W. Germany Urges Secure Polish Border

The West German Parliament today adopted a resolution calling for a united Germany to honor Poland’s western border after a raucous debate marked by charges that Chancellor Helmut Kohl had endangered the unification process.

The resolution states that the two Germanys should adopt identical declarations saying, “The Polish people are assured that their right to live in secure borders will not be questioned by us Germans through territorial claims either now or in the future.”

It further says that the future government of a united Germany should sign a border treaty on the basis of those declarations.

After the Parliament session, Kohl traveled to Brussels to meet with NATO allies. He said he reassured them that their concerns will be considered in the drive to reunify the two Germanys.

“Nobody has to be concerned that the Germans would one way or the other want to go it alone,” he told reporters after a nearly three-hour meeting at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters.

Kohl had come under fire abroad and at home for his previous reluctance to unequivocally state that a united Germany would never lay claim to land ceded to Poland after the Third Reich’s 1945 defeat.

In Parliament today, one lawmaker from the opposition Social Democrats, Juergen Schmude, said Kohl’s handling of the border issue had amounted to “political arson in the European house.”

Kohl, apparently trying to avoid offending conservative voters before federal elections in December, had insisted that only the government of a united Germany could address the matter.

His subsequent demand that a border treaty be linked to Polish concessions also caused an uproar, and he withdrew it earlier this week, at the same time proposing the resolution passed today.

In today’s parliamentary debate, the opposition Social Democrats charged that Kohl’s pronouncements had seriously endangered the unification process.

Party chief Hans-Jochen Vogel said “seldom has a federal chancellor . . . so mishandled” his responsibilities to West Germans “as Chancellor Kohl in the last days and weeks.”

In his own address, Kohl battled back by pointing out the Social Democrats’ contacts with East Germany’s now-disgraced Communist Party in past years.

Kohl also seemed to address concerns by Moscow that he is trying to make unification occur too quickly.

“We are producing no artificial time pressures in order to speed up unification,” said Kohl.