WASHINGTON, May 16 (UPI) -- Lech Walesa was a guest of honor and a keynote speaker at the annual Arab American Kahlil Gibran Awards dinner in Washington earlier this month. For those too young to remember, or for the history impaired, Walesa was the electrician from the Gdansk shipyards in communist Poland, who as leader of the Solidarity Trade Union, helped bring down communism. He later got elected president of a democratic Poland.
It's not everyday that one gets to meet a real hero, and Walesa is indeed a hero, if only when one thinks of the courage and self assurance he needed to maintain his course. His accomplishments are nothing short of remarkable -- though remarkable is too tame a word to describe his feats. In pushing for social changes in his native Poland, Walesa was instrumental in bringing about the demise of the Soviet empire, at the time the world's second-most powerful superpower. And these changes were brought about without a single shot being fired.
I asked the former president, if looking back there was ever a moment when he feared he might have had doubts about what he was trying to accomplish, alone against the entire Soviet system with its powerful and dreaded secret police, the KGB, working to undermine him. His reply was: "I was not alone. I had the support of (British Prime Minister) Mrs. (Margaret) Thatcher, of (U.S.) President (Ronald) Reagan, of (French) President (Francois) Mitterrand and the pope."
Quite a coalition, indeed.
Later, as Walesa (through a translator) addressed the audience which included a number of Arab ambassadors, it was hard not to make the comparison between where the former communist country was in the early 1990s and where it is today in terms of democratic and economic reforms, particularly when contrasted to a number of Arab countries where it seems that time stands still.
According to the Central Intelligence Agency, a "shock therapy" program introduced during the early 1990s enabled Poland to transform its economy into one of the most robust in Central Europe. Poland joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004. With its transformation to a democratic, market-oriented country largely completed, Poland became an increasingly active member of Euro-Atlantic organizations.
But without oil to rake in mega-billions of dollars, the situation in Poland is far from perfect. The country still faces high unemployment, is burdened with underdeveloped and dilapidated infrastructures, and its poor rural underclass is a drain on the economy.
Solidarity, the one-time poster child of post-communism Polish politics, proved unable to keep up with the fast-moving demands of a changing market-economy. It suffered a major defeat in the 2001 parliamentary elections when it failed to elect a single deputy to the lower house of Parliament, and as can be expected in any democratic society, it moved on.
Now compare these changes -- from a communist regime, a Soviet satellite state, a member of the Warsaw Pact, to a free society, member of the European Union and NATO -- to changes, or rather lack thereof, in much of the Arab world.
In many countries across the Middle East economies are stagnating, democracy is lacking and reforms are at best, cosmetic.
In Iraq, for example, a coalition of a different kind has been trying to establish democratic institutions, and three years later, and after tens of thousands of deaths, Iraq is still nowhere near a stable democracy. In other Arab countries basic human rights continue to be denied. Freedom of speech, assembly, religion and of the press -- freedoms established in Poland in a few years -- are still denied in several Arab countries under the guise of decades-old "emergency laws," or "state of war, or rather yet, national emergencies, or other such lame excuses aimed only at keeping the ruling party in power.
Though intrigued at first why James Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute, would invite a former Polish president who had long lost his political luster to speak to a group of Arab Americans -- and Arab ambassadors -- it suddenly made enormous sense. There is so much a man like Walesa can teach countries struggling on the path to democracy: not only how to peacefully bring about regime change -- a much favored phrase in Washington these days -- but perhaps just as important, how to gracefully give up that power when the people demand it.
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