TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/030590/0305007.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.3 KB | 115 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 29

THE GERMANYS

Waiting for the Magic Words


By failing to endorse the postwar border with Poland, Chancellor
Kohl stirs up old stereotypes and creates unease over
unification

By JAMES O. JACKSON/BERLIN -- With reporting by Ken Olsen/Bonn
and Christopher Redman/Paris


    Technically at least, East Germany is still a sovereign
nation. But that has hardly inhibited the leaders of West
Germany's major political parties, who have been crisscrossing
their neighbor's landscape on behalf of sister groups vying for
victory in the country's first -- and perhaps last -- free
elections on March 18. No one has campaigned with more gusto
than West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who was in the city
of Erfurt last week. When he was introduced as "the Chancellor
of our German Fatherland," chants of "Hel-MUT! Hel-MUT!" rose
from 100,000 citizens massed in the town square. "We are one
Germany!" Kohl declared. "We are one people!"

    Kohl's statements were not significantly different from
those of other West German politicians. The latest polls show
that 78% of West Germans and 75% of East Germans favor
unification. But taken together with earlier actions, they
fueled fears that Kohl may be pushing for unification too
quickly, largely to serve his own political ambitions, while
riding roughshod over the legitimate concerns of Germany's
neighbors. In Warsaw, Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki renewed
his demand last week for a direct Polish role in any
international discussions over Germany's future. Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev reluctantly agreed that the two Germanys had
a "right to unity," but maintained that "our country should not
sustain either moral or political or economic damage" as a
result.

    Most irksome so far has been Kohl's refusal to state
unambiguously that a united Germany would lay no claim to land
east of the Oder-Neisse line, which constitutes the present
border between East Germany and Poland. When challenged, Kohl
hides behind legalisms. His motives, however, are political:
a vocal minority of the descendants of 13 million Germans who
fled those territories after 1945 still lays claim to lands
that are now part of Poland and the Soviet Union. Kohl needs
their vote in West Germany's December election.

    The Chancellor's stand has prompted unusual statements of
concern from some close allies. British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher has complained that Kohl's behavior is "excessive."
President Bush, who met with Kohl over the weekend at Camp
David, let it be known in advance that he planned to press the
West German to allay Polish concern on the border question.

    Time and again, Polish leaders emphasized the depth of that
worry. Last week Mazowiecki said Poland would prefer to have
"only its own armed forces on its territory." But Polish
membership in the Warsaw Pact, he added, "is important for the
security of our borders." Bronislaw Geremek, parliamentary
leader of Solidarity, puts it more bluntly: "The only way to
change the border is war."

    Kohl aroused similar anxieties two weeks ago when he snubbed
East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow during a visit to Bonn.
Kohl high-handedly announced that his government would hold
back a $9 billion package of aid to East Germany until after
the March 18 elections. In a speech to the East German
parliament, an embittered Modrow declared that his country
"will not enter a unified Germany as a beggar or wearing a hair
shirt."

    On the territorial question, Kohl's narrow argument is that,
in the absence of a peace treaty after World War II, there
still is a legal basis for the 1937 borders of the Third Reich.
That area included about a third of present-day Poland and the
Kaliningrad region of the Russian Republic. In fact West
Germany has signed two treaties, one with Poland in 1970 that
explicitly recognized the Oder-Neisse boundary and another,
with 34 nations, that endorsed the 1975 Helsinki Accords,
affirming the "inviolability of frontiers."

    In refusing to speak the magic words Oder-Neisse, however,
the Chancellor is driven by fears that right-wing members of
his Christian Democrat-Christian Social Union coalition will
drift away to West Germany's xenophobic Republican party, which
won just over 7% support in European Parliament elections last
June. Pressure is also coming from those still living and the
descendants of Germans who were expelled from the lands east of
the Oder and Neisse rivers -- Silesia, Pomerania and East
Prussia. "We can understand that he has a genuine political
problem at home," said a Western diplomat based in Berlin. "But
playing politics with this issue at this time just stinks."

    If Kohl is behaving like a brazen opportunist, he is also
a shrewd master of political craft. As part of a "good-cop,
bad-cop" strategy, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher has
been passing the word at home and abroad that the Chancellor's
silence is less threatening than it appears. But Kohl should
build on the international confidence earned through 40 years
of exemplary democracy, not squander goodwill by playing small
political games when the harmony of Europe is at stake.