N o V a s c I e n c e p u b L i s h e r s, I n c
part of the indigenous population There are also some businessmen
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part of the indigenous population There are also some businessmen
coming from South Korea. In August 1992, the Hyundai» Company deputed 100 specialists to begin joint prospecting and mining tin with the «Dalgeologia» amalgamation. The South Korean company will invest $1 billion, expecting this venture to pay back in some 9 10 years Experts expect that by 1993 the world price of tin will nse from todays (August 1992) $6.6 thousand to $8.3 thousand per tonne. A great deal changed in the Far East in 1992 with the lift of restric tions for entry of foreigners. Vladivostok has now become one of three Russian cities (the other two being Yekatennburg and Novosibirsk) where France has opened her Trade Representation In Vladivostok there is a US Consulate, an Australian trade mission, a South Korean Trade Promotion Corporation. Vladivostok may be the first city in Russia where traffic of the left side of the road should be introduced: streets are filled with so many used cars imported from Japan, that our «LADA» look totally out of place. And the people are clad from head to foot in clothes made in China. After the division of the property of the former USSR the most up to date ships remained in the Baltic and the Black Seas .The principal shipbuilding yards and specialized ports are there too. Now, 200 years after the Emperor Peter the Great, we shall have to cut a northern win dow not to Europe, but, in the first place, to countries of Asia and the Pacific area. 66 George Vachnadze It is quite possible that we shall have to set up another free econom ic zone Primorski region littoral with civilian ports Vanino and Sovetskaya Gavan and with Postovaya and Zapadnaya bays which are now being handed over by naval units stationed there to the civilian authorities. There is enough load to be rolled to Europe by the Amur Baikal Railway, and our clients from Europe and Asia wish to ship their stuff in containers from Primorye, and the infrastructure of ports is not bad, and foreign investors are swarming up with ready money. But everything is at a standstill. Russian authorities cannot as yet provide legal guarantees for pro tecting foreign investments, whereas they eagerly take from our own entrepreneurs and state organizations the greater part of the foreign exchange they earn. The balance of forces between the Kremlin centre and the Russian province is being tipped in favour of the latter. And the Far East can scarcely be described as a province. The great majority of economic ties and promising interests of the. Far Eastern region and Siberia are with in the Pacific area. With opening our borders to foreign contracts, many previous connections (when, e.g. fresh tomatoes and preserved vegeta bles were shipped to Vladivostok from Bulgaria) with Europe became unprofitable, because they had been maintained by Moscow artificially. In 1992 Far Eastern economic cooperation association was formed to cover a lot of other territories, such as Buryatia, Yakutia, the Kamchatka and Sakhalin regions, the Jewish Autonomous Region and the Chukotka autonomous district. It may well be that Kazakhstan and other Central Asian republics will join in Under such pressure the Centre will have to give in and concede to anything. The notion of a sep arate Russian Far Eastern state is no chimera. In the 1920s there was a republic with such a name In 1992 four areas Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, the Kamchatka peninsula and the Island of Sakhalin claim the name The latter is on the very outskirts of Russia, and yet the press devotes more attention to it than to any other province of the federation. Following St Petersburg, Sakhalin in spnng 1992 and with the help of Americans obtained an autonomous space telephone station which now connects the island with the rest of the world, and it is at the time when practically every trunk call from Russia with any foreign country (except those making up the Commonwealth of Independent States) has to be channelled through Moscow. The 15 of March 1993 is the deadline for opening in Yuzhno Sakhalinsk (the island’s centre) the first m Siberia and the Far East an international 4 star hotel to accommodate 200 guests. The deal with the Japanese company (that is building the hotel) has already brought Sakhalin’ s mayor s office $20 million for the land sold to build the hotel on. Surprisingly, the biggest and most modern building in Yuzhno Sakhalinsk houses, since 1992, not the local authorities but represen 67 Russia’s Hotbeds of Tension tative offices of indigenous and foreign entrepreneurial structures All the companies have the computer communication with their counter parts in Moscow (the Centre of International Trade) and m the rest of the world. Sakhalin has embarked upon the path to free market And at the same time its authorities threaten to secede from Moscow, should the Kremlin decide to give over to Japan the Southern Kuril Islands, stretch ing from the Japanese island of Hokkaido to the huge Kamchatka penin sula. Artyom Tarasov, Russian MP stated in early 1991 that the USSR President M Gorbachev had agreed to hand over to Japan four disputed islands for $200 billion Gorbachev was appalled and the procurator general (Attorney general) of the USSR demanded that the MP be sued for insulting the honour and dignity of the President. However, 1992 already witnessed senous discussions in Moscow of compromises in the dispute with Japan about the islands vis a vis $2.5 billion credit that Tokyo would grant Russia. 68 George Vachnadze A ridiculous drop from 200 billion to 2 5 billion dollars!? Returning the islands annexed by force to their onginal and legitimate owner is to make a compromise with the demands of morality and justice: it is nit fortuitous that the Japanese were so insistent in their claims for their «Northern Temtones». Kurils, Shakhalin and Kamchatka Are Invaluable. For Russia the loss of four southern Kuril Islands would, economically, mean a reduc tion of fish catch by one third all over the Far East. Together with Iturup and the Habomais Japan may acquire a 200 mile zone in the sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific Ocean. The South Kunl fishing area annually yields 1.5 million tonnes of walleye (Alaska) pollack, iwashi sardines, all varieties of salmon, crab, mackarel, scomber, Pacific skipper, shnmp and laminaria (cf all the Baltic states catch 350 tonnes). All this wealth is worth not less than $2 million annually The Kunl Islands give Russia half the amount of lami naria it uses as a raw matenal for obtaining drugs for the radiation dis ease. The biological and mineral reserves of the islands proper are esti mated to cost $44 billion Properly developed, the South Kunl Islands can bnng trillions of dollars income. The islands are on the migration route of salmon and other kinds of fish and the loss of the islands will mean uncountable and irreparable losses to affect the entire Far Eastern area. The South Kunl shelf situated on the faults of earth crust whence streams of gases and various salts surface up to mix with coastal waters, thus activating the productivity of microorganisms. This accounts for the fact that though millions of tonnes of fish are caught here, yet the amount of it is not depleted. Before long tidal power plants will be built in the straits between the Kunl Islands Besides in the southernmost part of the Southern Kurils navigation is feasible all the year round, since one of the straits never freezes This is extremely important for Russia because if she loses the islands she will have to pay hard curren cy for the passage of the ships through these straits. The handing over to Japan her so called «Northern Territories» may become a bargain of the century in the field of real estate. But these beautiful, though remote, islands in the Northwestern part of the Pacific Ocean cannot fetch a good enough pnce, and, therefore cannot be sold because nobody can pay us the actual price. These islands have gold, silver and other noble metals and plenty of volcanoes (19 on the island of Iturup alone), hot geysers and sandy beaches «We just can’t give away this wealth», said Russia’s president Yeltsin after visiting the islands. On the whole Yeltsin is believed to be inclined to pass on this cumbersome problem to be decided by the next generation of Russia’s leaders. Another leader that we had Mr.. Nikita Khrushchev, back in 1956 was apparently prepared to return to the Japanese the coveted temtones by saying: «These islands were forsaken and were used only by fisher men and by our armed forces». 69 Russia’s Hotbeds of Tension The Southern Kuril Islands used to be Russian until 1855, when they went over to Japan, and after World War II, according to the Yalta arid Potsdam agreements, Japanese lost them to Russia again. There are grounds for endless arguments in this case, but there is the princi ple of inviolability of borders which is equally important for the whole world. We may deeply mourn the facts that the Emperor Nicholas I has sold Alaska to the USA and Khrushchev has made a present of the Crimea to the Ukraine, but that is all we can possibly permit ourselves to do. if Japanese are so fervently insistent and cannot help it, we may lease these islands and even other territories to them for a long period of time without officially altering the state borders of Russia. If this were done, the life of the population (47000) who now have to live in delapidated wooden barracks and stone houses would magically change. The islands have no aborigines: the local aina and 17000 Japanese were deported to Japan by Soviet military command bark in 1948. Under Gorbachev, Japan was several times offered a compromise: turning four South Kuril islands into an international wildlife preserve with a national park and recreation area attached to it. Larger and, all the more so, smaller islands and islets, uninhabited today are the mat ing places for seals and the most valuable fur bearing sea otters. They also house large and clamorous colonies of birds. The Japanese used to possess Southern Kurils close to 100 years and Southern Sakhalin 40 years. They wired electricity all over the town of Yuzhno Kurilsk and all the other townships and settlements on the island of Kunashir, and maintained in an excellent shape its ramified network of dirt roads, airstrips, the railroad, the wharves and piers, the collieries with coal washeries, the logging areas and fish canneries. During perestroika, i.e. at the end of the 1980s even frozen fish could be obtained in Sakhalin shops only for special food coupons. Even now the huge island has not a single fish market. During the entire peri od of Soviet power only fish canneries have been built on the island, while the private entrepreneurs using their savings and credits have built 30 such only in 1991. Now Sakhalin has 200 private shops. Non professional fishing and sale of the fish to the population by profession al fishermen were prohibited until 1992. Practically all the food is imported here from the mainland. The Governor of the Sakhalin oblast, Valentin Fyodorov, a former professor of economics in Moscow, having lost all hopes to build capital ism in a separate area, suggests setting up a joint Russian Japanese «special economic zone» involving the Southern Kuril Islands, the Island of Sakhalin and a portion of a Japanese island of Hokkaido without, however, altering the state borders. And as the first step he suggests establishing free entry into either country in that area without a visa. However, both in Russia and Japan these appeals fall on deaf ears. Prof. V.Fyodorov compares the potentials of Sakhalin with those of Taiwan with regards to the prospects of developing the beautiful shelf of 70 George Vachnadze the Pacific shores of Sakhalin. The reserves of oil and gas only at Piltun Astokh and Lunsk are about 100 million tonnes and 400 billion cubic metres, respectively, and these two fields account only for one tenth of the shelf territory. The federal government of the new Russia is ctically powerless to radically help the 700000 population of Sakhalin in their struggle to survive. In early 1992 in Moscow winners emerged in an international com petition among companies who desired to develop the Sakhalin Shelff with an area of 17000 sq.km. The indisputable winners were the «Mitshui» Company with their money and the «Marathon» and «McDermott» companies of the USA with their oil extracting technology. International bargaining concerning the running of the Sakhalin shelf has been under way for two decades at least and is still in the works. The most salient point of controversy is that some influential parties in Sakhalin would like to keep all the income from developing the shelf and channel it to meet the needs of the island, while Russia insists on retain ing her own control over all the mineral reserves all over the Federation. Especially so in view of the fact that the Khabarovsk area and the whole of the Primorye area are virtually suffocating in the grip of the fuel and the power supply crisis: in winter houses are not heated. The spring of 1992 was the time when demilitarization began on Sakhalin and the Southern Kuril Islands. Only from the latter a machine gun artillery division is to be relocated together with a fighter aircraft regiment numbering 28 MIG 23. The top secret Kamchatka peninsula has ceased being a closed fron tier area. Here the military have three aerodromes, a flotilla of atomic powered submarines, a huge testing ground where blank metal warheads fell during training launches of ICBMs. The peninsula’s population is under half a million. It has promising gold deposits, a lot of game and pre cious salmon, active volcanoes and warm springs, unique geysers, relict ferns and other exotic plants. In Magadan, beyond the Sea of Okhotsk gold reserves have already been depleted and in the years to come they will be completely exhausted. And that’s when the Kamchatka gold will be tapped. If they use the open cast method, and rip the ground with excavators it will be a death sentence to all varieties of salmon keta or chum salmon, soho silver salmon, sock eyed salmon and king or chinook salmon who come upstream to spawn in brooks near gold deposits. Mother nature is extremely vulnerable in the Far North. An aban doned path or car tracks get overgrown with grass only in 15 20 years. The air in Kamchatka is so clean that from the top of the volcano one can see the landscape 200 km away. The primeval nature of Kamchatka is of a much greater value than the momentary profits from gold drenched out from the earth so barbarically. Quite a stream of American and Japanese tourists who first appeared here in 1991 provides ample proof that reasonable civilized tourism and disciplined tourism can bring more income than gold mines. 71 Russia’s Hotbeds of Tension The USA, Japan and Russia share one ocean, same varieties of fish their indigenous populations are alike Aleutians, Itelmen, Indians. And severe living conditions in the far north are similar, too. It is only in such megapolises as Seatle, Tokyo, Moscow spring time means thawing snow and clean asphalt covering the streets. In Petropavlovsk. Kamchatskiy spring snow storms destroy houses. And in summer there are the tsuna mi Japan occupies the first place as an exporter to Kamchatka, while the USA exports ten times less Quite current now is the idea of reviving the old Russian American company, which in tsarist time was a decisive force in the vast region from Anchorage to the Hawaii. Currently containers for shipping personal belongings and furni ture are an item of the shortest supply in Kamchatka and Sakhalin People are fleeing these places making for the European part of Russia, though they do have a vivid example of how things can be set straight there is a joint venture which has been supplying Petropavlovsk Kamchatskiy with lavish amounts of food and other stuff The above city has a Soviet Dutch «Holkam» supermarket where goods are sold for rou bles and twice as cheap as one can buy them in private shops in Moscow. And it should be remembered that in Kamchatka people get almost dou ble pay as they will in the north. Grand Robbery. The chanty actions of the Holkam store are easily explained this joint venture gets the bulk of profits from the sale of fish and sea foods to Japan at dumping pnces Likewise, hundreds of fishing vessels of Russia, instead of delivering the catch to the home shores, go directly to Japanese ports or sell fish to foreign vessels in the sea. The Russian government has lost interest in the Maritime Territory and the army It has become profitable for the frontier guards to say that they have no fuel for their ships, which have allegedly low power engines. Poachers, both Russian and Japanese, have become the mas ters of the sea. They violate Russian state borders, the terms and fishing technologies, and intrude into preserve areas. The revenues of Russia from fishing exports plummeted after pnces of our fish sold abroad fell. According to official data, the catch itself diminished too But as the newspaper Rossia (Aug.26, 1992) wrote, the sales of fish abroad run into one billion dollars. This is depnving the state of even the theoretical possibility to retool the fishing fleet and fish processing enterpnses. In 1989 hundreds of thousands of tons of luxury fish were buned in Sakhalin because they could not be processed In the next one or two years we will scrap more than a half of fishing and nearly all processing vessels in the Far East which is great pity because the processing vessels of Dalmoreprodukt company produce the world s best crab preserves. There is a way out to build oyster and fish growing farms in ecologically safe regions Money has already been allocated for the creation of mussel farms in Krasnodar Territory and on the shores of the White Sea. 72 George Vachnadze Russia is dropping out of the club of sea powers. Under an agreement wit the USA, which has not yet been ratified by Russia the USA will get an area of over 16,000 square kilometres in the centre of the Benng Sea where our fishermen used to catch up to 150,000 tons offish annually. The situation in the Okhotsk Sea 97% of which is a part of Russia s 200 mile economic zone, has long been dramatic for us Only 3% of the sea are open for foreign fishermen, which officially catch up to 200,000 tons of fish there, but the fish inspection bodies of the Russian Far East believe that the actual figure is several times larger. Formally, Russia and Japan have not signed a peace treaty, although the Second World War ended 47 years ago. Japan will hardly return to Russia the 22 crates with gold coins from the treasury of the last Russian tzar, Nicholas II, which the White Army gave to Japan for safe keeping at the Manchuria station in November 1920. Together with interest, the crates now cost about 700 800 million dollars in current prices. Trying to save the Russian State Treasury from the Bolsheviks, the White Guards transported thousands of standard crates with gold from Petrograd (St. Petersburg] to Kazan, then further on to Samara, Chelyabinsk and the Far East. The gold was used to buy weapons and to maintain the army of Admiral Kolchak during the Civil War Regrettably, the bulk of Russia s gold fund (up to 10,000 tons of gold) were stolen from the Russian people in the first decade of this century and in the late 1980s. We can provide quite a few arguments from Russia s recent past to prove that Russians have a right to the Japanese island of Hokkaido and the US Hawaii But in practice it s the other way round Japan and China openly state that the Russian presence in Siberia and Maritime Territory is colonialist and imperialist Many Tokyo experts on Russia forecast that a new state, Eastern Russia, will appear before the end of this century. It will follow the lead of Japan and, like China and Korea, become a part of the economic zone of the Sea of Japan. So far it is obvious that the Sakhalin authorities are more resolute than the Moscow ones in trying to keep the Kunle islands. The same con cerns the operation of South Korean fellers in Mantime Territory The few local residents, Udegei hunters and Cossacks, are accusing the South Korean Hyundai of felling trees, including the valuable firs and cedars, indiscriminately. The Koreans leave behind them a lifeless desert, from which animals flee and where nvers die. But the contract was signed with Hyundai for 30 years, under which the Koreans will Produce one million cubic metres a year. The international ecological organisation Greenpeace more than once accused Hyundai of indiscriminate tree felling in other countries. Now Hyundai is vivisecting the 300,000 hectares of unique Ussun taiga, with tigers, ginseng, very expensive kinds of fish, etc. The Russian Ministry of Ecology and Natural resources and the Maritime Territory Soviet recommended creating a preserve in the region under control of the Udegei. In October 1992 it was announced that the Supreme Court 73 Russia’s Hotbeds of Tension of Russia would hear the complaint of the territorial Soviet of People’s Deputies and the Maritime administration on the illegal nature of felling by the joint venture Svetlaya and the South Korean Hyundai in the upper reachers of river Bikin. Greenpeace supported the demand for reviewing the terms of the contract with the South Korean concern. In general, the nch South Korea feels at home in the Russian Far East and intends to compete with Japan and the USA for the nght to pro duce oil and gas on the Sakhalin shelf There are over 40,000 Korean cit izens of Russia living in Sakhalin, which is a point to remember. Russia ceded 4,000 islets on the Amur to China. The Sino Soviet agreement to this affect was ratified by the Russian Parliament in 1992. It is possible that in the near future China will move the state border tends of kilometres inside the Russian territory by reviewing in its favour the peculiarities of the flow of the border nvers Amur and Ussun. The helplessness of the Russian authorities became flagrant in the case of Vietnamese hired workers, which we had the imprudence to invite to this country. The Vietnamese government appropnated their salaries leaving them only a few crumbs for survival. The hungry and dissatisfied Vietnamese turned into a criminal mob, bribing Russian customs officers and economic managers into letting them export large batches of pre cious metals and goods to Vietnam. The Russian authorities lose hun dreds of millions of dollars annually, while the smart Vietnamese are playing on the great difference between the Russian and world pnces. The problem is complicated by the fact that the Vietnamese remem ber only too well who helped their country to build socialism and later incited the war with the USA. I can imagine how Koreans thank us for exporting socialism to their country and dividing it into two states as well as for downing the ill fated passenger liner in 1983. The Japanese used to fight with Russia bitterly, and were the masters of the Russian Far East until 1945. This inheritance is the high wall of misunderstanding that divides business partners in the Far East. Besides, Moscow is to blame for many blunders. Here are some of them. The residents of Maritime Territory are dissatisfied that the military authorities don t want to raise 80 tons of yperite, buned in ordinary steel barrels 200 kilometres off Vladivostok in July 1941. In May 1992 all munitions depots of the Navy situated on the out skirts of Vladivostok burned for several days, as a result of which nearly a half of the city residents had to be evacuated. Or take the idea of wizards from the Moscow Kurchatov Institute of Nuclear Energy, who advised President Yeltsin to build a nuclear power sta tion on the Kunles. They think nothing about our incomparably low tech nical standards in this sphere and the threat of local quakes and typhoons. The Moscow authorities had the danng to proclaim invalid the results of the international competition for the nght to operate on the Sakhalin shelf, won by the Japanese and Americans, and to announce a 74 George Vachnadze new winner, the MMM consortium in October 1992. The consortium has commissioned the construction of the necessary technology at Russian defence plants, which means that all mountain overs and the shores of the Okhotsk sea will be polluted with oil and gas condensate. inhere are 300 kinds of fish there, a third of them endemic, which means hat they can live only there and nowhere else. The life span in the Far East is four five years shorter than the aver age for Russia. For decades the USSR ministries did what they wanted there. As a result, Amur, which used to have the world s richest fish reserves and which provided food and water to a vast region, was pollut ed by industrial wastes and cannot be used for drinking even after purification. The mining and dressing combine, the pulp and paper mill and the bio chemical factory, the steel mill and dozens of other ecologi cally hostile enterprises are discharging their poisonous wastes into the river. It is strange, but Jews, isolated there by Stalin, continue to live in that outlying region ill suited for normal life Only after the USSR col lapsed were Hebrew and Yiddish allowed to be taught in the schools of the Jewish Autonomous Region, bordenng on China. Only those who have something to sell can live in the Russian Far East. The personnel of the aircraft making factory in Komsomolsk on the Amur survive by producing for China the Su 27 fighters, which were put on active duty in the Soviet Army only in 1986. 75 Russia’s Hotbeds of Tension |
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