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Big Problems for Kuchma Protege

02 March, 00:00

By Vitaly PORTNYKOV, The Day Moscow was to host a CIS summit last Friday. The exponents of this actually nonexistent entity placed considerable hopes in the meeting, since only one such assignation had taken place in Moscow after the Chisinau summit placing CIS on a critical list and when the parties had once again failed to come to terms. At the time the decision to appoint Boris Berezovsky, noted (notorious?) Russian businessman, CIS Executive Secretary seemed the only serious accomplishment. He immediately declared his intention to make a reform in the Commonwealth. Prior to the March summit Mr. Berezovsky even managed to secure support from such opponents as Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenka and Uzbek President Islam Karimov. Everything seemed to indicate that the summit would pass in an atmosphere of complete understanding, and that Berezovsky's reform, boiling down to transforming CIS into an organization of economic cooperation of former Soviet republics, would become a guideline for the organization's further performance.

Then suddenly the summit was put off to an indefinite later date (March, they say), and it took Mr. Berezovsky completely unawares, for he learned about it only from the media. It was made perfectly clear who initiated it as the Russian Cabinet was instructed to revise the CIS reform project.

Without doubt, CIS was being held hostage to the struggle between Yevgeny Primakov and Boris Berezovsky. It is generally known that the latter's only official position is that of CIS Executive Secretary. At one time Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov did their best to oust him as Deputy Secretary of the Russian Security Council and to succeed they only needed Boris Yeltsin's nod. Toppling the man now requires the consent of twelve presidents. Mr. Yeltsin presents no problem, considering that at the previous summit he showed little enthusiasm about his Ukrainian counterpart nominating Boris Berezovsky. Mr. Yeltsin's lobby showed undisguised irritation, stressing that Leonid Kuchma played a dirty trick on his Moscow colleague. On the other hand, how can one be sure that those same presidents who easily agreed to Mr. Berezovsky's appointment will now as easily agree to his dismissal?

For Berezovsky's opponents the only real chance is to convince the presidents that if they do not go along they may well get in Dutch not only Boris Yeltsin but also Yevgeny Primakov. There is no secret that an increasing number of post-Soviet leaders believe that from now on they will have to deal with Mr. Primakov in the first place and that they ought to think twice before crossing him. For the time being, however, all versions of toppling Boris Berezovsky are highly questionable, one of the reasons being that no one is sure about how much ice he will cut on the date of the summit or that Mr. Primakov will not have his own problems by then. The fact remains that Messrs. Berezovsky and Primakov are part of the court of an unpredictable crowned head. Hence the question about how Mr. Yeltsin will feel when summit time comes.

In any case, nobody has been discussing possible candidates to replace Mr. Berezovsky in the lobbies; everyone understands that this would be premature as long as the summit issue remains open. In other words, Mr. Berezovsky seems to have chosen a convenient long-playing position.

Newspaper output №:

№8, (1999)

Section

Day After Day