Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

*** More Russian criticism of Nato.  We highlighted last week the degree to which Russia has been put out by Nato’s actions in Libya, which it sees as a “gross violation” of UN Security Council Resolution 1973.  Russia’s Nato envoy Dmitriy Rogozin is continuing with his warnings about Nato and its policy of “placing itself on the same level” as the UN when it comes to deciding “when to start a war and when to end it”.

Discussing some quite forceful anti-Nato comments made at a conference held in Prague on 29 August, Rogozin said that Nato is facing “the most serious risk of undermining its unshakable authority as an honest broker on matters of war and peace”.  Rogozin’s expressed sympathy for civilian casualties of Nato bombing may seem synthetic, given Russia’s own record on humanitarian issues, but his anger at Nato’s expansive interpretation of Resolution 1973 is genuine.

*** Pakistan still struggling to reassure China.  A month after China blamed a terrorist attack in its restless Muslim province of Xinjiang on militants trained in Pakistan, Islamabad is struggling to reassure Beijing of its innocence.  On 30 August, Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari met with the Communist Party chief for Xinjiang, Zhang Chunxian, and promised to work closely with China in the fight against terrorism.

In addition to its repeated apologies and assurances of future assistance in the fight against terrorism, Pakistan has tried to convince China that the real culprit is India.  Islamabad says that there is a large Uighur exile presence in northern Afghanistan and that this has enabled India, which is allied to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, to exercise influence over the Uighur activists. According to this theory, the Uighur-separatist Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement (Etim) is being funded and trained by Indian intelligence.  The Pakistanis also say that it is India that is spreading the false rumours about a Pakistan connection with Etim.

Occasionally, however, Pakistani sympathy for the Uighurs shows through.  For instance, on 25 August the Pakistani newspaper The News, which has been assiduous in propagating theories of Indian involvement, called on China to “address ethnic grievances to end Xinjiang unrest”.  As the commentary put it, no Pakistani media coverage has “looked at the issue beyond the element of friendship” between Pakistan and China.  The commentary accurately described how Beijing has used mass migration to subdue Xinjiang, reducing the Uighur percentage of the province’s population to 45%.  The paper called for “the social empowerment of Uighurs and other indigenous ethnic groups in the territory”.

This was not the message that President Zardari was seeking to convey in Urumqi this week.  He was still in full apology/denial mode.