U.S. Aggravates Conflicts, Soviets Charge
The Communist Party daily newspaper Pravda on Monday accused Washington of aggravating regional conflicts to provide a pretext for lack of progress on arms control.
The official news agency Tass also carried an attack on U.S. regional policies, saying the subversive activities of the CIA now cover all continents.
Tass assailed Congress for endorsing aid to rebels in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Cambodia and Angola, saying this is “tantamount to proclaiming terrorism a new item of American exports.”
The accusation in Pravda was made in an article by news analyst Vsevolod Ovchinnikov, one of four Soviet journalists who interviewed President Reagan before his summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Geneva last month.
Before the summit, Reagan made clear that in addition to arms questions, he wanted to discuss crises for which Washington holds the Soviet Union responsible in such countries as Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Cambodia.
Ovchinnikov said that conflicts in the Third World cannot be interpreted as a reflection of East-West rivalry. U.S. attempts at the “irrelevant linkage” of progress on arms with progress on other aspects of superpower relations have failed, he added.
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