>PRESIDENT YELTSIN and Jiang Zemin, the Chinese leader, will begin a rare summit meeting today that will underline the hostility in Moscow and Beijing to Nato's hegemony in Kosovo and the determination in both capitals to resist Western encroachments in their backyards.
Mr Yeltsin flew yesterday to Bishkek, capital of the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan, for a meeting of the "Shanghai Five" - a loose alliance of Russia, China and the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Though regional security, border issues and trade form the bulk of the agenda, the real importance lies in reinforcing the Moscow-Beijing axis, and the growing determination of Russia and China to confront what they see as American world domination.
The meeting comes at a time when President Yeltsin is enjoying an unusual bout of good health and is likely therefore to go beyond the courtesies and formalities of this three-year-old grouping, set up in Shanghai in 1996.
On arrival at Bishkek, Mr Yeltsin told waiting journalists that he was in combative mood. "I am ready to fight, especially with Westerners," he said.
The truth behind his jocular remarks was underlined by the Foreign Ministry, which put out a statement strongly denying that Moscow had softened its opposition to Nato's enlargement. It said that the impression had grown recently that Russia's position was going through an evolutionary change, becoming more tolerant. This was completely false, the ministry said.
Three issues, in particular, have given Moscow an interest in improving its relations with China: the lingering anger that the West gave strong moral support to the Chechen rebels; alarm at the entry of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic into Nato, and promised further expansion; and the frustration and sense of powerlessness in Moscow at Nato's intervention over Kosovo and Russia's inability to do anything except to go along with the West's plan. China, like Russia, saw Kosovo as a dangerous precedent that could be used to justify other Western interventions around the world without authorisation by the United Nations.
China, acutely sensitive to Western support for Tibet, Taiwan and human rights issues, is looking to Moscow to resist any further weakening of traditional UN exclusion from a country's internal affairs.
Mr Yeltsin will propose in talks today the development of "joint approaches to regional and international issues". This clearly translates into a stiff warning to the West to keep out of the two countries' backyards. |
