“There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances” — Leon Trotsky TRYST WITH TYRANTS: The Koreas, North and South, are an awkward couple. And, so are Russia and Cyprus. Odd, one might imagine to compare the Koreans with the Cypriots or Russians for that matter. Communist North Korea and capitalist Cyprus are struggling for survival. And as far as the Russians are concerned, I can only recall Leon Trotsky's notorious observation, far truer today than it was in his day. “From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality,” an indignant Trotsky spurned with contempt his compatriots. Pray, what would Trotsky have made of the saving accounts of Russia's rich in the Mediterranean midget, Cyprus masquerading as an offshore banking haven for Moscow's millionaire money launderers? Banking on Cyprus is bonkers. The tiny island-nation's bank assets reached 800 per cent of the Mediterranean midget's GDP of a mere $23 billion. Cyprus, a European Union member state and a Eurozone nation, is broke and it badly needs 17 billion euros, but was reluctantly bailed out by Eurozone finance ministers, who offered 10 billion euros instead — that is $13 billion, and what an utterly ominous, inauspicious number, too. Again, Trosky comes to mind. “In a serious struggle, there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune moment,” Trotsky mused. The monstrous Merkel, Angela, the German chancellor, masterminded the vile bail-out. She played the part of the wicked stepmother, performing an act of cruelty. The Cypriots had no choice in the matter, nor the Russians for that matter. Creditor countries, like Germany, and increasingly China, have clout. And, as the sun sets on the West, that brings me to BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India and China, together with South Africa as a token black nation in the group of emerging economies. There is no room for midgets in BRICS, and particularly not Mediterranean mites. BRICS is for behemoths. The bigger the better. Pyongyang is peewee. North Korea's bellicosity, empty threats and mindless “Marxist” (or is it “Maoist”?) rhetoric at the weekend, declaring that the Korean peninsula was in a “state of war” and saying that its nuclear weapons were “the life of the nation” to be treasured at all cost, is hogwash. It reminds me of Nic Jones's satirical song “The Warlike Lads of Russia”. I stand corrected. Actually Pyongyang's official ideology is neither “Marxist” not “Maoist”; it is “The Juche idea” otherwise known as Kimilsungism. “From this moment, North-South relations will be put at a state of war, and all the issues arising between the two will be dealt with in accordance with wartime regulations,” Pyongyang's official KCNA news agency indicated in a statement last Saturday. Ironically, the two Koreas remain technically at war since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce rather than a peace treaty. The North Korean leadership, with the youthful Kim Jong-Un at the helm, is furious about annual US-South Korean military drills. Last week, two B-2 stealth bombers dropped dummy munitions on an uninhabited South Korean island as part of the drills, which Pyongyang suspected was a rehearsal for military intervention. PYONGYANG IS PEEWEE: So what does puny Pyongyang have in common with the Mediterranean midget? Both have benefactors for starters. China, the world's second largest economy and fifth largest weapons exporter, is Pyongyang's preserver. To put it bluntly, without Beijing there would be no Pyongyang. So if China is North Korea's custodian, or guardian angel, who is the Cypriots' sentinel — fellow Orthodox Christian Russia or the nominally Christian Germans — an amalgam of atheists and agnostics, Protestants and Roman Catholics? Be that as it may, the Christian Russian and Germans are not as charitable to Cyprus as the godless Chinese are magnanimous to the North Koreans. The sabre-rattling of Pyongyang reflects its frustration with the fresh round of international economic sanctions following its third nuclear weapons test on 12 February. Most analysts agree that Pyongyang is powerless. A full- scale North Korean attack is highly unlikely, even though Pyongyang's preposterous boasts could lead to a border skirmish. The North said it reserved the right to react to any provocation with “resolute and merciless physical actions without any prior notice” and mentioned specific targets such as the United States mainland — one wonders whether Pyongyang has in mind California or Alaska, Hawaii or Guam, as well as the 28,500 American troops stationed on the Korean peninsula. Empty threats I presume. The official Pyongyang statement purported that the South Korean presidential residence of Cheong Wa Dae, or the Blue House, and its military bases would come under attack. Military muscling? Amid the muddling of Pyongyang politicos, Beijing has stood out as the guarantor of North Korea's survival. According to United Nations estimates, two-thirds of the country's 24 million people face regular food shortages. North Korea's “nuclear armed forces represent the nation's life, which can never be abandoned as long as the imperialists and nuclear threats exist on earth,” the statement ran, and would not be traded even for “billions of dollars”. In many ways the mess in the Korean Peninsula comes down to the political symbolism of the presumed merits of capitalism and communism respectively. Pyongyang is not Cyprus, but it is no Seoul either. The North promptly declared that it would shutter the inter-Korean industrial complex in its border city of Gaeseong should its “dignity” be threatened. The complex, where 123 South Korean companies run factories with cheap North Korean labour, is a major source of hard currency for the impoverished Pyongyang. “North Korea's statement is not a new threat,” said South Korea's Unification Ministry, which deals with matters relating to the North, and hawkish members of South Korea's ruling Saenuri Party urged dovish Seoul to adopt a tougher stance vis-a-vis Pyongyang. “The question is, for South Koreans, can we live peacefully with a nuclear-armed North Korea?” parliamentarian Chung Mong-Joon rhetorically asked in a recent interview with CNN. “The answer is No. Nuclear deterrence can be the only answer. We have to have nuclear capability.” Yet, it is unthinkable that Koreans would use nuclear weapons against each other. This would cause a messy collapse of the economically promising Korean Peninsula. But, as so often happens, short-term political gains have trumped rational crisis management. BACK TO BRICS: China's President Xi Jinping met India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Durban, South Africa at the fifth summit of BRICS. The meeting was warm and amiable enough for Delhi to signal its willingness to reciprocate China's new leadership's desire to improve ties and ease outstanding problems like the boundary issue between India and China. The Indian prime minister is understood to have conveyed to President Xi concerns over the Chinese proposal to construct three dams across Brahmaputra. India fears the Brahmaputra project would affect water flow to India, but the Chinese assured the Indians that the Brahmaputra dams were just run-of-the mill projects that would not hold water. India is ploughing ahead economically, even as China's economic growth rate is spiralling. This is the first face-to-face meeting between the two leaders of the world's two most populous countries at the highest level after the recent change in power structure in China. Xi, who has also assumed the role of chief of the Communist Party and Red Army, suggested that the boundary question be amicably negotiated. Both India and China are keenly interested in Africa. The Chinese Ambassador to South Africa Tian Xuejun was quoted as saying that “China's investment in Africa exceeds $40 billion.” The Chinese President Xi is visiting Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of his African tour — remarkable and unprecedented as the first foreign outing of a Chinese president. India lags behind in Africa, even though it secures about a third of Sino-African trade. Brazil, too, is acutely interested in Africa. Putin was posturing in Durban. Russia is trying to have a less awkward embrace with Africa. Moscow is shedding its Soviet history in post-colonial Africa, and frankly speaking contemporary Russia is more interested in Cyprus at the moment that in the entire continent of Africa. Differences remain between the three nations — Brazil, China and India — as how to deal with African affairs. For India, and especially as far as Brazil is concerned, culture is just as crucial as trade and investment. However, bilateral relations between the BRICS nations themselves are as important as the African setting of the summit. The two Asian giants last year decided to have a military dialogue. China's President Xi last week propounded five proposals for improving bilateral relations with India. Chinese investment in the Pakistan port of Gwadar and Chinese construction of nuclear reactors in Pakistan's Chashma power project gravely concern India. Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff and her Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin were warmly welcomed by their host South African President Jacob Zuma. BRICS represent a brave new world order as gravity and power gradually shift from North to South, and West to East. Between them, BRICS constitute 45 per cent of the world's population, and a quarter of the global GDP. BRICS nations agreed on the launch of a new BRICS Development Bank even before the summit officially started, according to South African Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan. But, African environmental and political activists as well as financial experts fear that the new development bank would lead to work being duplicated among lenders and chaos, Cyprus-style. The “BRICS-from-Below” activists also claim BRICS has damaged rather than benefited the South African economy. “The Development Bank of Southern Africa” lost 31 million euros or $40 million in 2012. There is a Cyprus of sorts in the making. “BRICS provides an opportunity for South Africa to promote its competitiveness,” South African President Zuma declared. “It is an opportunity to move further in our drive to promote economic growth and confront the challenge of poverty, inequality and unemployment that afflicts our country.” BRICS-from-Below, however, disagreed with Zuma's reasoning. Africans, they insist do not want to see BRICS businessmen muscle into their markets. There is a consensus among “BRICS-from-Below” activists that the emerging economies of the BRICS nations have to demonstrate that they can change global power structures to the benefit of the underprivileged in the underdeveloped world. In a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Pretoria last Tuesday, South African President Jacob Zuma paid tribute to the “comprehensive strategic partnership” between Beijing and Pretoria. China is now South Africa's biggest trading partner and in view of a significant deficit in bilateral trade, South Africa was now seeking “a more equitable balance of trade”, Zuma noted. Trade unionists in South Africa aggrieved by what they suspect as the anti-labour stance of BRICS were less enthusiastic about the Durban summit. The leader of COSATU, the powerful Congress of South African Trade Unions, Zwelinzima Vavi, told South African broadcaster SABC earlier this week that his organisation regarded the new development bank with scepticism and insisted that any BRICS bank should have “fundamentally different rules to those of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank”. Brazil, and other Latin American emerging markets share South Africa's fears. “Our interest is not to establish new relations with China, but to expand relations to be used in the case of turbulence in financial markets,” Brazilian Central Bank Governor Alexandre Tombini told reporters after the signing. Brazilian Economy Minister Guido Mantega described the deal, which is called a bilateral currency swap accord, as “a sort of umbrella agreement”. The deal was signed with Chinese Finance Minister Lou Jiwei. Trade between China and Brazil totalled around $75 billion (58.3 billion euros) in 2012. Almost half of Brazil's exports to China consist of iron ore and primary mineral and agricultural commodities. China's most important exports to Brazil, in sharp contrast, are electronics and machinery. The endorsement of plans to create a joint BRICS foreign exchange reserves pool and an infrastructure bank faltered. Yet officials were optimistic. “If there were shocks to the global financial market, with credit running short, we'd have credit from our biggest international partner, so there would be no interruption of trade,” Mantega extrapolated. HOLLOW MILESTONE? The decathlon of deprivation, the abject poverty, and related hunger, disease and malnutrition are given weight in the considerations of the BRICS leadership. It is not so easy for the emerging economies to transform philosophical musings at summit meetings into practical measurements that combat underdevelopment. China's economic grip is fast spreading across the African continent like wildfire. And, as noted it is not always welcome. Still, the Chinese persist and are reaping dividends. They are not perceived in the same manner as the colonial masters of yesteryear were. The broader brush of BRICS paints a radically different picture of cooperation between developing nations and emerging economies than the sorry spectre of nightmarish neocolonialism. The imperialists are as rotten as ever. Consequently countries like China and India and Brazil feel able to stay their hand for a bit longer. BRICS presents an opportunity for emerging economies to be able to sprint to first world status even as the financial crisis ravages the Western world. A fast changing China has long preoccupied its Asian neighbours. Now, Africans are intrigued with the Chinese economic miracle. The same, it turns out is true of Brazil's and India's engagement with the developing and underdeveloped worlds. Certainly there is plenty to complain about as far as BRICS is concerned. But, whatever their shortcomings they can never compare to peewee Pyongyang or the midget Mediterranean sinking Cyprus.
