Vladivostok (FN), Aug. 22 – Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russian Federation, Chairman of the United Russia Party, elaborated on several key topics as follows:
Neocolonialism near Russian borders
For many years, it seemed that neocolonialism in all its unsavoury iterations and manifestations existed somewhere far away from Russia’s borders, in Africa, Asia or Latin America. But this is not the way things stand. The newly proclaimed colonial powers have been nurturing sky-high economic and political ambitions, while refusing to respect the recognised strategic borders of other countries.
We must recognise that neocolonialism has long come as close as it could get to our national border. It started by taking Russia’s neighbours under its control, including by staging the so-called colour revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine. This effort transformed Tbilisi and Kiev into puppet regimes, headed by Mikheil Saakashvili – an alumni of a scholarship programme funded by the US Department of State, and Viktor Yushchenko, whose spouse is a former American official. The former unleashed an aggression against the people of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in August 2008, but Russia immediately demonstrated its resolve and firmness in countering this attack. In Ukraine, the 2010 presidential election was a moment of truth for Yushchenko – he received just slightly over 5 percent of the vote, a historical low for an outgoing president.
Nevertheless, despite these initial failures, the West persisted with its plans to subjugate our neighbours by focusing on transforming Ukraine into a bulwark for pursuing its neocolonial aspirations. The country lost its political agency following the February 2014 government coup, basically succumbing to external control. This has happened so many times around the world. It is obvious that fulfilling all the objectives of the special military operation is the only way to enable Ukraine to free itself from this neocolonial bondage.
The new colonial powers have now turned to other post-Soviet republics, including Armenia. The people of Russia and Armenia share centuries-old ties of friendship, sealed by their allied relations within the CSTO and the EAEU, only to become a sore in the eye for Washington and its allies. They invested a lot of effort in ensuring that this South Caucasian republic joins the Euro-Atlantic community. The fact that the Armenian capital is home to one of the largest US embassies in the world is not a coincidence. Emissaries from the United States, the EU and NATO have been visiting Armenia increasingly often to make all kinds of generous promises. It goes without saying that they have been promising Armenia wonders, but only in exchange for its complete loyalty. However, Armenia must understand that these promises are nothing more than cheese inside a neocolonial mousetrap. No one wants to introduce the people of Armenia into the select club. Just ask the neo-Banderites. Have they obtained the EU membership they wanted? No, and they will not get there in the foreseeable future. Will it ever happen? Take Georgia, which has displeased the United States and the EU with a recent law. What was the response? Sanctions, of course! The European Parliament adopted a resolution on strengthening EU-Armenia relations in March 2024, but it is just a worthless piece of paper.
A similar situation is arising in Moldova, a country that EU citizen and Harvard graduate Maia Sandu is now leading straight into neocolonial slavery, telling the same tall tales about its “bright” future. In reality, the most likely scenario of Moldova’s “European integration” will see it turning into a remote province on the northeastern fringes of Romania, one of the least developed states in Europe. The previous periods of Bessarabia’s occupation by the Bucharest regime, between 1918 and 1940 and then between 1941 and 1944, were marked by mass repressions and forced Romanianisation. It would be naïve to believe that this underlying attitude towards the Moldovan population has drastically changed.
Why should states fight neocolonialism?
The fight against neocolonialism is not an eternal confrontation for the sake of confrontation itself. It is primarily a progressive movement of states towards civilisational sovereignty, which is crucial in avoiding degradation and devastation in the 21st century. At the turn of the century, the most appalling prospect for a country was to be labelled a “failed state.” Today, the term “non-sovereign state” is becoming the worst stigma of weakness and inability to function as a political and economic entity, to exercise generally recognised public authority. Only fully sovereign countries that have independence in domestic and foreign affairs will be able to effectively counteract the deliberate efforts of the former metropolises to impose unequal economic and political deals on them.
Clearly, under these conditions, it is no longer enough to say the words that are ritualistically pronounced on March 21, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, no matter how true and commendable they are. It is imperative that we resolutely and consistently include the relevant anti-neocolonial narratives into the public agenda.
I am confident that the modern world provides the prerequisites for the consolidation of a broad group of nations that seek the completion of the decolonisation process and oppose neocolonial practices. This group could work on an inter-state consultative mechanism that would bring together national commissions to estimate the damage and expose the crimes committed during the colonial period.
This raises another lingering issue, which is as pressing as ever – it is imperative to complete the decolonisation process that began in the 20th century. Allow me to remind you of a list, approved by the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonisation, which includes 10 Non-Self-Governing Territories that continue to be administered by the United Kingdom; three administered by the United States; two by France and one by New Zealand. The countries of the Global South need to combine efforts to ensure that those “fragments” of the Western empires’ former greatness, artificially preserved after the collapse of the colonial system in the 1960s and 1970s, achieve true independence.
It is no less important that the Movement for the Freedom of Nations leave the door open as it works to achieve its far-reaching goals, being ready to align its efforts, in a variety of formats, with global and regional groups including BRICS and the SCO. For example, they could cooperate to implement anti-neocolonial initiatives to improve the developing countries’ financial security through a major reform of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. This is consonant with the ideas of financial independence promoted by BRICS.
Investigation of colonial crimes that do not have a statute of limitations should be placed at the forefront of this activity. It is necessary to consider the creation of a single public database (register) of crimes of the colonial period, as well as modern neocolonial practices, at the UN, and work out a scale to evaluate the damage caused by war crimes committed on their territory.
Neo-metropoles should be hit where it hurts the most, in their wallets, which they are filling largely by exploiting the rest of the world. We believe that the payment of compensations to the victims of neocolonial practices should be based on clear, legally considered and substantiated evidence. Political and diplomatic assessments must be complemented with a legal evaluation of their actions.
Our partners are already doing this. Back in 2014, 15 members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) adopted a 10-point plan for reparatory justice. Many of its provisions can be used for calculating colonial damage. In November 2023, the African Union masterminded a Reparations Conference in Ghana, the homeland of Kwame Nkrumah, an outstanding leader of the African national liberation movement. Considering that 12 million Africans were sold into slavery, reparations for trans-Atlantic slave trade have been estimated at $100 trillion.
The “golden billion” will have to dig deep into their pockets to pay for their countries’ sins. The countries and private companies that have been raking in money from slave trade for decades should not only muster the courage to recognise responsibility for the historical injustice and systemic racism towards Africans. A deeper look at the history of mergers and acquisitions of contemporary financial groups and companies in banking and insurance will show that many of them originated in the 18th and 19th centuries, which means that their money reeks of colonialism. It is these groups and companies that must foot the bill by stipulating relevant payments in their budgets.
Special focus in this regard must be on the idea of reparatory justice proposed by the victims of colonialism. In particular, the second session of the UN Permanent Forum of People of African Descent advanced the initiative on establishing a specialised International Tribunal within the UN to address reparations in coordination with other UN anti-racism mechanisms.
We wish the best of luck to our African and Latin American colleagues. Their success, including in establishing an anticolonial tribunal, will be a major step towards depriving the Global North of its domination and towards building a fair multipolar world order.
What will the world be like without neocolonialism?
It is clear today that the future belongs to strong and viable, ideologically integral and conflict-free regional structures. Within their boundaries, mutual understanding and trust between participants are considerably higher than between the great powers on the scale of the planet. These sorts of organisations and unions will become the growth locomotives and autonomous centres of global development with their own global agenda. They will take the lead in finally demolishing neocolonial governance schemes, and give hope for a better future to hundreds of millions of people on Earth.
One way to eliminate the social and economic dimensions of neocolonialism may be stronger coordination, by the global majority countries, of approaches to forming a completely new system of international relations based on the principles of respect and well-wishing non-interference. Solving these problems is a matter of the nearest future.
Multipolar globalisation, that is replacing, at a growing rate, the complete injustice of the monocentric Western universalism, will create an absolutely new dialogue paradigm. The foundation has already been built. During the year of Russia’s BRICS chairmanship, it is especially good to note that our country is full of resolve to continue executing the provisions of the Johannesburg II Declaration. BRICS and Africa: Partnership for Mutually Accelerated Growth, Sustainable Development and Inclusive Multilateralism, adopted at the summit in South Africa in August 2023. We hope that, through the joint efforts with our partners, we will create conditions for elevating cooperation within the BRICS ‒ African Union format to a qualitatively new level, building upon BRICS growing role in peaceful settling of conflicts and ensuring compliance with international law. Developing cooperation between the African Free Trade Zone and the EAEU also appears promising, along with other similar formats in trade and the economy.
We will be paying especially careful attention to a gradual transition from the conventional foreign aid schemes via government lines that rely on funds allocated by countries through the UN, the IMF and the IBRD, to a new type of international cooperation to assist development multilaterally – and with a wider involvement of private capital and funds of non-confrontational structures that the countries of the Global South can trust, including the New Development Bank.
Dynamic development of these geopolitical processes are particularly obvious as we watch how the Euro-Atlantists have found themselves stalled in trying to form a new system of relations with the Global South. The overwhelming majority of our strategic opponents have lost the gift they have had for centuries of creating a positive image of the future. Attempts by some reasonable Western politicians to understand the approaches of the currently emerging centres of power (and there are simply no more small players on the map, no matter how much some would like to continue ranking countries based on their significance) have been met with typical arrogance of the heavyweight bureaucratic apparatus in Washington and Brussels. Of course, they simply don’t have a choice. The arrogance, ideological dogmatism and self-complacency prevent the West from catching up with the rapid changes and realising the new role and place of no longer developing but developed and strong countries in the changing world. They come out deeply shocked at the “abrupt” unwillingness of the Global South to be in the wake of the Zelensky formula and break off their years-long ties with Russia, to join the sanctions frenzy of the White House and its satellites, or to ignore yet another escalation in the Middle East. The anti-neocolonial rhetoric is sounding louder. The Western liberal model has also lost its appeal.
A polycentric world order will be pragmatic and based on diversity rather than neocolonial dogmas. Economic stability will derive from the diversification of ties and the freedom of manoeuvre in contacts between macroregions based on the philosophy of the Non-Aligned Movement. There is no doubt that this format based on the vision of outstanding statesmen Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Sukarno and Josip Broz Tito in the 20th century will ultimately be given a second lease on life, even if in a slightly different form, in the 21st century. The objectives we must strive for not only include the proliferation of the principles of peaceful coexistence and the rejection of military bloc confrontation in the new post-colonial era but also the creation of a new content for the Non-Aligned Movement itself, including by establishing its inter-party dimension.
The anti-neocolonial movement should give a new meaning to the famous principle of unity in diversity, which is being applied in many spheres and must be spread throughout the system of international relations.
This is why the Movement for the Freedom of Nations could become a gigantic step towards the consolidation of the world’s nations in the fight against neocolonialists.
=FRESH NEWS
