LONDON, May 7 (AFP) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair will
inaugurate this month a new-look meeting of the world's most
powerful leaders by integrating Russia fully -- or almost fully --
into the Group of Eight.
In an innovation, he will also split up the heads of state,
gathering in Birmingham on May 15-17, from their finance and foreign
minsters, who will meet in London this Friday and Saturday.
That will take the annual summit closer to the formula of small
informal meetings inaugurated in 1975 by then French president
Valery Giscard d'Estaing.
Blair, who rides at record highs in the polls a year after his
landslide election, will be bringing Russian President Boris Yeltsin
into the G8 properly. Britain is hosting the summit as current
president of the European Union.
For the first time, the meeting will be called the G8, taking in
the biggest democracies in the world -- Britain, Canada, France,
Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States -- and the
official date will read 19G8.
At last year's meeting in Denver, Yeltsin was put on equal
footing with other leaders for the first time, but there was still
hesitancy about actually renaming the old G7. A compromise was found
in calling the event the Summit of Eight.
However, the G7 is not really buried. Before the first official
dinner, Yeltsin will not be present at a brief meeting between the
other leaders, who will also publish a separate communique.
On Friday at the finance ministers' meeting, Russian finance
chief Mikhail Zadornov will not be present when the others discuss
the creation of the euro single currency, Japan's efforts to
stimulate its economy, or the Asian economic downturn.
"Russia takes substantial aid and cannot be a judge and part of
financial affairs," said a high-ranking European official.
"Russia cannot, for example, work on the rules of the
International Monetary Fund, which delivers it money," he said.
The IMF made Russia a three-year conditional loan in 1996 of
10.2 billion dollars.
Zadornov will however be able to join his colleagues for more
wide-ranging talks, such as on employment and social protection,
matters that Blair also wants to be discussed in Birmingham.
The aim of the ministers' meeting a week before the summit will
be in part to clear the decks for the heads of state.
Blair, hoping to make the G8 address issues concerning as much
of the population as possible, has asked that the summit meeting
have just three central themes: the consequences of the Asian
economic crisis, unemployment and international crime.
The heads of state and government are almost certain to find
themselves addressing issues such as the foundering Middle East
peace process and the ethnic conflict in Serbia's Albanian-majority
Kosovo province.
However, it is the foreign and finance ministers who are likely
to address other issues, such as financing the United Nations or the
international programme to seal the destroyed reactor at Chernobyl
nuclear power station and attempts to close the centre down entirely
in 2000.
One of the most complex issues that the world leaders may have
to address is a shake-up of the international financial system to
prevent a repetition of the kind of meltdown that swept through
Asia's currencies, banks and stock markets in late 1997. |
