Пресс-секретарь президента РФ также указал на определенные нюансы в подходах сторон

       Москва и Токио не отказываются от поиска консенсуса по вопросу о мирном договоре, несмотря на наличие у каждой из сторон " своих ограничителей". На это обратил внимание в интервью телеканалу " Россия 1" пресс-секретарь президента РФ Дмитрий Песков.

       " Давайте все-таки отталкиваться от того, что японская сторона подтвердила намерение идти в сторону мирного договора", - прокомментировал представитель Кремля реакцию Токио на предложение президента РФ Владимира Путина заключить договор между двумя странами без предварительных условий.

       Песков назвал важным, что обе стороны признают отсутствие мирного договора большой проблемой и " никто не отказывается от намерения все-таки продолжать переговоры, чтобы выйти на консенсус". " Переговоры будут продолжаться. Понятно, что у каждой из сторон в силу внутренних соображений, по иным причинам существуют свои ограничители, существуют свои нюансы в подходах. Но стратегически премьер-министр Японии Синдзо Абэ и Путин подтвердили намерение работать для заключения мирного договора", - заключил пресс-секретарь российского лидера.

       12 сентября Путин, выступая на пленарном заседании Восточного экономического форума во Владивостоке, предложил заключить мирный договор с Японией до конца года без предварительных условий. В МИД Японии в ответ на просьбу ТАСС прокомментировать это заявление сообщили, что Токио намерен вести переговоры с Россией с целью заключения мирного договора после решения территориального вопроса, и эта позиция остается неизменной.

       Москва и Токио много десятилетий ведут консультации с целью выработки мирного договора по итогам Второй мировой войны. Основным препятствием для этого является принадлежность южной части Курил: после окончания войны весь архипелаг был включен в состав Советского Союза, однако Токио оспаривает принадлежность Итурупа, Кунашира, Шикотана и группы островов, которую в Японии называют Хабомаи. Как неоднократно заявлял МИД РФ, российский суверенитет над ними, имеющий соответствующее международно-правовое оформление, сомнению не подлежит.

Orban’s Moscow visit a gesture to EU after last week’s humiliation

John Laughland                                                                                                                                                              18 Sep, 2018

 

    Russian President Vladimir Putin is reviled as an enemy of the West in general, and of the EU in particular, and yet Hungarian Prime Minister Orban continues to conduct “business as usual” with the master of the Kremlin.

       The “salon des refusé s” of political dissidents in the EU is getting bigger by the day. Less than a week after his government was condemned in a vote in the European parliament, Orban is in Moscow for talks about energy with Putin. His visit to Russia is the political equivalent of giving the EU the finger following last week’s humiliation.

       Orban is not alone. In his battle with the EU over immigration and the rule of law, he is supported by Poland and the Czech Republic. Poland, which is also facing an Article 7 procedure against it by the European Commission, has vowed to protect Hungary, just as Hungary has vowed to protect Poland. So there is no way that the voting rights of either country can be removed, since the ultimate vote to do so requires unanimity. Orban also recently received the support of Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis and of the Italian Minister of the Interior, Matteo Salvini.

       These politicians have voiced support for Orban's stance against immigration. But they also support his pragmatic approach to Russia. Salvini is a well-known critic of the Russia sanctions, and Italy has said they should end. Parts of the Austrian government agree, the Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl having recently had Putin as a personal guest of honor at her wedding, while the Vice-Chancellor, Heinz-Christian Strache, is well known for his pro-Russian and pro-Putin views. On the other hand, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has reassured critics that Austria is rooted in the EU and shares its stance towards Russia.

       The striking thing about Orban, and about his Central European allies (who incidentally include the Czech President Milos Zeman), is that they are from countries which, as Orban puts it, suffered greatly “under Russia” in the past. He is referring to the countries’ membership of the Warsaw Pact, and their subjection to communist rule, after World War II. In Hungary’s case, the suffering was especially violent because of the suppression of the 1956 revolution in Budapest by Soviet troops. Yet it is precisely these countries that today advocate a pragmatic relationship with Russia, while countries such as Britain, and even Germany, treat Russia as if it were still a communist dictatorship with the Cold War in full swing.

       The irony is all the greater because Orban personally played a key role – but one which is often forgotten by historians – in bringing about the end of Soviet rule in Central Europe. His speech in Heroes’ Square in Budapest on June 16, 1989 on the occasion of the re-burial of the leader of the 1956 uprising, Imre Nagy, was the first time anyone in the Warsaw Pact had publicly called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The very making of this speech showed that the old taboos – and, with them, the power of the communist dictatorship – had collapsed. This was two months before the Hungarian government opened its border with Austria, allowing tens of thousands of East Germans to cross into West Germany, and five months before the Berlin wall came down. Orban’s contribution to the chain reaction which led to these later events was thereforedecisive.

       There is only one explanation for this apparent paradox that some former anti-communist Central European leaders are now pro-Russian. Unlike their Western colleagues, who were never directly affected by communist rule, the states of the former Warsaw Pact understand not only that Russia is no longer the old USSR, having abandoned communism, but also that national identity, and pride in national identity, were the key to undoing communist rule in Central Europe and then in Russia itself. Orban’s 1989 speech was a patriotic appeal to Hungarians: it traced their battle for national freedom back to 1848. Freedom and national pride went hand in hand.

       As in Poland, where not only national identity but also religion played a key role in the downfall of communism, Hungarians (and Czechs and many others) now see with dismay that same national identity which freed them from communism is under attack from the new commissars in Brussels. This is because the approach in Western Europe is directly the opposite. Pride in one’s nation is considered backward and dangerous, largely because national pride was irredeemably damaged during the war.

       The fact is that all the early member states of the EU were defeated in the war, whether by the Germans or by the Allies. During the process of defeat, national pride was ruined, either through the barbarism of Nazism and fascism or through various forms of nationalist collaboration with it. All these stain the national record. Only in Britain was national pride the key to victory; for everyone else it was the key to defeat. (The only partialexception to this rule is France, which retained some sense of national pride after the war. But, in later decades, the memory of the Gaullist resistance was effaced by a stronger memory of the national shame of Vichy.)

       Because of this, Western European states have adopted the EU ideology, according to which European history before the creation of the EU was nothing but wars between nation-states. Indeed, national rivalry was the key to these wars. In order for there to be peace, it is argued, Europe’s nation-states must be dissolved in a supranational entity. Germany has accomplished the task of making a clean slate of its national history in a more complete manner than any other European state but the other countries share parts, sometimes large parts, of this same German historiographical and political model.

       To be sure, the states of Central Europe have skeletons in their own cupboards concerning the war. Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany throughout it. But the more recent memory of national victory over communism has rekindled national pride, whereas the Western European states have not enjoyed any comparable victory and so they instead put all their faith in the post-national and post-modern European project. Moreover, whereas Communism was largely rejected as an ideology by the people living under it – including in Soviet Russia – the ideology of liberalism has penetrated very deeply into the Western European consciousness, to the extent even of extinguishingnational sentiment. Liberalism has been more successful in this regard than communism was, even though orthodox Marxism also called for an end to the nation-state.

       This East-West fracture is a major ideological dividing line inside the European Union. The vote in the European Parliament last week, in which over two thirds of MEPs ganged up on a member state in the name of their biased interpretation of “the rule of law, ” was a historic moment which brought into the open the depth of this radically different approach to politics and history. Opposite attitudes to Russia are also part of this division. As Marx said, history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, as we saw in Strasbourg last week: the European Union, like the Soviet Union, will in due course discover that national identity is stronger even than its political ideology.

 

 

Korea’s historic peace move puts onus on Washington to end conflict

 

Finian Cunningham                                                                                                                                                 21 Sep, 2018

 

       It can’t get more symbolic than that. The leaders of the two Koreas this week clasped hands atop the highest mountain on the peninsula, vowing to unite in peace. The ball is now in Washington’s court to help deliver that peace.

       This year has seen several diplomatic milestones already in the rapprochement between North and South Korea. But the three-day summit this week has advanced the cause for peace on the peninsula even further.

       South Korean President Moon Jae-in was greeted in the North’s capital by huge crowds of well-wishers. With North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, important commitments were signed towards scrapping nuclear weapons and normalizing ties between the two divided countries.

       On the second day of his historic visit, President Moon addressed an estimated 150, 000 people in the May Day stadium in Pyongyang during which he repeatedly referred to “my Korean brothers and sisters”. To rapturous applause, he called for peace and reunification of the “great Korean people”.

       The next day, Moon and Kim hiked up Mount Paektu accompanied by their wives and delegates. The mountain is revered by North and South Koreans as the spiritual birthplace of the nation, going back 5, 000 years. As Moon had noted in his stadium speech the previous night, Koreans have been living together in peace for millennia; it is only in the past 70 years they have been divided by Cold War and a brutal civil conflict (1950-53).

       That division seems now to be coming to an end after this week’s fraternal summit.

       It wasn’t all idle talk either. Both sides committed to demilitarize the border separating the countries and form a joint military committee to overseedeconfliction mechanisms. The two leaders set out plans to integrate the states through transport systems and economic cooperation.

       On the painful issue of reuniting families torn apart by the war, there are plans to regularize contacts across the border.

       What’s boosting the prospects of a comprehensive peace settlement is the positive reaction from the Trump administration. President Trump hailed the inter-Korea summit this week as “tremendous” and endorsed the push for peace.

       Mike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State, said he was instructing officials to resume negotiations with North Korea “at the earliest opportunity”.

       “On the basis of these important commitments by North and South Korea, the United States is prepared to engage immediately in negotiations, ” said Pompeo.

       So far, so good. North Korea’s Kim this week reaffirmed his commitment to dismantlefacilities for making nuclear weapons. But he wants the US to make “corresponding” concessions.

       This is not going to be a unilateral process in which the North gives up its nuclear arsenal without something major in return from Washington. Kim did not specify what US reciprocation would entail. But it is believed to involve security guarantees from the US in the form of a peace treaty to finally end the Korean War.

       North Korea would also want a permanent end to the annual US military maneuvers with its South Korean ally, which Pyongyang has always viewed as a provocation to its security. Additionally, if the two Koreas normalize ties and begin a reunification process, then American forces – currently numbering some 28, 000 troops – would be obliged to withdraw from South Korean territory.

       Trump and Pompeo seem to have moved significantly from earlier high-handed demands for a rapid “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization” by North Korea. The Trump administration, perhaps surprisingly, has shown a prudentflexibility, and appears to be willing to take an incremental approach of trust-building.

       It is astounding how far relations have improved in recent months. This time last year, Trump made a recklesswarmongering speech at the United Nations General Assembly in which he lampooned Chairman Kim as “rocket man” and vowed to “totally destroy” the country if it threatened the United States with its intercontinental ballistic missiles.

       Kim was at times equally combative, blasting Trump as “senile” and threatening with the usual “sea of fire” North Korean rhetoric.

       Many people around the world feared that a nuclear war was imminent. All changed, however, when Kim extended a hand of friendship to South Korean president Moon at the beginning of this year, and spoke about national unity. Moon, who has long political experience of working for detente between the two states, quickly reciprocated. He was elected in May 2017 with the promise of pursuing peace with the North.

       In April this year, the two Korean leaders held an historic summit at the demilitarized zone in a ceremony which saw them plant trees using soil and water from both sides of the border.

       It was Moon who then facilitated the breakthrough between Trump and Kim, which culminated in the Singapore summit in June, the first time a sitting US president ever met a North Korean leader.

       Next week, the South Korean president is due to meet Trump during the UN General Assembly, when it is expected that he will convey details of what concessions North Korea wants the US to make in order to drive the denuclearization process.

       The ball is in the US court. Trump needs to deliver substantive changes in US policy towards Korea. A declaration to end the Korean War would be a long-overdue start towards assuring North Korea’s security, and establishing peace on the peninsula.

       But Trump needs to go further. Playing hard ball with Pyongyang will not work. Easingpunitive sanctions on North Korea in recognition of concrete steps to dismantle its nuclear arsenal seems an appropriate way forward.

       The danger is the process could come unstuck from two factions in Washington. The first is the militarists and imperial planners who will be averse to American withdrawal from the Korean Peninsula. That decades-old US military presence is less about “protecting” South Korea, and much more about projecting American power in the Asia-Pacific against China and Russia.

       The second faction that could derail peace prospects is the “anti-Trump” political establishment dominated by Democrats and their media supporters. This faction loathes everything about Trump, no matter if he happens to be doing something good, as in diplomacy with North Korea. Let’s hand it to Trump. He has managed to give peace a chance with Kim Jong-un.

       Still, the anti-Trump brigade don’t seem pleased about that. The New York Times grudgingly headlined on the summit this week: “North Korea’s New Nuclear Promises Fall Short of US Demands”.

       Another naysayer was the Washington Post which snorted“North Korea is now under minimum pressure” to denuclearize, mocking Trump’s avowed policy of “maximum pressure”.

       In the same way that President Trump is hobbled by domestic enemies from normalizing US relations with Russia, he may find that his peace offers to North Korea are also stymied. That surely would be a perversely wasted opportunity for ending a historic conflict.

       Nevertheless, US spoiling tactics aside, the people of Korea, North and South, seem to now have the determination and courage more than ever to forge their own destiny. They will try to bring an end to war, no matter what Washington does. The days of American bullying power are waning.

 

 

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