Gorbachev and Walesa in row at German unification celebrations

Nov 10, 2009, 17:04 GMT

Berlin - Nobel Peace Prize winners Mikhail Gorbachev and Lech Walesa engaged in a round of tit-for-tat rebukes Tuesday as the pair celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall in Berlin.

After the Polish Solidarity union leader Walesa last week dubbed Gorbachev a 'weak politician' in an interview, the former Soviet leader on Tuesday hit back, accusing Walesa of trying to claim the credit for the collapse of the communism.

The two - plus other world leaders from the time of the 1989, such as then West German chancellor Helmut Kohl - have been in the German capital to mark the November 9 breach of the wall.

At a meeting of Nobel Peace Prize laureates on Tuesday evening, Gorbachev hit back at Walesa, when asked for his comments on 'weak president' jibe.

'Walesa wants a bigger piece of the slice of the pie, a larger amount of credit,' Gorbachev told reporters on the margins of the conference.

'Could a 'weak' president have started such reforms?' he continued.

'After I stepped down, people said the era of Gorbachev is over. However, the era of Gorbachev is not over, it is only beginning.'

Last week Walesa told Spiegel, the German weekly magazine, that 'It was good that Gorbachev was a weak politician,' suggesting that a stronger leader might have been tempted to 'block the mass escape' from the former East Germany.

He also appeared to downplay the role of the East German protests against their communist rulers, saying: 'The Germans, of course, tore down the literal wall in Berlin. The fall of the Berlin Wall makes for nice pictures. But it all started in the shipyards'.

That is a reference to his own Solidarnosc union, which confronted the Polish communist regime at the Gdansk shipyards in the early 1980s.

The apparent rivalry between the two leaders has not overshadowed the larger celebrations taking place in the reunited German capital, which saw fireworks and 1,000 dominoes toppled on Monday to mark the exact anniversary of the first breach of the wall.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel - who herself grew up in East Germany - was accompanied by both Gorbachev and Walesa on Monday as she walked across the first border crossing to have opened on November 9, 1989.