European reaction surprises U.S.

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33964, 3 October 1975, Page 9

European reaction surprises U.S.

(N.Z. Press Assn—Copyright)

WASHINGTON, Oct. 2. The severity of European reaction to Franco Spain’s execution of five terrorists has surprised American officials and created an acute policy dilemma for the Ford Administration, the “Chicago Daily News” reported. Among the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies, the United States has regretted but not formally pro-

tested against the execution. Officials have been negotiating with the Madrid regime for months to extend the leases of American air and naval bases in Spain, which Administration strategists deem important to United States and Western defence requirements. By an ironic turn of events, the United States may find it easier to conclude a new base agreement because of Spain’s growing isolation. Spain desperately needs the American tie, in the judgment of diplomatic officials, and will probably not push maximum demands now.

Those demands include a military security treaty, which the United States is not prepared to grant, and more military aid than either the Administration or Congress would accept. In fact, after the row generated in Europe, the Congress would be likely to criticise any base agreement, no matter how favourable to the United States, officials fear.

Officials had been hopeful that the N.A.T.O. allies were easing their hostilitv toward Generalissimo Francisco Franco, in response to appeals made by President Ford at a N.A.T.O. summit in Brussels earlier this year. But the demonstrations, strikes and boycotts in support of General Franco’s opponents have been so vehement as to baffle policy makers. The White House has characterised the executions as “really an internal Spanish matter,” and the President expressed regret, through a spokesman, “at the cycle of violence that leads to this tragic outcome.” With the base negotiations at a delicate stage, Mr Ford was clearly not about to say anything *o upset them. Other Western nations, including

Mexico, condemned the Spanish Government’s actions against the terrorists and prompted the Prime Minister (Mr Carlos Arias Navarro) to accuse them of “hypocritical and intolerable” interference in Spain’s internal affairs.

The executions and the protests have again raised questions about Spain’s future after the 82-year-old General Franco passes from the scene. Fears that Spain might go the way of Portugal or lapse into another bloody civil war which brought General Franco to power in the mid1980s are not shared by authorities in Washington. They see Spain as relatively stable, in spite of the guerrilla activity, the Army being unified behind the regime. General Franco, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, is said to have his good and bad days, but recent accounts picture him as taking an active part in the decisions that brought on the executions. A sign of possible trouble with the Army emerged recently when about 10 middlegrade officers were arrested for “sedition,” according to reports. The continued terro-

rist attacks on the police and others could force General Franco to crack down and invoke the anti-terrorist laws to include the press and other institutions which have enjoyed a measure of “liberalisation,” diplomatic sour.es say.

Behind the solidarity with General Franco’s opponents led by Western European trade unions, these sources point out, is the lingering memory of the Spanish Civil War, in which Hitler and Mussolini sided with Franco and tested weapons they were later to use in World War 11. General Franco is viewed as the last vestige of dictatorial rule in Western Europe, a relic of fascism. To some United States authorities, the response of European leaders to the executions is .a politically useful statement against what General Franco represented in the Civil War. These leaders feel free to vent their feelings, officials believe, in the secure knowledge that the United States will preserve Spain’s geographic and strategic value to Western defence. In any case, the United States finds itself, as it did in Greece under the military junta, supporting a regime supposedly unpopular among its people and plainly anathema to the other memb s of the Western Alliance.