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FSB's approach to international cooperationIn 2000s the Kremlin needed the recognition and appreciation for its efforts in fighting rebels in the North Caucasus, and that might be legalized only as a part of international war on terror. For that the FSB chose PR as a main tool to deal with hostile public opinion. At the same time the Kremlin was eager to preserve a sphere of influence in the former Soviet republics, establishing special relations with respective secret services. But the looming presence of U.S. and coalition forces in Central Asia during their Afghan campaign prompted Moscow to change tactics. Key to the new effort now is Uzbekistan. Conferences From the Soviet times conferences and forums were viewed in Moscow as a useful and rather simple tool of shaping public opinion. The same tactics was chosen in the 2000s. On March 25-26, 2002 the FSB organized the first so-called “Conference of special services and law-enforcement agencies” in Saint Petersburg. It was presented as a conference against international terrorism, and the FSB invited delegations from 39 countries to take part in the two-day meeting. The conference was made annual, and in the years to come the efficacy of the summits was to be calculated by the number of the states who decided to send representatives to Russia. As a result, the statistics of the participants of the conferences soon resembled the reports of the Olympic Games' records: the second one took place in Moscow in April 2003 and hosted 60 delegations, the third one in Sochi in May 2004 gathered 70 delegations from 46 states, the fourth in Novosibirsk in March 2005 was attended by representatives of 75 secret services from 50 states, the fifth meeting on 15-17 June 2006 (Kazan) – 51 delegations from 51 countries, and finally the summit in June of 2009 in Irkutsk hosted 87 delegations from 57 countries. But the conferences went all but unnoticed in the West because no decisions were made there, and no initiatives (except one: at the second meeting in 2003 Putin had proposed creating an international system to combat terrorism with the UN playing the key role) were proposed. Meanwhile, the conferences were seen in the FSB as an enormous success and the most important means of presenting the Lubyanka as internationally cooperative. In October 2007 FSB director Nikolai Patrushev said in an interview to the Russian newspaper Argumenti I Fakti:
But Patrushev failed to understand that this statement was disavowed by his own words in the same interview: ‘Despite the global changes that took place in the late eighties and early nineties, which everybody knows about, the special services of the NATO states continue to be extremely active with respect to Russia. In this category one should especially single out Britain, whose special organs not only conduct intelligence in all areas but also seek to influence the development of the domestic political situation in our country.’ Meanwhile, the same method of conducting conferences was used for allegations against Western intelligence services and Western media. In 2004 the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) established the “International Anti-terrorism Media-forum”. The forum was used by the CSTO chief Nikolai Bordyuzha in 2006 to claim that the information campaign against Belarus (meaning critics in Western media of the Lukashenko regime’s human rights abuses), is an example of intrusion in the internal affairs of the country and ‘the crucial goal is to prevent such destructive processes’ /Bolshaya Politika April 2006 “PR protiv analysa v borbe s terrorom” by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan/. On 31 March 2006 in New Delhi, India, the Russian Center for Science and Culture organized a conference attended by Alexander Mashkin, deputy chief of the Counter-terrorism Service of the FSB, and Vyacheslav Trubnikov, former SVR chief and now the ambassador to India. The conference was used to accuse Western intelligence of “double-standards” in the war on terrorismiv. New department This massive PR campaign was strengthened by structural changes intended to underline the willingness of the Russian secret services to develop international cooperation in intelligence with the West. Quite remarkably, all these changes were carried out by the FSB. In the fall of 2004 the FSB created a new division: the Directorate on the fight against international terrorism (Upravlenie po Borbe s Mezhdunarodnim Terrorismom UBMT FSB). At the same time Anatoly Safonov, the former first deputy director of the FSB, was appointed as the special representative of the President of the Russian Federation concerning international cooperation in fighting against terrorism and transnational organized crime. On December 6, 2004 FSB director Nikolai Patrushev and FBI director Robert Mueller signed a memorandum of cooperation between the two services. Patrushev then said: “The memorandum which particularly stipulates our cooperation on a lot of directions is signed. First of all, this cooperation in struggle against the international terrorism, in struggle against the crimes connected with the weapon of mass destruction, and in other directions.” / ITAR-TASS 6/12/2004 FSB Rossii I FBR SCHA podpisali memorandum o sotrudnichestve I borbe s terrorismom / But it seems the objective of the creation of a Directorate within the FSB and making the deputy director of the FSB the special representative of the president on fighting international terrorism was mostly to get the West to buy into the idea of extraditing Chechens resident in western countries. At the same time the intelligence information sharing was limited both by the West and Russian secret services’ positions. Gregory Treverton, a Senior Policy analyst at RAND and author of ‘Intelligence for an Age of Terror’, explained the problem: ‘Every country obviously has its own self-interests in any particular sharing arrangement. And since for the Russians their definition doesn’t extend much beyond the Chechens that obviously poses some problems for us and other would-be collaborators.’ Interdepartmental cooperation In the second half of the 1990s, the Kremlin was eager to establish special relations with all the security services in the Former Soviet republics. The first attempt was the creation of the Council of the Leaders of CIS Security Organs and Special Services in March 1997. The council was headed by the FSB chief and its executive branch by the chief of the FSB international relations service. But the council’s functions were purely consultative and its activities were limited to Moscow’s traditional area of influence: The most active members were Belarus and Armenia, the closest Moscow allies, while Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan refused to join. The second attempt was made in 2000 with the establishment of the CIS Antiterrorist Center, headquartered in Moscow with a Central Asian branch in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. But the Antiterrorist Center also failed. Its mandate was to create a database for intelligence sharing among the security services of all the member countries. But the idea of pooling intelligence information was abandoned when members learned that the database would be located in Moscow. Too much distrust existed within the CIS countries to willingly send their data to Russia: Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan refused to send representatives to the center, and after the Rose Revolution in 2005, Georgia stopped sending representatives as well. Soon, the Antiterrorist Center became just another backwater bureaucratic organization. The third attempt was the creation of the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (RATS SCO), officialy launched in 2004. Besides Russia and China, SCO’s other members are Central Asian states: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kirgizia and Kazakhstan. Joint struggle with terrorism, separatism and extremism is considered to be one of the main SCO purposes. The RATS was created especially for the mentioned purposes; actually it was formed for coordinating the actions of mutual giving up the suspects. Its main objective is helping special services of the states-members to bypass the obstacles presented by national legislations and by the norms of the international law about giving up the suspects. Today it looks like the RATS activity most pleased Uzbekistan among the members-states. In 2003 the headquarters of RATS moved from Bishkek to the Uzbek capital of Tashkent. In 2005 Russia has put the Hizb ut-Tahrir party, which is recognized to be legal in Europe and the US, into the list of terrorist organizations, under the request from Uzbekistan. The Uzbek President sees the threat for his personal power in the activities by this party featured with utopian theories about Islamic Caliphate, and he has been persecuting its members not only in his country, but also in Russia. Soon Russia made another gift to Karimov. In a regular RATS meeting in March 2006 the first FSB director informed that Russia had given 19 people, suspected of membership in Hizb ut-Tahrir, to Uzbekistan. In 2008 the Uzbek President’s enemies were announced to be a threat to Russian national security. In spring that-time FSB director Patrushev stated that “international terrorist organizations Hizb ut-Tahrir and Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU)” are basic threats for Russia. Agentura.Ru 2010 See also: |
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