Correspondents' Correspondence

...Journalists in Western European capitals may be more courageous than their governments...

...The Soviet bloc's newfound interest in curbing drug abuse and criminal trafficking was evident during a 1987 United Nations conference on the subject held in Vienna, at which Eastern diplomats sought advice and assistance from Western specialists...

...The evasions one hears in European capitals—"internal Iraqi affair" (London...

...Moscow had long spurned suggestions that it join Interpol because of the jealous secrecy maintained by its police forces—and Kremlin spokesmen meanwhile kept up the official pretense that drug addiction was a social evil found only in decadent capitalist nations...

...Even so, the Speaker of the Knesset at the time abstained from the vote on ratification of the treaty with Egypt because he felt returning the Sinai could set a precedent for giving up parts of the West Bank...

...Kudryavtsev, director of the Soviet Institute of State and Law, in a recent issue of the authoritative Moscow daily Sovetskaya Rossiya...

...The evident claim was that Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir's hard-line policies alone could induce the Palestinians to make peace with Israel...

...So far cooperation between British and Soviet police and customs authorities has resulted in the seizure in London of 3.5 tons of Afghan cannabis, worth $20 million...

...Finally, they are beginning—maybe too optimistically—to give a certain "legitimacy" to the struggle...

...The silence enforced for so long concerning the availability of drugs in the Soviet Union has "blunted the attention of the militia and doctors, of the public, families and schools," according to a high official in the Interior Ministry, and "promoted the spread of drug addiction...

...The Paris-based organization is concerned with combating international crime, which is increasingly dominated by the drug trade...

...For another, the more people learn about the details of the "uprising" in the West Bank and Gaza, the better they realize that there is another side to the pictures of violence they had been seeing...

...regional particularity" (Bonn...

...Opium and its derivatives have been used for many generations in the Asian regions of the USSR where poppies grow...

...He is seen, rather, as having given up hope of eliciting from Shamir the kind of accommodations that could justify, in Arab eyes, his bypassing the Palestine Liberation Organization and concluding a deal with Jerusalem over the future of the West Bank and Gaza...

...Alexelyev, chief of the law faculty at Leningrad University, has put it even more bluntly: "We should have joined Interpol a long time ago...

...hundreds of people have reportedly been arrested and vast poppy fields destroyed...

...These contacts led to the signing of a formal agreement earlier this year by Britain and the Soviet Union linking the law-enforcement agencies of the two countries...

...Professor S.N...

...There is, for example, a fairly widely held conviction that when King Hussein announced his decision this summer to relinquish Jordan's claim to speak on behalf of the West Bank Palestinians, he was merely engaging in a tactical maneuver...

...First, unlikethe West Bank, theSinai Peninsula was never considered part of the Land of Israel...

...But the intended implication was that only the superpatriotic Likud bloc could afford to risk the concessions needed for a settlement to be achieved...

...therefore, Likuddid not violate any nationalistic or religious taboos by exchanging it for peace...

...Tackling drug addiction, terrorism and other crimes is inconceivable in the absence of a well-coordinated mechanism of international cooperation," declared V.N...

...Washington's response to the situation, by comparison, appears to be the epitome of morality and international responsibility...

...Israel from Abroad Tel Aviv—"Only the Likud Can Do It" declared a slogan heard often during the election campaign here...

...The success of the Anglo-Soviet accord has apparently convinced the Kremlin that it needs similar arrangements with other Western countries—hence the interest in joining Interpol...

...Privately, some Western Europeans point an accusing finger at UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuéllar...

...Not long ago, Interior Minister Aleksandr V. Vlasov noted in the Communist Party daily Pravda that the fight against drug addiction has become "one of the main tasks" of his department...

...As one TV network news editor said: "This is the first genuine Israeli-Arab war, because it is being conducted between the parties directly concerned...

...The Soviet press has also described drug raids involving thousands of policemen backed by light aircraft...

...we asked the Secretary-General to investigate the allegations" (Paris)—cannot help but remind anyone who remembers it of Western Europe's attitude during prewar Italy's attack on Ethiopia...

...Experts in Israel believe Hussein's action was much more than that...

...Highly refined heroin and other drugs are smuggled in from nearby traditional supplying countries, such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran—partly to satisfy the growing demand in the relatively prosperous European industrial cities of the Soviet Union, partly to be shipped on to the West...

...They contend that official evasiveness stems from a fear of antagonizing Baghdad and losing hoped-for fat contracts from Iraq, where multibillion dollar reconstruction projects are scheduled to get under way now that the fighting has ceased...

...In addition, drugs for the illegal market are diverted from the State-controlled pharmaceutical sector by corrupt officials, or manufactured in clandestine laboratories operating at industrial enterprises and universities...

...But this has changed in the glasnost era...

...He acknowledged, moreover, the existence of 46,000 registered drug addicts in the Soviet Union, most of them under the age of 30 (previous official statistics, published in 1984, had put that number at only 2,500...

...It is a war about the shape and nature of future relations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, which must be settled before there can be peace...

...Since a significant number of Israelis appeared to believe this argument, I was not altogether surprised to find, in the course of a five-week trip prior to the November 1 balloting, that foreign ministries in several Western European capitals were similarly deluding themselves: Influenced by the fact that it was Likud's Menachem Begin who negotiated the peace with Egypt, they thought a victory at the polls would make Shamir more flexible toward Arab demands...

...They say he is soft-pedalling charges against Iraq, lest it walk out of thecurrent talks with Iran on implementing the UN peace resolutions designed to permanently end the hostilities between the two countries...

...Misreading Shamir, however, is not the sole mistake Western European officials seem to be making about the Middle East...

...For one thing, there is considerably less coverage of the Intifada in the press and on television...

...Perhaps most troubling, though, is the apparent equanimity displayed by Western Europeans in the face of Iraq's use of chemical weapons in its war with Iran and against its own Kurdish minority...

...Eliahu Salpeter Soviet Drug War Geneva—After many years of doggedly resisting the idea of law-enforcement cooperation with other countries, a drug-ridden Soviet Union is expected shortly to make a formal bid to join Interpol, the 140-nation global police organization...

...The fact that several prominent Soviet jurists have recently called for such a move in a coordinated press campaign suggests that an affirmative decision has already been taken by the Kremlin...

...Consequently, hecould not persuade the hardliners in his camp to accept territorial compromises in the areas they call Judea and Samaria...

...Thomas Land...

...As has been true in other matters, the USSR's willingness now to openly discuss this issue is shared by most of its Eastern European allies—some of whom are already members of Interpol...

...As for Israel's imageon theContinent, one gets the impression that at least at the moment it is rebounding from its lowest point...

...Since the USSR is a major source as well as transit route of the illicit drugs peddled by crime syndicates, any attempt at curbing the global traffic must involve Soviet cooperation if it is to be successful...

...Second, Shamir is both less flexible and less imaginative than Begin was, and he does not have the authority of the founder of Herut, the core party of the Likudbloc...

...The expectation was rather unrealistic for two reasons...

...Moscow's application, should it come, will be warmly welcomed by Interpol...