Shevardnadze to See NATO Headquarters at His Own Request

Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze will make an unprecedented visit to NATO headquarters next week in a move symbolizing the end of the Cold War.

“The Soviet foreign minister has requested that he be able to contact NATO during his visit to Belgium on Dec. 18 and 19,” a NATO spokesman said today.

“We are now trying to arrange for Mr. Shevardnadze to have a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Manfred Woerner on one of those two days.”

No Warsaw Pact minister has ever entered NATO headquarters and until recently the idea would have been dismissed as absurd.

Earlier, the 16 NATO foreign ministers, on the first day of a two-day meeting, set aside a dispute between Greece and Turkey, clearing the way for the Western alliance to present a draft treaty on cutting conventional forces in Europe (CFE).

The Warsaw Pact countries put forward their proposals at the CFE talks in Vienna today, several hours ahead of NATO.

It was not known why Shevardnadze proposed the NATO visit. He is due to meet European Community foreign ministers in Brussels next Monday and to sign a trade agreement with the EC.

A French official said the visit was discussed Wednesday evening at a dinner attended by the foreign ministers of Britain, France, the United States and West Germany.

The official, who asked not to be named, said the ministers decided that Shevardnadze would first meet Woerner and then confer with all 16 ambassadors to NATO headquarters in Brussels.

NATO diplomats said it was not immediately clear whether the Woerner-Shevardnadze talks would have a fixed agenda. “The visit has an obvious symbolic importance, though,” one diplomat said.

The two men are expected to discuss the changes sweeping Eastern Europe, the current state of arms control and East-West relations.

The 16 ministers cleared the way for the NATO proposals on conventional-force reductions to be presented at Vienna.

“A certain amount of time was spent reaching agreement on how we table the NATO draft in the CFE negotiations in Vienna which is being (presented) today, so that was settled,” British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd said.

The draft was being held up because of a dispute between Greece and Turkey over whether to include the Turkish port of Mersin in the area for arms cuts.

Hurd said the row had not been settled but both Greece and Turkey had agreed to set it aside so that the draft treaty could be tabled on behalf of all NATO members.

The Western proposal envisages cutting American and Soviet troops in Europe to 275,000 on each side and scrapping thousands of tanks, big guns and aircraft.

The ceiling of 275,000 troops for each superpower was first proposed by President Bush in May. U.S. officials said then that it would involve a cut of 30,000 men by the United States and 325,000 by the Soviet Union.

Greece and Turkey are at loggerheads over Mersin because it is the main Turkish port for reinforcing the Turkish-backed, self-declared independent enclave of northern Cyprus.

Greece wants the port to be included in the area for CFE reductions while Turkey wants to keep it out.