The release of Soviet Prisoner of Conscience Anatoly Shcharansky was greeted here Tuesday with welcome relief, tempered by regrets that it had to come about as part of an exchange of spies and by concern for the fate of the many thousands of refuseniks as well as imprisoned Jewish activists who remain behind.
President Reagan was scheduled to hold a news conference Tuesday evening in which he was expected to comment himself on Shcharansky’s release. In the meantime, the Administration indicated that Shcharansky’s release was the result of “close cooperation over an extended period of time” with the West German government.
The Reagan Administration had special praise for West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl whose government, according to statements from the White House and State Department, had made a “substantial contribution” to the prisoner exchange.
Administration officials declined to elaborate privately on what role the West German government had played or on any other specifics about the exchange arrangements, saying that a similar policy has been maintained in previous prisoner exchanges with the Soviets. Some of the spies released to the Soviet Union Tuesday had been in West German prisons. The State Department stressed that the inclusion of the celebrated Jewish human rights activist in an exchange of spies was in no way a retreat from the Administration’s categorical rejection of the espionage charge for which Shcharansky had been sentenced to serve 13 years in prison and labor camps.
“We do not consider this to be a spy case,” State Department spokesman Bernard Kalb said Tuesday. “There have been in the past releases of human rights activists; they have in fact taken place.”
“As a matter of fact, we consider Shcharansky’s release to be an additional and separate benefit to a package arrangement which otherwise deals with intelligence matters on both sides,” the spokesman added. He said that the Administration “would have preferred that the Soviets simply release Shcharansky” but that Moscow had long refused to do that.
Leaders of Jewish organizations hailed the release of Shcharansky but also stressed that the fight on behalf of Soviet Jewry is not over yet and that thousands of Jews are still waiting in the USSR to receive permission to emigrate. (full story in Thursday’s Bulletin.)
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