An alphabet, anyone?

Foreign Ministers from the P5 are talking about Kashmir in London. Then China will subtly go around the corner and the P5 minus one plus two...

Foreign Ministers from the P5 are talking about Kashmir in London. Then China will subtly go around the corner and the P5 minus one plus two will put on another cap to become the Contact Group of Six (C6). These Western democratic nations will talk about Kosovo and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic thumbing his nose at them from across the border. China will be briefed. An hour later the C6 will turn their caps around, open the door to two others to become G8.

Together, this alphabet soup will decide what India and Pakistan and Yugoslavia could do. The special briefings for China, not a member of the C6 and G8, will continue. It’s important to have Beijing, everybody’s new best friend, on board. Between them, the P5, the C6 and G8, former colonisers, neo-colonisers, human rights violators, have solutions to all the problems of the world. If they have no solution that’s because the problem doesn’t exist. Expect a communique.

The United States, Russia, France, China and Britain, the five permamnentmembers of the United Nations Security Council and also the five official nuclear weapons states (P5), have the language. It’s just a question of peppering the text with adjectives of which the sherpas have a ready and steady supply. China is not a democracy. It transfers technology including nuclear technology to Pakistan and beyond in gross violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Doesn’t matter. There’s language coming out of Washington on this. The president of the US, Bill Clinton, and his big diplomatic chief Madeleine Albright have been rolling their eyes at Beijing and contracts beyond for the past few weeks.

When the P5 will become C6, they would have dropped China gently and picked up Germany and Italy. Among them are country-breakers and map-makers and a Russia that the West insists on calling a democracy. Some of these are people who precipitated the war in former Yugoslavia by prematurely recognising Croatia and then watched as thousands were killed in Bosnia.

Among them will bepeace-makers who drew up the Dayton accord that cut up a country and imposed road-maps that ran through people’s homes and gardens in Sarajevo. Now they, key NATO members, must decide whether to bomb or not to bomb Serbian forces who have ignored Western outrage and bombed ethnic Albanian villages in the troubled Kosovo region. These bombs, like the West’s nuclear bombs, are okay. They are clever and can tell enemy human from friendly human. The C6 want to use Western democracy-style diplomacy backed by the democratic threat of force against Milosevic as opposed to presumably what China would have in mind when there is talk of force.

British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook has said he hopes Russia will join the Western powers (note, in this West, Russia is not West) in demanding that Yugoslavia end its crackdown in Kosovo and let the Muslim refugees go home. Next week, Milosevic travels to Moscow to show President Boris Yeltsin his bag of hopes.

The transformation from C6 to G8 is one short step. The newentrants will be Canada and Japan. By this time, everybody will have the language on the Indo-Pakistan nuclear blasts. Canada may pose a problem by asking questions. It is as critical of the P5 and their two-tiered nuclear powers system as it is for India and Pakistan. It will most probably be sat upon in the larger interest.

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That done, the G8 will admit some more Western countries (peace-loving and arms-selling Sweden, for example) as well as a clutch from the G21 group of devloping countries in a bid to build a broad coalition against the atomic tests. In the new group will be South Africa, Brazil, Argentina and maybe even Egypt. Colour is healthy.

Diplomats say the five nuclear powers are keen to use the moral influence of countries which decided not to cross the nuclear threshold to pressure India and Pakistan to sign the NPT and its controversial cousin, the CTBT. In other words, these countries will urge India and Pakistan not to weaponise while the the nuclear weapons states will down Canada andmaybe even Japan to keep quiet. How will China, the seller of nuclear technology and violator of human rights fit into all this? British officials say the G8 will be joined for an informal lunch by China. To complete that fudge, lunch invitations have also gone out to Ukraine, Philippines, South Africa, Argentina and Brazil.