Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 4, 1990 TAG: 9004040242
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Medium
Meanwhile Tuesday, the Soviet Parliament passed a law setting new requirements for a republic to secede: the backing of two-thirds of the voters in a referendum and a five-year waiting period to negotiate economic questions and resettle opponents of secession.
The meeting with Alexander Yakovlev, a confidante of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, lasted at least three hours and appeared to be the most substantial high-level discussion so far between Moscow and Vilnius.
There was no word late Tuesday night on whether the participants had reached a compromise on Gorbachev's demand that the Lithuanians rescind their unilateral declaration of independence. Egidius Bickauskas, the newly appointed official Lithuanian representative in Moscow, had earlier repeated the position that everything is negotiable except for the March 11 act restoring statehood.
The Lithuanian leadership has called a rally for today in a Vilnius park. Bickauskas said the republic's Parliament would issue a final response to Gorbachev's demand after "consulting the people" at the demonstration.
Other developments in Lithuania Tuesday kept tensions high:
Prime Minster Kazimiera Prunskiene disclosed she had ordered local government councils not to assist with the spring draft into the Soviet army and to cut off funding to local draft boards.
Moscow closed Lithuania's frontier with Poland between Lazdijai and the Polish town of Ogrodniki, about 180 miles northeast of Warsaw. Poland is the only foreign country that has a border with Lithuania.
Officials of the minority Communist Party that remains loyal to Moscow - having seized the newspaper plant with the backing of Soviet troops - said that they plan to stop printing four highly popular newspapers associated with Sajudis, the grass-roots independence movement. The announcement met with outrage from Lithuanian staff members at the printing plant. Its director, Aloizas Pivarionas, said that the plant is contractually obligated to print the papers.
Proponents of the secession law said it creates the necessary legal framework for a republic to exercise its constitutional right to secede from the union.
Opponents, including deputies from the Baltic republics and Georgia, denounced the law for creating obstacles to secession that would make it impossible for most republics to secede.
"It's purely decorative. It's not a law on secession, it's a law on non-secession," said Nikolai Medvedev, a deputy from Lithuanian. As an attempt to preserve the union, it would fail, he said.
"A union held together by force cannot be strong," he told reporters.
But the debate of the law in the Supreme Soviet was one-sided, because most opponents were among the Baltic deputies, who declined to participate.
The deputies from Lithuania and Estonia, as well as some from Latvia, take the position that their republics were illegally annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, so they are not legally part of the union. They say they can attend parliamentary sessions only as observers.
The new law, which will take effect after its publication within the next few days, requires the Parliament of a republic to set a referendum on secession at the petition of one-tenth of its residents.
If the referendum fails to win the two-thirds majority of all citizens required for passage, no referendum can be held on the issue for 10 years. In one of a number of vague points, the law requires that the vote of areas densely populated by an ethnic minority "be counted separately" but does not say what result must be obtained.
by CNB