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December 1999
Since the government and financial crisis of August 1998, Russia and its security policy have become turbulent. Economic problems and political instability have combined with threatening external developments to allow the resurgence of the military. The appointment of Vladimir Putin as Prime Minister this August was rapidly followed by Chechen incursions into Dagestan and three bomb explosions in Russian cities, killing almost three hundred people. With parliamentary and presidential elections this month and next June, it is vital to understand the nature and limits of this rise of the military.
Dr Dov Lynch is Lecturer in War Studies at King’s College London. His book on Russian Peacekeeping Strategies towards the CIS has recently been published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs and Macmillan.
This month European Union leaders journey far north to Helsinki—once on the Cold War icecap—to lay the foundations for enlargement into the twenty-first century and begin to explore some of the obstacles and dilemmas of stretching so far east. As growth continues and the Union increases from its current fifteen to a potential twenty-six members, will its strategic partnership with the Russian Federation be reinforced or undermined? The issues are clearly illustrated in the Russian territory of Kaliningrad.
Kaliningrad, situated further west than Athens, Sofia and Bucharest, can rightly claim to lie at the proverbial heart of Europe. For Moscow, with Vladivostok eleven time zones to the east, Kaliningrad is Russia’s western-most territory and only ice-free northern port. Sandwiched as it is between NATO Poland and a potential European Union (EU) member, Lithuania, and with no common border to the rest of the Russian Federation, it is a region of rising strategic importance.
Kaliningrad is on the front line between a market-democratic EU keen to enlarge and a battered post-Soviet Russian Federation, struggling to understand and manage its transformation. As with Kosovo in the Balkans, Kaliningrad will be the touchstone for the new European security order in the region. Its fate is inextricably linked to regional stability, with an ever-present danger that both Moscow and Brussels fail to co-ordinate policies and strengthen their strategic partnership...
Dr Graeme Herd is Deputy Director of the Scottish Centre for International Security and a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Aberdeen.
The international presence in Pristina is overwhelming. The UN mission in Kosovo has taken over the largest buildings in the town centre, and the UN administration has protected itself with security guards and rolls of razor wire. An international colony has taken hold in the Dragodan quarter, up on the hill below the KFOR base: many of the undamaged houses have been rented by international non-governmental organisations, which attach their placards to the gateposts; others are inhabited by the staff of the international bureaucracy which currently governs Kosovo. A whole street, cordoned off by the Americans, is protected by a wall of sandbags and armoured vehicles.
Five months after KFOR’s entry into Kosovo, Albanians’ relief and gratitude for NATO action has not yet worn off, although now there aren’t quite so many people selling NATO t-shirts. In the weeks following the arrival of the force, Albanians painted UCK + NATO and the NATO symbol on walls across the province—KFOR was seen as an ally of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). There was soon a restaurant called KFOR and, hilariously, a nightclub called BBC. There was incredible optimism.
For over ten years Albanians in Kosovo had struggled for one overriding objective—to run their own affairs, free from the oppressive and discriminatory policies of the regime in Belgrade. In July, many thought that they had achieved this.
However, the international administration cannot currently give the mainly Albanian population the chance to make decisions about the future of their province, or even about their own personal and family lives. For many, this contributes to frustration, which is likely to intensify over the difficult winter months...
Elizabeth Sellwood of OXFAM’s policy department, has just returned from Kosovo. She was previously in the International Security Programme at Chatham House. The views expressed are hers and not necessarily those of OXFAM.
Like old generals bent on fighting the last war, Western policy makers have characteristically reacted to rather than anticipated crises in south eastern Europe. First in Bosnia, then in Kosovo, failure to recognise the signals and undertake contingency planning has required a more costly reaction in the end. Yet, with the focus now on Serbia and Kosovo, there is a risk that the international community may underestimate the growing pressure for independence in neighbouring Montenegro, which could turn the small coastal republic into another Balkan trouble spot threatening the stability of the region.
Officially, the Montenegrin government has committed itself to no more than a re-definition of the relationship with Serbia, its only surviving sister republic in the Yugoslav federation. But, both privately, and increasingly publicly, supporters of the government of President Djukanovic suggest that the end game might be a return to the independence Montenegro lost at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919...
Elizabeth Roberts is an independent analyst of Balkan affairs.
Five years ago, President Chandrika Kumaratunga of Sri Lanka was elected with a mandate to achieve peace with the Tamil Tiger guerrillas who are fighting for a separate state in the north of the island. Having spent hundreds of millions of dollars on defence, and seen her soldiers continue to lose their lives—hundreds died or were injured in attacks on barracks in early November—she is now seeking re-election on an uncompromising policy of military spending and no negotiation.
As the civil war with the Tamil Tiger separatists enters a new phase, Sri Lankans will go to the polls on 21 December to choose a new president. President Chandrika Kumaratunga, who is also Defence Minister, faces re-election with her plans for devolution stalled and the country’s military costs spiralling to US$734 million for next year, from around US$657 million in 1999.
Analysts believe that the President decided to call an election a year early primarily because of the deadlock in political efforts to end the conflict. There are also widening divisions within her government over how to tackle the Tigers and the escalating costs of the military campaign...
Alan Bullion is the author of India, Sri Lanka and the Tamil Crisis (Pinter/Cassell) and a Research Associate with the Open University.
Even before the devastating violence that destroyed most of East Timor, the creation of a newly independent society and economy presented major problems. East Timor has almost none of the basic elements of a functioning state. Not least of the difficulties will be the distortion caused by the international assistance programme which risks creating an unsustainable service economy geared to the thousands of foreign officials, aid workers and peacekeeping troops.
Indonesian troops left the territory they had invaded, pillaged and eventually torched—a chapter ended. At the same time, a number of decisions were being taken in New York, Geneva, Lisbon and Darwin. Significantly few of these choices on the future of East Timor were taken in Dili, although that may be beginning to change...
Steve Kibble and Catherine Scott work at the Catholic Institute for International Relations as Conflict and Peace Officer and Asia Policy Offer respectively. They were part of an observer mission in East Timor during the election and the immediate aftermath.
Portugal is preparing to take on the presidency of the European Union for the first half of 2000, while, rather paradoxically, having to deal with the remnants of its empire. Its former colony of East Timor is finally to be granted the right to self-determination and China is about to take over the administration of Macao. Portugal is returning to its pre-expansion Iberian confines. But, to the surprise of the sceptics, its new position at the heart of Europe has given it more clout on the world stage.
At the close of the millennium, decolonisation is taking place in a radically different context from the aftermath of Portugal’s 1974 democratic revolution, when five African countries—Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé e Príncipe and Mozambique—became independent. Democracy has taken hold in Lisbon.
Two lasting territorial additions remain from the era of maritime discovery: the then uninhabited Atlantic archipelagos of Madeira and the Azores—to which Portuguese membership of Nato is heavily indebted. They were found right after the North African territory of Ceuta was taken in 1415, and the age of Portuguese expansion began.
In 1986, Portugal became a member of the European Union (EU), giving it an unprecedented capacity—at least in this century—for external action. The Cold War, which left such tragic wounds in Angola and Mozambique, thawed ten years ago. As the bipolar world came to an end, strategic questions lost much of their old dominance, while human rights concerns have come to figure much more prominently, at least in Western foreign policy agendas...
Dr Alvaro de Vasconcelos is Director of the Institute for Strategic and International Studies, Lisbon (IEEI).
Japan’s nuclear accident—the country’s worst—may have had a profound effect on attitudes to the nuclear industry. The cases of radiation sickness were greeted with shock. The way Japan generates power is likely to be influenced too, especially since plans to cut the emission of greenhouse gases were probably optimistic anyway.
There was an accidental radiation leak at a private-sector nuclear fuel-processing facility in Tokaimura, Japan on 30 September. It continued for many hours. The company had ignored the government fuel processing manual and, to raise efficiency, had replaced it with a secret procedural manual that omitted various steps.
The workers ignored even this secret manual and left out even more steps, resulting in the use of seven times the prescribed amount of uranium. This started an uncontrollable nuclear reaction, exposing more than seventy people, including workers and the public, to radiation. The critical chain reaction continued for about twenty hours, and many local residents had to be evacuated...
Hiroshi Matsumura is a Visiting Fellow in the Energy and Environment programme at Chatham House.
One of the dominant forces in this month’s Chilean presidential election is several thousand of miles away from the polling booths. The case of former President, General Augusto Pinochet, under house arrest in Britain pending possible extradition to Spain on charges of human rights abuse, is responsible for increasing support for a right wing candidate. It is also raising again the question of the special arrangements the General put in place before retreating to the barracks.
Almost ten years after the return to democracy, the Chilean political system is at last experiencing long-term change. The military regime of 1973-1990 interfered with party dynamics and distorted the evolution of democracy for almost twenty years.
The Concertación Democrática, a coalition of centre and leftist parties, including Christian Democrats and Socialists, effortlessly won the 1989 presidential elections and repeated its success in 1993.
The political spectrum has been divided in three since the nineteen sixties: as long as two-thirds—centre and left—were in coalition they would elect a president and obtain a majority in Congress. It seems that this is now ripe for change, with an emerging bipolar system of several parties in coalition. Chilean politics is consequently likely to become more stable in the long term...
Dr Emilio Meneses teaches at the Catholic University of Chile.