
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 20, 1990                   TAG: 9006200467
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A/5   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WARSAW, POLAND                                LENGTH: Medium

WALESA VOWS TO BE PRESIDENT

Lech Walesa says he must be president to preserve Poland's new democracy, and he has vowed to wage a political war against his former Solidarity allies, according to an interview published today.

The union leader challenged the longtime intellectual allies in Warsaw who now are opposing him to start a separate "center-left" political party, and not hide behind the broad label of Solidarity.

"I do not want to be president. [But] I will have to be president," Walesa said in the interview in Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's largest newspaper, whose use of the Solidarity logo Walesa now disputes.

Walesa announced that he plans to start a daily newspaper owned by the Solidarity union itself.

As president, he said, he would not oppose the government of Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, but he would use presidential decrees to "put the problems of our country in order."

Walesa said he would wage political war because he is in "deadly fear" that a new power monopoly is forming.

"Now I will create . . . a war at the top. It is a war that I want to win," Walesa said.

His proclamation that he must be president was used as the headline for the Gazeta Wyborcza story.

In recent months, open conflict has erupted between Walesa at union headquarters in Gdansk and the East bloc's first non-communist government in Warsaw. The government was created by Solidarity and led by Mazowiecki, who was among Walesa's closest advisers for nearly a decade.

The continued presence in the government of President Wojciech Jaruzelski, the former head of the now-dissolved Communist Party, symbolizes the dispute. The general who declared martial law against Solidarity was given the post to smooth the transition in once-historic reform agreements now overtaken by the breadth of change in Eastern Europe.

Jaruzelski's term runs to 1995, and fully democratic parliament elections are not scheduled until 1993. A new constitution could change the dates and it is widely accepted that both presidential and parliament elections will take place no later than next spring.

by CNB