Summit Peace Gains Seen for Angola and Namibia

Substantial progress on bringing peace to Angola and independence to Namibia (South-West Africa) may be made at summit talks in Moscow between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, a senior Administration official predicted Tuesday.

Assistant Secretary of State Rozanne Ridgway suggested that recent U.S.-Soviet success in forging an agreement on the Soviet withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan had improved the climate for moving ahead on other regional issues, especially southern Africa.

“Southern Africa is the regional issue that offers some prospect for moving the dialogue ahead,” Ridgway said at a White House news briefing a week before Reagan is scheduled to depart for the Moscow summit.

Proposed reductions in long-range nuclear weapons, human rights improvements and a number of other issues also are on the agenda, she noted, but she set low expectations for making headway in those areas.

The agenda “is not a high-water mark” in U.S.-Soviet relations but rather, she said, mixing metaphors, “sort of like catching your second wind.”

As previously reported, Ridgway indicated that Reagan and Gorbachev would sign relatively minor agreements to monitor nuclear testing and to cooperate on fishing, ocean pollution, transportation and cultural matters.

She said there would be five “substantive” meetings between the two superpower leaders at the May 29-June 2 summit. In addition, Reagan plans to “reach out to people” in get-togethers with a variety of Soviet citizens, “including refuseniks and dissidents and some of our humanitarian cases, intellectuals and others,” she said.

Meanwhile, First Lady Nancy Reagan will spend a day in Leningrad, visiting, among other sites, a memorial to Soviets who perished during the 900-day Nazi siege of the city during World War II.

Regional Issues

Also on the summit agenda of regional issues are the Middle East, Central America, Korea, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Ethiopia, Ridgway said.

She noted that U.S.-Soviet talks on withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola and granting independence to South African-controlled Namibia have intensified in recent months, involving meetings in Lisbon between Assistant Secretary of State Chester A. Crocker and a Soviet official.

She added that South Africa and Cuba had held their first meeting recently and that South Africa and Angola had met for the first time in four years.

“We think this U.S.-Soviet dialogue has had something to do with that,” she said, “and so we would like to continue to press forward on that dialogue to see what more progress we could make.”

Ridgway held out little hope, however, for reconciling U.S. and Soviet plans for bringing peace to the Middle East.

“We’re a long way, I think, from being able to get agreement from the Soviets on the Middle East,” she said.

Ridgway recalled that the Afghan talks, initially “polemical with very starchy positions” in 1985, had progressed to where negotiators would “engage on a very serious level.” And that, she suggested, might provide a theme for the Moscow summit.

For months, she acknowledged, Administration officials have been looking for a word to characterize the relaxed tensions between the United States and Soviet Union. “Detente,” the catchword adopted by former President Richard M. Nixon in the 1970s, is shunned by today’s conservatives as connoting too soft a line toward the Soviets. On the eve of the Washington summit last year, Ridgway suggested “engagement.”

Although she conceded Tuesday that it is “not good headline stuff,” she said that she has not come up with anything better.

“I’ve looked and looked,” she said, “and I still like ‘engagement’ best of all.”