Word: czechoslovakias
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Your article "Czech Officials Ask for U.S. Financial Aid" of 5 October 1990 misrepresents the message of Foreign Minister Jiri Dienstbier. Czechoslovakia has been notable among the former Communist countries in that it has not asked Western countries for any direct financial...
...Dienstbier did not come here to plead for money. He asked, rather, that the Western countries help create the conditions necessary for Czechoslovakia's successful transition to a market economy. He asked for technical assistance, for Western investment, and for a monetary fund to ensure the stability of the Czechoslovak currency...
Where CSCE might go from there is a matter of intense debate in foreign ministries and think tanks. Last April Czechoslovakia's President Vaclav Havel was among the first to propose that it become the core of a new all-European security organization replacing NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Moscow found the idea appealing because CSCE is the only organization that links Eastern and Western Europe -- and the U.S.S.R. belongs to it. German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher has been pushing a strengthened CSCE for a similar purpose: to keep the Soviets from feeling isolated and resentful...
Outside Britain there is still some worry about German ambitions. Poland and Czechoslovakia are anxious; France, the Netherlands and others are uneasy. The more realistic concern is that Bonn's agenda may be so filled with intra- German and East European issues that Germany will lose some of its eagerness for economic and political integration in the E.C. Jacques Delors, the Community's chief executive, is challenging Germany to prove that it is still determined to go forward. "Are the Germans truly interested in economic and monetary union?" he asked last week. "We need clear, unambiguous political commitments." The time...
Although the "bad guys" who oppressed Czechoslovakia for 45 years are gone, Dienstbier said some Czechs have a simple mentality that now the "good guys" are going to make things right. The people themselves are "not so interested in taking in their hands the reins," he said...