Warsaw Pact to End Soviet Domination : Eastern Europe: Leaders of the crumbling military alliance call for all of the members to have ‘equal rights.’

The Warsaw Pact, seeking a new role in Europe now that it no longer has a Cold War to fight and East Europeans are questioning its very existence, embarked Thursday on reforms designed to transform itself from a Soviet-dominated military alliance into a “treaty of sovereign states with equal rights.”

It is questionable, however, whether even the revamped Warsaw Pact, championed by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev as an intermediate step in the creation of a pan-European security system, can survive the consequences of the political changes in East Europe that have left the erstwhile “Soviet Bloc” in shambles.

Before coming to Moscow for the one-day meeting of leaders from the alliance’s seven member nations, Hungary’s prime minister, Joszef Antall, told correspondents in Budapest that the Warsaw Pact has “lost its function” with the end of the East-West divide and that its military organization should be scrapped by the end of 1991.

Other newly democratized nations of Eastern Europe have also called for an end to the alliance that has traditionally identified the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as the adversary and served as diplomatic justification for stationing hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops in the front-line states of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany.

In what even by official account was a meeting filled with conflicting opinion, Gorbachev prevented an open break in the 35-year-old Warsaw Pact by promoting change. He and the other leaders issued a declaration calling for its transformation into a “treaty of sovereign states with equal rights, formed on a democratic basis,” a tacit renunciation of Soviet pre-eminence.

Gorbachev and the visiting heads of state and government ordered the creation of a committee of representatives from the pact’s member states--the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland and East Germany--to present concrete reform proposals to another summit meeting, officially known as the Warsaw Pact’s Political Consultative Committee, in November.

“We now have a historic chance to overcome the postwar rift and build a flourishing Europe free of fear, where all people and countries could cooperate for mutual benefit,” Gorbachev told a luncheon given in honor of the visiting delegations, who met in a plush Moscow hotel.

He said a new-look Warsaw Pact could work constructively to encourage disarmament and cooperation on the Continent.

Significantly, the soul-searching here came the same day NATO foreign ministers were meeting in Turnberry, Scotland, to work out a new strategy for the Atlantic Alliance, now that an onslaught from the East seems far more unlikely and Moscow’s former allies are increasingly going their own way.

“If we want to be able to meet the challenge of change, we have to change ourselves,” NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner told the ministers as the two-day gathering began.

Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Yuli M. Kvitsinsky, speaking to the Moscow press corps after the Warsaw Pact summit, indicated that the new commission’s mandate is broad, but he declined repeatedly to give specifics of proposals it might consider.

“The prevailing view was we have to emphasize a political component in the Warsaw Treaty Organization’s activities. The same is true of a disarmament component,” said Kvitsinsky. “We have to broaden the consultative bases of the Warsaw Treaty Organization’s activities, and perhaps we should go in the direction of curtailing military structures.”

Paring or eliminating military structures would automatically reduce Soviet influence because it is Soviet officers who now wield command in the alliance, which theoretically has more than 5 million men under arms.

Both the Warsaw Pact commander-in-chief, Gen. Pyotr Lushev, and the chief of staff have always been Soviet officers. The alliance is run by a joint secretariat and a permanent commission and their senior posts are also staffed by Soviet personnel.

Since last year’s wave of political revolutions in East Europe has made the commitment of the region’s new democratic governments to any joint military operation involving the Soviets more than doubtful, for the Kremlin to relinquish the right of command over their armed forces may just be yielding to accomplished fact.

As the postwar division of the Continent comes to an end, a major concern for both Warsaw Pact and NATO nations is the status of a unified Germany. Gorbachev has repeatedly voiced objection to Germany’s belonging to NATO alone, and Kvitsinsky, a former Soviet ambassador to Bonn, said it is necessary to ensure that “a united Germany does not tilt to any one military bloc.”

The high-ranking Soviet diplomat indicated that a special kind of Warsaw Pact membership might be created so that Germany or East European countries could belong to the alliance without having traditional duties of members or, like France in NATO, without having to put their army under a unified or foreign command.

Despite the on-the-record Soviet position, East German Prime Minister Lothar de Maiziere, speaking Thursday in an interview with his country’s official ADN news agency, repeated his contention that a united Germany could belong to a “changed” NATO in the near future, with the present territory of East Germany governed by special agreements, presumably to exclude NATO troops.

By Kvitsinsky’s own admission, the issue of Germany’s future was apparently too divisive to consider at the Warsaw Pact meeting at length.

“Common-sense dictated it would not be worthwhile to consider this subject, on which the positions were known from the beginning,” he said.

Otherwise, he noted, despite “intense discussions” at the closed-door meeting, accord was reached.

“The fact that the declaration was agreed upon in one day speaks for itself,” he said. That was apparently enough to placate the Hungarians.

“There was not one statement made relative to a wish to quit the Warsaw Treaty Organization,” Kvitsinsky said.

During the meeting, Gorbachev dwelt “in detail” on his talks with President Bush and the U.S.-Soviet agreements reached at the Washington summit.

BAKER VOW TO SOVIETS--Secretary pledges that they will not be ‘left out of the new Europe.’ A6