Czechs Press for Soviet Pullout : East Bloc: Prague says talks for the withdrawal of 70,000 troops have begun. Official forecasts action soon.

Czechoslovakia’s new foreign minister, a non-Communist, declared Thursday that the agreement under which about 70,000 Soviet troops are stationed in the country is “invalid in the light of international law” and that preliminary talks now under way could lead to their withdrawal quickly.

In an extensive press conference that marked his first public comments since being sworn in Tuesday, Foreign Minister Jiri Dienstbier also called for reform of Comecon, the economic league between the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and said the nations of Europe will have to adjust quickly to the “80-million-strong colossus” that is quickly being formed by the de facto economic unification of Germany.

Dienstbier, a longtime opponent of Czechoslovak communism who was jailed and repeatedly harassed by the government for dissident activities, also said he had issued orders to “immediately dismiss” any Foreign Ministry official abroad who denies a visa to a Czechoslovak emigre seeking to return home.

Separately, Vaclav Klaus, the country’s new, non-Communist finance minister, said the government will move soon to significantly devalue the Czechoslovak currency, the crown, bringing its official value more in line with its black-market price. Currently, the currency’s official exchange rate is roughly three times the black-market rate.

And a special parliamentary commission investigating the Nov. 17 police attack on student demonstrators announced that six people, including several senior officials of the security services, have been indicted and that seven more are under investigation. Investigators have established that senior Communist Party officials directly ordered the attack, commission chairman Josef Stank said.

In his press conference, Dienstbier said Czechoslovakia will maintain its “international obligations”--a coded reference here for continued membership in the Warsaw Pact. And, he added, the Soviets already have removed “the main obstacle hindering better relations” between the two countries by renouncing the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion that crushed the last reform effort here.

After the invasion, Moscow forced Czechoslovak leaders to concur in a treaty allowing Soviet troops to be stationed in the country. That agreement “will have to be reopened” now, Dienstbier said, adding that he already has held “preliminary talks” with Soviet representatives and that he expects “we shall soon be able to arrive at some common conclusions.”

Soviet officials have publicly indicated a willingness to withdraw the troops as part of a negotiated arrangement.

Thursday’s developments occurred against the background of continued national celebration of the end of four decades of Communist dictatorship and continued negotiations over details of the nation’s future political structure.

On Thursday evening, Czechoslovak national radio and television carried a live broadcast of a special Prague Philharmonic Orchestra performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. The concert was billed as a tribute to Civic Forum, the main opposition group that has led the country’s 3 1/2-week-old peaceful revolution.

At the close of the concert, the forum’s leader, playwright Vaclav Havel, appeared on stage to present flowers to conductor Vaclav Neumann and to introduce Civic Forum-supported members of the new government, seated in a special box. The audience in Prague’s historic concert hall broke into loud applause and chants of “Long live Havel!”

Earlier in the day, the same chants could be heard as about 100,000 Civic Forum supporters gathered in Wenceslas Square in the heart of the city to urge Havel’s election as the country’s new president.

One month ago, Havel and Dienstbier were both dissidents hounded by the Communist government. Dienstbier, a former reporter for Czechoslovak Radio, was barred from the airwaves in the purge that followed the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion. Deprived of his job, he was forced to work as a stoker of coal.

Today, he is the first non-Communist foreign minister here since 1948, when Jan Masaryk, a leader of anti-Communist forces in the country, died under mysterious circumstances after the coup that brought the Communists to full power.

“Czechoslovakia until now has been an iceberg in the center of Europe, hindering the process of understanding,” Dienstbier told reporters. Now, the nation “should become one of the main centers promoting European unification.” The country’s goal, he said, would be “to move from a bloc concept of Europe to a concept of democracy and pluralism.”

Comecon, Dienstbier said, must go through a “drastic reform” to “transform it from an institution for exchange of rather obsolete commodities into an institution which will be capable of stimulating modern development” by opening Eastern Europe to the West.

Czechoslovak Television carried extensive excerpts from Dienstbier’s press conference as well as live coverage of the press conference by the commission investigating what students here call “the Nov. 17 Massacre.”

Thus, television viewers heard the commission spokesman, Lubomir Fanta, say that former Prague Communist Party chief Miroslav Stepan, once one of the most powerful men in the country, had personally ordered the attack. Testimony indicated that the attack was planned long in advance and that student demonstrators may have been lured to Narodni Street, where the security forces were waiting, commission members said.

At least 143 people were treated in hospitals for injuries received during the attack. Several Western journalists were among them.

The police attack caused a wave of revulsion against the regime that led directly to the swearing in of a new government here earlier this week.

Talks between Civic Forum and the Communists about further reconstruction of the government are continuing. On Thursday, both groups released a joint communique outlining an agreement hammered out in meetings that ended in the wee hours of the morning.

Under that agreement, election of a new president by the nation’s Parliament will probably be postponed until January. In the meantime, the Communists will force the resignation of dozens of their parliamentary deputies and replace them with new legislators who can be counted on to support the new government.

But Communist leaders, in yet another sign of the party’s weakness, warned that they cannot be sure the once-compliant deputies will follow orders and vote themselves out of office. Final resolution of that question will have to await a special party congress that will be held next week, party officials said.

SOVIET PRESENCE IN EAST EUROPE

Soviet troops stationed in key Warsaw Pact countries.

After unilateral Soviet cuts 1988 in 1989-90 Czechoslovakia 70,000 65,000 East Germany 380,000 350,000 Hungary 65,000 55,000 Poland 40,000 35,000

Sources: International Institute for Strategic Studies; Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies.