Iceland review - 2016, Page 64

62 ICELAND REVIEW
BETWEEN TWO FIRES
There has reportedly been disagree-
ment within Iceland’s governing parties
regarding the sanctions, though Gunnar
Bragi stresses that supporting them was
agreed upon at the government level.
The foreign minister has been at the
forefront of pushing for the sanctions.
He agrees that the fishing industry
is paying a high price, but considers
international obligations Iceland’s pri-
ority. In an official statement released in
January, the ministry concludes that it is
necessary to stay in line with Western
democracies—Iceland’s “most important
friends”—and that to step back would
compromise Iceland’s reputation as a
solid partner.
US Ambassador to Iceland Robert
Cushman Barber also has strong opin-
ions on the matter. “We believe that it
is important that, as NATO allies, we
continue to uphold the essential princi-
ples at stake if we are to deter aggres-
sion and efforts to change borders by
force of arms,” he addressed Icelanders
on his Facebook page early in the new
year, after daily newspaper Morgunblaðið,
associated with high-earning fishermen,
had reportedly refused to publish his
op-ed.
Bradley A. Thayer, professor of polit-
ical science at the University of Iceland,
believes that the sanctions—even though
damaging for the Russian economy—are
not going to change its behavior, as the
Obama administration is not fond of
forceful posturing towards the Kremlin.
To Ólafur Egilsson, Iceland’s last
ambassador to the USSR, Iceland’s par-
ticipation in sanctions is as unnecessary
as it is nominal. “Russia has for many
decades been a reliable trading partner,”
he urges. He explains that by virtue of
gaining the Soviet Union as an export
market in the early fifties, Iceland—being
a newly independent state—strength-
ened its position, making its interna-
tional trade less determined by Western
allies—initially its only business partners.
During the Cod Wars, which resulted in
a ban on Icelandic fish in British harbors,
Iceland was greatly helped by the USSR’s
willingness to purchase its fish.
Trade agreements between the coun-
tries were usually based on barters.
In exchange for its seafood, wool and
textiles, Iceland received fuel, build-
ing materials and agricultural products.
“Many Icelanders have quite precious
memories about their Soviet cars,” points
out Mikhail Timofeev, a Russian histo-
rian living in Reykjavík, and says that
imports from the USSR to some extent
contributed to Iceland’s modernization.
In the course of over six decades
of Iceland-Russia cooperation, trade
seemed to be separated from foreign pol-
icy. Even when the Soviet Army occupied
Afghanistan in 1979, and Iceland, along
with other NATO members, criticized
the military operation, it didn’t influ-
ence the business between the two. “For
Icelanders, of course, selling their fish is
the main thing. And the cooperation was
lucrative for both countries,” says Jón
Ólafsson, another Russia specialist, at the
University of Iceland, who emphasizes
that it would nevertheless be short-sight-
ed to abandon the sanctions because of
some apparent historical parallels. The
main reason behind this cooperation,
he asserts, with respect to Iceland’s geo-
POLITICS
graphical position, has always been not
least political: “Iceland was important in
the Cold War. Because of the American
navy [US Navy base in Keflavík, which
closed in 2006], the Russians would pre-
fer to keep these relationships.”
TRYING TO UNDERSTAND RUSSIA’S
INTENTIONS
The main rationale behind Russia’s
import ban in response to Western sanc-
tions, however, is not as much polit-
ical as economic and has to do with
Russia’s lowering purchasing power,
reckons Vilhjálmur Bjarnason, MP for
the Independence Party and Vice Chair
of the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs
Committee. He presents figures that
signify the devaluation of the Russian
currency: “The price for oil went down
and it made the ruble much weaker.” As
Russia’s stats office reported at the end
of January, in 2015 the Russian economy
contracted by 3.7 percent.
However, after the import ban was
revised and extended to include Iceland
and others in August 2014, Russian Prime
Minister Dimitry Medvedev announced
that Russia’s “agriculture received quite
a powerful boost” since the embargo was
introduced and that this is an opportuni-