Baker Urging Unity for Yugoslav Republics

If Croatia and Slovenia, the two most Western-oriented and democratic of Yugoslavia’s six republics, leave the 73-year-old federation, it would undermine the cause of human rights and economic reform, Secretary of State James A. Baker III said Monday.

“We think that it will be very difficult to foster sufficient respect for human rights and for conversion to a market economy if the country breaks up into . . . its constituent parts,” Baker said.

He said he hopes to deliver that message to leaders of Yugoslavia’s central government and the six republics when he meets them in Belgrade on Friday. It will be the first visit by a U.S. secretary of state to the ethnically torn country in more than five years.

Baker is in Berlin to deliver a speech tonight on post-Cold War European integration and to attend meetings Wednesday and Thursday of the foreign ministers of the 34-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

He also is scheduled to confer Thursday in Berlin with Soviet Foreign Minister Alexander A. Bessmertnykh, possibly completing arrangements for a summit between President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Baker told reporters that Bush has received an anxiously awaited reply from Gorbachev to an earlier U.S. initiative intended to resolve the remaining disagreements over a treaty to reduce by about one-third the superpower arsenals of long-range nuclear weapons. But Baker said he would not reveal the content of the message from Gorbachev prior to his talks with Bessmertnykh.

In addition, Baker plans to visit Albania on Friday before returning to Washington. He will become the first U.S. secretary of state to stop in Albania, which is starting to emerge from 47 years of almost total isolation imposed by Europe’s longest, hard-line Stalinist regime.

A senior Administration official said Baker expects to offer U.S. economic aid to Albania’s new coalition government, provided that it continues to open up its political system and moves toward free market economics.

Albania installed a 22-member “government of national salvation” last week after the collapse of a Communist-dominated regime selected by multi-party elections in March. Ylli Bufi, a former Communist, was named prime minister in the new government, which includes representatives of the democratic movement.

The State Department said Baker planned to confer in Tirana with both government officials and democratic opposition leaders.

At the same time, Baker said he will support Albania’s application for full membership in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe when the foreign ministers take up the issue this week. If Albania is admitted--as appears likely--the conference will include every government in Europe, including such mini-states as the Vatican and San Marino, plus the United States and Canada.

Baker said his objective in visiting Albania is to “encourage” political and economic reform. But he outlined a much more difficult goal for his trip to Yugoslavia--trying to persuade all factions that preservation of the federation is in the interest of all of them.

Washington provides very little economic aid to Yugoslavia. Thus, “our leverage is clearly limited,” an Administration official said.

Nevertheless, Baker said he plans to argue that the United States--and most of the rest of the world--can deal more effectively with a unified Yugoslavia than with a country split into independent republics.