weird people you’ve lately been favoring for no explicable reason except a desire for . . . how can it be?. . . "reelection" to a third term.

There’s already a Macapagal Airport in Angeles city. What’s important is that your name, in the end, be enscribed in the hearts of the people.