t r u t h o u t | Columnist
Tuesday 26 June 2007
Leaving India earlier this month as a representative of the country's peace movement and a member of a delegation of the Afro-Asian Peace and Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) on a goodwill tour of China, I had a little problem. What was I going to tell my hosts in this capacity?
India's peace movement is necessarily against nuclear weapons. The movement proceeds on the assumption that peace in the South Asian region has never faced greater peril than from the nuclear-weapon rivalry between India and Pakistan. While calling for a reversal of nuclear weaponization in the region, the movement also campaigns against the world's major nuclear powers as mainly responsible for nuclear proliferation.
Both peace organizations to which I belong - the Chennai-based Movement Against Nuclear Weapons (MANW) and the all-India Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) - count the P-5 (the five primary nuclear-weapon states) as the biggest culprits in this regard.
And China is one of the P-5. Beijing has consistently claimed to be the smallest among the nuclear powers recognized in the NPT (Nuclear nonproliferation Treaty), but never denied membership of the "nuclear club." Estimates of the number of nuclear weapons in China's arsenal vary widely between 80 and 1,000, but the generally agreed figure of 400 suffices to make the movement wary of making common cause with the country.
So, what was I going to tell my hosts - The Chinese People's Association For Peace and Disarmament (CPAPD)? The organization (representing ministries, departments, semi-governmental bodies and the four major Chinese religious groups comprising Buddhists, Taoists, Catholics and Protestants) had sent a greeting to the CNDP on its founding at a New Delhi convention in 2000.What common concerns, however, could I candidly express?
I discussed my apparent dilemma with colleagues. The closest among them, fellow journalist R. Gopalakrishnan (who, if I may share a personal sorrow with my readers, passed away during my China tour), came up with a concrete, helpful suggestion. In an email, he said I could make the point that, "for China to exert moral and other pressure on the US to follow its example in ... (its) incremental, but important steps (towards reduction of the nuclear threat to the world), it should not behave like a typical P-5 (member), equating nonproliferation with disarmament."
Gopal (as I called him) was articulating (as he often did) a deeply felt reservation in the developing world about the P-5 preaching nonproliferation while refusing to make any meaningful move towards disarmament. He was also speaking for many in the movement in differentiating between the rest of the P-5 and China, itself still a developing country despite the economic distance it has covered in the recent past. The line seemed a logical one to take in any discussion of the nuclear issue with our Chinese counterpart.
The opportunity to argue the line came early on the tour. Scheduled before our journeys in Beijing and provinces into China's colorful past - crowded with emperors and their concubines, palaces and pagodas - was a "substantive" discussion on issues of war and peace in the contemporary world between the AAPSO delegation and a CPAPD team, led by its ever-smiling but energetic and earnest Secretary-General Niu Qiang.
Since the Indian peace movement's current preoccupation with the US-India nuclear deal was well-known, I was asked to explain the issue. I hope I did not sound testy as I thanked the hosts for giving me an occasion to present the least-publicized point of view on the subject - our peace movement's.
I said that there were two widely publicized debates on the issue, and that both were non-debates from the peace movement's point of view. The first was the debate, particularly in the West, over whether the deal weakened the NPT or strengthened it. The second, in the political domain within India, was about whether the deal "capped" India's nuclear weapons program or actually promised to help it.
Clearly, the deal would not become desirable to the peace activists (unlike some opposition politicians) if it did not "cap" the country's strategic nuclear program and promised demonstrably to fuel it further. As for the NPT, the deal did violate it, but many in the movement doubted that the discriminatory treaty had ever helped the cause of nonproliferation. Quite a few, in fact, contended that it had supplied a major argument to nuclear militarists in South Asia and elsewhere.
We in India opposed the deal because it threatened to increase the country's nuclear arsenal, because it posed a further threat to peace in the region through a fresh nuclear arms race and because it came as part of the US-India "strategic partnership" that could not strengthen the nation's independence in international affairs. A failed, flawed treaty could not avert these dangers. The challenge for China was to push the P-5 towards at least a semblance of parleys on disarmament, if the NPT were to seem worth saving for the peace camp.
The most noteworthy thing about Niu's response was his nondefense of the NPT. He did not endorse me in explicit terms, even as he refrained from commenting on the US-India nuclear deal (which has raised speculation about a similar China-Pakistan deal). But he was at pains to differentiate China from the rest of the P-5 and to point to the common ground between the CPAPD and South Asia's peace camp.
Niu spoke nearly like an anti-nuclear-weapon critic of the NPT when he stressed the need for the nuclear-weapon states to adopt an international convention that held "a promise of total disarmament." As the first step, he said, the convention should call for "no first use of nuclear weapons" and "no use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states."
Secondly, the convention should envisage 'intermediate steps" (like nondeployment and de-alerting of nuclear weapons) towards total disarmament. "Total, immediate nuclear disarmament may be an unrealistic target," he added.
Niu was restating a long-standing position of China. Soon after ratifying the NPT in 1992 (28 years after its first nuclear weapon test), it declared: "China undertakes not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states or nuclear-weapon-free zones at any time or under any circumstances."
China has also stuck to its no-first-use stand. In 2005, the Chinese Foreign Ministry released a white paper, reiterating the stand and stressing that the country would not be the first to use nuclear weapons "at any time and under any circumstances."
Significantly, the paper added that China would not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against nuclear-weapon-free zones either. Sections in the world peace movement, especially in developing countries, have been talking of the P-5's refusal to guarantee no nuclear strike against non-nuclear-weapon states as a serious obstacle to creation of nuclear weapon-free zones.
While speaking of nuclear-free regions and "the inspiring slogan of a nuclear-free world," Niu stressed a relatively new point in the discourse on NPT and its objectives. "The need," he said, "is to strengthen nonproliferation regimes under the United Nations."
As a third "concrete step" towards world peace and total nuclear disarmament, Niu called for a new "outer space treaty to prohibit all weapons in outer space." He urged the conclusion of such a treaty "before it is too late." In this context, he vehemently criticized the expansion of the missile defense scheme of the US as "very provocative." He characterized such steps by the George Bush administration as "Cold War revivalism."
In an informal conversation later, I told Niu of the concern over the threats to peace in and from outer space, voiced by the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space (GN), with which MANW was affiliated. "They (the US) are so superior in conventional arms," he exclaimed, "what do they need all this for?"
Going by Niu and his CPAPD colleagues, China can be expected to step up its pressures for a new peace treaty in the coming days. In February 2007, China joined forces with Russia at the UN to berate US opposition to such a treaty. China warned that Washington's resistance would lead to an escalated arms race in space.
A month before that, China had sent tremors through the world by successfully carrying out an anti-satellite test (ASAT), destroying an aged Chinese weather satellite with demonstrative force. Western observers hastened to tell Washington that the test shattered the official US myth that there was "no arms race in space." The timing of the test seemed to show that it was meant as a major push for a new space treaty. Niu's comments on the subject apparently confirmed this.
I also told Niu about possible implications of the test for South Asia. I wrote in these columns then about the manner in which militarists in India, for example, were seeking to use the test to strengthen the US-India "strategic partnership" through India's induction into the missile defense scheme in Asia.
As I expected, Niu refrained from a direct response. He, however, talked about the economic imperative for peace in Asia and South Asia among other regions. He asked, "Why should developing countries squander resources on defense?" And he added, "Our foreign policy should be designed to help our domestic development."
Washington and the Pentagon would not believe him. They, of course, reject the reduction in the strength of Chinese armed forces (the People's Liberation Army or the PLA ) as a signal of peaceful intent, and interpret it as a move towards "informationization" of the Chinese military. More notably, a recent report from the US Army War College claims that the Chinese political and military leadership is "gradually revising its nuclear posture and even preparing for the possibility of using nuclear weapons in a pre-emptive counter-attack."
No concrete evidence in support of the claim is cited. The purpose of the report would seem to be to justify the Bush administration's plans to produce a new generation of nuclear weapons in the face of all internal and international opposition.
For a visitor to have witnessed the Chinese earnestness and excitement about the country's new economic growth, however, Niu's priority for peace did not lack credibility. "Ever since we opened up" was a repeated refrain in our conversations with the Chinese, who kept referring to investments and other gains from the country's increased international ties. The evident importance of this factor (to which we will return in a subsequent article) did not make Niu sound either hyperbolic or hypocritical when he talked of "a harmonious world" as the "core foreign policy of China."
As for China-India relations, blighted by border disputes (and mildly aggravated recently by Beijing's reiteration of its claim to India's state of Arunachal Pradesh), Niu agreed on the need for a campaign for people-to-people relations between the two countries, as carried out between India and Pakistan. Buddhism was once a great bridge between the two Asian majors, as relics still preserved in China reveal, but it cannot be that there is nothing else to bring the neighbors together again. The subject deserves separate treatment.
Can the peace movement make common cause with one of the P-5? In relation to the US of Bush and the UK of Blair, the question can only sound crazily rhetorical. In the case of China, the poser would appear to throw a challenge for the movement to accept and act profitably upon.
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