Double Threat To Berlin Meeting

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31828, 5 November 1968, Page 17

Double Threat To Berlin Meeting

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) WEST BERLIN, November 4. A twin threat faces Dr Kurt-Georg Kiesinger’s Christian Democratic Party today when it opens its congress in West Berlin—from the Soviet-backed East Germans, and from militant far-Left students within the city itself.

The congress, being held in West Berlin for the first time in 16 years, will meet behind the shelter of police squads and stringent security checks on delegates in the modern congress hall only a few hundred yards from the Berlin Wall.

Mr Walter Ulbricht’s East German Government maintains that West Berlin is a special political entity on East German territory in which West German authorities have no business. They therefore argue that the congress is an intolerable and illegal provocation. City officials and the Western allies responsible for protecting West Berlin can only guess at the form East German hostility to the congress will take, if indeed threats are translated into action.

But ominous East German comment, culminating in an

editorial in the official party newspaper, “Neues Deutschland,” declaring that East Germany had a duty to intervene against the congress, has created a mood of nervous uncertainty. There are dozens of ways in which the East Germans and their Soviet allies could put the squeeze on West Berlin, an exposed Western outpost 110 miles inside Communist territory linked to the West by air and land corridors.

They range from interference in the air corridors by Russian aircraft, something that could lead to an EastWest confrontation, to pinpricking administrative delays on the flow of people and goods to and from West Berlin by road, rail or canal. Western experts believe that a major show-down is extremely unlikely but Western determination to protect the air corridors is being underlined by intensive takeoff and landing exercises by aircraft of the Royal Air Force in Berlin that are continuing this week. Dr Kiesinger is to make the keynote speech to the congress today and aides said he would almost certainly stress West Germany’s commitment to maintain the viability of West Berlin and its right to hold official political functions whatever the East Germans might think. On the domestic front the smooth running of the congress is threatened by West Berlin’s far-Left students, who have not held a major

confrontation with the police since street battles last Easter, but who are trying to muster support for a big demonstration tomorrow.

The protest is directed at a professional disciplinary tribunal against a lawyer, Mr Horst Mahler, court champion of young extremists.

But police are ready to head off a march on the congress halt Leaflets distributed in the city last night instructed the demonstrators to bring eggs, tomatoes “and other effective missiles.”