POLAND: Former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa said yesterday that Ukraine's security forces were poised to crush last year's "orange revolution" until he intervened.
Mr Walesa claimed that he convinced Viktor Yanukovich, who had declared victory in recent presidential elections, to revoke an order for the police and military to crack down on tens of thousands of people who had gathered in Kiev's main square to protest against irregularities in the poll.
At the time, fears were rife that any violence could spark civil war in Ukraine, where the mostly Russian-speaking east backed Mr Yanukovich, while Kiev and the west hosted huge demonstrations in support of his eventual usurper, Viktor Yushchenko.
"The president [ Yanukovich] said an order had already been given to the security forces to restore order," Mr Walesa told The Irish Times in his office in Gdansk, the Baltic port where he led Solidarity's opposition to Poland's communist rulers in the 1980s.
"I told him: you say you have given orders to the police. I tell you now that you will lose. You have no chance to win. The only choice you have is between defeat with bloodshed and defeat without."
Events were on a knife-edge: Moscow and the West were backing different candidates, Ukraine was paralysed and thousands of people were encamped in central Kiev, waving the orange flags of Mr Yushchenko's party and demanding a rerun of the elections.
The world was watching, wondering whether Ukraine would follow the path taken by Georgia and its peaceful "rose revolution" of the previous winter, or perhaps descend into violence reminiscent of the Romania revolution in 1989, when communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was ultimately captured and executed with his wife on live television.
On November 23rd Mr Yushchenko invited the former dockyard electrician, who was Poland's president from 1990 to 1995, to mediate with Mr Yanukovich, who had been declared the winner of a November 21st election that was widely denounced as a sham.
Mr Walesa arrived in Kiev for talks on November 25th, the same day Mr Yushchenko's supporters were emboldened by the Ukrainian Supreme Court's decision to postpone recognition of the disputed election results.
"It was very, very tense in there," the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize winner said of his meeting with Mr Yanukovich, whom the Kremlin had openly supported and even congratulated on his election "victory" before it was annulled.
"The orders to 'solve' the problem had been given."
Moscow denied this. A Ukrainian interior ministry officer was quoted as saying 10,000 of his troops were on standby.
"If you don't withdraw your orders you will lose after bloodshed and perhaps eventually be hanged from a lamp-post," Mr Walesa recalled warning Mr Yanukovich.
"I said: 'Here, with these witnesses in the office, will you tell me that you will order those people in the streets to be beaten, or not?'
"After this talk of bloodshed, he said he would withdraw the command. So I said to those present: 'You have heard this and now I am going to tell this to the people in the square.' "
Mr Walesa says he also won Mr Yanukovich's promise to start negotiations with Mr Yushchenko and his supporters, a move he had previously resisted.
"For the sake of Ukraine, will you sit at the table to talk to the people standing in the streets? Tell me and I will tell them," Mr Walesa remembers saying.
"So I went to the people in the square and told them: 'In this situation, the real threat is provocation, so don't let yourselves be provoked.
"'You have already won, Ukraine has won!' Negotiations had already started by then."
Mr Walesa left Kiev soon after. His job as a "problem-solver" was done, he recalls, and it was time for politicians to devise a detailed route out of crisis.
"[ They] joined in only after my talks with Yanukovich," he said of EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Polish president Alexander Kwasniewski.
On December 3rd the Supreme Court annulled the election results and announced a rerun for December 26th. Mr Yushchenko won the vote and was inaugurated as president a month later.
Mr Walesa (61), whose political star fell rapidly after an election defeat in 1995, said that he had great sympathy for the huge reform task now facing Mr Yushchenko, and said that he had warned him that he might not be the people's favourite forever.
"When I ended the victorious Solidarity strike, I said: 'You have brought me here on your shoulders, in euphoria, but there may be a day when you throw stones at me.'
"Well, they haven't thrown stones yet but there have been snowballs, fruit, even manure. Real reform is a very tough thing."