G8 SUMMIT: No G8 Sanctions Likely Against Nuclear India

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Dipankar De Sarkar

BIRMINGHAM, England, May 15 1998 (IPS) - Leaders of the world’s eight most industrialised countries meeting here in the wake of this week’s nuclear tests by India, will not impose any collective sanctions on India, a spokesman for the British government said Friday.

At the same time, the leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) expect New Delhi to sign two treaties it has shunned as discriminatory: the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the spokesman said.

India conducted five nuclear tests over the past week in defiance of world opinion, prompting the United States and Japan to impose wide-ranging economic sanctions. The G8 allies, however, have opposed taking such steps.

“There will be no G8 package of sanctions,” the spokesman told reporters. “But bilateral measures will have a combined effect. The Americans have a legal necessity,” to impose sanctions. Britain holds the presidency of the G8 (whose other members are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the United States) as well as the European Union.

“Everybody is disturbed,” he said, referring to meetings Friday. A G8 leaders’ declaration is expected to express “dismay in the strongest possible terms.” The EU is expected to issue a similar response separately.

US President Bill Clinton told reporters there is “huge universal concern” at the Indian nuclear tests but that a retaliatory test by arch-rival Pakistan was “not inevitable.”

“But they are under a lot of pressure to do so,” he added.

Clinton said he favoured a “formula within which they (Pakistan) will find it politically possible not to go forward.”

One option is to reconsider US arms sanctions, imposed during the George Bush administration, which halted the delivery of F-16 fighter aircraft to Pakistan. “Many Americans are not very happy with the” prohibition, Clinton said, adding that Pakistanis also have a “general grievance” about it.

“Soon India will have the biggest middle class in the world. It will have a very large say in the 21st century – no less than China or the new democratic Russia,” Clinton said. These countries would have to “decide how they will define their greatness.”

The Indian blasts initially threatened to overshadow the G8 summit but British premier Tony Blair made known today the summit was keen to address other issues such as the Asian financial crisis, turmoil in Indonesia, and the crippling debts of some of the world’s poorest countries.

In addition, the finance ministers of Britain and France declared in an article published Friday that the G8 “will pay special attention to Africa,” with proposals before them that aim to bring all heavily indebted poor countries (HIPCs) under the umbrella of the World Bank-administered HIPC debt-reduction process by the year 2000.

There are currently 41 countries in the HIPC initiative – all but seven of them in Africa. To qualify for the benefits, borrowers must first satisfy ceditors that they have managed their managed their economies under direction from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for as long as six years.

At that point, all lenders must agree to shoulder their share of relief needed to bring each borrower’s outstanding debt down to a level deemed “sustainable” by the IMF. Critics say structural adjustment programmes to be implemented during the six-year test period are too stringent and hit the poorest the hardest – and relief provided at the end is too little, too late.

G8 leaders also are expected to agree on the need to pay special attention to the immediate problems of post-conflict countries, the finance ministers said in their published comments.