Pouring oil into troubled waters

By Rein F. Deer

Date: 27/10/05

One of the many interest groups in the European Parliament is called 'The Baltic Intergroup'. Once a month, during the Strasbourg plenary session, a gaggle of northerners cram into a small meeting room in Strasbourg.

The MEPs and their assistants feel they have been neglected by the other Europeans, particularly by the Mediterranean lot. They discuss anything from foreign policy to the environment. Russia, the eternal menace looming in the background, sets the tone even if no one mentions it.

Funnily enough the intergroup is led by an Englishman, a former schoolteacher called Christopher Beazley (EPP-ED). What makes him competent in Baltic affairs goes without saying. During the Crimean War in 1854 it was his countryman Admiral Napier who sailed his fleet all the way up the Gulf of Bothnia.

Rear-Admiral Plumbridge distributed orders in English to the locals to capitulate. But being ignorant of foreign languages, as people were in those days, they did not understand and nobody surrendered.

The English eventually weighed anchor and sailed home again. Beazley has learned the same, patient realism, listening, for example, to the former Lithuanian head of state Vytautas Landsbergis, as he socks it - at great length but also with great justice - to Vladimir Putin for Russia's "contamination of the Baltic Sea and of European politics, too".

The Baltic Sea should be of great concern to all Europeans. It is the Mare Nostrum of Europe, with 85 million people living around it; all, apart from the people of Russia, are EU citizens.

Southerners may think that the cold keeps the sea clean. Nothing could be further from the truth. The shallow waters of the Baltic are between twice and five times more polluted than those of the North Sea. The algae bloom turns the water the colour of pea soup and makes it smell rotten.

Along with hundreds of cargo ships, 1,200 oil tankers sail to and from a Baltic port every month. Russian oil carriers are not always, let us say, of the best quality. In 2004 alone, some 300 illegal oil dischargers were caught by the authorities.

Fat Baltic fish do not meet EU health standards any more. Locals are warned not to eat such delicacies as Baltic herring. Doctors in the area do not agree. People who suffer from cardiovascular diseases need the fish oil in question, especially the senior citizens.

So forget the dioxins! One should eat several tonnes of that fish, if only to achieve a face like Viktor Yushchenko's.
In theory, the patient Mr Beazley commands more lobbying firepower than any other Parliamentary pressure group. In practice, the interests around the Baltic Sea are so divided that Russia can carry on making international policy, using energy and old contradictions as her weapons against the EU.

Comment feature on the Baltic Intergroup at the European Parliament and the issue of Baltic sea pollution.