After Helsinki: Balkan Jitters

The 35 Presidents, Chancellors, Premiers and Communist Party leaders assembled in Helsinki had just signed their names to the "Final Act," the 30,000-word charter approved at the European Security Conference (TIME, Aug. 11). There, with great ceremony, the green, leather-bound original copy was sealed away in a corrosion-proof metal vault 60 feet--about 20 meters--beneath the Finnish state archives.

"Better it should have been buried 200 meters deep," a Rumanian official in Helsinki observed bitterly. Added a Yugoslavian: "Now the Final Act has its very own bomb shelter."

Those two sardonic comments, overheard by a Western official, summarize the undercurrent of apprehension inside the Rumanian and Yugoslav governments in the wake of the Helsinki agreement. Both fear that the Soviet Union may be tempted to increase its pressure on Bucharest and Belgrade to forswear or curtail their independent ways.

Few expected that such pressure would be exerted immediately. Last week, to the contrary, there were some superficial indications of progress that could be attributed at least partly to the accord. Bonn and Warsaw reached an interim agreement, for instance, providing for the repatriation of some 125,000 ethnic Germans (out of a total of 280,000) from Poland to West Germany. Cost to Bonn: almost $1 billion in credits and pensions. In addition, the conversations at Helsinki between West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and East German Communist Boss Erich Honecker were said to have led to some progress in the long-stalled negotiations between the two Germanys. In other respects, however, Honecker seemed totally unaffected by the spirit of Helsinki. Back home last week, he quickly declared that the Final Act notwithstanding, there would be no immediate easing of East German travel restrictions. For East Germany, he said bluntly, "security is and remains foremost."

As for the Soviet reaction to Helsinki, U.S. officials made much of the fact that Pravda and Izvestia published the entire text of the Helsinki declaration, including the Basket Three section dealing with civil liberties, travel and the exchange of ideas. Washington was disappointed, however, that the Soviets still seemed to be resisting the granting of multiple-entry visas to journalists--a commitment explicitly mentioned in Basket Three.

The Rumanians and the Yugoslavs are not expecting a Czechoslovakia-style invasion in the immediate future. But they fear that because the Helsinki declaration has in effect ratified Moscow's hegemony over Eastern Europe, the Soviets might be emboldened to step up their efforts to curb the independent behavior of Rumania and Yugoslavia.

Every Turn. During the 22 months of negotiations that preceded Helsinki, diplomats from Bucharest and Belgrade tried at every turn to gain guarantees against outside interference in their internal affairs. The thrust of their efforts was to seek a repudiation of the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, which Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev proclaimed after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. It asserts that the Soviet Union has the right to come to the assistance of any fraternal country where socialism is endangered.

Soviet officials now act as if the whole idea were a Western concoction. "There never was any such thing as 'the Brezhnev Doctrine,' " a Soviet official said recently with a perfectly straight face. "Such talk was a propaganda fabrication by the bourgeois capitalist press." When pressed, however, Soviet officials concede that "Socialist Internationalism"--the principle that the Soviet Union has the right to come to the rescue of socialist states abroad--is still very much in force.

The significance of such doubletalk is not lost on either the Rumanians or the Yugoslavs. Both, in fact, are engaged in a series of diplomatic, military and economic initiatives in an effort to protect their relative independence.

The Rumanian government of President Nicolae Ceauc,escu, reports TIME Correspondent Strobe Talbott, has secretly been looking into the possibility of buying modern armaments, including American F-5 jet fighters, in the West. Such a move, if it materialized, would be unprecedented for a member of the Warsaw Pact. The subject was raised by Rumanian Chief of Staff and Deputy Defense Minister General Ion Coman when he flew to Washington in March for talks with his U.S. counterpart, General Frederick Weyand. But while the U.S. would welcome a "protocol" or limited military relationship, it is reluctant to provide Rumania with modern weapons involving classified technology that might fall into Soviet hands.

Though Moscow had hoped to hold a European Communist summit conference within the next few months, the meeting has been postponed until next year--largely because the Rumanians and Yugoslavs have defied Soviet attempts to hammer out a unified European Communist position on China. Both Bucharest and Belgrade have been cultivating their relations with Peking. Recently, Yugoslavia has even improved its traditionally hostile relations with neighboring Albania, Peking's surrogate in Europe (and the only European state that boycotted the Soviets' cherished Security Conference). Both Yugoslavia and Rumania pressed hard --and successfully--for a visit from President Ford immediately after Helsinki, as a symbolic reiteration of American support.

Humoring Tito. In Yugoslavia, Soviet strategy seems to be to humor President Josip Broz Tito, who is 83 and ailing; a Mercedes ambulance outfitted with an emergency cardiac unit follows him wherever he goes within Yugoslavia. In the meantime, the Soviets are wooing as many of Tito's numerous would-be successors as possible. Rumania presents them with a far trickier problem. Ceauc,escu is a healthy 57 and may well be around for some time. To be sure, he has his internal enemies, who resent his "personality cult," his nepotistic elevation of his wife and son to important positions and his austere economic policies. On balance, however, Ceauc,escu remains well entrenched. The Soviets tried at least once to penetrate the Rumanian army and encourage anti-Ceauc,escu elements; but the effort ended in failure and embarrassment in 1972, when Moscow's apparent man in the Rumanian army, General Ion Serb, was caught and court-martialed.

Meanwhile, Ceauc,escu is doing everything he can to increase the psychological distance between his country and its gigantic neighbor to the east. Recently, for instance, Rumania applied for, and will probably be granted, observer status for the Conference of Non-aligned Nations, whose foreign ministers will meet later this month in Lima, Peru. Certainly, Ceauc,escu knows that his country will never be able to guarantee its independence by military means alone against a Soviet onslaught. Western observers estimate that Rumania could hold out for a mere three days, and Yugoslavia not much longer. So Ceauc,escu has little choice except to work toward an independence that, in some faraway time, even the Soviets might come to accept.

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