Solidarity to Move Operations Into Open

In a new challenge to Poland’s Communist authorities, the outlawed Solidarity movement announced Tuesday that it will disband its Warsaw regional underground leadership, operate publicly and work for the restoration of independent trade unions.

At the same time, two union leaders still in hiding from the days of martial law in 1981, Jan Litynski and Wiktor Kulerski, emerged at a Warsaw news conference to declare that they are ending their clandestine activities.

“We are leaving the underground today and going home,” Kulerski declared as fellow Solidarity activists, recently freed under a government amnesty for political prisoners, embraced the two men in emotional greetings.

Although the amnesty officially expired on Sept. 15, the government has extended the deadline to Dec. 31 for underground activists to emerge.

In a statement released in Warsaw and in his home city of Gdansk, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa praised the amnesty and described the movement’s formation of a new public council as an “expression of good will” designed to remove obstacles to dialogue with the authorities.

“I have said repeatedly that we do not want to conspire,” Walesa said. “It is therefore necessary to work out and agree upon a new model of open and legal activity.”

The amnesty, which freed more than 200 political prisoners including all senior Solidarity activists, “raised within society a spark of hope that Polish affairs will take a different course, that after four years of deep division, repression and hatred, the beginning of the road to dialogue and agreement will be found,” Walesa said. “Restoration of trade union . . . pluralism within the bounds set by the constitution becomes the matter of the day.”

7 Leaders Named

The new leadership structure, to be called the Provisional Council of Solidarity, consists of seven former underground leaders--Zbigniew Bujak, Bogdan Borusewicz, Wladyslaw Frasyniuk, Tadeusz Jedynak, Bogdan Lis, Janusz Palubicki and Jozef Pinior.

Walesa remains the chairman of Solidarity, a position to which he was elected in 1981, before the union was suppressed under martial law and declared illegal. But he was not listed as a member of the new council, which he appointed.

Poland’s influential Roman Catholic Church is known to have favored disbanding Solidarity’s national underground structure, known as the Temporary Coordinating Commission, or TKK. A number of high church officials regarded the underground as a stimulant to official concern and a pretext for repressive action against Solidarity.

Bujak, the recently released underground leader, said the church has been told of the changes, adding that “I think it received this decision with pleasure.”

Covert Work Continues

However, the reshuffle left unclear the status of the Temporary Coordinating Commission. Bujak and other activists indicated that covert Solidarity cells will continue to exist in factories and other workplaces and that an underground support structure will remain in place to aid Poland’s vigorous illegal press, with its scores of diverse publications.

Bujak said that while the underground’s regional leadership in Warsaw is disbanding, other regions will decide what to do depending on local circumstances. Two prominent regional leaders, Marek Muszynski of Krakow and Jan Gorny of the southern industrial city of Katowice, remain in hiding.

Creation of a new council will be a test of the authorities’ tolerance of unofficial political activity in the wake of the amnesty, which was clearly aimed in part at restoring Poland’s economic ties with the West.

Poland’s leader, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, has said that “every citizen’s voice should be heard, regardless of its source, if it is accompanied by a patriotic intention, a feeling of responsibility and respect for constitutional principles.”

However, Jaruzelski also said in a recent speech that “the foes of our political system understand the word ‘pluralism’ as a cover for essentially illegal activities that are anti-socialist and destructive.”