GUAM TRANSFORMATION: NEW “SANITARY CORDON” AGAINST RUSSIA
Sergey Shakaryants – expert of Caucasus analytical center
Regnum, Russia
May 23 2006
In order to understand what may be happening at the Kiev summit of GUAM
(Georgia-Ukraine-Azerbaijan-Moldova), any unbiased expert or observer
will have to look back at an earlier event attended by the presidents
of Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova and the prime minister of Azerbaijan –
the “Common Vision of Common Neighborhood” conference in Vilnius. So
as not to quote some participants inspired by the anti-Russian
rhetoric of US Vice President Richard Cheney, let’s just say that,
once backing the founders of GUAM, in Vilnius the Americans had to
admit that the bloc has failed to do what it was supposed to do –
a mission severely slated by many Russian politicians in 2000-2001,
particularly, by then-Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov.
To remind, they in Moscow believed that GUAM and the US’ attempts to
enlarge it were something like “bringing a Trojan horse” into the
CIS and, even more, a plot to create a kind of “sanitary cordon”
around Russia – similar to the one existing around the USSR in the
20s-40s of XX.
In Vilnius in early May the US, in fact, “gave an order” to its
post-Soviet satellites – the Baltic states, Georgia, Ukraine
and Moldova – that, from now on, GUAM will be replaced by another
“sanitary cordon” formula – Democratic Choice Commonwealth (DCC). We
would like to remind you that the pseudo-initiators of the DCC –
a structure with yet seemingly illogical imperatives – are Georgian
and Ukrainian presidents Mikhail Saakashvili and Viktor Yushchenko,
who came out with the idea as early as last summer. The participants in
the Vilnius conference made it clear that they are going to “struggle
for democratization” of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan jointly (under
the patronage of the US and the EU).
And Latvia’s call – “democratization can’t stop at this, it’s time
for the international community to look towards the east – Eastern
Europe and the South Caucasus” – was meant as start to this struggle.
We would like to note that, for the Baltic states, Eastern Europe
is two “non-democrat”-countries – Belarus and Russia. And when
Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus urged the West to create a
“European Democracy Fund,” everybody understood that this fund would be
a kind of account for “paying” for “revolutionary services” by certain
circles in Russia, Belarus, Armenia and Azerbaijan. As you may know
the “color revolutions” of the last years have “died out” in Armenia,
Azerbaijan and Central Asia, and the “children of the revolutions”
in Georgia and Ukraine have already fought with one another.
We believe that the US no longer needs local smaller-scope
sub-structure in a more global anti-Russian structure, even though
we can’t but agree with the first vice chairman of the CIS committee
of Russia’s State Duma Akhmed Bilalov that in their time many people,
even those in Western Europe, agreed that GUAM was a purely American
project that was supposed to give the US an advantage over France
and Germany in Europe. “In this light, Paris and Berlin will hardly
want this project to succeed, especially as the aspiration of the
GUAM members to join the EU can undermine the positions of the old
traditional European leaders,” Bilalov said on May 21. So, it is
obviously not without purpose that people are talking that during the
GUAM summit in Kiev this non-functional and inefficient alliance will
be renamed into “Organization for Democracy and Development GUAM” –
i.e. will be turned into a kind of “structural sub-division” of the
DCC in the region of Black Sea and Caucasus.
As we know, since 1999 American emissaries of different levels and
ranks have been actively persuading the Armenian authorities into,
at least, declaring their intention to join GUAM in some near future.
And so, today we don’t even doubt that the Americans will start an even
bigger fuss over Armenia. Now they will probably start to persuade us
that, unlike GUAM (which has proved no less amorphous than the CIS),
the “flagship of democracy” in the post-Soviet area – the DCC and its
branch, the Organization for Democracy and Development GUAM – will
have more clear goals and mechanisms and will get a big recompense
for joining in the new “Crusade” against Russia – from the selfsame
Adamkus- and his US patrons-proposed European Democracy Fund.
In fact, the point is not so much that the US and its satellites might
be doing this because of the “Iranian problem.” The actual point
is that they may well be growing anti-Russian because of Russia’s
unprecedented (for the whole post-WWII period) rapprochement with
China, including in the military. In fact, political pirates from
different countries are trying to come together into a single “front”
against the two biggest Eurasian states.
In this light, the whole row about the “Iranian dossier” looks quite
differently: not as a fight against theocratic rule in Iran or for
control over vast reserves of oil, gas, uranium and precious stones
in that country, but as an attempt to create a solid “circle” and,
simultaneously, to seize a key territory in the way of the so-called
Great Silk Road-2, a project by Sam Brownback, US congressman known for
his radical anti-Russian views. In other words, the world community is
dealing with the “declared” undeclared war of the West’s reactionary
circles against Russia and China. The bankrupt GUAM is just the
“fifth wheel in a cart” in this strategy.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress