The Russian recognition
Molly Mortimer
Australia is not the first western-orientated nation to give official aid to African guerrillas; Norway has long outbid her two hundred thousand dollars; but she is the first to give official recognition to the Russian occupation and annexation of the Baltic States. Don Willesee, Whitlam's foreign minister, says it is a question of 'realism' after thirty-five years. In that case, perhaps Australia should should equally accept the South-West Africa regimes, whose effective control has lasted much longer than thirty-five years. There is no moral reason why Russia's colonial oppression of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, states that were sovereign members of the pre-war League of Nations, should have preference, and on 'realism' either both or none should be recognised. The Baltic community in Australia is rightly incensed and has formed a fighting 'Action Group.' Even the Sydney papers. have commented on Australia's double standards and "paranoic preoccupation with racism abroad" forgetting its own beam: the Abos. Australia does not greatly care for external pressures there and looks less than kindly at the second Abo delegation this year to China, led by Gary Foley, to complain about Gough Whitlam's attitude on land and mining rights and condemn the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee as puppetry. Dr Rex Patterson,, Minister for Northern Development, has already warned of racial violence in the 'Deep North' and the Abo demand for separate status and statehood is growing.
But a wider and more embarrassing ripple had been cast by the Russian recognition for NATO and Norway. There are Baltic govern. ments in exile and refugee councils in Scandinavia who have made forcible representations against Russian pressure for recognition at the European Security and Co-operation meetings in Helsinki and Geneva, so far successfully. For Norway is increasingly nervous about her long frontier with Russia and the freezing war games which the USSR plays with the US up and down iceberg alley, from Spitzbergen to Greenland; from the extraordinary floating ice islands, known as Targets and North ,Poles, on which men are marooned for military research, to the sonar submarine system. Russia, which already has a coal concession on Spitzbergen and is currently looking for oil, has stepped up the pressure for a share in administration and air control. Every weakness is a threat to Norway, and the Australian recognition of Russian imperialism is not a friendly action to the northern flank of NATO.
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