Behind the BRICS Curtain
On October 22-24, 2024, leaders, negotiators, advisors, and representatives from 35 countries and six international organizations gathered in Kazan, Russia for the BRICS Summit, the theme of which was “Strengthening Multilateralism for Fair Global Development and Security.” 1 This was the 16th BRICS annual gathering since it was founded in 2009, as a Russian-led initiative to create an alternative to the G8 which was, allegedly, a vehicle for promoting the interests of the European Union and the United States.
According to headline speaker Vladimir Putin, the extremely high-profile October event “marked the culmination of Russia's chairmanship of the group and was one of the significant events on the global political calendar.”2 His speech and the reports, documents and declaration issued in conjunction with the Summit were replete with reassuring rhetoric and laudable objectives as suggested by the frequent use of words such as: “cooperation,” “diversity,” “sovereign policies,” “mutual respect,” “obligatory consideration of each other's interests,” “sustainable development,” “open dialogue,” “mutual understanding,” etc.
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The 33-page Kazan Declaration, “a comprehensive conceptual document with a positive forward-looking agenda,” reaffirmed the commitment of the signatories:
“to the BRICS spirit of mutual respect and understanding, sovereign equality, solidarity, democracy, openness, inclusiveness, collaboration and consensus…[and dedication to expand BRICS] under the three pillars of political and security, economic and financial, cultural and people-to-people cooperation and to enhancing our strategic partnership for the benefit of our people through the promotion of peace, a more representative, fairer international order, a reinvigorated and reformed multilateral system, sustainable development and inclusive growth.”
So far, so good? All the fine words, political camaraderie and jolly photographs have a very different interpretation when viewed in light of an online article which appeared on November 5, 2024 for a few brief hours before mysteriously vanishing some hours later.3
The author of the text made it abundantly clear that Russia’s main motivation in the creation of BRICS was the promotion of national economic interests such as those of the chrysotile (white) asbestos industry. The multi-billion-ruble income stream generated by chrysotile exports – and Russian asbestos producers have dominated global markets since taking over from their Canadian counterparts in the mid-1980s – has been under threat as worldwide consumption plummeted from 1,964,164 tonnes in 2001 to 1.32m tonnes in 2023. The strategic and economic importance of markets in asbestos-using BRICS countries could not have been made clearer in the anonymous Russian article:
“Today, it is our country that supplies China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and many other countries with affordable raw materials for the mass production of roofing materials, water and sewer pipes, thermal insulation materials and much more based on chrysotile fiber. At the same time, the EU countries do not abandon their attempts to squeeze competitors out of the market, relying on controlled international organizations. And they succeed, if we are talking about individual countries: in 2005, Egypt banned the production of chrysotile cement pipes, stopping a large-scale campaign to build a water pipeline for remote settlements. The country in that position, it must be admitted, simply did not have the tools to resist this pressure. That is why BRICS is an important international instrument that ensures the consolidation of countries in which the majority of the world's population lives.”
Of course, we will never know conclusively why the November 5th article was deleted. One could, however, speculate that the candor of the author – who is probably now on his way to a gulag – was out of sync with the official party line. It was the choreographed shows of unanimity and expressions of solidarity that the Russians wanted publicized and not the dirty secrets lurking in the background. The vanished text revealed the self-serving subterfuge behind the BRICS curtain which, upon closer inspection, will almost certainly be found to contain the same deadly asbestos fibers as were in proscenium fire curtains in almost all theaters and cinemas during the 20th century.
November 13, 2024
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1 Website. BRICS Summit 2024. Accessed November 10, 2024.
https://brics-russia2024.ru/en/summit/
2 Putin, V. Speech at news conference following 16th BRICS Summit. October 24, 2024.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/75385
3 Международный диктат большинства: зачем нужен БРИКС? [International Dictate of the Majority: Why Do We Need BRICS?]. November 5, 2024.
https://finance.rambler.ru/economics/53692383/?utm_content=finance_media&utm_medium=read_more&utm_source=copylink
