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16.01.08
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British Council Offices Closed Indefinitely
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By Grant Slater
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UK Officials Remain Defiant Despite Closures
The UK shuttered indefinitely two offices of its cultural organization, the British Council, under pressure from Russian security services in a protracted diplomatic tit-for-tat between the two countries.
Experts say that for two countries with increasingly robust economic ties, the political fallout carries little benefit for either country. But in this case, Britain had little leverage to prevent the closing of its regional offices for the foreseeable future.
The British Council office in St. Petersburg closed Wednesday after the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) summoned the entire Russian staff for questioning. On Tuesday night, police officers in St. Petersburg detained the office’s director, Stephen Kinnock, and accused him of drunk driving. British officials said that Kinnock was followed before he was stopped and was not drunk.
The Yekaterinburg office of the British Council was closed on Thursday. A spokesman for the British Council in London said both offices were closed out of fear for the safety of their Russian and British staff.
In announcing the closure of the offices Thursday afternoon, the British Council’s chief executive, Martin Davidson, said the Russian security services had engaged in “a campaign of intimidation” against their regional branches.
“I am bitterly disappointed that the Russian authorities have sought to limit our cultural and educational links at the very time when they can be of most value,” Davidson said.
The FSB summoned more than 20 staff members for individual interviews and visited 10 staff members at their homes, Davidson said. In a statement posted Wednesday on its Web site, the FSB said that it conducted the interviews “to protect Russian citizens from being drawn in as pawns in Britains’ provocative games.”
“I think this is bad for both sides clearly,” said Alex Pravda, an associate fellow at the Chatham House foreign policy center in London. “It’s a great pity and an unnecessary one that the political relationship has such a high degree of tension surrounding it.”
That tension can be traced back to the poisoning murder of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. Russia has refused to extradite the main suspect in the case, Andrei Lugovoi. Lugovoi won a seat in December’s Duma elections as a member of Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), and as such, the Russian constitution forbids his extradition. Last summer, Britain expelled four Russian diplomats in protest, and Russia responded in kind.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview with the BBC in December that the actions taken against the British Council were a retaliatory jab for the expulsion of Russian diplomats and directly connected to the Litvinenko case.
Russia has also chafed at Britain’s refusal to extradite tycoon Boris Berezovsky and Chechen separatist leader Akhmed Zakayev.
This most recent back-and-forth began in December when Russia’s foreign ministry demanded that the British Council close its branches outside Moscow by Jan. 1. Russian officials accused the two branches of operating illegally and skirting tax obligations.
On Jan. 3, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said any efforts by the British Council would inflame already tense relations between the two countries and threatened action against the council’s Moscow office if the regional branches were to reopen. “The activity of the British Council in Moscow has no legal foundation,” Kaminyn said.
Britain was defiant, saying the offices would open after the Russian holiday as planned. When the second branch in St. Petersburg did open, British Ambassador Tony Brenton was summoned to the Foreign Ministry where Russian officials told him they would refuse accreditation to council employees and seek to secure back taxes for the office in St. Petersburg.
James Barbour, a spokesman for the British Embassy, said the justification for closing the offices presented to Brenton was “very thin.” The British Council operates under the international Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and a separate 1994 agreement between Britain and Russia. Barbour said the council’s activities are completely in line with those agreements.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the actions taken against the regional offices were in line with Russian law. He accused the British foreign offices of using strong-arm rhetoric in a tense situation.
“Of course, we understand that the memories are related to nostalgia for colonial times, and it influences these events. But this is not a language in which one can talk to Russia,” Lavrov told the Interfax news agency on Wednesday.
If not to colonial times, the recent tension between the two countries definitely harkens back to the Cold War period when the two countries frequently skirmished over espionage tactics, Pravda said.
With connections to the poisoning murder and suspicions that the British Council provides a front for intelligence activities swirling around the scandal, the British foreign ministry took a “firm and robust” stand against Russian encroachment leading up to this week, Pravda said.
The British side is likely to portray itself as taking the moral high road in the conflict. “This particular episode stems from the Russians’ rather high-handed behavior in demanding the closure of these two regional offices and nothing else,” Pravda said.
The British Council receives part of its funding from the British government as its official cultural outreach wing. The offices in Russia maintain English-language libraries, encourage exchange programs between the two countries, conduct English-language classes and promote other outreach activities.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Russia’s actions of intimidation have been “completely unacceptable.”
"It is not in the interests of either the UK or Russia for flourishing cultural, educational and scientific links to be held hostage to unrelated issues in this way," Miliband said. |
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