Doubts Grow on Conference to Aid Soviets

The Bush Administration’s call for an international conference on aiding the Commonwealth of Independent States--the supposed centerpiece of a more dynamic American approach to the crumbling Soviet Union--has failed to catch fire and could become a minor embarrassment, U.S. officials and foreign diplomats said Wednesday.

Many of the allied governments that will be asked to attend have been polite but unenthusiastic. A few have been openly critical. French President Francois Mitterrand publicly dismissed the conference as unnecessary. Others complained that the Administration proposed the meeting without warning and has since offered no details.

The most enthusiastic, such as Germany, say they hope the meeting will prod the United States, Japan and other countries to offer more humanitarian aid to help the Soviet republics survive a hard winter.

“The European Community has given more than 70% of the aid or assistance received by the former Soviet Union,” an EC spokesman said. “We look forward to the sharing of this burden with the United States.”

For that very reason, even some U.S. officials have said that they are worried about the event. Speaking anonymously--for fear of running afoul of Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who announced the conference last week, and President Bush, who approved the idea--several officials warned that the meeting may turn out to be a mixed blessing.

“The damn thing is all bloody politics,” one senior official complained, noting that Baker and his aides whipped up the conference idea under pressure from Congress to show that they were on top of the swiftly changing Soviet crisis.

Coordinating allied aid to the Soviet republics “probably makes some sense,” he acknowledged, but the way Baker is going about it looks like “a turf play by the State Department.”

Other U.S. officials said they fear the meeting could pressure the Administration to come up with aid beyond the relatively modest amounts approved so far. “It could put us in an uncomfortable position,” if the Administration summons other countries to Washington to ask for pledges without offering any further sums of its own, one aide warned.

Baker, who was visiting five Soviet republics this week, has not yet set a date or an agenda for the meeting, although officials have said that they have proposed several dates in mid-January.

“It is a conference to coordinate what are already significant pledges of humanitarian and other types of economic assistance to the Soviet Union--the former Soviet Union--and to the republics. . . ,” Baker said last week. “The purpose here is not to conduct a pledging session but to call to arms, if you will, the international community to address what is a very, very substantial transformation.”

Almost everyone agrees that coordinating relief to the Soviet republics is a good idea. Already, planeloads of U.S. and other Western supplies, mostly food and medical goods, are landing at Soviet airports, without much certainty that they will reach the areas that need them most.

But some critics of Baker’s conference idea--most notably, Mitterrand--complain that the Administration is trying to claim a leadership role that it may not deserve. “We suspect this was done partly for domestic political reasons,” a French official said. “There was already a place set up to coordinate Western aid to the Soviet Union,” a reference to the Group of Seven industrial democracies that met on the issue last summer.

Nevertheless, he said, France will probably attend: “I don’t think we want to go to war over this issue.”

South Korean Ambassador Hong Choo Hyun, whose government also expects to attend, echoed Mitterrand’s suggestion that the meeting was prompted mostly by the Administration’s yearning to be seen as leading the West.

Other diplomats suggested that the main, unstated purpose of the meeting will be to put pressure on Congress--as well as on Japan and the oil-rich Arab countries--for more aid, despite domestic pressures to spend less.

The conference proposal was “a strong sign by the Administration that it’s not going to retreat in the face of America first-ism,” Canadian Ambassador Derek Burney said. “They’re obviously trying to build a more solid platform of engagement (on Soviet aid) with Americans and the Congress.”

But that could touch off an unseemly debate--within the Administration and among U.S. allies--over who has given enough.

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