NEWS ANALYSIS : E. Germany Riding Out Refugee Crisis, Shuns Reforms

East Germany’s Communist regime seems determined to ride out the crisis provoked by thousands of its citizens seeking refuge in the West and has shown no sign of initiating reforms that might help keep its citizens from trying to leave.

And, diplomatic analysts say, this policy may lead to even greater problems in the future for the country’s aging leadership.

“The choice is an almost impossible one for the government,” a senior diplomat here said. “If they don’t liberalize the economy and restrictions on personal life, the people will get more and more frustrated. But if they do, they are admitting that their hard-line Marxist policies have been wrong.”

The dilemma of the East German rulers was posed another way by Karl Kaiser, director of Bonn’s Foreign Policy Institute: “Either they keep the lid on and sooner or later they get an explosion. Or they try to liberalize and, to a degree, risk popular movements arising, as happened in Poland and Hungary.

“There is no easy way out, but the second course at least would give the government a chance by instituting limited reforms.”

So far, however, the only reaction of the East German regime has been to launch a vitriolic barrage against Hungary for letting the refugees cross its frontier into Austria without travel documents and against West Germany for encouraging the emigration.

“The language the Communist press is using is remarkable,” an observer here said. “It is almost like Nazi propaganda streaming against West Germany. The East German regime is even accusing Bonn of reviving Nazism.”

One of the reasons for a lack of a coherent response to the flight of the East Germans--more than 15,000 have done so illegally so far this year and another 90,000 will legally emigrate to West Germany--is the silence of Communist Party chief Erich Honecker, who is 77.

Honecker has been recovering from a reported gallstone operation and has not appeared in public nor publicly responded to the refugee crisis. None of the other members of the ruling Politburo have publicly dealt with the issue.

“The regime has been shaken up by so many people leaving,” said a Western diplomat. “It is a rejection of the state created by these old leaders--of which they are very proud--so the question is whether Honecker has even been informed of the extent of the crisis.”

No Free Elections

And the last kind of reform that the East German government is expected to introduce would be any kind of free elections.

“This government knows what happened when free elections were introduced in Poland,” commented a political specialist. “They know they would be at least as unpopular with their people as the Polish Communists were in that country.”

The East German regime is also losing the limited support it enjoyed from West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, which had held the position that Bonn should be supportive of the East German leadership in the interest of inner-German harmony and stability.

“Time is running out,” says Social Democratic Party senior member Egon Bahr, who helped create former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s sympathetic Ostpolitik in the early 1970s. “Stability can be reached only through the ability to make reforms. A regime that does not adapt can become encrusted. And when the crusts break off, that can be dangerous.”

Klaus Duisberg, a Bonn official who deals with East German affairs, says: “With or without Honecker, East Germany has to fear that if it brings in reforms in the direction of democracy and a market economy, the entire basis for its existence will be removed.

System Implosion

“But if it does nothing, there will also be destabilization. People’s readiness to make an effort for the state will fail, and over a long period, there will be implosion of the system.”

For years, the East German government maintained its rock-hard position because its economy was the most prosperous in the Communist East Bloc and, according to experts here, because East Germans are extremely attached to their heimat-- their home areas. But things are changing.

As one commentator put it: “In East Germany the state is as solid as stone. It is the population that is dissolving.”

In the past, the East German regime tended to deport political dissidents to West Germany to get rid of potential troublemakers. But now, with 100,000 or more young Germans leaving annually, the state is becoming denuded of the workers it needs most.

How to Keep the Young?

So the problem of the government, in the view of analysts here, is how to keep the socialist state intact but at the same time keep large numbers of young people it cannot afford to lose from going to West Germany.

“The government might get tough by tightening up on visa vacations to Hungary,” a senior diplomat said. “But this would just make the people more unhappy.