Lech Walesa, the former Polish president and hero of the uprising against communism, has been charged with perjury related to accusations that he was a spy for the former regime.
Walesa, 78, a former Gdansk shipyard electrician who won the Nobel peace prize in 1983 for his struggle against the communists, called the allegations “slander” and the latest attempt to rewrite and diminish his role in history.
He has long battled claims that he acted as a paid informer in the 1970s, prior to leading the formation in 1980 of Solidarity, the trade union that went on to play a key role in the fall of the communist regime. The success of Solidarity inspired similar popular revolutions in neighbouring states.
The perjury charge relates to a 2016 investigation into names included on communist secret police documents found in the home of the regime’s last interior minister, Czeslaw Kiszczak, which suggested Walesa was a paid informant. Walesa, who had been called as a witness in the investigation, said under oath that the documents were forged and that someone else had signed his name.
However, prosecutors from the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), a state institution charged with prosecuting communist-era crimes, now say a handwriting analysis shows the documents to be authentic and that Walesa committed perjury, a crime punishable by up to three years in prison.
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Walesa, who was charged on Friday but was not arrested, called the case against him “disgraceful”.
“This is another slander, an attempt to discredit me in the eyes of the public opinion, and, consequently, diminish my role in history,” he wrote on social media.
“The prosecution is not where historical truths are established. The truth about those times will be determined by historians, and I am not afraid of the verdicts of history.”
Walesa has been the frequent target of accusations about his past. His activities were first questioned in 1992, two years after he became president, when his name surfaced on a government list of some 60 suspected former agents. A court cleared him of the accusations in 2000.
In 2009 Walesa sued the president at the time, his former adviser Lech Kaczynski, who had accused him of spying for the secret services under the alleged alias of Bolek, a name shared by a Polish children’s TV cartoon character. The case was withdrawn after Kaczynski died in an aircraft crash in 2010.
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Walesa has in recent years been a vocal critic of Poland’s current government under the leadership of the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, which has promoted the claims against him.
Piotr Glinski, the current culture minister, called Walesa a “cog in the machine that crushed millions” and suggested that his collaborator codename be used in museums and textbooks. Dariusz Piontkowski, an education minister, also called for schools to teach this version of events.
The acrimonious rivalry has led to Walesa being left out of government anniversary events for Solidarity. On the eve of presidential elections last year Walesa told The Times that PiS was dismantling democracy and had undermined the rule of law so much that it was “unfit” to govern.
