The Stumbling Block of a Council
// The British Council defies the Russian ban
The UK has defied Russia’s order to close the British Council’s regional branches and announced that offices in St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg would re-open their doors on Monday. Russia has described the decision as sabotage and gets ready to retaliate.
The UK embassy in Russia announced that Russian branches of the British Council would resume operation in regions despite the January 1 order of the Russian Foreign Ministry to shut down the centers due to their “illegal status”. The Russian Foreign Ministry was accusing the British Council of murky financial dealings and illegally placing the center on the premises of the diplomatic missions, which gives diplomatic immunity to all British Council employees.
The British Council was set up in 1934 under the auspices of the British Foreign Office as a nonprofit organization to promote the United Kingdom and its culture abroad. The British Council has branches in 100 countries providing training, grants, exchanges, exhibitions and scientific workshops to foreign nationals. The first British Council in Russia was opened in Moscow in 1992 to get the status of a cultural center at the embassy in 1994. The British Council went on to open another 16 offices in the country – in St. Petersburg, Arkhangelsk, Volgograd, Ekaterinburg, Irkutsk, Kaliningrad, Murmansk, Nizhny Novgorod, Veliky Novgorod, Omsk, Petrozavodsk, Pskov, Rostov-on-Don, Samara and Sochi. 400,000 Russians were involved in the Council’s projects every year.
Announcing the decision to curtail operations of the British Council Russia did not hide the fact that the decision is politically charged. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov almost directly linked it to a recent strain in Russian-British relations in the midst of the Litvinenko row when London was urging Moscow to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, the chief suspect in poisoning former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko. Mr. Lavrov pointed to other “hostile” moves from Britain such as the decision to halt counterterrorism cooperation with Russia or reluctance to give the Federal Security Service a partnership status “in any kind of cooperation”.
Last October the British Council made moves to curtail activities in Russia ahead of the order of the Russian foreign office citing “reorganization of its activities” as it handed nine centers in regions to Russian partners and handed library facilities to local universities and libraries. However, the British Council had no intention to leave Russia and decided to keep projects in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Ekaterinburg at the initial full scale.
The New Year ban on the Council’s activities in regions caused a political row. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and Prime Minister Gordon Brown appealed with a demand to withdraw the “ungrounded order”. The British accused the Russian Foreign Ministry of intentionally dragging the process with the Council’s application to register its offices in the country.
The Russian Foreign Minister posted on its web-sited a repeat warning for the British Council on January 3. The UK Foreign Office issued a reply communiqué to express hope that relations between the two countries would not suffer “because of an external political agenda”. The British Embassy in Moscow said that “British Council employees are to come to work to their offices in St. Petersburg and Ekaterinburg as planned on January 14”.
“We are opening on Monday,” Stephen Kinnock, director of the St. Petersburg office, told Kommersant. “I know that relations between Russia and the UK are tough now but our educational and cultural efforts are even more important in this case. Like, we were banned to do the British Animation Festival in late December at Rodina but we are now going to hold it in the House of Cinema instead.”
“British Council employees in Ekaterinburg go back to work, and activities of the Council are not halted,” Elena Chesnokova, press officer for the UK Consulate in Ekaterinburg, told Kommersant. “We are ready to continue talks with the Russian party.”
Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Ministry doubts that the issue with the status of the organization would soon be resolved. Sergey Ivanov, second secretary of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s mission in Sverdlovsk Region, says that the British Council has come up with another offer to reorganize its offices into “culture branches of the consulate” which would hire British Council employees. The British Council has been coming up with this kind of suggestion ever since it appeared in Russia but the Russian Foreign Ministry would turn it down. “An attempt to change the sign board shows that the organization has never been really interested in cultural and educational activities in Ekaterinburg but it needed diplomatic privileges,” Mr. Ivanov says.
Russian views as sabotage the British Council’s intention to carry out working as usual defying the ban. “We will wait till it happens, that is, if the offices really start working,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrey Krivtsov told Kommersant. “One thing is certain. There have never been similar precedents of someone defying an order of this status. We will see how things will develop and decide on measures to react.”
A set of retaliation steps is easy to predict. Throughout its operations in Russia the British Council has repeatedly been presented with tax claims. In 2005, the British Council management in St. Petersburg was facing a criminal case on illegal business charges. However, the claims were lifted after the British Council was registered as a tax payer.
Kommersant sources report new financial repressions against the British Council in Russia. The culture center in Nizhny Novgorod was shut down following the British Council’s own decision late last year but local authorities are about to file a claim against the organization “to recover a debt from rent”. The region’s property management ministry has calculated that the British Council owes the regional coffers more than 5 million rubles, a debt that has appeared over the past three years. The British Council says that the gratuitous terms of rent were laid down in a 1994 contract with the education department of the region and the House of the Teacher state educational company that acts as the leaser. But the regional property management ministry claims that the fact that the British Council is curtailing its activities in Nizhny Novgorod is not going to influence their decision and they will carry on with their efforts to recover the debt.
The Foreign Ministry’s spokesman in Sverdlovsk Region Sergey Ivanov also dropped a hint in the interview with Kommersant that Russian companies would be recommended to halt their cooperation with the British organization if the ministry’s demands are ignored.
Yulia Taratuta, Moscow; Sergey Antonov, Ekaterinburg; Ivan Sergeev, Nizhny Novgorod; Sergey Polotovsky, St. Petersburg
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