Yeltsin and Walesa open 'new chapter'

WARSAW - President Boris Yeltsin and President Lech Walesa signed pacts on trade and energy yesterday to open a new chapter in relations between Russia and Poland, and drain what Mr Walesa called the 'bitter chalice' of their tragic shared history.

Mr Yeltsin, on his first official trip to Warsaw, also pledged to withdraw the last ex-Soviet troops from Poland by 1 October, three months earlier than planned.

The two leaders, who played historic roles in ending Communism and changing the face of Eastern Europe, signed an important trade pact and a deal to build a giant gas pipeline across Russia and Poland to Western Europe.

'In the new Russian-Polish relations, there is no place for hegemony and diktat, the political psychology of Big Brother and Little Brother,' Mr Yeltsin told a joint news conference. Later, in a gesture of atonement, he became the first Russian leader to lay flowers at a monument to some 4,000 captured Polish army officers who were murdered in Katyn forest in 1940 by Stalin's secret police.

The presidents said in a joint declaration that the perpetrators of Katyn would be punished, and efforts were being made to compensate other victims of Stalinist crimes.

'This is proof that we are able to talk to each other. That we understand each other. That we have the courage to drink this bitter chalice and not leave it for our descendants,' Mr Walesa declared.

The decision to withdraw the last remaining Russian troops - numbering about 1,000 - ahead of schedule was a token of good faith towards the Poles, who have long resented the former Soviet army's presence.

Both presidents attached great importance to the planned gas pipeline, which will stretch 4,000km (2,485 miles) from Russia's Arctic north to Germany across Polish territory, helping Warsaw to meet its energy needs.

Mr Yeltsin and Mr Walesa acknowledged that economic co-operation, badly damaged by the collapse of the Soviet trade bloc Comecon and the painful effects of free-market reform, had failed to live up to its potential. The new trade pact, replacing a Communist agreement of 1945, gives both partners 'most-favoured nation' status and transfers their relations to free-market principles.

But the two men failed to resolve a dispute over mutual debts inherited from Comecon, an issue that has confounded negotiators for the past three years and on which the Poles had hoped for a breakthrough. But relations between the two leaders appeared much warmer than last year, when Mr Walesa described their encounter in Moscow as 'difficult'.

'The main thing is that, to a very large degree, the ice of distrust that existed between our two countries has melted', Mr Yeltsin said, while Mr Walesa hailed his guest as 'a great, determined politician, on a level with the greatness of his country'.