C.W.C. Watch #1: Russia Defers Ratification, Seeks Payments For Compliance And A ‘Seat At The Table’ Anyway

*** This is the
first in a series of papers that will
monitor the implementation — or non-implementation
— of the Chemical Weapons Convention
(CWC). ***

(Washington, D.C.): No sooner had the
Senate agreed to U.S. ratification of the
Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) than
the Russian Duma confirmed some of the
critics’ worst fears: According to the Washington
Post, the parliament engaged in
“a slap in the face for both the
Clinton and Yeltsin administrations”
by refusing to ratify the CWC before it
entered into force on 29 April 1997.

While the Post reported that
the Duma “suggested it will approve
the [treaty] in the fall,” lawmakers
said “Russia would be
hard-pressed to pay even a fraction of
the more than $5 billion needed to
destroy [Moscow’s] arsenal without large
infusions of Western aid.”
This point was embellished in reports
circulated on 25 April by Interfax and
Itar-Tass. According to the Foreign
Broadcast Information Service, these
Russian media said that:

“Duma members…noted that
the ratification process had been
started and said it should be
finished in the autumn of this
year provided that necessary
conditions are created for this.
The address suggested what some
of these conditions might be:
that Russia be given more than
the mandated 10 years to destroy
its stockpile, that it not have
to pay the costs of verifying the
destruction and that it receive
more foreign aid to pay for the
destruction.” (Emphasis
added.)

Read Our Lips

In other words, just as Senate opponents of
the CWC had warned, the Russians
will be euchring the United States and
its allies to pony up vast sums
— ostensibly for the purpose of
demilitarizing what has conservatively
been estimated to be 40,000 tons of
chemical weapons. If past experience with
the U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction
(a.k.a. Nunn-Lugar) Program is any guide,
however, at least some of these
funds will wind up in Kremlin
kleptocrats’ Swiss bank accounts and
funding Russian nuclear and other
military modernization programs.

This maneuver will present an early
test of the Clinton Administration’s good
faith in implementing the conditions to
which it agreed in order to secure the
Senate’s advice and consent to the CWC.
Condition #18 stipulated that the United
States shall not allow Russia to
make its deposit of the instruments of
ratification contingent upon the U.S.
paying for Moscow’s chemical
demilitarization program. If, as
suggested by the remarks of weekend
talk-show pundits backgrounded by
Administration officials though, the
Clinton team regards this and other
conditions as “eyewash” or
cosmetic window-dressing, Moscow may
believe it can indeed parlay its withheld
ratification into additional hard
currency revenue streams.

A ‘Place at the Table’

Adding insult to injury, Duma members,
nonetheless, have “asked to be
represented in the executive bodies of
the Organization for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons (OPCW) so that there
might be ‘due participation of Russia in
drafting and adopting key
decisions.'” Such treatment would,
of course, fly in the face of consistent
representations by proponents of the
Chemical Weapons Convention to the effect
that the United States would be
permanently denied “a place at the
table” if the U.S. failed to ratify
the treaty by 29 April. Yet, Reuters
reported on 25 April that Ian Kenyon, who
chaired the OPCW’s Preparatory
Commission, responded to the Russian
demurral by announcing that “he was
sure Russia would not be kept off the
convention’s Executive Council for long
— once it had ratified the
Convention.”

As a result of the Russians’
predictable dodge href=”97-D59.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾,
the United States now finds itself in the
bizarre position where the U.S.
is the only state party to the
CWC that has declared it has chemical
weapons. (That situation seems
likely to persist even after the
thirty-days-after-entry-into-force
deadline for notification of past or
present chemical weapons activities
expires. India, France, Germany and other
industrialized states are very unlikely
to announce that they have had or still
have chemical weapons programs.) Pursuant
to the focus placed by the treaty on
“declared facilities,” the
United States will be subjected to
disproportionate attention from the
OPCW’s inspectors and monitoring regime.

Where is Condition #29 When
We Need It?

These considerations were among those
that prompted Senate critics of the
Chemical Weapons Convention to seek to
add Condition #29 to the Resolution of
Ratification. This condition stipulated
that prior to deposit of the U.S.
instrument of ratification, the President
was required to certify that, among other
things, Russia:

“has deposited its
instrument of ratification…, is
in compliance with its
obligations under the Convention
[and] is committed to forgoing
any chemical weapons capability,
chemical weapons modernization
program, production mobilization
capability or any other activity
contrary to the object and
purpose of the Convention.”

Due to the Clinton Administration’s
insistence that such a condition would be
a “killer amendment,” a motion
to strike this provision from the
Resolution of Ratification prevailed on a
vote of 66-34. Had Senators known
then what they know now — namely, that
their colleagues opposed to this treaty
were correct in warning that
Moscow would likely balk at ratifying
this treaty — there may well have been
more than the necessary 34 votes to
defeat the CWC.

One other
part of Condition #29 is relevant in this
context. It also required the President
to certify that “Russia is making
reasonable progress in the
implementation” of the 1990
Bilateral Destruction Agreement and that
the two nations have satisfactorily
resolved U.S. concerns about Russia’s
non-compliance with the terms of this
agreement and the Memorandum of
Understanding signed at Jackson Hole,
Wyoming that preceded it. Hard experience
with these two bilateral accords suggests
that — even if the Duma does
eventually agree to ratification of the
CWC in the absence of further financial
commitments from Western nations to pay
for its verification and demilitarization
obligations — Russia will decline to implement
the CWC unless it is assured of
additional resources from the West (read,
the United States).

The Bottom Line

The Washington Post, in
reporting on the Russian balk on CWC
ratification noted that outgoing State
Department Spokesman (and U.S.
Ambassador-designate to the Czech
Republic) Nicholas Burns opined that the
Russian government had shown “good
faith” with respect to ratification
of the Chemical Weapons Convention. (This
statement appears to fit a pattern of
pandering to thuggish authoritarians on
Mr. Burns’ part that has served U.S.
interests poorly not only in Russia, but
in Belarus.⁽²⁾)

It strains credulity that the Kremlin
was unaware of (not to say unsympathetic
to) the unanimous view of the Duma
twenty-four hours before the U.S. Senate
acted on the CWC. If, as seems
far more likely, the Yeltsin government
both knew of and supported parliamentary
efforts to sweeten the deal for Russia,
its behavior hardly can be construed as
“good faith.” This is
especially so in light of evidence that
the Russians are proceeding with three
new categories of chemical weapons,
agents that are both more toxic than
known substances and deliberately
comprised of chemicals not covered by the
Convention’s limitations.

Regrettably, the Russian
bait-and-switch will probably not be the
only aspect of the Chemical Weapons
Convention that fails to live up to its
proponents’ expectations, or even their
solemn promises. The record created in
the course of the Senate debate on this
treaty has identified a number of other
areas in which similar failures are
likely to occur. This “CWC
Watch” series will monitor such
developments closely and bear witness to
the detrimental effects they will have —
both individually and cumulatively — on
American security and other interests.

– 30 –

1. See Truth
or Consequences #11: Clinton’s ‘Changes’
To The C.W.C. Are Necessary, But Clearly
Not Sufficient ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_55″>No. 97-D 55, 21
April 1997).

2. See an article
that appears in today’s Washington
Times, entitled “Panel probes
Burns’ role in sending aid to Belarus
” (p. A3) concerning Mr. Burns’
appeasement of the hard-line Belarussian
government while serving as a deputy to
Toby Gati on the National Security
Council staff.