Unfinished Helsinki Business

...The press was informed by a senior Soviet Communist Party official, Andrei Grachev, that "the development of the German question played no small role in our decision to call for a new Helsinki Conference...

...If powerful elements of the Soviet military were scarcely mollified, Gorbachev had only a limited number of low cards to play...

...Prince Metternich's Congress, after all, was designed to freeze the status quo and suppress popular revolution...

...The efforts, he reported, succeeded in preventing several score of Pamyat members from being placed on trial...

...The six also gathered in New York on October 1—prior to the CSCE meeting of Foreign Ministers to prepare the Paris agenda—and executed an enabling document that allowed reunification to officially take place two days later...

...The conference failed, however, to offer any suggestions for countering these emerging disruptive forces...

...Now, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the East German Communist regime, the likelihood of a united Germany again took on menacing proportions...

...Policy and the Helsinki Process" under a Ford Foundation grant...

...if this happened in 1990...

...Exactly what this meant was spelled out by U.S...

...Even the classic work, The Black Book, compiled and edited by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vastly Grossman, has remained suppressed for over 40 years...

...Compared with Helsinki 1, though, the security factor has been extraordinarily diminished...

...As a result, the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, stipulating remarkably massive cuts in the Soviet military arsenal, was signed on November 19 in Paris...

...Tensions were eased by reducing the size of the unified German Army to 370,000 from over 600,000, and an agreement not to station nato troops in the East...

...based on the will of the people, expressed regularly through free and fair elections...

...Kampelman added, "There is no substitute for vigorous moral leadership...

...One week after Gorbachev returned from Rome, Mitterrand journeyed to Kiev to meet him...

...He was moved to suddenly urge an acceleration of the Helsinki timetable by the same specter that had motivated Moscow's foreign policy since World War II—aunified Germany...

...Those discussions were greatly affected by the anti-Communist revolutions in the fall of 1989...

...Ironically, the principal advocate of the 1990 conclave had strictly security matters in mind...

...But the powerful popular surge of the East Germans toward their brethren in the West assumed a momentum of its own...

...When the CSCE summit of August 1, 1975, held in Finland, approved the Helsinki Final Act, it struck a balance between satisfying security concerns (then the cardinal Communist objecti ve) and assuring human rights (the West's primary aim...

...Besides, in the face of an escalating domestic economic crisis he could not forgo Chancellor Helmut Kohl's offers of financial assistance...

...A day of intense discussions followed...

...The Warsaw Pact, in fact, virtually collapsed once a free Czechoslovakia and free Hungary demanded the withdrawal of the Red Army...

...Instead, the Charter focuses on detailed freedoms—of conscience, religion, expression, association, and movement...

...It was on November 30,1989, during atrip to Rome, that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev floated the idea of convening "Helsinki 2" a full two years before the next review conference scheduled for the Finnish capital...

...The first Helsinki summit, it will be recalled, was initiated by Leonid I. Brezhnev in March 1966 for the purpose of making the borders of Eastern Europe inviolable, especially those of the German Democratic Republic...

...Finally, the Copenhagen Conference urged governments to "ensure that the objectives of education include special attention to the problem of racial prejudice and hatred, and to the development of respect for different civilizations and cultures...

...Ambassador Max W. Kampelman...

...Resolution of the German problem left just one major security issue outstanding...

...Since the U. S. insisted that the issue had to be fully settled before Helsinki 2 could begin, the pace of the negotiations picked up...

...Racism and antiSemitism have reared their ugly heads in the former Communist countries, with the potential for exploding the modest stability democracy needs if it is to grow...

...Use of the public arena as the "bully pulpit" for combating hate by the top officers of state is precisely what is absent in Eastern Europe, as was illustrated during the Polish Presidential election campaign...

...Fortunately, a basic approach has been provided by the Helsinki process itself—most notably, in the decisions reached last June at the Copenhagen Conference on the Human Dimension...

...An unprecedented article in Pravda on July 22 acknowledged the existence of a "gap" between the Soviet law on incitement to racial hatred and its implementation in dealing with anti-Semitism...

...In Moscow this past August the postwar occupying powers and representatives of the two Germanies signed a treaty extending appropriate sanction to the inevitable...

...Whilewelcome, his words were hardly adequate, given the swelling bigotry in Russia...

...With the end of the Cold War, the November 19-21 Paris summit adopted a Charter for a New Europe that stresses not only "human rights and fundamental freedoms" but "democratic government...

...The CSCE had been serving as the umbrella for conventional arms reduction negotiations between nato and the Warsaw Pact powers...

...The highest authorities of government," he said, must engage in a "vigorous, systematic and public condemnation of antiSemitism and racial, religious and ethnichatred...

...William Korey, director of International Policy Research for B'nai B'rith, is currently preparing a study on "U.S...

...The Congress of Jewish Organizations in Moscow last year pleaded without success for the publication of books on the Holocaust to combat racism...

...The German question was thus decided pretty much on the ground...

...He cautioned that no country could act "without taking account of the European equilibrium," and joined in calling for a Helsinki 2, declaring that "it would be good...

...by permitting the Red Army three or four years to pack up...

...It is not a preoccupation of what President Bush described as a Europe "whole and free...

...The public prosecutor in the case, Andrei Makarov, revealed during a recent visit to New York that considerable efforts were made by local State and Party authorities to limit the focus of the proceedings...

...Mikhail Gorbachev, in April, confronted by increasing threats of pogroms from organizations like Pamyat, finally responded at a press conference with some brief incidental remarks to the effect that racism and anti-Semitism should not be permitted "to occur...

...And it created a new "architecture" of pan-European institutional mechanisms, to be mainly located in former Communist capitals...

...Mitterrand himself advised against any talk about "changing borders...

...The Paris summit also took note of some by-products of the popular revolt in Eastern Europe that are oriented more toward freedom to hate than toward freedom itself...

...The Charter for a New Europe proclaimed on November 21 reaffirms the pledge of the 34 CSCE members "to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state...

...and by formal German recognition of Poland's border on the Oder-Neisse Line...

...First, it called upon the CSCE governments to "take effective measures" that clearly and unequivocally reject racism and anti-Semitism...

...The Soviet President's anxieties strongly resonated in Prague, Warsaw and, not surprisingly, Paris...

...But the achievement of Helsinki 2 could be compromised—or worse, subverted —if the West neglects to press the parallel struggle against hate and bigotry...

...Second, the Copenhagen document underlined the need not only for passing but for enforcing laws to halt incitement to hatred and violence against ethnic minorities...

...The Paris meeting, by contrast, set unprecedented Helsinki democratic guidelines for Eastern Europe in the form of standards for free elections, political pluralism and the rule of law...

...CHALLENGING BIGOTRY Unfinished Helsinki BUSIness BY WILLIAM KOREY President Fran?ois Mitterrand had it right when he dubbed the Paris summit of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) the "anti-Congress of Vienna," and thereby rejected the media's all too facile comparisons of the two historic events...

...And it looks forward to additional "common efforts in the field of military security, " including disarmament...

...Moscow's fears were further damped by large credits and a huge payment of several billion dollars from Germany, presumably to offset the cost of housing for Soviet soldiers coming home...

...Mitterrand was correct in saying that the Paris summit opened the way to a future of expanding democratic rights...

...Largely ignored by the media, the Copenhagen meeting proposed three ways of responding to the challenge of bigotry...

...Two days later, for the first time, a Pamyat leader was put on trial and charged with racial violence...

...In essence, only the conventional forces of the Soviet Union were a bone of contention...