British Ambassador Simon Gass says the expulsion of
Russian diplomats is amatter of principle, not energy interests, and wants
Europe to start delivering policy rather than arguing over institutions
BRITAIN
today finds itself in the eye of the newest storm between Russia and the West.
The reason is Russia's refusal to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, the prime suspect
in the murder of former KGB agent and Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in
London last November. The dispute has resulted in tit-for-tat expulsions of
four diplomats a side.
In
announcing the expulsions on July 16, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband made
Britain the first western nation to stand firm in the face of what has been a
Russian juggernaut of aggressive self-assertion since the beginning of the
year.
When I met
British Ambassador Simon Gass at his residence in Athens to discuss the
dispute, he expressed his government's position with that combination of
consummate politeness and principled outrage the British do so well.
"We
can't simply watch a British citizen murdered under these circumstances and do
nothing about it, " he told me matter-of-factly. He called the expulsion
of Russian diplomats "very proportionate" in the face of a
"substantial body of evidence" against Lugovoi, whom he was careful
never to name.
Russia says
it is constitutionally unable to extradite citizens. Britain speedily rejected
this, which Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Grushko has called unfair
punishment against Russia for keeping faith with its laws.
"Many
countries have accepted that in a world where cross-border judicial cooperation
is more and more important, they have to modify internal regulations, "
says Gass, bringing up the three-and-a-half-year-old Europe-wide arrest warrant
as an example.
One
troubling aspect of the British expulsion was its timing. On June 22, British
Petroleum was forced to sell its stake in one of the world's largest gas fields
to Russian giant Gazprom under the threat of having its licence revoked. It was
a near-repetition of the strong-arm tactics used to oust Shell from an oil
development on Sakhalin island last April.
But Gass
unequivocally denied that that played any part in Miliband's decision.
"Nobody can object to Russia having a voice on the world stage," he
said, but stressed that the Litvinenko affair is a matter of Russia exercising
power in a responsible way. "This for us is a matter or principle,"
he said, calling Russia's behaviour "unacceptable".
Kosovo's crossroads
Britain and
Russia have now parted ways on Kosovo. On July 20, Britain and other backers of
UN envoy Martti Ahtisaari's proposal to grant the region internationally
supervised independence pulled the issue out of the Security Council after
Russia threatened to use its veto.
The writing
was on the wall when, three weeks earlier, former Russian prime minister
Yevgeny Primakov floated the idea of partitioning the province as a way of
allowing the Albanian majority to enjoy independence while the Serb minority
joins Serbia.
"I am
certain I won't be popular when I say that Kosovo should be divided, "
Primakov wrote in Belgrade's Politika newspaper in early July. "It is
difficult at the moment to say where the border would run. But it is clear that
the parts of Kosovo where the Serbs and the monasteries are located should
belong to Serbia."
Western
powers have rejected that idea, which Gass sees as a slippery slope.
"Kosovo is Kosovo, and as soon as you start dividing and subdividing you
could go on ad infinitum, " he says, pointing to the 60,000-strong Serb
population south of the Ibar River, some in enclaves deep inside Kosovo.
But the
subtext here is clear. A Kosovo divided along ethnic lines could have a domino
effect across the former Yugoslavia, leading to the secession of an Albanian
minority in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (Fyrom) and the
tripartition of Bosnia. Above all, it would be an admission of failure to
create multi-ethnic states, with repercussions as far away as Israel and Iraq.
"I really don't want to speculate, " said Gass when asked to muse on
a redrawn map of the western Balkans.
When pressed
on the point, though, he admitted that while Britain had hoped for a consensus
in the Security Council, it is ultimately prepared to make some people unhappy.
"I do
not think that you can expect that there will be some sort of agreed
solution... because there is a fundamental difference. The Kosovars will not
live under Serb governance, the Serbs will not allow Kosovo to leave Serbia,
and this to me looks like the irresistible force meets the immovable object; in
which case we have to find another solution, and that solution is Ahtisaari,"
he said in a flurry.
A relaxed
interlocutor off the record, Gass is a very self-controlled interviewee. He
delivers responses in near-perfect paragraphs and limits body language to the
occasional sip of juice, or an un-selfconscious fiddle with a pair of
spectacles in his lap. When his opinions are strong they emerge as didactic
tracts, and when he feels he has said as much as he is comfortable saying on a
subject he rounds off with evident finality.
European institutional wrangles
The question
of consensus is also at the heart of debates over how to most effectively form
a European foreign policy. Britain is said to be uneasy about the formation of
a European Union diplomatic service - part of a June summit agreement that
salvaged parts of the defeated constitutional treaty.
"We
think we can be as effective as we need to be using the machinery that we have,
" Gass said. Britain wants to keep foreign policy a consensual process
between governments. Putting it in the hands of a new bureaucracy could lead
individual states to lose control of it.
"Let us
suppose you had a foreign policy being delivered through a European diplomatic
service, through qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers, and
Fyrom applied to join Nato under the name given to it under its
constitution," Gass suggests. That name, Republic of Macedonia, is one to
which Greece strenuously objects but has for years found itself unable to
muster international diplomatic pressure on Fyrom to alter.
"Do you
think it would be acceptable to Greece if the Greek foreign minister were
outvoted and had to come back to Athens and say, 'I'm sorry, we were outvoted,
that's what we have to live with?' I don't think that is acceptable, " he
told me stridently.
Having said
that, neither did he want to entertain the notion of Europeanising the Fyrom
name problem.
"Fundamentally,
the two parties to the dispute have to resolve [it], " he said. Listening
between the lines, though, his hopes for a solution weren't high. He strongly
hinted that an Interim Accord, signed by Andreas Papandreou in September 1995,
may well continue to be the only basis for the relationship between Greece and
Fyrom.
But perhaps
some of the emotion in Gass' response was derived from experience. Britain
found itself in a minority position in early 2003, when it supported a US
invasion of Iraq. Together with Washington it managed to engineer a European
coalition with five other EU members including Italy, Spain and Poland; but the
split was traumatic to a continent overwhelmingly opposed to the war, and in
the eyes of many remains a landmark of apostasy.
Still, Gass
was legitimately able to point to policy on Iran as an example of a united
front. "Iran has the right to be a rich and successful country in the
Middle East," he said. "It does not have the right to destabilise its
neighbours or acquire nuclear weapons."
Gass
believes that what he calls "sterile institutional wrangling" and
voting power spats detracts from a focus on achieving results in the EU.
"Too
much energy has been devoted to discussing voting methods and minor
constitutional changes which are really only understood by a few experts in
many cases, " he said with what seemed to me personal as well as
professional conviction.
"We
need to deliver in areas that actually matter to people. What we have in the
European Union is not a democratic deficit at all. What we actually have is a
delivery deficit. It's a deficit in the EU's ability to meet the expectations
of people on ordinary questions like migration, security, climate change, the
economy, job creation, innovation. These are the things that really matter to
people."
The
'institutional wranglings' of the European Union, as well as its foreign policy
making, are thrown into a different perspective when one contemplates the
prospect of Turkish entry. Not only will that country of 65 million potentially
be the biggest member; it will also be the most adventuresome, because it sees
itself as a regional power.
As we spoke,
200,000 pairs of Turkish boots were reportedly lined up on the border with Iraq
in preparation for a possible invasion to defeat what Turkey and the US see as
Kurdish terrorism. Given that Britain, as Gass said, is "committed"
to stabilising Iraq "until the job is done", a sudden Turkish
involvement could complicate that job enormously.
"I don't want to say too much," Gass
intoned thoughtfully. "Turkey will be thinking very carefully not only
about the military risks if it crosses the border, but also about the political
risks."
