Amnesty Brings Challenge, Opportunity for Solidarity

It was 4:30 in the morning last May 31 when Zbigniew Bujak, the elusive leader of the Solidarity underground, awoke to the sound of pounding on the door.

“I thought, ‘Here they come,’ ” Bujak recalls.

And so they did. The wooden door of the borrowed apartment on Warsaw’s Gandhi Street splintered as 10 members of an elite anti-terrorist commando unit in full battle dress, armed with machine guns and grenades, burst into the room and quickly subdued Bujak, putting an end to 53 months of life on the run for Poland’s most wanted political fugitive.

Only days ago, the 31-year-old Bujak faced the bleak prospect of trial by military tribunal and a possible 10-year sentence on charges of plotting to overthrow Poland’s Communist system. Now, much to his surprise, he is a free man again, home for the first time since the martial-law suppression of the independent Solidarity union in 1981.

Along with more than 200 other opposition activists, Bujak (pronounced boo-yahk ) is the beneficiary of the Warsaw regime’s third and most sweeping political amnesty since the suppression of Solidarity and a period of rule under martial law.

Diplomatic observers regard the amnesty as an important strategic move by Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Polish leader, that reflects both confidence in his political control and a sense of urgency, if not desperation, as the nation’s debt-burdened economy shows increasing signs of stagnation.

The authorities, who have portrayed the amnesty as a gesture of national reconciliation, appear confident that Solidarity will prove unable to reassert itself as a major political force.

By clearing the jails of political prisoners, the leadership hopes to open the way to renewed economic ties with Western Europe and the United States. Fresh credits and an expansion of export markets in the West are seen as essential if Poland, the largest country in Eastern Europe and arguably the Soviet Union’s most important ally, is to end seven years of economic hardship and avert a new cycle of political turmoil.

An Opportunity and Challenge

For Solidarity, which still enjoys broad but largely passive sympathy among Polish workers, 10 million of whom belonged to the independent union during its 16 months of legalized activity in 1980-81, the amnesty poses both opportunity and challenge.

For the first time since the union’s suppression in December, 1981, when Bujak and many others went into hiding, its leaders are free to move about openly and, to all appearances, to meet and talk with each other. But the amnesty has also deprived them of their most effective rallying cause, the release of political prisoners, which also helped to cement a close relationship with Poland’s powerful Roman Catholic Church.

In a series of strategy meetings across the country that began last week in Gdansk, the Baltic port home of Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, the reunited Solidarity leadership is now trying to decide how to reconstitute itself and how to press its demands for economic and political reforms in a developing new environment that is likely to bring improved relations with the West.

Bujak, who acknowledged in an interview that his release on Sept. 12 came as a “big surprise,” said he believed the amnesty was intended not as a gesture of national reconciliation but as a tactical move to “soften” the opposition, in the hope that it will voluntarily disband its national underground structure, called the Temporary Coordinating Committee or TKK.

In this way, he said, “they hope to weaken--to neutralize--Solidarity, which they haven’t been able to do over the last four years. They seem to count on the TKK dissolving its main underground structures.”

Question of Underground

Bujak said the most immediate question facing Solidarity, one that must be resolved quickly, is whether in fact it still needs an underground organization. “This is the main issue, and in the coming week it has to be resolved,” he said.

He added that his own view is that a national underground structure remains essential, that without it, Poland’s various opposition groups, the most prominent of which is Solidarity, are likely to degenerate into “chaos.”

Over the past 4 1/2 years, the underground has served to coordinate the activities of clandestine Solidarity units in factories across the country, which still collect dues that helped to support the families of political prisoners, kept people like Bujak in hiding as they changed apartments and identities and funded the scores of illegal publications that make up the largest underground press by far in the Soviet Bloc.

Four regional underground leaders are still in hiding, but the TKK itself no longer wields significant influence in Poland.

Bujak estimates that as many as 30,000 people are still at least peripherally involved in underground activities while also leading normal lives. Other Solidarity activists estimate that 10 times that number still pay monthly dues to the outlawed union through clandestine factory cells. Even if the TKK chose to dissolve, he said, “nothing would change at the factory level” and the underground press would continue.

Issue of West’s Response

A large factor in Solidarity’s survival, and its ability to make itself heard in the Communist Party leadership, Bujak said, will be the Western response to this amnesty.

“If (Western countries) decide to give economic assistance without any demands on the internal situation in Poland, then the fact that Solidarity exists will be only of secondary importance to the regime,” he noted.

But he said that if the West will press for consideration of the liberalizing reforms proposed by Solidarity as a condition of aid, “then I think this, combined with internal pressures we are able to create, will force the regime to consult and agree with us on some kind of economic policy.”

Walesa, Polish primate Cardinal Jozef Glemp and, according to reliable sources, Pope John Paul II, himself a Pole, have all urged the United States in particular to lift sanctions still in place from 1981 while continuing to encourage a dialogue between the government and the opposition. Remaining U.S. sanctions are a ban on high-level political contacts, denial of new government-guaranteed credits and denial of most-favored trade status, which would exempt Poland from tariffs on its exports to the United States.

Western diplomats in Warsaw said that to avoid the appearance of cynicism in its sanctions, Washington will have to make some reciprocal gesture, although the Reagan Administration clearly wants to make sure first that the Polish regime will not start refilling the jails with Solidarity activists once economic ties are restored.

Low-Cost Gestures

These diplomats said the low-cost gestures available to the Administration include starting long-delayed talks on a new science and technology exchange agreement with Poland or resuming high-level official contacts, possibly when Polish Foreign Minister Marian Orzechowski visits New York later this month for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly.

They noted, however, that it may be hard to draw White House attention to Poland at a time when it is preoccupied with freeing American reporter Nicholas Daniloff from spying charges in Moscow and trying to salvage a second summit with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

“On the other hand, if Washington wants to stick it to the Soviets, they could warm up to the Poles again,” one diplomat commented.

Apart from these political questions, the amnesty poses problems of psychological adjustment for Bujak and scores of others, who are decompressing from months in prison and years on the run, and learning domestic routines all over again.

Bujak’s wife, Waclawa, who was clearly delighted to have her husband home, and had just sent him out to the neighborhood store for bread and milk, said she had managed to see him “only a few times” during his four and a half years in hiding.

Relaxed, in Good Health

Seated on a couch in his mother-in-law’s apartment in the town of Milanowek, about 10 miles from Warsaw, he seemed relaxed and in good health. He said he had not been mistreated during his 14 weeks in jail. But for the first time in five years, as a free man no longer hunted by the police, living with his family under his own name, he said he was having trouble sleeping.

With a popularity second only to that of Lech Walesa, Bujak’s name was chanted by thousands at street demonstrations across the country. His taped voice echoed from hidden loudspeakers at pro-Solidarity Catholic masses and his name gave authority to underground Solidarity’s calls for strikes and demonstrations. But he said there was nothing romantic about his clandestine existence, and returning to it, if that proved necessary, would be a “a very difficult decision.”

Equipped with a false identity, he said he changed apartments about once a month, living out of a suitcase and a briefcase in which he carried clothes, a few books, Solidarity documents, a small coffee-maker and a garlic press.

“You don’t find one in every apartment,” he explained of the last.

At one point, Bujak said, he was hidden by a Jewish man who himself had been hidden by non-Jewish Poles during the Nazi occupation. He declined to identify the man.

‘Enormous’ Problems

“This period in hiding,” he said, “allowed me for the first time to touch on the problem of Jews who were in hiding during the war. I was in a situation a thousand times better. I was among my own people, there was no threat of death. But the problems are nevertheless enormous.”

“Knowing now what it is like to be in hiding makes me want to write about it. Even most Poles are not aware of what it’s like. There are many hardships, and only now I begin to see how much they bothered me.”

He was captured in 1983, but when police drove him to an apartment where he had been hiding, to conduct a search, he bolted from his captors and escaped. At one point, Bujak said, there were indications that the secret police had managed to position an informer in the underground in the hope of pinpointing his hide out, but “we identified this person,” who he said was “extracted” from the organization.

His arrest, when it finally came last May, was a “ghastly” and terrifying experience. He said it was still unclear how the police managed to find him, but he has not ruled out the government’s explanation that a neighbor in the Gandhi Street apartment reported him to the police. Bujak adds only that the neighbor may have been employed by the interior ministry, which controls the uniformed police and security service.

After his arrest, the government implied that Bujak had financial and other ties to the U.S. Embassy. In the interview, he said he had no contact with foreign diplomats during his years in hiding, but that he had no qualms about accepting money from foreign organizations, including the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy as long as it came with no political strings attached.

Skeptical of Motives

“Every democratic country should have a fund like this,” he said.

Despite his release from prison, Bujak, like other activists, is deeply skeptical of Jaruzelski’s motives, suspecting that the government is more interested in the forms and appearance of reconciliation than in a genuine dialogue with the opposition, which would imply a measure of power-sharing inimical to Leninist dogma.

“Excessive admiration would be out of place,” he said, adding that the regime’s real intentions, whether those of Polish patriots or Soviet allies, are an old and enduring issue that “touches on the Communist soul.”

This, Bujak said, remains inscrutable.