Russia-China border: Questions need answering

When Russia President Boris Yeltsin flies to Beijing later this week for his delayed summit with Chinese President Jiang Zemin, Russians, especially those resident in the Russian Far East, will be wondering about the border deals he will be signing. Foreigners will watching too. The Jakarta Post's Asia Correspondent Harvey Stockwin comments on what might happen if China gets access to the Sea of Japan as a result of the border deals.

HONG KONG (JP): As Russian President Boris Yeltsin met U.S. President Bill Clinton in Moscow over the weekend, both leaders should have worried about what the other was doing in relation to China.

I say "should" because neither leader shows much aptitude for the finer nuances of foreign policy -- and both Yeltsin and Clinton are so worried about their re-election prospects they have little time to think about anything else.

Nevertheless, Yeltsin ought to find time to ask Clinton why he is excluding Russia and Japan from any Korean peace parley, while at the same time including China? Is this a crude American attempt to win credit with Beijing at Moscow's expense? Doesn't the American leader appreciate that the Russians have done much more than Chinese recently to put pressure on Pyongyang to be sensible?

In like vein, Clinton ought to find time to ask Boris what he aims to accomplish when he flies to Beijing this week? Is this a crude Russian attempt to win credit with Beijing at Washington's expense? Is the Russian leader really going to give back to China so much land that the People's Republic regains direct access to the Sea of Japan?

Then, if the Bill-Boris relationship is as intimate as the two leaders would like us to believe, Clinton could really dig Yeltsin in the ribs with a casual question: What was Maj. Gen. Valery Rozov really up to?

The question arises from an incident which recently made a few headlines, secured very little follow-up, and then disappeared, at least from the media outside Russia.

Initially, it was reported from Vladivostok that Maj. Gen. Valery Rozov, a chief negotiator in Sino-Russian border talks, had resigned in protest against the cession of land to China.

The land in question lies at the eastern end of the 4,300 kilometer Sino-Russian border where the Tumen River enters the Sea of Japan, and where the border of Russian's Maritime Province, taken from China in unequal treaties in 1858 and 1860, briefly meets the border of North Korea. The tri-junction between the Chinese, Russian, and North Korean borders lies inland, thereby preventing China from having access to the sea.

The news reports of the Rozov resignation were loaded with political and strategic implications. Rozov was protesting the latest border agreement under which Russia would concede 1,500 hectares of territory to China, some or all of which was adjacent to the Tumen River.

Refusing to "fool the Russian people any longer", the reports said that Rozov had resigned in "protest against Russian territory being transferred to China".

Russia and China signed a border agreement in principle in 1991, ending the first stage of rapprochement that had been earlier initiated under Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev.

The summit this week in Beijing between Yeltsin and Chinese President Jiang Zemin is due to take rapprochement further with the signing of a border agreement in practice, so to speak. The Far Eastern part of that border, which nearly brought about a full scale Sino-Soviet War in 1969, will be delineated along the middle of the rivers which mark most of it. This will involve Russia handing over some islands which it held when insisting that the border lay on the Chinese banks of the rivers.

This much has been known for quite a while. Rozov's resignation seemed to throw a monkey wrench into the proceedings.

The advent of democracy in Russia has opened up an internal cleavage over relations with China. Eight time zones away in Moscow it is possible to pursue improved relations with China without arousing an emotional reaction. But in the Russian Far East itself, fears of the 'yellow peril' are alive and well.

A greatly increased flow of Chinese traders and illegal immigrants across the Far Eastern and Siberian borders has increased both economic exchanges and political antagonism on the Russian side. Rapprochement with China is not a ticket for easy re-election in the Russian Far East.

Clearly Rozov's remarks also had the capacity to be hitched to the resurgent Russian nationalistic posturing which seems certain to accompany the Russian presidential election. Russians feel they lost enough turf when the Soviet Union broke up and they are understandably sensitive about losing any more.

Subsequent reports from Russia, after the initial resignation, did more to confuse than clarify the issue -- to the point where it became easier to understand why many Russians are nostalgic for the less complex world of Soviet simplicities.

First, the Russian Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the initial story, indicating that it recognized a political hot potato.

Next, the Governor of the Maritime Province Yevgeny Nazdratenko announced from Moscow, live on a Vladivostok radio station, that Yeltsin had ordered a halt to demarcations of the border. "We have told the President what we may lose there. Yeltsin saw all these losses -- things had been presented to him in a different light -- and ordered a halt to all demarcation works," Nazdratenko said, seemingly indicating that domestic political considerations were to the fore in the Kremlin.

But one day later, Yeltsin himself signaled that rapprochement with China was the priority when he denied that he had ordered any such halt. "On the contrary, I have signed a decree aimed at speeding up the demarcation of the border line with China because I am going there on an official visit on April 24," Yeltsin reportedly said.

A day after that, the foreign ministry, obviously faced with queries from China, felt sure enough to assert, albeit anonymously, that Russian would not renege on its border deal with China. "We hope the Chinese side understands that we are talking about Russia's federal border, and decisions are not made by the local authorities but by the country's President and Parliament," a senior foreign ministry source told news agencies, adding, for domestic consumption, that "both sides swap roughly equal plots of land along the border, which are pretty tiny".

Other reports only added further to the confusion. Rozov, it was alleged, was not a member of the demarcation commission after all, only an expert adviser. Even the fact of his resignation was denied. Nazdratenko denied what he had said live on radio. Cossacks in the Russian Far East threatened to physically obstruct any border giveaway to the Chinese. Another practical Russo-Chinese agreement on joint border surveillance was reportedly signed in Vladivostok.

China's access to the Sea of Japan is said to come through its repossession of some islands in the Tumen River on which it plans to build a river port. But direct Chinese access to the sea would involve the Russians ceding their land border with North Korea back to China, thereby giving a corridor through to the sea. That would be certain to raise an electoral ruckus, and not merely in the Russia Far East. It would also raise foreign diplomatic eyebrows.

Perhaps all will become clear after the Beijing summit -- or after the Russian presidential election.