Clinton Extols Peruvian Leader’s Crisis Response

President Clinton praised embattled President Alberto Fujimori of Peru on Monday for “skillfully walking a fine line” by trying to resolve the Lima hostage crisis peacefully “without giving in to terror.”

The abundant words of praise were relayed to reporters by Deputy White House Press Secretary David Johnson after a hastily scheduled 20-minute meeting between the two presidents.

Fujimori arrived in Washington over the weekend after signing a statement in Toronto with Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto. Fujimori promised that he would not use force to free 72 hostages still held by rebels of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement in the Japanese ambassador’s residence in the Peruvian capital. Instead, Fujimori said his government will push for resumed talks with the rebels, who stormed the compound and seized several hundred guests at a Dec. 17 reception.

Clinton, Johnson said, told Fujimori that the statement “set exactly the right tone.” The U.S. president also told Fujimori that seeking a peaceful solution without making concessions “was a very hard line to walk, but it’s the right one and he [Fujimori] was handling it very carefully,” Johnson said.

At a later news conference, Fujimori said that the United States was not providing his government with any experts or advice on how to end the crisis. Fujimori held out little more than asylum as a possible inducement to the rebels in impending talks, which he refused to call negotiations. He said that he and Canadian officials had discussed the possibility of asylum in Cuba for the rebels but that there had been no official contact between the Canadian and Cuban governments about the matter.

“Now I wonder if there are some countries that are willing to accept these terrorists,” he said. “I wonder if you American people or Canadian people are willing to accept in your countries these terrorists. I suppose certainly not. So we have to search for some country that is willing.”

The Peruvian leader insisted that he would make no other concession, however, and called the release of Tupac Amaru rebels now held in Peruvian prisons “out of the question.”

“We are not going to make much concessions,” he said. “This is very important not only for Peru. This is important for America, for the world, because these kind of crimes cannot be accepted.”

Clinton had evidently been reluctant to meet with Fujimori. Some administration officials reportedly feared that American involvement might prolong the crisis by making the hostages seem even more valuable to their captors. But the reluctance apparently evaporated after the successful outcome of the meeting in Toronto between Fujimori and the Japanese prime minister.

Fujimori seemed defensive at his news conference and in a speech to the executive council of the Organization of American States. Dismissing accusations by the hostage-takers that incarcerated rebels suffer because of their prison conditions, Fujimori said in his speech that “the Peruvian penitentiary system had been transformed into one of the most modern in Latin America” at a cost of $100 million.

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Fujimori also dismissed the argument that the rebels were empowered and even justified by Peru’s poverty--which, he said, “is an illness that has afflicted Peru for centuries.”

He said his government has applied “an effective strategy to fight poverty,” the first step being the government’s success in wiping out most terrorism.

Fujimori said the hostage crisis interrupted talks between Peru and the United States about the case of Lori Berenson, a young American sentenced by a Peruvian military court to life imprisonment for helping the Tupac Amaru. Fujimori said U.S. officials had asked that she serve her sentence in an American prison.

Questioned about reports that the Clinton administration intended to supply Peru with heavily armed patrol boats to stop shipments of coca leaves to Colombia, Fujimori said that he met with federal narcotics czar Barry R. McCaffrey on Sunday. “We have succeeded in making a very tough control in the air,” he said. “But now narco-traffickers are using the Amazonian rivers. And so we agreed that the American government is going to cooperate to give some material for this control over the rivers.”