Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 18, 1991 TAG: 9103180027
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DEBORAH SEWARD ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: MUKRAN, GERMANY LENGTH: Medium
As tens of thousands depart, they leave behind an environmental mess, bitter memories among Eastern Europeans and fervent hopes that the troops never return.
Some would rather not go home. In the Kremlin, a Soviet leadership caught up in economic, political and ethnic turmoil must wonder what it will do with the returning soldiers.
Nearly half a million Soviet troops remain in the satellites that became democracies. Most are in newly unified Germany, east of a vanished frontier that once was expected to be the first battle line of World War III.
Soviet troops have begun leaving the former East Germany, but the withdrawal is behind schedule. They also are pulling out of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Poland still is seeking a firm departure date for the 50,000 soldiers there.
The mess the Red Army is leaving behind will take years to clean up.
Eight barrels of napalm were found in a former garrison north of Budapest. The soil at military airports is soaked with gasoline, and subsoil waters are polluted.
Part of Hungary's Kiskunsag National Park was used for war games, and tons of military debris litter the forest, including unexploded ammunition.
Czechoslovakia said only 12 of the 227 sites evacuated by Soviet forces were clean, and estimated the damage at the equivalent of $8.6 million.
CTK, the official news agency, reported in January that schoolchildren in Rokytnice, 90 miles north of Prague, found live detonators, flares, smoke bombs and ammunition in garbage cans outside a Soviet barracks.
Poland's environmental agency said inspection of nine garrisons last year revealed that the Soviets were releasing untreated sewage into surface water.
In what many Eastern Europeans consider an added insult, the Soviets are demanding compensation for the buildings they erected, many of which are in poor condition and will cost a great deal to repair.
But problems plague the troops' departure. Red Army soldiers who do not want to return home often desert, especially in eastern Germany.
Soviet authorities have appealed to the German government for better cooperation in returning deserters, most of whom are in hiding or have requested political asylum.
The Soviets planned to route some departing troops and materiel through Poland, but the Poles refused, forcing greater reliance on sea and air routes, which the Soviets contend are more expensive.
Heavy fog reduced visibility to less than 10 feet at times this winter, making it hard to load the freighters docked in Mukran harbor, 150 miles north of Berlin.
Bad winter weather in the Soviet Union often grounded the transport planes carrying soldiers and their families home.
Only half of the 27,000 Soviet troops scheduled to leave eastern Germany in January and February did so, and just 70 percent of the assigned equipment was moved out.
Still, "We are determined to complete the withdrawal on schedule," said Col. Viktor Bistritsky, who runs the Soviet command post in Mukran.
When 1990 began, there were 388,000 Soviet military personnel, 184,000 dependents and hundreds of thousands of civilian support personnel in eastern Germany. The two countries' agreement requires that the troops be gone by 1994.
Germany's government and banks have committed the equivalent of $19.5 billion to cover troop relocation costs and help start a market economy in the Soviet Union.
"It is complicated, but in the end, the task must be completed," said Heerwart Schindler, director of the ferry complex completed at Mukran in 1986. "The Soviets must be out by 1994."
Mukran is the only German port that can accommodate Soviet railway cars, which have a wider gauge than European trains.
Empty Soviet cars are ferried from Klaipeda, Lithuania, to Mukran and rolled into a railway yard. They are loaded with military equipment that arrives on the German railroad line, then rolled back on the ferries for the 340-mile return trip to Klaipeda.
Lutz Reimann, director of the German shipping company in charge of the sea operation, said 200 train cars loaded with light vehicles, weapons and ammunition were handled every day.
In Poland, officials are linking permission to cross their territory with a firm date for completion of the troops' withdrawal.
Czechoslovakia also does not want the Soviet soldiers in Germany to use it as a route home, although the Czechoslovaks could earn about $600 million in transport fees.
Nearly three-fourths of the 73,500 Soviet soldiers in Czechoslovakia have left, and the rest are to be gone by June 30. The remaining 19,000 in neighboring Hungary also are to be repatriated by that date.
by CNB