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1994-05-09
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<text>
<title>
Kozyrev Interviewed on Elections, Zhirinovskiy
</title>
<article>
<hdr>
Foreign Broadcast Information Service, December 16, 1993
Kozyrev Interviewed on Elections, Zhirinovskiy
</hdr>
<body>
<p> [Interview with Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev by
unidentified correspondent; place and date not given--recorded]
</p>
<p> [Correspondent] Andrey Vladimirovich, so far the reaction
of the world community to the results, the preliminary results,
of the elections and the constitutional referendum in Russia has
been very restrained. Nonetheless, fears are already being
voiced that our foreign policy guidelines may yet alter in some
way in connection with the victory of the opposition. How
justified are these fears?
</p>
<p> [Kozyrev] I would here welcome this restrained reaction
because we are talking about a purely internal matter of ours.
At the same time this reaction is, on the whole, a positive
reaction. As usual, our foreign partners show interest not in a
precise distribution of seats among parties and in what sort of
parties these will be, for this is our own affair, but in
Russia's advance along the democratic path, the safeguarding of
human rights, let us say. This is a matter of concern for us in
other countries and these are the issues we always discuss with
our foreign partners, not just as applicable to Russia, but as
applicable to what is taking place in the relevant states.
</p>
<p> As for foreign reaction, the issue which happens to be the
main issue for us, too, is singled out: The constitution has
been adopted. It is, in fact, the Yeltsin constitution and
everyone understands that. The president has taken the
initiative and played the leading role in the elaboration of the
constitution, although the best minds and experts were also
involved, you will recall the painstaking work, but, of course,
it was the president's initiative and it is the president's
constitution, just as the De Gaulle constitution in France, let
us say, or the Jefferson constitution in the United States and
there is nothing special about it, nor does it signify any sort
of authoritarianism--it is a natural situation. A president
legitimately elected by the whole of the people favors the
construction of Russian statehood. The constitution has been
passed, and this is the main thing. It makes our foreign partners
and us ourselves confident that foreign and internal policy will
remain the same in its essence--reformist, democratic, open, and
so on and so forth. Our foreign policy is being made by the
president; It has been, it is now, and always will be, I would
like to stress this. Naturally, we want the Duma, the Federal
Assembly as a whole, and the parties and individual deputies who
come to work in it to contribute to the strengthening of the
foreign policy of the Russian state, but its fundamentals, its
fundamental policy will remain the same because it is being made
by the president.
</p>
<p> The presidential mandate is incontrovertible. In the space
of two years the president in fact received his third vote of
confidence from all the people--here I mean the vote for the
constitution--and, incidentally, in the course of the election
campaign the main principles of the foreign policy were not
questioned, if you ignore perfectly irresponsible statements
which their authors are already repudiating with the same ease
with which they made these irresponsible statements, having so
frightened the world which has apparently still failed to
distinguish between serious politicians with serious programs
and, forgive me here, the jester-cum-buffoon types.
</p>
<p> That is the way it appears, because these people, or this
person immediately made a statement completely contradicting
what was said before. Well, that is what they are worth, these
statements, the ones made before and, evidently, the ones made
later. It is difficult to consider them seriously, although we
will, of course, take account of the spectrum of views voiced in
the Duma on the part of all sorts of parties and individual
deputies.
</p>
<p> [Correspondent] Andrey Vladimirovich Kozyrev, it's
understood that, according to the new constitution, it's the
president and the government who design and carry out foreign
policy, but parliament, of course, cannot and should not be
detached from our foreign affairs. Yet, you have already said,
and everyone knows that some leaders of the opposition who gained
the upper hand in the elections just now have very original
views on the subject of international affairs.
</p>
<p> [Kozyrev] To begin with I would ask: What would we want
from the new parliament? What does the country, the state,
require from it? What do I, personally, as a representative of a
party bloc, or as a deputy from Murmansk Oblast, require and
what does the country require? The country needs stronger
legislation pertaining to those foreign policy matters, those
foreign policy problems with which we are permanently occupied:
for example, protection of the Russian-speaking population in
countries near our borders [v blizhnem zarubezhye], as they say,
that is, in the republics of the former Soviet Union. This is an
acutely difficult problem. No easy answers or easy approaches
will do, like: everything has been transformed into a guberniya
[pre-1918 administrative district], so the Russian-speaking
population is protected. This, on the contrary, works against the
Russian-speaking population. Why? Because it causes an even
greater explosion in those areas where there is already
nationalism, or in many cases simply causes offense, you
understand, and then you get people showing that strange desire
to prove that they fear no one. It all spills over into anger,
indignation and so on against the very Russian-speaking
population that was supposed to be protected by these heroic
statements.
</p>
<p> I would advise those leaders who make such easy statements
about former Soviet republics to visit them themselves and live
somewhere for a week after making such a statement, but I do not
mean they should do this surrounded by soldiers, by their own
bodyguards, or under the protection of Russian servicemen--who
serve so heroically in the most difficult conditions in many
places, like Tajikistan, Georgia, and so on, and the
Transdniester--I mean simply to live as the ordinary Russian
population does. The ordinary Russian population does not live
behind tanks, you understand, or behind barbed wire, but in
normal conditions. Their children attend school. People go to
work. If the leader who made the irresponsible statement were
himself to go to work and listen to what his colleagues say--the
Kazakhs, the Uzbeks with whom he would have to work, and with
whom people in fact do work with no problems in many cases,
thank God. We should help such people to continue to work without
problems, not have people point at others, saying: You hate us;
you want us again to be a dependent people, and so on. This, you
understand, is pure provocation.
</p>
<p> Now can the Duma, or the whole parliament, in actual fact
take part in settling this issue? It can and it is obliged to!
And very concrete measures must be applied. Thank God that the
current constitution--which is in force now, which has been
passed--thank God there is an article in it which stipulates
clearly that there will be dual citizenship in Russia. This means
that we can now approach our partners to conclude agreements on
granting dual citizenship. this would represent protection for
the Russian-speaking population.
</p>
<p> If a Russian, an ethnic Russian, or a Russian-speaker,
someone who feels close to Russia--there are Uzbeks and Kazakhs
and Kyrgyz who consider themselves in essence Russian-speakers;
you understand the position--if all of these people, or some of
them, wish to have Russian citizenship as well as Kyrgyz,
Kazakh, or Uzbek citizenship, of course they will be under the
protection of the Russian state, they will have the rights and
so on. People want this.
</p