World Peace Parley Opens With Scuffle as Protesters Take Stage

A scuffle erupted Wednesday on the floor of a world peace conference here, but the Soviet delegates calmly pursued a low-key line and reacted more in sorrow than anger to the outcome of the summit meeting in Iceland.

Once peace was restored to the proceedings, Soviet speakers called for continued dialogue between Moscow and Washington on the subject of arms control. They spared President Reagan from harsh criticism.

Leaders of American peace groups took a far tougher line toward the President’s refusal to trade off his Strategic Defense Initiative for a historic agreement to slash the number of missiles in the Soviet and U.S. nuclear arsenals.

‘People’s Summit’

The Americans called for an “international people’s summit” in Washington next spring to mobilize public and congressional support for banning nuclear tests and abolishing the Strategic Defense Initiative, the President’s “Star Wars” missile defense program.

The conference began with a battle as protesters took the stage and unfurled a banner accusing the KGB, the Soviet secret police and intelligence agency, of being behind the conference.

As they began a chant of “KGB go home!” ushers threw them off the stage, and a countershout of “CIA go home!” went up around the hall. Later, a woman seized the microphone and declared: “We cannot forget about the (Soviet) invasion of Afghanistan. . . . There are no Afghans here.”

She retreated when the moderator assured the 2,500 delegates that any issue could be discussed in the workshops. No resolutions will be adopted at the five-day meeting, in the hope of staving off floor battles.

Soviet-Funded Group

One of the chief sponsors of the congress is the World Peace Council, an organization funded largely by the Soviet Union, and because of this, members of Denmark’s Social Democratic Party pulled out of the conference in protest.

Andrei Grachev, a high official of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee, said that about 100 delegates from the Soviet Union are attending the meeting.

The failure of Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to reach agreement in Iceland, he said, may give new vigor to the peace movement in Western Europe and around the world.

“We want to keep the (Soviet-American) dialogue going--after a pause for meditation on both sides,” Grachev told reporters.