Word: bonneli
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During the weeks that Soviet leaders have been preoccupied with remaking their party and government, the pressure for unity inside the two Germanys has mounted faster than was predicted even in this age of sudden European transformations. In Bonn last week, Kohl won his coalition government's approval for talks with East Berlin on a monetary union that would make the deutsche mark the currency in both Germanys. He also set up a Cabinet-level committee to devise specific plans and legislation for political unification. Discussions on the merger would begin with the new East German government to be elected...
...government in East Berlin, which previously argued for a separate socialist existence in some kind of confederal relationship, has thrown in its hand. Unification is possible, Prime Minister Hans Modrow says, but only if the newly formed state remains neutral, unaffiliated with either NATO or the Warsaw Pact. Bonn and its allies reject that idea but counter with one presented by Genscher. A unified Germany should remain in NATO, he proposed, but allied troops or military structures should stay out of the areas that are now East Germany. In Moscow for his own set of talks, U.S. Secretary of State...
...when East Germany granted its citizens unrestricted travel rights. Schubert's daily chore is to pick up 25 copies of the Frankenpost, a newspaper published in Hof, a sizable town on the West German side. She is unaware of and untroubled by the fact that politicians in Bonn and Berlin have yet to agree on terms for the distribution of West German newspapers, which have been banned in East Germany for the past three decades. "Frankenpost has a special edition for us, with advertisements for clothes and such," she says. "The West German border police bring the papers along...
...seems curiously out of tune with the world as it looks in 1990. The Warsaw Pact, for all practical purposes, is dead as a military alliance. Soviet troops might have to fight their way through Warsaw, Prague and even Berlin before getting anywhere near the Fulda Gap, much less Bonn, Rotterdam or Paris. And while the Soviets were long considered capable of mobilizing for a strike at Western Europe in as little as 14 days, Pentagon analysts say that NATO could now detect preparations a month in advance. Some outside experts argue that signs of war would be evident...
Many Germans were also outraged to learn that the U.S. military is free to tap German telephone lines without court orders or even the knowledge of the Bonn government. The Allies retain the right to impose death sentences, control inter-German airspace and veto West German decisions concerning Berlin. The rights are resented even if they go unused, as has been the case with death sentences, and more so when used, as happened in 1988 when a U.S. eavesdropping operation exposed the fact that a West German firm was helping build a poison-gas plant in Libya...