'New' cold warriors simply haven't adjusted to end of the old one

The Guardian’s Jonathan Steele is amongst the most sober and sensible commentators on modern Russia. Whilst acknowledging that the country has problems as regards western notions of democracy and freedom, he simultaneously identifies sound historical reasons, both in the recent and more distant pasts, why this should be. He also emphasises the importance of a neighbourly relationship with Russia and defends its right to both chart its own path and defend its own interests on the international stage.

Today Steele focuses on EU efforts to renew the expired Partnership and Cooperation Agreement and the difficulties which are inherent in these attempts. In one particularly perspicacious sentence Steele cuts through the bellicose tone of those who suggest that relations with Russia are inevitably going to degenerate into a ‘new cold war’.

“Far from being in a "new cold war", neither the EU nor Russia has yet adjusted to the end of the old one and the past two decades' turmoil of newly released post-Soviet nationalisms.”

The idea of a new cold war is simply a symptom of attitudes which have not yet adjusted to the idea of a strong and independent Russia not comprising a threat.

More on Russian football and national resurgence

I hope to take Marc Bennetts’ book Football Dynamo to Russia next month as part of my holiday reading. It is subtitled ‘Russia and the People’s Game’ and purports to be an examination of football’s role in the world’s biggest country.

Bennetts has an article on Open Democracy’s new Russian blog (see also the updated links menu) today which hopefully provides something of a taster. His chosen topic is Russia’s football resurgence and its links to the political and economic fate of the country.

Lugovoi case not proven

The press have picked up on Andrei Lugovoi’s intended attendance at an event in Moscow tonight, at which a lot of British people will also be present. Lugovoi has garnered substantial publicity thanks to allegations that he murdered ex-KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko. These have propelled him into the Russian Duma where he represents Zhirinovsky’s extreme nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (not as the Guardian claims, a pro-Kremlin party, but rather a party in opposition to Putin’s United Russia).

It is perhaps a timely moment to remember that theories about Lugovoi murdering Litvinenko, whether under instructions directly from Putin, or directed instead by a renegade group of ‘siloviki’, are merely that – theories – and that a growing body of evidence is being adduced to suggest that Britain’s case against Lugovoi is a weak one and that other possibilities are equally plausible. Mary Dejevsky has provided a useful synthesis of these arguments in the Independent (many of which draw on an extensively researched New York Sun article by Edward Jay Esptein). She breaks down the problematic aspects of the case into a number of categories which I will briefly reprise here.

Polonium

Polonium 210 is not necessarily, as has been presented in the press, produced only in Russia. Any country with a nuclear reactor not inspected by the IAEA can produce the substance, including India, China, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.

Polonium 210 is considered an unlikely murder weapon due to its cost. It is however highly prized on the international market, due to its application in constructing nuclear devices. Thus the possibility that Litvinenko died from accidental exposure to the substance, whilst involved in a smuggling operation, should not be discounted.

Lugovoi

The former agent’s involvement has been adduced due to his meeting with Litvinenko coupled with the trail of radiation left in various locations to which he was linked. However Epsteain has suggested that the British authorities have omitted flights and contaminated sites which do not suggest the involvement of Lugovoi in order not to contradict their thesis. Alternative theories linking the omitted sites point to Litvinenko himself being the source of the radiation. An office building owned by Boris Berezovsky was reported at the time to be contaminated, but does not feature in the revised ‘official trail’.

The poisoning is alleged to have taken place in the Pine Bar in the Millennium Hotel via a contaminated pot of tea. Lugovoi insists that he does not remember tea being served during his brief meeting with the dead man and no CCTV footage has been produced to prove otherwise, despite plentiful cameras in the bar. Corroboration of tea being served, given 7 months later by a waiter to a newspaper, is flimsy evidence at best. Dejevsky concludes:

“If there was any deliberate poisoning – by tea, or any other substance – the most plausible venue appears to be a room at the same hotel where the two met earlier that same day (1 November). But the two had met on two previous occasions as well: two weeks before at another hotel, and in August at Litvinenko's home. There is nothing, however, to prove conclusively who poisoned whom – nor to disprove the theory that Litvinenko might somehow have been poisoned by mistake.”

Lugovoi claims that MI6 attempted unsuccessfully to recruit him on several occasions. He also maintains that a motive has not yet been provided to suggest why he would murder to Litvinenko, or put his family at risk in order to do so. He has remained consistent under questioning.

Litvinenko

Given the high profile of this case, very little attention has been paid to the exact nature of Litvinenko and his associates. “The authorised British version is that Alexander Litvinenko was a political refugee who paid the ultimate price for his vocal opposition to Putin”. Of course Litvinenko was in the pay of unreformed crook Boris Berezovsky, but what his duties actually entailed has not been made clear.

There are problems with claims that he used his intelligence knowledge to perform industrial due diligence and in terms of his use to western intelligence services, the US turned down his asylum application due to the low level nature of the material he was offering. His business relationship with Lugovoi extended back over 10 years both men having connections with Berezovsky. Pertinently it was Litvinenko who approached Lugovoi to organise the meeting which has become the centre of allegations.

Another of Litvinenko’s acquaintances was Italian businessman Mario Scaramella who is known to have been involved in ‘such murky deals’ as smuggling nuclear material. Another piece of circumstantial evidence links Litvinenko with the world of nuclear smuggling – his opaque business dealings took him frequently to Georgia where a Russian man was caught in an FBI sting attempting to smuggle uranium in 2007.

MI6

Of the link with MI6 Dejevsky comments:

“It seems safe to say that Litvinenko had a relationship with MI6, which could be seen as providing a motive for Russia – or rival Russian exiles – to eliminate him. But it could also be seen as a hint of desperation: perhaps he could find no other line of paying business. Whatever the truth, MI6 probably knows more about what happened to Litvinenko, and why, than might be concluded from its complete non-appearance in the authorised British version of his death.”

Berezovsky



Berezovsky’s name surfaces time and time again in the Litvinenko case. He employed the dead man and also enjoyed connections with his alleged murderer (indeed he had previously employed Lugovoi’s security company). During Litvinenko’s protracted death the dissident billionaire bankrolled a publicity company to present the ex-spy’s demise as he wished it to be presented. Whether Berezovsky truly believed Litvinenko to be poisoned or not, the narrative he advanced became accepted, even after it was established that polonium, rather than thallium, was the substance which he had ingested.

Of course none of these ‘clusters of questions’ proves conclusively that the British government’s allegations against Lugovoi are not correct, it is important to remember though that there are other explanations which have not yet been properly investigated.

David Trimble and the principle of consent

Frank Millar’s book about David Trimble, Price of Peace, takes the form of a series of extensive conversations with the former UUP leader, examining the beliefs, motivations and tactics which informed his political journey from the early 1990s onward. Price of Peace is a discussion, a dialogue, predicated on the ideas surrounding outward-looking, progressive unionism and therefore reading it is a stimulating experience, which raises issues which chime resonantly with the themes of this blog.

A passage in the book investigating the principle of consent and its role within unionist politics and those of Northern Ireland, in particular struck me as especially relevant, given a post carried on this site from Friday last. The two men discuss both the history of the principle, as it relates to the Northern Irish state, and the extent of Trimble’s achievement in enshrining that principle in an agreement to which all main sections within nationalist Ireland eventually subscribed.

The principle of consent, which acknowledges that any change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland must only take place with the consent of a majority of its people, is the bedrock of unionist argument. When Millar traces its acceptance by the British government, and the roots of its subsequent acceptance by the Republic of Ireland’s government, to the early 1970s and the Prime Ministership of Edward Heath, Trimble is quick to correct him.

The 1920 Government of Ireland Act, which set up the northern state and the southern Free State, carried implicit within it, the notion that Northern Ireland’s people would have to assent to any future all-Ireland parliament. This interpretation was effectively accepted by both governments when they signed the Anglo Irish Treaty and further enshrined by the Tripartite Agreement in 1925. Trimble’s thesis, and it is difficult to refute, is that the Irish Free State subscribed to the principle of consent and that the southern state abandoned that position only when it adopted de Valera’s irredentist constitution in 1937.

Whilst the British government restated the centrality of consent from 1973 onwards, it did not consistently cleave to its own undertaking. Trimble argues that the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement and its clause regarding the principle were effectively a means of saying ‘we’ve changed some things without consent, but we’ll not do it again’. Thus when Millar posits that the unionist leader ‘oversold’ consent’s inclusion in the Belfast Agreement, Trimble is able to argue that his achievement was not only in persuading nationalists to subscribe to a central unionist tenet, but that even the British government’s commitment to the principle was being substantially solidified.

Of course persuading nationalists to sign up to the principle of consent is a different matter altogether than making them adhere to what they signed up to. The equivocal attitude of nationalism to a principle which it purportedly accepts has been raised numerous times on Three Thousands Versts (most recently in the post cited above). There are differing degrees to which nationalists’ adherence to consent is either genuine or merely rhetorical. Trimble identifies the SDLP as committed to the principle for example. In contrast Sinn Féin’s approach is deliberately disingenuous and their policies are frequently designed actually to undermine the principle of consent.

The challenge for unionists is to clearly argue that having accepted the principle, nationalists should be expected to live with the consequences. Nationalists must persuade a majority of people within Northern Ireland to change their mind on the existing constitutional situation, rather than attempting to change it through stealth and sophistry.

A year of blogging

One year ago today Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness opened with its first post, a tentative effort speculating whom the IFA might choose to replace Lawrie Sanchez as Northern Ireland manager. From such humble beginnings, the humility has continued, although I’ve learned a bit about the technicalities of blogging in the interim. Hopefully some of the additional widgets and changes in layout offer a more user friendly experience for those who have stuck with us.

Gradually a web of links has been established with bloggers sharing similar preoccupations and through this expedient a readership has evolved. Posts about Northern Ireland politics have from the beginning been the most popular and Three Thousand Versts has become something of a fixture in the (admittedly small) unionist blogosphere. I’ve particularly enjoyed exchanging ideas and debate amongst readers and posters in this virtual community.

As regards recognition and approbation there have been a number of highlights during the year. In the initial tentative stages during which I was relatively clueless as to how to build links or publicise content to readers, Michael Shilliday helped enormously by identifying the blog as a UUP flavoured site and linking it both on the Young Unionists erstwhile website and on Slugger O’Toole. Slugger has picked up a number of posts from this site over the course of 12 months and traffic invariably rises substantially as a result. Indeed it was Slugger’s Mick Fealty who selected Three Thousand Versts as 18th best political blog in Ireland, back in September, thus securing inclusion and a brief synopsis in ‘Iain Dale’s Guide to Political Blogging’. Additionally the book mentioned us as 224th in its list of British political blogs, as voted by the general readership. Faint praise perhaps, but pleasing after only a few months online. An article on Russia’s new president was also featured in American online magazine Slate.

Some fascinating debates have ensued following posts on the blog, occasionally from unexpected sources. Observations springing from a trip to Latvia attracted the animus of a cadre of Baltic nationalists and a lengthy discussion of ethnic nationalism in post Soviet states resulted.

At one point in the year an impassioned plea for the rights of those with long hair was heard and a Canadian became very adamant that Northern Ireland had a long tradition of playing ice hockey.

Thank you to all readers and commenters and I hope you’ll stick around for another year, and all being well, some further debate and discussion.

Theocracy is dead, long live theocracy!

Whither the new technocratic, secular DUP under pragmatic Pentecostalist Peter Robinson and Nigel Dodds from the Free Ps liberal wing (ho-hum)? Onward towards a future where extremist clerics do not play a significant leadership role in the party? Or not as the case may be.

London, Chicago and Cullybackey

At the risk of losing my readership entirely, I couldn’t resist drawing attention to this confluence of famous TV programme, be-afroed Northern Irish singing sensation and the province’s finest village, Cullybackey.

Not only has Duke Special produced the theme tune for Northern Ireland’s version of Sesame Street, alongside children from the Diamond Primary School, his newsletter also details venues where the Duke will record his new album, “London, Chicago and Cullybackey”.

The attractions of London and Chicago will pale into insignificance when the Duke samples a chicken fillet burger from the Moby Chip. Although if he fancies a drink in Wylies, there’s a possibility his keyboard skills might be required to play the Queen on the trusty Casio at closing time.