Arctic problems -- Part 2

MOSCOW, May 25 (UPI) -- Many countries have staked their claims to the transportation artery of Russia's Arctic Northern Sea Route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.

The American Council at the United Nations University called the Arctic Ocean a potential breeding ground for international conflicts.

This is the situation: We knew from school textbooks that the sea lane stretching along the former Soviet coast from the Atlantic to the Pacific and up to the North Pole belongs to us. On all maps, it clearly follows the meridians, making only one curve in the Barents Sea. We have been disputing it with Norway for more than 30 years. It is worth the trouble -- by some estimates gas reserves on the disputed shelf are as large as the Shtokman deposit.

Both Russia and Norway are enthusiastically searching for a compromise. Renowned Norwegian scientist Willy Ostreng believes we only have a few more years to settle the issue, that is, before the main hydrocarbon consumers -- the United States and China -- make it to the Arctic and start dictating their terms.

There are grounds for such apprehension. The Chinese have opened a research station on Norway's Spitsbergen Island and transferred the Snow Dragon ice-breaker to it from the Antarctic. The United States has also become markedly more active. Just recently, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) urged the United States to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea in order to counterbalance Moscow's claims to polar energy resources.

In the past few years, other countries, some of them not even northern, have also been eyeing the territories that we have considered ours since time immemorial. Still others have called into doubt the principle of dividing up the Arctic pie, which was cut into five pieces way back in the 1920s. The reason for these claims is obvious -- the shelf of the northern seas accounts for up to a quarter of the world's hydrocarbon reserves.

Incidentally, the Convention on the Law of the Sea allows us to put this dispute to rest and expand our 200-mile zone legally, but only if we prove that the underwater Lomonosov and Mendeleyev ridges are direct continuations of Russian land. Five years ago, a special U.N. commission dismissed Russia's arguments as invalid. Now we will have to carry out a second survey.

These territorial disputes have had a tremendous impact on the importance of the Northern Sea Route, which is quite understandable. The country that dominates this sea lane will dictate its terms to the developers of the shelf deposits and will see the biggest gains from the transportation of raw materials to the Pacific and the Atlantic. These include billions of tons of oil and trillions of cubic meters of gas, not to mention other minerals in which the local lands abound.

It seems that everyone in Russia agrees that it is time to restore the Northern Sea Route and revive the economy of the Extreme North. We will then have both cargoes and vessels to carry them. At the Murmansk meeting, President Putin suggested establishing a national Arctic council to address this issue. This is a good idea, and it could work, unless it gets bogged down in red tape like a bill on the Northern Sea Route submitted to the State Duma in 2000. If this happens again, this sea lane will remain for us just a dotted line on the map.

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(Maxim Krans is a political commentator for the RIA Novosti news agency. This article is reprinted by permission of RIA Novosti. The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.)

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