Multi-polarity does not mean confrontation

Containing Russia: back to the future?-I

Sergey V. Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister

Influential political forces on both sides of the Atlantic seem intent on starting a debate on "whether or not to contain Russia". That appears to reflect actual sentiment and political strategies. I would like to contribute as much as I can to this discussion.
   The mere posing of the question of containing Russia appeals to the instincts of the past and suggests not so much the lack of imagination as the fact that for some almost nothing has changed since the end of the Cold War. It implies that the vision of the structure of international relations that took shape in the Western alliance during the Cold War era be mechanically projected to the rest of the modern-day world. The same motives that stood behind the choice in favor of the containment policy have re-emerged at the new stage of history.
   
   Which Russia to contain?
   Indeed, what does the containment of Russia mean to achieve in our time? Let me emphasize that we are talking about a Russia that has abandoned ideology, imperial and any other great designs in favor of pragmatism and common sense. What is the purpose of containing a country that has focused on its domestic development and has been successful in doing so? Our country's internal strength due to the constructive work at home has naturally translated into strengthening of our international position. Russia's foreign policy represents a logical extension of the domestic one. We have realistic and understandable aspirations, namely the maintenance of international stability as a key condition for advancing our nation's further development and natural evolution of international relations towards freedom and democracy.
   When analyzing the ideological inertia that led the US to the "transformational diplomacy", one may notice a substantial gap between the foreign policy aspirations of Washington and Moscow. It seems to be the core of the problem, at least a considerable part of it. Russia has had more than enough experience of revolutions, which are scattered throughout the entire twentieth century of our nation's history. This century has served as a sort of purgatory for the whole European civilization, which was overcoming evil through exorcising its own ideological demons - various extremist products of European liberal thought. For this reason, Russia will never subscribe to any ideology-driven project, let alone borrowing it from abroad.
   The Westphalian system, which has become a fashionable object of criticism in certain circles, has placed differences in values beyond the scope of intergovernmental relations. In this respect, the Cold War was a setback. Should we really follow this path back, which can only lead to confrontation?
   Ideology, when confused with practical policies, obscures one's vision and reason. This may be illustrated by the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who claimed that it had been the US that provoked the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This suggests that the US played a greater role than usually thought in giving birth to Al-Qaeda. The law of "unintended consequences" more often than not works in situations where ideology-inspired enthusiasm comes into play.
   What is the point of containing a country which is not overly ambitious and aspires for things as simple as trade which the vast majority of our partners have been successfully doing for centuries? While making use of our natural competitive advantages, we increase investments in human resources and build up our capacity of putting our economy onto the path of innovative development. Our economy is getting back to normalcy in the sense that its growth is largely driven by domestic consumer demand. We also make part of a worldwide trend of new transnational corporations emerging in new economies and presenting a competitive challenge to the "old" TNC. We plan to integrate further into the global economy on the universally accepted terms and we will continue to adapt our legislation accordingly.
   In contrast to the Soviet Union, Russia is an open country that does not intend to be closed to anybody. Therefore, there is no need for "opening" us. It is not us who erect walls today - both physical (between and within the countries) and political ones. On the contrary, we call for the removal of artificial obstacles in international relations and visa barriers, including in our relations with the European Union. What else could give more ironclad guarantees against unpredictable development of a nation?
   Russia has become a part of the universal consensus to the effect that democracy and free market should form the basis of a social and political order and economic life. Undoubtedly, we are just at the beginning of the road and far from being perfect. However, we have chosen our path of development once and for all. As a result of Russia's embarking upon the path of unprecedented change, which was extremely painful, our society has reached a broad consensus over the pace and depth of the change. This is the price of peace, domestic political stability and evolutionary development free of upheavals. In the final analysis, a more mature democracy, including a vibrant civil society and a well-structured party system, will be a natural result of a higher level of social and economic development. I mean primarily the emergence of a substantial middle class, which cannot come into being overnight in any nation. It was only "tycoons" who emerged overnight in the early 1990s, but these times are definitely over.
   
   Global energy and Russia
   Russia has been criticized for its natural role in the global energy sector. This is an obvious manifestation of the complexes of those countries that cannot overcome realization of their dependence on external sources of energy. However, energy dependence is reciprocal. A balance of interests of all energy market players was achieved on Russia's initiative at the G8 Summit in Saint Petersburg. A policy of "sitting on the pipeline" or on one's energy reserves like a "dog in the manger" is not a wise choice for an energy-exporting country. As elsewhere in the world, energy is considered to be a strategic sector in Russia. This is particularly true today, when we face a negative external reaction to the strengthening of the country and its role in global politics. After all, Russia has never failed to fulfill any of its obligations to importing countries or hydrocarbon-supply contracts.
   I think it would be fair to say that we see our role in the global energy sector as a means to safeguard our independence in foreign affairs. Are we to be blamed for that, when, as it seems, the freedom of action and the freedom of speech that we have secured in international affairs - by the way, we use both of them in accordance with international law - are the main accusations brought against us by those who frown upon a stronger Russia?
   The energy policy of the Russian Government is in line with the global trend towards establishing State control over natural resources. Thus, 90 per cent of the world's proven hydrocarbon reserves are, in some form, under State control. A new balance has been struck in the global energy sector, where State-controlled access to energy resources is offset by the concentration of cutting-edge technology in the hands of private transnational corporations. Isn't it an appropriate environment for cooperation based on competitive advantages of the parties, each having equal rights and sharing the same objective of meeting the energy requirements of the world economy?
   
   Multilateral diplomacy in the era of globalization
   Russia has started pursuing a national foreign policy. This, indeed, is a dramatic departure from the ideology-motivated internationalism, which used to underlie foreign policy of the Soviet Union. Multilateral diplomacy based on international law has become a universal means governing relations at the global and regional levels.
   There are no objective causes for confrontation in a globalizing world - of course, if we leave out the attempts to introduce ideology into international relations and to re-militarize them. As globalization extended beyond the Western civilization, the competition became truly global in nature. I am convinced that this is the essence of the paradigm shift in international relations. Competition now involves values and development patterns. And it must be fair. This is a fundamental challenge for all.
   Francis the First, having lost the battle of Pavia, wrote to his mother soon afterwards that "everything is lost save the honour" (tout est perdu fors l'honneur). Similarly, no one will ever make the West abandon its values and way of life against its wishes. Yet, it would be logical to focus on one's competitive advantages, rather than impose one's values on others. Here, it is appropriate to cite Dr. Eberhard Sandschneider, Director of the Research Institute of the German Society for Foreign Policy. He believes that the weakening of the West in this competition has been facilitated by recent policies of the United States, which "damaged tremendously the image of the West" in Asia and Africa. "Over the last eight years", he believes, "we have done nothing, or almost nothing, to make our values attractive to the population of these regions of the Earth". Why then hold Russia responsible for that?
   Global challenges and threats came to the forefront of the global politics, calling for a truly global response based on the widest possible international cooperation. Cumbersome traditional "binding alliances", as well as "holy alliances" against whoever it may be, fail to achieve these objectives. The variety of interests and possibilities of participating in relevant international efforts has given rise to the network diplomacy as the best means of inter-State interaction within bilateral and multilateral frameworks. It is logical that diplomacy has adopted the network approach developed by private corporations and civil society. Unity of the method allows to achieve harmony in all dimensions of international life.
   The foundation of the new international system is the emerging multi-polarity. This is an undeniable objective reality. President Vladimir Putin stated the obvious when he said in Munich that a "unipolar world" had failed to materialize. Recent experience shows as clearly as ever that no State or group of States possesses sufficient resources to impose unipolarity on the world. While this allegedly benign simplification of inter-State relations - namely, their vertical hierarchy structure - might seem attractive, it is utterly unrealistic. It is one thing to respect America's cultural and civilizational identity, and another to profess Americanocentrism.
   Unipolarity, after all, is an attempt at God's powers. The new system of international relations is not anarchy or a chaotic "Brownian motion". With several leading actors on the global arena, collective leadership is needed to manage international relations in a flexible way. This requires the ability to bring various interests of partners to a common denominator and to act in concert with other leading nations of the world.
   Multi-polarity does not predetermine confrontation in any way. Quoting Anna Akhmatova, "the future casts its shadow long before it comes in". This future of the world politics in the era of globalization is the United Nations, which on many occasions during the Cold War only "cast its shadow". Nowadays, this universal organization can and should really become pivotal for the entire international system. The UN Charter provides all the grounds for that. (More next week)

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Israel's conscious crimes

Jonathan Cook in Nazareth

Early August marked a year since the end of hostilities now officially called the Second Lebanon War by Israel. A month of fighting - mostly Israeli aerial bombardment of Lebanese civil infrastructure and residential areas, and rocket attacks from the Shia militia Hizbullah on northern Israel in response - ended with more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians and a small but unknown number of Hizbullah fighters dead, as well as 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 Israeli civilians.
   When Israel and the US realised that Hizbullah could not be bombed into submission, they pushed Resolution 1701 through the UN Security Council. It placed an expanded international peacekeeping force, UNIFIL, in south Lebanon to keep Hizbullah in check and try to disarm its few thousand fighters.
   But many significant developments since the war have gone unnoticed; including several that seriously put in question Israel's account of what happened last summer. This is old ground worth revisiting for that reason alone.
   The war began on 12 July, when Israel launched waves of air strikes on Lebanon after Hizbullah killed three soldiers and captured two more on the northern border. (A further five troops were killed by a land mine when their tank crossed into Lebanon in hot pursuit.) Hizbullah had long been warning that it would seize soldiers if it had the chance, in an effort to push Israel into a prisoner exchange. Israel has been holding a handful of Lebanese prisoners since it withdrew from its two-decade occupation of south Lebanon in 2000.
   
   Initiated by Israel
   Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has been widely blamed for the army's failure to subdue Hizbullah, appointed the Winograd Committee to investigate what went wrong. So far the committee has been long on pointing out the country's military and political failures and short on explaining how the mistakes were made or who made them. Olmert is still in power, even if hugely unpopular.
   Instead it has been left to the Israeli media to begin rewriting the history of last summer. In early August, an editorial in the liberal Haaretz newspaper went so far as to admit that this was, "a war initiated by Israel against a relatively small guerrilla group". Israel's supporters, including high-profile defenders like Alan Dershowitz in the US, who claimed that Israel had no choice but to bomb Lebanon, must have been squirming in their seats.
   
   Shebaa farms
   Other recent reports have revealed that one of the main justifications for Hizbullah's continuing resistance - that Israel failed to withdraw fully from Lebanese territory in 2000 - is now supported by the UN. Last month its cartographers quietly admitted that Lebanon is right in claiming sovereignty over a small fertile area known as the Shebaa Farms, still occupied by Israel. Israel argues that the territory is Syrian and will be returned in future peace talks with Damascus, even though Syria backs Lebanon's position. International media has ignored the UN's admission.
   In the meantime, there is every indication that Israel is preparing for another round of fighting against Hizbullah. The new defence minister, Ehud Barak, who was responsible for the 2000 withdrawal, has made it a priority to develop anti-missile systems such as "Iron Dome" to neutralise the rocket threat from Hizbullah, using some of the recently announced $30 billion of American military aid.
   
   One million bombs
   One of Israel's main claims during the war was that it had made every effort to protect Lebanese civilians from its aerial bombardments. Casualty figures suggested otherwise, but increasingly so too does other evidence.
   A shocking aspect of the war was Israel's firing of at least a million cluster bombs, old munitions supplied by the US with a failure rate as high as 50 per cent, in the last days of fighting. The tiny bomblets, effectively small land mines, were left littering south Lebanon after the UN-brokered ceasefire, and are reported so far to have killed 30 civilians and wounded at least another 180. Israeli commanders have admitted firing 1.2 million such bomblets, while the UN puts the figure closer to three million.
   At the time, it looked suspiciously as if Israel had taken the brief opportunity before the war's end to make south Lebanon - the heartland of both the country's Shia population and its militia, Hizbullah - uninhabitable, and to prevent the return of hundreds of thousands of Shia who had fled Israel's earlier bombing campaigns.
   
   War crime
   Israel's use of cluster bombs has been described as a war crime by human rights organisations. According to the rules set by Israel's then chief of staff, Dan Halutz, the bombs should have been used only in open and unpopulated areas - although with such a high failure rate, this would have done little to prevent later civilian casualties.
   After the war, the army ordered an investigation, mainly to placate Washington, which was concerned at the widely reported fact that it had supplied the munitions. The findings, which should have been published months ago, have yet to be made public.
   The delay is not surprising. An initial report by the army, leaked to the Israeli media, discovered that the cluster bombs had been fired into Lebanese population centres in gross violation of international law. Udi Adam, head of the Northern Command at the time, apparently gave the order. A US State Department investigation reached a similar conclusion.
   Another claim, one that Israel hoped might justify the large number of Lebanese civilians it killed during the war, was that Hizbullah fighters had been regularly hiding and firing rockets from among south Lebanon's civilian population. Human rights groups found scant evidence of this, but a senior UN official, Jan Egeland, offered succour by accusing Hizbullah of "cowardly blending".
   
   Israel's false claims
   There were always strong reasons for suspecting the Israeli claim to be untrue. Hizbullah had invested much effort in developing an elaborate system of tunnels and underground bunkers in the countryside, that Israel knew little about, in which it hid its rockets and from which fighters attacked Israeli soldiers as they tried to launch a ground invasion. Also, common sense suggested that Hizbullah fighters would be unwilling to put their families, who live in south Lebanon's villages, in danger by launching rockets from among them.
   Now Israeli front pages are carrying reports from Israeli military sources that put in serious doubt Israel's claims.
   Since the war's end, Hizbullah has apparently relocated most of its rockets to conceal them from the UN peacekeepers that have been carrying out extensive searches of south Lebanon to disarm Hizbullah under the terms of Resolution 1701. According to the UN, some 33 of these underground bunkers - or more than 90 per cent - have been located and the Hizbullah weapons discovered there, including rockets and launchers, destroyed.
   
   Nature reserves
   The Israeli media has noted that the Israeli army calls these sites "nature reserves"; similarly, the UN has made no mention of finding urban-based Hizbullah bunkers. Relying on military sources, Haaretz reported last month: "Most of the rockets fired against Israel during the war last year were launched from the 'nature reserves'." In short, even Israel is no longer claiming that Hizbullah was firing its rockets from among civilians.
   According to the UN report, Hizbullah has moved the rockets out of the underground bunkers and abandoned its rural launch pads. Most rockets, it is believed, have gone north of the Litani River, beyond the range of UN monitors. But some, according to the Israeli army, may have been moved into nearby Shia villages to hide them from the UN.
   As a result, Haaretz noted that Israeli commanders had issued a warning to Lebanon that in future hostilities the army, "will not hesitate to bomb - and even totally destroy - urban areas after it gives Lebanese civilians the chance to flee". How this would diverge from Israel's policy during the war, when Hizbullah was based in its "nature reserves" but Lebanese civilians were still bombed in their towns and villages, was not made clear.
   
   Arms in civilian areas
   If the Israeli army's new claims are true (unlike the old ones), Hizbullah's movement of some rockets into villages should be condemned. But not by Israel, whose army is breaking international law by concealing its weapons in civilian areas on a far grander scale.
   As a first-hand observer of the fighting from Israel's side of the border last year, I noted on several occasions that Israel had built many of its permanent military installations, including weapons factories and army camps, and set up temporary artillery positions next to - and in some cases inside - civilian communities in the north of Israel. Many of those communities are Arab: Arab citizens constitute about half of the Galilee's population.
   Locating military bases next to these communities was a particularly reckless act by the army as Arab towns and villages lack the public shelters and air raid warning systems available in Jewish communities. Eighteen of the 43 Israeli civilians killed were Arab - a proportion that surprised many Israeli Jews, who assumed that Hizbullah would not want to target Arab communities.
   In many cases it is still not possible to specify where Hizbullah rockets landed because Israel's military censorship prevents any discussion that might identify the location of a military site. During the war, Israel used this to advantageous effect: for example, it was widely reported that a Hizbullah rocket fell close to a hospital, but reporters failed to mention that a large army camp was next to it. An actual strike against the camp could have been described in the very same terms.
   
   Pilot-less drones
   It seems likely that Hizbullah, which had flown pilot-less spy drones over Israel earlier in the year, similar to Israel's own aerial spying missions, knew where many of these military bases were. The question is, was Hizbullah trying to hit them or - as most observers claimed, following Israel's lead - was it actually more interested in killing civilians?
   A full answer may never be forthcoming, as we cannot know Hizbullah's intentions - as opposed to its behaviour - any more than we can discern Israel's during the war. Human Rights Watch, however, has argued that, because Hizbullah's rockets were not precise, every time they were fired into Israel they were effectively targeted at civilians. Hizbullah was therefore guilty of war crimes in using its rockets, whatever the intention of the launch teams.
   In other words, according to this reading of international law, only Israel had the right to fire missiles and drop bombs because its military hardware is more sophisticated - and, of course, more deadly.
   Nonetheless, new evidence suggests strongly that, whether or not Hizbullah had the right to use its rockets, it may often have been trying to hit military targets, even if it rarely succeeded. The Arab Association for Human Rights, based in Nazareth, has been compiling a report on Hizbullah rocket strikes against Arab communities in the north since last summer. It is not sure whether it will ever be able to publish its findings because of Israeli military censorship laws.
   But information currently available makes for interesting reading. The association has looked at northern Arab communities hit by Hizbullah rockets, often repeatedly, and found that in every case there was at least one military base or artillery battery placed next to, or in a few cases inside, the community. In some communities there were several such sites.
   
   Hizbullah fought lawfully
   This does not prove that Hizbullah wanted only to hit military bases, of course. But it does indicate that in some cases it was clearly trying to, even if it lacked the technical resources to be sure of doing so. It also suggests that, in terms of international law, Hizbullah behaved no worse, and probably far better, than Israel during the war.
   The evidence so far indicates that Israel: first, established legitimate grounds for Hizbullah's attack on the border post by refusing to withdraw from the Lebanese territory of the Shebaa Farms in 2000; second, initiated a war of aggression by refusing to engage in talks about a prisoner swap offered by Hizbullah; third, committed a grave war crime by intentionally using cluster bombs against south Lebanon's civilians; fourth, repeatedly hit Lebanese communities, killing many civilians, even though the evidence is that Hizbullah fighters were not to be found there; and fifth, put its own, mainly Arab, civilians in great danger by making their communities targets for Hizbullah attacks and failing to protect them.
   It is clear that during the Second Lebanon War Israel committed the most serious war crimes.
   The writer is a journalist based in Nazareth and author of Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State.

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