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New Sino-Russian
treaty is directed against Central Asian Muslims, not
the US
Since
China and Russia recently signed a treaty of friendship
in Moscow, supposed by some to be a response to US president
George W. Bush’s missile project, trade and military
contacts between Moscow and Washington have mushroomed.
The tension has also been taken out of relations between
Beijing and Washington, following US secretary of state
Colin Powell’s visit to China and the release of US-based
lecturers who had been tried in China on charges of
spying.
The treaty’s
main provisions have turned out to be designed to strengthen
and coordinate efforts by Moscow and Beijing to suppress
Muslim independence movements in Chechnya and in Eastern
Turkestan (officially Xinjiang province), and Islamic
movements in Central Asia. That this last preoccupation
had been uppermost in the minds of the Russian and Chinese
leaders was confirmed by events in their respective
countries: president Vladimir Putin presided on August
2 over a summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States
(CIS), to discuss "security issues", and in
China the Peoples Liberation Army (spectacularly misnamed)
on the same day began one of its largest-ever war-games
in Eastern Turkestan.
The CIS
summit discussed international issues, such as the US
missile projects and the aftermath of the G8 summit
in Genoa, Italy, but it concentrated its attention on
"the threat of terrorism to the entire region posed
by fundamentalist Afghanistan", and on disputes
between member-states. Putin stressed mainly the Azerbaijan-Armenia
war and feuds in Abkhazia and Moldovia. But he also
emphasised the importance of protecting the interests
of the 20 million Russian residents of the CIS, particularly
the Muslim countries.
On the
very day Putin was calling for the protection of Russian
residents in CIS countries, Mufti Radhi Ain-Uddin, the
head of the Council of Muftis in Russia, issued a statement
in which he accused Russian authorities and media of
being obsessed with the "need to combat Islamic
terrorism". The statement particularly deplored
the tendency of the office of the Russian attorney-general
to jump to conclusions about the "threat of Islamic
terrorism". It cited recent reports about a meeting
organised by the office and attended by officials from
the ministry of the interior, and others, as the latest
occasion on which the discussion concentrated on "combatting
Islamic extremism". The statement also deplored
the tendency of Russian local authorities to reject
applications for permission to build new mosques and
to issue orders to demolish existing ones.
But it
is not only Russians and other members of the CIS that
are obsessed with "combatting Islamic terrorists".
The Chinese have been engaged in the largest war games
that they have ever held, in Eastern Turkestan to intimidate
the Chinese Muslims fighting for independence there.
Several hundred armoured personnel-carriers, tanks and
other military vehicles were manoeuvred into position
on a plateau about 20 kilometres north of Kashgar for
the four-day exercises. Thousands of troops were deployed
to carry out a live-fire war-game, seldom undertaken
in China in this northwestern region. The exercises
were intended not only to intimidate but were planned
also to enhance the Chinese army’s ability to resist
the Muslim fighters’ efforts to free Eastern Turkestan.
While
preparing to fight Islam and Muslims, the Russians and
Chinese were also improving their relations with the
US at an unprecedented pace, and indeed appeared at
times to be competing in doing so. Both, for instance,
released Americans whom they had held and tried on suspicion
of espionage, whose detentions had created friction
in bilateral relations. Beijing released two Chinese-American
scholars just before secretary of state Colin Powell’s
visit to China at the end of July. On August 3 Moscow
parolled John Tobin, an American Fulbright scholar,
from jail after he had served half of his one-year sentence
for possessing marijuana. Russia clearly did not want
the case to poison relations with the US. Similarly
Moscow also released Edmond Pope, an American businessman
sentenced to 20 years in December for spying, but speedily
pardoned by Putin.
Relations
between Beijing and Washington became tense when NATO
warplanes bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during
the Kosova war with Yugoslavia. The Chinese were also
shocked last year when Bush called Beijing a "strategic
competitor" to distinguish his policies from those
of Bill Clinton, who had said that China and the US
should aim to be "strategic partners". Relations
between the two suffered further setbacks in April when
a US spy aircraft and a Chinese fighter jet collided.
But Powell’s visit to Beijing eased tensions considerably.
He said in an interview on Chinese television that Sino-US
relations were too complex to be summed up in one word,
but that ‘cooperation’ was apt enough to describe them.
He said that he came to convey the message that Bush
"wants to develop constructive onward-looking relations
with the People’s Republic of China". Bush will
meet Chinese leaders at a conference of the Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation Forum in Shanghai in October, and
then go to Beijing for separate talks with them.
Relations
between Moscow and Washington have developed even more
swiftly, with Bush often saying that "Russia is
not an enemy of the US" and exchanging compliments
with Putin. The two men have heaped praise on each other
since their very friendly meetings in June and late
July. They are due to meet again in October, when Bush
travels to Moscow with a large business delegation.
How far the two sides have come to trust each other
was seen on August 7, when a Russian team were met at
the Pentagon by a US briefing team and given technical
and strategic information that "in the cold war
would have been stamped with the highest secrecy classification",
as a newspaper report put it the following day. The
British army is also sending a team of soldiers to Russia
to advise officers there on how to combat the growing
number of suicides (about 3,000 a year) among military
personnel. According to a report in the Sunday Telegraph
on August 5, the team, led by Major Schofield, will
visit Russia later this year at the request of Russian
officers.
In these
circumstances, Russia cannot be described as an enemy
of the West, and the Sino-Russian treaty cannot be deemed
to be directed against the US. In fact the treaty provokes
a strong feeling of deja vu. In December 1999 president
Boris Yeltsin, faced with parliamentary and presidential
elections, and stung by Western criticism of the war
in Chechnya, flew into Beijing to forge a new strategic
partnership with China. The resulting treaty concentrated
on preventing Chinese-Russian rivalry and border disputes
from getting out of hand, and on cementing their cooperation
to combat "Islamic extremism and separatism"
in central Asia, including Eastern Turkestan and the
Caucasus.
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