Western Plan For Talks On Germany

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28951, 20 July 1959, Page 11

Western Plan For Talks On Germany

(Rec. 9 p.m.) GENEVA, July 19. The Western Foreign Ministers yesterday agreed on counter-proposals to put to the Soviet Union tomorrow on the Russian suggestion for an allGerman committee, usually reliable sources said last night. They were understood to be a variation of an idea advanced by West Germany for a committee composed of the Big Four Powers, with East and West German experts, to work on German reunification.

Some sources said this idea was being combined with one that the present conference —composed of the Foreign Ministers of the Big Four Powers together with East and West German advisers—could continue in semi-permanent fashion at deputy-Foreign Ministerial or ambassadorial level and assume the functions of the committee suggested by West Germany. The need would thus be avoided of setting up a new instrument in the form of a separate fourPower commission, they said. The Western Foreign Ministers —Mr Christian Herter, of the United States, Mr Selwyn Lloyd of Britain, Mr Maurice Couve de Murville, of France, and Dr. Heinrich von Brentano of West Germany—reached their agreement at a 90-minute meeting today at the French delegation headquarters. According to the sources, they instructed officials to draft their proposals during the week-end and to submit them at a further meeting the Western Ministers will have on Monday morning. Then, it was believed, they would first put them informally to Mr Andrei Gromyko, of the Soviet Union, at a private lunch Mr Lloyd is giving for the Big Four on Monday.

Diplomatic observers believed the Western intention was to

follow up the private talks with Mr Gromyko by tabling the proposals formally at Monday’s plenary session. The Western proposals would be a substitute for the Soviet proposal for an all-German committee composed of equal numbers of East and West Germans on a basis of parity to work on expanding contacts between East and West Germany, on a peace treaty, and on reunification. The West rejects this committee because of the equal status it would give the unrecognised East German regime. It was believed that in their new proposals, the West would not object to East and West Germans conducting discussions on their own on broadening nonpolitical contacts between them; but political work on a German settlement would have to be carried out under the umbrella of the Big Four Powers.