Correspondents' Correspondence

...The Eastern European correspondents here brush the controversy aside as so much propaganda and possibly an organized campaign against the Warsaw Pact countries...

...The delegates have settled into Geneva's new $25-million International Conference Center for what is expected to be another six months of difficult, complex bargaining...

...After wrestling with the Soviets over human rights for weeks on end in Helsinki, however, the Western delegations are well aware of the limits to which Moscow will go in making concessions...

...It is all being conducted with polite formality, in preparation for the legalistic debates to come over the wording of the final documents that will form the basis for a top-level Phase III meeting sometime next year...

...When Willy Brandt publicly mentions the issue," one official told me, "the German ambassador must keep this in mind in the negotiations...

...The consensus here, at least for the moment, seems to be that an attempt by the West to extract fundamental changes in the USSR would probably further jeopardize the already considerably slowed momentum of East-West detente...

...basket three," cultural and human contacts...

...It has already relented somewhat on Jewish emigration, waiving its education tax in anticipation of American trade concessions, specifically most-favored-nation status...

...What has slowed the progress of the conference since Helsinki is the emergence of the issue of human rights in the USSR...

...Some of the nonaligned and neutral nations have tabled their special arguments for full discussion of Europe's military problems-a subject the United States and the Soviet Union want to reserve for the separate talks on mutual and balanced force reductions, to begjn October 30 in Vienna...

...There is hope that the Soviets and their Eastern European allies will make some small compromises on the human rights issue, but nothing approaching the demands of Western public spokesmen is expected.-mark Hopkins...

...Western diplomats say that though the dispute has not yet altered basic bargaining positions, it "affects" the atmosphere in Geneva...

...Thus far the Warsaw Pact members have presented in harmony pro forma declarations on each topic, while the nato countries have dribbled in position papers drafted over the summer...

...Soviet Party chief Leonid Brezhnev, speaking in Bulgaria as Phase II got underway, declared that his government does not consider its internal affairs a negotiable matter, and this has been Moscow's press line since...

...Essentially, what we are witnessing here is really a replay in detail of the tedious negotiations that took place during the first phase in Helsinki...

...They have been trading information and floating ideas with one another for quite some time, and the jargon of the negotiations has become second-nature to them: "Basket one" means principles of relations among nations...

...basket two," economic cooperation between East and West...

...No one can tell at this point how-hard the West will try to bear down on the cultural and human contacts question...

...And that is precisely what full acceptance of a "free flow of information, people and ideas" would bring...

...Many of the diplomats and foreign correspondents from the 35 participating countries are on a first-name basis...

...It now sees the West as, in effect, upping the ante and pressing for changes that could only encourage more dissent against the Soviet political establishment...

...Hard Bargaining Geneva-for those who went through the six-month-long planning talks and the ceremonial foreign ministers meeting in Helsinki, last month's opening of the working session-or Phase II-of the European Security Conference seemed like old times...

...Nonetheless, the Western outpouring of support for Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn and Andrei D. Sakharov has made "basket three" a focal point of attention at Geneva...