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08.08.07
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The Standards Of Double Standards
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Comment by Georgy Bovt
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How much are international principles worth?
Modern international politics is constructed in such a complex manner that sometimes it’s difficult to understand where certain common human principles end and where the banal, unscrupulous haggling begins. In fact, the concept of common human principles hasn’t been defined in any clear form – UN documents or, say, documents adopted at a European level do exist on this matter, but previously they have never really been taken into account where serious, vital interests of one state or another are concerned and even at present they are not used in this manner.
Against this background, many countries, as soon as they enter into any disputes, immediately begin accusing each other of using policies founded on double standards. And the reverse is true – if countries are seen as being on friendly terms, they are allowed to apply those same double standards without any censure at all.
In the case of the fortunate freeing of the Bulgarian nurses from Libyan prison and their being saved from execution, only the ending can please us: people have been saved, they’re alive, healthy and back in their homeland. Nevertheless, many of the circumstances of this case raise issues because many steps taken by the countries involved are not beyond reproach, to put it mildly, for example, in the context of principles propounded by the European Union. Or the references that we hear from time to time from, say, Moscow.
If the principle of freeing hostages at any cost, including negotiation with and concessions to terrorists and other international blackmailers, was fixed on a certain high international level then no issues would be raised. That is to say that we would decide, once and for all, that in order to preserve the lives of hostages and to gain their freedom everything is permissible. And then the talks with the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi on the freeing of the Bulgarian nurses and, say, with the Afghan Taliban on the freeing of South Korean missionaries would be carried out along those lines. However, it’s clear that the methods and principles involved in the holding of those talks differ widely.
For the nurses, essentially, Gaddafi received a ransom. Thus, ransoms for hostages – and we are entirely justified in regarding the Bulgarian nurses as having been hostages – are entirely acceptable in certain circumstances in international politics.
Further, the Bulgarian government announced that one of the conditions for the freeing of the nurses was that they would serve out their sentences in their homeland. It was with this guarantee that Gaddafi pardoned those sentenced to execution by all Libyan judicial institutes. As soon as the nurses arrived on Bulgarian territory, however, they were in turn pardoned by presidential decree. In response to Libya’s outrage, who acted as if they had been cruelly and cunningly tricked, comments were issued from the Bulgarian side along the lines that the Bulgarian president has the full legal right to pardon any prisoners. This is in fact the case, although it leaves a mixed, contradictory impression of this deal made outside of the courtroom. The impression was made even murkier when a few days later the Bulgarian government wrote off Libyan debt running to tens of millions of dollars dating back to when Bulgaria was a Warsaw Pact country assisting Gaddafi’s regime with weapons and military and technical aid.
And finally, the situation surrounding the actual accusations thrown at the nurses hasn’t been cleared up – are they to any extent guilty of the infection of 400 Libyan children with the HIV virus or are they entirely innocent? We can accept that the Libyan investigations and court rulings are not recognized as independent by the European Union. But nevertheless, there wasn’t even a hint of any intention to carry out a separate, independent investigation or to organize independent court hearings. Not even to establish the truth, to see that justice is done and to ensure that the names of the nurses are entirely cleared. Or are truth and justice in a case such as this of no significance?
The bulk of the questions that arise, of course, surround France’s behavior in the person of its newly elected president, Nicolas Sarkozy. In essence, he used his own, separate channels (separate from the EU, which was negotiating with Gaddafi) with Tripoli to conclude two contracts with the Libyans to the tune of $400 million. Both contracts were profitable to French business. The first was a contract to supply Libya with anti-tank missiles, though the vendor, European Aeronautics and Defense Systems, also intends to sell Libya the latest Tetra communications systems. Secondly, France stands on the brink of signing a contract with Libya to construct a nuclear reactor.
There have been no violations here, the sanctions against supplying Libya with arms were abandoned in 2004. Similarly, however, there are no sanctions against the regime in Tehran. As there are no sanctions against Iran in the nuclear sphere, it can also receive nuclear technology in the same way as Gaddafi’s regime. Nevertheless, whenever Russia begins talks on such a theme, there’s a very noisy reaction.
Here, however, it would be appropriate to ask in what way, exactly, is the odious Libyan regime better than the one in Tehran? Is it all down to the fact that it handed over two terrorists who were involved in an attack against an American passenger flight (the Lockerbie case) and paid compensation to the families of those killed? Or is it down to the fact that it’s promising the very same EU massive supplies of gas, allowing it to diversify the sources of its energy imports? If the second suggestion is correct, then it has nothing to do with so-called “common human principles,” and can be put down entirely to a banal and cynical international deal in the spirit of the 18th or 19th centuries.
Does this mean, then, that if, say, the Americans during the course of confidential talks (and there is every indication that they could begin in the very near future) make a deal with Iran on cooperating on the conflict in Iraq, it will be followed by contracts with the West for the supply of equipment to Iran or for the completion of the atomic power station in Bushehr? At the end of the day, it wasn’t the Russians that began its construction, but the Germans and the French. |
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