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CIAO DATE: 08/06
International Affairs:
A Russian Journal
“Russians Want Back What Was Taken From Them”
N. Narochnitskaia*
Heated and not so heated territorial debates continue as before at different levels in Japan. The other day, the upper chamber of the Japanese Parliament passed a resolution claiming that the two states, Russia and Japan, should achieve a settlement not only over the ownership of the South Kuriles but also other "disputed territories."
The Japanese Communists came up with even more radical demands. Urged by the Communists, the Parliament included in the resolution on relations with Russia a point to the effect that in resolving the territorial dispute Tokyo would ask to be given back not only four islands of the South Sakhalin ridge but also the whole of the Kurile Islands as far as Kamchatka as well as South Sakhalin.
That beats everything.
Let us turn for explanations.
Prominent political scientist Natalia Narochnitskaia talks to International Affairs observer Yevgenia Piadysheva about the history of the problem and its possible solutions.
THE KURILE CAMPAIGN began during the Gorbachev rule. It was then that the "territorial problem" was allowed to reappear from thirty years of political non-existence. Interestingly, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, of all people, was a better patriot of Russia than Mikhail Gorbachev where the Kuriles were concerned. On February 11, 1945, while signing, in company of Stalin and Churchill, a tripartite agreement on the Far East, which said that the USSR's demands in respect of Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands should be unconditionally met after a victory over Japan, he commented in no uncertain terms that the "Russians want back what was taken away from them."
In the heyday of Gorbachevian "perestroika," the absence of a Soviet-Japanese peace treaty was palmed off as a problem that urgently needed a solution. It was done so unexpectedly that no one had the time to realize the absurdity of the situation: a victorious nation all of a sudden started seeking peace with a defeated nation at the cost of renouncing a part of its territory in favor of the latter. The political theater, complete with efforts to expedite the signing of a peace treaty on Tokyo's terms, that is, on condition that at least the Little Kurile Ridge be handed over to Japan, went on in the same vein during the Yeltsin presidency.
Our present-day approaches to the Kurile issue should take into account the fact that the negative consequences of the 1989-1991 "Kurile campaign" have not been removed in full. Some of these consequences are, first, a change of geographical stereotypes that was totally unwarranted by anything in the national self-consciousness (the "perestroika" media turned South Kurile Islands into "northern territories"); second, a perilous delusion that Russia's sovereignty over a territory or its part may be subject to any behind-the-scenes deals (this view is still alive in Chechnya).
From the point of view of international practices, however, the absence of a Japanese-Russian peace treaty is no more of an impediment than the absence of a peace treaty between Germany and Russia or between selfsame Japan and China. The absence of a treaty and the vigor of a "movement for the return of the northern territories" that emerged in Japan in the late 1960s did nothing to prevent a surge in bilateral trade, which increased more than 40 times between 1960 and 1988.
How important are the Kurile Islands geopolitically?
The Kurile ridge is not just pieces of land lost in the oceanic expanses. The southern portion of the ridge - Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan, and Habomai islands - form a natural boundary in the Pacific on the approaches to the Sea of Okhotsk and the Russian Maritime Territory. While extending the continental sphere of Russia's military security, they also ensure communications between the Maritime Territory and Kamchatka. The southern part of the Kurile ridge is where we have the only non-freezing straits (the straits between the Northern Kuriles freeze), which secure an exit to the Pacific through Russian territorial waters. The ports like Vladivostok and Nakhodka possess their current strategic importance mostly by virtue of the Russian ownership of the Kurile Islands.
It is the Kuriles that were the base whence Admiral Yamamoto started his Hawaiian raid that ended in his attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. From the point of view of a balance of forces in East Asia and the Pacific, the strategic importance of the Kurile archipelago was never called into question, be it during the First and Second World Wars or now.
The Kuriles are not only a deployment zone for the navy but also an area rich in resources, the latter including oil, sulphur, manganese and more. The total amount of bioresources in the Kurile Islands and the adjoining territorial waters is estimated at 2.5 trillion dollars and their annual renewable stocks at 4.2 billion dollars.
Won't the "return" of Kurile Islands be a signal for another redivision of the postwar world?
The 1956 Declaration first envisaged the signing of a peace treaty and only after that a "handover" of two islands. Any handover is an act of goodwill, a sign of readiness to use one's territory "in accordance with Japan's wishes and with regard for the interests of the Japanese state." Japan, for its part, insisted and continues to insist that the "return" precede the peace treaty, insofar as the notion "return" is recognition of the illegality of ownership of the islands by the Soviet Union and Russia as its successor. It is a direct revision of both the principle of inviolability of the results of World War II and the substance of those results.
1945 was not even the year when all past treaties, which Japanese politicians refer to lost effect. That happened as early as 1904, when the Russo-Japanese war began, for international law says that the state of war between nations invalidates each and every treaty between them. For this reason alone the entire "historical" stratum of arguments adduced by the Japanese side has no relation to the rights of the present-day Japanese state. Particular emphasis has been placed on two 19th-century treaties: 1855 Shimoda trade agreement which drew the border between Urup and Iturup, leaving Sakhalin non-delimited; and 1875 St. Petersburg agreement which gave all the Kurile islands to Japan in exchange for its recognition of the whole of Sakhalin as Russian-owned.
Notice that in the past all major Japanese historians claimed that up to the mid-1800s Japan had not listed as its possessions not only Sakhalin, which it had long regarded as a peninsula while it had been thoroughly explored by Russians, but also the Kuriles and even Hokkaido Island which was unpopulated as early as the latter half of the 19th century.
While on the subject of events in the latter half of the 19th century, one cannot but point to the role of the United States of America, which at that time was embarked on a rapid trade and economic as well as political penetration to Asia and the Pacific. And it saw Russia as the chief obstacle to its expansion and Japan as the main tool in opposing it. While visiting Japan, U.S. missions and military officers spared no effort to persuade its government not to agree to recognition of South Sakhalin as Russian-owned and sought to convince the Japanese side of Russia's imaginary aggressive plans for Edzo (Hokkaido) Island. Washington wished to assume a mediating role in all Russo-Japanese negotiations on the delimitation of disputed territories and suggested that those matters themselves be referred to "arbitration of international diplomatic conferences." In the 1870s, the U.S. press (The New York Herald) openly expressed a hope that the American-Japanese cooperation would result in the diminution of Russia's possessions in Eastern Asia.
Historically, allowance must be made for the fact that the proofs of some or other status of the islands and Sakhalin before the 1855 Shimodo trade agreement or before the 1875 St. Petersburg agreement are of no importance for present-day rights of both states.
What legal framework ought to be relied upon today in the matter of the islands?
The Yalta and Potsdam decisions and the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan are the only effective and legally binding international juridical documents in the matter of the Kurile Islands. In keeping with the Yalta decisions, all the Kurile Islands and Sakhalin were to be "forever" restored to the USSR, which was the condition of its joining the war against Japan. The same was confirmed by the Potsdam Declaration signed by the United States, Britain and China, which the USSR later joined too: "The Terms of the Cairo Declaration (the unconditional surrender of Japan. - Tr.) shall be carried out and Japanese sovereignty shall be limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine." The latter words illustrated the international legal consequences of the principle of complete and unconditional capitulation, that is, the loss by Japan of international personality and the right to discuss the terms of postwar settlement. Based on these documents, the U.S. military administration in Japan sent Directive #677 of January 29, 1946, which stated that all the Kurile Islands, including Shikotan and Habomai, were withdrawn from the Japanese jurisdiction.
The USSR did not sign the San Francisco Peace Treaty. As a consequence, the Treaty did not contain any indication that the said territories were handed over to the USSR. But this does not change the immutable fact that in Art. 2 of the Treaty Japan "renounces all rights, title and claim to the Kurile Islands, and to that portion of Sakhalin and the islands adjacent to it over which Japan acquired sovereignty as a consequence if the Treaty of Portsmouth of 5 September 1905."
As is common knowledge, you have made public the story of U.S. mediation in the signing of the Russian-Japanese agreements in the wake of the Russo-Japanese war. How did the whole thing happen?
The U.S. role in the course of Russian-Japanese negotiations at Portsmouth following the Russo-Japanese war is literally a detective story. The United States "took the cause of general peace close to heart," particularly so if that peace led to the coveted "diminution of Russia's possessions." Its real role becomes clear from the memoirs written by Kukuziro Ishii, a major 20th-century Japanese diplomat and a living participant in the events, which were published in a small run with an analytical foreword by the prominent diplomat Anatoly Troyanovsky. Ishii was later promoted foreign minister in Japan and authored a well-known agreement on special rights in China, the 1917 Lansing-Ishii Agreement.
The Japanese delegation to the Portsmouth Conference demanded not only the whole of the Kurils but also the whole of Sakhalin as well as a money indemnity. Russia in the person of Count Sergei Y. Witte objected, displaying what Ishii described as "hysterical obstinacy" and rejecting any indemnity. It is clear from the memoirs that Japan was so much exhausted by the war and wished peace to be signed as soon as possible that by the end of the negotiations it was ready to agree to Russian ownership of the whole of Sakhalin without any money indemnity. That real state of affairs and moods in Japan was not known either to St. Petersburg or to the Russian delegation. But appropriate instructions were sent to Portsmouth, prescribing the Japanese delegation to agree to leaving the whole of Sakhalin to Russia should the Russian delegation continue to persist in its stance.
Russia knew nothing about the Japanese governmental decision to give up the original demands with regard to Sakhalin. Not so the United States, which was immediately notified by someone about the unsuitable prospect. When the conference became deadlocked, the United States volunteered its "help." How much the U.S. would have liked to "diminish Russia's possessions" is clear from a cable Theodore Roosevelt sent to Nicholas II. The President expressed certainty that the Japanese claims were insuperable, and threatened that the war, if continued, was likely to lead to the loss of the entire Russian territory east of Lake Baikal, to wit, to put an end to Russia's existence as a Pacific power. Around the same time, the U.S. ambassador to St. Petersburg, George Meier, asked to be received by the Tsar and tried to persuade him to make concessions, promising President Roosevelt's mediation in the matter of "convincing" Japan to renounce the indemnity. Inexperienced in craftiness, Nicholas II on the whole "played stubborn," but then "said, as it were in passing and to himself, that a possibility of southern Sakhalin being handed over to Japan could be considered." The news that he was ready to agree to the transfer of South Sakhalin was immediately relayed to Roosevelt and became known to the Japanese side within less than a day.
Though Ishii in every way denies the natural assumption that the U.S. President could have committed a dubious act by tipping off Tokyo, it is nevertheless a fact that this crucial piece of information turned up precisely in the Japanese capital and that precisely Ishii became its first owner. The 14-hour time gap between Tokyo and Portsmouth enabled Ishii to have meetings with the prime minister and the war minister. Ishii managed to convince them that the information was trustworthy, even though his memoirs describe its receipt as a sheer "chance" due to a conversation with "a friend... at a foreign mission in Tokyo," from which he "learned what had happened during the Tsar's audience." Old instructions were urgently recalled and new ones dispatched. The Japanese delegation canceled a meeting and later came up with this statement: "The Imperial Government has decided, in token of its love for peace, to renounce its demands for the whole of Sakhalin, and makes its last concession, agreeing to content itself with the southern half of the island." "Count Polusakhalinsky's (literally half-Sakhalin, Witte’s derogatory nickname)" diplomacy was not successful. In their memoirs, both Witte and Rosen, the Russian ambassador to Washington, keep silent about the Sakhalin problem and the relevant negotiations.
Judging by all appearances, solving the Russian-Japanese territorial problem is unlikely to be an easy process. Both Russia and Japan have concepts of their own on how the problem should be solved. The Japanese side continues to insist on taking into its possession all four islands of the Kurile Ridge. Russia is based on the 1956 Declaration, which both sides signed and ratified, expressing readiness to pursue negotiations on two islands and the signing of a peace treaty. In any event, continuous interstate consultations are in progress and visits are exchanged at the level of ministers of foreign affairs. The Japanese foreign minister, Nobutaka Matimura, came to Moscow in December 2004. His Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, is expected to travel to Tokyo late in May of this year to prepare Vladimir Putin's forthcoming visit to Japan.
Endnotes
Note *: Natalia Narochnitskaya, Deputy Chairman, Committee for International Affairs, State Duma of the Russian Federation; Doctor of Sciences (History). Back