No Soviet Bid to Divide West, Genscher Told

West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher said Sunday that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has assured him the Kremlin is not aiming to split the Western alliance between Europe and North America.

Genscher told a news conference after a day of talks with Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze that he is now even more convinced that the Soviet Union is working seriously for a fundamental improvement in East-West relations.

“The Soviet side repeatedly underlined that it is neither its intention nor in its interest to try to separate Western Europe from the United States and Canada,” he said.

Aim for Deepening Cooperation

“We agreed that it should be the objective of both East and West to deepen cooperation in such a way that it both strengthened peace and became an irreversible process,” Genscher added.

He said he also assured Gorbachev during a two-hour meeting Saturday that the creation of a unified domestic market within the European Communities in 1992 would not become a barrier to pan-European cooperation.

“I said we were not interested in using the bricks of the walls we were pulling down within Europe to build walls higher around the community,” Genscher told the news conference.

The West German foreign minister arrived in Moscow on Friday for talks aimed at preparing for a visit to the Soviet Union, probably in October, by Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Gorbachev is expected to go to Bonn in the first half of next year.

Genscher said he felt his Moscow discussions have helped make progress possible at East-West discussions in Vienna on seeking a mandate for full-scale negotiations on conventional force cuts across the entire European continent.

Final agreement on the mandate for the talks has been held up partly because many Western states are seeking new human rights commitments from the East Bloc at the Vienna Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.