Bush Hails German Exodus but Berlin Embassy Is Put ‘Off Limits’

Although President Bush declared Thursday that he is deeply moved by the flight of East Germans to the West and that “America stands with the forces of change,” the State Department announced that the U.S. Embassy in East Berlin will not become a haven for refugees.

The Administration, which was drawn into the escalating drama when 18 East Germans pushed their way into the embassy earlier this week, negotiated an accommodation with the Communist government effectively closing the embassy to future refugees while allowing the 18 to leave the country.

“The embassy that we have in Berlin is, of course, not set up as a place where people can go,” said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. “Our embassies and other diplomatic missions overseas generally do not have the capability to handle even a limited number of people who would seek to depart their home country, especially people who have to seek to depart their home country by sitting in at a foreign embassy.”

He said that the embassy “remains open for people with normal embassy business,” which clearly excludes desperate people trying to flee East Germany.

Despite decades of impassioned rhetoric in support of free emigration, the U.S. government is reluctant to play an active role in the frenzied scramble by East Germans to reach West Germany because it is concerned that forceful involvement might upset U.S.-Soviet relations or trigger a harsh crackdown.

Bush illustrated the paradox in his remarks to a Rose Garden audience that included several members of the Bundestag, the lower house of the West German Parliament.

“We are riveted, and I am moved, by the tens of thousands of East Germans sacrificing all that they own, leaving everything behind, to find their way to a West that offers the promise of freedom and opportunity,” Bush said.

“I also look forward to the day that Germans will not have to climb fences, freeze in embassy courtyards or dodge bullets in order to enjoy the fruits of a free society,” the President said as he signed a German-American day proclamation.

But East Germany has responded to the flight of its citizens not by relaxing controls, as Bush urged, but by imposing new restrictions on travel to Czechoslovakia, one of the main routes that East Germans have taken to the West.

With the new travel ban, which echoes earlier restrictions on travel to Hungary and Poland, the only way out of East Germany may prove to be over the fence surrounding one of the Western embassies in the East German capital. And that may drag the Administration back into the crisis, despite its best efforts to remain aloof.

“If these travel restrictions are going to be enforced and if there isn’t any give in the East German regime, the situation will become more and more explosive,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former State Department and National Security Council expert on Eastern Europe.

“This virus is infecting the entire population,” he said. “It presents the nightmare scenario on how things might really become unglued in central Europe.”

Sonnenfeldt said that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev “has his work cut out for him” to persuade the East Germans to ease the travel restrictions.

“We and the British and the French (embassies) will confront this more and more,” he said. “We have limited space, so we have to hope that we will not be faced with thousands of people.”

If there is a sudden rush of refugees to Western embassies, East German police almost certainly would try to prevent them from reaching the buildings. The police did just that Wednesday when hundreds of East Germans attempted to follow the 18 asylum-seekers into the U.S. Embassy.

Boucher said the U.S. government objected to the police action and “sought assurances that visitors with normal embassy business will not be stopped.”

The State Department spokesman made it clear that the U.S. government does not consider attempts to obtain asylum to be “normal embassy business.” But, he added, “We deplore the manhandling of the crowd by the East German police.”

Unlike Poland, Hungary or even the Soviet Union, the East German government may be unable to relax its iron grip much. Communist ideology is the major thing that differentiates East Germany from its larger and richer neighbor, West Germany. But the regime seems to be finding it more difficult every year to maintain its ideological edge.

“There used to be some significant support for all of those Eastern European regimes,” said Charles William Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy magazine. “Now I don’t think there is any. The prewar regimes had been so bankrupt and had led the countries into such disasters that there was a willingness on the part of a significant portion of the population to acquiesce in the new system. I think that has all been burned out. There is no starch to the regime. There is nobody at the middle levels who believes.”

Maynes said that the East German regime has “only two choices--put a wall along every border or establish an orderly procedure for emigration.”

But Robert Hunter, director of European Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said: “It is hard to believe that East Germany will permit itself to be bled to death, as much as we might like to see it. We are not dealing with a bunch of pussycats. We are dealing with people who are heavily armed and strongly motivated to prevent the destruction of their society.”

Times staff writer James Gerstenzang contributed to this report.