ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

PERINA: I would say in the CSCE they were playing the normal game. None of the
Eastern delegations suspected that the collapse of the Warsaw Pact was coming. No one
expected it. The Soviets were a little easier to deal with because of Gorbachev and
perestroika but the East Germans, for example, were very hard-line. The Hungarians
were the easiest to deal with, and the Poles were mixed. No one sensed that anything
significant was imminent.
Q: The Czechs were pretty hard-line, weren’t they?
PERINA: Oh, yes. They were quite hard-line. But the worst were the East Germans. One
story on the many ironies of this period. We had a rotating chairmanship in the CSCE at
that time. Different delegations would take turns chairing every meeting of the Permanent
Council. By coincidence, I was the acting head of the U.S. delegation and in the chair on
the day that the two Germanys merged. This is jumping ahead a little bit. It was toward
the end of my assignment in Vienna but on the day that we took the GDR nameplate off
the table and East Germany disappeared and West Germany took over. It was remarkable
because on the same day the East German Ambassador, or rather former Ambassador,
since the country no longer existed, asked to meet with me. He knew I had worked in
West Berlin, and he asked if there was any chance of getting employment with the U.S.
Mission in Berlin as an expert on East Germany and on a reintegration process. This was
the man who for the previous two years had always been the harshest critic of the U.S.,
the West and West Germany. But clearly he was desperate. German Foreign Minister
Genscher, as you know, made the decision that every East German diplomat would be
fired. There was not a single one that was integrated into the West German Foreign
Ministry, and they were all out of work. But knowing what this Ambassador had been
saying about us and the West Germans over the previous two years, it was hard to feel
sorry for him.
Q: Were you dealing with issues like freedom of movement, freedom of the press and that
sort of thing during your time in Vienna?
PERINA: Not in the CSBM negotiations, which were pretty technical and concerned
things like observation of military maneuvers and so on, but certainly that was the case in
the CSCE and OSCE. Toward the end of my tour, our delegation really had two parallel
negotiations going, and the broader CSCE/OSCE ones were the more interesting and
productive. Ironically, the CFE talks, which had been Washington’s primary focus when
I arrived in Vienna, really found themselves in a lot of confusion when the Warsaw Pact
came apart because they had been premised on negotiations between the two military
blocs. Many things were just turned upside down in those three years. But you are right
that in the OSCE context we became very much involved in human rights issues. I
remember dealing with the overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania, the beginning of the
Yugoslav crisis, all of these things started bubbling up.
Q: How was the working relationship with the Western Europeans?
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