Andropov wastes no time in taking up reins

Press, 17 November 1982, Page 9

Andropov wastes no time in taking up reins

NZPA-Reuter Moscow The new Soviet leader. Yuri Andropov, has shown that he plans to play a vigorous persona! role in Kremlin diplomacy by holding a series of brisk meetings with political figures from outside the Communist bloc. Yesterday Mr Andropov seized the "opportunities presented by the presence in Moscow of high-level foreign visitors who had come to attend the funeral of his predecessor. Leonid Brezhnev.

He held meetings with the West German President, Dr Karl Carstens, the American Vice-President, Mr George Bush, and three leaders from Asia - the Pakistani President, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the Indian Prime Minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi, and the Afghan leader, Babrak Karmal. Soviet bloc leaders left Moscow for home without any separate meetings with Mr Andropov after what one soui-ce said had been an amicable agreement to meet some other time. The Soviet Union and its six Warsaw Pact allies are due to meet next month in Prague for a long-planned summit meeting of their alliance, giving Mr Andropov a chance to receive their party leaders. Mr Andropov’s decision to see non-Communist leaders

first was a departure from the often ritualised protocol of the Brezhnev era. Only brief details of his meetings were released, but the presence of General Zia and President Karmal suggested that Afghanistan was one of Mr Andropov’s priorities. A Tass report confirmed that Afghanistan had been discussed “on a principled plane” in the meeting with President Zia but gave no details. Another funeral mourner, the Chinese Foreign Minister, Mr Huang Hua, was expected to see the Soviet Foreign Minister, Mr Andrei Gromyko, today. Mr. Huang has

been given markedly preferential treatment by his Soviet hosts, as if to underline the importance they want to attach to normalising SinoSoviet relations. The meeting between the Chinese and Soviet Foreign Ministers would be the highest-level known contact between the two governments since 1969. Consultations were held at deputy Foreign Minister level in Peking last month and diplomats said that a logical next step would be' agreement to formal talks to normalise relations between them. Yesterday Mr Andropov, shaking hands with foreign

delegation chiefs in the St George’s Hall of the. Kremlin, chatted to Mr Huang for three minutes, more than any other guest. Mr Huang, as a further mark of favour, was accompanied by Moscow’s chief negotiator with China, a deputy Foreign Minister, Leonid Ilyichov. Western Kremlin-watchers said that Mr Andropov’s first public day as party general seretary had thrown interesting sidelights on the balance of power in the post-Brezh-nev Politburo. He was joined at the reception by the Prime Minister, Mr Nikolai Tikhonov, the first Vice-President, Vasily Kuznetsov, and Mr Gromyko. At the funeral on Red Square he delivered the main address, with the Defence Minister, Marshal Dmitri Ustinov, speaking second. But there was no role yesterday for the man who proposed Mr Andropov for the party leader’s job, Konstantin Chernenko, a close associate of Mr Brezhnev’s, and some Western analysts believe that his politcal future could be in doubt. Mr Andropov’s hard-line remarks on the importance of Soviet military strength and his attacks on “imperialism” have suggested he has gone out of his way to win the trust of the, powerful military establishment.