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it seems fair to assume that the historic baggage of mistrust and suspicion still
serves as a 'facilitating condition' for securitization. Throughout most of the
Cold War period, Norwegian research and infrastructure projects on Svalbard,
such as the establishment of a telemetric station at Kongsfjord in cooperation
with ESRO (mid-1960s), and the building of an airstrip at Hotellneset (early
1970s), were initially met with protest notes from the Soviet Foreign Ministry
(Østreng 1977:55-8). As late as in the early 2000s, the 'radar issue' had not
been removed from Russia's security agenda, and the archipelago Svalbard
was still seen in Russia as 'one of the key elements in Norway and NATO's
system for widened influence in the Arctic' (Gundarov 2002b:3). The Russian
Government and commentators still tend to 'securitize' perceived changes to
the status quo, whether it is new research installations, environmental protec-
tion measures or Norwegian fishery enforcement measures.
Case 2: The Svalbard Environmental Protection Act
The Svalbard Environmental Protection Act, passed by the Norwegian
Parliament on 15 June 2001, aimed to preserve Svalbard as 'one of the best-
managed wilderness areas in the world'. In Russia, Norway's viewpoint that
environmental concerns should weigh more heavily in the event of a con-
flict between environmental aims and other interests (Ministry of Justice
and the Police, 1999:section 6.2) was seen as a mere pretence for other long-
term Norwegian objectives. At the time, provisions that would establish
several new environmental protection areas for Svalbard - pursuant to the
Svalbard Environmental Protection Act - were in the pipeline, including a
14km 2 biotope protection area in Coles Bay, east of the Russian settlement of
Barentsburg. However, apart from rare plants, the Coles Bay area also held the
largest and most promising coal reserves of the Russian state-owned mining
company Trust Arktikugol. The proposed protection area in Coles Bay coin-
cided conspicuously with the area in which Trust Arktikugol had planned
its new coal mine. In 1998, Russia's largest-ever Svalbard settlement, the
mining town of Pyramiden, had been abandoned due to depletion of coal
reserves. Now, the reserves in the mines outside the only remaining Russian
settlement, Barentsburg, were coming to an end. Barentsburg is run like a
company town, where the state-owned Trust Arktikugol employed virtually
the entire population (Jørgensen 2004:189). Hence, by 2002, a new coal mine
in Coles Bay was considered crucial in order to maintain a significant Russian
presence on Svalbard. Russian authorities were not convinced by the assur-
ances from the Governor of Svalbard that the protection of the surface biotope
in the Coles Bay area could be combined with underground mining activities
(Pedersen 2002).
In a diplomatic note, Russia asserted that the protection area would annul
their right under article 3 of the Svalbard Treaty (1920) to mine on the archi-
pelago. Hence, the promising coalfields outside Coles Bay would 'in reality
 
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