Germany Moving on Saudi Arms Deal

Government officials are believed to be paving the way for the sale of 300 highly sophisticated Leopard-2 tanks to Saudi Arabia and have launched a campaign to prepare public opinion for a possible deviation from the traditional limitations on arms shipments to non-members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In this connection, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher has been quoted as saying that Saudi Arabia is not to be considered a “region of tension.”

The same view was expressed last week by Hans-Juergen Wischnewski, a top aide to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Schmidt reportedly negotiated a deal last year to provide the Saudis with the most advanced West German tanks. Under current regulations, no West German-made weapons can be exported directly to non-NATO countries located in so-called “areas of tension.” But that self-imposed ban can be lifted by removing the country seeking the weapons from the category of a tension area.

The government is said to have taken into account a possible worsening of relations with Israel if the tank sales to Saudi Arabia go through. But officials here said Bonn has decided to follow its own national interests on the question of arms supplies.

Until now, West German policy-makers considered the entire Middle East an area of tension that posed possible “acute dangers” to world peace. Neither Genscher nor Wischnewski have explained the sudden change in this evaluation.

(Israel, meanwhile, is reacting cautiously to the reported arms sale. The Israeli Embassy in Bonn has been instructed to ascertain discreetly–without making a formal approach to the German government–whether these reports are in fact true. Until Israel has an accurate reading, neither the Embassy nor the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem will make any official statement.)