When a U.S. veto delights Russia

Press, 12 June 1986, Page 21

When a U.S. veto delights Russia

NEAL ASCHERSON,

the London ‘Observer”

columnist, analyses yet another scuppered European conference where, because of a United States change of mind, agreement

could not be reached.

Once again, a European conference has ended in fiasco. The Experts Meeting on Human Contacts and Family Reunion at Berne in Switzerland failed to agree. A closing document had been painfully worked out and accepted by all the 35 nations present. Then, after a telephone call to Washington, the American delegation suddenly vetoed it. This is becoming a depressing tradition with the conferences which are supposed to carry forward and elaborate the principles of “Helsinki,” the European Conference on Security and Co-operation. No final document could be agreed at the meeting on human rights at Ottawa. The Budapest "Cultural Forum” last year went the same way when the Rumanians, out of narrow spite against their Hungarian hosts, vetoed the closing document. Now it has happened again at Berne..

There were bound to be problems. Nobody seriously expected the Soviet Union, above all, to agree to let its citizens come and go across the frontiers as normal states allow their people to travel. But after six weeks of debate behind closeij|doors and a

desperate scramble at the end to beat the clock, the neutrals — led by Austria and Switzerland — produced a document of the “lowest-common-multiple” kind which East and West decided they could accept with a few amendments.

Many good ideas had to be jettisoned to gain the assent of Mr Yuri Kashlev, the touchy leader of the Soviet delegation. Out went — to mention a few — the French proposal that states should abolish exit visas for their own citizens; the time limit for publishing regulations on foreign travel; the suggestion that national and religious minorities had a right to be reunited with their fellows abroad. What remained in the draft document was mainly to do with families. It would have committed the 35 nations — including the U.S.S.R. — to "positive attitudes” towards applications for family reunification; to immediate processing of requests for family visits on urgent compassionate grounds; to granting exit permission to all applying family members at once, instead of one by one; and to a general speedup of the bureaucracy. It was not tremendous, but it

would have marked a step forward of sorts, and the West had been insistent that it would be pointless to have a closing document which merely mouthed platitudes and left matters where they were. America’s allies were all the more dumbfounded when Mr Michael Novak, head of the United States group, came back from the telephone and announced that he had changed his mind. After all, the document was “too thin and full of holes.” Somebody in Washington, probably Secretary of State George Shultz, had slapped him down.

Since then the West, with varying success, has tried to hide its consternation. The official British view is that Berne was quite successful, actually; closing documents don’t really matter, and the point is that an excellent six-week discussion was had by all. The neutrals feel insulted; the French think it just shows President Reagan’s indifference to European subtleties. The real losers are the West Germans, with 3i/ 2 m ethnics Germans still living in the Soviet Union, Poland and Rumania. Their Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, was on a visit to Turkey and made a frantic telephone call to Shultz from Ankara begging him to change his mind. But there was nothing doing. Why on earth did the Americans do this, Infuriating their already resentful European allies and handing to the Soviet Union a propaganda coup which it is

the last state in the world to deserve and the happiest to exploit? So far, there is no coherent explanation from Washington.

But other Western delegates to Berne think they know what happened, although there have been some American denials. It was the matter of the Soviet Jews. At the end, Mr Kashlev managed to insist that the draft document only applied to persons moving between the 35 “Helsinki” nations — in other words, not to Soviet Jews trying to visit or emigrate to Israel. This may have been mean, but it certainly was not unexpected. It was obvious to everyone at Berne, from the first day, that if they were only talking about travel between the 35 countries, the Soviet Jews would be out of it if they wanted to go directly to Israel. Mr Novak and his team knew this perfectly well. Mr Shultz, in ordering a veto, seems once again to have put votes back home above the interests of his European partners. Happy, happy Mr Kashlev! What a love’ly speech he was able to make! The Americans, he said, were acting as a “world gendarme,” threatening the little nations of Europe with their big stick. “This decision was probably planned a long time ago,” he said. “We believe that the United States are trying to kill off the whole Helsinki process, following the successive failures at Ottawa, Budapest and

They want to prevent any closer co-operation between eastern and Western Europe; they are not mature enough for the modem philosophy that enjoins us to find a way of living together.” Coming from a Government that treats citizens who want to travel much as we treat prisoners on bail who ask for a foreign holiday, this is rich. Unfortunately, Mr Kashlev makes a point which cannot be brushed away. The time has come to ask what really is the underlying American attitude to the “Helsinki Process,” and whether the United States do, indeed, “want to prevent any closer cooperation between Eastern and Western Europe.”

The Helsinki conference took place in 1975, just 30 years after the Potsdam conference. Essentially it grew from a Polish idea, accepted by the Soviet Union after some doubts. Its central thought was to get away from the Potsdam style , — in which a few great Powers decide the future of Europe and hand out their decisions to the lesser nations waiting in the corridor — and substitute a system in which all nations take part with formally equal status. It was meant to allow small nations more elbowroom and reduce the grip of the two military alliances, and to some extent — a precious extent, for countries like Hungary or Austria, or even the Netherlands — it does so.

In recent years, American sus-1

picions of Helsinki have grown. The conferences allow the Soviet side to blur issues, and loosen N.A.T.O. discipline. Flowery French or German talk about “the unity of Europe” are a cover for immoral coquetry and private deals with the Reds. Increasingly, the Americans have misused the meetings for propaganda, posing demands which — through fine in themselves — are meant to be unacceptable to the Soviet Union, whose wickedness and repressiveness will then be manifest to all the world.

This may suit them. It does not suit the Europeans — Western, Eastern or neutral. As a West German participant at Budapest wrote “The strong wish of all the smaller countries was to come to some conclusions ... The Americans tried so hard to provoke the Russians until they fought back.” Britain has gone loyally along with this American line, accepting the shipwreck of one conference after another with the excuse that "a weak closing document is worse than no document.” Other Europeans retort that if the Helsinki process is denied agreement on anything at all, it will collapse. One experienced N.A.T.O. diplomat said to me: “Don’t you understand why the Americans are really here? It is to prevent any agreement between Europe and the Soviet Union.” I look for evidence to disprove that sinister, lucid statement but — after Berne — I cannot find any.