President of the People's Republic of China Hu Jintao (left) and Russian President Vladimir Putin
Photo: Ilya Pitalev
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The Color the Workers Want
// The Price of the Question
Natalia Gevorkyan
The Shanghai Organization of Cooperation is a new version of the CIS with hints of potential to become a new Warsaw Pact. If Moscow and Beijing agree that any means of avoiding “color” revolutions are good means, the comparison with the Warsaw Pact is be quite appropriate. Russia, which approved Islam Karimov's use of force against his people in Uzbekistan, could, for example, recommend insistently that member states have the right to provide each other with military aid, “at the request of the workers,” of course. Situations in which that aid may be called for need not be called “revolutions.” Try the fight against extremism, terrorism or separatism. If anyone doesn't know or has forgotten, that was the practice of the Warsaw Pact members. The attempt to create socialism with a human face ended for the Czechs with the introduction of the united forces of the Warsaw Pact states which saved socialism from capitalist scoundrels, but only because the workers requested it.
There is a feeling that fear of future “color” revolutions predominates over basic common sense in Moscow. The Chinese nod their agreement, since they also dislike separatism, sympathize with Karimov and hope to maintain the status quo in the Shanghai Organization territory. At the same time, they offer Russia a project to build an oil pipeline to China and sell them Russian oil. For them, oil is main issue. Russian oil makes Beijing less dependent on America. Judging all the indicators, China is becoming a superpower, the only one that will be comparable to the United States. For that cause, they are fully prepared to use the Shanghai Organization as a cover for shooting civilians in Central Asia, if they take it into their heads to fight for democracy. And the Chinese, as is well known, have the ability to wait. What is not known is what they will use the right of the Sanghai Organization countries to intervene in each other's internal affairs. That is, if they can reach an agreement and give each other that right.
What a state of affairs. Russia will use its special forces to prop up Asiatic regimes, and protect itself from revolutionary fervor, while the pipeline, delivering Russian oil to China, will make that powerful (but not dangerous?) country a superpower. Then Russia will be the raw materials appendage of its neighbor. The wily Chinese are pulling Russia into their geopolitical game, even if Russia doesn't realize it. It thinks that, in this new CIS and Warsaw Pact, it will be in the fore, but that is a Chinese strategy.
The closer Moscow and Beijing get, the less room there is for democracy in Asia, especially in the four countries squeezed in the middle of them. Will the Shanghai Organization stop change with extreme measures to fight extremism? I doubt it. As Andijan showed, they will pay with their lives for the global plans of distant politicians.
All the Article in Russian as of July 05, 2005
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