World

' Airing a few cand

id opinions

# after three years in Moscow

Len cow — Every columnist should be
senatd 5 ae to venta few tough opinions once in
 remal Re ile. In this spirit, here are a couple of
as I’ve accumulated during the course of
ect , My work here,
Pe Former Manchester Guardian Moscow
ai T€spondent Martin Walker's surpris-
ria et book about Gorbachev’s Soviet
“hrist on, the Waking Giant, opens on a
be familiar note of self-pity: “This book is writ-
: dien? “ti from the ghetto,” he complains. “We
‘nristi icreigners who live in Moscow, the journal-
ng (0! us diplomats, businessmen and bankers,
ng ah assigned to one of a series of apartment
engtit ie that are surrounded by wire fences.
still ane gates are guarded by a sentry box,
_,._“f€a policeman stands day and night ...
of # #, Main duty seems to be to monitor and
ntht 5 eck the names of any Russian who seeks
q ed © visit us, and to make reports of our
ng aif movements whenever we leave by car.”
eave €re Is an amazing degree of solidarity
P mill wrong Western journalists based in Mos-
smpld Sy #round this line, for it conveniently
£809 ti Plains and also romanticizes their isola-
vet i) 108 from everyday Soviet life.
prot!
ts abl

Jrlan
minis

- humiliating, for most people here to accept
hospitality they are materially incapable of
reciprocating. On the other hand, there is no
shortage of people who think that a rela-
tionship with a foreigner is a potential gold
mine, or a ticket to paradise. The dipkorpus
community understands this from expe-
rience and that is the overwhelming reason
why they prefer to stick to themselves. The
solitary militiaman at the gate has very little
to do with any of this. ;

Moreover, one has to qualify the repeti-
tious implication that “all” foreigners in
Moscow are confined to the ghetto. Perhaps
they mean “all those who count.” Actually,
by far the majority of us cannot afford to
live in a dipkorpus. There are tens of thou-
sands of students from around the world at
dozens of Soviet educational institutions
— 5,000 at Lumumba University alone —
as well as people working for Soviet com-
panies and organizations, even a few
journalists, I might add. Our main distinc-
tion is that we receive our salaries in roubles,
and that’s what we live on. We live together
with Soviets — sometimes our own families

Fred Weir

fore i
s imp"
relea®
ates. f
sorb!
otim |

Glasnost has not induced them to ana-
Chile Efi their own circumstances any more
mi! feply. Just last month Washington Post
on | Correspondent David Remnick filed a story
et mn eh how Profoundly journalistic possibilities
7m cti ave been transformed in the past couple of
a) ae but still founda paragraph to lodge
bem the old, unreconstructed complaint: “Des-
the " one all the recent changes, reporters still live
; Ree. from much of daily life. We are
ee | Still required to live in foreigners’ ghettoes,
2 b Protected’ by militiamen with phones and
a | Walkie-talkies. We rarely stand in lines to
on buy anything.”
et t It Teally is time that someone pointed out
y ltl, at this is, at best, a partial truth. Perhaps
ft Years ago KGB surveillance and the
2 Pe cnoes of Stalinism in Soviet society were
ce | © main forces isolating foreigners from
©viets. Perhaps. But today the wall that
e ~ “Parates two worlds within this city is made
cert wrly of dollars,
0 & Representatives of foreign embassies and
arbi a Mpanies in Moscow live in “dipkorpus”
_bartments rented to them by the UPDK, a
eit | see Organization whose function is to
“fh ne ide them with living and office quar-
d bY hare €mployees, and other services, all for
‘Tard currency. In addition, there are

bs Mlozkas,” where imported consumer
io Bos and food products are available,
vit! oo 'n only for dollars. What the foreign
4 Bt from ety can’t find there, they obtain
ane ce ™ One of the elaborate mail-order servi-
jos ;“S that operate out of Helsinki and Copen-
g73. “*8en. Every week, crates loaded with
as 0 Trodies come in by the trainload from Fin-
fin® “Nd, all destined for dipkorpus addresses.
ier W, ' is a scotch-and-soda ghetto, where
oj t ‘ll-off foreigners are basically insulated by
ntef SIT money from the vicissitudes and
eeu of the Soviet consumer economy.
ers! ~Vetything they use, from furniture to salad
} ©ens, is brought in from outside. They are
eto! At and away the most privileged minority
: Sef es, they may exist in Moscow, but they
Mainly don’t live here.
. ltis thts, more than any other factor, that
ae and thwarts their relations with
‘rage Soviets. A moment’s reflection on
Ussian culture, if nothing else, should
€ it obvious that it is difficult, even

FROM MOSCOW

— in Soviet buildings, ride the metro, mix
freely with whomever we wish, shop in
Moscow shops and go without whatever
isn’t on the shelves that week. We stand in
line for everything.

An enterprising reporter need only visit
Moscow’s wedding palace number one ona
Tuesday afternoon, see the crowds of for-
eigners waiting to tie the knot with Soviet
citizens, to discover that there is teeming life
beyond the dipkorpus.

The fatal trend — does the Soviet Union
have a third world economy? That certainly
seems to be the tone of much being said in
the west these days, such as the commenta-
tor who remarked that the USSR is like
“upper Volta with missiles.” Or Patrick
Moynihan, who says that on the global
market the Soviet Union is “peddling fish
eggs and furs, the trading goods ofa hunter-
gatherer economy.”

Occasionally an exaggeration is useful to
illuminate some underlying truth. These
ones only obscure. Whatever the crisis fac-
ing Soviet development — and it is pro-
found — this is a highly developed,
industrialized society, with an extraordinar-
ily well educated, sophisticated population
and a huge engineering base. The problems

. facing it are not those of the poorer two-

thirds of humanity.

To explore the example of Soviet exports,
their composition does indeed tell us a great
deal about the glaring weaknesses of the

For most Western
correspondents in
Moscow, the wall
separating them from
ordinary Soviet people
is made entirely of
dollars. :

Soviet economy, as well as a couple of its
strengths. Soviet exports — very much like
Canada’s — are in general far too heavy on
raw, unprocessed materials and far to
sparse in finished, manufactured goods. No
doubt that is a fatal trend, one that the
Soviets at least are beginning to get frantic
about.

A breakdown of Soviet exports in the last
few years has recently been published in the
weekly Argumenti I Fakhti. In this context,
it’s worth pondering:

@ The Soviet Union ranks seventh in the
world in volume of exports, nearly two-
thirds of which go to socialist countries, 20
per cent to industrialized capitalist coun-
tries, and around 15 per cent to the develop-
ing world.

© In recent years fuel and energy resour-
ces constituted about half of Soviet exports,
machinery and vehicles 15 per cent, ores
and metal products eight per cent, chemi-
cals and fertilizers four per cent and consu-
mer goods just over two per cent.

@ In 1987, the USSR exported 10.6-
billion roubles worth of engineering pro-
ducts, including 65 airplanes, 147 helicop-
ters, 41,500 tractors, 40,600 trucks, and
339,000 cars. Consumer goods exports
included 18.6-million watches, nearly a mil-
lion cameras, 1.1-million television sets and
one million radios.

“The Soviet Union is also the world’s
second largest exporter of military hard-
ware, after the United States.In the period
between 1982 and 1986, the USSR sold 50-
billion dollars worth of armaments to other
countries,” the journal stated.

I read with mounting astonishment the
news that a U.S. State department
employee,.Francis. Fukuyama, has declared
socialism dead and “the end of history as
such: that is, the end point of mankind’s
ideological evolution and the universaliza-
tion of western liberal democracy as the
final form of human government.”

I’m certain that the 27 per cent of eligible
American voters who combined to give
George Bush his “landslide” victory last
November will applaud this line of thinking,
but about the death of socialism I’m not so
sure.

Indeed, as Moscow correspondent over
the past three years it has been my tough lot
to chronicle an immense, unfolding crisis in
the only form of socialism we have known
up till now. But it has also been my privilege
to sit in on some of the most searching,
far-ranging election meetings I have ever
attended, to talk with environmental, politi-
cal and other activists who are re-inventing
that venerable socialist form — the grass-
roots mass-action movement — in the
Soviet Union, and watch Soviet coal miners
struggle with the question — no, not how
to privatize — of how to take control of
and run the means of production on a
democratic basis.

Socialism, as a set of principles, has
always been essentially about how to place
human values and real popular control
above the utterly undemocratic, amoral and
sometimes brutal dynamics of the market-
place.

Looking around the world, from the
starvation and deprivation that afflicts the
bulk of humanity, to a ticking environmen-
tal time-bomb to, the poverty of inner-city
America, I insist that those principles are
more relevant than ever.

Someone recently reminded me of the
scholar who suggested that Karl Marx, in
his analysis of the 19th century industrial
revolution, had “mistaken capitalism’s rise
for its decline.” Upon reflection, that is
probably so, but there is no doubt that it
was a brilliant and fertile error.

These days it often seems that there are a
lot of people out there foolishly and hastily
mistaking socialism’s rise for its demise.

World News

FMLN wants
evacuations

SAN SALVADOR — Nine members
of the FMLN are continuing to occupy
the Cathedral of San Salvador here
demanding that president Alfredo Cris-
tiani allow wounded guerrillas to leave
the country in order to receive medical
treatment.

The occupants say that about 120
members of the Farabundo Marti Liber-
ation Front who are wounded or dis-
abled, are waiting in different parts of the
country to be evacuated and receive med-
ical treatment.

The FMLN wants the international
Red Cross to supervise the evacuations.
It accuses the Cristiani government of
violating the Geneva Conventions by
denying medical treatment for the
wounded. It also accuses the government
of carrying out military attacks and
bombings on hospitals run by the
FMLN, and reports several incidents
where captured wounded or medical
personnel have been murdered.

ANG urges
renewed defiance

LUSAKA — At least half of South
Africa’s Black population responded to
a call from the African National Con-
gress to intensify the campaign of
defiance by staying home on election day
last week.

The appeal called for “Week of
Action,” against the apartheid regime.
The statement said, “we must confront
the regime on every front: in the facto-
ries, schools and universities, villages,
farms, churches, mosques, temples and
synagogues.”

The ANC also called for an intensifi-
cation of the armed struggle.

2,000 Kurds
poisoned

(PDW) — A team of British investi-
gators has revealed evidence of the mass
poisoning of 2,000 Iraqi Kurds at a Tur-
kish refugee camp last June.

“Our analysis of samples showed that
these people had been poisoned by a very
powerful nerve agent,” the team said ata
London Press conference in late August.
They concluded that the poisoning was
caused by chemical weapons.

Following reports of a mass illness at
Turkey’s Mardin refugee camp, Dr.
John Foran, chair of International Med-
ical Relief, went to the camp with jour-
nalist Gwynne Roberts, according to the
Morningstar newspaper.

Turkish authorities, who have consist-
ently denied access to welfare or aid
agencies, refused to let the investigators
enter.

Instead, they arranged secret meeting
with refugees who told them that within
20 hours of one specific meal over 2,000
refugees suffered abdominal pains, vom-
iting, breathing difficulties, vision prob-
lems and paralysis.

The refugees also provided the investi-
gators with samples of food eaten in the
camp and blood samples from those who
had become ill.

“We are extremely concerned, given
that over 2,000 people were affected and
we think it is possible that it was a delib-
erate poisoning because of the very high
level of toxicity,” said Dr. Alastair Hay,
a toxicologist at Leeds University.

“We think it is most likely that this
was a deliberate attack and, given the
history of the Iraqi government in using
poison gas against the Kurds, I think you
can draw your own conclusions.”

Pacific Tribune, September 18, 1989 « 9