The Brits opted for Brexit! What comes next?

The morning after the leave decision in the United Kingdom, the non-elected functionaries of the European Union are dismayed and panic-stricken.

The people of Great Britain have spoken and David Cameron, the Prime Minister, is going to resign in the fall. His successor has to negotiate the modalities of the exit. Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, has read out a statement shakily. Juncker seems ailing and he is untrustworthy. “Once it becomes serious, you have to lie”, seems to be his motto. When he was the head of Luxembourg and also its Finance Minister, he has run the tiny country like a fiefdom. He represents the “dark part” of Europe and stands for its demise.

Having followed and watched the massive remain propaganda for the last two weeks, I can understand that the stay in-supporter are disappointed that all the demonization of the Brexiteers was in vain. That the financial class and the stock markets around the world are disappointed and try to sanction Great Britain is understandable, but after a couple of weeks, they will return to business as usual because they want to make money.

Apparently, five billion US Dollars were burned, so what. For the big shots and the stock jobbers, these are peanuts. The City of London is too important for the financial elite than that they would leave London. The Brits have to keep calm because the international community needs Britain more than the other way around. The corporatist EU that Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande represent is a dinosaur and should be rebuilt.

Since Friday, the European Union is in crisis mode and indulge in incantations such as “Europe must stand together”. Just on this “Dark Friday”, the German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, invited his colleagues from France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, the six founding members of the European Economic Community (EEC,) in order to present a paper calling for a “flexible Union”. The timing could not have been worse. The remaining 21 members were not invited. “Standing together” looks different.

Angela Merkel’s “open border policy” has tipped the scale in favor of Brexit. Last summer, when Merkel invited millions of refugees to Europe and Germany, the Brits were shocked. They considered this policy as irresponsible. With such a policy, Merkel did not only destabilized the EU but also led Germany into isolation. When the Eastern European countries closed their borders, Merkel criticized them massively. According to her, the following decline in the number of refugees was due to her policy and not to the border closures!

On top of that, Merkel’s austerity policy caused economic decline all across Sothern Europe, especially in Greece. The country is bankrupt and can only survive with the financial help of the Troika (=the IMF, the ECB, and the European Commission EC). A sovereign Greece doesn’t exist any longer. It’s run by the Troika. After the Eastern European states closed the so-called Balkan route, the refugees from Turkey are stuck in Greece. Greece is in every respect in dire straits. Some analysts call the Greeks “the Palestinians of the EU”.

The Brexit is going to have repercussions all over Europe. It will encourage the populist movements across Europe. Instead the political elites see the writing on the wall, they call for even more and deeper integration, knowing that the EU is already unable to act in many political fields such as the refugee crisis in which the EU cannot distribute apparently 160 000 refugees from Greece and Italy to the 27 member states, so far 1 000 have been allocated. Beyond that, the Euro currency has not fostered unity but has proven as a spirit of discord. In the field of foreign policy, the EU acts as an annex of the U. S. Empire. Since the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, they have caused havoc. The last achievement was the U. S.-led putsch in Ukraine that triggered a new cold war.

To the widespread frustration and disillusionment among the citizens of Europe, the corporate media have to be blamed. Many of them have not supervised the policy of the EU critically but rather affirmatively. They behaved like cheerleaders rather watch dogs, especially in the refugee crisis and the permanent crisis of the euro. A large section of the population who are critical of the current EU or domestic policy are called populists that equal a cuss word. The editor-in-chief of Spiegel online, Florian Harms, instead of calling for a pause after the Brexit he called for more integration; ” Now the EU must coalesce a fortiori.”

Instead of accelerating further integration, the member states should reclaim more sovereignty from Brussels. The EU nomenclature is out of touch with the real world. They do not serve the interest of the peoples but rather corporate interests such as the TTIP negotiations show that are held in camera. If the EU doesn’t change track, it will fall apart.

*Jahangir Karami*

The summit meeting of the member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is scheduled to be held in the Uzbekistan’s capital city of Tashkent on June 23-24, 2016. At present, Iran is only an observer member of this organization and submitted its request for full membership last year. Now that international sanctions against Iran have been removed and restrictions caused by resolutions adopted by the United Nations Security Council have been lifted, there is no important obstacle to Iran’s full membership in the organization. Since the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was established, the Islamic Republic of Iran has considered it as a positive and effective institution under regional and international conditions. As a result, by requesting to become an observer member in 2005 and then requesting full membership in 2008, which was repeated last year, Iran has been trying to play a more effective role in the region.

Due to many reasons, including membership of all neighboring countries of Iran in various security alliances and cooperation institutions, and because Iran is not a member of any effective regional institution, the membership of the Islamic Republic in this organization is an important strategic imperative. I by no means believe that Iran should necessarily look upon this institution as an alternative for relations with other governments and probably for a full-fledged and perfectionist oriental policy. However, I seriously believe that in its constructive interaction with the world, Iran’s foreign policy must put emphasis on forging balance and multilateralism, and should not limit its opportunities for interaction as was the case with three important Eastern powers: China, India and Russia. At the same time, however, I see the SCO as a middle way between being part of an alliance and not becoming a member of any international institution.

After an important part of the Western forces left Afghanistan, and due to subsequent concerns about increasing activity of the Taliban forces, the rise of Daesh terrorist group in Afghanistan and Central Asian countries, and increasing need of Russia, China, and governments in Central Asia to Iran’s effective role, it seems that the present juncture is a good opportunity to pay more attention to Iran’s membership in the SCO. On the other hand, following the conclusion of Iran’s nuclear negotiations with the West, the way has been paved for more international interactions by the Islamic Republic and this issue has been even effective in Iran’s relations with the member states of the SCO. In addition, attention must be paid to the new international approach to Iran in line with which, high-ranking officials from Russia, India, China, and European countries have paid official visits to Iran for the first time after a few decades.

Another issue is the situation in Russia, which has adopted more aggressive policies following the crisis in Ukraine and also over the eastward expansion of NATO, deployment of the West’s missile shield in Eastern Europe, and increased pressures from the West and Turkey. Moreover, China is feeling more threatened by the West as a result of which it has been adopting more confrontational policies. Under such tense conditions, there will be more opportunities for cooperation between these countries and Iran.

However, despite conditions, which have led to common concerns on the part of such countries as Russia, China, and Iran with regard to the structure of the international system, there is still another group of factors, which restricts practical possibility of establishing a power pole by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, at least, for a predictable period of time. In general, it is natural for big countries to want to create balance and accumulate power. However, conditions under which this happens are not the same in different times. At present, there are common concerns among some global powers and there are signs of inclination toward a multipolar world, but there are obstacles and problems, which slow the march towards this end.

At the same time, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization can play a more effective role than before both at regional level and in Central Asia and South Asia. It seems that in spite of many problems that exist on the way of the emergence of a new power pole, there is possibility for modification and restriction of the United States’ behavior at regional and transregional levels. Therefore, formation and bolstering of such treaties as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization will pave the way for more purposive regional cooperation among major Asian countries and add to their bargaining power in global equations. However, this does not mean that this organization should be considered as an institution for convergence and a strategic alliance as of now.

The reality and developments in the SCO indicate that this organization is willing to change its functions from a regional organization focused on peaceful coexistence to a security union, and this willingness has been mostly reflected in remarks and statements of its member countries. However, issues related to statute of the organization and interactions among its member states show that there are practical barriers to the realization of this goal. Nonetheless, if the SCO wanted to follow suit with successful organizations and pursue clear common goals at a regional level and in a more technical and specialized way, it would be able to gradually and slowly move toward more farsighted goals in the long run. In doing this, it seems that the following facts should be taken into consideration:

A) In reality, temporary reactions shown by the organization will fail to solve the aforesaid problem, because necessary institutions have not been created for this purpose while there is no practical mechanism to solve the problem. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization must address common problems in a more serious way and in an institutional manner.

B) Attention to economic logic is very important when expanding organizations and previous successful examples of organizational expansion had their roots in successful economic and hegemonic models. At present, there is no hegemonic power among the member states of this organization. Russia is a military power while China is an economic powerhouse, but both of them lack necessary soft power potential to create norms and make other governments accept them. Meanwhile, there are also covert and overt rivalries among China, India and Russia.

C) Attention to the logic of horizontal and vertical spillover and gradual evolution of activities from a limited to an expanded level is very important.

D) Resolving bilateral issues between countries must be their foremost priority.

E) Attention to domestic development of member countries is very important. China, for example, can play an effective role in smaller countries such as the Central Asian states, while India and Iran also enjoy high potential to do this.

Both Iran and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization can offer each other with important opportunities. Iran should get rid of its strategic isolation with regard to global and regional equations and since it is currently not possible for Iran to create and play an axial role in an effective institution or obtain equal membership in a strategic alliance, other options such as this regional organization can be considered a middle way for Tehran. Iran’s isolation was especially evident in recent months and in the light of decisions taken and statements issued by the (Persian) Gulf Cooperation Council, the Arab League, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Membership in this organization would not be at odds with any of the legal and political principles of the country. On the opposite, the experience of recent years, especially pressures mounted on Iran by Saudi Arabia and Turkey within three institutions, namely, the (Persian) Gulf Cooperation Council, the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, clearly show how institutional tools can play an effective role in multilateral diplomacy.

On the other hand, Iran’s stabilizing and state-building role as well as its important experiences in helping regional peace, stability and security as well as in fighting terrorism during past decades, is a good opportunity for the SCO as it can boost capabilities of this organization over a vast geographical expanse from the Middle East to South Asia and Central Asia. Iran’s geographical, cultural, economic and political capacities are such that it can boost capabilities and capacities of this organization for regional cooperation and convergence. In doing so, it can help revive the axis of Asian trade and cultural interactions and cooperation, which has been dormant since about two centuries ago.

At the same time, it must be noted that this organization is not a security and military union and it cannot be considered as an institution promoting regional convergence as well. However, if the current trend continued, it could play an important role in promoting regional convergence and facilitating realization of the Asian security initiative while offering the Islamic Republic of Iran with a strategic opportunity as well.

*Jahangir Karami
Associate Professor of International Relation at the University of Tehran,
Member of the Scientific Council of Iran and Eurasia Research Center (IRAS)

Source: Iran and Eurasia Research Center (IRAS)
http://iras.ir/
Translated By: Iran Review.Org

The progressive complexity of cyber-enabled conflicts are likely to challenge Singapore’s traditional conceptions of ‘Total Defence’ strategy.

By Michael Raska*

For more than 30 years, the principal strategy underlying Singapore’s security has been embedded in the concept of “Total Defence” – a form of national security strategy aimed at strengthening and mobilising resources in five mutually-supportive defence domains: military, civil, economic, social, and psychological. Singapore has applied its ‘Total Defence’ to an array of potential security predicaments, as a comprehensive defence framework amplifying resilience in both civil and military domains.

However, as conflicts transcend into the cyber and information domains, the centres of gravity – the sources of state power that provide moral or physical strength, freedom of action, or will to act – are going to shift. The principal challenge for Singapore’s Total Defence strategy is identifying these shifts, while managing, and responding to potentially more severe, cascading, multi-level crises – whether internal or external – emanating from cyber space.

Changing Character of Cyber Conflicts

Indeed, in every major security issue facing Singapore today and even more in the future, cyber-enabled threats have an extensive footprint.

Cyber conflicts transcend the cyber domain. Cyber conflicts are embedded in the broader context of information conflicts – political, economic, information, technological, media, and ideological struggles for influence in which information may simultaneously serve as a target and weapon. In doing so, cyber-enabled conflicts are increasingly challenging traditional boundaries between peacetime and wartime, geography and distance, state and non-state actors, civil and military domains.

These cross-domain civil-military interactions therefore provide a new arena for strategic competition, which increases uncertainty, and enables new forms of conflicts other than war.

As Singapore is preparing its first comprehensive cyber strategy, while allocating substantial resources to strengthen cyber security, national resiliency, Singapore’s leaders must be clear about their long-term national cyber priorities. In particular, they must define what constitutes Singapore’s cyber power in relation to its means, national security aims and objectives.

Implications on ‘Total Defence’

Singapore’s Total Defence envisions mobilisation of population and resources to strengthen the readiness, resolve, and resilience of every sector of society as well as government departments – each playing a role in ensuring Singapore’s security against all forms of security challenges.

The progressive complexity of cyber-enabled conflicts, however, challenges each pillar of Singapore’s ‘Total Defence’ simultaneously, while increasing the risks and costs of potential failure.

(1) Cyber-enabled conflicts may challenge Psychological Defence or the collective will and commitment among Singapore’s citizens to defend the country. Singapore’s multi-cultural society is increasingly affected by global information conflicts through social media. Social media campaigns may target national will, regional or group audiences to gain support and weaken opposition, to individual targets to enhance particular narrative at a local level.

(2) In cyber-enabled conflicts, the main battlefield is consciousness, perception, and strategic calculus of the targeted adversary. As such, a false picture of reality may threaten through the manipulation of the information sphere. It may also threaten the mutual co-existence, cohesion, and harmony based on multicultural consensus and community-building regardless of race, language and religion – Social Defence.

(3) Cyber-enabled conflicts increasingly target processes controlling critical information infrastructure – strategic industries such as energy, transportation, communications, water distribution, and others. An advanced persistent cyber-attack may disrupt, deny, destroy, or subvert these critical systems, which provide distribution of essential items and resources such as food, water, fuel, and in doing so, undermine the foundations of the Civil Defence.

(4) Economic Defence has both strategic and operational significance for Singapore: on one hand, it refers to the contingency planning for the conversion of civilian human resources, technological skills, and capital investments for the military during wartime. At the same time, it also recognises that military power depends on economic strength.

In the absence of a strong economy, the costs of creating and maintaining an effective military capability would be too high. In cyber-enabled conflicts, cyber criminals may seek to attack Singapore’s financial system primarily for monetary gain, using relatively low-cost means but sufficient subject-matter knowledge. At the same time, there are substantial risks of various economic cyber-espionage.

(5) Ultimately, computer network operations in the military domain may challenge Singapore’s Military Defence, undermining the operational readiness of the SAF as well as indigenous defence industrial base that meets the SAF’s military-technological requirements. For example, cyber-enabled attacks that may disrupt, deny, degrade SAF’s situational awareness – Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR).

Rethinking Strategy

The key question for Singapore’s Total Defence is this: should Cyber Defence become a separate pillar in the strategy or serve as an integrated part in each of the existing domains?

For example, in the military domain, the SAF is currently studying cyber as a new domain of warfare together with its strategic and operational ramifications in the context of the Fourth-Generation SAF 2030 Force. In the process, the SAF is likely to conceptualise both offensive and defensive components of cyber power and its utility in achieving strategic and political outcomes. In this context, should the SAF be tasked to defend Singapore’s strategic industries from advanced persistent cyber-threats?

Notwithstanding the seemingly symbiotic relationship between Singapore’s defence spending, economic development, educational system, civil service, media information sphere and the public in tackling emerging cyber threats, the Singapore government must continue to revamp its interagency policy processes, while encouraging a broader understanding of cyber-enabled conflicts, including debates on future cyber threats that might differ from what is seen today.

Ultimately, government agencies, academia and think tanks, and the private sector must work together to facilitate strategic and operational adaptability that leads to innovative concepts, technologies, and organisations in tackling existing and more importantly, future cyber threats.

*Michael Raska is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, a constituent unit of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Azerbaijani veterans of the Second World War have appealed to Pope Francis over Armenia’s advocating fascist ideas at the state level and glorification of Nazi criminals in the country. Following is the text of their letter to Pope Francis.

Your Holiness,

As we know, You are going to visit Armenia on June 24-26, 2016. We wish You a successful visit for the sake of peace, welfare and prosperity in our region. At the same time, we would like to draw Your highest attention to the ongoing events in Armenia that threaten the ideas of peaceful coexistence and are contrary to Your holy mission.

Your Holiness,

While Azerbaijan and Vatican demonstrates to the world a bright example of cooperation for the sake of dialogue between civilizations and religions, Armenia advocates racist ideas at the state level.

In 2015, on the eve of 70th anniversary of the historical victory over fascism, we – veterans of the World War II raised alarm about the glorification of Hitler’s Nazi accomplices by Armenia. It was not only about the blasphemous glorification of Nazi felons in Armenia, but also at the international information and cultural realm.

With pain in our hearts, we would like to draw your attention to the fact, how Armenia uses all the resources for bleaching the accomplices of Hitler and Himmler, leaders of the Armenian punitive legion SS Drastamat Kanayan and Garegin Ter-Harutiunian, known as the generals Dro and Nzhdeh.

Briefly, we recall that these “national heroes” of Armenia are responsible for the death of tens of thousands people in Ukraine and Poland, crimes against Jews and other “undesirables” to the fascist ideology, mass killings in concentration camps of Hitler. The reports of Armenian legion approve the extermination of over 20,000 civilians in Western Crimea alone.

Today, it is extremely cynical that Armenia has created the main “front” for glorification of Nazi criminals on the territory of neighboring Russia, the country, which cherishes the memory of millions who were killed by Nazis.

Armenia’s President Serzh Sargsyan personally took part in the ceremony of perpetuating the memory of a Nazi criminal in the centre of Yerevan. A year before that together with the leaders of the countries affected by fascism, Sargsyan participated in the Victory Parade in Moscow, and “commemorated” the victims of the World War II in Yerevan in May 2016.

Your Holiness,

Today, the world condemns any form of fascism. On the 17th of December, 2015, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution entitled “Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”.

In paragraph 4 of the document, it is stated that the UN General Assembly expresses “deep concern about the glorification, in any form, of the Nazi movement, neo-Nazism and former members of the “Waffen SS” organization, including by erecting monuments and memorials and holding public demonstrations in the name of the glorification of the Nazi past, the Nazi movement and neo-Nazism, as well as by declaring or attempting to declare such members and those who fought against the anti-Hitler coalition and collaborated with the Nazi movement participants in national liberation movements”

In Armenia, which has joined this resolution, a large-scale cult is being created around those who swore to the fascist regime and responsible for the death of millions, including the representatives of the Armenian people.

Moreover, we are surprised by the lack of any reaction to it by the international community. In the case of other countries, they always react to such issues. We do not understand Armenia’s special right to behave this way. Armenia mints commemorative coins, shoot films in honor of Nazi criminals Dro and Nzhdeh. There is a square and subway station named after Garegin Nzhdeh in Yerevan.

There is a street named after Drastamat Kanayan. In addition, there is also a monument to Nazhdeh in the centre of Yerevan, next to the complex of government buildings and the headquarters of the ruling party of Armenia.

Isn’t that insulting the memory of the dead? Is not that a cynical mockery of the victims of fascism?!

We, the people who survived all the pain of the war against fascism, lost comrades in the battles, with an aching heart, have to see the creation of the halo of heroes around Nazi criminals. We are indignant of Armenia’s actions which are a direct challenge to the entire world.

We are confident that being faithful to the blessed memory of those who were killed in the fight against fascism, you will make every effort against the common evil as the fascist ideology cultivated by Armenia.

We hope that our voice will be heard by your Holiness. We sincerely ask you to influence the Armenian leadership in order to prevent attempts to rehabilitate and glorify Nazi criminals, in particular the dismantling of the monument to the accomplice of Hitler, the general of fascist army Garegin Nzhdeh.

With respect and hope for understanding on behalf of all veterans of the World War II of Azerbaijan:

Dadash Rzayev,  Chairman of the veteran organization of the Republic, member of the Presidium of the Coordination Council of the CIS, Member of the International Advisory Committee for Reserve officers and the Committee. Major General in reserve

Tofig Agahuseynov, Member of the presidium of the veteran organization, a war veteran, Colonel General in reserve, awarded the Order of the Red Star

Agadadash Samedov, A war veteran, awarded the Order of “Glory” three degree

Maria Rzayeva, A war veteran, awarded the Order of Patriotic War 2rd degree

Alexander Gretchenko, A war veteran, captain of 1st rank, awarded the Order of “Glory”

Irina Gadimova, Blockaded Leningrad, teacher at the University

Ismayil Farajov, A war veteran, chairman of the veteran organization of Nasimi district

Gara Sariyev, A war veteran, professor

Sofia Jafarova, A war veteran, colonel of police in retirement

Ismayil Ibrahimov, A war veteran, academician, member of the presidium of veterans’ organizations of the Republic, hero of Socialist Labor

Bahadur Huseynov, A war veteran, member of the presidium of veterans’ organizations of the Republic, Major General in retirement

Jalil Khalilov, Deputy Chairman at veterans’ organizations of the Republic, PhD in Political Science, Associate Professor of the Academy of State Service under the President of the Republic, member of the Coordination Council of the CIS, Member of the International Advisory Committee of the reserve officers and the provision, Colonel in reserve, a war veteran

Lev Mohin, A war veteran

Vasiliy Shevchov, A war veteran

Atabala Hajiyev, A war veteran, awarded the Order of Lenin

By Alireza Rezakhah*

In continuation of Manama’s policy of revoking citizenship of its political opponents, the Kingdom of Bahrain announced last Monday, June 20 2016 that it has revoked citizenship of the country’s top Shia cleric, Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qassim. This comes while Sheikh Isa Qassim was born in 1938 in Diraz region of Bahrain, that is, three decades before Bahrain came into being as a country in 1971.

The interesting point is that this decision by Bahraini government has evoked protests both from the government of Iran and the United States. France has also voiced concern about this measure by Manama. The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva has noted that the Bahraini government’s decision is at odds with international laws and regulations. Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the UNHRC has noted that revocation of citizenship is admissible under “special conditions,” but has added that this step must be taken in the service of “legitimate goals” and it should be also open to appeal. However, and despite international reactions, the Al Khalifah regimes seems to have no intention for changing its repressive policies.

World’s first rank in citizenship revocation

Among Arab countries and also at global level, Bahrain ranks first in terms of revoking citizenship of its citizens under political excuses, especially in response to peaceful opposition against the government’s policies. This issue has made Bahrain subject to strong criticism from regional and global human rights bodies. Last April, Nidal Al Salman, a member of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, said 280 Bahrainis have had their citizenship revoked since 2012 and about 200 cases of revocation of citizenship have taken place in 2015 alone. He added that university professors, religious leaders, businesspeople and former parliament members have been among those people who have lost their citizenship. Meanwhile, the UN high commissioner for human rights has greatly criticized revocation of Bahrainis’ citizenship. According to an announcement by the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, more than 3,000 people have been sent to jail on charges of taking part in anti-government demonstrations or inciting hatred against the ruling regime.

In its statement on March 7, 2016, Amnesty International said forceful expulsion of citizens from Bahrain and revocation of their nationality is a blatant violation of human rights and other rules of international law, especially the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Despite all the criticism, revocation of citizenship has apparently turned into a major tool for the suppression of political opponents in Bahrain. Amnesty International has added that revocation of citizenship has turned into the best weapon in the hands of the Bahraini government to suppress its opponents, while issuing warning about increased frequency of revocation of citizenship and forceful expulsion of the country’s citizens.

Systematic citizenship as opposed to revocation of citizenship

On the other hand, in parallel to revoking citizenship of opposition figures, the government of Bahrain follows the policy of systematic granting of citizenship and intentional acceptance of foreigners. It seems that the Al Khalifah regime has put the policy of changing the composition of the country’s population on top of its priorities in order to counter its opponents. Many analysts maintain that Al Khalifah is trying to implement the same policy in the country, which the British monarchy implemented in Palestine. They believe that by revoking the citizenship of Bahraini people and granting citizenship of Bahrain to foreign nationals and expulsion of Bahrainis from their homeland, Al Khalifah regime is actually implementing the same strategy that Britain implemented in the occupied Palestinian territories. Based on a plan by the British government, Israel started in 1967 to secretly change the composition of population in the al-Quds (Jerusalem). As a result, while in 1967 about 7,000 Palestinians lived in al-Quds with no Israeli citizen being present there, at present, there are 200,000 Israelis living in this city along with about 300,000 Palestinians.

By following suit with that plan, the Al Khalifah officials are pursuing a purposive and long-term plan to change the composition of Bahrain’s population – most of whose residents are Shias – according to their will. Hadi al-Mousavi, a prominent member of Bahrain’s Al-Wefaq National Islamic Society, says in this regard, “Since Shias account for a majority in Bahrain and Bahrain is the only member country of the (Persian) Gulf Cooperation Council with a Shia majority population, the Al Khalifah regime is incessantly trying to change the population composition of the country.” Another noteworthy point about this policy, which is being followed diligently by the government of Bahrain, is that Bahraini officials, unlike officials of other countries in the world, give no figures on the number of people who have been granted the citizenship of Bahrain on an annual basis.

With regard to figures that have been released so far, a report by Al-Wefaq National Islamic Society can be cited here, which says, “The Al Khalifah regime granted citizenship of Bahrain to more than 95,000 foreign nationals between 2002 and 2014.” Sheikh Ali Salman, the secretary general of Al-Wefaq National Islamic Society, who is now doing time in Al Khalifah regime’s prison, made a speech in August 2014, describing as “catastrophic” the regime’s policy for granting citizenship to foreign nationals while calling on the people of Bahrain to seriously oppose this policy. In reality, the policy of revoking citizenship of political opponents in Bahrain has been used by Al Khalifah regime as both a tactic and a strategy and this reality can explain why Manama is resisting international protesters against the country’s recent suppressive measures.

* Alireza Rezakhah
Doctorate in Political Science; Political and International Analyst

The Vote Leave chief executive Matthew Elliot was wishing to get voters out for the cause, circulating a message that, “There is a very real chance that voters in London and Scotland will vote to keep us in the EU today despite the heartlands of the country voting to leave.”

The circulated email also sported a picture from a “leafy” part of London, with queues to boot. “If you don’t want people in London to force you and your family to stay in the EU please email and call all your friends and make sure they Vote Leave today!”

Chuka Umunna, Labour MP for Streatham, retorted in disgust that, “Vote Leave are ending this campaign as they began it – by seeking to divide our country not unite it, turning regions, nations and communities against one another.”

As the votes neared their final tally, Elliot found himself on the right side of history, keeping company with other Leave campaigners. Almost 52 percent had decided that the Leave campaign had made their case, while the Remain case limped in at 48.1 percent.

UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage was truly chipper, calling the referendum result, after expressing initial doubts, an assertion of independence. June 23, he confidently claimed, would “go down in our history as our independence day.”[1]

The entire Remain campaign was deservedly routed. From the 2013, Prime Minister David Cameron was caught by the populist surge both within his conservative party, and the pressure from UKIP to press for a renegotiation with the EU.

Having marketed himself as John Bull saving Britain from the clutches of continental bureaucracy, he looked out of sorts attempting to argue for a Remain campaign he only ever seemed half-hearted about. Such untidy minds constitute true punishment indeed.

That has been the nature of the entire debate from the start, with strong resonances from the continent about where the European Union fits in the debate. The EU is a spouse with visible defects that has resulted in a vote of divorce. Umunna’s point, along with those of the Remain campaign, was never well made, if, indeed, it was made at all.

When prosperity, wealth and peace might have been framed as both arguments and aspirations, the Remain team decided that mocking critics as bumpkins, village hicks and extremists was the way to go.

A sour taster of this came in the broader, nigh hysterical response to Keith Adams and his expressive pro-leave, near blind “93 year old mum”. Adams, on making a post of his mother’s intentions, was trolled with some rigour, with various accusations about being a liar, a “right wing racist brexiteer” and a fabricator. (“It can’t have happened because blind people vote using Braille.”)[2]

Umunna’s own Labour party came across as cool and indifferent to traditional blue collar constituents, with Jeremy Corbyn himself a long time sceptic of much of the EU program. Within its ranks, a populist reassessment has been demanded, taking into account traditional areas which the party has left behind.

While London, Scotland and Northern Ireland fronted up with numbers for Remain, the English shires and Wales went for Brexit. Traditional labour bastions such as Sunderland gave the Leave campaign a 22 percent margin of victory. Newcastle scraped in with Remain with a mere one percentage point.

All in all, this vote saw a return to the politics of anger and estrangement. It revealed two classes, “staring at each other across a political chasm.”[3] It is the message that Podemos is capitalising upon in Spain. Ditto that of those on the Right, such as Geer Wilders in the Netherlands.

Not all have the same view on how best to tackled the EU conundrum. Genuine concerns about centralised governance and intrusion have been muddled with a terror about refugees, immigrants and life style choices. A distinct spinelessness from Europe’s leaders on this point has not helped. Gone are the broader discussion about accountability and liberty.

A perfect illustration as to how problematic any challenge to the way the Union is governed came in the market chatter. It resembled all too closely the language of the portfolio prospectus, with its monthly updates on shocks and instabilities, rather than political questions of sovereignty. Forget discussions about reform, or the application of Article 50 of the Treaty of the European Union. Such commentary was far more interested in the wounds that a democratic experiment had inflicted.

The Economist and Wall Street Journal noted with alarm how the pound had fallen to its lowest level relative to the US dollar since 1985. Futures and the S&P 500 fell by five percent. Stock markets in Asia were given a drubbing. All of this seemed academic as polls closed, with a sense that the Remain campaign would edge out the Brexiteers by a few good points. The position was totally reversed.

While there was much mythmaking and manufacture in the grounds for the Leave campaign, the sentiment was sensible enough. Not all should be dismissed as raw nativism and autarchic romance. Those on wanting Britain to stay did just that.

Notes:
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36613238

[2] https://justablogwordpress.wordpress.com/2016/06/23/trolled/

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/23/united-kingdom-two-nations-political-chasm-left

As the sun set over New York on June 12, hundreds of Muslims gathered in Hudson River Park to break their Ramadan fast together. Iftar, the evening Ramadan meal, is often a joyous celebration of faith and family. But the mood that Sunday was solemn: That morning, news had broken of the ghastly massacre of LGBTQ revelers at Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

A lone Muslim had allegedly perpetrated the attack. Here by the Hudson, over 200 knelt in prayer. “We’re praying for those who were lost,” one woman explained in a video circulated by the Huffington Post, her voice breaking. “As Muslims, we’re united in our outrage over this senseless act of violence.”

Meanwhile, an Orlando imam condemned terrorism as un-Islamic and affirmed his belief that “Islam teaches peace.” The Florida chapter of a national Muslim group called on members to donate blood for the victims. And statements of sympathy tumbled forth from American Muslims in what CBS News called “an avalanche.”

“Today, we stand in solidarity with the LGBTQ community,” said the group Muslim Advocates. “Your grief is our grief. Your outrage is our outrage.”

Unfortunately, none of those touching gestures deterred Donald Trump from warning darkly that “radical Islam is coming to our shores.” In a falsehood-riddled speech following the Orlando massacre, the presumptive GOP nominee blamed the shooting on immigration and “political correctness.”

As Muslims all over America sent their sympathies to Orlando, Trump mocked his Democratic rival’s insistence that “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people.” He accused Muslims of causing “death and destruction” by covering up terrorism in their midst (though it was later revealed that a Muslim member of Mateen’s community had reported him as suspicious).

Then, in perhaps the most ominous part of the address, Trump claimed that Democrats will “take away Americans’ guns and then admit the very people who want to slaughter us.” Muslim immigrants are the problem, he seems to be saying. And guns are the solution.

If you ask me, I’d feel much safer with the crowd at Hudson River Park than anywhere near a rally of armed Trump supporters.

But here’s the creepier part: For all his blathering that “we have to get smart” about “radical Islam,” Trump is stupidly playing right into ISIS’s hands. Like Trump himself, the group benefits immensely from anything that drives a wedge between Muslims and the societies they live in.

ISIS said as much itself — in plain English — in a publication detailing its plan to “destroy the gray zone” between infidels and believers. Since most Muslims seem to like living in the liberal societies of Europe and North America, ISIS propagandists have written, the only way to drive up recruitment is to make Muslims feel unwelcome there.

No wonder ISIS recruiters are now featuring Donald Trump in advertisements. It’s not because they’re afraid of him — it’s because few people are working harder to make Muslims feel unwelcome than he is. Civil rights groups report that Trump’s rise has paralleled a shocking increase in hate crimes against Muslims in this country.

That’s an outrage. And it’s thoroughly self-defeating.

In fact, the United States has arguably the most prosperous, well-integrated Muslim population in the western world. Even as ISIS has scored a few recruiting successes among the much more marginalized Muslim communities of Europe — though even there the group falls way outside the mainstream — it’s flat-lined here.

Scenes like the iftar gathering in New York, in other words, are the rule, not the exception. They’re a touching rejoinder to the toxic politics of division, and a far more accurate reflection of our Muslim neighbors than anything peddled by Trump.

And, not least, they’re a much better asset in the fight against terrorism than any bullet or bomb — or any demagogue who urges his followers to reach for their guns at the first sign of trouble.

This article appeared at Other Words.

(EurActiv) — The EU’s founding states want Britain to begin leaving the union “as soon as possible” to keep the bloc from being stranded in “limbo”, Germany’s foreign minister said after emergency talks held on Saturday (25 June).

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, hosting the six original states of the European Union in Berlin, said they were in agreement that London must not wait to start the complex procedure of extracting itself from the bloc.

“We join together in saying that this process must begin as soon as possible so we don’t end up in an extended limbo period but rather can focus on the future of Europe and the work toward it.”

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier hosted his French counterpart Jean-Marc Ayrault, the Netherlands’ Bert Koenders, Italy’s Paolo Gentiloni, Belgium’s Didier Reynders and Luxemburg’s Jean Asselborn for the six-way talks on “current European political issues”, the German foreign ministry said.

Why the wait?

European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said earlier that Britain’s planned departure from the European Union was “not an amicable divorce” and also called for it to be quick.

“I do not understand why the British government needs until October to decide whether to send the divorce letter to Brussels,” he told German public broadcaster ARD late Friday.

“I’d like it immediately.”

He admitted that the EU had hoped Britain would stay but that now it was key to make the separation process as speedy and painless as possible.

“It is not an amicable divorce but it was also not an intimate love affair,” he said.

“It is not a good day for Britain and the European Union but we must go on.”

British Prime Minister David Cameron said Friday in the wake of the shock referendum outcome that he would resign his office in October and leave negotiations on the so-called “Brexit” to his successor.

Hollande: ‘A massive change is needed’

Meanwhile, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande led calls for the EU to reform in order to survive a traumatic divorce with Britain.

Ayrault said he and Steinmeier, whose countries long represented the twin-engine of European integration, were working on joint proposals that could deepen cooperation among EU members that use the euro currency, or bolster security and defence coordination.

Paris and Berlin will present their partners with “concrete solutions” to make the EU “more effective”, Ayrault told AFP.

However, France and Germany appear deeply divided over the way forward, with French public opinion increasingly hostile to further integration.

Merkel, who called the result a “blow” to Europe, said she would would host the leaders of France and Italy along with EU President Donald Tusk in Berlin on Monday to try to chart a reform plan.

“We take note of the British people’s decision with regret. There is no doubt that this is a blow to Europe and to the European unification process,” Merkel told reporters in Berlin.

With global markets in turmoil, she said it was important to “not draw quick and simple conclusions from the referendum in Great Britain, which would only further divide Europe.”

For his part, Hollande said on Twitter, “Today, history is knocking at our door, I will do all I can to make this a profound change and not a setback. A massive change is needed. In order to progress, Europe cannot go on like before.”

“Strengthening the euro area and its democratic governance is a necessity,” Hollande added, saying the European Union “must be understood and controlled by its citizens.”

A summit bringing together the leaders of the 28 EU member states will be held in Brussels on Tuesday and Wednesday (28-29 June).

Entire communities in the West Bank either have no access to water or have had their water supply reduced almost by half.

This alarming development has been taking place for weeks, since Israel’s national water company, “Mekorot”, decided to cut off – or significantly reduce – its water supply to Jenin, Salfit and many villages around Nablus, among other regions.

Israel has been ‘waging a water war’ against Palestinians, according to Palestinian Authority Prime Minister, Rami Hamdallah. The irony is that the water provided by “Mekorot” is actually Palestinian water, usurped from West Bank aquifers. While Israelis, including illegal West Bank settlements, use the vast majority of it, Palestinians are sold their own water back at high prices.

By shutting down the water supply at a time that Israeli officials are planning to export essentially Palestinian water, Israel is once more utilizing water as a form of collective punishment.

This is hardly new. I still remember the trepidation in my parents’ voices whenever they feared that the water supply was reaching a dangerously low level. It was almost a daily discussion at home.

Whenever clashes erupted between stone-throwing children and Israeli occupation forces on the outskirts of the refugee camp, we always, instinctively, rushed to fill up the few water buckets and bottles we had scattered around the house.

This was the case during the First Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, which erupted in 1987 throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Whenever clashes erupted, one of the initial actions carried out by the Israeli Civil Administration – a less ominous title for the offices of the Israeli occupation army – was to collectively punish the whole population of whichever refugee camp rose up in rebellion.

The steps the Israeli army took became redundant, although grew more vengeful with time: a strict military curfew (meaning the shutting down of the entire area and the confinement of all residents to their homes under the threat of death); cutting off electricity and shutting off the water supply.

Of course, these steps were taken only in the first stage of the collective punishment, which lasted for days or weeks, sometimes even months, pushing some refugee camps to the point of starvation.

Since there was little the refugees could do to challenge the authority of a well-equipped army, they invested whatever meager resources or time that they had to plot their survival.

Thus, the obsession over water, because once the water supply ran out, there was nothing to be done; except, of course, that of Salat Al-Istisqa or the ‘Prayer for Rain’ that devout Muslims invoke during times of drought. The elders in the camp insist that it actually works, and reference miraculous stories from the past where this special prayer even yielded results during summer time, when rain was least expected.

In fact, more Palestinians have been conducting their prayer for rain since 1967 than at any other time. In that year, almost exactly 49 years ago, Israel occupied the two remaining regions of historic Palestine: the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. And throughout those years, Israel has resorted to a protracted policy of collective punishment: limiting all kinds of freedom, and using the denial of water as a weapon.

Indeed, water was used as a weapon to subdue rebelling Palestinians during many stages of their struggle. In fact, this history goes back to the war of 1948, when Zionist militias cut off the water supply to scores of Palestinian villages around Jerusalem to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of that region.

During the Nakba (or Catastrophe) of 1948, whenever a village or a town was conquered, the militias would immediately demolish its wells to prevent the inhabitants from returning. Illegal Jewish settlers still utilize this tactic to this day.

The Israeli military, too, continued to use this strategy, most notably in the first and second uprisings. In the Second Intifada, Israeli airplanes shelled the water supply of whichever village or refugee camp they planned to invade and subdue. During the Jenin Refugee Camp invasion and massacre of April 2002, the water supply for the camp was blown up before the soldiers moved into the camp from all directions, killing and wounding hundreds.

Gaza remains the most extreme example of water-related collective punishment, to date. Not only the water supply is targeted during war but electric generators, which are used to purify the water, are often blown up from the sky. And until the decade-long siege is over, there is little hope to permanently repair either of these.

It is now common knowledge that the Oslo Accord was a political disaster for Palestinians; less known, however, is how Oslo facilitated the ongoing inequality under way in the West Bank.

The so-called Oslo II, or the Israel-Palestinian Interim Agreement of 1995, made Gaza a separate water sector from the West Bank, thus leaving the Strip to develop its own water sources located within its boundaries. With the siege and recurring wars, Gaza’s aquifers produce anywhere between 5-10 percent of ‘drinking-quality water.’ According to ANERA, 90 percent of Gaza water (is) unfit for human consumption.’

Therefore, most Gazans subsist on sewage-polluted or untreated water. But the West Bank should – at least theoretically – enjoy greater access to water than Gaza. Yet, this is hardly the case.

The West Bank’s largest water source is the Mountain Aquifer, which includes several basins: Northern, Western and Eastern. West Bankers’ access to these basins is restricted by Israel, which also denies them access to water from the Jordan River and to the Coastal Aquifer. Oslo II, which was meant to be a temporary arrangement until a final status negotiations are concluded, enshrined the existing inequality by giving Palestinians less than a fifth of the amount of water enjoyed by Israel.

But even that prejudicial agreement has not been respected, partly because a joint committee to resolve water issues gives Israel veto power over Palestinian demands. Practically, this translates to 100 percent of all Israeli water projects receiving the go-ahead, including those in the illegal settlements, while nearly half of Palestinian needs are rejected.

Presently, according to Oxfam, Israel controls 80 percent of Palestinian water resources. “The 520,000 Israeli settlers use approximately six times the amount of water more than that used by the 2.6 million Palestinians in the West Bank.”

The reasoning behind this is quite straightforward, according to Stephanie Westbrook, writing in Israel’s +972 Magazine. “The company pumping the water out is ‘Mekorot’, Israel’s national water company. ‘Mekorot’ not only operates more than 40 wells in the West Bank, appropriating Palestinian water resources, Israel also effectively controls the valves, deciding who gets water and who does not.”

“It should be no surprise that priority is given to Israeli settlements while service to Palestinian towns is routinely reduced or cut off,” as is the case at the moment.

The unfairness of it all is inescapable. Yet, for nearly five decades, Israel has been employing the same policies against Palestinians without much censure or meaningful action from the international community.

With current summer temperature in the West Bank reaching 38 degrees Celsius, entire families are reportedly living on as little as 2-3 liters per capita, per day. The problem is reaching catastrophic proportions. This time, the tragedy cannot be brushed aside, for the lives and well-being of entire communities are at stake.

“The US destroys and China builds,” was how a taxi driver from Ethiopia in Washington DC responded to Chen’s question about China’s main activity in Africa. Building is what China has been doing, on a massive scale, with projects of all kinds sited in African cities and spread across this vast continent. Having built the $150 million gleaming new conference centre at the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa, China recently signed a contract worth $12 billion to build the Coastal Railway in Nigeria stretching 650 km across the country from Calabar in the east to Aba, Port Harcourt, Warri, Benin City and Lagos in the west. Never before in human history have we seen the spectacle of a continental-sized China, which was as poor as most African countries only 30 years ago, building up Africa’s infrastructure on such a scale that could help the world’s poorest continent catch up in development.

China’s dominant role in building Africa’s infrastructure has been controversial despite two generally agreed positions. The first is that Africa lags severely behind other developing regions in infrastructure and has a craving demand for catching up. The second is that China is meeting that demand more than any other country, with its companies, especially state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and workers labouring away on projects that range from municipal buildings and dams to roads and railways that begin to stitch together poorly connected African cities and regions.

State-led economic development and infrastructure provision in China often implies that its central government can extend its experience in shaping the scale and speed of infrastructure development in Africa.¹ Some even suggest that China is exporting its infrastructure production as a political leverage in Africa. However, Huang’s experience working with Chinese SOEs in Nairobi and other places in Africa leads us to make an alternative argument backed by evidence marshalled in this article. Chinese SOEs are generally misconceived as political allies with the central government, while their corporative nature with a profit orientation and financial constraints is largely overlooked. This bias tends to inflate the political rhetoric of China building Africa.

We question “Is China Building Africa” by probing the hidden interface between the strategic and pragmatic levels of China’s involvement in Africa’s infrastructure development. We do so by examining: 1) how the political rhetoric is translated into any practical strategies; 2) how the different players, including the government representatives of China, the Export-Import Bank of China (EximBank), the subsidiaries of the SOEs in Africa, as well as the local authorities and agencies, interact with one another in initiating and executing infrastructure projects, and 3) the benefits and risks for the various parties now and into the future of Africa’s infrastructure development.

Dominating the African Infrastructure Market

China plays the most important external role in Africa’s infrastructure construction, as the largest contracting nation in Africa. Europe used to be Africa’s largest contractor, accounting for 44.3% of the region’s total market revenue in 2002, but its share declined to 34.6% in 2011. The market share of US contractors dropped even more, from 24.1% in 2002 to 6.7% in 2011. In contrast, the market share of Chinese companies rose sharply from 9.9% in 2002 to 40.1% in 2011, and has remained fairly stable² (see Figure 1 below).

From a related perspective, Africa has become China’s largest market in its overall overseas contracting work. In 2008, Africa grew to account for almost half of China’s overseas construction markets, surpassing Asia (32%) for the first time in history (see Figure 2 below).⁴

The data in Figure 2 refer to the projects commissioned to Chinese SOEs by customers in the African countries, usually their national governments. When it comes to the financing of African infrastructure, China’s involvement is quite different. While China is the largest funder of African infrastructure as a national government,⁶ its financing is more limited than other funding sources (see Figure 3 below), especially in comparison with its dominant role in project contracting and construction.

It is important to distinguish the roles and responsibilities of Chinese entities in financing vs. building Africa’s infrastructure projects that carry varied short- and long-term benefits and risks. There are two distinctive dimensions to Chinese entities building in Africa. The China-funding aspect refers to the projects where Chinese entities, usually the EximBank, occasionally the SOEs themselves, play a major role in funding the projects. They could potentially become a shareholder in such projects, which are not necessarily built by Chinese contractors, although the latter are involved in most cases. Second, the China-contracted projects are those that are built by Chinese enterprises, mostly SOEs, but not necessarily funded by the Chinese government.

The data above reveal the different levels of China’s involvement in contracting and financing African infrastructure development. It is clear that China is more of a contractor and builder than a financier. Whilst China is building the majority of infrastructure projects in Africa, the financing of these projects often comes from sources other than Chinese banks, and companies themselves (see Figure 4 below).

Silent Builders and Limited Influence

In revealing the disparity between China’s financing and building roles in Africa’s infrastructure, we highlight a complex environment in which many Chinese SOEs are limited to a marginal position, even though they are the contractors and builders of most infrastructure projects. This environment features multiple sources of financing that both facilitate and inhibit China’s extensive presence and influence in Africa’s infrastructure sector. As suggested by the most recent ICA report (2014),⁸ the largest investment in infrastructure in Africa comes from the African governments themselves. Normally this is enhanced by external financial sources, the largest being ICA funding, that mainly include the OECD countries and regional banks such as the World Bank and African Development Bank (AfDB). A typical financing structure and flow is illustrated in Figure 5.

In this scheme, when Chinese entities participate as contractors, their responsibility is to “build the project to specification on time.”¹⁰ The Chinese contractors sometimes complain that they are at the bottom of the supply chain. Not only do they have to face the challenge of cost control, but they are also positioned at the frontline of social and political clashes, a challenge they are not equipped to address. On some occasions, conflict in landownership may halt a project. In Kenya, Nigeria, Angola and elsewhere, there have been projects cancelled in the middle of construction, causing tremendous loss to both the host country and the Chinese contractors.¹¹

Given the Chinese enterprises’ state-owned nature, they are likely to be seen as more politically oriented. In principle, Chinese SOEs have been ‘modernised’ since the Company Law was passed in 1993, and are supposed to follow international corporative practices, through the separation of ownership and control. In reality, the central government continues to influence SOEs mainly through two mechanisms: the de facto shareholder of State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) and the Personnel Appointment System.¹² For the subsidiaries of SOEs operating in Africa, decision-making is naturally decentralised and largely localised, which limits the leverage of SASAC.

The subsidiaries in Africa are not very popular among their mother SOEs’ employees. This leads to a short-term human resources management system. Junior managers would normally work in an overseas subsidiary for 2-4 years, before being transferred back to China. The relatively short assignment makes them focus on near-term targets, such as maximising the number of contracts signed and the turnover of projects, which are regarded as benchmarks for their promotion and subsequent transfers, while the long-term benefits and sustainability of projects are neglected or even sacrificed.

Besides this term-based personnel system, there is a lack of long-term strategies from the Chinese government or the SOEs to exert any positive social impact through these infrastructure projects. This is also why the Chinese SOEs are usually observed as being segregated from the African cities and places where they operate. The capacity of Chinese contractors’ communication with locals is lacking partly due to the labour management system in Africa. Most of the SOE employees in Africa are manual workers. In 2011, China sent 452,000 workers abroad, of which 243,000 were engaged in construction work, accounting for 53.8% of the total.¹³ This has created some misunderstanding, distrust and even antagonism from the host countries. To be fair, on most construction sites in Africa, the majority of the labour force turns out to be local. But since infrastructure construction is labour-intensive and there is a chronic shortage of skilled labour in the local market, it is not surprising that a large number of construction workers are sent from China. According to a recent study by Ethics Institute of South Africa, 55% of the interviewees had the impression that Chinese companies in Africa were hiring Chinese employees only. This is neither true nor practical. As reported by China Daily in 2011, at China Roads and Bridges Corporation (CRBC), the ratio of Chinese to local employees was around 1 to 15, with our caveat that this may not be representative of most China-built infrastructure projects.

The Chinese government has a policy of encouraging all SOEs to “Go Out” to Africa. While this policy may or may not be politically motivated, Chinese SOEs face serious challenges in following this policy, let alone being able to fulfill any political agenda behind the policy. The entry of many SOEs into Africa’s infrastructure sector creates severe competition among themselves, often leading to price wars and underhanded or shady practices. As revealed by a senate debate in Kenya, during a bid for C13 highway construction, of the ten companies who submitted their bids, five were from China. Not surprisingly, the lowest price offer came from one of the five Chinese companies, Jiangxi International Ltd, which was a well-established enterprise in East Africa and also building a few important projects in Nairobi. To be more specific, while the officially estimated cost for the project was 5.2 billion Kenyan shilling (ca. $64 million), the bids from the Chinese competitors were 3.8 by Jiangxi International, 4.5 by China Wu Yi, 4.5 by China Railway No. 5 Engineering Group, 4.8 by Shengli Engineering 4.8 and 5.0 by Sino Hydro. In comparison, a local construction firm with equivalent size and experience quoted 5.2 billion and Hayer Bishan Singh & Sons, an Indian company, offered 6.0.¹⁵ This is not rare in Africa. In a recent bid for an infrastructure project in Angola, there were 13 Chinese companies out of 21 bidders.

Generally speaking, there is lack of a strategic plan for many Chinese contractors to act as truly market actors in the distant and unfamiliar African market. While the increasingly competitive and saturated domestic infrastructure market in China pushes more SOE builders to go to Africa, many of them failed to develop a long-term strategy to take advantage of the market potential in Africa.

The China-Africa Triangle

Although Chinese SOEs have not developed a very effective long-term strategy for Africa’s infrastructure market, the Chinese government found it critical to grow and diversify financing in Africa. Its main financing channels include grants, zero or low interest loans, and preferential export credits.¹⁶ Among them, the concessional loans and preferential export credits are the two main tools used by China EximBank, and called “the Two Preferential Loan Programs” (Liangyou). Figure 6 (see figure 6 below) captures these practices through a triangular structure of the agencies from the Chinese and African sides and their basic procedural and operative interrelations.

Compared to a more detailed scheme developed by Deborah Brautigam,¹⁷ our diagram left out several procedural steps associated with government regulations. More importantly, the diagram shows that the three actors have independent interests and functions in implementing infrastructure projects, and that each has the ability to initiate a project and its financial flow between the three parties. This way of visualising a triangular structure aims to dispel the illusion that the Chinese government agencies and policy banks (MOFCOM and the EximBank) always team up with Chinese SOEs in dealing with their counterpart – the African governments and their agencies.

While the bilateral agreements between the Chinese and African governments are the foundation for financing any project, they do not directly lead to roads and bridges being built. In practice, African agencies can and may reach out to a Chinese company when they are aware of the connection between the company and the EximBank or MOFCOM that could ease the access to the Two Preferential Loan Programs. On the other hand, Chinese SOEs, when bidding for projects in Africa, can use the government financing support to enhance their competitiveness against non-Chinese bidders.

One important drawback built into this framework is a lack of third party evaluation and supervision of the financial flow between the three parties. In financing from sources such as the World Bank or JICA (Japanese International Cooperation Agency), a private or independent consultant team would be hired to assess and monitor the projects’ financial flow. In the China-African Triangle, the feasibility study usually is conducted by the SOE that has won and will build the project, supported by Chinese diplomatic officers in the embassies, evaluated by permanent employees of the Bank,¹⁸ which usually leads to reporting that discounts risks.

Another issue with this way of financing and building infrastructure is the unfair and irrational concentration of risks. Once a loan is initiated, the SOE building the project receives regular payments directly from the EximBank, which lowers the risk of no profit for the contractor. It also shifts the risk to be shared between the African Government and the EximBank. Considering that most of the infrastructure loans from the EximBank offer a grace period of 5-10 years, the burden for a borrowing African government is significantly reduced. Since the electoral system in most democratic countries in Africa is a 3-4 year term, it is fair to say that the government in power would rather seize the financial resource for now than being concerned about who will pay back the principle plus interest down the road. As a result, the risks for potentially unpaid or defaulted loans end up in the hands of the EximBank. This explains why MOFCOM had to limit the budget in funding Africa’s infrastructure to around 3% of the bank’s profile,¹⁹ which might also account for the drop of total investment from China to African infrastructure in 2014 (see Figure 3).

The discussion above points to the fundamental loophole of the EximBank’s financing model for African infrastructure: it’s not sustainable. The repayment of the loans largely depends on external elements, or lies in the hands of the local agencies. Even if the Chinese government has any political ambition with the loan as the vehicle for projecting soft power, the other two players in the triangle are much more short-termed and opportunistic, which forestalls or limits the adoption of a strategic and sustainable approach to infrastructure provision. As long as this triangular system dominates the financing from the Chinese government for Africa’s infrastructure, the benefits from the projects for all parties will be limited overall and unevenly distributed.

The Japanese model

When it comes to inter-governmental financial support for African infrastructure, or in terms of the ODA (Official Development Assistance) methodology, the Japanese model can be used as a comparison. China used Japan’s aid system as a model in developing its own foreign aid policies in the 1970s.²⁰ But the Japanese model for financing African infrastructure today (see Figure 7 below) stands as an alternative to the Chinese approach.

The JBIC, the equivalent of the EximBank, does not enforce any ODA loans by itself. Instead, the semi-government agency JICA (Japanese International Cooperation Agency), authorised by JBIC and the central government, is in charge of financing projects in Africa. By establishing a Special Purpose Company, often times taking the form of a joint venture with a local partner, JICA would implement strategic planning at the project level. As an effort to strengthen public-private partnerships, JICA would initiate a call for bids from private partners in Japan to carry out a feasibility study. The winner will then follow the project implementation as an important stakeholder.

The hierarchical structure reflects a strong enforcement of the Japanese government decisions. In addition, if we place both the Chinese and the Japanese models into the framework shown in Figure 5, the Japanese entities would be located on the left side of the diagram and maintain a long-term interest in a given project, while Chinese SOEs would remain on the right hand side in pursuit of short-term profits.

Despite contributing a much smaller amount of investment to Africa’s infrastructure development than China, Japan “has adeptly walked the fine line between assistance and interference, … staffed by technical experts or the Japanese Overseas Cooperation Volunteers, which is loosely analogous to the US Peace Corps. Practicing the softest of soft power, Japan became one of the largest but least visible donors to Africa.”²¹ In Kenya alone, the bypasses in Nairobi and a highway in Kisumu were designed and funded by JICA. JICA also sent two expats to Nairobi’s city council to carry out long-term research and the metropolitan plan of Nairobi, the most recent and potentially the first implemented urban plan after the 1948 British version for Nairobi.

Who Benefits and How?

There has been a rapid, sometimes explosive, expansion of Chinese contractors into the African building market. It may look like a large-scale aggressive strategy of the Chinese government to exert political influence in Africa. However, our analysis suggests that Chinese SOEs are mainly profit-driven in pursuing short-term economic goals, which tends to produce a wide-ranging but shallow impact. While China’s policy of encouraging its companies to ‘go global’ has encouraged some SOEs to enter Africa’s infrastructure sector, many have gone in to make quick money using their experience and expertise in building low-cost standard infrastructure and taking advantage of the relatively easy access to financing from international, African, and Chinese lenders. Smaller than other sources of financing and its building role, China’s financing through the EximBank and MOFCOM has allowed SOEs to take some risks and reap decent profits. At the same time, while unwilling to provide more financing fearing the risk of instability in some African political regimes, China’s state lenders have assumed some long-term risks of certain African governments failing to pay back the low-interest loans. In these ways, the Chinese state has blended and blurred with the increasingly market-oriented SOEs.

If China’s own development is any guide, physical infrastructure can play an important role in Africa’s economic development. However, it takes a long time to return on investment in transport infrastructure as the lagging demand from faster economic growth catches up to the supply of newly built roads and railways. In a shorter time horizon, African local residents can benefit from the municipal infrastructure projects such as stadiums, schools, hospitals and light rails that China has also built. These immediate benefits for local users however will not last for the long haul if the municipal facilities are not properly operated and maintained. For China, just building them in Africa is not good enough. Whether it is a sign that China has moved beyond just building in Africa, China has agreed to train over 100 operators for the light rail system it has built in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

This encouraging example aside, much of China’s involvement in African infrastructure is limited to physical construction. In most projects built by Chinese SOEs, there are limited contributions to local capacity building and technology transfer that will make the projects truly sustainable. Therefore, there may be a justifiable criticism that while China has built massive infrastructure across Africa, the lack of a long-term orientation and sustainable strategy has limited mutual benefits for both the Chinese builders and African agencies and people. This concern gets further magnified when some China-built infrastructure projects have displaced local poor and incurred environmental contamination and health hazards such as dumping excess oil in ditches and having local workers remove it without protection.²²

In building Africa’s infrastructure, is China signaling that its own development model based on infrastructure-induced industrialisation, which has brought ‘miraculous’ economic growth, could work or be replicated in Africa? If you built it in China, they or the investors did come, in very large numbers. But building infrastructure in Africa faces one fundamentally different constraint. In China, the public ownership of urban land and the aggressive conversion of rural land from communal to public ownership, in conjunction with a powerful developmentally-oriented state, has allowed the government to quickly build massive industrial (factory zones) and transport (roads and railways) infrastructure on huge swathes of land within, around, and between municipal boundaries. In Africa where land ownership is mostly privatised, government is generally weak and economic development is primarily based on an extensive informal sector, it is an entirely different proposition and process to secure large and connected lands on which to build infrastructure. As a result, before we can really assess if and how the constructed infrastructure in Africa will lead to faster economic growth through more industrialisation, we need to figure out if China is building Africa in a way that can be financially stable, socially responsible, environmentally sound, operationally sustainable and bring other equitable benefits for both sides.

*Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Eastern Sociological Society annual meeting in Boston, March 17-21, 2016; at the “Governing the Future City” workshop at University College London, London, April 21-23, 2016; and at the Center for Urban and Global Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, April 26, 2016. Helpful comments from these audiences were acknowledged, but we are responsible for any errors in facts and interpretations that might be in this article. We thank the Henry Luce Foundation for an institutional grant that has brought Zhengli Huang to Trinity College as a visiting scholar and facilitated the completion of this article.

*About the authors:
Zhengli Huang is an architect and urbanist. She studied Architecture and Urban Design in Shanghai, Vienna and Berlin. Since 2010 she has been a senior researcher and editor in Urban China Magazine, and served as Editor-in-Chief for the Special issue of “Urban China 63: Chinese Urbanism in Africa.” Her PhD research focuses on the informal settlements and their building system. In 2014 she worked as project manager in a school-building project in Mathare Valley, one of the largest informal settlements in Nairobi.

Xiangming Chen is the Dean and Director of the Center for Urban and Global Studies and Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Global Urban Studies and Sociology at Trinity College, Connecticut, a distinguished guest professor at Fudan University, Shanghai and an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. He has published extensively on urbanisation and globalisation with a focus on China and Asia. He is also a Senior Contributor for the “China and the World” series at The European Financial Review.

Source:
This article was first published at The European Financial Review.

References:
1. Ben Lampert and Giles Mohan, “Making Space for African Agency in China-Africa Engagements.” In Gadzala, Aleksandra W., ed. Africa and China: How Africans and Their Governments Are Shaping Relations with China. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015.
2. Data from Engineering New-Record (ENR), New York.
3. Data from the annual reports of ENR for 2003-2015.
4. This ENR data is different from the official report by MOFCOM, in which Africa stayed as the second largest market until 2011, although not far behind first-place Asia.
5. Data from Engineering New-Record (ENR), New York.
6. Data collected from annual reports of Infrastructure Consortium in Africa (ICA).
7. Ibid.
8. Accessed from www.icafrica.org, on 16 February, 2016.
9. “Structured Finance – Conditions for Infrastructure Project Bonds in African Markets,” African Development Bank Group; accessed March 16, 2016; http://www.afdb.org/en/documents, accessed on 9 March, 2016.
10. Ibid.
11. Vivien Foster, William Butterfield, Chuan Chen and Nataliya Pushak. Building Bridges: China’s Growing Role as Infrastructure Financier for Sub-Saharan Africa. World Bank Publications.
12. Jiangyu Wang, “The Political Logic of Corporate Governance in China’s State-Owned Enterprises.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 1 December, 2014.
13. Xiaohu He, “A Brief Introduction to China’s Foreign Contracting Works and Labor Force Cooperation.” China Survey and Design (3), 2012, pp. 38-39.
14. Peter Wonacot, “China Inc. Moves Factory Floor to Africa.” The Wall Street Journal, 14 May, 2014. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304788404579519631654112594, accessed on 15 March, 2016.
15. Parliament of Kenya, 7 August, 2014. www.parliament.go.ke/the-senate, accessed on 15 March, 2016.
16. Deborah Brautigam, “Chinese Development Aid in Africa.” In: Song, Ligang, ed. Rising China: Global Challenges and Opportunities. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2011.
17. Deborah Brautigam. The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
18. Informational resources can be found on the EximBank and MOFCOM websites when introducing the concessional loans.
19. Deborah Brautigam. The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
20. Deborah Brautigam, “Chinese Development Aid in Africa.” In: Song, Ligang, ed. Rising China: Global Challenges and Opportunities. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2011
21. http://www.newsweek.com/japan-takes-china-far-home-ethiopia-238362, accessed on 19 February, 2016
22. Xiangming Chen and Garth A. Myers, “China and Africa: The Crucial Urban Connection.” The European Financial Review (December-January), 2013-14, pp. 51-55.

The atmosphere at the special session of the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS) on June 23 to hear Secretary General Luis Almagro’s report on the situation in Venezuela was tense, with both pro-Chavista and pro-opposition demonstrators outside the building and a formidable media presence inside. The President of the Venezuelan National Assembly, opposition leader Henry Ramos Allup, was watching the proceedings on a monitor elsewhere in the building while the Venezuelan mission and its allies inside the Simon Bolivar Room were indignant that the meeting was even taking place. There was a great deal at stake for the future of the OAS as well for Venezuela.

After the call to order, Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Delcy Rodríguez proposed that the agenda be rejected, questioning its legality with regard to the norms of the OAS. Rodríguez argued that the agenda constituted a form of golpismo against the government of Venezuela within the OAS itself because it inherently fails to recognize the legitimacy of the democratically elected government of Venezuela. Instead, Almagro’s agenda substitutes the opposition coalition (United Democratic Roundtable – MUD), which has a majority in the Venezuelan National Assembly, as if it were the legitimate agent for an appeal to the Inter-American Democratic Charter. The agenda thereby uses the OAS as a platform to indict, try, and judge the government of Venezuela. By its attempt to delegitimize the Maduro administration, the agenda also promotes golpismo inside Venezuela. With regard to the report itself, Rodríguez made the case later in the session that it lacked validity because it failed to make use of independent, impartial experts. The OAS was about to set a dangerous precedent, argued Rodríguez , for similar outrages to be perpetrated in the future.

After a vote of 20 for approving the agenda, 12 against, and two abstentions, Almagro was able to proceed with reading a summary of the 132 page report aimed at justifying his claim that there has been, per article 20 of the Charter, “an unconstitutional alteration of the constitutional regime that seriously impairs the democratic order” in Venezuela. This allegation addresses one of the requirements for applying the Charter to a member state. Application of the Charter could ultimately lead to the temporary suspension of a member state from the OAS (article 21). So this vote was serous business. Voting yes were: Uruguay, Surinam, Perú, Paraguay, Panamá, México, Jamaica, Honduras, Guyana, Guatemala, US, Costa Rica, Colombia, Chile, Canada, Brazil, Belize, Barbados, Bahamas, and Argentina. Although this particular vote was not about applying the Democratic Charter but for approval of the session’s agenda, it nevertheless altered the configuration of political forces for both the Venezuelan opposition (MUD) and the administration of President Nicolas Maduro.

The special session of the Permanent Council of the OAS of June 23 produced an ambiguous outcome. On the one hand, the opposition (MUD) was able to make its case to the international media by means of press conferences outside the Simon Bolivar Room and the reading of a summary of the report by Almagro inside the Room. The opposition has also managed, through their man in the OAS, to keep the Charter on the table. The fact that 20 members voted to allow the agenda to proceed was itself a momentous political act, keeping hope alive for the opposition that enough of these votes will evolve into full support for applying the Charter further down the road.

On the other hand, since there was no significant show of support or declaration by the Permanent Council in favor of applying the Charter, nor a formal endorsement of the remedies recommended by the Secretary General, nor an announcement of a future meeting to address this issue, the government comes away with another window of opportunity to address the economic crisis, resist the pre-conditions set by the opposition for talks, and to fortify its position among the majority of member states.

Given these considerations, Maduro is unlikely to get full cooperation from the MUD with regard to dealing with the economic crisis and there is now little prospect that the MUD will participate in a Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) sponsored dialog without some serious prodding from its international allies. So long as the MUD perceives that the Charter is on the table, it probably will view this as leverage and continue its push for a recall referendum to take place this year rather than next year. This, as well as other demands would then remain as conditions for entering into direct talks with the Maduro administration. Why sit down with Maduro when the full weight of the OAS and the threat of U.S. intervention (let us recall that Obama’s Executive Order is still in force) might be brought to bear against him.

Despite these ambiguous features of the session, there was some continuity in the last three meetings of the OAS with regard to mediation. Notwithstanding some skepticism over the still “exploratory” status of the UNASUR effort (which is accompanied by three former presidents), almost all ministers of the Council expressed support for UNASUR sponsored mediation between the government and the opposition. This is consistent with the universal applause given to former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero who addressed the Council on June 21 and with the declaration issued earlier, on June 1, by the Council in support of UNASUR’s work on behalf of dialogue.

While the mood at the special session was tense, there was no grand finale. There was concern over the situation in Venezuela voiced by a number of ministers, but these generally were not calls for adversarial intervention against the government. A more adversarial critique came from the representative of Paraguay, outdone only by the US representative who supported the session’s agenda and expressed concern about human rights and democracy in Venezuela. There was also some intense criticism by a number of member states of the role being played by Almagro. For example, due to Almagro’s blatant partisanship on the side of the opposition of a member state (Venezuela), Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela called for Almagro’s resignation, arguing that he had undermined his role as Secretary General of the organization.

The OAS position on Almagro’s interventionism on behalf of the Venezuelan opposition is evolving not only in relation to the situation in Venezuela, but also in relation to the conservative wave in parts of South America (Brazil and Argentina). No doubt the member states are also cognizant of the continent wide Bolivarian movement that insists on regional sovereignty and abhors imperial intervention.  Moreover, historic memory certainly plays a role in the deliberations of the Council. Indeed, the ugly past of the OAS still haunts the Simon Bolivar Room; it was only little over a week ago that the 46th Ordinary Assembly of the Organization of OAS met in Santo Domingo and issued an apology for the U.S. led invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965.

It is too early to see exactly where all of the 20 states that voted in favor of giving Almagro a hearing stand on inviting imperial intervention. Some of the 20 ministers explicitly stated during the session that they were opposed to applying the Charter (including Surinam and the Bahamas), even though they voted in favor of the session’s agenda. This means Almagro still may not have a simple majority at this time to activate the Charter, let alone a two thirds majority, should he seek this down the road, for a vote for suspension. Perhaps that is why he did not push yet for a vote.

This latest chapter of OAS history is far from over. But we can see the outlines of the coming struggle. The ongoing effort by Almagro, on behalf of Washington and the Venezuelan opposition to apply the Inter-American Democratic Charter is arguably inconsistent with supporting the pursuit of UNASUR mediated talks, because keeping the Charter on the table provides a disincentive for the opposition to participate in a dialogue with the Maduro administration. Any further delay by the opposition in coming to the mediation table, however, could have a political cost for the MUD. The reason for this is that the proposed talks have the support of the majority of Venezuelans. According to a recent Hinterlaces poll, 74% of Venezuelans consulted agree that it is better for Venezuela if there is a dialogue between the government and the opposition to reach an agreement to resolve the economic problems of the country while 25% were in disagreement.

Time also is of the essence for the government. Unless there is urgent improvement in overcoming the shortages of basic goods and improving public security, the government will face further erosion in its traditional base of support, which in turn would add to the leverage of the opposition in their efforts to lobby the OAS to have yet another round of “discussion” on the situation in Venezuela.

In the end, the fundamental argument over the Charter question is whether its application in the present case is legal. (Or is legality itself merely a function of hegemonic political interests?) The articles constituting the content of the Charter (especially 20 and 21) arguably do not apply to Venezuela because the Charter can presumably be legally applied only when there is “an unconstitutional alteration of the constitutional regime that seriously impairs the democratic order.”  While there is intense conflict between the branches of government in Venezuela, the OAS does not appear convinced, at least not yet, that this rises to the level of a rupture in the constitutional order. Nevertheless, by conducting Thursday’s session, the OAS, thanks to Almagro and the 20 who voted for the agenda, has inserted itself into the internal affairs of the government of Venezuela, forcing all member states to take sides, including the ones which abstained.

Scientists say good bacteria could be the key to keeping coral healthy, able to withstand the impacts of global warming and to secure the long-term survival of reefs worldwide.

“Healthy corals interact with complex communities of beneficial microbes or ‘good bacteria’,” said Dr. Tracy Ainsworth from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University who led the study. “It is very likely that these microorganisms play a pivotal role in the capacity of coral to recover from bouts of bleaching caused by rising temperatures.”

“Facilitating coral survival and promoting coral recovery are growing areas of research for coral reef scientists,” said co-author Dr. Ruth Gates from Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology, University of Hawai’i. “To do this we need to explore and understand the bacteria that help keep corals and coral reefs healthy.”

Dr. Ainsworth and Dr. Gates have identified new directions for research in understanding coral survival in rapidly changing reef environments.

“We know that lasting changes to the community of beneficial bacteria affects important aspects of the function of host organisms such as humans or corals, including their ability to withstand further stress,” said Dr. Ainsworth.

“Corals rely on good bacteria but crucially we don’t yet understand these microbes well enough to know how they influence coral survival.”

Their latest research has been published in the journal Science, and gives an overview of the current understanding of bacterial communities on corals. It highlights the vital importance of good bacteria to coral health.

The scientists discuss how corals, and coral reefs that survive large-scale changes in the environment over the coming decades, are likely to be very different from those of today.

They say the interaction between corals and good bacteria is crucial to long-term survival.

Their work comes from recent advances in understanding the complexity of the coral’s genetic make-up and the unique bacterial communities that corals maintain.

“Preventing physical contact with corals and maintaining high water quality on reefs during stress events will reduce stress loads on corals and creates the best case scenario for survival and recovery,” said Dr. Gates.

Health warnings about complications related to Zika virus significantly increased demand for abortions in Latin American countries, according to a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

On November 17, 2015, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) issued an alert about the Zika virus in Latin America. Although the virus, spread by mosquitos, causes only mild symptoms, it can have serious complications for unborn children, ranging from eye and hearing defects through to microcephaly (abnormally small heads) and other severe fetal brain defects. Following the PAHO alert, several countries issued health advisory warnings, including urging women to avoid pregnancy.

The researchers found that in almost all of the countries that had issued health warnings about Zika and had legal restrictions on abortions, the number of requests for abortion through Women on Web (an organization that provides medical abortion outside the formal healthcare settings) rose significantly – effectively doubling in Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela, and increasing by over a third in most of the other countries. In countries that had issued no health warnings, there was no statistically-significant increase.

Assistant Professor Abigail Aiken from the University of Texas at Austin, said, “Accurate data on the choices pregnant women make in Latin America is hard to obtain. If anything, our approach may underestimate the impact of health warning on requests for abortion, as many women may have used an unsafe method or visited local underground providers.”

Dr Catherine Aiken from the Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology at the University of Cambridge added, “The World Health Organization predicts as many as four million Zika cases across the Americas over the next year, and the virus will inevitably spread to other countries. It isn’t enough for health officials just to warn women about the risks associated Zika – they must also make efforts to ensure that women are offered safe, legal, and accessible reproductive choices.”

Research teams on both sides of the Atlantic have shown that precise modeling of the universe and its contents will change the detailed understanding of the evolution of the universe and the growth of structure in it.

One hundred years after Einstein introduced general relativity, it remains the best theory of gravity, the researchers say, consistently passing high-precision tests in the solar system and successfully predicting new phenomena such as gravitational waves, which were recently discovered by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

The equations of general relativity, unfortunately, are notoriously difficult to solve. For the past century, physicists have used a variety of assumptions and simplifications in order to apply Einstein’s theory to the universe.

On Earth, that’s something like averaging the music made by a symphony. The audience would hear a single average note, keeping the overall beat, growing generally louder and softer rather than the individual notes and rhythms of each of the orchestra’s instruments.

Wanting details and their effects, U.S. and European teams each wrote computer codes that will eventually lead to the most accurate possible models of the universe and provide new insights into gravity and its effects.

While simulations of the universe and the structures within it have been the subject of scientific discovery for decades, these codes have made some simplifications or assumptions. These two codes are the first to use Einstein’s complete theory of general relativity to account for the effects of the clumping of matter in some regions and the dearth of matter in others.

Both groups of physicists were trying to answer the question of whether small-scale structures in the universe produce effects on larger distance scales. Both confirmed that’s the case, though neither has found qualitative changes in the expansion of the universe as some scientists have predicted.

“Both we and the other group examine the universe using the full theory of general relativity, and have therefore been able to create more accurate models of physical processes than have been done before,” said James Mertens, a physics PhD student at Case Western Reserve University who took the lead in developing and implementing the numerical techniques for the U.S. team.

Mertens worked with John T. Giblin Jr., the Harvey F. Lodish Development Professor of Natural Science at Kenyon College and an adjunct associate professor of physics at Case Western Reserve; and Glenn Starkman, professor of physics and director of the Institute for the Science of Origins at Case Western Reserve. They submitted two manuscripts describing their work to the arXiv preprint website on Nov. 3, 2015.

Less than two weeks later, Marco Bruni, reader in cosmology and gravitation at the University of Portsmouth, in England, and Eloisa Bentivegna, Senior Researcher and Rita Levi Montalcini Fellow at the University of Catania, Italy, submitted a similar study.

Letters by the two groups appear back-to-back in the June 24th issue of Physical Review Letters, and the U.S. group has a second paper giving more of the details in the issue of The Physical Review Part D to be published on the same day. The work will be highlighted as Editors’ Suggestion by Physical Review Letters and Physical Review D and in a Synopsis on the American Physical Society Physics website.

The researchers say computers employing the full power of general relativity are the key to producing more accurate results and perhaps new or deeper understanding.

“No one has modeled the full complexity of the problem before,” Starkman said. “These papers are an important step forward, using the full machinery of general relativity to model the universe, without unwarranted assumptions of symmetry or smoothness. The universe doesn’t make these assumptions, neither should we.”

Both groups independently created software to solve the Einstein Field Equations, which describe the complicated interrelationships between the contents of the universe and the curvature of space and time, at billions of places and times over the history of the universe.

Comparing the outcomes of these numerical simulations of the correct nonlinear dynamics to the outcomes of traditional simplified linear models, the researchers found that approximations break down.

“By assuming less, we’re seeing something new,” Giblin said.

Bentivegna said that their preliminary applications of numerical relativity have shown how and by how much approximations miss the correct answers. More importantly, she said, “This will allow us to comprehend a larger class of observational effects that are likely to emerge as we do precision cosmology.”

“There are indeed several aspects of large-scale structure formation (and their consequences on, for example, the cosmic microwave background) which call for a fully general relativistic approach,” said Sabino Matarrese, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Padua, who was not involved in the studies.

This approach will also provide accuracy and insight to such things as gravitational lensing maps and studying the cross-correlation among different cosmological datasets, he added.

The European team found that perturbations reached a “turnaround point” and collapsed much earlier than predicted by approximate models. Comparing their model to the commonly assumed homogeneous expansion of the universe, local deviations in an underdensity (a region with less than the average amount of matter) reached nearly 30 percent.

The U.S. team found that inhomogeneous matter generates local differences in the expansion rate of an evolving universe, deviating from the behavior of a widely used approximation to the behavior of space and time, called the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric.

Stuart L. Shapiro, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is among the acknowledged leaders of solving Einstein’s equations on the computer. “These works are important, not only for the new results that they report, but also for being forerunners in the application of numerical relativity to long-standing problems in cosmology,” said Shapiro, who was not involved in the studies.

No longer restricted by the assumptions, researchers must abandon some traditional approaches, he continued, “and these papers begin to show us the way.”

Bruni said galaxy surveys coming in the next decade will provide new high-precision measurements of cosmological parameters and that theoretical predictions must be equally precise and accurate.

“Numerical relativity simulations apply general relativity in full and aim precisely at this high level of accuracy,” he said. “In the future they should become the new standard, or at least the benchmark for any work that makes simplifying assumptions.”

Both teams are continuing to explore aspects of the universe using numerical relativity and enhancing their codes.

Bentivegna and Bruni used the Einstein Toolkit, which is open-source, to develop theirs. The U.S. team created CosmoGRaPH and will soon make the software open-source. Both codes will be available online for other researchers to use and improve.

Facebook claims that anti-Macedonian hate speech “does not violate their Community Standards”. What kind of community with no standards does Facebook think we live in? This sounds a lot like the “freedom of speech” excuse for doing nothing about lesser-known examples of racism. Well, freedom of speech (and related excuses) do not include hate. The term “freedom of speech” should not be used in order to avoid being placed “in the middle” of a conflict. Saying that an ethnic group doesn’t exist and supporting various governments’ policies aimed at eradicating this ethnic group does not constitute “conflict”. It is hate speech. Facebook chooses to do nothing about it.

Macedonians in Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and other Balkan countries face discrimination every day and are struggling to achieve their human rights. Even the name of the Republic of Macedonia is under attack. Macedonian Human Rights Movement International advocates for oppressed Macedonians and demands an end to this discrimination. Visiting our Facebook page, one should not have to see anti-Macedonian messages and relive the hate that these people face every day.

MHRMI has asked Facebook to allow the removal of these messages and we have reported the people who posted them for violations, but to no avail. We’ve complained. Facebook is unmoved. Do we need to explain exactly how this is hate or compare it to more well-known examples of racism and xenophobia? No. That is not fair to Macedonians or the other ethnic groups that endure racism. Hate is hate. Facebook, change your policy now and issue an apology.

Macedonians, and other oppressed ethnic groups, make your voices heard. Share this message and contact Facebook. Demand change. www.facebook.com/mhrmi

The approval by the Duma of the so-called Yarova-Ozerov package of legislation will among other things drive many followers even of Russia’s “traditional” religions into the underground, leading them to ignore the official leaders of these faiths and opening the way to their radicalization, thus restoring the pattern of the late Soviet period.

And by so doing, Russia’s latest “anti-terrorist” effort is likely to lead to more terrorism rather than less, although some commentators are hoping that the provisions of this draconian new law will be mitigated in the usual Russian way by the impossibility of enforcing it or the unwillingness of officials to do so.

The Yarovaya-Ozerov packet – the full text of the final version of which is available at asozd2.duma.gov.ru/main.nsf/%28Spravka%29?OpenAgent&RN=1039101-6 – attracted an extraordinary amount of attention mainly because of its provisions governing the Internet and NGOs with foreign funding.

But the provisions of the measure concerning religious organizations and especially the new limits on missionary activity may have the greatest consequence. At least, that conclusion is suggested by coverage in Kazan’s “Business-Gazeta” (business-gazeta.ru/article/314859) and in the SOVA Center (sova-center.ru/religion/news/authorities/legal-regulation/2016/06/d34888/).

“Business-News” points out that the new law defines missionary activity as “the dissemination of beliefs and religious convictions outside of cult buildings and structures or other places and objects specially intended for divine services, religious respect [such as] cemeteries and crematoria … of through the media and the Internet.”

And the law specifies that the only citizens who are permitted to engage in such activity are those who have been specifically authorized to do so by the leaders of their communities which in turn must be communities registered with the government. Anyone else is subject to fines and, if they are foreigners, to fines and then expulsion from Russia.

Albir Krganov, the mufti of Moscow, the Central Region of Russia and Chuvashia, told the outlet that he did not know how the law could possibly be enforced given that Muslim leaders routinely visit the homes of believers without specific authorization – although he acknowledged there might be a point to imposing such limits on unregistered groups.

The mufti noted that “Protestants had spoken out sharply against this law because it is desirable that such important initiatives be discussed with religious organizations.” (On that, see ria.ru/religion/20160623/1449861755.html.) The Duma has a special forum for that, but, the deputies did not consult with any religious group. “This was an unjustified step,” Krganov said.

Moreover, the provisions of the law and the failure of the deputies two consult will, he suggested, “lead to the radicalization of Islamic society in the country,” with many “simply going underground and no longer listening to official religious workers.” That in turn will lead to “a split within the Islamic community,” something no one can possibly want.

In its evaluation of the final version of the law, the religious affairs experts at SOVA said that there had been some “small changes” in the language which marginally improved things but that “the repressive character of the amendments had been preserved.” Indeed, in one sense, although SOVA does not mention this, they may have been made worse.

That is because while the final version restricted the definition of missionary activity, it did so in a way that will reinforce the notion of “ethnic” believers, the idea that members of some nationalities are historically Orthodox and others are historically Muslim or Buddhist or something else and one that Patriarch Kirill has frequently supported.

The final version of the law limits restrictions on missionary activity to activities intended to spread a faith beyond those “who are not participants (members or followers) of a given religious union.” If that is interpreted as the Moscow Patriarchate is likely to, it will mean the Orthodox Church can go after ethnic Russians but that no other church will be allowed to.

By Hector Perla*

The Panama Papers aren’t just about Panama. They’re relevant for us, the average Joe and Joanne in the United States, because they offer a tantalizing look into the globalized financial system that has emerged over the past 45 years. The cache of over 11 million documents, which were leaked from the Panama City office of corporate law firm Mossack Fonseca, provide penetrating insight into the rules that govern the casino capitalism that systematically stacks the odds in favor of the high rollers at the expense of everyday people who are being suckered at the poker table of the daily grind and slot machine of hard work. The Panama Papers divulge not only the names of some of the wealthiest politicians, athletes, actors, and businesspeople in the world who have been taking advantage of offshore loopholes, but more importantly expose a massive business network of global tax evasion. Yet in spite of these revelations, relatively few heads have rolled as a result of their disclosure; after the resignation of the Prime Minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, few other of the implicated public figures have faced serious sanction.

There are several lessons that we should take from the Panama Papers scandal, many of which seemingly have not been paid enough serious attention by the mainstream press in Europe and North America. By looking more deeply into these issues, I hope to examine some of the political and also moral implications that have so far largely evaded serious analysis.

First, the disclosure of Panama Papers has provided perhaps the most conclusive evidence yet to date for what has long been obvious to the more discerning followers of international tax policy: that a completely different set of rules currently exists for the wealthy. Whereas the average citizen must declare income and pay up to the IRS on tax day, it is now clearer than ever that the rich are allowed to hide incredible fortunes in offshore shell companies and foreign tax havens. Unfortunately for those of us who want to see greater transparency and more progressive taxation policies emerge throughout the world, such behavior is completely legal in most cases. In fact, the only cases in which taking advantage of these tax loopholes becomes illegal is if there is a clear conflict of interest, which incidentally is what toppled Gunnlaugsson, or in cases of tax evasion (deliberate hiding assets) or money laundering. But in just about all other scenarios, stashing money in these tax shelters allows the most privileged and powerful members of society to avoid paying their fair share of taxes without actually breaking any domestic or international law. Meanwhile, the rest of us are supposed to abide by a different set of rules that requires us to pay our taxes every April 15 without the benefit of tax relief.

Second, although few Americans have been directly named as actors in the scandal so far, this could paradoxically be even more disturbing for us as a nation since it suggests that the United States itself has become a tax haven for billionaires. As a matter of fact, last year multiple international organizations rated the United States as one of the world’s biggest tax havens.[1] Consequently, the rich hardly even need offshore accounts any more. Instead, many simply create anonymous shell companies in states like Delaware and Nevada, which are known for “loose regulations and low taxes, [which make] them attractive for people to hide their activities and assets behind a corporate façade.”[2] The gross economic inequality for which this has given rise has been compounded by regressive tax reforms that have been instituted by successive governments. As the United States’ 99% recently paid their taxes, the 1% are cashing in on the radical redistribution of wealth (from the bottom and middle to the top) that all U.S. administrations going back to at least the Reagan administration have presided over. Today, as a result of these legal and public policy changes the wealthiest Americans pay among the lowest taxes in the developed world.[3]

Third, the Panama Papers have both domestic and foreign policy implications for the upcoming U.S. presidential election. In domestic affairs, only one of the candidates running in the primaries of our two major political parties, Bernie Sanders, staked his campaign on reforming the unfair and unjust taxation system that over burdens working families while letting billionaires like Donald Trump and Wall Street executives take advantage of lucrative tax shelters. On the other hand, at least one high-dollar Clinton donor, a man also implicated in the Iran Contra Scandal, has been named in the Panama Papers.[4] To put it as generously as one possibly can, this should give us serious pause about Hillary Clinton’s ability, willingness, and commitment to reform the unfair tax structures of which many of her wealthy donors are direct beneficiaries. It should also remind us of the urgency of campaign finance reform, which is desperately needed to ensure our democracy’s grounding in the principle of one person, one vote.

Fourth, we should turn our attention to the manner in which so-called free trade agreements (FTAs) interact with the system of global tax avoidance. There is increasing evidence that FTAs like NAFTA and CAFTA have made monitoring, regulating, and closing down tax shelters and loopholes more difficult. It’s no wonder that public outcry against looming agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is growing and mobilizing voters in the upcoming election cycle. But even more relevant for understanding the Panama Papers is the rarely mentioned U.S.-Panama Free Trade Deal, an FTA that passed through Congress via the secretive and controversial “fast track” procedure. During debate on the Senate floor about whether to pass the agreement, Sanders offered an impassioned appeal explaining why he would never support such a deal. Citing research from Citizens for Tax Justice, he noted that tax havens have at least one of three characteristics: no or low income tax rates, bank secrecy laws, and a history of non-cooperation in exchanging tax information with other countries.[5] Panama, he noted, has all three of those and is among the worst offenders worldwide. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, was, during her time as Secretary of State, a vocal advocate of not only the free trade deal with Panama, but also of similar treaties with Colombia and South Korea.[6] Looking back at this context, Sanders’ critique now sounds remarkably prescient, while Clinton appears to have long-ago sided with the global elite. Their diverging stances offer another example of how, when it comes to foreign policy at least, judgment trumps experience. The growing awareness amongst primary voters of such stark distinctions between the two candidates’ records surely goes a long way in explaining why the Sanders’ campaign gained so much momentum and made the race so much more competitive than Clinton and her party’s establishment had anticipated. Though the inherently rigged contest now seems to have reached its inevitable conclusion, Democratic party delegates and super-delegates would be well advised to take this history into consideration at the convention when deciding who to cast their vote for.

Lastly, even though this is potentially the largest information leak in history, it must be kept in mind that the Panama Papers in all likelihood represent just the tip of the iceberg. They are, after all, merely a fraction of documents from just one law firm’s business activities over a fixed and limited time period of its decades in operation. One can only imagine what further information is still concealed beneath the layers of secrecy that the rich and privileged use to legally hide their fortunes and avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Until we change this rigged system of financial rules that govern our national and global economies, ordinary working and middle class people will be destined to continue picking up the tab.

*Hector Perla, Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs

[1] “Introduction.” Introduction. Accessed June 2016. http://www.financialsecrecyindex.com/.

[2] Schuppe, Jon. “Why Are Americans Not Included in the Panama Papers?” NBC News. Accessed June 2016. http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/panama-papers/why-are-americans-not-included-panama-papers-n551081.

[3]DeSilver, Drew. “High-income Americans Pay Most Income Taxes, but Enough to Be ‘fair’?” Pew Research Center RSS. April 13, 2016. Accessed June 2016. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/13/high-income-americans-pay-most-income-taxes-but-enough-to-be-fair/.;Ingraham, Christopher. “As the Rich Become Super-rich, They Pay Lower Taxes. For Real.” Washington Post. June 4, 2015. Accessed June 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/04/as-the-rich-become-super-rich-they-pay-lower-taxes-for-real/.;Shell, Elizabeth, and Frank Bi. “Compare Your Pay after Averaged Taxes to Other Developed Nations.” PBS. April 14, 2014. Accessed June 2016. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/calculator-compare-taxes-might-pay-u-s-developed-nations/.; Thomson, Derek. “How Low Are U.S. Taxes Compared to Other Countries?” The Atlantic. January 14, 2013. Accessed June 2016. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/how-low-are-us-taxes-compared-to-other-countries/267148/.

[4] Fitzgibbon, Will. “Panama Papers: Links Revealed to Spies and Iran-Contra Affair.” The Irish Times. April 5, 2016. Accessed June 2016. http://www.irishtimes.com/business/panama-papers-links-revealed-to-spies-and-iran-contra-affair-1.2599083.

[5] “Did Bernie Sanders Predict the Panama Papers When He Opposed Clinton-Backed U.S.-Panama Trade Deal?” Democracy Now! April 5, 2016. Accessed June 2016. http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/5/did_bernie_sanders_predict_the_panama.

[6]Mindock, Clark. “Panama Papers: Obama, Clinton Pushed Trade Deal Amid Warnings It Would Make Money Laundering, Tax Evasion Worse.” International Business Times. April 04, 2016. Accessed June 2016. http://www.ibtimes.com/panama-papers-obama-clinton-pushed-trade-deal-amid-warnings-it-would-make-money-2348076.; “Korea, Colombia, and Panama Free Trade Agreements.” U.S. Department of State. October 03, 2011. Accessed June 2016.; http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2011/10/174957.htm.

By Christian Koch*

The historic vote in the United Kingdom to leave the European Union is bound to have repercussions far beyond the European continent. This includes implications for the GCC states who will now find themselves having to deal with a more fractured Europe and an EU institution struggling to define its purpose in the wider integration process. On the foreign-policy front, the vote signifies a return to classical nation-state power politics with the EU losing its momentum as a voice for diplomacy and cooperation.

The immediate consequences will off course be felt within Europe first. While the process of separating the UK from Brussels will be a complicated and prolonged one, the vote is certain to provide further impetus for European separatism. With issues like immigration on the top of agenda in most European countries, parties like the French Front National and the Alternative für Deutschland (AFD) in Germany, could see their poll prospects rise further, a worrisome development given the fact that both France and Germany will hold national elections in 2017.

The European project has always succeeded or fallen short based on the strength of a solid German-French understanding on the way forward for Europe. This alliance, however, is weak rather than strong at the moment. The result is an EU in a profound period of doubt and declining confidence. With the UK now set to leave the EU, it will be incredibly difficult to insert a new sense of momentum unless Paris and Berlin can quickly regain their footing and agree on a comprehensive agenda going forward. At the moment, this does not appear to be the case.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries have always dealt with Europe from two perspectives. On the one hand, there are the numerous bi-lateral relationships, which each GCC state fosters with their European counterpart. This equation is likely to remain although the GCC states will have to deal with a UK that is now taking on a different sort of European identify. Especially on foreign policy and defense matters, it will no longer be possible to assume that the UK and other European countries are following similar approach. Instead, differences will become accentuated, a reality that the GCC states need to adjust to.

A more direct impact will be felt in GCC-EU relations where the EU finds itself in a much weaker position at a time when it was just celebrating some foreign policy successes, for example, in the deal over Iran’s nuclear program. The formula of the EU/E3 (the European Union as one actor alongside the three main European powers of France, Germany and the UK) +3 (Russia, China and the United States) that was seen a model for future diplomatic negotiations is now no more.

The move by the UK further complicates the process of maintaining common European positions when it comes to critical issues such as relations to Russia, the crisis in Syria, how to deal with Iran and Turkey, or responding to the current turmoil in the rest of the Middle East. On all fronts, the GCC states will find themselves having to deal with sets of European actors rather than a relatively coherent EU position. Eastern European countries like Poland and Hungary will likely toe their own foreign policy prerogatives rather than follow the weak lead out of Brussels. The trend of individual policies, something that was already visible in terms of the refugee crisis over the past year, will be strengthened.

On issues such a combatting terrorism, countering money laundering, and regional issues such as Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya, all areas in which GCC-EU relations have grown in recent years, the GCC states now have to deal with the EU and the UK as two separate entities. This makes the policy coordination process more complicated and difficult.

Finally, GCC-EU relations will also be impacted from an integration point of view. For many years, the EU served as a model for the GCC pursuing its own integration process, most recently reflected in late King Abdullah’s call moving the GCC from cooperation to union. But with the EU increasingly seeing its integration path obstructed by various forces, this model character has lost much of its luster.

The UK vote further dampens the prospects that an integration momentum can be regained any time soon. The vote to leave the European Union leaves the Gulf region with a more complicated European partner to deal with. Rather than moving toward more concerted efforts at cooperation and common positions, the GCC states will find a Europe characterized by increasingly diverse policies when it comes to its foreign policy with direct implications for the Middle East as a whole. A period of adjustment will be required accompanied by a new degree of uncertainty.

The writer is director of the Gulf Research Center Foundation in Geneva.

An international volleyball tournament in the Iranian capital has thrown into sharp relief a debate in international sporting associations on how to deal with nations that restrict women’s rights as athletes and/or spectators. How the Federation Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) evaluates next month’s World League in Tehran is likely to shape debate on how international sports should handle countries guilty of violations of women’s and human rights.

At stake in the debate is whether international sports associations should refuse hosting rights to nations who restrict women’s rights or use the awarding of tournaments as a means of fostering domestic pressure for the lifting of restrictions. The debate focuses on Iran, which unlike Saudi Arabia, the only other country that bans women from attending male sporting events and men from watching women’s competitions, is eager to host international tournaments.

FIVB, in contrast to world soccer body FIFA which refuses to award hosting rights to Iran, has argued that a refusal would penalize players and male rather than female fans in the Islamic republic.

FIVB has moreover suggested that forcing women’s entry into Iranian stadiums was likely to provoke violence against women wanting to exercise their right. The fact that awarding rights would provoke violence would seem to favour a refusal to award hosting rights to Iran rather than accept a reality that is imposed in part by threats of violence.

Iranian backtracking on earlier promises to lift the ban on women for international volleyball tournaments like the World League in Tehran and an earlier Asian Football Confederation (AFC) tournament in Iran further calls into question whether engagement instead of boycott is the more effective approach.

The glass is half full and half empty in the debate. The dilemma is built into the charters of international sports associations like FIVB that champion anti-discrimination but restrain them becoming embroiled in political and religious issues. Both sides in the volleyball debate sum up aspects of Iran’s reality and the volleyball federation’s experience in the country to argue their positions.

Proponents of engagement note that Iran has proven in the battle over its nuclear program that it is willing and able to sustain sanctions and unlikely to bend easily when penalized. Iran, they argue, drove a hard bargain when it finally agreed to serious negotiations.

For their part, opponents of engagement charge that Iran has repeatedly backtracked on promised concessions. At stake, the opponents say, is given the failure of the engagement approach the need for international sports associations to uphold principles and their commitment to values of equality and universal human rights.

Refusal to demonstrate that commitment, they say, would reduce their adherence to those principles to lip service and turn it into a farce. It would also hand a victory to those who threaten violence, a striking move in a world that vows not to be intimidated by indiscriminate political violence by the likes of groups like the Islamic State.

FIVB, which has been pushing for Iranian concessions not only during the World League but also more permanently in Azadi Stadium, Iran’s flagship sporting facility in Tehran, says it will evaluate the effectiveness of its engagement in the wake of next month’s tournament.

The FIVB first backed away from its earlier threat to boycott Iran when it last year went ahead with its Beach Volleyball tournament on Kish Island, a Muslim-tinted Las Vegas style resort developed before the 1979 Islamic revolution, despite Iran’s backtracking on its consent to women’s attendance of matches. Iranian officials justified their reversal by pointing to threats by religious groups that blood would be spilt if women were allowed to attend.

The FIVB secured a women’s section in the stadium despite the threats and women believed to be relatives of Iranian volleyball federation executives rather than from the public attended a couple of matches. Women fans who travelled to Kish to watch matches were barred entry.

The situation in Tehran next month is likely to be no different as supporters of President Hassan Rouhani, widely viewed as an advocate of reduced social controls, and Iranian hardliners battle over Iran’s future in the wake of the lifting of the nuclear-related international sanctions. The fact that the battle over women’s unfettered right to attend sporting rights is part of a larger struggle in Iran significantly reduces the FIVB’s chances of influencing Iran.

Hard line threats of violence designed as much to intimidate their opponents as to attempt to keep Iranian moderates in line are not restricted to sports.

Major General Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, in an unprecedented response to this week’s likely deportation by Bahrain of Shiite Sheikh Isa Qassim, warned that the Gulf state had crossed a red line.

Bahrain stripped Sheikh Isa at the beginning of this week of his Bahraini nationality. The move against Sheikh Isa was part of a renewed crackdown on Bahrain’s majority Shiites by the Gulf island’s minority Sunni rulers.

General Soleimani said the it would spark “the beginning of a bloody uprising” that would lead to the “annihilation” of the country’s “bloodthirsty regime.”.

The warning by General Soleimani, who commands IGRC forces in Syria that support the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and who played a key role in shaping Shiite militias confronting the Islamic State in Iraq, was directed as much at Bahrain as it was at those in Mr. Rouhani’s government who want to reduce tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Ironically, Bahrain’s move against Sheikh Isa serves the purpose of Saudi Arabia which has been seeking to strengthen Iranian hardliners as part of its struggle with Iran over regional dominance in the Middle East. Like when it executed a prominent Saudi Shiite cleric in January, Saudi Arabia hopes that strengthened Iranian hard liners will obstruct Mr. Rouhani’s US-backed efforts to return Iran to the international fold.

The Iranian power struggle and its role in the covert war between Iran and Saudi Arabia constitutes a high stakes battle that is far beyond the paygrade of internationals sports associations like the FIVB. With Mr. Rouhani and Iranian moderates having bigger fish to fry, it precludes the FIVB from getting any real foot on the ground in its effort to secure women’s rights. Under the circumstances, the FIVB and international sports associations are best served by upholding principles and standing on the side lines until the dust settles and new opportunities arise.

By Deepak Sinha