Rumania’s choice: the tiger or the bear

Press, 28 August 1978, Page 16

Rumania’s choice: the tiger or the bear

By

MARK FRANKLAND

iu Constanza,

Rumania

A Rumanian diplomat once compared small countries to tugboats that usefully guide the hulks of great Powers through straights and shallow waters. The visit of the Chinese leader Hua Kuo-feng to Rumania suggests a cautionary rider: small Powers should look out when the big countries they hope to guide start moving quickly under their own steam.

The one unambiguous message of Chairman Hua’s visit here and to Yugoslavia is that China, after the uncertainties of the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s last years, is on the move again in the world. One wonders whether Rumania, and the rest of Europe for that matter, realise how turbulent a wake it might leave behind. The Chinese Chairman is certainly proving expert in what, barring Mao’s one trip to Stalin’s Moscow, is the first visit to Europe by any supreme Chinese leader. He has joined in folk dances with good humour, inspected honour guards with dignity. And, no doubt with the genuine interest of a builder of modem China, he has examined Rumanian turbines, tractors and oil-drilling equipment.

He is bigger than his photographs suggest and also a good deal more elegant. The large face with its baggy cheeks and toothy smile announces shrewdness and good health. He is, in other words, an obvious contrast to President Brezhnev, who is seen by informed Rumanians, and other East Europeans, as the less and less active invalid leader of an almost immobile Soviet Government. And it is in this contrast between the two Communist giants’ leaders, and the policies they represent, that one senses grave problems for Europe. Chairman Hua’s visit is the latest in a series of jabs that China has aimed at what it now likes to call “the Arctic Bear.” He has just signed a

Sino-Japanese friendship treaty which seems likely to change world politics in ways still hard to foresee, though surely all unfavourable to the Soviet Union.

What is more, the Albanians have just provided proof of Chinese ambitions to change the pattern of European politics.. According to a statement by the Albanian Central Committee recently, after China ended its aid to Albania, Chou En-lai proposed in 1968 and again in 1975 that Albania form a Balkan alliance with Rumania and Yugoslavia. This suggests a Chinese readiness to push Rumania far beyond what Rumanian diplomacy considers the safety margin in cheekiness to the Soviet Union. Rumania, after all, is a member of the Warsaw Pact. “Pravda” has reprinted the Albanian charge that the Chinese are trying to “interfere in the affairs of the Balkans, to mix up the cards and to kindle the fire of war in this very sensitive area of Europe.” This month, when Brezhnev and the Bulgarian leader, Mr Zhivkov, met in the Crimea they returned to that theme.

It is not only the Russians Who have reason to worry. Soviet rule has at least brought to the Balkans and the rest of Eastern Europe stability of frontiers in a region notorious for the passion and permanence of its national quarrels.

An attempt to modify the present order .— even with angelic intentions, which China’s scarcely are — would be exceptionally tricky. It is not surprising that the Rumanians deny all knowledge of any new Balkan alliance, or that they have shown some nervousness about Chairman Hua’s visit.

An official who was given the delicate job of supervising the Western journalists said with a pitiful, almost imploring look:

“Don’t speculate. How would you like to be speculated about?” The welcome and the well-rehearsed crowds have been carefully kept to the same size as those prepared for Brezhnev in 1976. And it seems that President Ceausescu persuaded his guest, while in Rumania, to stick to the Rumanian rule of no open criticism of the Soviet Union or anyone else. When Chou En-lai was here 12 years ago he ignored this and the Rumanians had a great battle to get him to rewrite one particularly sulphurous speech. But this diplomatic correctness, at which Rumanians are so good, is beginning to look as useful as

putting on kid gloves to pick up plutonium. The Chinese insist — and the Chinese Defence Minister repeated it only last month — that detente is “humbug”, that a new world war is “inevitable,” and that Russia is the most likely country to start it.

Small wonder if the Russians take exception to, say, the Chairman’s visit to the Black Sea port of Constanza, where China wants to open a consulate. The port lies conveniently between the base of. the Soviet Black Sea fleet and the Bosphorus, through which the fleet must pass to enter the Mediterranean.

In some things President

Ceausescu agrees with Peking. His most recent judgment of the Soviet Union, without of course naming it, is that because it has a far weaker economy than America it must use chiefly military means to extend its influence. This is strikingly similar to the Chinese analysis. But, of course, Rumanian officials have always said in private that they disagree with much of Chinese policy; that they have looked to China for a marriage of interests, not minds. It is this marriage of interests that is now in question, and not only for Rumania. In Rumania’s case the core of its policy, as a

Western diplomat in Bucharest put it, is that “both deals and disputes between great Powers are usually settled on the backs of small countries.”

For many years, China seemed to Rumania a safe counterweight to the Soviet Union. To suggest another metaphor, it was like a large, but slumberous water buffalo which you could push and poke, and even ride, without any danger. But since Mao’s death and the elimination of the Gang of Four the water buffalo has begun to look remarkably like a tiger. And we all know what happens to people who ride tigers. 0.F.N.5., copyright.