Vajpayee’s ‘Guest Appearance’ in G8 Tamasha

The G8 summit on 1-3 June in Evian in France marked the first reunion between the US and ‘old’ Europe after the Iraq war had virtually split the world’s elite club of the richest and most powerful countries into two camps revolving around what came to be known as the Anglo-American and Franco-German axes. France, Germany and Russia had however already moved a step back and demonstrated their readiness to patch up their wartime differences with the Bush-Blair alliance by unanimously endorsing the recent UN Security Council resolution on the immediate future of post-Saddam Iraq.
Though the G8 summit was held amid signs of a continuing global recession, it was Iraq and not the economy which overshadowed the summit. Both Bush and Chirac made a number of gestures to indicate that they were ready to ignore the past and look to the future and work together in reshaping post-Saddam Iraq. Bush made a public statement about seeking Chirac’s ‘advice’ on West Asia. But the deep divisions among the world’s major imperialist powers could not be hidden behind such diplomatic phrases.
Bush used the G8 summit as a platform for pleading for still greater unity in the continuing war against ‘terrorism’ declaring that “this is no time to stir up divisions in a great alliance”. But the very fact that Bush reduced his own participation in the G8 summit to a mere one-day stopover in a six-country, seven-day junket – for him Evian remained sandwiched between meetings in Poland and Russia before and the Middle East afterwards – made it amply clear that all was not well with the ‘great alliance’.
The summit could not produce any major economic declaration to combat the global recession. This had become clear during the G8 finance ministers’ meeting held two weeks before. The continuing decline in the value of dollar vis-à-vis euro has begun to make European exports less competitive. The economic portents of the American policy of “punishing France, warning Germany and pardoning Russia” are yet to become clear with regard to the ongoing reconstruction of post-Saddam Iraq. Meanwhile, the American threats to Iran are also loaded with serious implications for the European powers who have close economic and defence ties with Iran.
For the anti-globalisation protesters, Evian was the first major opportunity to vent their accumulated ire against the imperialist merchants of death and devastation. All over Europe, the demand for trying Bush and Blair for their war crimes is getting louder. In Britain itself, Blair is faced with a growing demand for a ‘war probe’ as evidences indict him for manufacturing and exaggerating the so-called Iraqi threat. And the list of crimes is getting longer with every passing day. In the wake of its military victory in Iraq, the Bush Presidency is now busy producing a new series of nuclear bombs that are capable of ‘destroying bunkers beneath 300 metres of rock, and … ideal for targeting stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons’.
The choice of Evian as the venue for G8 summit was itself a product of stringent security considerations. After the violent demonstrations during the July 2001 G8 summit in Italy’s Genoa, last year the summiteers had fled to Kananaskis, a remote mountain resort in the Canadian wilderness where protesters could get no closer than 17 kilometres from the village. This year again, the French and Swiss police – backed by a reserve force of German police as well – tried to enforce a security zone with a radius of at least 10 miles surrounding the summit’s site. All roads leading into Evian were blocked, and heads of state and other leading participants in the summit were flown over the protests in helicopters. Yet, tens of thousands of protesters assembled on both sides of the border, in Geneva in Switzerland and Lausanne in France and clashed with the police.
As part of the G8’s script of an ‘extended dialogue’, Prime Minister Vajpayee put in a guest appearance in Evian, reiterating his claim to renounce politics if he failed to win peace with Pakistan. Is it intended to win more laurels for his presumed ‘statesmanship’? Or is it an admission of his fear that the days of his government were getting numbered? Meanwhile, back home in Hyderabad, the BJP’s own summit has now made it official that Advani, the ‘iron man’, would now share the limelight in the next elections with ‘vikas purush’ (priest of development) Vajpayee.

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