Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (right) meet in Heiligendamm, Germany before the beginning of the G8 summit, on June 6, 2007.
Photo: Dmitry Azarov
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G8 Leaders Have Something to Say to Each Other
// And Nothing to Hear from Each Other
Yesterday Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in the German town of Heiligendamm and met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. According to Kommersant special correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov, who was there in the thick of things, thanks to the efforts of anti-globalization protestors the meeting took place in an atmosphere that was positively martial. Not only that, but differences of opinion among the heads of the world's leading industrialized nations, which yesterday appeared insurmountable, may mean that a joint statement will not be signed at the conclusion of the G8 summit.
From the airport, we were taken to the summit's press center in two buses, accompanied by a police escort and reports that were appearing at that time in the international media from correspondents working near Heiligendamm.
The reports were broadcast by people who had fallen into the fire but managed to maintain their cool even while thousands of anti-globalization protestors rushed a police cordon around the town.
Apparently, the protestors were causing a ruckus not only in the vicinity of Heiligendamm but in the town itself. The internet was full of information about the famous old train that was supposed to ferry journalists from the press center to Heiligendamm. It was reported that the protestors had peppered it with stones and even punctured the steam boiler, which the organizers of the summit were said to be feverishly working to repair. No connections with Heiligendamm were in sight. The summit was no longer on the brink of failure – it had already stepped over the edge. In a report from a Russian information agency that I opened on the internet using my mobile phone while we were driving from the airport, I read that Russian journalists were the ones suffering the most from the goings-on, since they had hoped that it would still be possible to get to the meeting between Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin in Heiligendamm. But there was no chance of that.
Reality, like usual, exceeded all expectations. This time for the better. In other words, the steam engine was actually in perfect shape, and I managed to make it to the meeting between the Russian president and the German chancellor.
It is true, though, that everything else could have gone a bit better. Weaving circuitously through the town's outskirts (while dozens of helicopters flew overhead), presumably to avoid encountering rioting anti-globalization protestors, it took us more than two hours to get to the press center from the airport. At one point, our retinue was divided in two, obviously to deflect the attention and vehemence of possible assailants. In the end, thanks largely to the enormous number of back roads in rural Germany, the maneuver succeeded so well that we managed to reach the press center, which is located six kilometers from the by now legendary town of Heiligendamm, without encountering a single protestor.
Nevertheless, they were out there. They didn't throw stones at the train and didn't break the boiler. And they didn't lie down on the rails. They simply tore them up. (We eventually took a boat to Heiligendamm.) In order to get to the tracks, the protestors had to overcome a police cordon, which most of them succeeded in doing by simply circumventing it. I saw these crowds of people as they navigated their way through fields full of flowers. The procession was several hundred meters long. In some places, however, there were clashes between protestors and police. In one spot, a group of reporters from the television channel Rossiya was filming a piece featuring young motorcyclists dressed in black who had decided to take on the police. And they did so, receiving truncheons blows to their backs, and then when a courageous television reporter asked if he could ride along with one of them on his motorcycle in the direction of yet another group of policemen (the motorcyclists had chosen their next target, realizing that they themselves were likely to become the next target no matter what they did), the motorcyclists at first agreed to take him along, but when they learned that he had no motorcycle helmet, they indignantly refused: "That's breaking the law!"
On the boat to Heiligendamm, we were joined by a group of Russian experts who were participating in preparing the concluding documents for the G8 summit. They were late for the talks. These were people who really had a serious problem: it turned out that there was still no agreement on the concluding joint statement on the international economy, a project that had been set to the participants in the G8 summit in January of this year. Specifically, one section of the statement was still being disputed: "Climate Change and Energy Efficiency." In the discussion of the problem of global warming, the Americans and the Germans couldn't come to an agreement on target values for quotas on carbon dioxide emissions to counter the effect of greenhouse gases on the planet.
The Americans are still insisting that no numbers should be included in the document. The Germans resolutely disagree.
From the very beginning, the position of the Russian experts has been a compromise between the American and German sides.
One of these experts, Andrei Kondakov, who was sitting in the hold of the boat, was fairly skeptical about the project and said that the target emissions values in the concluding statement are not at all scientifically based, "and those that are [scientifically] based will cost too much to implement." He remembered how at the beginning of the year the first talks about the joint statement began with the Germans proposing an innocent formula about "the necessity of urgent measures to combat [global] warming, to which the Americans immediately declared their categorical disagreement.
During the negotiations, the countries of the EU sided with Germany and its version of quantitative parameters for reducing CO2 emissions, while Canada supported the US in insisting that there should be no numbers regulating reductions in emissions. As a result, according to the experts with whom I spoke yesterday evening, the negotiations got hung up on seven or eight parentheses enclosing target emissions values, and they died there.
The passengers in the boat even expressed the opinion that the concluding statement might not be signed, and they discussed the rumor that had appeared an hour previously alleging that, after the meeting between Angela Merkel and George Bush that had just taken place in Heiligendamm, the federal chancellor had agreed to remove all target emissions values from the document. Andrei Kondakov, for one, didn't buy it. Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Kislyak, who was sitting next to him, was more optimistic and opined that "there will be a compromise, but the threshold for it will be much higher than Germany had hoped."
In the meantime, the boat had arrived in Heiligendamm. The view from the water was commendable: several well-kept buildings, trimmed shrubbery, and, most importantly, the absence of anti-globalization protestors.
We did discover five unkempt cottages with flaking plaster. The Japanese experts on the boat with us guessed that the organizers were planning to use them to house the heads of "outreach" states (the world's poorest countries) who had also been invited to the summit.
The Russian president, who flew to Heiligendamm in a helicopter, went to his cottage briefly before appearing against the backdrop of the harbor to be photographed wearing a wide and even demonstrative smile with Angela Merkel, who came out of the library to greet him.
The meeting lasted for only 15-20 minutes. Walking out of the library, Vladimir Putin said that he like Heiligendamm: "it's a pretty place, very nice…this is Angela Merkel's constituency…yes, her homeland…"
I asked the president whether he will discuss the problem of climate change tomorrow at the first meeting with his colleagues, as Angela Merkel had insisted and about which, I later learned, she had asked Vladimir Putin during that 15-20 minutes.
"About the climate," answered Mr. Putin, pausing before adding, "and about international problems, about the Balkans, about Kosovo."
On that he stopped his enumeration of what was, strictly speaking, the same problem, and I came away convinced that Mr. Putin had come here chiefly to speak to his colleagues about Kosovo.
They all have something to say to each other on that subject – and no plans, apparently, to listen to each other.
Andrei Kolesnikov, Heiligendamm
All the Article in Russian as of June 07, 2007
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