KARACHI, April 12: “We do not want Syria to become a second edition of the ‘Libyan scenario’, where the adoption of a UN Security Council resolution resulted in a foreign military intervention that led to a territorial breakdown,” said Andrey V. Demidov, the consul general of Russian Federation in Karachi, on Thursday.

He was speaking at the University of Karachi where he was invited by the Area Study Centre for Europe to talk about Russian Foreign Policy in the Emerging Global Order.

Mr Demidov said that the resolution was supposed to enforce no fly zones, but in practice it was enforced only against the government and not the opposition.

“We used the veto power as we do not want the same resolution for Syria,” he continued, “the veto power is not a caprice. It was introduced in the UN Charter because of US insistence and forms an integral part of the world order.”

He said that prior to the military intervention, Libya had been a rather prosperous country, where education, gas and housing were cheap, which was not the case anymore.

Mr Demidov said that the regimes of the ‘Arab Spring’ countries were dictatorial but assured stability and that the recent developments were following a scenario far from civilised.

“Is it a democracy if domination of one group is being replaced by even more aggressive domination of another group?” he asked.

He said that just as the current situation in Mali was a direct result of events in Libya, one must not forget that Syria is also adjacent to Iraq that had already been destroyed. He added the Israelis themselves didn’t want President Assad out of power as he assured a stable border.

According to Mr Demidov, if a balanced, mutually acceptable approach was not taken to both the Syrian and Iranian issues, a vacuum would be created in this region of Syria-Iraq-Iran-Afghanistan.

He said that long-lasting instability is known to give birth to international terrorism and pointed out that the crisis zone of Afghanistan was much closer to Russian borders than to the borders of Europe or America.

Regarding Afghanistan, he said that the main issue for Russia was drug trafficking. “In 2011 alone, narcotics production in that country rose by 61 per cent. We are literally facing a heroin aggression,” he exclaimed.

He said that Nato created precedents which did not inspire confidence, alluding also to a relationship with the US that had not managed to change for the better over the years.

“This relationship has high and low tides,” he said, “in our view such a picture is a result of remaining stereotypes and phobias in American political thinking.”

He explained that a major reason for this was the lack of solid economic foundations for bilateral relations given that the American share in Russian foreign trade was only one per cent.

Mr Demidov emphasised repeatedly the importance of the changing world order, especially since the end of the Cold War, and that of Russian interest in maintaining business-like, mutually beneficial cooperation with foreign partners.

“The US and Nato understand the notion of security in a very peculiar way,” he said, “they wish to provide for themselves absolute invulnerability. But absolute invulnerability is a utopia, both technologically and geopolitically.”

He said that relationships were based on legitimate interests of both partners and that it was important to increase the say of other countries in shaping the world. “Just like how Pakistan can do so right now because it currently has a seat on the UN Security Council,” he explained.

He added that Russia attached great importance to the promotion of cooperation within an organisation like BRICS that symbolises the ongoing transition from a unipolar world order to a multipolar one.

He said that Russia put an accent on ‘soft power’, a series of instruments which exclude use of force, and was proactive on the world scene even if they didn’t publicise their ongoing involvement.

In reply to a question regarding EU enlargement, he made clear the distinction between the EU and Nato saying that Russia encouraged EU enlargement as it was Russia’s main economic and commercial partner.

‘Reshaping markets’

Mr Demidov also said that Russian companies had lost their business positions after decades-long work in countries that had passed through the ‘Arab Spring’. “New companies were arriving and these companies were from countries that had taken part in the regime changing,” he said, adding that the same thing had previously happened in Iraq, and that regime change seemed stimulated more by an interest in reshaping markets than a concern over human rights.

Answering a question on Russian interests in South Asia and Saarc, the consul general said that although Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had accepted an invitation by Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani to visit Pakistan, Saarc lies beyond Russian interests.