Costa Mesa Rejects Soviet Sister City

The Costa Mesa City Council voted 5 to 0 Monday night to participate in a sister city program but rejected on a 3-0 vote a citizen group’s notion of establishing the relationship with the Soviet city of Melitopol.

Council members Mary Hornbuckle and Dave Wheeler abstained because the matter was not clearly listed on the agenda.

The vote came after nearly three hours of testimony marked by history lectures and drama, including poetry and song by the grandson of a Melitopol man and details of alleged Soviet wartime atrocities.

David Balsiger, an evangelical Christian writer who formed the Ban the Soviets Coalition before the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, has taken the lead in protesting a proposed sister city link between Costa Mesa and Melitopol, a Soviet city 200 miles north of the Black Sea.

“We’re opposed to the sister-city project because of the Soviet Union’s human rights record and their terroristic adventurism throughout the world,” Balsiger said Monday.

Group Protests

Fifteen members of Balsiger’s organization, Restore a More Benevolent Order Coalition (RAMBOC), and other groups demonstrated Monday night at Costa Mesa City Hall before the council considered the proposal. They carried placards saying “Communism Kills” and “Just Say No to Soviet Sister Cities.”

Balsiger said defectors have told him the Soviet government uses sister city programs as “propaganda.” Because U.S. citizens’ contacts are limited to government-selected spokesmen, sister city programs are more people-to-government or government-to-government programs than the people-to-people exchanges they purport to be, he said.

In 1984, Balsiger’s group captured attention with efforts to keep Soviet athletes out of the Los Angeles Olympics. As it was, the Soviet Union boycotted the Games.

Also joining Balsiger in opposing a Soviet sister city were several members of Young Americans for Freedom, who threatened to campaign against council members who voted for a Soviet sister city link, the Baltic American Freedom League, Californians for a Strong America, and Americans for Freedom Inc.

Soccer Team Trip

The sister city proposal arose in conjunction with efforts of a soccer team to travel and play in the Soviet Union, said Jan Kausen, 34, a homemaker who is heading the proposal on behalf of the team of 15 boys. The team, which includes Kausen’s son, is planning a trip to the Soviet Union a year from now through the New York-based Citizens Exchange Council.

In trying to find a Soviet city, Kausen attended a conference of Sister Cities International in May in Seattle. There, she met Eugene Kovalenko, a Soviet immigrant and resident of Long Beach who is trying to establish a sister-city relationship between his city and one in the Soviet Union.

Kausen said she chose Melitopol because Kovalenko has relatives in Costa Mesa who also immigrated from the manufacturing city with a similar climate and population to Costa Mesa.

So far, she has no indication whether Melitopol citizens are interested, Kausen said. Under the procedures set up by Sister City International, a group based in Alexandria, Va., the Soviet government will contact the cities and determine whether they want to join a program of educational and cultural exchange, she said.

“I would be naive to think there would be no opposition to this,” she said. “I’m hoping they will see I’m just a mother of four trying to broaden the horizons of my kids. If I had any qualms about any part of this program, I wouldn’t (try to) send my first-born child over to the Soviet Union.”

Balsiger said RAMBOC is a coalition of “patriotic” groups nationwide that opposes “totalitarian propaganda” and offers aid to defectors denied asylum and victims of terrorism.

Balsiger, 40, has written 20 books, including “In Search of Noah’s Ark” and “The Lincoln Conspiracy,” and publishes “Family Protection Scoreboard and Biblical Scoreboard” newsletters profiling political candidates to the Evangelical Christian community, he said.