Dissidents West Germany

Fifty "skinheads" smashed a street vendor's booth and attacked riot police with debris and bottles at a festival near Frankfurt, authorities said Sunday.

Fifty "skinheads" smashed a street vendor's booth and attacked riot police with debris and bottles at a festival near Frankfurt, authorities said Sunday.

East Germany expelled four prominent dissidents to West Germany on Tuesday in a move apparently aimed at calming tempers among young East Berliners demonstrating for reform. At the same time, Wolfgang Vogel, an East Berlin lawyer, said he thinks that a score of demonstrators arrested over the last two weeks "will be released this week and that they will be able to emigrate if they desire to do so." More than 200 dissidents were arrested in East Berlin on Jan.

East Germany's Communist regime seems determined to ride out the crisis provoked by thousands of its citizens seeking refuge in the West and has shown no sign of initiating reforms that might help keep its citizens from trying to leave. And, diplomatic analysts say, this policy may lead to even greater problems in the future for the country's aging leadership. "The choice is an almost impossible one for the government," a senior diplomat here said.

Sunday's East German elections mark the real start of the German reunification process. Outgoing Communist caretaker Prime Minister Hans Modrow ran his weak, transitional government with a dignity that won the respect of many in both Germanys, but he had neither the legitimacy to take major decisions nor the power to stop the sense of drift and uncertainty that has so clouded the country's hard-won freedom.