U.S. Vetoes East-West Travel Pact : Allies, Soviets Back Helsinki Group Bid on Human Contacts

To the dismay of its NATO allies, the United States on Monday blocked the adoption of proposals accepted by the Soviet Union to make marginal improvements in human contacts among the 35 nations that signed the 1975 Helsinki agreements.

Even an appeal by telephone from West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in Bonn to Secretary of State George P. Shultz in Washington failed to prevent the American veto.

The proposals required the approval of all member states.

Bonn was especially anxious to improve East-West human contacts in view of the post-World War II division of Germany that has resulted in the separation of many families.

No Joint Resolution

The U.S. action means that a six-week meeting of experts from the Helsinki participating states to review the human contacts record will conclude today with speeches but no joint resolution.

The proposed compromise, a compilation of many items discussed at the conference here, called for the signatory nations to speed the issuance of travel visas, to give special consideration to personal hardship cases such as family illness, to publish rules and regulations on travel restrictions, and to expand contacts between East and West through group travel, sports exchanges and sister-city relationships.

One improvement, sought by the West, would have urged that families be allowed to travel together, instead of the usual Soviet Bloc practice of letting only some members leave home at the same time.

The proposal would also have abolished age requirements in family visits between East and West, a provision targeted at East Germany’s practice of allowing, except in special cases, only retired people to visit relatives in the West.

Explaining the American veto at a brief news conference Monday, the chief American delegate, Ambassador Michael Novak, said only that human rights proposals had not been sufficiently matched in the past by improved performance in human contacts on the part of the Soviet Union and East Bloc states.

‘Noble Documents’

“We in America deeply cherish the Helsinki process,” Novak said. “These are noble documents that gain nobility from performance. As our people review the record of performance, there is concern that words without compliance would only undermine the whole Helsinki process. Thus, given the record, we imagine that a document would have to be of sufficient weight to offset the performance. We regret after careful review that we could not give our consent to this compromise.”

Novak declined to specify the U.S. objections to the document, saying he was too tired. But there were indications that the State Department at the last minute had insisted on including a passage that would have facilitated travel by ethnic minorities--a provision that could have eased the emigration of Soviet Jews.

The clause, included in the original compromise put together by neutral and nonaligned nations here, was earlier deleted under Soviet Bloc pressure. The U.S. delegation had gone along with that move, mostly because the provision would have applied only to travel among the signatory nations, not to Israel, the destination of many Soviet Jews. But then the State Department balked.

The American delegation earlier in the day had given its tentative acceptance to the compromise document prepared by the nine neutral and nonaligned countries among the 35 states. The American acceptance, however, was subject to clearance from Washington, and when the State Department swung into action on Memorial Day morning--by then mid-afternoon in Bern--back came instructions that the compromise was unacceptable.

Immediately after Novak announced the American veto to an evening plenary meeting, Soviet delegate Youri Kachlev took the floor to praise “the great work of the conference” and urged the United States “to join in our consensus and reconsider its negative attitude.”

Soviet Allies Join In

The Soviet delegate was quickly echoed by delegation heads from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary and East Germany.

British Ambassador Anthony Williams, the only North Atlantic Treaty Organization delegate to take the floor at this stage of the proceedings, then said that “the news tonight will have saddened us all and aroused a certain sympathy.” He did not elaborate, but presumably he was expressing sympathy for the United States finding itself alone.

The compromise document was reintroduced by the neutral and nonaligned nations Monday morning after an all-night meeting had ended with a Soviet walkout at 4 a.m. that seemed to indicate a complete breakdown of the conference. After the walkout, the meeting adjourned to resume with a final plenary meeting.

Then everything began to change. The Soviet delegation suddenly turned from a hard-line position to an attitude of compromise. At a working meeting, the 35 delegations began to reach a consensus, paragraph by paragraph, as the Soviets and Americans joined in. After an argument over one controversial passage, the paragraph was simply dropped from the document entirely.

A Swiss delegate who was involved in drafting the compromise commented, “The Madrid agreement three years ago was a 20% improvement on Helsinki, and this would be a 20% improvement on Madrid in human contacts.”

But the State Department did not agree.

U.S. Stands Alone

The United States now stands alone against a European consensus that includes Western Europe, the neutrals and nonaligned and the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.

In general, as one Western European delegate said, “We in Europe have far many more close problems of human contacts than the United States on the other side of the Atlantic, and there were a number of points in the compromise document which we felt would offer real benefits in improving the Helsinki process.”

The Europeans urged the United States to go along because they see some elements of the compromise--particularly on family travel--as small but important improvements.

This is the third “Helsinki process” meeting that has failed to come up with any final agreement. In Ottawa in April, 1985, a meeting to discuss human rights ended without a formal statement. In Budapest last November a Helsinki cultural contacts meeting also failed as a result of a Romanian veto on a final agreement.

A full Helsinki review conference is scheduled to open in Vienna in November.