Asian leaders fear Russian intentions

Press, 10 April 1980, Page 27

Asian leaders fear Russian intentions

By

DENIS

BLOODWORTH, of Observer Foreign News Service

The Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister (Mr Nikolai Firyubin) has visited Singapore amid a sharp burst of anti-Russian criticism that one local source artfully described as “an unplanned coincidence we allowed to happen.” It expressed the mistrustful mood among Ministers of all non-Commu-nist States in this subcontinent, who have jointly called for the withdrawal of foreign troops from both Afghanistan and Kampuchea. Just before Mr Firyubin’s arrival, the local press broke the unsavoury story of a cypher officer in the Singapore Embassy in Moscow who had been seduced by a Soviet woman agent and then blackmailed into passing her secret documents. He was jailed for 10 years. The disclosure prompted predictably wry comment in the region. In February the Soviet Ambassador to New Zealand had been expelled for slipping cash to militant unionists, and the Soviet military attache in Tokyo had been suddenly withdrawn after being cited in a spy scandal involving a Japanese general. Then it was reported that a Japanese military attache accredited to Moscow had collapsed after being served spiked vodka during an official tour of south Russia.

Questioned earlier by a backbencher who urged greater vigilance against Russian subversive activities. the Singapore Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, (Mr S. Dhanabalan) declined to consider cutting down the size of the Soviet Embassy in Singapore. Almost simultaneously, however, he gave an interview to a magazine in which he emphasised that Soviet naval auxiliaries would no longer be allowed to call at Singapore for repairs, nor would the Russians be permitted to

“land their planes, refuel, or fly over our air space” on the way to Indo-China. Then, four days before Mr Firyubin was to arrive, the Foreign Minister (Mr Sinathamby Rajaratnam) forcefully warned a conference, of strategic experts that, since the compulsive expansionists in the Kremlin disdained “bourgeois” international law, the whole concept of neutrality and non-alignment (to which Afghanistan and Kampuchea had subscribed) must be questioned.

For the smaller nation, siding with a super-Power had become practical politics: to stay neutral was to be “caught in the crossfire.” The implication was that those who would find future Russian domination distasteful must turn to the West. Indonesian and Malaysian leaders are also beginning to see the greater danger of Soviet global ambition behind the hegemony of Hanoi and the theft of Cambodia. The Russians are paying out up to $3 million a day to finance the impecunious Vietnamese in exchange for strategic air and naval facilities, and they are reported to have established a new route for flying aid and advisers to Da Nang direct from Russia.

Moscow recently earnestly exhorted the Thais to hammer out their “misunderstandings” with Vietnam over Kampuchea, and Mr Firyubin told Mr Rajaratnam that Singapore also “misunderstood” the ill-used Vietnamese, who were offering their “genuine friendship” to all non-Communist States in the region.

In the past this routine might have been read as a signal that the Russians wanted a quick end to the Kampuchean crisis, but today sceptics fear Moscow is merely trying to lull one half of the subcontinent into a false sense of security ' while Hanoi swallows the other.

Mr Rajaratnam replied that if words were to be

matched by deeds. Moscow should persuade Hanoi to open a “genuine dialogue” with the Association of South-East Asian Nations, and the Vietnamese should pull out of Kampuchea to open the way for a peaceful settle-, ment.

The frustrated Russians claim that the member States of A.S.E.A.N. — Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines — are under pressure from the Americans to turn the partnership into an antiSoviet defence organisat j o n . Responsible A.S.E.A.N. Ministers have repeatedlv rejected the idea, protesting that their whole purpose is to establish a “zone of peace, freedom, and neutrality.” But security evidently demands something more. Malaysia, stimulated by the Russian and Vietnamese predilection for geopolitical piracy, is transforming its anti-guerrilla army into a force that can meet a modern invader head on. It is putting together its first tank regiment, and will also be buying up to 600 armoured personnel carriers and self-propelled guns. The Indonesians are in the market for a similar number.

thinking of purchasing the A 4 Skyhawk groundattack fighter “because three other A.S.E.A.N. countries” have chosen it. Kuala Lumpur is building a naval base in Sarawak and an air base on the east coast of Malaysia, opposite Vietnam, and both Malaysia and Indonesia have mounted their biggest military exercises to date in the last two months. Soviet and Vietnamese behaviour “will decide ultimately whether A.S.E.A.N. becomes a military alliance,” Mr Dhanabalan said recently. If the Americans really want that alliance, it looks as if they can leave it to Moscow to forge it for them. —O.F.N.S. Copyright.