Czech Leader Meets Bush, Gets Pledge of Trade Aid

President Bush, meeting with Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel as part of the first trip to Washington by one of Eastern Europe’s new government leaders, announced measures Tuesday to give Czechoslovakia greater access to American markets.

“The United States will be part of your nation’s democratic rebirth,” Bush told the visiting playwright turned president at the end of a two-hour White House meeting and lunch.

The President said that “Czechoslovakia can meet the challenges ahead” as it emerges from the Communist world to join the Western economic community.

Bush initiated steps leading to the granting of “most favored nation” status, which would allow Czechoslovakian products to enter the United States at the lowest possible tariffs. The status is awarded to America’ major trade partners.

The action is intended to put Czechoslovakia on equal trade footing with Poland and Hungary and represents a form of limited financial encouragement for the fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe.

Unlike leaders of other East European nations, however, Havel said he is not interested in outright U.S. financial aid. Rather, he said his country needs intellectual links and educational programs with the United States to bring the two nations closer together.

Bush announced that he is seeking a one-year waiver of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which denies most-favored-nation status to countries failing to allow free emigration or to satisfy other human rights standards.

The waiver will allow negotiations to begin immediately on a commercial trade agreement, with the expectation that a pact will be completed by the end of the spring. Approval of most-favored-nation status would follow.

When the Czechoslovak Parliament, as anticipated, passes emigration legislation doing away with controls imposed by the former Communist government, which was overthrown late last year, the Jackson-Vanik waivers would no longer be necessary.

During the 11 months ending last November, the most recent period for which figures are available, the United States imported $78.3 million in Czech goods, far less than the $302.6 million imported from Hungary and the $357.2 million from Poland, according to the Commerce Department.

Other steps outlined Tuesday include the planned opening of a branch of the Export-Import Bank in Czechoslovakia, U.S. support for Prague’s entry into the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the opening of a U.S. consulate in Bratislava and the assigning of Peace Corps volunteers to Czechoslovakia to prepare instructors there to teach English.

But more important, perhaps, than the prospects for enhanced trade or a growing cultural relationship is the extraordinary changes they reflect.

As he bid farewell to Havel at the White House, Bush noted that his visitor, once “a dissident subject to arrest and imprisonment at any time . . . could never go out without your toothbrush in your pocket.”

“Now, as president, you can never go out without one of these neckties,” he said to Havel, generally an informal dresser.

“Our task now in the 1990s is to move forward, from revolution to renaissance, toward a new Europe in which each nation and every culture can flourish and breathe free,” Bush said.

Earlier, Havel said in an interview on the Cable News Network that he has no fear of a united Germany, discounting concerns elsewhere about Germany’s past aggressions.

“If Germany is a democratic state, I will not be afraid of it even if it had 100 million people,” he said. “On the other hand, I would be afraid of Germany if it were a totalitarian state with just 2 million people.”

Havel also predicted that the Soviet Union eventually will emerge as a democratic nation with a market-based economy.

Prague’s new ambassador to the United States, Rita Klimova, said that while her president does not necessarily fear a united Germany from a military standpoint, there is concern that an economically thriving German state could overpower its neighbors.

“There is a danger,” Klimova said at a breakfast meeting with reporters, “that Germany, or the German speaking parts of Europe, will be successful where the Hapsburgs were not successful, where Bismarck was not successful, where Hitler was not successful: in Germanizing Central and Eastern Europe by the peaceful and laudatory methods of economic development.”

Times staff writer Doyle McManus contributed to this story.