Why Tibet Matters to India

Posted on by
Reply

 

New Delhi has a major stake in Tibet, with its security tied to the developments there

 

India’s Muddle Path

 

By Brahma Chellaney

The Hindustan Times, March 19, 2008

When Burma’s junta last September killed at least 31 people during monk-led protests in Rangoon, it triggered international outrage and a new wave of US-led sanctions. Now the junta’s closest associate, the world’s largest autocracy in Beijing, has cracked down on monks, nuns and others in Tibet, with an indeterminate number of people killed. The muted global response thus far raises the question whether China has accumulated such power as to escape international censure over highly repressive actions.

For India, the Chinese crackdown on monk-led pro-independence protests in Tibet — the biggest in almost two decades — is an opportunity to highlight a festering issue that is at the heart of the India-China divide. That divide cannot be bridged unless Beijing begins a process of reconciliation and healing in Tibet by coming to terms with the reality that nearly 60 years of oppression have failed to crush the grassroots Tibetan resistance. By laying claim to Indian territories on the basis of alleged Tibetan ecclesiastical or tutelary links to them, Beijing itself underlines the centrality of the Tibet issue.

While China unabashedly plays the Tibet card against India, such as by staking a claim not just to Tawang but to the whole of Arunachal Pradesh — a state nearly thrice the size of Taiwan — New Delhi fights shy to even shine a spotlight on the Tibet issue. Worse, India has unwittingly strengthened China’s Tibet-linked claims to Indian territories, including occupied Aksai Chin, by recognizing Tibet as part of the People’s Republic. Even when the Dalai Lama backs the Indian position on Arunachal, New Delhi is too coy to translate such support into diplomatic advantage.

It is a testament to India’s pusillanimity that, even as Chinese security forces arbitrarily arrest and publicly parade young Tibetans, New Delhi has received fulsome praise from Premier Wen Jiabao, who, while calling the Tibet issue a “very sensitive one in our relations with India”, said, “We appreciate the position and the steps taken by the Indian government in handling Tibetan independence activities masterminded by the Dalai clique”. The orchestrated, Cultural Revolution-style attacks on the Dalai Lama are a reminder that a line of moderation vis-à-vis Beijing is counterproductive. Two decades after he changed the Tibetan struggle for liberation from Chinese rule to a struggle for autonomy within the People’s Republic, the Dalai Lama has little to show for his ‘middle way’, other than having made himself a growing target of Chinese vilification.

It is past time India reclaimed leverage by subtly changing its stance on Tibet. It can do that without provocation. Indian policy has been held hostage for long by a legion of panda-huggers, who bring discredit to our democracy and comfort to our adversary. These Sinophiles believe the only alternative to continued appeasement is confrontation. They cannot grasp the simple fact that between appeasement and confrontation lie a hundred different options. A false choice — pay obeisance to Beijing or brace up for confrontation — has been used to block any legitimate debate on policy options.

Today, several developments are underscoring the need for a more nuanced approach on Tibet that adds elasticity and leverage to Indian diplomacy. These include China’s frenetic build-up of military and transport capabilities on the vast Himalayan plateau; its refusal to clarify the frontline with India; and its latent threat to fashion water as a weapon.

Tibet’s vast glaciers and high altitude have endowed it with the world’s greatest river systems. With global warming likely to aggravate water woes, China’s control over the riverhead of Asia’s waters carries major security implications for lower-riparian states like India.  As World Bank Vice-President Ismail Serageldin warned in 1995, “If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water.”

Tibet’s forcible absorption not only helped China to expand its landmass by one-third, but also has given it a contiguous border, for the first time in history, with India, Bhutan and Nepal, and an entryway to Pakistan and Burma. By subsequently annexing Aksai Chin, China was able to link Tibet with another vast, restive region, Xinjiang, home to Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups and seat of a short-lived independent East Turkestan Republic up to 1949. Today, China is recklessly extracting Tibet’s immense mineral deposits, unmindful that such activities and its new hydro and railway projects are playing havoc with Tibet’s fragile ecosystem — critical to the climate security of India and other regional states.

Tibet’s security and autonomy are tied to India’s own well-being. If the ‘Roof of the World’ is on fire, India can hardly be safe. Tibet indeed symbolizes that a sustainable regional order has to be built on a balance among the market, culture and nature. Tibet is likely to determine whether we will see a more cooperative or a more competitive Asia — a stable, peaceful Asia that expands its economic and cultural renaissance, or an Asia riven by Great Power rivalries and the continued suppression of conquered nationalities.

Against this background, India needs to do at least three things. First, softly put the focus on the core issue, Tibet, including on China’s denial of autonomy to that region, in breach of the ‘17-Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet’ imposed on the Tibetans in 1951. New Delhi could sugar-coat this by saying China’s own security would be advanced if it reached out to Tibetans and concluded a deal that helped bring back the Dalai Lama from his long exile in India. The onus must be placed squarely on Beijing to ensure that Tibet, having ceased to be a political buffer, now becomes a political bridge between India and China.

The choice before India is to either stay stuck in a defensive, unviable negotiating position, where it has to fend off Chinese territorial demands, or to take the Chinese bull by the horns and question the very legitimacy of Beijing’s right to make territorial claims ecclesiastically on behalf of Tibetan Buddhism when it still has to make peace with Tibetans.

Second, if Tibet is to be the means by which India coops up the bull in its own China shop, it has to treat the Dalai Lama as its most powerful ally. As long as the Dalai Lama is based at Dharamsala, he will remain India’s biggest strategic asset against China. The Tibetans in Tibet will neither acquiesce to Chinese rule, as their latest defiance shows, nor side with China against India. If after the death of the present incumbent, the institution of the Dalai Lama gets captured by Beijing (the way it has anointed its own Panchen Lama), India will be poorer by several army divisions against China. To foil China’s scheme, India should be ready with a plan.

Third, India has to stop gratuitously referring to Tibet as part of China. From Nehru to Vajpayee, no Indian PM returned from a Beijing visit without referring to Tibet, in some formulation or the other, as part of China. Last January, Manmohan Singh became the first PM to return from Beijing without making any unwarranted reference to Tibet to please his hosts. The ‘T’ word is conspicuously missing from the joint communiqué — a key point the media failed to catch. If this is not to be a one-shot aberration, Indian policy has to reflect this change, however unobtrusively.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=3f44c623-a1cb-43ee-8b50-e421ec3d3bff&&Headline=India%e2%80%99s+muddle+path

Nuclear Power: Hype and Reality

Posted on by
Reply
Energy reality beyond the nuclear hype

Brahma Chellaney The Hindu March 17, 2008


India’s zeal for reactor imports needs to be tempered by the fact that more than half a century after U.S. Atomic Energy Agency Chairman Lewis Strauss claimed that nuclear energy would become “too cheap to meter,” the nuclear-power industry everywhere subsists on generous state support and shows the slowest rate of advancement among all energy technologies.

The American-inspired multilateral export controls, including on high-technology flow, that have blocked India from importing even reactors and fuel for power generation, need to go in full — not just partially and conditionally as under the proposed Indo-U.S. nuclear deal. India is keen to boost nuclear power generation by buying reactors from all the three principal countries that can make such exports — the U.S., France and Russia. In consecutive months this year it has finalised agreements to buy reactors from France and Russia, subject to a rule change by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), a U.S.-led cartel. Its hopes of opening up international civil nuclear trade, however, have been dealt a blow by uranium-rich Australia’s U-turn on yellowcake exports to India — an ill-founded decision by its new Prime Minister that is to stand even if the NSG changes its rule.

Mix of energy sources needed

India needs a mix of energy sources as a commercial hedge against unforeseen risks, and nuclear power certainly deserves a place in a diversified energy portfolio. But India needs to temper its new-found enthusiasm for nuclear power, which currently supplies barely 2.5 per cent of its electricity.

First, generating power from imported reactors dependent on imported enriched-uranium fuel makes little economic or strategic sense. Had the proposed import of such light water reactors (LWRs) — the only type on offer — been part of India’s planned transition to autonomous capability, akin to China’s, the purchase of that model could have been justified. But India has no intention to design and build LWRs locally.

Second, just as lucrative arms export contracts oil the military-industrial complex of any major international power, reactor exports are integral to the French and Russian nuclear power business and to America’s efforts to revive its moribund industry, which has not received a single domestic reactor order since the 1970s. The political salesmanship on reactor exports thus is no less intense than on arms sales, with the sales pitch on both centred on the word “security,” although energy or national security does not mesh with import dependency.

Arms import

Today, India is under pressure to replicate in the energy sector the very mistake it has made on armaments. One of the world’s top arms buyers, India now annually imports weapons worth between $4 billion and $6 billion, many of questionable value, even as its own armament production base remains weak and underdeveloped. Despite the rising arms imports bill, the Indian military is becoming less capable of winning a decisive war against an aggressor-state. Nuclear power, which was unappealing until imports were not possible, with the domestic industry actually starved of necessary funds for expansion through much of the 1990s, is now touted as an answer to India’s energy needs. But why should India compound its mistake on armaments by importing high-priced reactors when it can more profitably invest in the development of its own energy resources?

Third, the share of nuclear power in worldwide electricity supply has been stagnant at 16 per cent for the past 22 years. A 2003 MIT study put it thus: “Today, nuclear power is not an economically competitive choice.” The industry is still dependent on generous state subsidies for survival. To be sure, every energy source relies on some state subsidy. But nuclear power involves the most significant external costs, which are usually passed on to the taxpayers, including on accident liability cover, anti-terrorist safeguards, radioactive waste storage, retirement of old reactors, research and development, and international safeguards. To know the true cost of nuclear-generated electricity, the eclectic state subsidies need to be factored in.

Such is the reality that even External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee was compelled to admit in the Rajya Sabha last December: “Yes, it is proved, everybody admits that nuclear energy… is definitely costly.” This is borne out by India’s indigenous power reactors: escalating construction costs have resulted in all the newer nuclear plants pricing their electricity at between 270 and 285 paise a kilowatt hour (kWh). Compare those tariffs with Reliance Energy’s coal-fired Sason plant project, which has contracted to sell power at 119 paise a kWh, or even with the poorly-run Dadri plant, which supplies electricity to Delhi at 225 paise a kWh, although coal has to be hauled for the plant over long distances. When India produces electricity from reactors it wishes to import, the already wide price differential will increase.

Mr. Mukherjee, however, tried to put an interesting gloss, claiming that nuclear power “technology is moving ahead… With the advancement of the technology… nuclear energy, if it appears to be too costly today, perhaps, it will not appear that costly tomorrow.”

In a rapidly changing world, technological advances are inevitable. But international studies have shown that nuclear power, although a 50-year-old mature technology, has demonstrated the slowest “rate of learning” among all energy sources, including newer technologies such as wind power and combined-cycle gas turbines. It remains highly capital-intensive with comparatively long lead times for construction and commissioning, which prolong the start of returns on capital and put off private investors.

Global warming concerns

Fourth, the nuclear power industry, after being in decline for a quarter century, lacks the capacity to undertake a massive construction programme that could make a noticeable difference to global warming. Even at the current slack rate of reactor construction in the world, bottlenecks are a problem for key components. The industry relies on a few international manufacturers. At least nine power reactor components, including giant pressure vessels and steam generators, are made in only one facility owned by Japan Steel Works. A recent U.S.-based Keystone Centre report pointed to a six-year lead time for some parts.

To control one-seventh of the global greenhouse gas problem, according to calculations by Princeton University Professors Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, the world will need to triple its installed nuclear power capacity by building more than 1,300 reactors. And the U.S. share of that project (including replacing plants reaching the end of their lifespan) will entail building five power reactors a year for 50 years. Yet, notwithstanding all the tax breaks, loan guarantees, liability cover and other subsidies on offer, no reactor construction has begun in the U.S.

Carbon-intensive

Fifth, despite the industry’s efforts to latch on to the rising international concerns over climate change and present nuclear power as “clean,” the reality is greyer. While electricity generation itself is “clean,” the nuclear fuel cycle is carbon-intensive, with greenhouse gases emitted in mining and enriching uranium with fossil fuels.

Reactor construction also carries large carbon footprints. In addition, radioactive wastes from reactor operation pose technological challenges and environmental costs. Governments, environmentalists and industry still cannot agree on how best to dispose of radioactive waste. Reprocessing of spent fuel can help minimise, but not eliminate, such toxic waste.

While nuclear power proponents trumpet the emission-free front end, opponents cite the exceptionally problematic back end. A more balanced approach is called for, with the short-term benefit of generating more nuclear power weighed against the long-term environmental costs for future generations.

Sixth, a sobering fact is also the unflattering reactor construction record of France and Russia, both eager to bag Indian contracts. France is offering the same new model that the French firm Areva is building in Finland — the Olkiluoto-3 plant, the first Western European reactor construction since 1991. That much-hyped project is running at least two years behind schedule and $2.1 billion over its original $4-billion budget. What was trumpeted as a sign of a possible nuclear comeback in Europe is set to become the most expensive nuclear plant built in history. Such is the horror construction story that Areva and its partner, Siemens, have had to re-forge some key equipment and replace substandard concrete.

While India’s own indigenous programme has managed to reduce construction time, with the Tarapur 3 and 4 reactors coming up ahead of schedule, the two Russian VVER-1000 (V-392) reactors, being constructed since 2001 at Koodankulam under a Moscow-financed contract, are running far behind schedule. The first unit is now expected to be commissioned only at the beginning of 2009. The bottlenecks over Koodankulam — a $3.4-billion project — are partly due to the Russian industry’s struggle to recoup itself fully from the post-1991 problems.

Another reason is that although Russia is building an advanced VVER-1000 model at Koodankulam, with Western instrument and control systems, its own industry has moved to a third generation standardised VVER-1200 reactor of 1170 MWe for the home market.

Against this background, India needs to tone down its zeal for reactor imports. In the long run, the path to energy and climate security lies through carbon-free renewable energy, which by harnessing nature frees a nation from reliance on external sources of fuel supply. While seeking to prise open the international civil nuclear trade, India ought not to succumb to contrived deadlines. The deal with America can take effect only if it wins bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress — a fact that belies the attempt-to-hustle-India claim that it can be sealed only by the Bush administration.

(The writer, a Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, is the author, most recently, of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.)

© Copyright 2000 – 2008 The Hindu

http://www.hindu.com/2008/03/17/stories/2008031755851000.htm

Strobe Talbott: Fact and Fiction on India

Posted on by
Reply

The truth Talbott hides

Brahma Chellaney

The Asian Age, March 15, 2008

_________________________________________________________________________________

What 14 rounds of hush-hush negotiations during the Clinton years could not clinch, the Bush administration is seeking to pull off through aggressive public diplomacy, centred on marketing the nuclear deal as India’s “passport” to the world.

_________________________________________________________________________________

The Prime Minister has done well to assure Parliament that he will continue to "seek the broadest possible consensus within the country" over the nuclear deal with the United States. A critical matter like this, which is going to affect the future of India’s nuclear programme and tie the country to perpetual, legally irrevocable international inspections, demands such a consensus. The partisan rancour over what has become an increasingly divisive issue needs to be defused.

While giving that assurance, the Prime Minister referred to a recent claim by former US deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott that, had the Clinton team offered only "half" of what the Bush administration has proposed now, the Vajpayee government "would have gone for it." The truth is that Talbott says just the opposite in his detailed exposition in Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb, a book he published in 2004.

Talbott has a long record of mounting non-proliferation pressure on India. Before becoming deputy secretary, Talbott travelled to Moscow, as ambassador-at-large, to persuade the Russians to renege on their $75-million contract to sell cryogenic-engine technology to India — dangling carrots and warning that "a viable Indian missile capability could one day pose a security threat to Russia itself." It didn’t matter that cryogenic technology has civilian space applications and no nation has employed it in ballistic missiles.

To Talbott, India had to be penalised for retaining its nuclear-weapons option. Yet when India gatecrashed the nuclear club in May 1998, Talbott took the lead — after the shock over the tests had dissipated — to help shift the US policy goal. In place of the lost aim to stop New Delhi from crossing the threshold, a new objective was devised: Prevent India’s emergence as a full-fledged nuclear-weapons state by bringing it into the US-led non-proliferation regime.

With that purpose in mind, Talbott, as the Clinton administration’s troubleshooter, held extended, closed-door negotiations with then external affairs minister Jaswant Singh during 1998-2000. The discussions that stretched to 14 rounds at ten locations in seven countries have been described by the recently-retired US undersecretary, R. Nicholas Burns, in an article published in the November-December 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs, as "Washington’s first truly sustained strategic engagement with the Indian leadership."

That "sustained strategic engagement" was essentially about getting India to accept a set of rigorous non-proliferation benchmarks, by Talbott’s own admission. But where the Clinton administration failed, the Bush team is on the scent of success. The impulse to stitch up the deal before it unravels under wiser Indian reflection has triggered a crescendo of calls by US officials: "The clock is ticking;" "the timelines are short;" "we are kind of playing in overtime;" "there’s still a lot of work but not a lot of time;" "India must move ahead;" and it’s "now or never."

Let’s compare the benchmarks the Clinton team tried to impose with the non-proliferation conditions the Bush administration has attached to the deal.

Talbott says in his book, "If there is a deal to be done with India, my guess is that it will be a version of the one offered by the Clinton administration and rejected by the BJP-led government. The four US-proposed non-proliferation benchmarks put forward in 1998 — joining the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, making progress on a fissile material treaty, exercising strategic restraint (by that or some other name), and meeting the highest standard of export controls … should remain the basis of the American policy into the future. That means the US government should persist until the four areas of restraint become the basis of the Indian policy."

Here is Talbott admitting the Vajpayee government rejected the deal that was on offer then and saying the four Clinton-set benchmarks should remain the basis of US policy "into the future" — until India has caved in. In the book, Talbott presents himself as an unapologetic champion of hawkish positions — from mocking New Delhi for wanting to be grandfathered out of the NPT restrictions, to insisting the US cannot give India "a free pass into the nuclear club."

He lampoons Indian leaders he met. "Vajpayee’s pauses seemed to last forever … I had never met a politician so laconic." Prime Minister Inder Gujral’s 1997 meeting with President Clinton was a washout "in part because Gujral spoke so softly that everyone on the US side had trouble hearing what he was saying." Defence minister George Fernandes "regaled us with the story" of how he had been strip-searched in the US. "He seemed to enjoy our stupefaction at this tale." Sonia Gandhi went from being "diffident and evasive" to being "steely."

If Talbott has kind words for anyone, it is Jaswant Singh, whom he describes as the "persistent and beleaguered champion of moderation." He indeed flatters and pumps up Jaswant Singh, "the Indian statesman," saying it was "Jaswant" (as he calls him) who promised India’s signature on the CTBT. Talbott candidly admits the US game-plan was "to get the Indians to accept the CTBT along with meaningful restraints on their nuclear and missile programmes in exchange for our easing sanctions and throttling back on the campaign of international criticism we were orchestrating."

Domestic opposition in India, however, put paid to Jaswant Singh’s CTBT pledge. Not only that, the American side ended up empty-handed on the other restraint measures despite the protracted, 14-round talks. Talbott, whose approach in the negotiations was to smooth-talk the other side into submission, rues that Jaswant Singh "lost out" to the "conservatives within the BJP."

Now let’s see where the four Clinton-prescribed benchmarks stand today. What sticks out is that the Clinton benchmarks have not only been embraced wholeheartedly by the Bush administration, but also deftly incorporated in the deal, with each benchmark finding unequivocal mention in one or more of the key documents — the July 18, 2005 joint statement, India’s Separation Plan, the Hyde Act and the so-called 123 Agreement.

Benchmark 1 — a permanent test ban. That benchmark is central to the Bush deal with India. The expansive Hyde Act drags India through the backdoor into the CTBT. The Act admits it goes "beyond Section 129 of the Atomic Energy Act" in mandating that the waiver for India will necessarily terminate with any Indian test. The test ban is also built into the 123 Agreement by granting the US the dual right to seek the return of exported goods and to suspend all cooperation forthwith. In fact, with the Hyde Act going beyond the CTBT to define in technical terms what constitutes a nuclear-explosive test, India is to be held to CTBT-plus obligations.

What Jaswant Singh could not deliver has been ceded by a government whose real centre of power, Sonia Gandhi, paradoxically, was instrumental in scuttling the Vajpayee-led effort to build a political consensus for CTBT signature. Vajpayee’s hopes collapsed the moment Sonia Gandhi spoke up at the consensus-building meeting he had called. She said, "Why hurry when the US Senate itself has rejected this treaty? Heavens will not fall if we wait."

Benchmark 2 — restraint on fissile-material production. The Bush deal imposes this check in eclectic ways — from getting India to shut down one of its two research reactors producing weapons-grade plutonium to securing New Delhi’s commitment to work "with the US for the conclusion of a multilateral Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty." The Hyde Act proviso for regular presidential reports on India’s "rate of production" of fissile material or on any changes in "unsafeguarded nuclear-fuel cycle activities" opens New Delhi to sustained pressure.

Much of India’s cumulative historic production of weapons-grade plutonium has come from the Cirus research reactor, to be dismantled by 2010 after having been refurbished at a cost of millions of dollars barely four years ago. Eight indigenous power reactors will also become unavailable for strategic-material needs.

Benchmark 3 — strategic restraint. The Bush deal seeks to hold India’s feet to the non-proliferation fire through the instrumentality of the Hyde Act and 123 Agreement. The controls built into the deal, as Senator Joseph Biden has admitted, will help "limit the size and sophistication of India’s nuclear-weapons programme."

While permitting conditional and partial civil nuclear cooperation, the Hyde Act, seeking to hobble the growth of Indian delivery capability, mandates the continued applicability of US missile sanctions law against India. The deal primarily is aimed at ensuring that India’s nuclear-deterrent capability remains rudimentary and regionally confined, thus helping promote security dependency on the US, including for missile defence and conventional weapons. Fostering security dependency is the key to winning and maintaining an ally.

Benchmark 4 — "meeting the highest standard of export controls." India has agreed under the deal to enact "comprehensive export-control legislation" and to unilaterally adhere to the rules of US-led cartels. While the original deal cited two such cartels, the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group and Missile Technology Control Regime — both of which continue to exclude India from their membership — the Hyde Act has expanded the list to include more, including the controversial Proliferation Security Initiative.

So, as is clear, all the four Clinton benchmarks are at the heart of the Bush deal with India.

In fact, the Bush deal has far more to show. While the Clinton team could not persuade the sphinx-like Vajpayee to place under international inspection more than the two indigenous power reactors he was willing to offer under a potential deal, the Bush administration has won the Manmohan Singh government’s agreement to subject 35 nuclear facilities, including eight existing indigenous power reactors, to permanent external inspection. New Delhi will also shut down Cirus and remove the fuel core from Apsara, Asia’s first reactor.

The Bush team could extract such commitments from India by taking the tack Talbott suggested in his book that he wrote with "the cooperation of the department of state," which later — in his words again — "subjected the manuscript to a review to ensure that the contents would not compromise national security."

With the benefit of hindsight, Talbott had advised that the White House use the dual bait of UN Security Council permanent membership and a strategic partnership to "coax India into the non-proliferation mainstream." That is exactly what President Bush did.

Before offering the deal, Washington led India up the garden path on UNSC membership and massaged its ego with statements that it was both "ready to help India become an important power in the 21st century" and open to "a decisively broader strategic relationship." Since the deal was unveiled, a growing number of publicists have been pressed into service to market it as "India’s passport to the world."

As a result, what hush-hush negotiations with Jaswant Singh could not achieve, aggressive public diplomacy may pull off, with Burns singing the ditty that the deal is "wildly popular among millions of Indians who see it as a mark of US respect for India." That explains why an inveterate non-proliferation ayatollah like Talbott today is hawking the Bush deal, betting that India’s short public memory will help obscure the inconvenient truths.

(c) Asian Age, 2008

http://www.asianage.com/presentation/leftnavigation/opinion/op-ed/the-truth-talbott-hides.aspx 

Engage Burma, Don’t Isolate

Posted on by
Reply
Burma sanctions don’t work

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times, March 14, 2008

Burma today ranks as one of the world’s most isolated and sanctioned nations — a situation unlikely to be changed by its ruling junta scheduling a May referendum on a draft constitution and facilitating U.N. special envoy Ibrahim Gambari’s third visit in six months.

The referendum and planned 2010 national elections are part of a touted road map to democracy. But the iconic opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, may not be able to contest because the still-undisclosed, military-drawn constitution — in the making for 15 years — is likely to bar anyone who married a foreigner.

Burma is an important state. This is not a Bhutan or a Brunei but a country that boasts
the largest Indochina land area. It is a resource-rich nation that can become an economic powerhouse if it can remedy its poisoned politics and ethnic divides and dispel international sanctions. And it is a land bridge between South and Southeast Asia. Such is its vantage location that Burma forms the strategic nucleus for India, China and Southeast Asia.

The military has run Burma, once the world’s leading rice exporter, for 46 long years. Indeed, Burma’s present problems and impoverishment can be tracked back to the defining events of 1962, when General Ne Win deposed elected Prime Minister U Nu, one of the founders of the nonaligned movement.

The callous Ne Win, a devotee of Marx and Stalin, virtually sealed off Burma, banning most external trade and investment, nationalizing companies, halting foreign projects and tourism, and kicking out the Indian business community.

It was not until nearly three decades later that a new generation of military leaders, motivated by Deng Xiaoping’s modernization program in China, attempted to ease Burma’s international isolation through tentative economic reforms without loosening political controls. Such attempts came much after the military’s brutal suppression of the 1988 student-led protests that left several thousand dead or injured — a bloodbath that coincided with the numerology-devoted Ne Win’s announcement of retirement on the "most auspicious" day of Aug. 8, 1988 (8.8.88).

While Western aid cutoffs and other penal actions began no sooner than the Burmese junta refused to honor the outcome of the 1990 elections, won by the detained Suu Kyi’s party, Burma became a key target of U.S. sanctions policy only in the Bush years.

The new missionary zeal in the U.S. approach, reflected in the 2003 Burma Freedom and Democracy Act banning all imports from that country and several subsequent punitive executive orders, has occurred because of the White House president’s wife. Laura Bush’s Burma fixation has put the policy establishment in a bind: The more the United States seeks to punish the regime, the more it undercuts its ability to promote political reforms in Burma, and the more its actions threaten to disrupt the lives of ordinary Burmese.

As then Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Daley told Congress in late 2003, many garment workers made jobless by U.S. sanctions "have entered the flourishing illegal sex and entertainment industries" in Burma or neighboring states.

While prohibiting new investment by American citizens or entities, Washington has protected the business interests of Chevron Corp., which acquired a stake in the Yadana natural-gas export project in Burma when it bought Unocal Corp. in 2005. Because Unocal’s investment in the project, in which France’s Total SA holds the biggest stake, predated the imposition of U.S. sanctions, Chevron has used a grandfather clause to stay put in Burma — one of the few large Western companies left there.

The junta, through its remarkable shortsightedness, has only aided Laura Bush’s activism. Its crackdown last September on monk-led protests — which, according to a U.N. special rapporteur’s report, left at least 31 dead — invited a new round of U.S.-inspired international sanctions. The regime not only continues to detain Suu Kyi, now 62, but also has isolated itself from the public by moving the national capital to remote Nay Pyi Taw, located between Rangoon and Mandalay.

The big losers have been Burma’s 58 million people, bearing the brunt of the sanctions, while the only winner is China, a friend of every pariah regime.

Democracy offers the only path to bringing enduring stability to diverse Burma. Genuine participatory processes are necessary to promote ethnic reconciliation in a country that has been at war with itself since its 1948 independence. While the ethnic Burmans, of Tibetan stock, constitute the majority, the non-Burman nationalities (including the Shan and the largely Christian Karen, the first to take up arms) make up one-third of the population.

The oversize Burmese military fancies itself as the builder of a united Burma. Given that ethnic warfare began no sooner than Japanese-trained General Aung San (Suu Kyi’s father) persuaded the smaller nationalities to join the union, the military has used the threat of Balkanization to justify its hold on politics.

It trumpets its successes between the late 1980s and early 1990s in crushing a four-decade-long communist insurgency and concluding ceasefire agreements with other underground groups, with just a few outfits left in active resistance. The period since has been viewed by the military as a time to begin state-building, while to the opposition it has been an unending phase of political repression.

Given Burma’s potent mix of ethnicity, religion and culture, democracy can serve as a unifying and integrating force, as in India. After all, Burma cannot be indefinitely held together through brute might. But make no mistake: The seeds of democracy will not take root in a stunted economy, battered by widening Western sanctions.

The junta restored the traditional name Myanmar for nationalistic reasons as a break from the colonial past. But Myanmar, meaning the Burman land, carries an ethnic connotation, and Suu Kyi’s party continues to use the name Burma. A name change ought to have the imprimatur of an elected government citing a national consensus in favor.

Sanctions have sent Burmese society into a downward spiral of poverty and discontent while strengthening the military’s political grip. Today, under the cumulative weight of sanctions, Burma has come full circle: Its 74-year-old senior general, the ailing and delusional Than Shwe, an astrology aficionado, has amassed powers to run a virtual one-man dictatorship in Ne Win-style.

Burma illustrates that sanctions can hurt those they are supposed to protect, especially when they are enforced for long and shut out engagement.

Such is Laura Bush’s ability not only to influence U.S. policy but also to orchestrate an international campaign in which she announced Dec. 10 that "India, one of Burma’s closest trading partners, has stopped selling arms to the junta."

New Delhi has neither confirmed or denied that. Who can contradict a first lady whose fury on Burma reputedly flows from a meeting with a Karen rape victim and information from a relative with an erstwhile connection to that country?

If the Burmese are to win political freedoms, they need to be first freed from sanctions that rob them of jobs, cripple their economic well-being and retard civil-society development. It is a growing civil society that usually sounds the death knell of a dictatorship.

Years of sanctions have left Burma bereft of an entrepreneurial class but saddled with the military as the only functioning institution — to the extent that the spokesperson for Suu Kyi’s party admits the military will have an important role to play in any future government.

To avert looming humanitarian catastrophes, the same international standard applicable to autocratic, no-less-ruthless regimes in next-door China, Bangladesh and Laos should apply to Burma — engage, don’t isolate.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

 

The Japan Times: Friday, March 14, 2008
(C) All rights reserved

Rudderless Rudd’s uranium-export decision throws a spanner in Indian goal

Posted on by
Reply

Rudd’s uranium reversal irks India

Bruce Loudon, New Delhi | March 03, 2008

The Australian

KEVIN Rudd was lashed yesterday by one of India’s most influential foreign affairs commentators over the Prime Minister’s ditching of his predecessor’s pledge to sell uranium to the emerging economic powerhouse.

Brahma Chellaney launched a searing denunciation of Mr Rudd’s "abstruse, retrograde ideology" over his reversal of a decision made last year by John Howard to sell uranium to India.

Mr Chellaney accused Mr Rudd in The Asian Age newspaper of striking "a jarring note amid a growing convergence of strategic interests" between the two countries.

Under the headline "Rudd’s rudderless reversal", Mr Chellaney noted that Mr Rudd was the free world’s first Mandarin-speaking head of government, saying he "has made plain his intent to cosy up to the world’s largest autocracy, China, while nullifying an important decision that his predecessor took to help build a closer rapport with the world’s largest democracy."

The stridency of Mr Chellaney’s attack reflects the widespread annoyance at high levels in New Delhi over the Rudd Government’s reversal on the uranium issue.

The Indian Government was irked when, in January, it sent special prime ministerial envoy Shyam Saran to see Foreign Minister Stephen Smith in Perth and found itself being bluntly told – even though it had not asked – there would be no sale of Australian uranium to India.

Indian sources insist Mr Saran was taken aback by the minister’s forthright stance as he had gone to Perth only to brief Mr Smith on New Delhi’s negotiations with Washington over its civilian nuclear deal and specifically not to ask to buy Australian uranium.

"Chellaney is saying what many of us feel about the Rudd Government’s pathetic hypocrisy on this issue," one highly-placed official told The Australian yesterday.

The criticism of the Rudd Government is in sharp contrast to the significant strides made in Indo-Australian relations in the Howard years, which are praised by Mr Chellaney.

But in overturning the decision to sell uranium to India, Mr Chellaney says, Mr Rudd has been "notably regressive".

"Driven by misplaced non-proliferation zealotry, Rudd not only went ahead with cancelling Howard’s decision, but his Government also continues to parrot the same lame excuse, as if he has not read the Non-Proliferation Treaty text.

"In touting its ideological resolve to uphold the NPT, the Rudd Government wants to be more Catholic than the Pope. Far from the NPT forbidding civil exports to a non-signatory, the treaty indeed encourages the peaceful use of nuclear technology among all states.

"Rudd has no qualms about selling uranium to China but will not export to India, even though the latter is accepting what the former will not brook – stringent, internationally verifiable safeguards against diversion of material to weapons use."

Mr Rudd’s office would not be drawn on claims his Government had mishandled Australia’s relationship with India.

A spokesman for the Prime Minister said only that it remained government policy not to sell uranium to countries who had not signed the NPT.

Shadow foreign minister Andrew Robb said the Government’s handling of the relationship with India had been "clumsy".

Additional reporting: Paul Maley

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23308272-2702,00.html

The Butterfly Chase: Rearmament, not disarmament, looms large

Posted on by
Reply

Stop Chasing Illusions

 

Pursuing nuclear disarmament is a good pastime for retired men.

 

Brahma Chellaney

Times of India, March 11, 2008

 

Nearly a century after chemical arms were introduced in World War I and more than six decades following the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world is at the threshold of new lethal and precision weapons, as underlined by the ongoing research on lasers, information weapons, space-based platforms, anti-satellite weapons and directed energy systems. Technological forces are now shaping geopolitics and power equations in a way unforeseen before in history. 

 

We live in a Hobbesian world, with power coterminous with national security and success. The global power structure reflects this reality. Only countries armed with intercontinental-range weaponry are United Nations Security Council permanent members, while those seeking new permanent seats have regionally confined capabilities and thus are likely to stay condemned as mere aspirants. Japan, with one-tenth of the population, has a bigger economy than China, but the latter, because of its rising military prowess, gets more international respect.

 

The past century was the most momentous in history technologically, with innovations fostering not just rapid economic change, but bringing greater lethality to warfare. Consequently, the 20th century was the bloodiest. Weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and missiles came to occupy a central military role. In the new century, the advance of technology and the absence of relevant safeguards or regimes evoke possible scenarios of deadly information and space warfare.

 

Such are the challenges from the accelerated weaponization of science that instead of disarmament, rearmament today looms large on the horizon, with the arms race being extended to outer space. Take, for example, America’s February 20 destruction of a crippled satellite by missile strike. Having criticized China’s January 2007 anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon test — the first ASAT kill by any power in more than two decades — the US set out to be the first to knock out a space-based asset from a mobile platform at sea, in an operation that resembled shooting down an ICBM, except that the target was larger and easier to destroy.

 

In a Cold War-reminiscent tone, outgoing President Vladimir Putin last month vowed that Russia will field new strategic weapons because “a new arms race has been unleashed in the world”.  Alluding to the US pressing ahead with a missile shield in Eastern Europe and working on new warheads, Putin declared: “We didn’t start it … funnelling multibillions of dollars into developing weapon systems”. The same day, the Russian foreign minister raised the spectre of “hundreds of thousands of missile interceptors all over the world … in the foreseeable future”.

 

            Disarmament fell off the global agenda long ago, with the UN’s Conference on Disarmament (CD) bereft of real work for nearly 12 years now. Yet, some in India continue to chase illusions. More flattering attention has been paid in India than anywhere else to two newspaper articles written by four senior ex-US officials, who in office were votaries of unbridled nuclear might but who now, while peddling a nukes-free world as a distant goal akin to an invisible mountaintop, suggest modest steps for US forces (like changing the antediluvian Cold War posture), only to advocate more rigorous non-proliferation.

 

India has a rich history of floating disarmament proposals that come back and haunt it as non-proliferation pacts. It was India that put forth the ideas of an NPT and CTBT. Add to that its record of not acting when the time is right. Had it tested when it acquired a nuclear-explosive capability in the mid-1960s, it would have beaten the NPT trap. Had Indira Gandhi pressed ahead and not baulked after the May 1974 test, India would not have faced a rising tide of technology sanctions for the next quarter-century. No nation perhaps has paid a heavier price for indecision than India.

 

India’s priority today should its security, given that it still does not have a minimal, let alone credible, nuclear deterrent against China, which is rapidly modernizing its arsenal. Yet India has placed its future deterrent capability at risk by concluding a nuclear deal with the US whose touted energy benefits are dubious and dispensable. It is also unable to control its proverbial itch to win brownie points, as shown by its recent submission of a seven-point proposal to the deadlocked CD, calling for, among other things, the outlawing of nukes. Such ardour is baffling, given that India imports virtually all its conventional weapons and is in no position to deter China conventionally in the long run.

 

Pursuing disarmament is like chasing butterflies — enjoyable for some retired old men but never-ending and beyond the pale. Nuclear weapons, as the last US posture review stated, will continue to play a “critical role” because they possess “unique properties”. Until such time as nukes remain the premier mass-destruction technology, disarmament will stay a mirage. The Chemical Weapons Convention became possible only when chemical arms ceased to be militarily relevant for the major powers and instead threatened to become the poor state’s WMD. Considering the rapid pace of technological change, a new class of surgical-strike WMD could emerge, even as nuclear weapons, with their unparalleled destructive capacity, stay at the centre of international power and force.

 

The writer is a strategic affairs analyst.

 

© Times of India, 2008

A jarring note in fast-growing India-Australia ties

Posted on by
Reply

Rudd’s rudderless reversal

 

Australia’s new government needs to deal pragmatically with India after its ideologically driven policy reversal on uranium exports

 

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, March 1, 2008

The rapidly developing India-Australia relationship has been underscored by the various agreements reached in recent years — from a trade and economic framework to cooperation on defence and counterterrorism. India has emerged as Australia’s fastest-growing merchandise export market, even as an increasing number of Indian students enrol in Australian educational institutions (more than 65,000 last year alone).

 

Amid a growing convergence of strategic interests, however, new Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has struck a jarring note. Rudd, the free world’s first Mandarin-speaking head of government, has made public his intent to cosy up to the world’s largest autocracy, China, while nullifying an important decision his predecessor took to help build a closer rapport with the world’s largest democracy.

 

Before he was voted out of office last November after 11 years as prime minister, John Howard had agreed to sell uranium ore to both China and India. Rudd has no problem with uranium exports to Beijing but, in one of his first actions in office, scrapped Howard’s decision to sell yellowcake to New Delhi, although such transfers (unlike to China) were to be covered by stringent international and bilateral safeguards.

Rudd’s reversal — egged on by the anti-uranium export lobby within his Labour Party — closes the door on India even if the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers’ Group carves out an exemption for India from its rules. Considering that Australia holds the world’s largest uranium reserves and annually exports more than 10,000 metric tonnes of processed ore, the action undercuts India’s endeavour to prise open international civil nuclear trade. It thus represents a major setback to Indian diplomacy.

On some issues, Rudd has taken welcome steps — from ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on global warming (an action that leaves the United States isolated as the only industrialized country not to have done so) to seeking to open a new chapter in Australia’s troubled relations with its indigenous, still-marginalized peoples by offering a national apology for past wrongs, albeit without addressing the issue of compensation (which led one newspaper writer to say it meant, “Blackfellas get the words, the whitefellas keep the money”).

On India, however, Rudd’s approach hasn’t been forward-looking. Indeed, his justification for disallowing uranium exports has been notably regressive. Consider the following:

■ Rudd has linked Australia’s U-turn on uranium exports to India’s non-membership in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, although the NPT carries no prohibition on civil nuclear cooperation under safeguards with a state outside its fold.

While it is true the Labour Party had pledged to scrap uranium exports to India if voted to power, election rhetoric often gives way to sober judgement when in office. Given that the Labour’s hostility to exports was founded on a legally untenable argument — India’s staying out of the NPT — Rudd, as PM, ought to have reviewed that opposition in the context of Australia’s geopolitical interests.

Instead, driven by misplaced non-proliferation zealotry, Rudd not only went ahead with cancelling Howard’s decision, but his government also continues to parrot the same lame excuse, as if it has not read the NPT text. In the words of Foreign Minister Stephen Smith, “The current government … will not authorize the export of uranium to a country which is not a party to the NPT.”

 

In touting its ideological resolve to uphold the NPT, the Rudd government wants to be more Catholic than the Pope. Far from the NPT forbidding civil exports to a non-signatory, the treaty indeed encourages the peaceful use of nuclear technology among all states. All it requires is safeguards application, which its Article III (3) stipulates shall not hamper “international cooperation in the field of peaceful nuclear activities, including the international exchange of nuclear material and equipment for the processing, use of production of nuclear material for peaceful purposes in accordance with the provisions of this Article and the principle of safeguarding set forth in the Preamble of the Treaty.”

 

The NPT has no explicit or implicit injunction against civil cooperation with a non-signatory. Rather, it enjoins its parties to positively facilitate “the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy” (Article IV) so long as safeguards are in place on all peaceful nuclear activity.

 

Any restriction on civil cooperation with a country like India is not in the NPT but in the revised 1992 rules of a US-led cartel, the NSG. The NSG has amended its rules more than once since it was secretly formed in 1974, and today its founder, America, has come full circle by conditionally proposing that the group exempt India from its no-military-facility rule intended for non-nuclear-weapons states.

■ The Rudd government has opened itself to accusations of hypocrisy by deciding not to sell Australian uranium but at the same time saying it could back an NSG exemption that would allow other suppliers to export yellowcake to India.

 

Canberra has been at pains to clarify that its policy reversal does not mean it will oppose an NSG rule-change for India. On that issue, in Smith’s words, “the Australian government has not come to a concluded view on those matters. We will give consideration to those matters and will do that in an orderly way, having listened to the views of the Indian government … and the U.S. government.” Canberra, in fact, has hinted it won’t obstruct an NSG waiver.

 

However, in rushing to abandon uranium exports to India — that too on the pretext of wishing to defend the NPT — the Rudd government made no similar effort to go through “an orderly way” and solicit the views of others.

More significantly, how can Canberra justify its policy reversal and yet hold out the promise of backing an NSG waiver? Strange as it seems, Canberra won’t export uranium to India but may end up backing an NSG exemption that would encourage other potential suppliers to do business with New Delhi and “weaken” Rudd’s much-loved NPT.

■ While emphasizing an internationalist approach in foreign policy, Rudd has sought to plough a lonely furrow on India.

In promoting Australia’s greater participation in multilateral institutions and agreements, Rudd’s foreign-policy catchwords have been inclusion and internationalism. He moved quickly to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and announce the withdrawal of Australia’s 550 combat troops in Iraq by mid-2008.

Yet the policy reversal on India stresses exclusion and embargo as the key words. Worse, it puts Australia in the unenviable position of having taken the lead to isolate a rising India at a time when all other powers are courting New Delhi.

The Rudd government’s justification, inopportunely, comes out as a red herring to not reconcile with India’s decade-old status as a nuclear-armed state. Rudd sees no contradiction in keeping Australia ensconced under American nuclear and conventional deterrence while refusing to accept India’s sovereign right to build nuclear security in a highly troubled neighbourhood without any breach of its legal commitments. In that sense, he unflatteringly presents himself in holier-than-thou colours.

Australia has derived important security and other benefits from its alliance with Washington, and Australian public opinion strongly supports the so-called Anzus pact. Pragmatic considerations have prompted Rudd, despite his party’s left-wing support base, to affirm the centrality of the alliance with the US and to keep the roughly 1,000 Australian troops in Afghanistan. He could have taken an equally practical view of India’s security dynamics.

■ Rudd has no qualms about selling uranium to China but will not export to India, even though the latter is accepting what the former will not brook — stringent, internationally verifiable safeguards against diversion of material to weapons use.

Howard sought to boost uranium exports, declaring in 2006 that Australia, with its abundant natural resources, “had the makings of an energy superpower” — a point highlighted by the fact that it already is the world’s largest coal exporter and is set to become the second-largest supplier of liquefied natural gas. As Howard put it, “With close to 40 per cent of the world’s known low-cost uranium deposits, for Australia to bury its head in the sand on nuclear energy is akin to Saudi Arabia turning her back on global oil developments.” At present, uranium makes up two-fifths of Australia’s energy exports in thermal terms.

Before it decided to export yellowcake to India, the Howard government finalized its uranium deal with China through two accords in 2006 — one a civil nuclear cooperation agreement and the other setting out the transfer terms. The uranium deal with India would have involved similar accords but on far more stringent terms because New Delhi has pledged to accept a host of legally irrevocable obligations that Beijing will not consider, including permanent international inspections on all civilian nuclear facilities.

While in China the civilian and military nuclear programmes overlap, India has, under the nuclear deal with the US, announced a watertight segregation of its civil and military parts. For Washington, the deal indeed has been a means to try and build, in the words of Australian analyst Robert Ayson, “a de facto NPT around India,” with the Howard government conditioning exports to New Delhi’s implementation of the various elements of the Indo-US deal. By contrast, exports to China will carry “zero real controls,” as the Australian Financial Review put it.

Yet the Rudd government has reversed policy on India while displaying the same zealousness as its predecessor to sell uranium ore to China. Canberra has turned a blind eye to the fact that, in contrast to New Delhi’s squeaky-clean record in not proliferating nuclear technology to other states, Beijing for long has played proliferation as a strategic card, with US intelligence identifying it as the “most significant supplier” of items and technology related to weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Given that Beijing is rapidly modernizing its nuclear arsenal and maintaining an opaque nuclear posture, Howard and now Rudd have overlooked concerns that uranium exports are likely to result in the diversion of more resources for China’s nuclear-weapons programme. Rather than insist that the International Atomic Energy Agency verifiably ensure that Australian uranium is used for nuclear-power generation, not for weapons purposes, Canberra has merely gone by the peaceful-use promise of a country that stands out for its egregious WMD record.

This is manifest from the two accords — one titled, “Agreement Between the Government of Australia and the Government of the People’s Republic of China on the Transfer of Nuclear Material,” and the other headlined, “Agreement Between the Government of Australia and the Government of the People’s Republic of China for Cooperation in the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy.”

The accords do not require Beijing to go beyond the largely-symbolic inspections it accepts under a “voluntary safeguards” agreement with the IAEA. The facilities under “voluntary safeguards” can be withdrawn from inspection at any time of Beijing’s choosing. Also, Australian uranium will first go to Chinese fuel-fabrication facilities, which remain outside IAEA safeguards. As Annex B of the transfer accord states, it is only after “conversion to uranium hexafluoride” that China will use Australian-origin material in designated plants that may be subject to token IAEA inspections.

The new Rudd-introduced duality in export policy unfortunately signals that Canberra is more concerned about India’s rudimentary nuclear-weapons capability than with the growing sophistication and reach of China’s nuclear arsenal.

Indo-Australian cooperation can be elevated to close strategic bonds through forward-thinking pragmatism. Abstruse, retrograde ideology, as manifest in the uranium-exports reversal, can hardly aid Australian interests with a country that will remain a significant power in the Indian Ocean and a fast-growing market for Australian minerals and fuels. Rudd, with the China fixation he carries from his diplomatic career, needs to demonstrate a more-balanced appreciation of Australia’s long-term interests in an Asia that is unlikely to countenance any power’s hegemonic ambitions. Before long, he will have to deal pragmatically with the realities of Indian power without his NPT reflexes.

© Asian Age, 2008

Australia-India-Japan-U.S. Quadrilateral Initiative: An idea that will survive the current vicissitudes

Posted on by
Reply
Obstacles to overcome in the development of a concert of Asia-Pacific democracies
By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times, February 20, 2008

The new Australian government is signaling a wish to turn its back on an initiative bringing four major democracies of the Asia-Pacific together, even as U.S. Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has vowed to institutionalize that venture.

Whatever its future, the nascent Australia-India-Japan-U.S. “Quadrilateral Initiative” symbolizes the likely geopolitical lineup in the coming years.

At a time when a qualitative reordering of power is reshaping international equations, major players in the Asia-Pacific are playing down the risk that contrasting political systems could come to constitute the main geopolitical dividing line, potentially pitting a China-led axis of autocracies against a constellation of democracies. The refrain of the players is that pragmatism, not political values, would guide their foreign-policy strategy. Yet the new Great Game under way plays up regime character as a key driver.

Ordinarily, the readiness to play by international rules ought to matter more than regime form. But regime character often makes playing by the rules difficult.

For example, as revealed by a new book, “China’s Great Leap,” edited by Minky Worden, China won the right to host the 2008 Olympics on the plea that awarding the Games would help it improve its human-rights record. Instead, Beijing has let loose new political repression in the runup to the Games. But just as the 1936 Berlin Olympics set the stage for Nazi Germany’s collapse, the 2008 Games could help trigger radical change in China.

It is established that democracies rarely go to war with each other, even though democratic governments may not be more wedded to peace than autocracies.

Today, China’s best friends are fellow autocracies, including pariah states, while those seeking to forestall power disequilibrium in the Asia-Pacific happen to be on the other side of the values-based divide. In that light, political values could easily come to define a new geopolitical divide.

What may seem implausible globally, given America’s lingering tradition of propping up dictators in the Muslim world, is thus conceivable in the Asia-Pacific theater as a natural corollary to the present geopolitics. But for the divergent geopolitical interests at play, the differing political values would not matter so much.

After all, a major challenge in Asia is to banish the threat of hegemony by any single power (as Europe has done) so that greater political understanding and trust could be built. This challenge pits two competing visions.

On one side is the mythical “Middle Kingdom” whose foreign policy seeks to make real the legend that drives its official history — China’s centrality in the world. Its autocrats believe that in their calculus to make China a “world power second to none,” gaining pre-eminence in Asia is an essential step. On the other side is the interest of many Asian nations and outside powers in a cooperative order founded on power equilibrium.

It was China that took the lead in 2001 to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to help unite it with Eurasian strongmen in a geopolitical alliance. Designed originally to bring the Central Asian nations — the so-called Stans — under the Chinese sphere of influence, the SCO is today shaping up as a potential “NATO of the East.”

Yet, when Australia, India, Japan and the United States last year started the Quadrilateral Initiative, Beijing was quick to cry foul and see the apparition of an “Asian NATO.” A Chinese diplomatic protest to each Quad nation followed.

Through sustained diplomatic pressure, mounted on the back of growing economic clout, Beijing has sought to wilt the Quad. A new opening has come with the Mandarin-speaking Kevin Rudd being elected Australia’s prime minister.

Rudd is so mesmerized by his Mandarin fluency that he feels an inexorable itch to cozy up to Beijing.

In a strange spectacle, the Rudd administration has proclaimed it will sell uranium to Beijing (without adequate safeguards against diversion to weapons use) but not to New Delhi, even if the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG) carves out an exemption for India. The previous John Howard government, which was in office for 11 years, had concluded uranium deals with both China and India.

Rudd’s reason for overturning the decision to export uranium to India is that New Delhi has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. As Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith explained at a Feb. 1 news conference in Tokyo, “The current government will not authorize the export of uranium to a country which is not a party to the NPT.”

That rationale is seriously flawed: The NPT has no explicit or implicit injunction against civil cooperation with a non-signatory. The treaty actually encourages the peaceful use of nuclear technology among all states. All it requires is safeguards application, which its Article III (3) stipulates shall not hamper “international cooperation in the field of peaceful nuclear activities, including the international exchange of nuclear material and equipment for the processing, use of production of nuclear material for peaceful purposes in accordance with the provisions of this Article and the principle of safeguarding set forth in the Preamble of the Treaty.”

Any restriction on civil cooperation with a country like India is not in the NPT, but it is in the revised 1992 rules of the U.S.-led NSG, a cartel that was formed outside the framework of international law and the United Nations. The Rudd government, interestingly, has not come out against the proposed NSG exemption for India. On that issue, in Smith’s words, “the Australian government has not come to a concluded view on those matters. We will give consideration to those matters and will do that in an orderly way, having listened to the views of the Indian government and the U.S. government.”

In rushing to abandon uranium exports to India — that too on the pretext of wishing to uphold the NPT — Rudd, however, made no similar effort to go through “an orderly way” and solicit the views of others. Indeed, underscoring a holier-than-thou attitude, Rudd, despite his leftwing political base, sees no contradiction in pledging to keep Australia ensconced under American nuclear and conventional deterrence, yet refusing to accept India’s sovereign right to build nuclear security in a highly troubled neighborhood without any breach of its legal commitments.

With the Australian economic boom being driven by Beijing’s ravenous resource imports — which helped China to overtake Japan and the U.S. as Australia’s largest trading partner in 2007 — the Howard government wasn’t exactly enthused by the Quad proposal when it was first floated. Beijing had already taken a dim view of Canberra’s U.S.-backed bilateral and trilateral defense tie-ups with Tokyo. But Howard was persuaded by the U.S. to take part in the initiative.

Now the Quad’s future has come under a cloud following the Rudd administration’s statements. With the visiting Chinese foreign minister by his side, Smith said in Canberra on Feb. 5: “One of the things which caused China concern last year was a meeting of that strategic dialogue plus India, which China expressed some concern with. And I indicated when I was in Japan that Australia would not be proposing to have a dialogue of that nature.” Smith later called the Quad meeting of last May, held on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) gathering in Manila, “a one-off” affair.

Australia’s growing wariness, admittedly, may be no different from India’s. After having called liberal democracy “the natural order of social and political organization in today’s world,” Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on the eve of his China visit last month that the Quad “never got going.” Even the U.S. has publicly downplayed the initiative, whose real architect, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who had spoken of an “arc of freedom and prosperity” stretching across Asia, was driven out of office last fall.

Yet, it is significant that the Quad staged weeklong war games in the Bay of Bengal five months ago, roping in Singapore. Those war games came close on the heels of major military exercises involving practically all SCO members in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region. The Quad was not intended to be a formal institution. McCain, however, in a recent article published in Foreign Affairs, said: “As president, I will seek to institutionalize the new quadrilateral security partnership among the major Asia-Pacific democracies: Australia, India, Japan and the United States.” McCain also has larger ambitions: “A ‘worldwide League of Democracies’ that could be a “unique handmaiden of freedom.”

The more modest Quad, founded on the historically valid hypothesis of democratic peace, is supposed to serve as an initial framework to promote security dialogue and interlinked partnerships among major Pacific Rim democracies. Such collaboration is already being built.

As an idea, the Quad will not only survive the current vicissitudes, but it also foreshadows what is likely to come. With the Asia-Pacific region becoming more divided in the face of conflicting strategic cultures, major democracies are likely to be increasingly drawn together to help advance political cooperation and stability through a community of values.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan” (HarperCollins).
The Japan Times: Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2008
(C) All rights reserved

U.S.-India nuclear deal’s future cloudy

Posted on by
Reply

Rice does not Hyde the truth

The US secretary of state has laid bare the centrality of the controversial Hyde Act. The Nuclear Suppliers’ Group, like the U.S., is likely to grant India, at best, only a narrow, conditional waiver from its rules.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, February 18, 2008

However inadvertently, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in one stroke, has deflated New Delhi’s public claims through her unequivocal assurance to Congress that any exemption for India from the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group rules will be “completely consistent with the obligations of the Hyde Act.” As Rice put it, “We will support nothing with India in the NSG that is in contradiction to the Hyde Act.”

The reality is that no administration in Washington can ignore the Hyde Act, a 41-page omnibus of assorted India-specific conditions, several of them unrelated to civil nuclear matters. Even the bilateral 123 Agreement India has concluded with the U.S. complies with the provisions of the Hyde Act, with Undersecretary Nicholas Burns publicly complimenting New Delhi for being “good enough to negotiate on this basis — that anything we did had to fall within and respect the legal guidelines that Congress had set forth”.

Yet, to deflect rising criticism at home, New Delhi resourcefully came up with a variety of explanations — from the assertion that Hyde Act has binding and non-binding sections to the claim that the 123 Agreement, once ratified, will override all other laws. It was beguilingly stated that the Hyde Act, as an American law, cannot bind India, leaving out the more-relevant point that it binds the supplier-state to enforce tough, legislatively decreed conditions on the recipient.

What Rice has stated is just a reiteration of what the Hyde Act obligates Washington to do in the NSG — to ensure that the 45-nation, US-led cartel does not in any way dilute the India-directed conditions prescribed by the Act. But because few have read that long, intricate legislation, her words serve as a much-needed reality check for India.

Long before the Hyde Act was passed, the Bush administration submitted to the NSG in March 2006 a draft “pre-decisional” proposal to carve out an India-related exemption. Even that draft, mirroring the terms of the official bill the administration had submitted days earlier to Congress for an India waiver, sought to subject New Delhi to a lasting test ban.

Section 4 of the US draft to the NSG proposed that civil trade with New Delhi be allowed “as long as the participating government intending to make the transfer is satisfied that India continues to fully meet all of the aforementioned non-proliferation and safeguards commitments, and all other requirements of the NSG guidelines.” One of the commitments specified was for India to indefinitely “continue its moratorium on nuclear testing.” Another commitment was for India to embrace international inspections “in perpetuity,” leaving no room for corrective measures if India was faced with a Tarapur-style fuel cut-off.

Once the Hyde Act was enacted, the US draft to the NSG, of course, got overtaken by that legislation and its grating stipulations, including a clear prohibition on the transfer of enrichment, reprocessing and heavy-water equipment or technology even under safeguards, an immediate termination of all nuclear trade with India if it tested, and the US enforcement of additional “end-use” and “fallback” safeguards.

As a result, Washington is now obliged to ensure that any NSG rule-change for India is consistent with those congressionally mandated conditions. One of the Hyde Act prerequisites for the nuclear deal to win congressional ratification is that any NSG rule-change mirror the scope and rigour of the India-specific standards of compliance the legislation has set. The law indeed demands that an NSG exemption for India neither be less stringent than what it has prescribed nor take effect before the US Congress has given its final consent to the deal.

The legislation’s clause-by-clause explanatory notes state that no NSG decision should “disadvantage US industry by setting less strict conditions … than those embodied in the conditions and requirements of this Act.” The concern is that if the NSG fails to set US-style conditions for civil nuclear commerce with India, New Delhi could do an end-run around Washington and buy reactors from Russia and France, which are overly eager to bag lucrative contracts. The Act asserts the US “possesses the necessary leverage” in the NSG to “ensure a favourable outcome.”

So, as and when the NSG takes up the India case, the US is certain to back an exemption soaked in Hyde Act-style conditions. As Rice acknowledged, “We’ll have to be consistent with the Hyde Act or I don’t believe we can count on the Congress to make the next step.” But it will be virtually impossible for an NSG exemption to replicate all the Hyde Act stipulations. That Act, a unique, country-specific nuclear law, comes not only with preconditions but also post-conditions.

The Act mandates that after the deal passes congressional muster and takes effect, the post-implementation conditions will become operational — from an annual presidential certification to ensuring India’s “full compliance” with a non-nuclear cartel like the Missile Technology Control Regime. The president, besides having to submit a comprehensive “implementation and compliance report” within 180 days of the deal’s entry-into-force, is required to cyclically certify that India is continuing to meet all the stipulated conditions.

As a large, unwieldy association that meets behind closed doors, the NSG is in no position to emulate the procedures set by the Hyde Act, whose intent is to keep India on good behaviour by subjecting continued civil commerce to congressional oversight and overtly hanging the Damocles’ sword of cessation of cooperation. But the NSG, under American persuasion, is likely to grant New Delhi an exemption that, like the US waiver, is conditional and partial, meeting the supplier-states’ commercial interest to win multibillion-dollar reactor contracts, yet without giving India access to civil fuel-cycle technology or equipment.

If New Delhi presses ahead with the deal, the poorly-negotiated 123 Agreement is going to come to haunt it. The outcome of the NSG deliberations would be influenced by the several conditions India has willingly embraced in that accord.

These include: (i) the supplier’s right to seek the return of transferred material and items if it determines the recipient is in breach of any non-proliferation commitment; (ii) New Delhi’s grant of an open-ended right to the supplier to suspend supplies forthwith simply by issuing a one-year termination notice; (iii) India’s agreement to route not just spent fuel of US-origin but all “foreign nuclear material” through a new dedicated reprocessing facility that will take years to complete; (iv) instead of securing the right to reprocess upfront, India is to negotiate a separate agreement with the US on reprocessing-related “arrangements and procedures” after the new facility has been built; (v) in the absence of an enforceable link between perpetual international inspections and perpetual fuel supply, India’s much-touted right to “corrective measures” has been rendered cosmetic, with the accord forbidding the lifting of safeguards in any situation, even if the supplier cut off fuel supply; and (vi) the recipient placing itself at the mercy of the supplier also by not insisting on a provision, as in the Japan-US 123 Agreement, for an international arbitral tribunal to deal with any dispute.

It is because of the flawed 123 Agreement that India finds itself on the back-foot in the negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Having failed in the 123 Agreement to secure a binding fuel-supply assurance or a spelled-out right to corrective steps, New Delhi has sought ornamental concessions from the IAEA in the safeguards accord so as to be able to play to the public gallery at home. These include a cosmetic reference to assured fuel supply in the preamble and a dubious right to take corrective measures short of withdrawal from safeguards.

The pressure now is to get India to speedily conclude a perpetual safeguards accord with the IAEA on the terms the Agency is seeking to dictate. Once that happens, India will have little role, other than as a bystander, in the NSG and congressional processes.

© Asian Age, 2008

Australia reverses its decision to export uranium ore to India

Posted on by
Reply

Uranium woes

Australia’s U-turn on uranium exports to India represents a serious setback to the Indian drive to open up international civil nuclear trade.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, February 16, 2008

New Delhi has cited a pressing need to source natural uranium from overseas as a key driver of its nuclear deal with the United States. Yet, when the new Labour Party-led government in Australia conveyed its decision last month not to export uranium to India, New Delhi did not react. Indeed, even as Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s administration publicly defends its reversal of the previous Liberal-led government’s agreement to sell uranium to India, mum is the word from New Delhi.

The uranium deal was to involve a separate safeguards accord between Canberra and New Delhi, along with a civil nuclear cooperation agreement.

            How significant a setback for India this reversal constitutes can be seen from the fact that Australia, with 38 per cent of the world’s lowest-cost uranium reserves, currently accounts for 22 per cent of the global exports. “A doubling of uranium exports by 2015 is realistic,” according to an official Australian report released in late 2006, a decade after Canberra changed policy and approved new uranium-mining projects, two in South Australia state and a third in the Northern Territory.

Australia exports virtually all its production of processed uranium ore — also called U3O8, or yellowcake — because it has no real domestic needs in the absence of a single commercial nuclear power plant. Its U-turn eliminates a key potential supplier for India in a tight international uranium market, where demand is outstripping supply.

Global uranium demand now runs at about 80,000 metric tonnes per year, while mined output is roughly 60,000 tonnes, leaving a shortfall of around 20,000 tonnes, which has been met from utility stockpiles or from decommissioned nuclear warheads in Russia. Although Australia and Canada are the world’s main uranium producers, Russia became a major exporter by tapping the inventories it built up by down-blending highly enriched uranium extracted from retired Soviet-era weapons.

Today, in addition to the 439 nuclear power reactors operating around the world, a further 29 plants are under construction. France, a large uranium importer, has taken the lead to aggressively export power reactors, with President Nicolas Sarkozy turning into a nuclear salesman during a recent Middle Eastern tour, seeking to dispense reactors like charity.

Most commercial nuclear plants in operation or under construction are Light Water Reactors (LWRs), which are fuelled by low-enriched uranium (LEU), with a first fill normally demanding around 600 tonnes of natural uranium and each subsequent refuelling consuming about 200 tonnes.

The price for uranium ore in the world market has come under pressure due to several factors, including a drying up of the excess uranium supply from dismantled Soviet-era weapons, inventory constraints among power companies and rising international demand, which is projected to grow annually by about 5 per cent. Yellowcake sold for less than $12 a pound in 2003. Today its international price for immediate delivery — the so-called spot price — is $75 a pound. Uranium had actually raced to a record spot price of US$135 in 2007, on speculative pressure built up by hedge funds and other institutional investors. Although the price has fallen back, it is still far above long-term averages.

Add to this picture another element: The world’s proven uranium reserves are limited and unless breeder technology is embraced in a big way or the higher-grade ores reserved for military programmes are freed, the known uranium stocks are likely to last barely 85 years, according to estimates in the Red Book, jointly published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and International Atomic Energy Agency.

 

It is possible, however, as is happening in the oil-and-gas sector, that sustained high prices would spur more exploration, mining and supply. The IAEA believes high prices could help raise production by 10 per cent a year. But if the new supply takes years to enter the market, the price of uranium is bound to climb steeply, adding to the cost of nuclear-generated electricity, whose commercial attraction has already taken a beating through escalating equipment costs and manufacturing bottlenecks.

 

This has been highlighted by the Franco-German Areva’s time and cost overruns to complete Finland’s much-touted Olkiluoto 3 — the first nuclear plant to be built in Europe since 1991. With the $4 billion original price tag facing a $2.1 billion cost escalation, Olkiluoto 3 is set to become the most-expensive nuclear plant in history — a point missing from Sarkozy’s feverish sales pitch in India and elsewhere.

 

The significance of Australia’s withdrawal as an agreed supplier to India is also underscored by another fact: Uranium, unlike other commodities, does not trade on an open world market. Rather, in keeping with political controls, buyers and sellers negotiate contracts privately, with the spot price published every Friday by two market consultants, Ux Consulting and TradeTech. The spot market actually is very small, with most trading occurring through governmental intervention under long-term contracts, where prices typically are marked down. 

 

Nuclear trade indeed constitutes the world’s most politically-regulated and monopolized commerce, with a tiny cartel of state-guided firms controlling all reactor, fuel and component sales.

 

Against that background, the government-to-government deal that New Delhi had with the previous John Howard administration in Canberra was the only way to secure Indian access to the vast uranium resources of a country where BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, two of the world’s largest and diversified mining companies, are involved in uranium extraction. A new Canadian-run project at Honeymoon, South Australia, is scheduled to start annually producing 400 tonnes of U3O8 later this year, while $81 million is being spent to assess the possible doubling of production at the BHP Billiton-owned Olympic Dam — the world’s largest-known uranium deposit.

 

The Australian deal was also important because the world’s other major uranium producer, Canada, while agreeing to “pursue further opportunities for the development of the peaceful uses of atomic energy” with New Delhi, has yet to decide whether it would allow its mining firms to export yellowcake to India. Ottawa may be leaning toward a position to not come in the way of a Nuclear Suppliers’ Group exemption for India. The opening of its uranium exports, however, is a separate matter demanding a Cabinet decision to lift a 33-year-old ban on nuclear trade with India. Canada’s Cameco Corporation alone holds almost 20 per cent of the global uranium market.

 

Another supplier-state, Russia, is committed to meeting the LEU needs of reactors it is building or intends to construct in India. But beyond such fuel arrangements to underpin reactor exports, Moscow has little capacity to meet the supply needs of India’s indigenous, natural uranium-fuelled Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs). In fact, with its own nuclear-power industry beset with problems, Russia’s first two reactors in India are running far behind the agreed construction schedule.

 

Owing to its rising domestic demand, Russia’s uranium exports are set to peter out. Moscow is seeking not only to expand its nuclear-power programme, but also to build a new generation of nuclear warheads in response to the U.S. pressing ahead with a missile defence system in Eastern Europe and designing a new warhead for the D5 missiles, carried on Trident submarines. Two decades after the Berlin Wall’s fall, Russia and the U.S. together still retain some 25,000 nuclear weapons, including 6,000 long-range weapons deployed on hair-trigger alert.

 

Outgoing President Vladimir Putin last week vowed that Russia would field new strategic weapons because “a new arms race has been unleashed in the world.” Putin declared: “We didn’t start it … funnelling multibillions of dollars into developing weapon systems.” With rearmament looking certain, Russia has been aggressively seeking uranium imports.

 

Last September, Canberra signed an agreement with Moscow allowing Australian mining companies to export uranium ore for use in Russian power reactors. Moscow is also tapping the uranium resources of Kazakhstan, which has larger recoverable reserves than Canada but lags significantly in production and export. Foreign investment and technical assistance, however, helped expand uranium production in Kazakhstan by 25.3 per cent last year.

 

Kazakhstan’s state-owned agency, Kazatomprom, which controls all uranium exploration and mining, has roped in several foreign partners, including companies from Russia, France, Canada, China, the US, Japan and South Korea. Two joint mining ventures with Kazatomprom are to give Moscow access to 6,000 tonnes of U3O8 every year. Kazatomprom is also set to become the main uranium supplier to China, having agreed to export 2,000 tonnes per year from two mines in which Chinese state companies hold a 49 per cent stake. India, in contrast, figures nowhere in the Kazakh picture.

 

While America, France and Japan will remain the world’s three largest uranium importers, the yellowcake needs of China, Russia and India are set to expand.

 

India’s uranium crunch is self-made. Despite new deposits having been discovered in Andhra Pradesh, Meghalaya and elsewhere, the central governments between 1991 and 1998 starved the nuclear programme of necessary funds, crippling uranium projects and other expansion plans. As nuclear chief Anil Kakodkar publicly admitted last October, “The present fuel demand and supply mismatch would not have arisen had these projects been pursued in the same spirit with which Dr. Homi Bhabha started activities at Jaduguda” — the site of India’s first uranium mine and mill.

According to the Red Book, India has 64,000 tonnes of reasonably assured uranium reserves and an estimated additional 30,000 tonnes in situ — sufficient to meet the current modest demand for long.  At present, all mining and milling is done in Jharkhand state, at Jaduguda and Bhatin (since 1967), Narwapahar (since 1995) and Turamdih (since 2002).  Last year, India’s first open-cut mine was commissioned at Banduhurang (Jharkhand), along with a new mill at Turamdih. Two new Jharkhand mines are coming up at Bagjata and Mohuldih.

Despite environmental clearances, however, the opening of new mines in Andhra Pradesh and Meghalaya has been held up by grassroots activism over land-acquisition and rehabilitation issues and other concerns. In Andhra, the Lambapur-Peddagattu project in Nalgonda district is building one open-cut and three small underground mines, while an underground mine and a mill are to be developed at Tummalapalle in Kadapa district. In Meghalaya, uranium is to be mined at Domiasiat-Mawthabah and Nongstin.

Australia, unlike distant Canada or landlocked Kazakhstan with no freight corridor to India, would have been New Delhi’s preferred uranium supplier.

Canberra’s policy reversal leaves India on shaky ground. In the absence of a single committed long-term supplier of yellowcake, can New Delhi proceed to permanently place eight indigenous power reactors under external inspection or begin to import plants of a type that are going to be perpetually dependent on foreign fuel? And will it still be ready to assume international obligations of a kind that no nuclear-weapons state has accepted thus far?

 

© Asian Age, 2008