JULES EVANS, LONDON
GEORGIA COULD BE OBSTREPEROUS OVER RUSSIA’S WTO BID
The Georgian government has apparently been offering olive branches to the Russian government over the last two weeks, with the demotion of hawkish defence minister Irakli Okruashvili to the ministry of economy (he’s since resigned), and mollifying words from the prime minister, Zurab Nogadeli, that Georgia would of course support Russia’s WTO bid, as long as Russia stood by a trade agreement it made with Georgia in 2004.
In fact, that little trade agreement could have far-reaching consequences. In it, Russia agreed to shut down two check-points it controls in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. They thus run beyond the jurisdiction of Georgian customs, costing the Georgian government hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues, while allowing the tiny separatist provinces to support themselves through smuggling, while also providing the Russian army with a convenient route into and out of the provinces.
As Nino Burjanadze, speaker of the Georgian parliament, said to me in a phone interview last week: “Russia is using these illegal check-points to support these provinces, to keep these conflicts frozen, to try and prevent Georgia from joining NATO and becoming an independent, prosperous country, as well as an alternative transit route for oil and gas”.
The spokesperson for Russia’s WTO bid, Aleksey Portansky, says the issue of these checkpoints is “not in any way connected with the WTO”. He’s being disingenuous – the issue was included in the same trade deal in which Georgia agreed to support Russia’s WTO bid, so of course they’re connected.
Besides, there are other voices in the Georgian government, more strident than that of Zurab Nogadeli, who question whether Georgia should support Russia’s bid at all. Burjunadze told me: “The Georgian position is that Russia shouldn’t be a member of the WTO at this moment. Look at its blockade of our wines, our mineral water. How can such a country be a member of the WTO when it behaves like this?”
It seems the Georgian government has not yet worked out a consistent line on this issue, which is strange, considering how sensitive relations with Russia are at the moment.
The English papers, meanwhile, are secretly loving the spy scandal involving the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko last week. A strange and rather hypocritical mixture of moral indignation (“they’ve attack a Brit in Britain”) and secret voyeuristic interest and salacious delight (“gosh, those Russkies are a rough lot, aren’t they”) have characterized the British media response.
The BBC warned that the incident was “reminiscent of the bad old days” of the Cold War. What they really meant was, the good old days, when the British media had all those villainous KGB plots to write about. The Times even reproduced some stories from the 1960s about devious KGB exploits, just to reminisce about the bad old days a bit more extensively.
The moral indignation aspect of the response has been stretched out with some rather dodgy reporting. Litvinenko has been turned from a defected KGB operative into a “dissident”, yes, that old Cold War word again. How many innocent people did he kill, I wonder, before he became a dissident? Does this make Boris Berezovsky a dissident too?
Nor have many papers seen fit to mention Litvinenko’s clear connection with Berezovsky, and that man’s dubious moral background, and single-minded campaign to discredit Putin. In fact, of the British coverage I’ve read, only The Times mentions the relationship between the two, a relationship which to my mind discredits to some extent his claim to be called a dissident.
While the news pages are full of FSB plots, Moscow’s advertising bill-boards are full of…James Bond! Nothing could be a better advert for MI6 than a new Bond movie, and a good one too.
I saw the new film, Casino Royale, last night, and I enjoyed it. Daniel Craig plays a convincing enough killer, perhaps the most convincing killer of all the Bonds there have been. But I’m not sure he’s that convincing as Bond.
The reason is that Bond, in the original conception of Ian Fleming, was meant to be utterly comme il faut, knowing not just how to garrotte a man, but also where to get one’s suits made, what vintage Bordeaux to order, how to tie a bow tie etc.
There’s a great scene in From Russia With Love which illustrates this snobbish side of the Bond hero. In the film, Robert Shaw plays a SMERSH spy sent to kill Bond and steal the Russian decoding system he is smuggling from Turkey. He meets Bond on a train, and pretends to be working for the British foreign office (FCO). In the buffet car, however, he orders red wine with fish, thus revealing that he couldn’t possibly work for the FCO, because only gentlemen work there, and gentlemen order white wine with fish. Fleming was, as Sean Connery noted, “a tremendous snob”.
Craig has the killer side of Bond down great – he looks like he isn’t just licensed to kill, but he positively enjoys doing it. But he doesn’t have the gentleman thing down. When he puts on a tuxedo, he looks like a bouncer rather than a toff. He eats with his mouth open. He drives a Ford. There’s every danger he’d order red wine with fish.
Perhaps this is a good updating of the Bond myth. After all, the Foreign Office and MI6 have both changed. Neither are the Oxbridge / public school preserves of old. ‘Essex man’ now dominates the FCO, and so we now have an Essex Bond.
Thing is, they’ve still left Bond an Old Etonian (as he was in Fleming’s books), only now apparently, as one character puts it in the film –“you weren’t there with your own money, and the other boys at the school never let you forget it”. So now Bond has some chip on his shoulder about not being posh enough. So he’s not the unflappable, poised gentleman of old, he’s some maniac on a personal revenge trip for not being accepted by the posh kids at school. Which is fine by me.
Meanwhile, that other spy with a chip on his shoulder about being made fun of by rich kids, Vladimir Putin, did his best to compete with the James Bond advertising last month, by helicoptering in to the brand new headquarters of GRU, the Russian military intelligence.
He and his buddy Sergei Ivanov let off a few rounds in the shooting range, then went on a tour of the building. I was interested to see, in the Moscow Times photograph below, that Russian military intelligence has apparently hired the services of Batman to help them in their quest for world domination. So that’s how they got Shamil Basayev.
Julian Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.
November 20, 2006
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