ROAR: Russian Opinion and Analytics Review

20 February, 2009, 08:25

This Friday ROAR presents two views on the fate of the Manas air force base, a commentator’s opinion on the coming presidential election in Iran and an academic’s view on the North Korean nuclear problem.

VREMYA NOVOSTEI’s Arkady Dubnov writes that the decision by the Kyrgyzstan parliament to close down the US air force base at the Manas airport seals the fate of the base in its present form. The writer says the US may try to offer a bigger price for it but it doesn’t mean that Kyrgyzstan will easily yield and accept the money.

The author writes that the MPs participating in the debates over the Manas base talked of massive damage to agriculture inflicted by the aviation kerosene which is often dropped on the fields situated directly under the airport’s line of approach, and of corruption at the local and central levels of government which the base causes to prosper. In such circumstances even an increase in the rent on the part of the American command may not be enough to solve the problem.

As for the top leadership of Kyrgyzstan, says Dubnov, President Bakiev may or may not be interested in further bargaining with the US as he has already gained everything he needed: a huge loan from Moscow and higher stakes in his game with Washington.

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Petr Inozemtsev writes in IZVESTIA that many US officials see ‘the hand of Moscow’ in the events around the Manas base and blame Russia’s ‘double standards on Afghanistan’ for the possible loss of it.

Manas Air Base, Kyrgyzstan
(U.S. Air Force photo / Staff Sgt. Lara Gale)

Meanwhile Russian experts say that the decision of the Kyrgyz parliament is important for the image of the whole Central Asian region because it shows that the US has become vulnerable there. Russian experts also say that at the moment the US is already actively seeking a replacement for the Manas base, negotiating with other countries neighbouring Afghanistan.

NEZAVISIMAYA GAZETA’s weekly supplement DIPKURIER publishes an article by Ilya Kononov, who is trying to predict the main international agenda of the coming presidential election in Iran. He writes that a new period may begin in Iran’s relations with the West. On the one hand, the generous offer of investments in Iranian industry and agriculture made by the Western nations to Iran in 2006 and 2008 in exchange for discontinuation of its nuclear programme cannot be realised now, in the circumstances of a global economic crisis, even if Iran agreed.

On the other hand, the change of administration in the US and the first signals from the new tenant of the White House promise Iran a chance to normalise its relations with the West without a major shift in its policies, including the peaceful nuclear programme. The author argues that even the new rhetoric of the country’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which reflects the change in the position of Ayatolla Khamenei, the supreme spiritual leader who has the main say in policy issues, means that Iran may need a new figure with a less nationalist and conservative image than Ahmadinejad.

In that sense, continues the author, the Iranian election this time is as unpredictable as ever, but given than Iran now needs a president with good negotiation skills and a personality acceptable to Iran’s Western counterparts, Ahmadinejad will most probably have to vacate the presidential seat for someone else who at the moment may not even be among the announced presidential candidates: for instance, the present parliament speaker and former chief negotiator on the nuclear problem Ali Larijani.

The same weekly has an article by Dr. Georgy Kunadze of the Institute of the World Economy and International Relations, who writes that since 1990s plain blackmail has become the main tool in North Korea’s interaction with the outside world. The academic says that Pyongyang’s strategic interest consists of surviving the hunger and sometimes famine, surviving the winter cold and keeping the country together and maintaining an uninterrupted rule by the current quasi-monarchic system, while the tactical means of achieving these ends consist of threatening their closest neighbour, South Korea, with a war of mutual destruction and getting aid in exchange for good behaviour, meaning simply postponing the threat of war until the next convenience.

The author says that by using its nuclear programme of blackmail, North Korea has managed to survive through the 1990s and most of the 2000s and complete the journey from readiness to exchange the nuclear programme for material and monetary aid to the request of an official status of a nuclear power. The author insists that the current situation proves that over a decade of negotiations in different formats has achieved no progress in the denuclearisation of North Korea but actually, if one is ready to attach the real names to events, consisted of repeated acts of blackmail on the part of Pyongyang to which the West, together with South Korea, Japan and Russia, yielded every time. If it is going to continue that way, says the academic, the healing of North Korea from its ‘nuclear disease’ is going to take a very long time.

Evgeny Belenkiy, RT