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World

———

Missed

7K,

opportunity,

hope for the future

MOSCOW — The bunting and flags have been folded away,
hopefully, for next time. Legions of foreign journalists have
Packed up video cameras and scratch pads, and departed
in search of another headline. The political attention of
most in the Soviet capital has swung sharply towards the
Crucial 19th conference of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union (CPSU) coming up at the end of this month.

ow is the time for
sober analysis of the
Moscow summit,
perhaps the least
productive but most
important of the
four Reagan-Gorba-
chev meetings since
1985.

Both sides agree that little substantive
Progress was made in any area except the
intangible but essential business of building
momentum in the U.S.-Soviet relationship.
Both expressed satisfaction with the devel-
oping process —a very good sign —
although the Americans seemed unaccoun-
tably pleased with the lack of practical
results. White House aides even conceded
to the press that “the president was more
Interested in making statements than in
Teaching agreements, more concerned with
the image he projected than in the content
of his direct conversations with Gorba-
chev.”

The Soviet leader appeared to harbour
more reservations. Comparing the unfold-
ing U.S.-Soviet detente to a train that has
Switched from a dangerous to a safer track,
Gorbachev nevertheless expressed disap-
Pointment over “lost opportunities.

“Our dialogue has not been easy,” he
told a Moscow press conference. “It has so
far been moving much more slowly than is
Tequired by the real situation, both in our
tWo countries, and in the world.”

At the summit, the ratified INF
treaty — history’s first true disarmament
Pact — was signed into law. Seven minor
accords dealing with such matters as fishing
nights and student exchanges were also

nique formalizing the relationship between
the two great nuclear powers as one of
“peaceful coexistence.” American officials
balked on the grounds that the Soviet draft
‘contained slippery and “imprecise” lan-

- guage.

The central idea of that draft commu-
nique: “Equality of all states, non-
interference in internal affairs and freedom
of socio-political choice must be recognized
as the inalienable and mandatory standards
of international relations.”

Actually, the U.S. summit agenda
appeared in some disarray, with much of its
traditional fire having been stolen away by
bold Gorbachev initiatives. The thorny
issue of regional conflicts was a clear exam-
ple: Reagan could hardly do more than
congratulate the Soviets for impressive
movement on Afghanistan, and for inspir-
ing similar progress in Kampuchea and
Angola.

American unwillingness to move on sub-
stantive issues, and a situation providing
fewer opportunities to score rhetorical
points off the Soviets, combined to produce
a strange vacuum in the U.S. summit pos-
ture. It was precisely this vacuum that Rea-
gan and his advisors sought to fill by
hammering almost exclusively at human
rights issues — an approach that deeply
‘offended many Soviets and which may yet
boomerang on the Reagan administration.

Even here the going was decidedly uphill
for a president who has made a career of
anti-communism. Standing in the heart of
the Kremlin, surrounded by smiling Soviets,
he had to renege on his “evil empire” rhe-
toric of the past: “I was speaking of another
time, another era,” he temporized. That is

Fred Weir

finalized, bringing to 47 the number of
bilateral agreements signed between the
US. and the USSR over the past three
years. Although most of these are of little
Consequence in themselves, overall it is clear
that an infrastructure of trust and co-
Operation is gradually taking shape.

On the other hand, some of Gorbachev’s
“missed opportunities” include a failure to
deal with Star Wars — the chief impedi-
ment to strategic disarmament. Conse-
quently, no clear agenda has been set for
finalizing the next stage of disarmament, a
START treaty. On conventional and chem-
ical arms, U.S. negotiators ducked signifi-
cant proposals put to them at the summit,
although the Soviets remain optimistic
there will be progress on data-sharing, on-
Site inspection and defining the level of
“reasonable sufficiency.”

Perhaps the biggest Soviet disappoint-
ment was the U.S. refusal to sign a commu-

FROM MOSCOW

probably the closest Ronald Reagan will
ever come to admitting he was wrong to
have dragged his country and the world into
a multi-trillion dollar arms race and a cold
war that rivalled the 1950s in intensity.

It was Reagan’s meeting with carefully
selected dissidents and refusniks at his offi-
cial residence of Spaso House, May 30, that
particularly raised Soviet hackles and led
one Kremlin spokesman to blurt, in a
widely-quoted remark, that Gorbachev
hadn't tried to meet with representatives of
the downtrodden when he visited Washing-
ton. That badly misses the point.

Human rights is a difficult dialogue, but
one that deserves to be two-way, and Gor-
bachev has proposed the creation of a high-
level U.S.-Soviet committee to work out
terms for such a discussion. In general, the
Soviets have shown a new willingness to be
self-analytical on this issue, to an almost
painful degree.

in Moscow.

“The question of human rights is indeed
valid to us,” said Soviet news anchor Stanis-
lav Kondrashov. “It is necessary that a per-
son should be able to state his or her view,
not be harassed by bureaucrats, and be able
to develop his or her creative and civic free-
dom. This is the essence of perestroika and
the focus of the individual, public and state
interests of people in the USSR. We are
awakening, encouraging and developing
these interests now.”

It was not the principle of the
thing — that Reagan wished to meet with
differently-thinking Soviet citizens — which
so disturbed his hosts. It was the people he
chose to invite. Virtually none of those pres-
ent at Spaso House that day had links with
any significant community or social move-
ment in the USSR.

And since the guest list was tightly con-
trolled, Reagan must certainly have been
aware that one of those who warmly
applauded his sermonette on freedom and
democracy, Nikolai Rozhko, was once
sentenced and served a term of imprison-
ment as a Nazi war criminal. Surely he also
knew that at least one of the refusniks he
had brought in to illustrate his case for freer
emigration was a man who long ago
received his exit-visa and has since been
refusing to use it.

“T feel a slightly bad taste in my mouth,
hearing about that meeting,” said a Jewish
friend of mine who was, in the past, himself
several times on the verge of emigrating.
“There was no one there you could respect.
Real dissidents of the 1970s, like Andrei
Sakharov or Roy Medvedev, are now work-
ing for change inside the system, and they
weren’t invited to Spaso House. I think it
was degrading for the president to meet
with those people.”

Soviet spokesperson Gennady Gera-
simov has suggested that the Reagan
administration is “four years behind” in its
understanding of the human rights question
in the USSR, but that is probably going too
easy on a U.S. leadership that appears to
have little interest in comprehending the
real dynamics of Soviet society or in chang-

Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan talk to reporters following summit meeting

ing its own perception of the world.

Looking at another dimension, the
summit redefined the human rights ques-
tion in an unexpected way by giving a big
boost to the process of people-to-people
diplomacy. Along with all of the officials
and journalistic hangers-on, Moscow played
host to representatives of the world peace
movement, women’s organizations, trade
unions, youth groups, clergy, veterans and
others, all of whom worked in their own
ways to tear down cold war barriers,
renounce enemy images and engage in
direct dialogue with their Soviet counter-
parts.

Western press coverage, though fre-
quently accompanied by vacuous commen-
tary and superficial analysis, also ventured
into new forms of coverage — such as
Soviet person-in-the-street interviews —
which showed the Soviet people in all of
their colourful, feisty, contradictory depth.
It will be very difficult after this ever to return
to the stereotypes of cold war propaganda.

However, the most deliciously ironic
rebound from the summit is the growing cry
for more attention to glasnost and human
rights in America itself.

It remains to be seen how well Reagan’s
carefully-contrived freedom song played
with the Soviet people, but there is little
doubt that many Americans are going to be
asking him to run it by them again. Take his
views on North American Indians, as
explained to students at Moscow Univer-
sity:

“Maybe we made a mistake” in permit-
ting Indians to be isolated on reservations,
said Reagan. “Maybe we should not have
humoured them in that, wanting to stay in
that kind of primitive life-style ... Even so,
many Indians discover their reservations
are sitting on huge pools of oil. You can get
rich, being an Indian in America.”

I haven’t been able to find out what the
students at Moscow U. made of that, but I
do have the feeling a lot of angry Americans
are going to be pounding on the White
House door, demanding that the Spaso
House treatment be extended to them ....

Pacific Tribune, June 15, 1988 « 9

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