02 July 2002 00:00
ON A MEETING WITH THE MILITARY ATTACHES ACCREDITED IN MOSCOW
The Defense Committee of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of Russia has held a meeting with the military attaches accredited in Moscow, dedicated to summing up the results of its legislative work in the State Duma's spring session, aimed at reforming the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.
Committee Chairman Andrei Nikolayev said 28 bills had been submitted to the session under the auspices of the Defense Committee. Of them 23 were considered, 1 was passed in the first reading, 6 were rejected, 1 bill was passed at the second reading, and 1 was passed at the third reading. The President signed 7 bills into law.
The adopted documents are aimed at enhancing the protectedness of servicemen, citizens discharged from service and members of their families, improving the legislation on conscription and military service, increasing servicemen's pay, and dealing with the questions of military education and pensions for persons who performed military service.
Nikolayev noted that 41 draft resolutions had been prepared over the period of the session. Holding a special place among them are the Resolution on Immediate Measures in Connection with the USA's Decision to Unilaterally Withdraw from the ABM Treaty of May 26, 1972, and the appeal by the State Duma to the UN, other international organizations, parliaments, and the media concerning the potential danger for humanity of the continuation by the USA of large-scale experiments on purposive and powerful modification of the near-Earth space environment by high-frequency radio waves.
Speaking of the development of the international situation, the Committee Chairman stressed that the world has encountered a sharp contradiction between the rapid growth of new security problems and the conservative old, exclusively military methods of solving them, which in the conditions of terrorist warfare have shown low effectiveness.
Furthermore, during the liberation from old positive schemes in the field of stability and the strengthening of confidence-building measures no fundamentally new ideas and instruments of security have been worked out. The story of the ABM Treaty is very indicative in this regard: renouncing it may lead to a chain reaction of dismantling the operative agreements. It is not unlikely that the sad fate of START-2 and ABM-72 will now befall the Agreement on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE).
The potential of the OSCE as an international organization has not been completely exhausted, said Nikolayev, and the persistently furthered idea of transforming NATO into a universal security structure will lead to adverse consequences. "Detrimental from the point of view of international law," he pointed out, "is the methodology of determining a criminal on the 'who is not with us is against us' principle. No one has the right to arbitrarily determine a criminal and punish him on behalf of the world community."
The Committee Chairman believes that the UN in present-day conditions should be helped via a reallocation of the load onto regional security systems. The OSCE can become such a UN "affiliate." Based on the heterogeneity of the world's regions, thought might also be given to creating respective structures in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
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