
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 9, 1994                   TAG: 9401090056
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

CLINTON TO STRESS STABILITY

As President Clinton begins the longest foreign journey of his young presidency, he is preparing to cast himself and the United States as forces of stability for an uneasy Europe and a politically divided Russia.

Far from the congratulatory idyll he may once have expected, the eight-day trip across the continent from Brussels to Prague, Moscow, Minsk and then Geneva is shadowed by new difficulties arising from the strong showing of rightist candidates in Russian elections last month. The vote result threatens to slow the pace of economic reform in Russia and has fostered anxiety among its neighbors.

For Clinton, who last visited Moscow as an Oxford University student in the late 1960s, the trip presents an opportunity to cast himself as a true statesman who can address the deep concerns of European governments and put the United States behind the right forces at an uncertain time in history.

"All of Europe stands at a turning point with deep implications for our own security and prosperity," Vice President Al Gore said in a radio address he delivered Saturday on behalf of Clinton, who was returning from the funeral of his mother in Arkansas and preparing to depart again around midnight for the NATO summit meeting in Brussels.

Gore described the president's trip as one "that can help make our nation and our world more secure in every way."

The trip begins in Brussels, where leaders of the 16 NATO nations are gathering for their summit Monday and Tuesday. Clinton heads next to Prague, where he will meet with leaders of Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia; then on to Moscow on Wednesday for a summit with President Boris Yeltsin and other Russian officials.

The president has said he will seek on his trip to reinvigorate the Atlantic alliance, encourage political reform in the former East bloc, limit the dangers posed by stocks of nuclear weapons and promote economic renewal throughout Europe.

But he must also contend with complaints from Eastern Europeans angered by his refusal to grant them immediate membership in NATO and with the challenges to political and economic reform in Russia personified by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist whose faction is now the second-largest bloc in a freely elected Parliament.

So tangled is the agenda that on the eve of Clinton's departure, administration officials said they had not decided exactly how to finesse the uncertainty and political divisions in Moscow.

Still undecided, for instance, was whether Clinton should reach out to the agrarians and Communists who now make up about half of the new Parliament's membership.

by CNB