Soviets Say They Won’t Cut Jewish Emigration

Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, backing away from a threat to curtail Jewish emigration, told Secretary of State James A. Baker III that Moscow will continue its liberal departure policy, a senior State Department official said Wednesday.

The official said Baker questioned Shevardnadze closely about Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s statements to a Washington press conference Sunday that his government would rethink its emigration policy unless Israel guaranteed that Soviet Jews would not be settled in the occupied West Bank or Gaza Strip.

Shevardnadze asserted that Soviet policy is unchanged “and they are committed to that,” said the official, who spoke to reporters aboard Baker’s Air Force jet transport just before it left Copenhagen for Turnberry, Scotland. The secretary of state is attending a North Atlantic Treaty Organization foreign ministers meeting there today and Friday.

Baker met Shevardnadze for two hours Tuesday night.

The official refused to amplify on the cryptic account that Baker and Shevardnadze presented after the meeting concerning their talks on German reunification, perhaps the most vexing issue on the superpower agenda. But he volunteered a full account of the exchange on Soviet Jewish emigration.

Although the United States shares Soviet objections to Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza territories that Israel has occupied since the 1967 Middle East War, Baker told Shevardnadze that Washington cannot support renewed restrictions on Soviet Jewish emigration, the official said.

“He (Baker) wanted to make it very clear that if there is any move in that direction, it would have very serious consequences,” the official said.

Gorbachev set off alarm bells Sunday when he said that unless the Jerusalem government agreed to prevent Soviet Jews from settling in the occupied territories, “we must give further thought to it in terms of what we do issuing permits for exit.”

Caretaker Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s government replied that less than 1% of the Soviet Jewish immigrants coming to Israel settle in the West Bank or Gaza. An Israeli spokesman said Arab governments have focused on settlement in the occupied territories as a pretext for opposing all emigration to Israel.

At his press conference, Gorbachev said he had been “bombarded” by Arab criticism for permitting Soviet citizens to swell the ranks of Jewish settlers in the occupied territories.

“One thing is very clear--they are sensitive to Arab criticism,” the U.S. official said Wednesday of the Soviet Union.

Shevardnadze told Baker that Gorbachev’s remarks were not intended to signal a reversal of policy, although the Soviet president hoped to “demonstrate their (Moscow’s) concern to the Israelis.”

The official reported that Shevardnadze said he is prepared for face-to-face talks with Israeli officials on the issue. Gorbachev told reporters in Minneapolis on Sunday that “the time has not yet come” when he would be willing to visit Israel.

Gorbachev’s press conference remarks took on an added significance because President Bush, who was seated next to him, did not object to the Soviet president’s threats.

Bush had earlier urged Israel to end all settlement activity in the occupied territories. Washington has long considered the settlements to be an obstacle to Middle East peace.

The official said the U.S. government supports unrestricted emigration by Soviet citizens, although “we draw a distinction between Soviet Jews going to Israel and to the territories.”

Baker was in Copenhagen to address a meeting of the 35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), often called the Helsinki process because the conference first met more than 15 years ago in the Finnish capital.

Although Baker called for steps to strengthen CSCE, he made clear that Washington does not share a growing European fascination with turning the organization into a Continent-wide security organ that could replace both NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

Shevardnadze suggested just such a role for CSCE in his speech to the conference Tuesday. Some Western European nations, although they do not go that far, have also talked of enlarging the security component of CSCE, one of the few organizations that successfully straddled the ideological division of the Cold War. The United States, Canada and all European nations except Albania are members of CSCE.

“NATO will continue to serve as the indispensable guarantor of peace--and therefore the ultimate guardian of democracy and prosperity,” Baker said. “The alliance will work to lock in stabilizing arms control agreements, to reshape its defense strategy to meet fundamentally changed conditions and to build bridges of political cooperation to the newly emerging democracies of the East.

“As we leave the Cold War behind us, we confront again many age-old national, religious and ethnic conflicts that have so sorrowed our common civilization,” he added. “CSCE, NATO, and the (European Community) and democratic institutions of Europe must now play a greater part in deepening and broadening European unity. We must ensure that these organizations continue to complement and reinforce one another.”

Meanwhile, Baker told reporters he will brief his fellow NATO foreign ministers on a Soviet proposal for some sort of agreement between NATO and the Warsaw Pact that Moscow has said might remove Soviet objections to a united Germany holding full membership in NATO.

Baker said that although the Soviets raised the issue in the Washington summit, they have not yet worked out all of the details.

“They continue to flesh out the idea, and they will be in touch with us,” he said.

The NATO foreign ministers meeting is expected to complete plans for an alliance summit conference in London next month.

BACKGROUND

Israel, which expects up to 150,000 Soviet Jewish immigrants to arrive this year, denies that it has a policy of settling them in the occupied territories. But Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir says that because Israel is a democracy, its citizens are free to live wherever they wish, including the West Bank and Gaza Strip.