1981: an overview: Madrid Conference (12/27/81)

1981: an overview

Madrid Conference

This was the year the Madrid Conference became a diplomatic marathon. The 35-state meeting to review implementation of the 1975 Helsinki Accords on human rights and detente began in November 1980, and lead-bottomed delegates from the Warsaw Pact and the West remain at loggerheads over such key issues as human rights and the particulars of a post-Madrid disarmament conference. A final communique is nowhere in sight.

When the conference resumed on January 27, the Soviet delegation, stung by criticism of its country's awful human-rights record and the Afghanistan invasion during last year's sessions, responded by insisting that agreement at Madrid, and indeed the fate of the Helsinki process itself, hinged on the West's acceptance of a proposal for a follow-up disarmament parley. The NATO alliance had their own plan, and the meeting adjourned until May 5. The result? No progress. The meeting was reconvened, but the only agreement was to adjourn on July 27.

When delegates returned to the bargaining table on October 27, both sides continued to haggle about the nature of a post-Madrid disarmament meeting. The crabby Soviets dug in and stubbornly continued to insist that so-called security "confidence-building measures" be extended to encompass zones of notification of troop movements or military maneuvers which would include all Atlantic as well as European air and sea space. In exchange, they offered all Soviet territory to the Ural Mountains to be included in their notification zone. Deeming the Soviet position preposterous, the West refused. The conference recessed on December 18, and is scheduled to resume on February 9.

Throughout 1981, the Soviets have attempted to talk the Helsinki process to death. They would like to avoid any mention of their human rights abuses in the final communique, something the U.S. delegation has said must be included. So they continue to stall in the hope that the conference will eventually collapse under its own tedium. For its part, the NATO alliance, which sees the conference as, at the very least, a huge propaganda defeat for the Kremlin, is prepared to sit tight. Yet, the deadlock, and an East-West situation clearly exacerbated by events in Poland, may just sound the death knell of detente and the Helsinki process.

But, despite the mess, some headway has been made at Madrid in such areas as family reunification, measures against terrorism and the rights of journalists. But both sides remain ideologies apart on the key issues, and the diplomatic stalemate does not bode well for East-West relations or for the thousands of Helsinki monitors and political prisoners currently languishing in Soviet labor camps or internal exile.

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