Soviet leader offers to cut air strength

Press, 13 July 1988, Page 11

Soviet leader offers to cut air strength

NZPA-Reuter Warsaw The Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, has begun a visit to Poland by proposing a pan-European disarmament summit conference and offering to cut Soviet air strength in East Europe if United States Fl 6 fighters are withdrawn in the West.

Mr Gorbachev made the proposals in a speech to the Sejm (Parliament) within hours of landing yesterday and repeatedly plunging into Warsaw crowds to chat and sign autographs. He said a “great rapprochement” was under way between the Soviet Union and Poland, both of which were on the path of socialism reforms, and promised that problems of their tormented recent history would be cleared up. “Truth and justice may come late but they have to come,” Mr Gorbachev said. He denounced Stalin’s deportations of hundreds of thousands of Poles . after the Soviet and Nazi armies carved up Poland in 1939. But he made no reference to the massacre of 15,000 Polish officers captured by the Soviet Union during the invasion — dashing speculation that Moscow might accept responsibility for the killings previously

officially blamed on the Nazis. Mr Gorbachev was flying south yesterday to visit the ancient royal city of Krakow, with a side trip to Poronin village where Vladimir Lenin, father of the Soviet State, lived for several months in 1913 and 1914. He told the Sejm that a

pan-European summit conference could discuss how to break a logjam in East-West negotiations and prompt some movement towards a reduction of conventional weapons. He offered an "analogous” reduction of Soviet air strength in eastern Europe if the United States cancelled plans to

switch 72 Fl 6 fighters to Italy after their withdrawal from Spain in 1991. In a third proposal Mr Gorbachev suggested setting up a “permanent war risk reduction centre” in Europe to help consolidate peace on the continent. The Polish leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, in a speech to the Sejm, welcomed the European conferences call and offered the anti-war centre a home on Polish territory. Italy welcomed the proposal to trade plane withdrawals, but N.A.T.O.’s new Secretary-General, Manfred Woerner, was less enthusiastic. In London, an official source said the offer looked like “a propaganda-type exercise”. The Italian Prime Minister, Ciriaco De Mita, said in Rome it would be “a great step forward on the road to peace after 14 years of disappointing negotiations”.