U.S., Soviets Fly Emergency Aid to 3 Republics

Soviet and American military transport planes left the United States on Sunday carrying emergency stores of medicine and other relief supplies to three Soviet republics, the State Department announced as Secretary of State James A. Baker III began meetings in Moscow with leaders of the Kremlin and the republics.

Among his missions there is the coordination of American aid efforts.

The first two U.S. assistance flights, bearing cargo donated by private organizations, mark the beginning of what is expected to be a massive airlift as winter and need spread across the old Soviet Union.

The shipment is to be delivered to children’s hospitals in the Russian Federation, Belarus and Armenia.

But while GIs and relief workers were loading cots, blankets, clothing and antibiotics aboard the cargo planes near Washington, U.S. lawmakers, Kremlin and republic leaders and the Bush Administration sparred over the adequacy of the American response and the future of the Soviet central government.

“The White House was politically traumatized or asleep” when Congress debated whether to set aside U.S. aid funds to help the Soviet republics destroy nuclear weapons and endure a winter of hardship, complained Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Congress has approved $400 million for relief and technical aid, including assistance in storage and destruction of nuclear weapons. But initially, proposals for aid to the collapsing Soviet Union met strong resistance both in Congress and within the Administration.

Then last week, Baker announced that President Bush will invite foreign officials to a “coordinating conference” in Washington intended to mobilize other countries to pick up their share of an immediate humanitarian aid effort and also to serve as a model for cooperative work on longer-term economic development.

That proposal drew a sharp reaction from French President Francois Mitterrand, who said Sunday that he has told Bush in a telephone conversation that such a conference would be a waste of time.

According to news agency reports from Paris, Mitterrand said that European countries are in touch daily about helping the Soviet people, that they have donated far more than Washington and that they do not need to be summoned across the Atlantic Ocean to decide about aid.

For his part, Nunn complained that the fruits of such a conference might come too late to reach Soviet republics this winter, when it is most urgently needed.

As a result, Nunn added, Baker’s mission will have to focus on longer-term issues of change while U.S. and Soviet aircraft carry supplies to plug critical holes in the collapsed Soviet supply system.

Nunn warned that significant political and economic assistance as well as diplomatic recognition of the Russian Federation must come quickly or reform-minded leaders could be swept away.

“It’s fine to say they ought to undertake every reform we can envision before we give them macro assistance, but we’ve got to deal with these reformers while they’re still in power,” Nunn said on CBS’s “Face The Nation.”

“If we do not start dealing with them now, we may wake up and find we’re not dealing with democratic reformers . . . but we’re dealing with people that are unknown in their political philosophy,” Nunn said.

Nunn’s warnings echoed a debate that has been boiling within the Bush Administration about when the United States should withdraw its support of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, how quickly it should recognize the newly independent Soviet republics and what conditions it should exact from the republics in exchange for recognition and aid.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, a principal advocate within the Bush Administration of speedy recognition, said Sunday that “the torch is being passed” from Gorbachev to the republics.

Asked why the United States has not recognized Ukrainian independence two weeks after Ukrainians overwhelmingly declared themselves independent, Cheney pointed the finger of blame elsewhere in the Administration.

“Have you ever seen the State Department work?” he said of Baker’s department, which has been eager to receive assurances from the republics on a number of issues before granting them recognition.

Acknowledging that the State Department has sought delays in shifting allegiance toward the republics from the rapidly weakening central Soviet government, Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger said Sunday that “some people have been saying that we were hanging on to Gorbachev too long.”

“I won’t argue at all with those who say that, to some degree, we have been reactive. We have to be in a situation like this,” said Eagleburger. “We had to wait to see which way it was going.”

The unresolved debate also has affected the provision of aid.

“The biggest problem,” said Cheney, “is what do you do inside the Soviet Union once (aid) arrives. You can deliver all kinds of goods to an airport inside the Soviet Union, but then all kinds of questions flow from that. Who’s going to receive them? What are they going to do with them? How do you get them into the right hands so it doesn’t just go into the black market?”

Cheney, interviewed on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” added that fuel shortages that have grounded the Soviets’ fleet of commercial jets also have caused uncertainty within the Pentagon, which will be largely responsible for the delivery of emergency aid.

Eagleburger, interviewed on ABC’s “This Week With David Brinkley,” said he is “relatively confident” that a viable network can be established quickly in the Soviet republics to assure distribution of emergency aid.