Continued from page 1

he existing Soviet
political system,
Politbureau member
Alexander Yakovlev
told the press last
week, is outmoded,
gravely inadequate
and badly distorted.
“Tt is largely a pro-
duct of the era of the personality cult,” he
said, “and often turns out to be indifferent
to the needs of people. Over the years real
political power was usurped by a bureau-
cratic apparat ... Therefore we have come
to the conclusion that we need basic politi-
cal changes, to overcome the perennial alie-
nation of people from power.”

_ These changes, as the conference pro-
Jected them, involve a broadening of public
democracy, clear separation of Party and
state, and a new level of glasnost and open
debate in the media and society at large. In
short, said Yakovlev, “we mean to recon-
struct the social superstructure ... Future
generations, I believe, will remember this
meeting as ‘the conference of democratiza-

399

tion’.
The second major focus of the confer-
ence, as it shaped up, proved to be the effort
to firmly enshrine the supremacy of law in
all social relations. This drive is predicated
on a hard analysis of post-revolutionary
experience, and its aim is to once and for all
put an end to the arbitrary intervention of
authority into the country’s economic, intel-
lectual and cultural life. During Stalin’s time
such abuses led to horrifying results — from
which the USSR is still recovering — and,
as Gorbachev noted to the conference, offi-
cial caprice is a phenomenon that still can-
not be described as a thing of the past.
“The only antidote to this is the ironclad
rule of law,” said Yakovlev. “Without

exception everyone must be equal before ~

the law.”

FROM
MOSCOW

Perhaps the toughest question before the
conference was to hammer out agreement
on a new understanding of the Party’s role
in society. Tough, because it requires a
courageous level of self-analysis: the Party
must educate and transform itself.

“The leading role of the Party is to be
interpreted in a new way,” delegate Victor
Afanasyev, editor of Pravda, told the press.
“The Party must learn to exercise its influ-
ence in society through political means,
using education and persuasion, through
the work of Party members in various areas.
This means we have to abandon the habits
of command, strictly delineate functions
between Party, state and management, and
severely reduce bureaucracy.” Many of the

' “shadow government” departments of the
Party, which frequently duplicate state
agencies, are set to be disbanded.

The conference itself mirrored both the
electric atmosphere. of the times as well as
the contradictory nature of the unfolding
process. Of the 4,991 delegates, only two
were under the age of 25. Yet this middle-
aged crowd — mostly the products of the
stern and stultifying Brezhnev years —

enthusiastically ejected a Secretary of the
Moscow Party Committee from the
podium when‘he tried to deliver a bland
“report on achievements” in the old-
fashioned style. Sharp exchanges punctu-
ated the meeting — including an amazing
dialogue between actor Mikhail Ulyanov
and Gorbachev on the role of the
press — all of which speaks clearly that the
old ways are gone, never to return.

Accompanying the conference has been
an unprecedented level of public debate,
barrier-smashing in the media, and entirely
new forms of political activity. Most of this
did not wait for the conference to anoint it
with legitimacy.

In the Baltic republic of Estonia, dra-
matic developments just before the confer-
ence led to the firing of the republic’s Party
leader — he was charged with being
“incapable of working ina new way” — and
the introduction of a new dimension in
Soviet politics: a “People’s Front,” a broad
union embracing groups and individuals
from all walks of life, Party and non-Party
members, whose purpose is to press the
momentum of constructive change and
plant the reforms deep. Already some
40,000 of Estonia’s 1.5-million people have
joined it, and similar fronts are in various
stages of creation all over the country.

In the Baltic republics — which in many
respects are on the cutting edge of
perestroika — thousands have already
demonstrated in favour of constructing a
monument to the victims of Stalinism. In
Moscow, an ad hoc committee has collected
30,000 signatures on a petition urging the
conference to take up this cause. Last week,
I witnessed a rally of some 300 people in
Moscow’s Dynamo Square, addressed by
such leading figures as Yuri Afanasyev,
Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Sak-
harov, which called upon the conference to
build not just a monument, but adjoining
archives, a museum and a research centre.

Last week all eyes were on the 19th CPSU
conference, watching it with deep hope and
new expectations, as the Soviet Communist
Party grappled with the challenge and
renewed its committment to lead and unify
the vast and diverse forces of the world’s
first socialist society.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (above)
warned special CPSU meet in Kremlin
(left) not to be complacent about per-
estroika.

Meet marks progress of
n-weapons free zones

By RITA HOPPE

BERLIN — Nobel laureate Wole
Soyinka’s powerful imagery brought the
message home. -

He began by pointing out the ultimate
irony — humanity, which has yet to
resolve the mysteries of the creation of
the universe, has succeeded “‘in perfect-
ing the means of terminating its existence
as we know it.” He then completed the
picture: We “‘appear to have been led
inexorably toward a joining of the big-
bang emergence theory by a big-bang
extinction craving.”

It was the determination to slow this
seemingly relentless drive to annihilation
that brought together just over 1,000 par-
ticipants from 113 countries to the
world’s first International Meeting for
Nuclear-Free Zones, initiated and hosted
by the GDR here on June 20-22.

Anker Joergensen, former Social
Democratic prime minister of Denmark,
reported on the progress made toward
the establishment, under a treaty, of a
Nordic nuclear-free zone. He explained
that three of the five countries involved
(Denmark, Norway and Iceland) are
NATO members and, Joergensen af-
firmed, they intend to remain as such.
Yet the treaty would stipulate that
nuclear weapons shall not be used
neither from nor against the Nordic
region in case of war. This would consti-
tute a departure from Norway’s present
policy of nuclear weapons deployment in
times of crisis.

This points to significant progress on
disarmament being made even within the
present alliances framework. As Egon
Bahr, chair of the West German parlia-
mentary sub-committee on disarmament
and arms control emphasized, “As
neither side can any longer hope for vic-

tory and the only unity lies in death, our
potential adversary is now our indispen-
sable partner in achieving our own secur-
ity.”

This argument would seem to rebuff
NATO’s strategy of nuclear deterrence.

Christine Peringer, a member of the
Canadian Peace Alliance, outlined the
arguments she was most often faced with
against a nuclear weapons-free Canada:
a nuclear weapons-free Canada would
be in conflict with its status as a NATO
member; it would be a unilateral move
and therefore a factor toward destabili-
zation; and local nuclear weapons-free
zones are meaningless.

Her reply that a nuclear weapons-free
Canada is not contrary to our commit-
tment to NATO has been reinforced at
this meeting. We heard many representa-
tives from NATO countries saying they
want to make their countries and regions
nuclear weapons-free. For example, a
speaker from Greece placed the issue like
this in one of the commissions I
attended:

“Will a unilateral declaration of a
nuclear weapons-free zone have a desta-
bilizing effect? This meeting has rein-
forced the opposite. We have learned
that nuclear weapons-free zones them-
selves are stabilizing, confidence-building
measures and, wherever they exist in the
world, have so far made those regions
more, not less, secure. Unilateral arma-
ment is accepted without question, why
not unilateral disarmament aimed at
creating international security?”

Speakers from New Zealand des-
cribed the way churches, homes, schools,
towns and cities were declared nuclear
weapons-free zones and how this gradu-
ally convinced the whole population to
elect a government with a positive
nuclear weapons-free policy.

Pacific Tribune, July 6, 1988 « 5