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Post by Jaga on Oct 28, 2013 22:34:13 GMT -7
I still remember his first speech as a prime-minister when he fainted in 1989. After maybe 5 min. when he was able to speak back he said, that his health is not better than Polish economy in that time....
Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Poland's first post-communist premier, dies at 86
Tadeusz Mazowiecki, 86, Eastern Europe's first democratic prime minister after communism, a key advisor to Poland's Solidarity freedom movement and U.N. human rights envoy to Bosnia in the 1990s, died Monday in Warsaw after being hospitalized for a high fever, said his personal secretary, Michal Prochwicz.
In August 1980, Mazowiecki joined thousands of workers on strike at the Gdansk Shipyard. Within days, their action grew into a massive wave of strikes that gave birth to Solidarity — Eastern Europe's first free trade union and a nationwide freedom movement — led by a charismatic shipyard electrician, Lech Walesa, whose name quickly became known around the globe.
The outcome was Eastern Europe's first partly free parliamentary election June 4, 1989, that gave Solidarity seats in Parliament and paved the way for the first democratic government in the cracking communist bloc. In September, Mazowiecki became the region's first democratic prime minister. Poland's peaceful revolution initiated changes in the region, climaxing in the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.
Mazowiecki, among Walesa's closest counselors, advised him in the tough yet successful negotiations with the communists, who granted union and civic freedoms in 1980. ... Mazowiecki was appointed the first U.N. envoy to war-torn Bosnia in 1992 and widely reported on atrocities there before resigning in 1995.
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