#11
Moscow News
September 11-17, 2002
BERING SEA TO BE REDIVIDED
Anastasia Kornya

The Federation Council resolves to erase the Baker-Shevardnadze line and go ahead with redividing the Bering Sea between Russia and the United States in an effort to uphold the interests of Russian regions

Within the next few months Russia will propose a new draft agreement on delimiting the Soviet-U.S. maritime border in the Bering and Chukchi Seas.

This was announced by Alexander Nazarov, head of the Federation Council Committee for Northern Affairs, after the first session of a Federation Council working group on revising the current agreement on the delimitation of maritime borders. According to Nazarov, the working group is now preparing proposals to U.S. senators to look for points of convergence which should help resolve an outstanding problem.

What is the root of the problem? Under the document signed back in 1990, the border between Russian Chukotka and U.S. Alaska was not equidistant from Soviet and U.S. coasts, with 50,000 square kilometers of Russian territorial waters and continental shelf ending up under U.S. jurisdiction.

Their fishing capacity is estimated at 200,000 tonnes of walleye pollack a year (not counting crab and mollusk); furthermore, there is evidence of substantial oil, natural gas, coal, and ore reserves on the shelf.

The agreement (it was signed by the then Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, on the Soviet side, and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, on the U.S. side) was never ratified - either by the USSR Supreme Soviet or the Russian parliament - as infringing on Russia's national interests. The treaty entered into force merely on the strength of diplomatic instrument exchange, its legitimacy thus questionable from a lawyer's point of view. Nonetheless, the United States has for more than a decade been using the Baker-Shevardnadze agreement in its economic interests. In February 1999, the State Duma once again refused to ratify the agreement, deciding to restore Russia's rights in the Bering Strait area. To date, however, only the RF State Committee for Fishing has been taking concrete steps in this direction, in particular initiating negotiations on the issue with the leadership of the U.S. fishing department, which are due to begin in two weeks time.

Now Russian upper house members have joined in, counting on constructive dialogue with the United States - at least in the Federation Council working group-U.S. Senate format.

"The Federation Council is often criticized for purportedly failing to uphold regional interests," says Mikhail Margelov, chairman of a Federation Council committee. "In this instance we in fact maintain the interests of specific regions in Russia's Far East. We have taken on the issue not to earn cheap popularity but to resolve it on a practical level. In the last 18 months we have established a viable working mechanism with U.S. senators to discuss moot questions in Russian-U.S. relations which could become a problem for the executive. We are beginning the process in a politically correct manner with regard to our U.S. partners: We are now preparing the text of a letter that I will, on September 30, in Washington, hand to Joseph Biden, chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee."

Melissa Sanderson, first secretary of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, who attended the first session of the working group, had no comment to make on the matter, but parted with Federation Council members in a very friendly manner. Meanwhile, the Federation Council sent an official query to the RF Foreign Ministry on the legal status of the controversial agreement, also asking whether former Foreign Minister Shevardnadze had not exceeded his powers in signing the document. To the latter question, officials at the Foreign Ministry Legal Department who had taken part in the session of the working group, said that the incumbent Georgian president had been but a pen driven by the hand of Mikhail Gorbachev, promising to provide written replies on all matters within the next few days.

Admittedly, hardly anyone seriously believes that the United States will of its own free will review such a beneficial agreement. Meanwhile, the 1969 Vienna Convention leaves Russia this opportunity: after a simple notification of the United States to the effect that the agreement will not be ratified, it will be terminated unilaterally.

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