
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, May 13, 1990                   TAG: 9005130183
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

DEMOCRACY AID CORPS PROPOSED

President Bush said Saturday he would create a volunteer corps to try to strengthen the emerging democracies in Central and Eastern Europe.

In one of several foreign-policy speeches before the summit meeting this month with President Mikhail Gorbachev, Bush said he would try to export his "thousand points of light" theme through a new Citizens Democracy Corps that would serve as an information clearinghouse for U.S. volunteer programs for Europe.

Giving a commencement address at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, Bush said the volunteer corps could help the new democracies in Europe build political and legal systems to shore up their freedom.

Bush has been sharply criticized in Congress as missing an opportunity to help fledgling democracies overseas and in Eastern Europe in particular.

But Saturday Bush said Americans, "so free to chart our own course," identify with the "hopes and aspirations" of the Baltic states, "where people struggle for the right to determine their own future."

The program Bush announced Saturday, described by an administration official as a "Peace Corps point-of-light kind of thing," will receive $300,000 in start-up funds in the 1991 budget of the Agency for International Development, and then will be run privately.

It will be based in this country, not in Europe, and will promote free markets and the tenets of freedom.

by CNB