It is not generally appreciated that Russia and Japan are still technically at war and have been for the last 64 years. Moscow declared war on Japan in the closing days of World War II in 1945, seeking to benefit from any gains in the peace. The prospect of a Japanese invasion in the East had haunted Soviet generals after the German attack in 1941. However, a year later, a remarkable espionage coup by Victor Sorge, a KGB spy working in the German Embassy in Tokyo, confirmed to Stalin that the Japanese had refused a request from Hitler that they also attack Russia. Thus the Soviet Army was able crucially to release substantial forces in the East to reinforce their Western front.
One benefit Russia gained following Japan’s defeat was its occupation of the four islands in the Kuril chain to the north of Japan, which Russia had agreed in a 1855 treaty were Japanese. The Japanese have never accepted this loss. As a result no formal peace treaty has ever been signed between the two countries. Relations between them have long remained strained.
However, all this seems to be on the point of changing, following the visit this week of Russian Premier Vladimir Putin to Japan. Talking with his Japanese counterpart, Taro Aso, the Russian leader has promised to consider “all options” to end the territorial dispute. What is fascinating is not so much how the problem will be solved, but why it is only now that the Kremlin is prepared to consider the exercise.
Japanese businessmen have made investments in Russia, despite the technical state of war between the countries, of some $6 billion. However, that needs to be put in the context that it represents just 1.5 percent of all foreign investment in Russia and a mere half a percent of all Japanese overseas investment. In particular, Japanese companies have made only limited business commitments in Russia’s Far East, despite the fact that this is a region very much on its own economic doorstep.
Putin has been at pains during his visit to underline the need for closer economic and commercial cooperation. When the recession ends, there will clearly be a great deal of scope for Japanese business to expand into Russia. The Russian premier clearly wants to prepare the ground for that now. This change of tack by the Russians is almost certainly not simply motivated by a desire to clear up a postwar anomaly. The Kremlin is also signaling to Europe and the United States that it is taking up economic and political options that have long lain unexploited. Japan no longer poses a military threat but Russia needs Japanese capital and technology. The calculation may also be that the Japanese “keiretsu” model of interlocking corporate shareholdings with strong government influence, more suits Russian business than the raw US-style capitalism imposed during the Yeltsin years. For both countries, major Japanese inward investment might also balance the growing economic power of China. Here, therefore, is further evidence of radical change in the world economic order.
Stop slaughter in Sri Lanka
Western governments should treat Sri Lanka as a pariah until it halts its heavy guns, said The Times of London in an editorial yesterday. Excerpts:
The United Nations has spoken of a “bloodbath”. Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general, was “appalled” at the killing of hundreds of trapped civilians at the weekend, and called for an immediate halt to the Sri Lankan Army’s indiscriminate shelling of the tiny coastal strip, the last hold-out on the island of the rebel Tamil Tigers. But the shelling goes on. Yesterday a mortar bomb struck the only functioning medical facility in the war zone, killing 49 patients and bystanders and wounding more than 50 others. The figure cannot be verified, as the army refuses to allow in any doctors, emergency workers or outsiders. But what is hideously clear is that huge numbers of people have been killed and that at least 50,000 are still trapped in appalling conditions as the bombs continue to explode among them.
This carnage must stop. Already more than 6,500 civilians have been killed and 14,000 injured in the first four months of the year. Thousands of those who have managed to escape were on the brink of starvation when they arrived at the camps set up by the Sri Lankan government outside the combat zones. Conditions inside the camps are barely any better: Lethally overcrowded, with little food, no proper medical care and the prospect of indefinite internment, the camps are fast becoming more a place of death than a place of refuge for 193,000 people.
The world has made its horror abundantly clear. The British and French foreign ministers have flown to the war zone to urge restraint and a halt to the bombings. There have been huge demonstrations of Tamils in London, Toronto and in Tamil Nadu, the Indian state across the strait. The UN Security Council would have taken up the issue had Russia, China, Japan and Vietnam not blocked it on the spurious pretext that the fighting was an internal matter.
