Kohl Calls on West to Step Up Aid to Soviets : Economic needs: ‘Every nation must carry its fair share,’ he says. He is clearly speaking to U.S., Japan.

In a major foreign policy address, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl called Wednesday on other Western nations to increase economic aid to the Soviet Union, declaring the success of major reforms there “lies in the interest of the West as a whole.”

“This huge task cannot be left to us Germans alone, or just to the Europeans,” Kohl said in his speech to a crowded parliamentary session in Bonn.

“It is a question of an accelerated expansion of existing concepts for joint Western assistance,” Kohl added. “Every nation must carry its fair share of this common responsibility to the limits of its capabilities.”

Although Kohl did not single out any countries in his call for more Western aid, it was clear he was talking mainly to the United States and Japan. Both countries are potentially large donors who so far have been reluctant to underwrite the Soviet reform process.

The Bush Administration has balked on such aid as long as Moscow continues to support Fidel Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba, while Japan has held back assistance because of a longstanding dispute over four islands north of the Japanese island of Hokkaido that were seized by Soviet forces in the fading days of World War II.

However, with the collapse of Communist authority in the Soviet Union, the chance of overcoming both of these obstacles is now far greater than at any time in the past, political analysts here believe.

Kohl applauded efforts in Moscow to preserve a loose union of republics with economic and security ties, but at the same time he placed stiff conditions on new foreign aid to the Soviet Union.

He declared that Western assistance could only work if Moscow first develops an agreed-upon economic development program with the union’s constituent republics, if technical assistance accompanies financial aid--and if the Western countries are willing to open their own markets to the Soviet republics.

Germany has provided more help to Moscow than any other Western country, partly because it is both the Soviet Union’s largest single trading partner but also because its social stability could be directly endangered by any large-scale turmoil there.

About 2 million ethnic Germans live in the Soviet Union, and authorities in Bonn worry that the nation’s uncontrolled disintegration or economic collapse could send them fleeing for their old homeland.

There are also an estimated 275,000 Soviet troops still in eastern Germany.

Noting that since 1989, Germany has provided more than $50 billion to the reform process in Eastern Europe, including about $33 billion to the Soviet Union alone, Kohl said that Germany itself has reached “the limits of its capacity” to help.

“According to the European Commission, we have contributed 56% of all Western help to the Soviet Union and 32% of Western aid to the nations of central and Eastern Europe,” the chancellor said.

While Kohl’s remarks on domestic matters were later hotly debated, there was broad, bipartisan agreement across the German political spectrum on his call for greater Western help for the Soviet Union.