At rare meeting, two presidents agree that current escalation is a bad thing, but will they do anything to stop it?

By Armen Karapetyan*

The presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan had a rare meeting last weekend amid escalating tensions around Nagorny Karabakh.

The meeting between Armenia’s Serzh Sargsyan and Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan took place in the Swiss capital Bern on December 19, under the auspices of the Minsk Group, the tripartite body set up by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe to support peace talks on Karabakh.

“The summit created an opportunity for the presidents to clarify their respective positions,” a statement from the Minsk Group said afterwards. While the meeting did not generate any concrete results, the fact that the two leaders were talking was seen as positive. The last time Sargsyan and Aliyev met to discuss the conflict was in Paris in October 2014.

According to the statement, Aliyev and Sargsyan both said they were ready to continue talks on a final resolution of the Karabakh dispute, both said they remained committed to a peaceful settlement, and both reaffirmed their support for the Minsk Group as the lead mediating body. That last was a significant statement, since support for the Minsk Group has wavered in recent times as local officials accuse the OSCE body – co-chaired by United States, Russian and French diplomats – either of favouring the other side,or of failing to achieve progress.

War in the early 1990s left a local Armenian administration in control of Nagorny Karabakh and several adjoining districts of Azerbaiijan. The ceasefire signed in 1994 has prevented a resumption of large-scale hostilities, but is frequently breached by bouts of shooting across the “line of control” surrounding the Karabakh zone and across the Azerbaijani-Armenian state border.

More intense periods of fighting always raise concerns of a return to full-scale conflict. There were serious upsurges in fighting in July- August 2014, again in January 2015, and most recently since October this year.

Just before Sargsyan and Aliyev met, there were reports of more deaths. On the night of December 17-18, the Karabakh defence forces reported that three of their soldiers and two Azerbaijanis were killed in an enemy reconnaissance raid. Azerbaijan later denied this was true.

The OSCE statement said that Aliyev and Sargsyan discussed the recent violence on the ground, and that they “expressed particular concern about casualties, including civilians, caused by the use of heavy weapons“.

Reports that heavier weapons are being deployed emerged this autumn. First the Armenians accused the Azerbaijanis of using large-calibre mortars, rockets and conventional artillery, then they announced they were responding in kind.

On December 9, the Karabakh defence ministry said Armenian troops had been fired on by an Azerbaijani tank, in the first use of heavy armoured fighting vehicles since 1994. In Yerevan, Defence Minister Seyran Ohanyan urged the OSCE Minsk Group to take Azerbaijan to task over the incident.

Azerbaijani officials did not deny outright that one of their tanks was in action. Commenting on the claims on December 10, defence ministry spokesman Vagif Dargahli said merely that the army used “various weapons against the enemy depending on the situation”, according to the Azernews agency.

Both Armenian and Azerbaijani forces obtain most of their weapons from Russia. Armenia is a long-term, trusted ally of Moscow in a region in which neither state has many other friends. But Azerbaijan has the oil revenues to buy all the advanced weaponry it wants, and Russia seems happy to sell it.

A report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) published in March aid Azerbaijan increased its arms imports by 249 per cent between the periods 2005-09 and 2010-14, making it the second-largest arms importer in Europe. It acquired 85 per cent of these weapons from Russia.

Many recent purchases have been of hi-tech weapons like the latest-model T-90 tanks, S-300 air defence missiles, Mi-35M helicopter gunships and Smerch multiple rocket launchers.

Armenia’s imports over the same period were just four per cent of those of Azerbaijan, said SIPRI.

Commentators in Armenia and Azerbaijan agree that the latest escalation in fighting comes from calculated political thinking rather than trigger-happy troops, but they differ sharply on who is seeking to make trouble.

Sergei Minasyan, deputy director of the Caucasus Institute in Yerevan, argues that Azerbaijan wanted to ramp up the pressure on OSCE mediators and the Armenians ahead of the December 19 presidential meeting. But the desire to project military strength also reflected domestic pressures on Azerbaijan’s government, he said.

“There are other factors, such as the reduction in government revenues in Azerbaijan due to the sharp drop in oil prices,” said Minasyan. “We can see what’s happening in Azerbaijan – the state security ministry has practically been dissolved, there’s the unrest in Nardaran and the aggravated situation on the border. The Aliyev administration is trying to distract people´s attention.”

In Baku. Mubariz Ahmedoglu, head of the Centre for Political Innovation and Technology in Baku, said it was Armenia that was driving conflict.

Ahmedoglu noted that there was a view that since the Armenians had gained de facto control of all the territory they wanted, they had no need to upset the status quo by engaging in aggressive military action. But he said it would be misguided to accept this as a truth.

“In reality, it’s the wrong approach,” he told a press conference reported by the Trend news agency. Armenia realises that everything it’s done hasn’t been legally formalised. Armenia’s current aim is to get some kind of legal document signed, any kind, even if there’s little substance to it…. The main aim of Armenia’s strategy is to keep the ‘line of contact’ constantly on the agenda as a source of danger. And the best way to do that is to breach the ceasefire frequently, because news of that quickly goes out via the media and reaches influential figures on the international scene.”

On December 9, US State Department spokeperson John Kirby called for an end to the latest round of violence. “We also remind the sides that these attacks do not conform to the commitment by the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan to resolve the Nagorny Karabakh conflict peacefully,” he said.

Asked whether tensions between Turkey and Russia might have contributed to the Armenia-Azerbaijan situation, Kirby said, “We´re concerned about the escalation itself and not necessarily the source. Obviously, in both cases we want to see tensions de-escalated and for cool heads to prevail.”

*Armen Karapetyan is the pseudonym of a journalist in Armenia. This article was published at IWPR’s CRS Issue 801

“If you invite a bear to dance, it’s not you who decides when the dance is over.” — Cengiz Bandar

So much has been put into it, and one can only imagine that some of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s officials are troubled by what is becoming something they can barely handle. That is the dilemma with miscalculating power, a dangerous possession to have at the best of times.

Students of Turkish-Russian history will hardly be taken aback at the recent jousting that has taken place between Moscow and Ankara. Relations between the states in their respective forms since the 1600s have often been frosty. Wars have been fought, and regional power plays engineered. But both have also shown periods of accord, notably during the Cold War when Turkey started feeling less accommodating to its Western allies.

The shooting down of the Russian Su-24 fighter jet, the first time a Russian warplane has been downed by a NATO member since November 1952, was bound to unleash a range of consequences, and these have tended to conform to the historical set: threats, sanctions, cutting off ties.

Accounts from both sides differ, with Moscow insisting it was an intentional hostile act by the Turkish air force, and Ankara begging to differ. On Wednesday, Russian Defence Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov insisted that the November 24 incident was planned, claiming Turkish sources as good authority. President Vladimir Putin has been typically more colourful, insisting that the act was occasioned by Ankara’s desire to lick “the Americans in a certain place.”

Turkey’s response made via an unnamed government official? “The Russians originally complained that Turkey had involved NATO in a bilateral dispute. Now they’re saying we conspired with Washington to shoot down their aircraft. To be honest, we don’t understand why they would make contradictory remarks.”[1]

In a broader sense, they have ignited fears of a great power standoff, notably centred on Syria. It is frequent these days to hear statements such as those of Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlou: “Syrian lands are not, and will not be, a part of Russia’s imperialist goals.”[2]

The action is, however, calamitous for the future regional requirements in the region. Russia has shown that it will be a member of any agreement dealing with Syria. The Turkish regime has shown itself to be distinctly opposed to any situation where the Assad regime might feature, suggesting that Moscow has no business to insist otherwise.

Friendships are being strained; enemies are being riled. But there is a fundamental double stance here. Ankara persists in its determination to attack the PKK or the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, even as it attempts to overthrow Assad while providing token resistance against Islamic State. The result, as Sputnik News put it, was the “waging of war on two fronts”, one being “cold war” with Moscow, and an ever persistent hot war with the PKK.[3]

The ploy is something that is bound to backfire. For one, it makes the backing of the PKK ever more inviting from those who wish to see its support bolstered. Russia, inserting itself into the situation, naturally takes a more sympathetic view to the Kurds, who are doing something invaluable to the broader cause against such enemies of Moscow as Islamic State.

The consequences for Turkey in this regard could be significant. On December 23, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was welcoming Selahattin Demirtaş, co-chairman of the foremost Kurdish political party in Turkey, the HDP. The announcement for the meeting was made by Demirtaş deep in Diyarbakir, a southeastern province in Turkey which has borne witness to battles between Turkish and Kurdish forces. Rather cleverly, he has managed to hitch the case for Kurdish autonomy to the anti-authoritarian cause, much to the consternation of such figures as Davutoğlou.[4]

The Chairman of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), Devlet Bahçeli, was even less diplomatic, suggesting that the HDP “is working with Turkey’s enemies and does not see a drawback to leaning its back on countries whose aims are clear, so as to garner their support for autonomy and Kurdistan.”

Moscow also sees a chance for some tactical snorting in the face of Ankara. It was only recently that Russia decided to openly support the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party’s militia, otherwise known as the People’s Protection Units, in its battle against Islamic State, though Syrian Kurds have been very wary to openly endorse this support.[5] Within Turkey, the PYD, which controls much of the north and northeast of Syria at this point in time, are considered PKK affiliates.

The internal issue for Ankara will be far more destabilising. In seeking a broader Middle Eastern agenda that pushes Moscow out, the result may well be an unintentional empowerment of local forces within the country on the one hand, and the bolstering of its external enemies. Continued belligerence over the jet fighter incident has scented the world wind.

Notes:
[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-suggests-turkey-planned-downing-of-warplane-1450899609

[2] http://www.dailysabah.com/diplomacy/2015/12/23/hdps-demirtas-meets-russian-fm-lavrov-despite-harsh-criticism

[3] http://sputniknews.com/politics/20151222/1032163871/erdogan-humiliating-defeat-ankara-moscow.html

[4] http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/hdp-co-leader-justifies-declarations-of-autonomy-as-fight-against-the-dictatorship.aspx?PageID=238&NID=92890&NewsCatID=338

[5] http://www.euractiv.com/sections/global-europe/why-pro-kurdish-russia-infuriates-turkey-320615

A surprise visit to Pakistan by Indian Premier Narendra Modi on Friday pressed the reset button on the blow-hot-blow-cold relationship between the two nuclear-armed neighbors, paving the way for official dialogue to resume next month.

On his way back from Afghanistan, Modi stopped over at Lahore for an unscheduled meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, after a surprise announcement on Twitter that sent analysts on both sides of the border into a tizzy.

Modi tweeted good wishes for Sharif on his birthday and said he is “looking forward to meeting Nawaz Sharif in Lahore today afternoon, where I will drop by on my way back to Delhi.”

The two leaders met for a little less than two hours at Sharif’s festively lit ancestral home in Lahore, where they talked about improving ties.

India’s NDTV 24×7 news channel called it “Modi’s masterstroke.” In Pakistan, the phrase “birthday diplomacy” trended.
Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said the leaders “expressed their desire to carry forward the dialogue process for the larger good of the people of the two countries.”

Modi arranged the visit at the last minute, said a Pakistani official.

Modi phoned Sharif and asked if he could make a stop in Pakistan on his way home, Pakistani Foreign Secretary Aizaz Chaudhry told media after Modi departed.

“And Sharif said to him, ‘Please come, you are our guest, please come and have tea with me’,” he said.

Modi’s favorite dish ‘Saag’ was among other vegetarian delicacies prepared for him at Jati Umerah residence of Sharif.

“All dishes, including Saag, daal and vegetable food, were cooked in pure ghee,” a source said. He said Kashmiri tea was also served to Modi.

Some 11 members of Modi’s delegation who were issued a 72-hour visa accompanied him. However, over 100 other members of the delegations stayed at the airport. There were refreshments at the airport for them.

Congress alleged the visit was made to promote private business interests.

Congress spokesperson Anand Sharma attacked Modi’s engagement with Pakistan as “frivolous, unpredictable and full of abrupt U-turns” and asked what assurances he got on bringing back or punishing perpetrators of 26/11 Mumbai attacks, especially Zakiu Rehman Lakhvi, and on dismantling terror syndicates in Pakistan acting against India.”

The U.S. has some big problems that require bold solutions. Unfortunately, books about solutions to our society’s problems are often given short shrift by reviewers or languish on our bookshelves. As I often say, this country has more problems than it deserves and more solutions than it uses. Now comes S. David Freeman.

In 1974 David Freeman, an energy engineer and lawyer, wrote much of and directed all of the research for the book, A Time to Choose: America’s Energy Future, a comprehensive early inquiry into America’s energy crisis. A Time to Choose offered ideas galore about how our country could use efficiency and conservation to benefit the environment and the economy and ushered in a new era of energy efficiency.

Freeman has also run several giant utilities including the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), the New York Power Authority (PASNY) and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP). After seven years at the TVA, he spent the next thirty advocating for and implementing environmentally sound and consumer friendly changes in energy policy. Mr. Freeman has been an innovator and leading authority on energy and environmental matters for a long time and knows what he’s talking about, so when he speaks up about energy policy we should listen.

In January of 2016, in collaboration with his coauthor, Leah Y. Parks, he will publish a new and important book about our energy future: All-Electric America: A Climate Solution and the Hopeful Future. The book is scathing but optimistic, and manages to be bold while remaining pragmatic. Drawing on their combined years of experience, Freeman and Parks make the case for addressing the dangers of climate change with some concrete steps to counter our current downward spiral. Mr. Freeman argues that we will soon be able to power all of our energy needs with electricity generated completely by renewable energy as well as with increased energy efficiency in heating, cooling, lighting, transportation and our electric grid. The authors point out that:

Transforming our entire energy infrastructure to run on renewable energy by the year 2050 will require a larger effort than solely switching out our current electricity capacity. Investments in coal mining, oil and gas drilling and building new large coal, gas, and nuclear plants will give way to a massive increase in the construction of solar and wind power plants.

It comes as no surprise that this book rejects the indiscriminate “all of the above” approach (coal, oil, gas, nuclear, solar and conservation) to generating energy and argues that we have a leadership gap when it comes to developing a clean, safe and efficient energy policy that can boost our economy:

Rapid progress toward an all-renewables future is being stymied not by lack of technology, or even by cost or market demand, but by lack of vision on the part of our political and business leaders, and lobbying and persuasive advertising by the oil, gas, coal, and nuclear industries.

President Obama, environmentally minded political leaders and most of the major environmental organizations have been promoting both the “green revolution” and the “brown surge,” supporting both renewables and the continued use of fossil fuels. They have failed to hammer home the message that a completely renewable future will be lower in cost, as well as necessity if we are to halt global warming, much less propose programs to make it happen. This is despite the fact that a long-sought bipartisan goal of U.S. energy policy has been to achieve energy independence. An all-renewable supply is the best way to do so.

By reducing emissions by 3 percent each year, the authors argue we would be capable of achieving a zero-emissions society in 35 years. The book manages to reconcile its lofty goals with sensible policy prescriptions. Big items on the agenda put forth in this book include:

Outlawing the building of new fossil-fueled electric power plants;

Creating a Federal Green Bank, which provides loan guarantees (not loans) for the financing of railroad electrification and for the construction of renewable electricity power plants;

Requiring  that all new homes and buildings be Green House Gas (GHG) -free and existing buildings be retrofitted to zero GHG at time of sale or within fifteen years; and

Requiring all major auto, truck and bus manufacturers to reduce GHG emissions of vehicles by 3 percent each year, through a combination of improvements in mileage and lower GHG emissions.

The authors also note that big energy companies and their campaign contributions from the fossil fuel and nuclear industries have stifled sound, sustainable energy policies but how, with a little focused “civic energy” we can motivate industry and utility companies to adopt cleaner practices and policies that can make 3 percent annual emissions reductions not only feasible, but profitable.

The authors also challenge the notion that nuclear power and natural gas will eliminate our climate change woes and argue that renewables are a better financial bet for the consumer than oil, coal, natural gas or nuclear power for several reasons:

Nuclear power is a poor economic risk, requiring full government (taxpayer) loan guarantees, and also because no private insurance is available for an accident that causes billions of dollars of damage.

There are no fuel costs for solar and wind maintenance and it is thus virtually inflation-proof.

Renewable costs are going down while the price of oil fluctuates with an upward trend. The future price of natural gas is most likely to go up.

The savings in the indirect cost of renewables over coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power are profound. Some indirect costs include damages from environmental contamination, climate change, health expenses, managing the risks of nuclear power and military commitments—including deployments and even wars to safeguard oil from the Middle East.

When All-Electric America comes out in January of 2016 you will have a chance to make yourself knowledgeable about the real avenues available to us to transform our energy infrastructure for present and future generations by moving toward a new renewable energy economy with far more jobs, health, efficiency and security benefits than there are in relying on hydrocarbons and radioactive atoms.

To listen to my interview with David Freeman, visit ralphnaderradiohour.com

Two weeks ago, Benedict Anderson died. Or, as we say in Hebrew, “went to his world”.

Anderson, an Irishman born in China, educated in England, fluent in several South Asian languages, had a large influence on my intellectual world.

I owe a lot to his most important book, “Imagined Communities“.

Each of us has a few books that formed and changed his or her world view.

In my early youth I read Oswald Spengler’s monumental “Der Untergang des Abendlandes” (The Decline of the West). It had a lasting effect on me.

Spengler, now nearly forgotten, believed that all the world’s history consists of a number of “cultures”, which resemble human beings: they are born, mature, grow old and die, within a time span of a thousand years.

***

The “ancient” culture of Greece and Rome lasted from 500 BC to 500 CE, and was succeeded by the ‘magic” Eastern culture that culminated in Islam, which lasted until the emergence of the West, which is about to die, to be succeeded by Russia. (If he had lived today, Spengler would probably have substituted China for Russia.)

Spengler, who was a kind of universal genius, also recognized several cultures in other continents.

The next monumental work that influenced my world view was Arnold Toynbee’s “A Study of History“. Like Spengler, he believed that history consists of “civilizations” that mature and age, but he added a few more of them to Spengler’s list.

Spengler, being German, was glum and pessimistic. Toynbee, being British, was up-beat and optimistic. He did not accept the view that civilizations are doomed to die after a given life-span. According to him, this has indeed always happened until now, but people can learn from mistakes and change their course.

Anderson dealt only with a part of the story: the birth of nations.

For him, a nation is a human creation of the last few centuries. He denied the accepted view that nations have always existed and only adapted themselves to different times, as we learned in school. He insisted that nations were “invented” only some 350 years ago.

According to the Europe-centered view, the “nation” assumed its present form in the French revolution or immediately prior to it. Until then, humanity was living in different forms of organization.

Primitive humanity lived in tribes, generally consisting of about 800 human beings. Such a tribe was small enough to live off a small territory and big enough to defend it against neighboring tribes, which were always trying to take the territory away from it.

From there, different forms of human collectives emerged, such as the Greek city states, the Persian and Roman empires, the multi-communal Byzantine state, the Islamic “umma”, the European multi-people monarchies, and the Western colonial empires.

Each of these creations suited its time and realities. The modern nation state was a response to modern challenges (“challenge and response” was Toynbee’s machine of change). New realities – the industrial revolution, the invention of the railway and the steamship, ever deadlier modern weapons etc – made small principalities obsolete.

A new design was necessary, and found its optimum form in a state consisting of tens of millions of people, enough to sustain a modern industrial economy, to defend its territory with mass armies, to develop a common language as a basis of communication between all citizens.

(I ask for forgiveness if I am mixing my own primitive thoughts with those of Anderson’s. I am too lazy to sort them out.)

Even before the flowering of the new nations, England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland were forcibly united in Great Britain, a nation big and strong enough to conquer a large part of the world. French, Bretons, Provencals, Corsicans and many others united and became France, taking immense pride in their common language, fostered by the printing press and mass media.

Germany, a latecomer on the scene, consisted of dozens of sovereign kingdoms and principalities. Prussians and Bavarians loathed each other, cities like Hamburg were proudly independent. Only during the French-Prussian war of 1870 was the new German Reich founded – practically on the battlefield. The unification of “Italy” took place even later.

Each of these new entities needed a joint consciousness and a common language, and that is where “nationalism” came in. “Deutschland Über Alles”, written before the unification, did not mean originally that Germany was set above all nations, but that the common German fatherland stood above all the local principalities.

All these new “nations” were out to conquer – but first of all they “conquered” and annexed their own past. Philosophers, historians, teachers and politicians all set out eagerly to re-write their past, turning everything into “national” history.

For example, the battle of the Teutoburg forest ( 9 CE), in which three German tribes decisively defeated a Roman army, became a national “German” event. The leader, Hermann (Arminius), posthumously became an early “national” hero.

This is how Anderson’s “imagined” communities came into being.

But according to Anderson, the modern nation was not born in Europe at all, but in the Western Hemisphere. When the immigrant white communities in South and North America were fed up with their oppressive European masters, they developed a local (white) patriotism and became new “nations” – Argentina, Brazil, the United States and all the others – each a nation with a national history of its own. From there the idea invaded Europe, until all humanity was divided into nations.

When Anderson died, nations were already starting to break up like antarctic icebergs. The nation state is becoming obsolete, and rapidly becoming a fiction. A world-wide economy, superanational military alliances, space flight, world-spanning communications, climate change and many other factors are shaping a new reality. Organizations like the European Union and NATO are taking over the functions once performed by nation states.

Not by coincidence, the unification of geographical and ideological blocs is accompanied by what seems the opposite tendency, but is in reality a complementary process. Nation states are breaking apart. Scots, Basques, Catalans, Quebecois, Kurds and many others clamor for independence, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Sudan and several other supranational entities. Why must Catalonia and the Basque country live under the same Spanish roof, if each of them can become a separate, independent member of the European Union?

A hundred years after the French Revolution Theodor Herzl and his colleagues “invented” the Jewish nation.

The timing was not accidental. All of Europe was becoming “national”. The Jews were an international ethnic-religious Diaspora, a remnant of the ethnic-religious world of the Byzantine Empire. As such, they aroused suspicion and enmity. Herzl, an ardent admirer of both the new German Reich and the British Empire, believed that by redefining the Jews as a territorial Nation, he could put an end to anti-Semitism.

Belatedly, he and his disciples did what all the other nations had done before: inventing a “national” history, based on Biblical myths, legends and reality, and called it Zionism. Its slogan was “If you will it, it is no fairy tale”.

Zionism, helped by intense anti-Semitism, was incredibly successful. Jews established themselves in Palestine, created a state of their own, and in the course of events became a real nation. “A nation like all the others”, as a famous slogan said.

The trouble was that in the process, Zionist nationalism never really overcame the old Jewish religious identity. Uneasy compromises struck for expediency’s sake blew up from time to time. Since the new state wanted to take advantage of the power and financial means of World Jewry, it was quite happy not to cut the ties and pretend that the new nation in Palestine (“Eretz Israel”) was only one of many Jewish communities, although the dominant one.

Unlike the process of cutting themselves off from the motherland, as described by Anderson, the feeble attempts to constitute in Palestine a new separate “Hebrew” nation, like Argentina and Canada, failed. (They are described in the books of Shlomo Sand.)

Under the present Israeli government, Israel is becoming less and less Israeli, and more and more Jewish. Kippah-wearing religious Jews are taking over more and more of the central government functions, education is becoming more and more religious.

Now the government wants to enact a law calling for the “Nation State of the Jewish People”, overriding the existing legal fiction of a “Jewish and democratic State”. The fight about this law may well be the decisive battle for Israel’s identity.

The concept itself is, of course, ridiculous. A people and a nation are two different concepts. A nation state is a territorial entity belonging to its citizens. It cannot belong to the members of a world-wide community, who belong to different nations, serve in different armies, shed their blood for different causes.

It also means that the state does not belong to 20% or more of its own citizens, who are not Jews at all. Can one imagine a constitutional change in the US, declaring that all Anglo-Saxons world-wide are US citizens, while African-Americans and Hispanics are not?

Well, perhaps Donald Trump can. Perhaps not.

I never met Benedict Anderson in person. Pity. I would have liked to discuss some of these concepts with him.

In the past this writer spent a lot of time marketing industrial installations in Syria, Israel, Jordan, and other countries in the Middle East. During these trips we secured many profitable orders. Syria housed a business environment very similar to ours in Turkey, it represented a properly functioning business climate where we could earn money. However, it now goes without saying that those times are over. Unfortunately there will be no way to conduct any business in Syria for at least the next 10 years.

We were able to easily access the Syrian market due to Turkey and Syria’s shared border We had close cultural ties, and natural similarities. Unfortunately, the old Syria is no more. Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Deir ez-Zor now lie in ruins due to clashes between government forces and foreign backed insurgents. We do not know how the new Syria will be created or how its new economic environment will be rebuilt. However, if you want to avoid war, you must always be prepared for war.

We are not Arab, we are Turkish. Our two peoples do not share a common language. We Turks have our own democracy, our own political system. We do not need to lead the Middle East nations, nor do we need to be their role model. Each Arab nation should create their own political system based on their own historical and cultural heritage as well as their own geography.

Turkey created its own approach to international politics based on “non-interference in the internal affairs of other neighboring countries” as formulated in the mantra “peace at home, peace abroad” which was adopted after WWI and tested during WWII, subsequently being validated and proven correct for its geopolitical location.

When you get involved in the internal conflicts of others, the situation hurts you economically and politically. Trade relations stop, you lose money and markets. Now, we have more than 2.2 million Syrian refugees in our border regions, all of whom are unemployed and in dire need of our humanitarian assistance. We have already spent more than 6 billion USD on refugees in Turkey over the last 6 years since conflict was first initiated. With the money they allocated to securing refuge abroad, rich Syrians and their families left Turkey for Europe or elsewhere soon after their arrival.

***

There is an important Russian naval base in the sea port town of Tartus on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. This site embodies the most powerful point of logistical support for Russian naval vessels in the Mediterranean Sea. Assad’s government has granted this base to the Russians in order to win their military, political, and financial support. Almost all Russian naval vessels in the Mediterranean receive their logistical support, whether food, fuel, or maintenance, from this naval base. This base represents the life support of the Russian Navy, and Russia would not risk losing the military seaport for any reason. Its position in the palm of Russia’s hand is nonnegotiable.

Next to the city of Latakia in northwestern Syria is Bassel Al-Assad International Airport, part of which has been converted into the Khmeimim airbase that is now being operated by the Russian military. Here, Russia has deployed its latest military technologies including Su-24 and Su-34 warplanes, T-90 war tanks, and S400 anti-aircraft missiles. Russia has now imposed its own “rules of engagement” in Syria that allow it to shoot without warning anything it deems to be a danger.

In foreign affairs, there is only one basic mission; it is national interest. Democracy, human rights, humanitarian sentiments are useless. It is not one’s job to bring democracy to other nations. It is not one’s responsibility to solve the internal problems of other countries. Turkey should have close, equal, and profitable relations with all of its neighboring countries including Russia, a nearby super power. Turkey should pay attention to Russians’ red lines, sensitivities, interests, military concerns, and it should remain distant.

Russia is our “Northern Neighbor”, not a distant nation overseas. We share close economic, trade, and social relations with this country and hope to increase our bilateral trade volume to more than 100 billion US dollars. By ignoring the defense sensitivities of our major neighbor to the north, we cannot hope to continue to maintain our friendly relations with the country that would lead to our mutual prosperity.

Russia is not the “Soviet Union” any more. It now has its own version of democracy that is still being shaped to bring greater prosperity to the Russian people. As market forces settle slowly, it should be noted that Russians are not “Comrades” any more. They have been repositioned as highly qualified, educated, and competent businessmen and women.

Today in front of the Kremlin, there are no more old Soviet cars, but high-quality BMWs, Mercedes, and Audis. The Russians have money, they buy the best there is to buy in the international market. They have no hard feelings about their local relatively lower quality manufactured products. They have their own high-technologies that have gained a solid reputation in the space, military, nuclear, and defense sectors.

Under strict surveillance of government hosts, your writer paid a short visit to a few pre-selected industrial sites in Western Siberia in 1976 under the auspices of the United Nations. Back then the Russians had a few gas turbines displaying the UK Rolls-Royce design with small outputs. They were skilled in reverse engineering and produced hundreds of these turbines. In case of the need for 100-Mwe, they would install 10x 10-MWe simple cycle gas turbines of their own, whereas we would install 2×50-Mwe from a reputable Western supplier.

Nowadays, they have money to spend, so they buy the best and they can’t be bothered to manufacture themselves. Our local contractor companies in Turkey had many orders for combined cycle power plants that were to be constructed for Russia in locations spanning from its western border with Poland to the east Pacific Ocean shores on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

Our northern neighbor has agreed to build, own, and operate Turkey’s Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant within the framework of an intergovernmental agreement that stipulates Russia’s complete financing of the project. All industrialized countries have nuclear power plants; and we may also have one of our own someday. You may oppose nuclear power, but this is the reality. That said, let us do it properly, under our own supervision together with internationally reputable partners and engineers.

However, without competitive market tendering, projects arranged under intergovernmental agreements are too dangerous for the purchasing as well as the supplying countries. When Aswan Dam in Egypt was in its design stage, suppliers had no available high-capacity, high-head hydro turbines for the desert site. All of their water turbines were suitable for rivers in northern Siberia. Nonetheless, they decided to install whatever was available at that time. These turbines worked at first and generated electricity in Aswan, but in the long term they were plagued with failures and came to need frequent repair and rehabilitation in the desert environment where the dam is located.

We have had similar experiences in our country related to the design and supply of industrial installations, such as the Orhaneli 210 Mwe thermal power plant steam turbine, the Seydişehir aluminum producing facilities, the Iskenderun iron and steel mills, and the Petkim Aliaga refinery.

The designs of these installations were meant for cold Arctic environments, whereby our sites were located in tropic weather conditions. In this way, we need to evaluate the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant designs carefully. A nuclear power plant designed to thrive in a cold Arctic environment may have difficulty in coping with the climate of our tropic Mediterranean coastal regions. We all wonder how the plant designers will ensure the functioning of the plant cooling system when considering the warm temperature of the available sea water nearby.

Who would honestly give preference to an industrial plant designed and fabricated by our northern supplier? When was the last time you purchased an industrial product? Please do recommend a brand name of high-quality. If you could, would you prefer to buy an AirBus, Boeing, or a Tupolev? When was the last time you flew on a Tupolev?

There are unconfirmed rumors among the circles of the nuclear industry that suppliers would prefer to supply nuclear cores only and then outsource the rest, whether steam turbines, instrumentation and controls, or boilers, to other reputable sub-suppliers provided that they furnish Exim financing themselves. There are rumors on the market that German Siemens-KWU could supply steam turbines to the project under German or European Union Exim financing.

***

We have young Turkish students who are receiving their higher education on nuclear power plants in Russia. Over the last few years, they have learnt the Russian language. They have at least 5 more years until they graduate. During this period their number will reach almost 400. The Russian university environment is not like ours. Sexual freedom is beyond our understanding. Young men and women over the age of 15 have absolute sexual freedom in Russia. Our sense of morality is not valid there, where the youth play by their own rules.

How will our youth cope in that environment? They were chosen to participate in these programs based on their technical and scientific qualifications, yet they are being tossed into the water and told to learn to swim. How will this work? How can they protect themselves? When they finish their education in nuclear sciences, how can we ask them to control/ maintain full responsibility over a nuclear power plant with such limited experience? In your own industrial plant, how many years of operation experience do you ask from an incoming young engineer?

***

Leaders of Russia and Turkey now find themselves in a difficult phase characterized by misunderstanding and distrust due to the recent downing of the Russian Su-24. The situation is displeasing if not downright nasty. Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Turkey many times in the past to evaluate the Turkey’s foreign affairs and economic cooperation with Russia. His last visit was on 15-16 Nov. 2015 for the G20 Summit in Antalya. High-level face-to-face meetings are always important, as they give leaders the opportunity to express and evaluate their countries’ needs, mutual interests, and sensitivities. While translations may falter and consultants/experts may mislead, these instances of face-to-face communication between top authorities facilitate the formulation of resolutions to problem areas that are mutually satisfactory. We have much to learn from one another; it is essential that we keep open all lines of information and communication in the arena of international relations.

President Vladimir Putin is a well-educated, multilingual, rational, and pragmatic head of state. He holds a PhD degree from the University of Leningrad-Saint Petersburg in International Law and Economics. He speaks fluent German, and while he understands English, he does not necessarily volunteer to display his ability to speak it. He knows his capabilities and what he wants. These are important virtues. It is good to have a competent counterpart in international relations. These are important virtues. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks French, but most of the US’s earlier Secretaries of State have not known a second language besides English. Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and current US National Security Advisor Susan Rice do not speak any foreign languages.

***

Our relations with the Soviet Union during the Cold War were thoroughly bitter. But now the walls have fallen and the Cold War is over. We have more than 200 thousand qualified Turkish workers in Russia securing contracts and constructing high rises, power plants, and industrial installations. More than 200 thousand weddings have taken place between Russian and Turkish nationals; 140 thousand Turkish-Russian binational families live in Russia, while 60 thousand live in Turkey, mostly on the Mediterranean coast in the Antalya region. Most of these couples consist of a Russian bride and a Turkish groom, but the number of Russian men marrying Turkish women is on the rise. Russian brides are the cultural inheritors of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Tchaikovsky. They are beautiful and highly educated. If the mutual relations between our two countries are not completely soured, many of our 400 students of nuclear science in Russia could marry Russians in the near future, then we would have even more binational mixed marriages. The Russian language could be used commonly as a language in their homes. In this sense, we might also expect a greater number of Russian in-laws in our communities. Nonetheless, the growth of such binational interpersonal relationships is severely hindered due to the environment of mutual mistrust created by the mismanagement that was the downing of Russia’s Su-24.

***

We should also note that Turkey is highly dependent on Russian natural gas. We generate almost 60% of our electricity from natural gas, and most of this is supplied by Russia. This is augmented by our unsustainably high current account deficient. Both our account deficit and dependence on foreign natural gas should be reduced. In the long term, the same can be said of our dependence on imported coal and future imported supply of nuclear fuel.

Such realities represent flashing emergency lights on our balance sheets. We must reduce our dependence to lower levels in the shortest amount of time within reason. We should mend our broken ties with Russia as soon as possible and open new joint ventures and promote new businesses together. Thanks to the internet, we now have a more free and independent social and political environment in which to discuss such matters.

As noted above, in 1976, under the auspices of the United Nations, your writer spent 3 months in Russia. 32 years later, in 2008, I went to Moscow and Saint Petersburg for 1 week on a touristic program that was paid for out of pocket. Your writer sincerely feels that the Russian and Turkish peoples are cut from the same cloth. The country is undergoing a slow but certain transformation from the old Soviet system to the market economy. Russian citizens are now more comfortable with this change. While the black market in the country has all but vaporized, its service sector is still struggling. Strict state scrutiny of daily life has nearly vanished. Traditional vodka is out, beer is in. Russian women are still very beautiful, while the men have acquired greater business savvy. Ballet and Opera performances are exquisite, but very expensive. If you ask for directions, ten or more locals will come to your aid; if they cannot help you with the map, they will take you where you need to go themselves.

Growing tension and hostility never help anyone. War, in any terms, harms all those involved. Good neighborliness, mutual trust, friendship, and cooperation should form the basis of Turkish-Russian relations. Turkey continues to seek to further develop the mutual interests of both countries. Concrete results of our cooperation should be seen in the energy and economic fields. Let us take comfort in the synergy that working together can produce, and hence stick to our tested motto “peace at home, peace abroad”, a major requirement for the survival of any independent nation in the Middle East region.

We wish you a happy and prosperous New Year!

Engineers have successfully married electrons and photons within a single-chip microprocessor, a landmark development that opens the door to ultrafast, low-power data crunching.

The researchers packed two processor cores with more than 70 million transistors and 850 photonic components onto a 3-by-6-millimeter chip. They fabricated the microprocessor in a foundry that mass-produces high-performance computer chips, proving that their design can be easily and quickly scaled up for commercial production.

The new chip, described in a paper to be published Dec. 24 in the print issue of the journal Nature, marks the next step in the evolution of fiber optic communication technology by integrating into a microprocessor the photonic interconnects, or inputs and outputs (I/O), needed to talk to other chips.

“This is a milestone. It’s the first processor that can use light to communicate with the external world,” said Vladimir Stojanović, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the development of the chip. “No other processor has the photonic I/O in the chip.”

Stojanović and fellow UC Berkeley professor Krste Asanović teamed up with Rajeev Ram at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Milos Popović at the University of Colorado, Boulder, to develop the new microprocessor.

“This is the first time we’ve put a system together at such scale, and have it actually do something useful, like run a program,” said Asanović, who helped develop the free and open architecture called RISC-V (reduced instruction set computer), used by the processor.

Greater bandwidth with less power

Compared with electrical wires, fiber optics support greater bandwidth, carrying more data at higher speeds over greater distances with less energy. While advances in optical communication technology have dramatically improved data transfers between computers, bringing photonics into the computer chips themselves had been difficult.

That’s because no one until now had figured out how to integrate photonic devices into the same complex and expensive fabrication processes used to produce computer chips without changing the process itself. Doing so is key since it does not further increase the cost of the manufacturing or risk failure of the fabricated transistors.

The researchers verified the functionality of the chip with the photonic interconnects by using it to run various computer programs, requiring it to send and receive instructions and data to and from memory. They showed that the chip had a bandwidth density of 300 gigabits per second per square millimeter, about 10 to 50 times greater than packaged electrical-only microprocessors currently on the market.

The photonic I/O on the chip is also energy-efficient, using only 1.3 picojoules per bit, equivalent to consuming 1.3 watts of power to transmit a terabit of data per second. In the experiments, the data was sent to a receiver 10 meters away and back.

“The advantage with optical is that with the same amount of power, you can go a few centimeters, a few meters or a few kilometers,” said study co-lead author Chen Sun, a recent UC Berkeley Ph.D. graduate from Stojanović’s lab at the Berkeley Wireless Research Center. “For high-speed electrical links, 1 meter is about the limit before you need repeaters to regenerate the electrical signal, and that quickly increases the amount of power needed. For an electrical signal to travel 1 kilometer, you’d need thousands of picojoules for each bit.”

The achievement opens the door to a new era of bandwidth-hungry applications. One near-term application for this technology is to make data centers more green. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, data centers consumed about 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2013, about 2 percent of the total electricity consumed in the United States, and the appetite for power is growing exponentially.

This research has already spun off two startups this year with applications in data centers in mind. SiFive is commercializing the RISC-V processors, while Ayar Labs is focusing on photonic interconnects. Earlier this year, Ayar Labs – under its previous company name of OptiBit – was awarded the MIT Clean Energy Prize. Ayar Labs is getting further traction through the CITRIS Foundry startup incubator at UC Berkeley.

The advance is timely, coming as world leaders emerge from the COP21 United Nations climate talks with new pledges to limit global warming.

Further down the road, this research could be used in applications such as LIDAR, the light radar technology used to guide self-driving vehicles and the eyes of a robot; brain ultrasound imaging; and new environmental biosensors.

‘Fiat lux’ on a chip

The researchers came up with a number of key innovations to harness the power of light within the chip.

Each of the key photonic I/O components – such as a ring modulator, photodetector and a vertical grating coupler – serves to control and guide the light waves on the chip, but the design had to conform to the constraints of a process originally thought to be hostile to photonic components. To enable light to move through the chip with minimal loss, for instance, the researchers used the silicon body of the transistor as a waveguide for the light. They did this by using available masks in the fabrication process to manipulate doping, the process used to form different parts of transistors.

After getting the light onto the chip, the researchers needed to find a way to control it so that it can carry bits of data. They designed a silicon ring with p-n doped junction spokes next to the silicon waveguide to enable fast and low-energy modulation of light.

Using the silicon-germanium parts of a modern transistor – an existing part of the semiconductor manufacturing process – to build a photodetector took advantage of germanium’s ability to absorb light and convert it into electricity.

A vertical grating coupler that leverages existing poly-silicon and silicon layers in innovative ways was used to connect the chip to the external world, directing the light in the waveguide up and off the chip. The researchers integrated electronic components tightly with these photonic devices to enable stable operation in a hostile chip environment.

The authors emphasized that these adaptations all worked within the parameters of existing microprocessor manufacturing systems, and that it will not be difficult to optimize the components to further improve their chip’s performance.

Norwegian breweries have been producing commercial Christmas beer over the last several centuries. The history of Christmas beer brewing sheds light on larger societal changes in Norway, from the temperance movement to the occupation of Norway by Germany during the Second World War, says Norwegian University of Science and Technology beer enthusiast Anders Christensen.

The brewing of Christmas beer in Norway is a very old tradition and dates back to pre-Christian times, at least.

Much has been said and written about Christmas beer in ancient times, so Anders Christensen from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology has chosen instead to focus on commercially brewed Christmas beer from the last few hundred years.

The Norwegian brewery industry went through a tremendous upheaval in the early 1800s. In the 1700s, home brewing, farmstead brewing and craft brewing were producing more or less the same product.

But by the mid-1800s these were all about to be displaced by commercial brewing at a large scale and by drinking habits that shifted more towards hard liquor.

The first commercial advertisements for Christmas beer came in the 1860s and 1870s. Before this time, there had certainly been advertisements for extra good beer for Christmas, much as a number of other items were promoted in advance of Christmas, especially food and drink. But this beer was not presented as “Christmas beer”.

The first newspaper ad that lists something called “Christmas beer” was in the Bergen Adressecontoir Efterretninger of 1 December 1869.

The ad read: “Extra fine Christmas beer in tønder and ankervis available, and can be ordered from C. Andersen, Dræggen.” “Ankervis” means that the beer was in a wooden barrel, called an anker, which contained 38.6 litres.

The brewer is likely Carl Johan Andersen, born in 1839, who was registered as a beer brewer in 1875 and by 1881 as a beer dealer. He was likely a small craft brewer who also took orders, and who may have also resold beer from other brewers. But Andersen was overtaken by industrial breweries, and the last mention of him lists his occupation as a fishmonger.

Rich and sweet, but not very strong

By the end of the 1800s, Christmas beer was mainly something called “pottøl” (literally, pot beer) or “søttøl” (sweet beer). It was a rich, sweet but relatively weak beer.

Pottøl was a remnant of the old beer brewing tradition that dated from before the Bavarian type of bottom fermentation was adopted in Norway. At the same time, it was also a kind of precursor for landsøl (a lager) and vørterøl (a malt beer).

Pottøl and søttøl were supposed to be sweet, good and rich, designed to go with Christmas food. Even industry breweries, which mainly brewed with bottom yeast, brewed pottøl. For Christmas in 1877, for example, Aass Brewery in Drammen brewed a beer they called Christmas beer and described as an “extremely good, malt-rich sweet beer.”

A few years later the Christiania Brewery advertised an “inexpensive Christmas beer,” which they described as: “A tasty household beer, which is very malt-rich and stronger than the normal pottøl.” It could be purchased in bottles or in barrels of approximately 40 or 80 liters.

This advertisement represents what could then be described as the Christmas beer of the time. It was not so much that it was a specific kind of beer, but more that it was a better, sweeter, richer and happily stronger variation of an everyday beer, for use in food and with food for Christmas. If the price is any indicator, the beer’s alcohol content was probably around 2.3%.

Christiania Acti Beer Brewery advertised a Christmas beer in 1881 which they called a sweet beer (“sødtøl“) and described as a light, tasty Christmas beer. At the same time, they advertised a bock beer, which they described as very strong and malt rich. The sødtøl was half the price of the bock beer.

An interwar beer cartel

It is only during the interwar years that Christmas beer becomes more common. In the 1930s Norway’s breweries divvied up the country among themselves. Every brewery was basically given a monopoly in their own surrounding areas through a cartel system administered by the Brewery Association.

They did this not only to limit destructive competition, but also so they could present a common front to the temperance movement and eventually to the possibility of nationalizing the production, distribution and sale of beer.

One consequence of of the cartel’s activities was that breweries delivered the same standardized commodity. People tried to eliminate the differences between breweries, beers, prices, sales times, recipes and so on.

Christmas beer was also standardized. At the same time, the 1930s were a creative period for the advertising industry, and Christmas beer advertising began to take off.

No Christmas beer during WWII

During the Second World War, when Norway was occupied by Nazi Germany, brewers did not produce Christmas beer—they simply didn’t have the resources. All beers became weaker, thinner and it became a real challenge to find raw materials for brewing.

Yet even after the war, breweries did not produce Christmas beer. The Norwegian Brewery Association did not want to provoke the temperance movement and the government into introducing beer rationing by brewing a luxurious and resource-intensive Christmas beer.

In fact, it wasn’t until 1956 that Christmas beer was brewed again in Norway. It says something bout the iron grip the Brewery Association had on breweries that not one Norwegian brewery deviated from this. And when Christmas beer came back on the market, all the breweries sold the same beer, in the same bottles with the same price, with all sales starting on November 29 and ending on January 15.

However, Christmas beer had actually been on the market a couple of years already, incognito. Breweries were initially subject to strong import restrictions on raw materials.

But then they started to brew beer for export, and importing expensive barley grains to brew this beer made sense, because it brought hard currency to Norway. These light and dark export beers, sold after the war, were actually reincarnations of a spring beer and Christmas beer from the interwar years.

Strong beers return

The next important change for Christmas beer was in the mid-1990s. At this time, the sale of beer with an alcohol content between 4.7 and 7.0% was transferred to the state-owned wine and liquor monopoly, the Vinmonopolet, and within a few years the sales of these beers dropped to a twentieth of what they had been.

But this guaranteed that Norwegians could buy Christmas beer in the supermarkets with a alcohol content of 4.7% ,in addition to the older style of Christmas beer, which was at 6.5%. A few years later the government lifted the upper limit for alcohol content in beer. It had been 7% for many years. This led Norwegian breweries to experiment with stronger beers, and Norwegian beer drinkers were able to buy Christmas bock beer, made from a double bock beer.

In the meantime there have been two things that would have great significance for Christmas beer: In the mid-1970s the Norwegian government introduced a ban on advertising for alcohol and the cartel system collapsed in the 1980s, making for true competition between the breweries.

A perfect storm for Christmas beer

Without the possibility of open advertising, breweries had to be sneaky with their advertising. The Norwegian beer industry was called a “dark market”—a market where you had to market your product without direct advertising.

This created a kind of perfect storm for Christmas beer: A seasonal beer in a competitive market without advertising. Combine this with the newspapers’ interest in consumables and the Vinmonopolet’s policy of equal price and availability throughout Norway, and you get Christmas beer tests, and Christmas beer becomes a prestige product for breweries.

With Norway’s microbrewery revolution the country has gained a wealth of new small breweries, all of which typically have at least two Christmas beers, one in the supermarkets and one in the Vinmonopolet. Christmas beer is actually one of the most important beers a brewery produces, if not in monetary sales, then in the implicit marketing.

It’s commonly believed that Norway’s micro-breweries have taken their lead from the profusion of US breweries. There is certainly some truth in this, but traditions can also go the other way.

One of the earliest Christmas beers brewed in the US was Anchor Christmas Ale, which has been brewed every year since 1975.

This beer has directly and indirectly has inspired numerous other US breweries to make Christmas beer. But Anchor’s motivation was supposedly that they had heard of Norwegian Christmas beer traditions.

Diabetes is one of the leading causes of death. Patients with type 1 diabetes have their insulin secreting cells destroyed by the immune system and require daily insulin injections. Pancreatic islet transplantation is an effective treatment that can dramatically reduce daily doses or even eliminate dependence on external insulin. Insulin producing cells are injected into a recipient liver. After an adaptation period they start to produce sufficient hormone needed by diabetic patients.

However, while the transplantation procedure itself has been greatly improved in recent years, collection, preservation, and transportation of these cells are still very challenging. Research published in Advanced Healthcare Materials by the scientists from the Okinawa Institute of Technology and Science Graduate University (OIST) in collaboration with the University of Washington and Wuhan University of Technology offers a solution for some of these problems.

Production and secretion of insulin occur in the pancreas — an endocrine gland in the digestive system. Cells secreting insulin are clustered in pancreatic islets. Despite their crucial role in organismal wellbeing these islets comprise only a few percent of the pancreatic tissue. The islet transplantation does not require major surgical intervention and is often done under local anaesthesia. It is also cheaper and might be safer than transplantation of the entire pancreas. Unfortunately, so far, only human islets can be transplanted and their supply is but a trickle.

Cryopreservation, or deep freezing, is the method commonly used for the islet preservation and transportation. But it is not completely safe. One might think that storage at temperatures below -190°C is the most dangerous phase. However, the cells are very good at enduring it. It is the freezing process (-15 to -60°C) itself that poses the most challenges. As the cells are cooled, water in and around them freezes. Ice crystals have sharp edges that can pierce membranes and compromise cell viability. This also becomes problematic during thawing.

A multidisciplinary group of researchers led by Prof. Amy Shen, head of the Micro/Bio/Nanofluidics Unit at OIST, developed a novel cryopreservation method that not only helps to protect pancreatic islets from ice damage, but also facilitates real-time assessments of cell viability. Moreover, this method may reduce transplant rejection and, in turn, decrease use of immunosuppressant drugs, which can be harmful to patient health.

The novel technique employs a droplet microfluidic device to encapsulate pancreatic islets in hydrogel made of alginate, a natural polymer extracted from seaweed. These capsules have a unique microstructure: a porous network and considerable amount of non-freezable water. There are three types of water in the hydrogel: free water, freezable bound water, and non-freezable bound water. Free water is regular water: it freezes at 0°C, producing ice crystals. Freezable bound water also crystallises, but the freezing point is lower. Non-freezable bound water does not form ice due to the strong association between water molecules and the hydrogel networks. Hydrogel capsules with large amounts of non-freezable bound water protect the cells from the ice damage and reduce the need for cryoprotectants — special substances that minimise or prevent freezing damage and can be toxic in high concentrations.

Another innovation, proposed by the group, is the use of a fluorescent oxygen-sensitive dye in hydrogel capsules. The porous structure of the capsules does not impede oxygen flow to the cells. And this dye functions as a real-time single-islet oxygen sensor. Fluorescence indicates whether cells are consuming oxygen and, therefore, are alive and healthy. It is a simple, time-efficient, and cheap method of assessing viability, both of individual islets or populations thereof.

Islet encapsulation reduces the risk of rejection of transplanted cells by the recipient. The hydrogel capsule allows small molecules, e.g. nutrients and islet secretions, to pass through the membrane easily, but prevents direct contact between implanted islets and host cells. Encapsulation also may prevent an attack on transplants by the autoimmune response that destroyed the patient’s own islets in the first place.

The microencapsulation method can help to overcome some major challenges in pancreatic islet transplantation, including the scarcity of available islets and the lack of simple and reliable control methods, especially for individual islet assessment. It offers hope to patients suffering from type 1 diabetes to return to a “normal” life, free of insulin injections.

Burma’s parliament should reject a proposed law that would shield former presidents from prosecution for crimes committed during their terms in office, Human Rights Watch said earlier this week.

Published in the state-run newspaper on December 21, 2015, the Former Presidents Security Bill grants immunity to former heads of state “from any prosecution for actions during his term.” Outlined in article 10, this provision would protect former presidents from domestic prosecution for even the most serious crimes committed while in office, including war crimes and crimes against humanity.

“The Former Presidents Security Bill is a brazen attempt to shoehorn immunity from prosecution into the president’s retirement package,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director. “The immunity provision should be stripped from the proposed law so that President Thein Sein and future Burmese presidents remain accountable for any crimes they commit.”

The draft law consists of 14 clauses that outline the government’s commitment to support retired presidents, such as lifetime funding for a bodyguard and other personal security measures.

The bill was announced during the final parliamentary session of the current government, which reconvened shortly after the National League for Democracy’s (NLD) landslide victory in the November 8 elections. The session will continue until the end of January 2016. President Thein Sein and the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) have promised a smooth transition of power to the new NLD-led government. Yet the proposed provision on presidential immunity suggests that the military and USDP want to ensure that their leaders cannot be prosecuted for past criminal offenses.

Impunity for Burma’s longstanding military government is already enshrined in article 445 of the 2008 constitution, which prohibits prosecution of officials of former military juntas including the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) (1988-1997) and the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) (1997-2011), of which Thein Sein served as prime minister until 2010. Article 445 blocks justice for the victims of decades of human rights violations carried out under military rule.

Burmese military personnel also enjoy effective immunity as the commander in chief serves as final arbiter in matters of military jurisdiction. However, since 2011 the military commander has referred some cases of military personnel to be prosecuted in civilian courts for offenses related to sexual violence against women and young girls, use of child soldiers, and murder.

Domestic immunity from prosecution would not spare past Burmese leaders from prosecution for international crimes before international tribunals, including the International Criminal Court (ICC). Although Burma is not a member of the ICC, war crimes and crimes against humanity could still be tried by the court with United Nations Security Council approval. Article 27 of the ICC’s Rome Statute on “Irrelevance of official capacity” states that heads of state and government are not exempt from criminal liability and that national immunities provide no bar to prosecution. Under the concept of universal jurisdiction, grave crimes including war crimes, torture, and crimes against humanity can be prosecuted by a country even if the crimes were not committed on its territory, or by or against one of its nationals.

“Instead of providing another protective blanket for the already well-shielded officials of past military governments, the parliament should act to ensure that all Burmese are equal under the law,” Robertson said. “By making domestic prosecutions more difficult, the government is sending a signal that serious crimes may have to be addressed by international or foreign courts, where domestic immunities are irrelevant.”

By Akhmed Gumbatov*

After more than a decade of tough negotiations, the global oil industry expects to welcome Iran back into the market. On July 14, 2015, the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council— China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States— plus Germany), the European Union, and Iran agreed on a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The JCPOA limits the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program in return for relief from oil and financial sanctions.

If implemented, the landmark agreement will reopen the Iranian economy to global trade and recover billions of dollars in frozen assets. Most importantly, investment and technology-starved Iran will be able to rehabilitate its energy sector, which has been hit hard by international sanctions.

Although many obstacles remain before Western oil companies can do business there, the question of whether Iranian crude will reach the market is one of when rather than if. Based on the pace at which nuclear equipment is removed at uranium-enrichment facilities, sanctions against the Islamic Republic might be lifted as soon as early next year. The article seeks to analyze the implications of Iranian sanctions relief for the global oil market.

Analysis

While Iran enjoys the world’s fourth-largest proven crude oil reserves and the world’s second-largest natural gas reserves, its production and export potential has remained largely unutilized as a result of the nuclear related sanctions. The sanctions have had a major impact on Iran’s energy industry and have caused a number of cancellations or delays in its oil and gas upstream projects.

Nuclear-related sanctions on Iran and their impact on the country’s energy industry

Nuclear-related sanctions on Iran date back to September 2005, when the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog, found that the country was violating its treaty obligations in regard to the uranium- enrichment program. Since then, numerous sanctions have been imposed by various governments and international institutions, including the United States, United Nations and the European Union, mostly targeting Iran’s oil and financial sectors.

The sanctions have sought to cut Tehran’s access to nuclear-related materials, and to exert economic pressure on the Iranian government to cease its uranium-enrichment program.

Rounds of sanctions enacted by the US and the EU in late 2011 and mid-2012 had an especially significant impact on Iran’s energy sector. Besides boycotting Iranian crude, the sanctions dramatically limited Iran’s ability to export its oil by cutting the country off from the European International Group of Protection and Indemnity (P&I) Clubs, which had provided Iranian oil carriers with insurance and reinsurance. As the European P&I clubs are responsible for the majority of insurance policies for ocean-going ships and cover around 95 percent of tankers worldwide, the insurance ban became a serious barrier to exporting Iranian crude.

As a result, Iran’s oil exports dramatically declined from around 2.5 million barrels per day (mb/d) in 2012 to 1.1 mb/d today. In addition, only six buyers were allowed to import crude from Iran – China, Japan, India, South Korea, Turkey and Taiwan – down from 21 before the sanctions were implemented.

Iran’s oil exports. Credit: CFR.

Three-stage increase of Iranian crude export

According to the terms of the JCPOA, sanctions will be lifted once the IAEA submits a report to the UN Security Council confirming Iran’s adherence to the nuclear restrictions of the agreement. The most recent statistics indicate that Iran has already disconnected almost a quarter of its uranium-enriching centrifuges in less than a month. Based on the pace at which nuclear equipment is being removed from uranium-enrichment facilities, sanctions against Iran might be lifted as soon as early next year. In addition, the Islamic Republic is holding parliamentary elections on February 26, and President Rouhani’s team should gain electoral support if the sanctions have been lifted by then.

Amid the anticipated sanctions relief, Iran is already preparing to ramp up its crude output. The country’s oil exports will likely rise in three stages.

The first stage will be the immediate release of the crude currently stored on tankers that it has not been able to sell due to sanctions. Since data on Iranian crude oil storage is not publicly available, conflicting reports have circulated, with estimates ranging from around 10 million barrels up to 50 million of barrels. In fact, many experts analyze crude volumes by calculating oil tankers and measuring how deep the ships float in the water. According to the US Energy Information Administration, Iran stores around 30 million barrels, more than half of which is condensate, while the rest is mainly medium, sour crude oil.

The pace of the sales also remains highly uncertain and will depend on a number of factors, including the price of crude and the availability of customers. In theory, Iran could release all of its stockpiled crude and condensate volumes in just a month or two. However, a dumping policy would be damaging, as it would force Tehran to accept larger discounts, thereby, significantly reducing its revenues. Most probably, the volumes in storage will be released at the pace of 100,000-250,000 barrels per day in around six months.

Thus Iranian crude will hit global markets long before the Islamic Republic starts pumping more oil. Whatever volumes are coming, they will surely put downward pressure on an already oversupplied market.

The second stage will be the re-opening of the wells Iran has been forced to shut down, and the revitalization of mature oil fields currently experiencing production decline. Although Iranian officials claim to return to pre-sanctions levels within a couple of months, most probably it should take around a year to produce an extra 1 million barrels of crude oil. Many existing reservoirs have been abandoned for decades, and will need significant investments and technology to offset falling reservoir pressure and maximize production capacity.

The priority destination for Iran’s rising crude output, according to the Iranian oil minister Bijan Zanganeh, will be Asian markets, where oil demand is still growing. Due to sanctions, Iran’s Asian share was largely displaced by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, whose crude contents are chemically similar. In addition, Tehran will find itself competing with Russia, which has significantly increased its market share in many Asian countries, thanks to a pipeline to the Pacific and China.

Tehran is also keen to reclaim its market share in Europe, where additional Iranian barrels will be competing with similar sour quality crude from Russia, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, causing producers to grow still more competitive on pricing. Prior to the sanctions, Iran supplied around 1 mb/d of high-sulphur sour crude to European markets – mostly to Mediterranean refineries in Italy, Greece and Spain. Today, however, the deliveries are limited to just 100,000 barrels per day for Turkey.

According to the World Bank’s simulations with a multi-country, multi-sector computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, without any policy interventions by OPEC and other oil producers, the resumption of Iran’s crude exports to pre-2012 levels should decrease international oil prices by around 14 percent. Assuming that Brent crude is traded at today’s 38 USD (December 14, 2015) per barrel, oil prices should drop to around 33 USD.

Iran’s potential return to pre-sanctions levels of crude export could also upset the fragile balance that has been established within OPEC. It is still unclear how the organization is going to accommodate Iran’s possible increase in crude production amid the current global supply glut. In December 2011, OPEC agreed to cancel individual country quotas and set a collective ceiling of 30 mb/d. In reality, however, the organization dramatically exceeds its collective quota and currently pumps around 31.76 mb/d, mostly from Saudi Arabia and Iraq, OPEC’s top two producers.

Moreover, with Indonesia rejoining OPEC as of January 1, 2016, and bringing additional 800,000 barrels per day, the bloc’s de facto production will increase to around 32.56 mb/d. In this regard, OPEC was expected to adjust the ceiling at its December meeting to accommodate Jakarta’s return to the organization, but no changes were introduced. Thereby, OPEC’s output target can be considered as more of a guideline than a strict limit. Guided by its largest producer Saudi Arabia, the bloc will most probably continue pumping crude at near-record levels in a bid to maintain market share and squeeze higher-cost shale producers in the US.

In the third stage, Iran will attempt to develop its new oil fields. The Islamic Republic plans eventual- ly to increase oil production to more than 5 million barrels a day by 2020. For that, according to the head of the National Iranian Oil Company and deputy oil minister Rokneddin Javadi, the country will need around 100 billion USD over the five years. Raising such a huge investment amid the current low oil prices would be a challenging task for Tehran.

Nevertheless, investments in Iran’s upstream oil projects should be well worth the reward for international energy majors, which are already in preliminary discussions with Tehran. The country holds the world’s fourth-largest proven crude oil reserves, with most of them located onshore, making development costs well below world averages. Market Realist, an investment research and analytics firm, estimates Iran’s cost of crude production at 15 USD per barrel, which is way below shale, deep water and oil sands operations. According to the National Iranian Oil Company, production costs are even lower, averaging at 5-10 USD a barrel. In addition to favorable geology conditions making crude production cheap, Iran’s stable political regime (in comparison to neighboring countries) and its unique geographical position, with access to the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, will prove attractive to international energy companies.

Iran’s new petroleum contract model

In an attempt to lure foreign investors to its energy industry, Iran has also introduced a new contract model, putting an end to a two-decade old buyback system that has prevented international oil companies from booking reserves or taking equity stakes in Iranian companies. Although Tehran has updated the buyback model twice since it was first released, the short-term risk service contracts have been unpopular among foreign energy companies due to their inflexibility and limited returns.

The new model, called Iran Petroleum Contract (IPC), aims to make the energy sector financially attractive to international oil companies by offering more flexibility on price fluctuations and investment risks. Under some circumstances, the IPC also allows reserves to be booked, though international oil companies would still not own fields. In addition, the new model extends project involvement period to 15-20 years, and in some cases up to 25 years, allowing for much longer cost recovery after first production.

Under the new contracts, foreign investors will also be required to partner with Iranian oil com- panies in running the projects. Potential investors are leading European energy majors, including Total, BP, Shell, Eni and OMV. All of them have recently met with Iranian oil executives, and are keen to exploit the country’s abundant oil reserves once sanctions are lifted.

While European energy executives along with the Russians and Chinese line up do to business in a post-sanctions Iran, their American counterparts remain sidelined due to an existing ban prohibiting US firms from dealing with Iranian officials.

Conclusion

Based on the pace at which nuclear equipment is removed from uranium-enrichment facilities, sanctions against Iran could be lifted as soon as early next year. When sanctions are eased, Tehran will ramp up its crude exports in three stages.

First, the world oil market will see the immediate release of Iran’s stockpiled crude and condensate, totaling around 30 million barrels. The release will be gradual, as dumping the market would not be in Tehran’s interests. Thus, Iranian crude will hit the market long before the actual increase in production. Whatever volumes are coming, they will put downward pressure on global crude prices.

In the second stage, Iran will restore the wells it was forced to shut down and abandon due to the sanctions regime. It will allow the country to add an extra million barrels per day, to return to pre-sanctions export levels of 2.2 million. In an attempt to reclaim its market share, Tehran will be targeting, first of all, Asian and European markets, where the Iranian barrels will be competing with similar sour quality crude from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait and Russia. Finally, Iran’s full return to the crude market could also create a conflict of interests within OPEC over the market share issue and collective output target. Given that OPEC is unlikely to alter its collective ceiling quota, extra output from Iran will send crude prices down.

Finally, the third stage will be the development of new fields to take crude production level to more than 5 mb/d by 2020. Despite low oil prices, international oil companies are keen to invest in Iran. The country’s favorable geological conditions making crude production cheap, while its relatively stable political regime and direct access to waterways will prove attractive to international energy majors. In addition, Iran has recently updated its petroleum contract model making investments in the country’s energy sector more rewarding.

About the author:
*Akhmed Gumbatov, Project Manager at Caspian Center for Energy and Environment of ADA University

Source:
This article was published by Caspian Center for Energy and Environment (CCEE) as Policy Brief 21 (PDF).

By Jaya Ramachandran

With extremist assaults continuing unabated on striking symbols of Syria’s cultural diversity, the United Nations has condemned archaeological devastation of yet another major World Heritage site. Earlier, in October, it had declared such acts as “war crimes” and assured that those responsible “would be tried and punished”.

After the destruction of Palmyra’s ancient temple of Baalshamin in August, of the Arch of Triumph in Palmyra in October, yet another World Heritage site has fallen prey to fighting in Syria. According to the Syrian Directorate of Antiquities and Museums, parts of the ancient city of Bosra were severely damaged during combats on December 22, 2015.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) responded to the latest such assaults on December 24, alerting the world art market to potential trafficking in artifact from the World Heritage site.

“The destructions sustained by Bosra represent a further escalation in the horror of war and must be stopped at once to allow the concerned parties to consolidate the agreement reached on the ground to preserve the irreplaceable heritage of Bosra,” UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova said of the site containing Roman, Byzantine and Muslim ruins, including a magnificent 2nd century Roman theatre.

Further deterioration is feared due to severe damage to the western courtyard adjacent to the theatre and to parts of the Ayyubid citadel surrounding it.

The theatre, exceptional due to its architecture and state of conservation, was reportedly built under Trajan, who ruled the Roman Empire from 98 C.E. to 177 C.E. Between 481 and 1251, it became part of the fortifications of a powerful citadel guarding the road to Damascus.

“The protection of cultural sites is part and parcel of the protection of human lives as it is essential for the restoration of peace in Syria,” Bokova said.

“The Roman theatre of Bosra embodies the rich diversity of the identity of the people of Syria and I call on culture professionals worldwide, and particularly on the art market, to be extremely vigilant so as to fight against the traffic in artefacts from Bosra.”

Bokova has repeatedly condemned the destruction of archaeological and cultural sites in the fighting in Syria and Iraq. Extremists will “never be able to erase history,” she declared in October after the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) destroyed the Arch of Triumph in Palmyra, another major Syrian World Heritage site.

Bosra, once the capital of the Roman province of Arabia and an important stopover on the ancient caravan route to Mecca, was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1980.

“The key surviving monuments of Bosra reflect the Outstanding Universal Value of the site,” the UN agency said then.

Destruction of everything that stands for intercultural dialogue

Back in October, the Arch of Triumph in Palmyra fell victim to extremists. “Palmyra symbolizes everything that extremists abhor; cultural diversity, intercultural dialogue, the encounter of different peoples in this centre of trading between Europe and Asia,” Bokova declared then.

“This new destruction shows how terrified by history and culture the extremists are, because understanding the past undermines and delegitimizes the pretexts they use to justify these crimes and exposes them as expressions of pure hatred and ignorance,” said Bokova.

“Despite their relentless crimes, extremists will never be able to erase history, nor silence the memory of this site that embodies the unity and identity of the Syrian people,” she continued.

The UNESCO head also said that there would be no impunity for war criminals, and that UNESCO would make every effort to ensure that those responsible for the destruction of the Arch “would be tried and punished”.

According to UNESCO, the Arch of Triumph was built by Septimius Severus between 193 and 211 AD. It marked the junction between the immense Great Colonnade of the site and the Temple of Bel, also destroyed in 2015.

Condemning the destruction of Palmyra’s ancient temple of Baalshamin, in Syria, a World Heritage site, the UNESCO head said on August 24, 2015: “Extremists cannot silence history.”

“The systematic destruction of cultural symbols embodying Syrian cultural diversity reveals the true intent of such attacks, which is to deprive the Syrian people of its knowledge, its identity and history, Bokova declared in a press release.

“One week after the killing of Professor Khaled al-Assaad, the archaeologist who had looked after Palmyra’s ruins for four decades, this destruction is a new war crime and an immense loss for the Syrian people and for humanity,” she added.

According to UNESCO, Baalshamin temple was built nearly 2,000 years ago, and bears witness to the depth of the pre-Islamic history of the country. According to several reports, the building was blown up on August 23. Its cella, or inner area, was severely damaged, and followed by the collapse of the surrounding columns.

The structure of the Baalshamin temple dates to the Roman era. It was erected in the first century AD and further enlarged by Roman emperor Hadrian. The temple is one of the most important and best preserved buildings in Palmyra.

It is part of the larger site of Palmyra, one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world, famed for its Greco-Roman monumental ruins, repeatedly targeted by Da’esh (also referred to as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL) since May 2015.

The art and architecture of Palmyra, standing at the crossroads of several civilizations, is a symbol of the complexity and wealth of the Syrian identity and history, Bokova continued.

“Extremists seek to destroy this diversity and richness, and I call on the international community to stand united against this persistent cultural cleansing. Da’esh is killing people and destroying sites, but cannot silence history and will ultimately fail to erase this great culture from the memory of the world. Despite the obstacles and fanaticism, human creativity will prevail, buildings and sites will be rehabilitated, and some will be rebuilt.”

Such acts are war crimes and their perpetrators must be accountable for their actions, the UNESCO Director-General said on August 24, 2015.

Following his official visits to Russia and Afghanistan, Indian Prime Minister Modi landed at Lahore’s Allama Iqbal International Airport on December 25 on a “surprise” visit, where he was received by Pakistani Premier Nawaz Sharif and his bother Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif.

PM Modi visited Lahore on his way back home in a surprise visit – the first trip to Pakistan by an Indian premier in more than 10 years. This is the first time an Indian Prime Minister has visited Pakistan in more than a decade after former statesman like PM AB Vajpayee made a trip from Amritsar to Lahore on an Indo-Pakistani government plan. The same ruling party BJP but different premiers! Modi repeated the same “innovative” diplomatic trip.

Modi’s arrival in Lahore looks unannounced to the public, though not necessarily unscheduled and so the media of governments of both India and Pakistan have been kept in darkness about Modi meeting Sharif.

In international relations unscheduled visits are seen as abnormal practice. A visit, normal or unscheduled visits require preparations. Pakistan needed time to prepare for welcoming Indian guest. Modi met Sharif in latter’s home town Lahore and elaborate arrangements were made to felicitate Indian PM.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s favourite dish ‘Saag’ was among other vegetarian delicacies prepared for him during a lunch-cum-dinner at Jati Umrah residence of his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif. “All dishes, including Saag, daal and vegetable food, were cooked in desi ghee,” a source in the Jati Umra said. He said Kashmiri tea was presented to the Indian premier. Some 11 members of Modi’s delegation accompanied him to the Jati Umerah who were issued a 72-hour visa. (However, over 100 other members of the delegations stayed at the Allama Iqbal International Airport. There were refreshments at the airport for them).

When Modi reached at Jati Umrah Raiwind residence, located on the outskirts of Lahore, Sharif’s son Hasan and other family members received him warmly. The source said Sharif’s mother also entered the hall where both premiers were holding the meeting along with his other family members. “Modi touched the feet of Sharif’s mother,” he said.

As expected, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), General Secretary Ram Madhav lauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “sudden” Lahore visit, saying this is an extra ordinary step which will take the relation between both the nations to a new level. This “breath taking” step would make our relations with Pakistan more informal,” he said. “This step was initiated by the Prime Minister in his oath taking ceremony by inviting all the premiers of the neighbouring countries,” he added.

When in opposition, the BJP always opposed Indo-Pakistan relations. Now the ruling party BJP General Secretary said that the relationship with Pakistan needed a transformation adding that the Prime Minister has done a wonderful job by initiating this step. “This step gains further importance because this has taken place on the Birthday of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajapyee,” he added.

The Congress Party, however, lashed out at Narendra Modi for his “sudden detour” to Lahore for attending Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif’s birthday, saying the ‘unannounced visit cannot be termed statesman like as the former hasn’t done anything to promote India’s national interest. “I completely reject External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj’s claim that this visit is statesman like. It can’t be termed statesman like. Diplomacy must have seriousness and gravitas,” Congress leader Anand Sharma told media here. “His External Affairs Minister claims, very foolishly so, that its statesman like, we completely reject her claim,” he added.

The Congress leader further said that the meet was ‘pre-arranged’, saying that both the Prime Ministers met for one hour in Kathmandu during the SAARC summit. “He has not done so to promote India’s national interest. An Indian industrialist who has a private business with ruling establishment in Pakistan is there already, so how is Prime Minister’s visit spontaneous?” he asked. Congress leader Sharma further claimed that the Prime Minister has ‘not gone to Pakistan to take forward the roadmap to engage with Pakistan or build an understanding that would eliminate immediate threats”. “How many Prime Ministers or Heads of States make such detours to wish birthdays? In last 67 years, has any Indian Prime Minister landed in another country in this manner,” he sought to know.

Prime Minister Modi landed at Lahore’s Allama Iqbal International Airport on a surprise visit, where he was received by his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif and Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif. This is the first time an Indian Prime Minister has visited Pakistan in more than a decade.

Kashmiri freedom leaders (Separatists) in Sri Nagar welcomed PM Modi’s visit to Lahore on Friday, with “moderate” Hurriyat Conference chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq terming it “a positive move” and “hardline” faction leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani saying they have no objection to improved relations between India and Pakistan. The Mirwaiz further said, “Political will and vision is needed on all sides to address issues, especially Kashmir…We do not have any issues with relations improving between India and Pakistan… No right thinking peoples shall have any reservation on it. However, the two countries have to address the Kashmir issue as per wishes and aspirations of the people if these endeavors are to succeed,” Geelani said. “We hope that Pakistan will also remain steadfast on its stand on Kashmir issue.”

Another “moderate” Hurriyat chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq said, “Modi’s surprise visit to Pakistan is a positive move. People of Kashmir welcome any opportunity that brings India and Pakistan close.” Abdul Gani Bhat, head of Muslim Conference, a constituent of the “moderate” Hurriyat faction, said his party supports the resumption of dialogue process between India and Pakistan to resolve all disputes, including of course the dispute on Kashmir, and consider this development as an effectively civilized means to move out from the frozen yesterdays to a peacefully productive tomorrow,” Bhat said.

Admitting that no dialogue process has so far produced any results, Bhat said the situation now was different in the backdrop of the dynamics of global economic liberalization as an order, which pre-supposes that peace and disputes can never co-exist.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed on Friday welcomed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s surprise visit to Lahore to meet his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif, saying it is a step in the right direction. Sayeed said he was delighted by Modi’s visit, which will further strengthen the bonds of friendship and usher in an era of peace and stability in the region. This is an “evolutionary process and step in the right direction”, he said. “It indicates the Prime Minister’s resolve to enter into a long-term strategic partnership with Pakistan,” the Chief Minister said in a statement.

Sayeed hoped that the meeting between the two leaders will provide the much-needed momentum to the Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue for peaceful resolution of all issues between the two countries. This initiative, besides being a great step towards improvement of bilateral relations, will also give impetus to the concept of SAARC, he added.

The 79-year-old PDP leader Sayeed was yesterday admitted to the premier medical institute AIIMS in Ansari Nagar, New Delhi after he complained of uneasiness at his residence in Srinagar and was flown to Delhi in a state aircraft.

PM Modi returned to New Delhi where he was welcomed and met briefly by his foreign minister Sushma Swaraj at the airport.

India has shown it is the super power of South Asia by constructing new parliamentary building in Kabul and it seeks to retain all regional nations its “customers” but New Delhi’s strategists believe that Pakistan is not an easy customer but India should keep its diplomacy on alert to get Pakistan on board because many future economic projects, including oil-gas pipelines will have to pass though Pakistan and Afghanistan from Central Asia and West Asia. USA and NATO have been on the job in getting Pakistan work for the “projects” even by killing Pakistanis as “terrorists” who oppose the big Silk Route projects.

Both India and Pakistan have a common agenda: retention of nukes, while India pins hopes of retaining Kashmir now a mere prestige issue.

India bullies Pakistan on “terrorism” and by citing “action” on terror, New Delhi seems indirectly talk only about the secret future economic projects that bring money as commission charges.

Many people were surprised to learn about the unannounced visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Pakistan on his way back to India from Afghanistan. But, this visit should not be a surprise to those who understand Narendra Modi’s courage of conviction and his ardent desire to bring all round development in India, which cannot happen without building a peaceful relationship with neighboring countries, particularly Pakistan.

As expected, a section of media and major opposition parties in India are critical about Modi’s sudden visit to Pakistan. Of course, there are hawkish elements both in India and Pakistan who want both the countries to be in perpetual conflict, swearing by hatred and animosity. However, there can be absolutely no doubt that vast majority of well-meaning citizens in India and Pakistan that applaud Narendra Modi for his bold initiative, which certainly can be called as extraordinary considering the hostile relationship and border skirmishes between both the countries for last several decades.

Mr. C. Rajagopalachari, popularly known as Rajaji, who was called by Mahatma Gandhi as his conscience keeper and who was hailed as a great intellectual who could think beyond his time, said several decades back that the only way of restoring peace between India and Pakistan is to focus on positives rather than negatives. Obviously, what Rajaji meant was that building up of the people to people relationships by focusing on the positive aspects between the people of both the countries and cooperation would create appropriate and positive climate , when the so called insurmountable problems would be looked upon as problems for which solutions can be found by give and take attitude.

Having taken this initiative for peace, there is huge responsibility on the shoulders of Narendra Modi and Nawaz Shariff to take the efforts further forward, despite that of the opposition faced by both of them coming from vested interests, self-centered political parties and section of hostile media. In all probability, the militant and extremist elements in Pakistan may foolishly interpret this peace move as against the interests of Islam and may try to whip up agitation, communal hatred and terrorist activities. Possibly, some Hindu extremists in India also may create hurdles in the peace process.

One cannot be sure as to how the military establishments in Pakistan will view the response of Nawaz Shariff to Modi’s peace initiative. Unlike India, military establishments in Pakistan have often influenced or even controlled the political decisions in Pakistan and the military chiefs that have ruled Pakistan for several years in the past. It is also not certain whether Nawaz Shariff will have the political strength and will to withstand the pressure from the military establishments. In the past, when the former Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee visited Pakistan, the then-military chief Musharaff who later became the President of Pakistan, was reported to have objected to the visit of Vajpayee. One only hopes that such developments will not recur in Pakistan now.

Nawaz Shariff and Modi should move fast to build people-to-people relationships in a healthy way. The average Indian and Pakistani do not bear ill will towards each other as has been seen several times in the past. Several Pakistani cricketers and ghazal singers are popular in India and many Pakistani families have been visiting India for medical treatment and for other reasons. Such an exchange of visits between citizens should become more frequent and should be facilitated and encouraged by both the governments.

While one has to keep the fingers crossed, all peace-loving citizens in India and Pakistan would wish that year 2016 would be a year of peace between both the countries and certainly , they wholeheartedly bless the peace initiatives of Narendra Modi and Nawaz Shariff.

*N. S. Venkataraman, Nandini Voice For the Deprived, nandinivoice.com

By Liz Fuller

(RFE/RL) — Zviad Kvachantiradze, who heads the Georgian parliament’s majority Georgian Dream (GD) faction, announced at a meeting of faction members on December 25 that agreement was reached during talks the previous day on nominating current Foreign Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili as the country’s new prime minister.Irakli Garibashvili announced his resignation from that post late on December 23 without specifying his reasons for doing so.

In line with the Georgian constitution, President Giorgi Margvelashvili must ask the parliament to approve Kvirikashvili’s candidacy, for which a minimum of 75 votes is necessary. The various parties aligned in the GD coalition control 87 seats.

Kvirikashvili, Garibashvili, and parliament speaker Davit Usupashvili arrived together for the faction meeting on December 25 and were met with a round of applause.

Kvirikashvili, 48, was named foreign minister on September 1 despite his lack of any relevant experience. He holds degrees in medicine and economics and has spent most of his career in finance and banking. He was elected to parliament in 1999 on the ticket of the opposition New Rightists party, then from 2006 to 2011 he served as general director of billionaire philanthropist Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Cartu Bank. Following the victory of Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream coalition in the October 2012 parliamentary elections, Kvirikashvili was named economy minister.

Asked by journalists to explain the choice of Kvirikashvili as Garibashvili’s successor, senior GD law-maker Gia Volsky replied “he is a member of the Georgian Dream political family and has good data.”

Those opposition politicians, primarily but not exclusively from the former ruling United National Movement (ENM), who long regarded Garibashvili as little more than a puppet in Ivanishvili’s hands, are likely to construe the choice of a former close Ivanishvili associate for prime minister as corroborating that conviction.

According to speaker Usupashvili, the parliament will consider the composition of the new cabinet on December 28-29. Kvirikashvili said today there will be “no significant, dramatic changes.” Finance Minister Nodar Khaduri, Health Minister David Sergienko, and Minister for Reconciliation and Civic Equality Paata Zakareishvili are reportedly at risk of losing their posts.

Insofar as GD’s failure to deliver on its pre-election promises to speed up economic growth and reduce unemployment is one of the main factors behind its loss of popular support over the past year, the choice of a competent economist to head the government is logical. Whether Kvirikashvili can deliver the hoped-for economic upswing in time to reverse that trend in the run-up to the parliamentary elections due in October remains to be seen, however.

Speaking at a press conference on December 23, just hours before Garibashvili announced his resignation, ENM parliamentarian Zurab Chiaberashvili said the current government “has no vision of how to improve the economy.” Chiaberashvili specifically called for the abolition of the profit tax in order to lighten the burden on business and help create new jobs.

A second ENM law-maker, Giorgi Gabashvili, opined that Garibashvili’s resignation shows the current leadership is aware “what a catastrophe the country is facing.” At the same time, he predicted that “nothing will change until Ivanishvili distances himself” from the workings of the government.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi says Iraqi forces will move to free the strategic northern city of Mosul once they have liberated Anbar’s provincial capital city of Ramadi from the Islamic State (Daesh).

“The liberation of dear Mosul will be achieved with the cooperation and unity of all Iraqis after the victory in Ramadi,” Abadi said in a statement on Friday.

The comments came on the same day as volunteer fighters purged areas in al-Karmah some 48 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad, and adjacent areas of Daesh militants following intense clashes.

On Thursday evening, Iraqi intelligence forces and army troops launched an operation in Ramadi, about 110 km (68 miles) west of Baghdad, and captured a high-ranking Daesh militant commander identified by the nom de guerre Abu Bakr.

They also secured a road in the town of Albu Faraj, located more than 120 kilometers (74 miles) west of the capital, clearing booby-trapped houses and defusing several improvised explosive devices.

Iraqi volunteer troopers also destroyed several explosives-laden vehicles in the al-Sabihat region of Karmah as Daesh militants sought to ram the cars into the positions of the Popular Mobilization units.

Additionally, Iraqi security forces repelled a Daesh offensive against the Sab’in district in the troubled western province of Anbar on Thursday, killing seven militants in the process. The rest of Daesh members reportedly fled the scene after the unsuccessful bid.

The northern and western parts of Iraq have been plagued by violence ever since Daesh began an offensive through Iraqi territory in June 2014. Army soldiers and Popular Mobilization units have joined forces and are seeking to take back militant-held regions in joint operations.

Original article

The carving up of Africa by colonial powers is often a touch-stone for those concerned with African development and underdevelopment. This column looks into the effect imposed borders had on splitting ethnicities across countries. It finds that colonial border designs have spurred political violence and that ethnic partitioning is systematically linked to civil conflict, discrimination by the national government, and instability.

By Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou*

“We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s feet have ever trod; we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were” – Lord Salisbury, British Prime Minister, 1885-1892 and 1895-1902.

The predominant explanations on the deep roots of contemporary African development centre on the influence of Europeans during the colonial period (Acemoglu et al. 2005), but also in the centuries before colonisation when close to 20 million slaves were exported from Africa (Nunn 2008).1 Yet, another milestone took place amidst these two major events – that according to the African historiography (Herbst 2000) had malicious long-lasting consequences. In a forthcoming paper (Michalopoulos and Papaioannou 2016), we examine the impact of the ‘Scramble for Africa’ (1860-1905), when Europeans partitioned Africa into spheres of influence, protectorates, and colonies. The borders were designed at a time when Europeans had barely settled in Africa and had limited knowledge of the local conditions. Despite their arbitrariness these boundaries outlived the colonial era. Jeffrey Herbst summarises: “[f]or the first time in Africa’s history [at independence], territorial boundaries acquired salience…The boundaries were, in many ways, the most consequential part of the colonial state.”2 While African scholars have presented case-study evidence on the negative consequences of the improper border design (see Dowden 2008 for an eloquent narrative), there is little work formally examining the impact of ethnic partitioning focusing on the universe of African ethnicities. Our work is a first step in this direction.

Identifying partitioned ethnicities

To identify partitioned groups in a systematic manner, we project contemporary country borders to George Peter Murdock’s Ethnolinguistic Map (1959) that depicts the spatial distribution of African ethnicities at the time of colonisation (Figure 1a). We classify as partitioned those ethnicities with at least 10% of their total area falling to more than one country. There are 229 ethnicities (out of 825) with at least 10% of their historical homeland falling into more than one contemporary state (Figure 1b). While there is noise in Murdock’s map, which does not allow for a likely partial overlapping of groups’ and although we do not have good ethnic-specific population estimates, our procedure identifies most major partitioned ethnicities. 

A primer on border artificiality

The African historiography provides ample evidence arguing that, in the majority of cases, Europeans did not consider ethnic features and local geography in the design of colonial borders. A.I. Asiwaju (1985) summarises: “[t]he study of European archives supports the accidental rather than a conspiratorial theory of the marking of African boundaries”. At the time Europeans had limited knowledge of local conditions, since, with the exception of some coastal areas, the continent was largely unexplored. Moreover, at the time Europeans were not drawing borders of prospective states or –  in many cases –  even colonies. In a few instances, nevertheless, Europeans did try taking into account political geography, as, for example, in Swaziland and Burundi. And few borders were delineated in the early 20th century (Somalia), when Europeans conceivably had some knowledge of local conditions.

We first examine whether partitioned and non-split ethnic homelands differ with respect to various geographical, ecological, political and other features, as this may shed light on whether coloniser’s decisions reflected such factors. With the exceptions of the land mass of the historical ethnic homeland and (weakly) the presence of lakes, there are no significant differences between split and non-split homelands along a comprehensive set of covariates that besides geography-ecology also reflect pre-colonial, ethnic features, such as the size of settlements, the type of the subsistence economy, practice of slavery, etc.

Ethnic partitioning and conflict

We then employ the Scramble for Africa as a ‘quasi-natural’ experiment to assess the impact of ethnic partitioning on civil conflict, as this has been theorised to be the main channel of influence. We exploit on a newly assembled dataset (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project) that provides georeferenced information for 1997-2013 on battles between government forces, rebels and militias, one-sided civilian violence, riots, and foreign interventions.

Figure 2a gives the spatial distribution of conflict over this period. The map plots 64,650 high-precision georeferenced conflicts. We conduct the analysis at the historic-ethnic-homeland level, so as to account for national politics, colonial and post-independence institutions, and other country features – the regional analysis allows controlling at a fine level for geography, natural resources, and ecology. Figure 2b portrays the spatial distribution of all conflict incidents at the country-ethnic homeland level.
Our econometric analysis shows that civil conflict is significantly higher in the homelands of partitioned, as compared to non-split, ethnicities. The strong link between ethnic partitioning and conflict is also present, when we restrict the estimation to ethnic homelands close to the national borders, so as to account for any border effects (which nonetheless could be driven by partitioning). Our estimates suggest that conflict intensity is approximately 40% higher and conflict lasts on average 55% longer in the homelands of partitioned ethnicities. And the likelihood of conflict is approximately 8% higher in the homelands of split ethnicities. We also document spillovers to areas adjacent to split ethnicities. Conflict intensity is approximately 30% higher and the likelihood of conflict increases by 7% in the homelands of groups that are surrounded by 50% of split groups (as compared to groups whose neighbours are not partitioned).

Ethnic partitioning and type of conflict

We then exploit the richness of the data to shed light on the mechanisms. First, we examine the thesis put forward by African historians that split groups are often used by neighbouring countries to stage proxy wars and destabilise the government on the other side of the border. Our analysis supports this conjecture. Military interventions from adjacent countries are more common in the homelands of partitioned groups, rather than in nearby border areas where non-split groups reside. Second, we examine the impact of ethnic partitioning on the different forms of political violence. Partitioning matters crucially for two-sided conflict between government troops and rebel groups “whose goal is to counter an established national governing regime by violent acts” and to a lesser extent with one-sided violence against civilians.

These patterns are corroborated with a different georeferenced conflict database (Uppsala Conflict Data Program Georeferenced Event Dataset) that records only deadly events associated with major civil wars. In contrast, there is no link between ethnic partitioning and riots/protests, which are predominantly a capital-city phenomenon – and there is no association between partitioning and conflict between non-state actors. These results are in accord with African historiography pointing out that partitioned groups face discrimination from the national government and often engage in rebellions to counter repression.

Ethnic partitioning and political violence

In an attempt to dig deeper on the partitioning-repression-civil war nexus we use the Ethnic Power Relation dataset (Wimmer et al. 2009), which offers an assessment of formal and informal degrees of political power in national politics since independence. The analysis reveals three key findings:

• First, partitioned ethnicities are significantly more likely (11%-14% higher likelihood) to engage in civil wars that have an explicit ethnic dimension.

Seventy-two out of the 234 split groups in our sample (31%) have participated in an ethnic-based civil war, while 69 out of the 359 non-split groups (19%) have participated in a war with a specific ethnic dimension (Figure 3).

• Second, the likelihood that split ethnicities are subject to discrimination from the national government is approximately 7 percentage points higher compared to non-split groups.

Fifty-eight of the 234 split groups have suffered from discrimination (25%), while the corresponding likelihood for non-split groups is 15% (Figure 3).

• Third, we examine the impact of partitioning jointly on one-sided violence (repression) and two-sided violence (civil war).

We find that in the weakly institutionalised African countries, ethnic partitioning leads much more often to major two-sided conflict, rather than on political discrimination; thanks to support from nearby countries and the low opportunity cost of war, repression often escalates into full-fledged conflict.3

Figure 3

Further evidence

Finally, we examine the role of ethnic partitioning on public goods using information from 85,000 households across 20 African countries (Demographic and Health Surveys). Individuals who self-identify with partitioned ethnicities have fewer household assets, poorer access to utilities, and worse educational outcomes, as compared to respondents from non-split ethnicities in the same country (and even in the same town/village). This pattern is not due to a generalised decline in standards of living of all households residing in split homelands – rather, it is driven by the poorer economic performance of members of split ethnicities irrespective of their actual residence.

Conclusion

Our work shows that, by splitting ethnicities across countries, the colonial border design has spurred political violence. Ethnic partitioning is systematically linked to civil conflict, discrimination by the national government, and instability. More research is needed to examine the precise mechanisms at play and elucidate other aspects of state artificiality, related to country size, isolation, and fractionalisation.

And since border artificiality and ethnic partitioning are not phenomena exclusive to Africa, subsequent works perhaps in the Middle East could shed light on how the colonial borders in this part of the world may have a contributed to violence and civil strife.

This column updates the authors’ earlier column, Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2012).

*About the authors:
Stelios Michalopoulos, Associate Professor of economics, Brown University; Research Affiliate, CEPR

Elias Papaioannou, Associate Professor of Economics, London Business School and CEPR Research Affiliate

References:
Acemoglu, D, S Johnson, and J A Robinson (2015), “Institutions as a Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth,” in The Handbook of Economic Growth, P Aghion, and S N Durlauf (eds.), Elsevier North-Holland, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Alesina, A, W Easterly, and J Matuszeski (2011), “Artificial States”, Journal of the European Economic Association 9(2): 246.277.

Asiwaju, A I (1985), Partitioned Africans. The Conceptual Framework, St. Martin Press, New York.

Besley, T and T Persson (2011), “The Logic of Political Violence”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126(3): 1411.1445.

Blattman, C and E Miguel (2010), “Civil War”, Journal of Economic Literature, 48(1): 3.57.

Dowden, R (2008), Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, Portobello Books Ltd, London, UK.

Herbst, J (2000), States and Power in Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Michalopoulos, S and E Papaioannou (2014), “National Institutions and Subnational Development in Africa”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 129(1): 151-213.

Michalopoulos, S and E Papaioannou (2016), ”The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa”, American Economic Review, forthcoming

Nunn, N (2008), “The Long Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123(1): 139-176.

Wimmer, A, L –E Cederman, and B Min (2009), “Ethnic Politics and Armed Con.ict. A Configurational Analysis of a New Global Dataset”, American Sociological Review, 74(2): 316-337.

Endnotes:

1 On the role of Africa’s slave trade on contemporary development, see Nathan Nunn (2008).

2 As a result in many African countries today a significant fraction of the population belongs to ethnicities that are partitioned among different states. Alesina et al. (2011) estimate that partitioned groups constitute on average 40% of the total population.

3 This approach follows Besley and Persson (2011), who proposed studying jointly repression and civil conflict.

By Aron Lund for Syria in Crisis*

Rebel sources report that a missile hit a gathering of Islam Army leaders in the Eastern Ghouta region Friday, killing several of them, including Mohammed Zahran Alloush. Some reports also say that an allied rebel faction, Feilaq al-Rahman, had much of its leadership wiped out, and that the strike was carried out by Russia. (The Syrian government claims that its own airforce was behind the attack.)

This is big news and it has the potential to shift the balance of power in the Ghouta, a region of suburbs and agricultural towns into that rings the Syrian capital. It could also impact the Syrian peace process—such as it is—that is slated to begin this January.

First of All, Is It True?

Abu Humam Bouidani, reportedly the new Islam Army leader.

Seems like it. Pro-opposition media is awash with stories about Zahran Alloush’s death and there have been no signs of life, no denials, and no comments from his associates. Major rebel leaders and allies of Zahran Alloush and the Islam Army, including leaders of such major factions like the Mujahedin Army and Ahrar al-Sham, have posted their personal condoleances on social media. The Islam Army’s own media channels are still posting reports on military actions, but they have so far distributed nothing on the alleged attack. The fact that several top-ranking Islam Army figures have been silent since earlier today could mean that some of them, too, may have been killed or wounded in the strike.

About half an hour ago, at 21.40 Syrian time, the online news agency Sada al-Tawhid, which is aligned with the Islam Army, stated on Twitter that Zahran Alloush is dead and has been succeeded by Sheikh Abu Humam Bouidani. In other words, it would seem that Zahran Alloush is in fact dead.

Who Was Zahran Alloush?

Mohammed Zahran Alloush (1971-2015), also known as Abu Abdullah, was a salafi activist from Douma, a town east of Damascus in the Ghouta region. His father, Abdullah Alloush, is a salafi theologian resident in Saudi Arabia.

Alloush was arrested several times before the uprising for his religious and political activism and sent to the  ”Islamist wing” of the Seidnaia prison north of Damascus. There, he formed close connections to many other Syrian Islamists, including people who now run large rebel factions like Ahrar al-Sham. He was released from jail in June 2011 and quickly joined the armed uprising, eventually emerging as the strongman of his home region in the Eastern Ghouta and one of the most powerful rebel leaders in all of Syria.

He was also one of the most controversial ones. His supporters were taken in by his forceful personality and his personal bravery, as a commander who lived with his men in the warzone and visited the frontline. They admired his knack for organization and politics and credited him with the semi-stability that reigned inside the besieged Eastern Ghouta enclave—a bombed out and starved suburban region that resembles nothing so much as a giant version of the Gaza Strip in Palestine. The Ghouta has been under constant pressure since the marginalized Sunni suburbs of Damascus, where hatred against Bashar al-Assad and his government ran strong, began to throw out the police and security services in 2011 and 2012. Since then, the region has been under siege and functioned as a world of its own. Holding the frontline in Damascus, where Assad has concentrated so much of his army, was no small feat and it was much thanks to Alloush’s men. Coordinating the rebels there and limiting their infighting was no less of an achievement, especially considering the all-out chaos that reigned in other areas of Syria, where conditions were much better. For many supporters of the opposition, defending and stabilizing the Eastern Ghouta despite unceasing war and artillery bombardment, including with nerve gas, was enough to make Zahran Alloush a hero of the Syrian revolution.

Zahran Alloush watches a military parade of Islam Army fighters from a podium in the Eastern Ghouta, in a propaganda tape released by the group.

But the methods that Alloush used to bring stability to the Eastern Ghouta were not pretty. He has been accused of stuffing the local administration with cronies and family members to assure that no one could threaten his grip on power, of monopolizing access to the outside world through a system of tunnels, of selling aid and food at inflated prices, and of suppressing dissent with brutal means, including torture and assassination. To his rivals, he was no hero, but power-hungry opportunist or worse: a warlord, a dictator-in-the-making, hell-bent on seizing the presidential palace for himself. Some even acidly compared his methods of governance to those of Bashar al-Assad.

One aspect of this intolerance for dissent was a ferocious manhunt for supporters of the extremist Islamic State. It was long warily tolerated, the way the Islam Army still works with the Nusra Front despite latent tension between the groups. But when the Islamic State began to seriously challenge the system Alloush had constructed in the Eastern Ghouta, in 2014, all hell broke lose. Zahran Alloush’s men drove the Islamic State out of several neighborhoods, in a violent crackdown that made Syrian human rights activists and Alloush’s other Islamist rivals go pale with fright. The purge was mostly successful and it won discrete international applause, though it seems to have been a turf war just as much as it was an ideological conflict and a political conflict.

Non-extremists were also in danger. The 2013 kidnapping of four well-known secular human rights activists in Douma, an area under strong Islam Army influence, was blamed on Zahran Alloush by their families, who noted that men under his command had previously threatened the activists. Alloush denied responsibility, albeit rather unconvincingly, and he seemed genuinely perplexed that so much attention could be attached to the fate of four individuals, when people were being killed in the Ghouta by their thousands every year. But the affair made him a bête noire of much of the secular opposition, with its powerful networks abroad, and made Western governments shy away from direct dealings with his group even as it sought to moderate its politics and connect to the UN-backed political process.

While Alloush was an unabashedly sectarian Islamist, inspired by Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi establishment, he was also pragmatic enough to maneuver his way through Syrian rebel politics and its shifting alliances. In the past, he threatened non-Sunni Muslim religious groups, referring to Alawites and Shia Muslims as ”filth” that would be cleansed from Syria. He condemned democracy and pronounced himself in favor of a Sunni Islamic theocracy, where sharia law would be applied in the fullest. But in the past year, perhaps under pressure from his foreign supporters, Alloush began to try to polish his image and gain acceptance in the West. His last interview, with a female Christian Syrian reporter working for the U.S. online journal The Daily Beast, was a good example of this. Alloush folded back his fangs and tried to come off as a constructive, responsible centrist, an anti-terrorist ally, and an all-around gentleman. You know, the kind you’d like to see in a coalition government.

What Is the Islam Army?

When Alloush was released from jail in summer 2011, he contacted friends and family in Douma to create an armed rebel faction in Douma, which he dubbed the Islam Brigade (Katibat al-Islam). The group later grew and added more men and more powerful weapons, rebranding itself as the Islam Brigade (Liwa al-Islam). It shot to fame or infamy—depending on which side of the conflict you’re on—in July 2012, when it issued a statement claiming responsibility for killing several top commanders in Assad’s army and intelligence services. The incident, reportedly a bombing of the National Security Office in Damascus, has never been fully explained. To me, it seems likely that foreign intelligence services were involved, perhaps allowing the Islam Brigade to claim credit to boost the group’s credentials. (But this is speculation!)

Whatever happened, the Islam Brigade quickly grew into one of the most powerful factions of the Eastern Ghouta, which gradually freed itself of government control. After initially being one among several groups, the Islam Brigade started elbowing its way to the top, striking deals with other factions or muscling them out of its way, as the situation required. It appears that generous foreign support, reportedly from Saudi Arabia, contributed to the rise of the Islam Brigade. In September 2013, the group renamed itself the Islam Army (Jaish al-Islam). Holdout groups continued to try to challenge Alloush’s growing dominance in the Eastern Ghouta enclave over the following months. Most were eventually forced to negotiate for their share of power in a system thoroughly dominated by Alloush.

In August 2014, the Islam Army spearheaded the creation of the Unified Command in the Eastern Ghouta, which also included the Ajnad al-Sham Islamic Union, Feilaq al-Rahman, Ahrar al-Sham, and other groups. Alloush was appointed its leader. However, other rebels guarded their influence and it was not a mere puppet body. For example, control of the Sharia court system in the Eastern Ghouta in fact fell to Khaled Tafour, an Ajnad al-Sham ally, rather than to Samir Kaakeh, who ran religious affairs in the Islam Army. (At the time of writing, it remains uncertain whether Kaakeh survived today’s airstrike.) Conflicts continued to occur, with Ajnad al-Sham and Ahrar al-Sham occasionally at odds with the Islam Army, sometimes trading harsh accusations with Alloush. Some factions remained outside the scope of the alliance entirely—most notably the jihadis of the Nusra Front (al-Qaeda) and the Islamic State.

According to some reports, leaders of Feilaq al-Rahman were also present at the meeting targeted today and killed in the strike, and the Syrian state press has also said local Ahrar al-Sham leaders were among those killed.

What Happens to the Group Now?

The death of Zahran Alloush does not necessarily mean that the Islam Army will fall apart. Another strong leader could emerge, perhaps backed by foreign supporters like Saudi Arabia, or by other rebels in the area, all of whom are presumably anxious to preserve basic stability in the Eastern Ghouta at a difficult moment.

Islam Army logotype

Some rebel factions in Syria collapse quickly when a central leader or founder is lost. Others fade away gradually. For example, the Tawhid Brigade in Aleppo was weakened and split after the death of Abdulqader Saleh in November 2013, and it has now folded into another faction—but it took a while. And Ahrar al-Sham somehow survived the killing of nearly all its leaders in September 2014, relying on strong institutions and foreign support.

But in the case of the Islam Army, it has virtually been synonymous with Zahran Alloush throughout its existence, going back to the days when it was known as the Islam Battalion. Many of the most prominent leaders and representatives of the Islam Army were close friends or relatives of Zahran Alloush himself, such as Mohammed Alloush, who served as the group’s lead negotiator and political chief; he is a cousin of the Islam Army leader. If Zahran Alloush has now been killed, possibly alongside other top leaders, it could amount to a decapitation strike.

Add to that the fact that the Islam Army’s dominance has created so much resentment among other factions over the years, and the situation seems very unstable. It looks likely that the Eastern Ghouta is in for major change in the coming months.

How Does It Affect the Syrian Peace Process?

A Syrian peace process was recently launched in Vienna by the International Syria Support Group, a coalition including the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other governments. In early December, a meeting in Riyadh created an opposition body to participate in negotiations with Bashar al-Assad’s government. According to the United Nations, which will convene the talks, they are currently planned for Geneva in late January 2016.

Though Zahran Alloush couldn’t attend in person, the Islam Army was the most powerful and the most hardline faction to sign on to the Riyadh talks (after Ahrar al-Sham backed out), despite fierce opposition from al-Qaeda aligned jihadi groups. If the Islam Army has trouble getting its house in order after Zahran Alloush’s death, or is caught up in rivalries with factions seeking to increase their share in the Eastern Ghouta’s war economy, or is weakened, this could have a negative effect on the opposition’s ability to conduct talks in Geneva.

On the other hand, the peace process has plenty of other problems to stumble over—whether or not the Islam Army is on board just adds to a long list of reasons it looks likely to fail.

What Happens in Damascus?

A lot of things are happening in Damascus. Less than two weeks ago, the Syrian Arab Army and its Shia Islamist allies attacked and retook the Marj al-Sultan air base in the southern part of the Eastern Ghouta, threatening the enclave.

Also, just before the news about the airstrike that killed Zahran Alloush, it was revealed that a UN-brokered arrangement will evacuate insurgents from several neighborhoods in southern Damascus, including the Yarmouk refugee camp. These areas have been mercilessly starved by the government over the past few years, and bombed, and bitterly contested both between Palestinian factions, the Syrian government, various Sunni rebel factions, and the rival Islamic State. Now, some 4000 Sunni fighters will be escorted to their respective strongholds in northern Syria and the neighborhoods will revert to some form of government control under a ceasefire arrangement. If the deal is followed through, this marks a major advance for Bashar al-Assad’s government.

With so much up in the air, and rebels threatened on multiple fronts, Zahran Alloush’s death is important. If it leads to instability and infighting among the rebels, or weakens command and control in the Ghouta, we could start to see a shift in the balance of power in the Syrian capital over the coming months.

*Aron Lund is the editor of Syria in Crisis

After almost two decades of discussion, the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) will be proclaimed on December 31. The AEC is a potentially significant and competitive economic region, should it be allowed to develop according to the aspiration of being a “single market and production base, with free flow of services, investments, and labour, by the year 2020”.

The ASEAN region as a composite trading block has the third highest population at 634 million, after China and India. GDP per capita is rapidly rising. The AEC would be the 4th largest exporter after China, the EU, and the United States, with still very much scope for growth from Cambodia, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Vietnam from a diverse range of activities ranging from agriculture, food, minerals and commodities, electronics, and services. The coming AEC is already the 4th largest importer of goods after the United States, EU, and China, making it one of the biggest markets in the world.

Unlike the other trade regions, the AEC still has so much potential for growth with rising population, rising incomes, growing consumer sophistication, and improving infrastructure.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of the upcoming AEC is the expected boost this will give to intra-ASEAN trade. Most ASEAN nations have previously put their efforts into developing external relationships with the major trading nations like the EU, Japan and the US through bilateral and free trade agreements. To some extent, the potential of intra-ASEAN trade was neglected, perhaps with the exception of the entrepot of Singapore.

The AEC is an opportunity to refocus trade efforts within the region, especially when Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia are rapidly developing, and Myanmar is opening up for business with the rest of the region.

The social, cultural, political and business interchange within the region has traditionally been low, until the rapid increase of intra-ASEAN travel, due to the low-cost airline explosion within the region.

Today intra-ASEAN trade is approximately 25% of total trade, growing around 10.5% per annum, and expected to reach 30% of total ASEAN trade by the year 2020. However, the necessary infrastructure to support intra-ASEAN trade growth is lagging behind with a delay in the completion of the Trans-Asia Highway in Cambodia, and vastly inadequate border checkpoints between Malaysia and Thailand in Sadao and Kelantan.

Some infrastructure development projects have been severely hit by finance shortfalls within member states.

There are a number of outstanding issues concerning the growth and development of the AEC.

The ASEAN Secretariat based in Jakarta has a small staff, where the best talent is lacking due to the small salaries paid. The Secretariat unlike the EU bureaucratic apparatus in Brussels relies on cooperation between the member state governments for policy direction, funding and implementation of the AEC.

Thus the frontline of AEC implementation are the individual country ministries, which presents many problems, as some issues require multi-ministry cooperation and coordination, which is not always easy to achieve as particular ministries have their own visions and agendas. Getting cooperation of these ministries isn’t easy.

There are numerous structural and procedural issues yet to be contended with. At the inter-governmental level, laws and regulations are yet to be coordinated and harmonized. So in-effect there is one community with 10 sets of regulations in effect this coming January 1st. Consumer laws, intellectual property rights, company and corporate codes (no provision for ASEAN owned companies), land codes, and investment rules are all different among the individual member states.

There are no integrated banking structures, no agreement on common and acceptable currencies (some ASEAN currencies are not interchangeable), no double taxation agreements, and no formal agreements on immigration.

There is not even any such thing as a common ASEAN business visa. These issues are going to hinder market access for regional SMEs. Any local market operations will have to fulfil local laws and regulations which may not be easy for non-citizens to meet and adhere to.

Even though there are some preferential tariffs for a number of classes of ASEAN originating goods, non-tariff barriers are still in existence, which are insurmountable in some cases like the need for import licenses (APs) in Malaysia, and the need to have a registered company which can only be formed by Thai nationals within Thailand.

Some of these problems are occurring because of the very nature of ASEAN itself. ASEAN was founded on the basis of consultation, consensus, and non-interference in the internal affairs of other members. This means that no formal problem solving mechanism exists, and the ASEAN Secretariat is a facilitator rather than implementer of policy. Illegal workers, human trafficking, money laundering, and haze issues between member states have no formal mechanisms through which these issues can be solved from an ASEAN perspective.

This weakens the force for regional integration.

One of the major issues weakening the potential development of the AEC is the apparent lack of political commitment for a common market by the leadership of the respective ASEAN members. Thailand is currently in a struggle to determine how the country should be governed. Malaysia is in the grip of corruption scandals where the prime minister is holding onto power. Myanmar is going through a massive change in the way it will be governed. Indonesia is still struggling with how its archipelago should be governed. There is a view from Vietnam that business within the country is not ready for the AEC.

Intense nationalistic sentiments among for example Thais, exasperated by the recent Preach Vihear Temple conflict along the Thai-Cambodian border need to be softened to get full advantage out of the AEC. The dispute in the International Court of Justice over Pedra Branca, and the Philippine rift with China over the South China Sea show the delicacy of relationships among ASEAN members. The recent Thai court decision on the guilt of Zaw Lin and Win Zaw Tun in the murder of two young British tourists may also show how fragile intra-ASEAN relationships can be.

The AEC is going to fall far short of achieving its full potential of becoming a major influence in global trade.

The AEC is not intended to be the same model as the EEC. The AEC is far from being any fully integrated economic community. The lack of social, cultural, and political integration within the ASEAN region indicates the massive job ahead that Europe had been through decades ago. There is still a lot of public ignorance about what the AEC is, and lack of excitement or expectation for what should be a major event within the region. Respective national media are scant on information about the forthcoming launch of the AEC.

Economic nationalism is very strong within ASEAN. Malaysia has its Government Linked Companies (GLCs), State Economic Development Corporations (SEDCs), Thailand its Crown Property Bureau, and family business empires within each country which have vested interests in keeping market access at the current status quo. The AEC is seen as a threat to many existing business empires, which fear open market access. Many of these business empires have enormous political influence upon their respective governments.

The AEC could be deemed to conflict with the special advantages bumiputera businesses in Malaysia enjoy in areas of government tendering and contracting.

It is yet to be seen how some of these businesses will behave within an AEC environment. However what can be said for sure is that the AEC will not create any level playing field for ASEAN businesses in the foreseeable future.

With the problems the EU is currently facing, maybe it is wisdom in hindsight that the leaders of ASEAN have been extremely cautious in their approach to the formation of the AEC. Any opening up of the labour market could also be a potential disaster. A free flow of labour across ASEAN would potentially put many under-qualified people out of work according to Gyorgy Sziraczki, the director of the ILO in Vietnam.

This could lead to economic downturns in some of the more susceptible parts of the AEC like Lao PDR and Cambodia. The AEC rather than promoting intra-ASEAN trade, lead to a more domestic orientation, where unemployed may see the informal economy looking much more attractive means of making a living.

However, if the leadership of ASEAN see the opportunities of dramatically increasing intra-ASEAN trade, then the AEC has great potential to assist the region withstand any steep economic downturn around the rest of the world.

Projects that are able to boost regional synergies like coordination of education, river system water management, energy, transport, banking and finance, may very quickly improve regional integration. Regional clustering can be developed in education, auto-parts, food production, electronic parts, and the value adding of basic commodities to benefit the economies of the region.

Infrastructure development will be vital to the success of the AEC. For this purpose the ASEAN Infrastructure Fund, financed by member countries and the Asian Development Bank will be extremely important. The recent ASEAN summit in Kuala Lumpur also reactivated the ASEAN Joint Consultative Committee to resolve trade and investment issues.

The slowness of the AEC should not be seen as a failure of ASEAN. We can see the slow pace that ASEAN makes decisions, with the long period it is taking to admit Timor Leste as ASEAN’s 11th member.

The vital questions here are whether the AEC will be able attract direct foreign investment to the region? Take advantage of rising opportunities like international education? Stop the talent drain from the region with China becoming more aggressive in attracting the best from the region? and Create an ASEAN awareness within the region?

Sadly, one may expect the fate of the AEC to be similar to that of the Indonesia-Malaysia-Thailand Growth Triangle (IMT-GT), and the Brunei Darussalam-Indonesia-Malaysia-The Philippines East ASEAN Growth Area (BIMP-EAGA). They are in existence by name, but with little real substance on the ground.

By S. N. M Abdi

What transpires between a diplomat posted abroad and politicians of the host country is usually kept under wraps. But India’s Home Minister, Rajnath Singh, who enjoys the distinction of being appointed acting premier whenever Prime Minister Narendra Modi is away, recently went public with what one of the most important envoys stationed in New Delhi told him.

Addressing a public meeting in his parliamentary constituency, Lucknow, Singh triumphantly said: “The High Commissioner of Bangladesh, Shri Muazzem Ali, has told me that the rate of cow meat has shot through the roof in his country.” Singh was bursting with pride when he made the disclosure. His mood was so self-congratulatory that if he could, he would have literally patted himself on the back.

According to media reports, after publicizing Ali’s concern about rising beef prices in Bangladesh, Singh complimented the Border Security Force (BSF), which is directly under the Home Minister, for clamping down on the traditional export of Indian cattle to Bangladesh. Singh revealed that only 200,000-250,000 Indian cattle entered Bangladesh in 2015 compared to 20-22 lakh annually in previous years, resulting in the sharp hike in beef prices across the border.

Singh is evidently determined to extend the Bharatiya Janata Party’s controversial beef banning drive to Bangladesh. But the Hindutva-driven campaign is fanning anti-India sentiments in an otherwise friendly neighbor ever since Singh — a former BJP president — decided to stop India’s surplus, non-milk producing cattle from going to Bangladesh, halting a $1 billion-a-year informal trade determined by supply and demand that had been going on for as long as anyone can remember.

Not surprisingly, the BJP’s cow obsession cast a shadow over the two-day meeting between Rajiv Mehrishi and Mozammel Haque Khan, home secretaries of India and Bangladesh respectively, held in Dhaka last month. More time and energy was expended on dissecting the BSF crackdown on the cattle trade than on issues like sharing intelligence on militancy, illegal infiltration and influx of fake currency notes, which were given top priority earlier.

An Indian Express story on the home secretaries’ talks quoted an Indian official saying that the “principal issue raised by an alarmed Bangladesh was the BSF crackdown that has reduced cattle supplies by 70 percent, hiking the price of beef manifold and having a crippling effect on their beef industry”.

Until Singh’s Hindutva-fueled clampdown, three out of four cows slaughtered in Bangladesh were from India because there were no restrictions on sending surplus, non-milk producing cattle across the 4,000-km border separating the two countries.

The BJP government’s pro-cow and anti-beef agenda is rooted in Narendra Modi’s Aug. 9, 2012 “pink revolution” remarks on his website. Subsequently on Sept. 10, 2013, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat made protection of cows, construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya, introduction of Uniform Civil Code and abolition of Article 370 preconditions for backing Modi’s prime ministerial bid. And true enough, the BJP 2014 Poll Manifesto stated on page 41 that its government would “protect and promote cow and its progeny.”

But the cattle blockade is wreaking havoc in Bangladesh. The cattle crisis was the subject of a three-part series titled “Loss on Both Sides” published in The Daily Star, Dhaka’s leading English daily, reflecting the outrage over Indian arbitrariness.

HT Imam, a political adviser to Bangladesh’s pro-India Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has said on record that “there is absolutely no doubt” that the beef trade and leather industry are reeling as a result of India’s clampdown. Bangladesh’s beef processing units, slaughterhouses, tanneries and bone crushing factories have traditionally relied on Indian cattle.

Syed Hasan Habib of Bengal Meat, Bangladesh’s top meat exporter, also told Reuters that he had to cut international orders by 75 percent. Before the clampdown, he exported 125 tons of beef annually to Gulf nations. Echoing Habib, Bangladesh Tanners Association president, Shaheen Ahmed told the news agency that of 30 of 190 tanneries had suspended work due to shortage of hides, rendering 4000 jobless.

According to a study published in The Times of India, the Modi-Singh government will have to spend over Rs31,000 crores annually on feeding and sheltering India’s surplus, non-milk producing cows if BSF permanently stops all cattle supplies to Bangladesh.

Obviously, ordinary taxpayers will have to bear the burden of India’s new cow policies. Hence a public debate is necessary to arrive at what’s good for the common man. A rethink is absolutely necessary not only because of economics but because trouble-free relations with Bangladesh is vital for our national security and ensuring India’s pre-eminence in its zone of influence.