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All the President's Men
// Participants in Zagreb Meeting Exchange Politics for Ethics
Putin Finds Himself Mainly Among Friends in Croatia
At the Balkan Energy Summit, which took place in the Croatian capital of Zagreb yesterday, the summit's participants attempted to find a compromise between ethical and political approaches to energy projects. According to the observations of Kommersant special correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov, the choice of approach depends on the amount of oil and gas involved in the project in question.
It is difficult to say for certain why the organizers of the summit decided even before the summit began that they hate journalists so much. If they didn't hate them with such a primal passion, they presumably wouldn't have put a 20m-radius tent right up against the hotel where the Balkan Energy Summit was taking place in a spacious and well-air-conditioned venue, and moreover, they wouldn't have called that tent, which was boiling inside by noon, the summit's press center.
If these powerful feelings hadn't overwhelmed the organizers, they never would have allowed anyone to smoke inside the tent and wouldn't have outfitted the tent with several enormous round tables and a minimum number of chairs. In my opinion, they did so just so that as few journalists as possible would be able to sit down while listening to the speeches (only a handful of photojournalists were allowed inside the building itself). As a result, everyone was miserable – not only those who were standing, but also those who were sitting, since the people standing were determined to remind them that no one should be able to suffer in even slightly more comfortable conditions than anyone else inside that stifling gas chamber.
It was in this atmosphere that I heard Croatian President Stipe Mesic give the opening address at the conference. Mr. Mesic greeted the participants in the summit and the journalists listening in from outside "with feelings of sincere satisfaction," which immediately led me (and not without reason) to suspect him of sadistic tendencies.
"I am particularly glad that a special guest has joined us for this meeting: Russian President Vladimir Putin," said Mr. Mesic. If I had been sitting inside, I would have looked around the room in confusion, because Mr. Putin had not yet joined the participants at the summit. The forum had started without him. According to the plan of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Putin was to triumphantly enter the room as the event kicked into high gear. But at the moment that the Croatian president uttered those words, Vladimir Putin not only wasn't in Zagreb – he wasn't even in Croatia. Nor was he in Moscow. The Russian president was in the air at the time.
A few minutes later, I really started feeling sorry for Mr. Putin. By not hearing a single word of Mr. Mesic's speech, he missed a lot (if not everything). These are Mr. Mesic's exact words: "I would also have liked to swap opinions about the dead end in which the modern world currently finds itself and in which, considering our major positions, we also find ourselves."
By this point, I practically had my face pressed up against the television screen, attempting through the clouds of tobacco smoke to discern even an imaginary flicker of faith in tomorrow in the face of the Croatian president. Just something that would give the modern world a chance. I saw nothing of the sort.
"When the issue is energy products," said Mr. Mesic, "the question that is becoming ever more commonly heard and more pressing is the question of what we are justified in doing and what we are not justified in doing. It often seems that if we do what we must, then we are doing something that we do not have the right to do, and vice versa – if we do not do what we cannot justify, we will neglect what we should have done."
In my heart I understood that what Mr. Mesic was saying was very important for the future of humanity. My heart aside, however, I was at a total loss, since there was definitely no point in trying to use reason to figure that one out. Which is exactly why it was impossible not to agree with him.
"I am aware that meetings such as ours cannot completely define the direction of desirable future developments," said the Croatian president in an unexpectedly hearty tone. "However, I believe that at the very least we cannot fail to make a contribution to the discussion that has already been started on that topic, even though it has not yet been entirely defined. It is in this context that I view the final document of our summit, the Zagreb Declaration, which we will adopt at the end of the meeting…"
In the end, he didn't manage to stick to his guns, and he finally turned out to be a victim of his trans-European – or actually even trans-Atlantic – ambitions, which could have been put to better use in organizing a pleasant press center.
It was impossible to tell from the Croatian president's long speech why he needed this summit and why he was pushing his colleagues so enthusiastically towards a compromise: "The ethical approach is always uncompromising. The political approach follows from the idea that everything that is good at a certain time and under certain conditions should be considered positive. The idea that compromise is something bad has always had numerous supporters, but real life paints an entirely different picture. Lurking behind an uncompromising position are often either various forms of fanaticism or the intent to get one's way at all costs, even at someone else's expense. Ordinary people have suffered from this, and entire populations and countries have had to live through its difficult consequences."
Really, though, Mr. Mesic had much simpler things in mind that those at which he so grandiloquently hinted. Some time ago, Russia suggested to Croatia that part of the gas pipeline to northern Italy be laid through Croatian territory. And speaking of compromises, Mr. Mesic clearly wanted to break the news gently to Croatian society that despite the country's current stable existence as a tourist superpower, it has no future without such projects, which, without a doubt, stand in direct opposition to environmental preservation. No matter which way you look at such projects, they are an assault on the environment.
And the Croatian president, of course, is not capable of turning down such an offer. He has already said that his country has no extra money to finance the project, but that it would be nice if some of the gas transported across Croatian territory stayed in Croatia itself.
For several years, Mr. Mesic has been favorably inclined towards the idea of joining the Druzhba and Adria oil pipelines in order to transport oil to the Croatian port of Omishal, from where it could be shipped via tankers. Croatia also planned to keep some of this oil for itself and even bought a packet of shares in the Siberian Beliye Nochi oil field from a Russian company that was happy to sell. However, soon it emerged that this oil field was not what it was made out to be. The Beliye Nochi sale quickly came to naught: to put it lightly, the oil field turned out to be less rich than the buyers had thought. The sellers, on the other hand, had been under no delusions about the field from the very beginning.
Now the project of joining the Druzhba and Adria pipelines has extended to the Italian town of Trieste, at least on paper. But now the Croatians are behaving more warily and explaining their wariness by claiming that the Italians and Slovenians now involved in extending the pipeline are not showing an appropriate level of interest in the project.
The Croatians are more well-disposed towards the idea of a pan-European pipeline from Constanza to Trieste that would carry 40 million tons of oil annually. In that case, Croatia could lay claim to $1.3 billion per year in transit duties on the oil.
All of this suggested that the Croatian president was ready for any negotiations with any partners, especially since he said in his speech, "I don't mean any concrete arrangement, I'm talking about the constant process of coming to an arrangement. I'm talking about arrangements as our way of life."
Vladimir Putin, once he appeared at the summit, assured Mr. Mesic that "Russian ecological standards are higher than those of our partners in other countries."
Corporations like Shell and BP must love to hear that.
Over lunch and at a meeting afterwards, the participants in the forum discussed the summit's final declaration. It would have been flawlessly tailored to the interests of special guest Vladimir Putin if Bulgarian President Georgy Pyrvanov and Romanian President Traian Basescu hadn't suggested including a special mention of the Nabucco project and about the pan-European oil pipeline – "given their particular importance and priority status."
Thanks to the efforts of participants in the summit loyal to Russia, however, there was no mention of these pipelines in the summit's summary declaration. Nevertheless, the third point of the declaration remained untouched: "Countries that supply energy and countries that purchase it, as well as transit countries, should not use energy or energy resources as an…instrument of political or other pressure."
Greek deputy development minister Anastasios Nerandzis objected categorically to this point, seeing it as absolutely unacceptable from the point of view of his country's interests. Apparently, Greece intends to do everything it its power to use energy and energy resources as an instrument of political or other pressure. But in the end, Anastasios Nerandzis was obviously convinced that that shouldn't be done.
Andrei Kolesnikov
All the Article in Russian as of June 25, 2007
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