Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 30, 1990 TAG: 9007300222
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/2 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: GEORGE JAHN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: VIENNA, AUSTRIA LENGTH: Medium
Rapid changes that have reshaped Eastern Europe and are fragmenting the Warsaw Pact have created anomalies at the negotiating table that were unthinkable a year ago.
Take the East Germans, for instance. Once the Soviets' most formidable military allies, they have been pushed to the sidelines by approaching German unification.
"Nobody takes them seriously," said a delegate of another Warsaw Pact country.
A senior NATO negotiator, who spoke on condition his name not be used, said his East German counterpart "doesn't get any in- structions and doesn't write any reports. I feel sorry for him."
Negotiators for the two military alliances who avoided each other just a few years ago now lunch together. And as independent thinking supplants bloc loyalties, the seven Warsaw Pact and 16 NATO countries happily enlist each others' help against their allies.
"Nobody is worried that the friendship is because someone is trying to recruit someone else" as a spy, said a Warsaw Pact delegate. "In other words, I don't see the CIA in a Western delegate, and he doesn't see the KGB in me."
"We very often conspire together with Western colleagues to accomplish something" that other Warsaw Pact countries oppose, said a senior Hungarian negotiator who also commented on condition he not be identified.
"If the more flexible NATO countries want to propose something but NATO discipline won't allow it, then they ask us to do it."
Such thinking was non-existent at the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction Talks, which broke up without a treaty last year after 16 years of frustration, stonewalling and posturing by both sides.
Deadlocks on troop strengths and verification of troop and weapons cuts, among other issues, proved insurmountable in the climate of distrust generated by superpower confrontation.
Enter the Conventional Forces in Europe talks now going on in Vienna. A child of perestroika in the Soviet Union and the resulting lessening of East-West tensions, they have been marked by an atmosphere of cautious trust from the outset.
But the ice wasn't broken until the wave of democratization swept autocratic communist rule from most East European capitals.
That heralded the beginning of the end for the Warsaw Pact. Hungary, which served notice earlier in the year it is leaving the East bloc alliance by 1992, recently signed a deal to provide NATO troops with meat and cold cuts.
Other members are bound to leave soon as well. And although the pact has said it is changing from a military to a political alliance to conform to new realities, most members agree its days are numbered.
Nowhere is that more evident than at these talks. Most participants, whether from NATO or the Warsaw Pact, now share one overriding goal: rid Europe of as many Soviet troops as possible.
The superpowers have agreed to a ceiling of 195,000 troops each in Central Europe, with the United States permitted to keep up to 30,000 soldiers elsewhere.
The desire of both sides to shrink the Soviet troop presence from the Atlantic to the Urals appears a prime reason for keeping the talks going even as the Warsaw Pact unravels.
"Nobody wants to upset the present structures on which the negotiations are based," said a Warsaw Pact delegate. "This would give the Soviets a prime excuse to leave the negotiations, and we don't want to do them that favor."
A Western delegate agreed.
"The primary interest of every nation but one at the talks is to effect some kind of reduction of Soviet forces," he said. "It's NATO against the Soviet Union, with the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact countries playing the go-betweens."
by CNB