Baker Carrying Allied Plan for One Germany

After consultations with his French and British counterparts, Secretary of State James A. Baker III carries to Moscow today the outlines of a common allied position on German reunification, which has emerged as the most pressing single problem following the upheavals in Eastern Europe, senior U.S. officials indicated Tuesday.

The position embraces the essentials of a plan proposed by West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher during a hasty visit to Washington last week, which proposes a unified East and West Germany that would be a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, one of the officials said.

The U.S. officials accompanying Baker on his trip here and to Moscow said the plan provides that the NATO military structure would not be extended to East Germany. Thus, for instance, Western troops would be barred from entering what is now East Germany. Soviet forces could remain in East Germany, where they would join in confidence-building exchanges with NATO forces to give assurances of peaceful intent, the officials said.

The proposal contrasts with the approach urged by East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow, who called for a unified Germany that would be neutral, siding with neither the Warsaw Bloc nor NATO. Both West Germany and its NATO allies have rejected this concept, and Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel told Baker here Tuesday that German neutrality was “not reasonable,” a senior U.S. official said.

The proposal also paints a slightly different picture of U.S. policy on a reunified Germany from the one that officials of the Bush Administration appeared to be offering a day earlier. That emerged from ambiguous statements by White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater and State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler that seemed to back off from a requirement that a reunified Germany remain a member of NATO.

A senior White House official explained Monday that the statements meant that the Administration would accept a reunified Germany not being a member of NATO so long as it maintained “ties” to the alliance.

Asked about the apparent policy shift Tuesday, a White House spokesman would only say: “The policy is: We want Germany to remain in NATO; we expect the German government will choose to stay in NATO.”

Speculation about how the United States would respond if Germany chose to end formal membership in the alliance is “too hypothetical,” he added.

The U.S. officials with Baker said British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd gave London’s endorsement to the Genscher plan during a visit to Washington last week. Baker met early Tuesday morning with French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas at Shannon airport in Ireland while en route here, they said, and Dumas gave a “positive” response to the idea.

The Soviet Union, for its part, has expressed recognition of the inevitability of German reunification but suggested vaguely that an “international” referendum should be taken on whether the two states should be united.

West Germany and the United States, as well as other NATO nations, rejected this concept.

On Tuesday, the Soviet position was further complicated when a leading Kremlin conservative, senior Politburo member Yegor K. Ligachev, urged the Soviet Communist Party and Soviet citizens to prevent reunification, calling it a threat to national security.

A Genscher-like solution has many pitfalls, however, including the volatility of having two potentially hostile armies--American and Soviet--on the same German soil. But it appears to be the only proposal that the victorious Western powers of World War II and West Germany now agree upon as a “first cut” at the reunification problem, one of the U.S. officials said.

Explaining the U.S. position, a senior official said that the United States believes that German reunification “will now happen very quickly,” perhaps very soon after elections there scheduled for March 18. It “is in fact occurring on the ground now,” with East Germans pouring westward and discussions of increased economic and political cooperation between the two nations, the official said.

Genscher’s proposal has the advantage of “not requiring NATO forces to move further east” to take up defense responsibilities for the entire unified Germany, a senior official said, “And it maintains a NATO structure” ready to undertake new political missions to supplement its longstanding military role.

“So we think that’s a very positive contribution” he added. “It may not be the only idea, but it is a significant one” he said.

Baker and Dumas, at their Shannon meeting, “both recognized that the German unification process was moving very quickly now,” the official said. They “discussed the framework of possibilities by which the process towards unification could proceed.”

The two men also recognized, as have West German government leaders, that German unification must take into account the status of the divided city of Berlin, the rights of the four occupying powers (the Soviet Union, France, Britain and the United States) and the broader German political and economic position in Western Europe, the official said.

Nothing in the plan would preclude the Soviets from reaching bilateral agreements with a unified Germany to keep some troops in what is now East Germany, the official said. But he acknowledged that the presence of armies from two opposing military blocs on the territory of a Germany that adheres to NATO would be awkward at best and could easily become dangerous.

“That obviously could not go on very long,” said another official, “but it might work for a year or two while there would be phased draw-downs of forces by both sides.”

However, developments in the Soviet Bloc may make the issue of Soviet troops moot. Czechoslovakia and Hungary have already demanded total withdrawal of Soviet troops from their countries, and East Germany is expected to call for at least partial withdrawal of Soviet troops following the election in March.

U.S. officials would not supply more details on how a Genscher plan would handle such problems. One of the senior officials said impatiently that the plan “has not been discussed much beyond” its public outline, and that it would be “premature” to address it at a greater length now.

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Kohl calls for a united monetary system. A6