Almost half of the Albanian population has said that Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship was a good system, but its implementation had many mistakes! This poll was conducted by the OSCE.

It will not be a surprise if after a while the results of the same poll will differ, turning this opinion into a majority. Because – even without a poll – what we call ‘democracy’ is also a good system, but is poorly implemented. It has even reached a point where communism is just a joke compared to our way of democracy.

However both systems have a commonality: that is the class struggle! Edi Rama’s renaissance government is the continuation of Class Struggle with a staunch commitment that was started by Enver Hoxha, but equipped, varnished with other methods. Obviously he is not the only one. In a quarter of a century of democratic transition almost all leaders of Albania have done their best to have such a transition become the shift of the inherited power from the elderly communist leaders to their sons and daughters, even genetically, at the helm of Albanian Government we have the sons, daughters and nephews of those who established the Class Struggle: Sulejman Bushati, Llambi Gegprifti, Spiro Koleka, Rrapo Dervishi, Lenka Çuko, Babë Myslymi and many others.

Their presence is not only in the Executive Government but also in the Judicial Branch and International Institutions. They had the power and were educated abroad at a time when thousands of their countrymen, with their parents educated in the west, were brewing their talent and knowledge in the brutal camps of internment.

Such a fatality was accepted by all of those that were prosecuted by communists, just like many other Albanian’s who escaped from their punishment on internment camps and become tortured in the notorious communist jails, while trying to comply with the Class Struggle. However, the sons and daughters of these communist leaders, who are in power today, have never pardoned the rest of the Albanian population!

Today Edi Rama’s ‘renaissance’ is at the peak of Class Struggle Implementation, obviously in a more undisclosed shape. The new nomenclature, selected carefully by the early communist elite, have established and deeply rooted their network. Such a nomenclature, within three years, has managed to turn the economic policies upside down.

Through “reforms”, “state establishment”, “formal economy”, Mr. Rama has exerted a systematic pressure through his inspectors and innumerable agencies, while using words such as ‘jail’ and ‘punishment’ as a corner stone concept, while pressuring many businesses to change ownership or accept new share holders that are the emissaries of the ‘renaissance movement’. There have been taken over many real estate properties in the name of ‘public interest’.

Private property has not been neglected this much and abused upon even in Enver Hoxha’s time.

Human freedoms have been confined and abandoned dramatically. Today to own a brand new car purchased with the money from your savings or decent salary, it seems that you are entering the Ministry of Interior with an illegal gun in your belt. Massive Confiscations! Ticket! Jail! Are the potential consequences expected by Edi Rama’s Government in Office.

Such threats, such a red terror, equal to the early dictatorship, have created a climate of Class Struggle, since it is selectively applied in order to attack political enemies. The freedom of expression has been heavily hijacked. Communications Media is under government control and they have become propaganda agencies on behalf of the government; meanwhile there are attempts to take under control social media through blackmail and jail punishment.

After 25 years of students’ aspirations, degrees of Albanian students are not recognized in the world. The kids of the new ruling class are studying abroad; meanwhile Edi Rama has attacked fiercely the national universities and prioritized professional training! Those who were politically prosecuted and all Albanians that are not part of this new political class, which is the continuation of the communist regime of the early 1980s, in addition to economic struggles, they are punished to have a rotten education system and consequently it would be very hard for them to participate in the future governments ladder.

This is just an idea.

The anti-communists and political prisoners were unable to recover and become fully integrated after the 1990s. An overwhelming majority left their country immediately after the fall of Ramiz Alia’s rule. Others continued to struggle in Albania with high hopes that the government will reimburse, pay back their suffering and remunerate their unfair time in jail as well as barbarian punishments during the communist reign.

Almost one third of the population, torn apart by poverty and ruined by Albanian dictatorship, was continuously divided and held in poverty, without having a possibility to organize themselves and without a real weight in Albanian political landscape.

“Chicken hunters” as it is stated by Edi Rama in reference to the National Front fighters of World War Two, and his mockery with the blood of National Front members executed by Mehmet Shehu in the province of Myzeqe, the appearance of large portraits of Enver Hoxha in every official celebration organized by the government, the close connection of Class Struggle with Enver Hoxha and communism by Edi Rama’s ‘renaissance’ there is no doubt that: Class struggle is at the peak of its implementation, with a new shape and form.

Until now, it has been successfully installed and operates very smoothly. The silence of the opposition and a ‘smiling’ distance maintained by the Democratic Party in relation to the current political blackmail is helping at a greater length. Today this is understood and felt in Albania; however there is no political formation that could handle with every cost such a restoration of the communist elite.

The Class Struggle demands a serious reply. Edi Rama’s regime has no pity and obviously they deserve an equal response. There are two options to face such a neo-communist threat: 1. have one of the political parties that has traditionally denounced communist crimes and class struggle to become more effective; 2.to establish a new political front that must consider its war against neo-communists as its main struggle.

National matters, the sanctity of private property, state of justice instead of arrogant state of law, a high quality education at every level; condemnation of communist crimes as well as the drafting of a national strategy to root out communist ideology, similar to McCarthyism in the United States, must be the main columns of priorities.

There must be no compassion for those who have never felt such a compassion for others, who are becoming as cruel as their forefathers, while fighting fiercely against every political enemy with bloody handcuffs, implantation of misery and chronic hunger.

Translated to English by: Peter M. Tase

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday night rejected an invitation from French President Francois Hollande to attend an international conference in Paris later this month aimed at reviving Palestine-Israel peace talks.

According to the prime minister’s office, Netanyahu told Hollande on Wednesday night that Israel would “not take part in an international conference that will not contribute to achieving peace”.

“If there is no international conference in Paris, the prime minister will come to meet the Palestinian president [Mahmoud Abbas] for direct talks without preconditions,” the statement from Netanyahu’s office read.

Palestinian presidential spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh, for his part, told Anadolu Agency earlier Wednesday that the French authorities had informed the Palestinian leadership of their intention to hold the Paris conference on Dec. 21.

Peace talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators collapsed in 2014 over Israel’s refusal to release a group of Palestinian political prisoners despite earlier pledges to do so.

Since then, all attempts to revive the moribund peace process have failed, due mainly to Israel’s continued insistence on building Jewish-only settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

Palestinian negotiators say such settlement-building activity must stop before a comprehensive peace deal can be reached.

By Anees Barghouti, original source

The Saudi Arabia-led coalition killed several dozen civilians in three apparently unlawful airstrikes in September and October 2016, Human Rights Watch said today. The coalition’s use of United States-supplied weapons in two of the strikes, including a bomb delivered to Saudi Arabia well into the conflict, puts the US at risk of complicity in unlawful attacks.

The attacks underscore the urgent need for foreign governments to suspend all arms sales to Saudi Arabia and for the United Nations human rights office to send additional investigators to Yemen to carry out credible investigations of alleged abuses by the coalition, the Houthis and their allies, and all other parties to the conflict, Human Rights Watch said.

“Saudi-led forces are bombing civilians in Yemen with newly supplied US weapons,” said Priyanka Motaparthy, senior emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Obama administration is running out of time to completely suspend US arms sales to Saudi Arabia or be forever linked to Yemen wartime atrocities.”

Since the beginning of the Saudi-led campaign in March 2015, Human Rights Watch has found remnants of US-supplied weapons at the site of 23 apparently unlawful coalition airstrikes, including more than a dozen attacks involving US-made cluster munitions. Researchers did not find identifiable remnants in every attack documented. The US approved more than US$20 billion in military sales to Saudi Arabia in 2015 alone. Three US arms sales in 2015 and 2016, worth nearly US$3 billion, involved replenishing Saudi weaponry used in Yemen.

Human Rights Watch located remnants of US-made weapons at the site of coalition airstrikes in Arhab in Sanaa governorate and in the Hodeida governorate. A September 10 attack on a drilling site for water in Arhab killed at least 31 civilians, including three children.

According to the Human Rights Watch researchers found remnants of two US-made GBU-12 Paveway II laser guided 500-pound bombs. One Paveway II laser guidance system had markings indicating it was manufactured by Raytheon, Inc., a US arms manufacturer, dated October 2015 – seven months after the start of the war. The other weapon was manufactured at an undetermined date in 2015. By October 2015, the UN as well as Human Rights Watch and others had already reported numerous unlawful attacks by coalition forces.

A coalition airstrike on October 29 struck the al-Zaydiya security administration building north of the city of Hodeida. Many of the about 100 people who were being detained in the facility died in the bombing. The Houthis and allied forces stationed military personnel and trucks mounted with machine guns at the site.

What will happen to Earth when, in a few billion years’ time, the Sun is a hundred times bigger than it is today? Using the most powerful radio telescope in the world, an international team of astronomers has set out to look for answers in the star L2 Puppis. Five billion years ago, this star was very similar to the Sun as it is today.

“Five billion years from now, the Sun will have grown into a red giant star, more than a hundred times larger than its current size,” says Professor Leen Decin from the KU Leuven Institute of Astronomy. “It will also experience an intense mass loss through a very strong stellar wind. The end product of its evolution, 7 billion years from now, will be a tiny white dwarf star. This will be about the size of the Earth, but much heavier: one tea spoon of white dwarf material weighs about 5 tons.”

This metamorphosis will have a dramatic impact on the planets of our Solar System. Mercury and Venus, for instance, will be engulfed in the giant star and destroyed.

“But the fate of the Earth is still uncertain,” continues Decin. “We already know that our Sun will be bigger and brighter, so that it will probably destroy any form of life on our planet. But will the Earth’s rocky core survive the red giant phase and continue orbiting the white dwarf?”

To answer this question, an international team of astronomers observed the evolved star L2 Puppis. This star is 208 light years away from Earth – which, in astronomy terms, means nearby. The researchers used the ALMA radio telescope, which consists of 66 individual radio antennas that together form a giant virtual telescope with a 16-kilometre diameter.

“We discovered that L2 Puppis is about 10 billion years old,” says Ward Homan from the KU Leuven Institute of Astronomy. “Five billion years ago, the star was an almost perfect twin of our Sun as it is today, with the same mass. One third of this mass was lost during the evolution of the star. The same will happen with our Sun in the very distant future.”

300 million kilometres from L2 Puppis – or twice the distance between the Sun and the Earth – the researchers detected an object orbiting the giant star. In all likelihood, this is a planet that offers a unique preview of our Earth five billion years from now.

A deeper understanding of the interactions between L2 Puppis and its planet will yield valuable information on the final evolution of the Sun and its impact on the planets in our Solar System. Whether the Earth will eventually survive the Sun or be destroyed is still uncertain. L2 Puppis may be the key to answering this question.

New genetic research from an international team including McMaster University, University of Helsinki, Vilnius University and the University of Sydney, suggests that smallpox, a pathogen that caused millions of deaths worldwide, may not be an ancient disease but a much more modern killer that went on to become the first human disease eradicated by vaccination.

The findings, published in the journal Current Biology, raise new questions about the role smallpox may have played in human history and fuels a longstanding debate over when the virus that causes smallpox, variola, first emerged and later evolved in response to inoculation and vaccination.

“Scientists don’t yet fully comprehend where smallpox came from and when it jumped into humans,” said evolutionary geneticist Hendrik Poinar, senior author of the study, director of the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre and a researcher with Michael G. DeGroote Institute of Infectious Disease Research. “This research raises some interesting possibilities about our perception and age of the disease.”

Smallpox, one of the most devastating viral diseases ever to strike humankind, had long been thought to have appeared in human populations thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, India and China, with some historical accounts suggesting that the pharaoh Ramses V -who died in 1145 BC–suffered from smallpox.

In an attempt to better understand its evolutionary history, and after obtaining clearance from the WHO in Geneva, scientists extracted the heavily fragmented DNA, from the partial mummified remains of a Lithuanian child believed to have died between 1643 and 1665, a period in which several smallpox outbreaks were documented throughout Europe with increasing levels of mortality. The smallpox DNA was captured, sequenced and the ancient genome, one of the oldest viral genomes to date, was completely reconstructed. There was no indication of live virus in the sample and so the mummies are not infectious.

Researchers compared and contrasted the 17th Century strain to those from a modern databank of samples dating from 1940 up to its eradication in 1977. Strikingly, the work shows that the evolution of smallpox virus occurred far more recently than previously thought, with all the available strains of the virus having an ancestor no older than 1580.

“This study sets the clock of smallpox evolution to a much more recent time-scale” said evolutionary biologist Eddie Holmes, a professor at the University of Sydney, Australia.

“Although it is still unclear what animal is the true reservoir of smallpox virus and when the virus first jumped into humans.”

The pox viral strains that represent the true reservoir for human smallpox remains currently unsampled. Both the closest gerbil (Tetarapox) and camel pox are very distantly related and consequently are not the likely ancestors to smallpox, suggesting that the real reservoir remains at large or has gone extinct.

Researchers also discovered that smallpox virus evolved into two circulating strains, variola major and minor, after English physician Edward Jenner famously developed a vaccine in 1796.

One form of VARV (Variola virus), known as V. major was highly virulent and deadly, the other V, minor much more benign. However, scientists say, the two forms experienced a ‘major population bottleneck’ with the rise of global immunization efforts. The date of the ancestor of the minor strain corresponds well with the Atlantic Slave trade which was likely responsible for partial worldwide dissemination.

“This raises important questions about how a pathogen diversifies in the face of vaccination. While smallpox was eradicated in human populations, we can’t become lazy or apathetic about its evolution – and possible reemergence–until we fully understand its origins,” said Ana Duggan, a post doctoral fellow in the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre.

Whether the date of the ancestor, approximately 1580, precludes the massive destruction of aboriginal populations in central America by smallpox, introduced by the Spanish, remains questionable. To that end, researchers must carefully examine the remains of individuals buried in epidemic burials in central and southern America, say scientists.

“This work blurs the line between ancient diseases and emerging infections. Much of smallpox evolution apparently happened in historic time,” said Margaret Humphreys, historian of medicine at Duke University.

The World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated in 1980.

U.K. officials drew strong criticism for denying visas to Middle East bishops from regions that have suffered Islamic State group persecution, preventing them from attending a cathedral consecration.

“These are men who have pressing pastoral responsibilities as Christian areas held by ISIS are liberated,” said Archbishop Athanasius Toma of the Syriac Orthodox Church in the U.K. “That is why we cannot understand why Britain is treating Christians in this way?”

Syriac Orthodox leaders Archbishop Nicodemus Daoud Sharaf of Mosul and Archbishop Timothius Mousa Shamani of St. Mathew’s in northern Iraq were denied visas, the U.K. newspaper The Sunday Express reports.

Similarly, Syriac Orthodox Archbishop Selwanos Boutros Alnemeh of Homs and Hama was also denied a visa. British embassy officials said they would not waive the blanket policy against visas for Syrian citizens.

The archbishops had hoped to visit for the Nov. 24 consecration of St. Thomas Cathedral in London, the first Syriac Orthodox cathedral in the country. Both Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Theresa May had sent personal messages of congratulations, while Prince Charles of Wales addressed the congregation in person.

Each of the three bishops come from regions that have been under the control of the Islamic State group. The group has executed Christians, forced them to pay an extortionate tax and accept second-class status.

The extremist group destroyed churches or converted them into mosques, including the Mosul archbishop’s former cathedral.

Martin Parsons, head of research at the U.K.-based Christian aid agency the Barnabas Fund, was among the critics of British officials.

“It’s unbelievable that these persecuted Christians who come from the cradle of Christianity are being told there is no room at the inn, when the U.K. is offering a welcome to Islamists who persecute Christians,” he charged.

A Home Office spokesperson said that all visa applications are considered on individual merits and applicants must prove they meet immigration rules requirements.

The Barnabas Fund criticized the decisions at length in an Oct. 2 editorial at its website.

It said the concerns about the two Iraqi bishops are “at best spurious.” The fund rejected claims that the bishops did not have enough money to support themselves in the U.K. and might not leave the country.

“Anyone who has paid the slightest attention to current world news reports would know that both men have pressing pastoral responsibilities as previously Christian areas held by ISIS are liberated,” the Barnabas Fund said.

“The refusal to grant a few days’ U.K. visa to these very senior church leaders is symptomatic of a deeper problem in the U.K. Home Office,” it continued. “In fact they are not the first persecuted Christian leaders to be refused visas for pastoral visits to the U.K., nor is this problem confined to Orthodox Christians.”

The organization also noted the denial of a visa to the Iraqi evangelical pastor Majeed Rashid Kurdi, who was to participate in a Barnabas Fund speaking tour in the U.K.

The Barnabas Fund has previously objected to U.K. Home Office guidance stating that senior members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood should be presumed to be granted asylum, despite the group’s alleged incitement of violence against Egyptian Christians.

The group also questioned why visas had been granted to two Pakistani Islamic leaders who, according to the Barnabas Fund, backed their country’s strict anti-blasphemy law and called for the immediate killings of Christians who have been accused of blasphemy, including Asia Bibi. The two leaders visited tour U.K. mosques in July.

“(T)here is clearly a serious systemic problem when Islamist leaders who advocate persecution of Christians are given the green light telling them that their applications for U.K. visas will be looked on favorably, while visas for short pastoral visits to the U.K. are denied to senior Christian leaders, such as the Archbishop of Mosul, whose congregations are facing genocide,” the Barnabas Fund said.

The organization called on Home Office ministers to remedy the situation.

The Barnabas Fund has helped more than 8,000 Christians escape persecution from the Islamic State group.

The Chinese government should immediately abolish a secretive detention system used to coerce confessions from corruption suspects, said Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The Communist Party-run system, known as shuanggui, has no basis under Chinese law but is a key component of President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, the U.S.-based rights group said in a statement.

HRW gives details of shuanggui in a report the 102-page report, “‘Special Measures’: Detention and Torture in Chinese Communist Party’s Shuanggui System” released Dec. 6.

The start of a shuanggui investigation is often marked by an individual’s disappearance — family members are given no notification of the person’s detention or location, no information about the alleged infraction, or the length of detention. Detainees have no access to lawyers, said HRW.

Although there are time limits for shuanggui, Commissions for Discipline Inspection (CDI) investigators can seek repeated extensions, permitting detainees to be held indefinitely, often until they confess, reported HRW.

Shuanggui facilities are typically rooms in hostels with special features, such as padded walls or a lack of windows, to prevent suicides or escapes. Detainees are guarded round-the-clock by shifts of officials, often put together in an ad hoc fashion for this purpose, and subjected to interrogation by CDI officers.

The 25-year-old status-quo of the Nagorno-Karabakh armed conflict has made the people of the two countries, Armenia and Azerbaijan, feel exhausted.

After the Republic of Azerbaijan proclaimed its independence on 18 October 1991 from USSR, the country was faced with Armenian claims over Nagorno-Karabakh region which caused a 4 years long war between the two countries resulted with a death toll of 20.000 innocent people, nearly 1 million of Azerbaijanis were forced to move from their own lands and twenty percent of the internationally recognized territories of Azerbaijan (Nagorno-Karabakh and the seven surrounding districts) have been occupied by the Armenian armed forces.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations with the mediation of the OSCE Minsk Group, co-chaired by USA, Russia and France and it continues until today without generating any little improvement on the ground due to the absence of an objective approach that must be undertaken by the countries that are co-chairing this process.

The April 2016 Armenian provocations caused high tensions between the two countries and could have led to a full-fledged war that could have definitely caused the rapid restoration of the full sovereignty of Azerbaijan over its territories, but it could have meant more blood and humanitarian devastation for both nations.

Young Armenian and Azerbaijan soldiers are in their full military positions. We don’t expect such a worst event to occur again and it stands far away from the thoughts of the majority of the people who currently live in the two states and who are striving for peace.

The international conference on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict was recently held in Baku (on November 8th, 2016) it was attended by many participants representing civil societies of the two conflicting states. Rauf Zeyni, President of Azerbaijan National NGO Forum stated that the conference has played a critical role in an effort to resolve this conflict and it was carried out for the first time in the history of the Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict.

Mr. Vahe Avetyan, a well-known Armenian human rights activist said that humanism is the foundation upon which peace can be built between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Avetyan added that his personal attendance to Baku was considered as doing a pilgrim and he sent his deep sympathy to the Khojaly genocide victims. Khojaly genocide was committed at the Khojaly town by the Armenian army with the help of the former Soviet 366th Motor Rifle Regiment during the occupation of the Nagorno-Karabakh. Now Mr. Avetyan, as a human rights activist, is making a good impact to the improvement of bilateral relations and it will bring a successful outcome through his persisting humanitarian mission.

While the Head of Armenian Intra-Nation Liberation Movement Organization, Mr. Vahan Matirosyan who also attended in the conference stated that the people with power in Armenia who have committed the genocide of Khojaly are those who are against the entire Armenian people. Matirosyan added that he has met with 30.000 Armenians residing in Baku and states that the government authority in Azerbaijan preserves and respects the Armenian Church in Baku. Matirosyan emphasized that the situation in Armenia is totally the opposite; mosques are damaged and history is rewritten and the communications media in Armenia is silent. He also said that no one of the Armenian people get the benefit from the conflict, but those who profit are the elite who exert their power and their number is less than 500 people.

Professor Kamil Salimov stated that the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict must be in line with the international law. This Doctor of laws added that it would be better to discuss the future plan rather than to flashback the inherited problems of the past. He reminded us that the negotiations process has started since 1991 but so far there has not been accomplished any positive result, even the OSCE MINSK Group has been created since 24 years ago.

At the present time, after 25 years of liberation, the people of Azerbaijan are hopeful for the settlement of the conflict in a serious and conducive stage, while reminding us of the threat of Nuclear weapons and other radioactive materials, which have been smuggled by the Armenian government from some neighboring countries since 1999 up until now.

The Nuclear and Radioactive materials that are related to the Metsamor NPP are part of the nuclear technology built in 1976 and have the same characteristics with the technology that has been used in Chernobyl NPP. Such an information has been stressed during the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington from March 31 to April 1, 2016. According to Peter Tase, an International Security Expert: “Even though Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant was built to resist an earthquake with a high magnitude, its safety measures; infrastructure security and geological-seismic instability; place this facility in a vulnerable position. The safety level of this Armenian nuclear power plant is very precarious and it could be disastrous for the surrounding environment and the overall regional safety in the Caucasus.”

The trafficking of nuclear and other radioactive materials by Armenians in Armenia is against the commitment of Armenia within the framework of the agreement signed between the Republic of Armenia and IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) for the Application of Safeguarding nuclear materials and in connection with the Treaty of the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and a number of Conventions and Supplementary Guidances on the Import and Export of Radioactive Materials, as well as the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council 1373 (2001) and 1540 (2004) on the prevention of proliferation of nuclear, chemical, biological weapons and their delivery systems.

The current threat of Nuclear and Radioactive weapons is the real danger for the regions of the Caucasus, Europe, Middle East, and the entire world. International Organizations must act quickly in order to stop the Armenian Government from expanding its nuclear and radioactive materials destined to be used for civilian and military purposes.

The Prophet Muhammad had prophesied the coming of extremism. The roots of the vicious beliefs of IS can be traced back to the Kharijites – the first extremist group in Islamic history. What were the defining characteristics of the Kharijites and their impact?

By Mohamed Bin Ali*

Extremism in Islam is not something new, has been prophesied by the Prophet Muhammad and will continue for many years to come. Looking into Islamic history, contemporary scholars have identified many similarities between Muslim extremist groups today like IS and the Kharijites, the extremist group that emerged during the reign of the fourth Caliph of Islam, Ali Bin Abi Thalib. These similarities include both physical and ideological manifestations.

The re-emergence of the Kharijites today in the form of extreme groups like IS was foretold by Prophet Muhammad in his time, with warnings about the future emergence of extreme groups within the Muslim community which would serve as trials and tribulations for the people.

Who are the Kharijites?

The term Kharijites came from the Arabic word Khawarij which means “those who left”. It refers to a group of Muslims who were initially followers of Ali, the fourth Caliph, but later went against him and broke away from him.

Ali was the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law. He assumed the position of the Caliph after the demise of Caliph Uthman Bin Al-Affan. During his reign, Ali had a leadership dispute with Muawiyah Bin Abi Sufyan, the governor of Damascus. This ended up with a civil war in Siffin, Syria in year 658. During the battle, Ali and his opponent, Muawiyah decided to end the war and agreed to arbitration.

However a group of 6,000 men, who later would be the Kharijites, rejected the arbitration and rebelled against Ali. They accused Ali of apostasy for agreeing to arbitration and not judging with the Book of God. The Kharijites declared takfir (accusing Muslims as disbelievers) on Ali and those who accepted the arbitration. They used the slogan “inil hukmu illa lillah” (legislation is for none but Allah) which they quoted from the Quran and went against anyone who ruled not with God’s revelations.

Although the Kharijites were extreme in their religious beliefs and practices, Ali initially tolerated and accepted them as part of the Muslim community. However, when the Kharijites killed Abdullah Bin Khabbab, a companion of the Prophet and his wife in a barbaric and inhumane manner, Ali decided to fight the Kharijites. They met in the Battle of Nahrawan in 659 which was won by Ali. In 661, Ali was killed by Abdul Rahman Ibn Muljam, a member of the Kharijite community.

Characteristics of the Kharijites

A very significant attribute of the Kharijites was their strict and uncompromising views of Islam. They considered sinful Muslims to be disbelievers and would fight them if they did not repent. They rebelled against the rightful rulers and Muslim rulers who did not rule with Islamic law. Kharijites were the first group in Islamic history to practise takfir and hence justified the killings of those who they deemed infidels.

A second characteristic of the Kharijites is their shallow understanding of the religion and lack of rigorous Islamic scholarship. As such, their comprehension of the Quran is superficial and prone to literal, extreme misinterpretations. However, they were scornful of the people of knowledge and would consider the true scholars of Islam as misguided. This is so as to consider themselves to be more righteous than the people of knowledge.

A third characteristic of Kharijites was the outward piety that they portrayed. They appeared to be very religious and were fanatics in their worship. Their piety and devotional acts would impress many but they did have an effect on their behaviour. The Prophet had described these characteristics and warned Muslims not to be deceived by their outward piety and use of the religion.

He said there would arise from the Muslim community people who would recite the Quran, perform the prayers and fast and all these acts would seem insignificant compared with the recital, prayers and fasting of the rest of the Muslims. However, their prayers did not get beyond their collar bone; they would swerve through Islam just as the arrow passed through the prey.

Prophet’s Prophecy and Modern Extremist Groups

The first Muslim extremist emerged as early as the period of the Prophet. A man known as Zul Khuwaisirah At-Tamimi who accused the Prophet of injustice in a derogatory manner was believed to be the first Muslim extremist in Islamic history while the Kharijites were the first Muslim extremist group.

According to the Prophet, Muslim extremist groups will continue to exist until the Day of Judgement. He said that in the end of time, there would be young people rebelling with foolish dreams. They would say the best of words but they would go out of Islam just as an arrow goes through its game. Their faith would not go beyond their throats.

Modern Extremist Groups

When we look at modern extremist groups like IS, we find the same symptoms as the Kharijites. For instance, just like the Kharijites, IS and other violent Islamist groups are known to practise takfir on Muslims who do not agree with them. They also believe that a perpetual war must be fought to force Muslims to join their ranks and this can include killing the innocent.

Another manifestation of the unyielding nature that is similar to the Kharijites is IS’ narrow interpretation of Islam; they believe there is just a single way to practise Islam and that their way is the only way towards salvation. Hence, they are closed to multiple interpretations of Islam and reject the various sects and movements that form the global Muslim community as misguided innovations.

IS consists of young people who are mostly ignorant of Islam. Yet they give the impression of being firmly adherent to the Quran by their way of worship, speech and propagation of Islam. This is especially apparent in their main propagandic mode, their online magazines such as Dabiq and Rumiyah where Islamic messages including texts from the Quran and the prophetic tradition are prominently displayed.

The Prophet Muhammad’s prediction of the emergence of the Kharijites and other Muslim extremist groups was to serve as a warning and guide post to the community in dealing with these extreme groups who would emerge as a trial and tribulation for Muslims across various times and ages. Thus, an understanding of the Kharijites is pertinent and would give a better insight and understanding into the IS phenomenon and similar extremist groups in the future.

*Mohamed Bin Ali is Assistant Professor with the Studies in Inter-Religious Relations in Plural Societies (SRP) Programme, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. He is also a counsellor with the Religious Rehabilitation Group (RRG).

By K. P. Fabian*

Brexit, the results of the elections held in Italy and Austria on December 4, 2016, and certain related recent developments in Europe raise questions about the future of the Union. There is mounting popular discontent against the status quo, the Euro, and, in some cases, against the very idea of the European Union (EU) itself. There is a discernible move towards the far right that needs close watching as elections are due next year in France, the Netherlands, Germany, and, perhaps, in Italy and the UK too. Europe might see growing political instability resulting in the unravelling of the Union.

Elections in Italy

In Italy, Matteo Renzi, who at 39 was the youngest to be Prime Minister when he took office in 2014, has repeated the act of political suicide patented by the UK’s David Cameron. Renzi put to referendum a rather complicated set of constitutional amendments. The 65 per cent of the eligible population that voted rejected Renzi’s proposals by a margin of 60 to 40 per cent, despite his threat to resign in the event of the amendments being rejected. Little did he know that his threat to resign will boomerang.

Essentially, Renzi wanted to reform Italy’s rather brittle constitution by giving more powers to the central government in Rome at the expense of provincial governments, apart from reducing the number of elected Senators from 315 to 95 and taking away the powers of the Senate to stand in the way of legislation approved by the House of Representatives. More than a rejection of the proposals as such, the vote was a rejection of Renzi’s performance as Prime Minister in the face of the worsening economic crisis characterised by unsustainable debt and deficit. Italy’s economy in 2016 is 12 per cent smaller than it was in 2008 when the recession started.

While the Euro has recovered, the referendum result has aggravated the crisis in Italy’s banking system burdened with a debt of USD 385 billion. While the EU was able to find money to prop up the failing Greek banks, it is painfully clear that it is beyond the capacity of the EU to prop up Italy. One of the banks in deep trouble is Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the oldest bank in the world, founded in 1472. Renzi wanted to provide funds to the bank, but Germany opposed the move. The bank urgently needs at least USD 5 billion and it is not certain now that private lenders will lend that amount to the bank post the referendum. If the bank falls, other banks also might follow.

Whether Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella decides to ask the ruling party to form a new cabinet, or appoints a cabinet of technocrats, Italy will enter a period of political instability which even a general election in 2017 might not put an end to. The anti-Establishment Five Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle) founded in 2009 succeeded in getting more than 25 per cent of the votes in 2013, making it the second largest party in Parliament. The party is known for its populist, Eurosceptic, anti-globalist and anti-Euro stand, effectively projected by Beppe Grillo, a famous comedian and one of the movement’s co-founders. But there is nothing comic about what is happening to Italy. It is truly tragic.

The Presidential Election in Austria

Norbert Gerwald Hofer of the Freedom Party of Austria, founded by some former Nazis in the 1950s, lost by 6.6 per cent to Alexander Van der Bellan, former head of the Green Party who won 53 per cent of the votes cast. What is significant is that neither of the two established parties, the Austrian People’s Party or the Austrian Socialist Party, who have till now shared power, had a candidate in the final round of voting. Hofer’s party stands a good chance of winning the Parliamentary elections due in October 2018. Opinion surveys show that it might get 35 per cent of the votes if the election were to be held now.

Hofer has asserted that he would ask for a referendum on Austria’s membership of the EU if the European Parliament assumes more powers or if Turkey were to be admitted to the EU. He is against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between EU and US, already rejected by President-elect Trump. Hofer maintains that Islam has no place in EU and he wants to take back South Tyrol, now part of Italy. His motto is ‘Austria First’. He gained 35 per cent of votes in the first round held in April 2016, with his nearest rival Alexander Van der Bellen getting only 21 per cent. However, in the second round, Hofer lost narrowly. With the counting contested, the court ordered a new election in December. The final result shows that the foes of Hofer succeeded in uniting against him. While the post of President is largely ceremonial, it remains to be seen what will happen in the general election due in October 2018.

The Far Right trend in Europe

Support for the European Union has been dwindling elsewhere in Europe, not just in Austria and Italy. To understand the Far Right trend in Europe, we only need look at the anti-Establishment parties gaining strength in other countries: Podemos (Spain), Syriza (Greece, ruling), National Front (France), Freedom Party (The Netherlands), Alternative for Germany, and the UK Independence Party which succeeded in the referendum on Brexit. We cannot predict how well these parties will fare when France, Germany, and the Netherlands go to the polls in 2017. In Germany, Angela Merkel has announced that she would contest for a fourth term, but it is difficult to say whether she will win. In France, Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, is hopeful of capturing the presidency next year. Whether she gets elected or not, her party should do well in the legislative elections due in June 2017.

Is Capitalism in danger?

A related fall-out of the resurgence of the far-right would be renewed attacks on globalisation. In a recent speech, Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England said, “Globalization is associated with low wages, insecure employment, stateless corporations and striking inequalities.”

Carney’s warning is to be taken seriously. As Raghuram Rajan put it, “Democratic capitalism’s greatest problem is not that it will destroy itself economically, as Marx would have it — but that it may lose its political support.” It is obvious that if capitalism fails to deliver the expected benefits to the majority, the political support for it will erode.

In conclusion, Europe is likely to experience serious political turbulence and economic instability in the near future. The dream of ‘an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’ inserted in the preamble to the 1957 Treaty of Rome and reaffirmed in the 2007 Lisbon Treaty is as dead as a Dodo. The plans for a common defence and foreign policy are in tatters. Europe has entered uncharted seas and there is an impression that its current leaders are not up to the task of navigating through it.

Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India. Originally published by Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (www.idsa.in) at http://idsa.in/idsacomments/where-is-europe-headed_kpfabian_081216

By Justin McCauley*

Since the election of Michel Aoun to be president of Lebanon on November 1, a two-year political stalemate in Beirut has concluded. His election marks the culmination of a strategic effort that began over ten years ago, when out of the rubble of the Syrian withdrawal emerged a pragmatic alliance between Aoun’s nascent Free Patriotic Movement and Hezbollah. The marriage between the Maronite Aounists and Shi’ite Hezbollah was a shrewd move of political convenience, calculated to circumvent the rise of the Western- and Saudi-backed Saad Hariri and his 14 March Alliance.

But it was also a part of grand Iranian strategy. Aoun’s rise to the presidency is the latest in a series of master chess moves calculated to solidify Hezbollah’s control over Lebanon, and, more broadly, to strengthen Shi’ite Islamist power.

While Hezbollah – the Middle East’s most powerful popular Shi’ite movement – secures hard-won political power through the gaming of the Lebanese political system, its nearest Sunni counterpart, Daesh (“Islamic State”), is on the cusp of defeat at the hands of Iraqi and Kurdish forces, following several years of incompetent and barbarous millenarian governance in the areas under its control. All the while, policies from Sunni powers in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Turkey have fanned the flames of nihilistic takfirism and inter-Sunni ethnic warfare.

It is legitimate to ask how the militant variants of Sunni and Shi’ite Islam have become so divergent.

Although a granular analysis of Islamic hierology would be fascinating (and endless), suffice to say that the codified theological authority of Shi’ism allows for a more rigid adherence to clerical dictates. A significant effect of this structure has also been a religious leadership that is considerably better educated and qualified than its Sunni counterparts. For example, Osama bin Laden, who was an engineer with no religious qualifications to speak of, became a spiritual leader of militant Sunnis. Yet a similarly unqualified figure materializing in Shi’ism is almost unthinkable. Indeed, while Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah has received extensive theological education in both Lebanon and Najaf, on all major questions he has deferred to maraji such as the late Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, as well as to ayatollahs in Iran.

But the application of theological tenants does not occur in a vacuum. Identities – local, tribal, cultural, and national – contribute, as does the broad sweep of history.

For the Shi’ites, nothing has contributed more to their modern identity – or to the nature of their militancy – than Iran. Since the time of the Safavids, Iranian Shi’ism has been the most powerful force guiding the sect. Given Shi’ite hierarchical authority, this has resulted in a ‘Persianization’ of Shi’ism, with Iranian clerics saturating Shi’ite mosques, as well as the watering down of ethnic divides between Arabs and Persians through marriage and cohabitation, particularly in neighboring Iraq.

Despite theological debates among maraji, with highly influential ayatollahs such as Iraq’s Ali al-Sistani not wholly subscribing to Khomeini’s Wilayat al-Faqih, the sanctity of the authority has prohibited inter-sectarian conflict of any significant kind. This is in stark contrast to inter-Salafist violence prevalent in Syria and Iraq, or the Salafist targeting of other Sunni sub-sects (Sufis) and theocracies (Saudi Arabia).

A crucial byproduct of Iran’s de facto custody of Shi’ism has been the cross-pollination of Shi’ism and Persian nationalism. Iranians are conscious that they are inheritors of a grand history of Persian greatness. Iran’s status as the preeminent purveyor of Shi’ite theological currents (Najaf and Karbala notwithstanding) has rendered its strategic guidance the virtual command authority for the Middle East’s vast Shi’ite communities. With the unitary nature of Iran’s clerical-governmental leadership, the centuries-ingrained Persian chauvinism tends to inflect the strategic expressions of Iranian religious thought. No marja or ayatollah has directly questioned Iran’s religious legitimacy, as Sunni extremist leaders routinely do of Saudi Arabia.

Iranian leadership, although highly religious in nature, is pragmatic, pursuing regional hegemony with Shi’ism as its vehicle. Nationalism, anti-colonialism, and anti-imperialism have come to define Shi’ite fundamentalism, a result of the “red Shi’ism” of Ali Shariati and the radical Left’s influence on Khomeini and other anti-Shah thinkers during the 1960s and 1970s. Iran’s grand strategy, in fact, has more in common with Bolshevism than with Sunni takfirism. From its alliances with the Communist (that is to say atheist) Tudeh Party during the Iranian Revolution, to its empowerment of the region’s 30 million Sunni Kurds (which it has been doing since the early 1980s), to Hezbollah’s alliance with the Christian Aounists, the militant Shi’ite movement has proven to be pragmatic and strategically talented.

The Sunni jihadist movement, conversely, busies itself with internecine conflict (see Daesh versus Jabhat al-Nusra for but one salient example) and draconian massacres of civilian populations. The Iranian leadership, meanwhile, has formed a kind of Shi’ite Comintern (admittedly, not so clearly organized) comprised of allied militant groups across the Muslim world and beyond.

Although Iran is full of many liturgical illogicalities typical of a theocratic administration, when it matters, the Islamic Republic has proven time and time again, as have its prized proxies, that discipline and strategic foresight, not irrational fanaticism, rule the day. One only needs to drive through Hezbollah neighborhoods in Beirut to understand that it is not exactly Daesh-controlled Raqqa.

Iran’s military professionalism illuminates the point. Throughout the Middle East, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)’s Quds Force is the only strategic military organization, beside U.S. Army Special Forces, conducting long-term force multiplication among local guerrilla forces of any significant size and scope. In addition to Quds Force operatives, Iran has even deployed regular army commandos to the fighting, a risky commitment its Sunni state rivals lack. The military alliance of Iran, Russia, the Assad government, Hezbollah and Iraq’s myriad Shi’ite militias has proven strategically decisive in Syria.

The Sunni powers, because of a lack of unity both with each other and with their militant sub-state coreligionists, have no discernable strategy in place in Syria, Iraq, or Yemen.

Ultimately, it is the purity – the life-or-death importance of ideological details – that prevents the extended Salafi-Wahhabi-Takfiri community from challenging Shi’ite geostrategy and organization. In many ways, the Shi’ite militant movement is simply Iranian imperial nationalism under the guise of Islam. It is the preeminence of this pursuit of hegemony that has allowed it to compromise the most irrational (if doctrinally accurate) elements of fundamentalism – namely, inter-religious alliances with Sunnis, Christians and, covertly at least, Jews. This is because Shi’ite fundamentalism is based primarily on the idea of resistance, not extreme literal adherence to Koranic text. Hence the deep, decades-old ties between Lebanese Christians and Shi’ites, which has culminated in Aoun’s (and Hezbollah’s) victory.

Inside the Washington beltway, imprecise and generic umbrella terms such as “radical Islamic terrorism” and “jihadist” are routinely employed to refer to a complex, multifarious, and distinct milieu of often-militant political forces that exist from Africa across the Middle East to South Asia. More mundanely, little distinction is made between organizations like Hezbollah and al-Qaeda.

For officials in Washington to come to terms with the changing power dynamics in the Middle East, Iran’s historical arc and its guidance of Shi’ite fundamentalism need to be understood. Although events such as Iraq’s laborious retaking of Mosul from Daesh are good PR for the U.S., the primary geostrategic benefactor is the Islamic Republic.

The incoming Trump Administration would do well to understand the differences between the Sunni and Shi’ite fundamentalist movements, and to strategically reassess accordingly. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that better relations with a rational Islamic Republic could foster the kind of alliance balancing the U.S. engaged in during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, which benefited American regional policy by allowing the U.S. to better navigate the complex political and security dynamics of the Middle East.

For this to be achieved, however, a realization needs to occur within the American foreign policy establishment: Iran and Hezbollah are not the irrational nihilists of Daesh – not even close.

Gulf State Analytics originally published this article on December 6, 2016. Justin McCauley, based in the UAE, is an analyst at Gulf State Analytics.

By Scott N. Romaniuk and Tobias Burgers

Canada has long been known for being a disarmament champion. 2016 marked the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the “Ottawa Process,” which eventually led to the Landmine Convention (Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production, and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines, including their destruction). Canada has also played a crucial role as a conflict mediator, has been a global peace broker for decades, and engaged in a wide range of humanitarian aid efforts. However, Canada has, despite its many initiatives and endeavors, strayed far from the “road to disarmament” over the previous decade.

For years, the Canadian government has made billions of dollars on the sale of advanced weapons to countries, many of which boast less than pristine human rights records. Outlined within the “Report on Exports of Military Goods from Canada,” nearly $30 million CAD was the export value associated with arms sold to Algeria, over $10 million CAD to Egypt, $2 million to Iraq, $5 million CAD to Jordan, nearly $2 million CAD to Nigeria, $6 million CAD to Thailand, and close to $100 million CAD to Saudi Arabia – a country having earned the lowest ranking on human rights by Freedom House and Amnesty International, among other watchdogs.

Over the past 12 months, Canada has vaulted to a shining 6th place among the world’s top arms sellers and has recently claimed its place as the No. 2 arms dealer to the Middle East. It is a cardinal moment for Ottawa, which has never held the position. Today, only 5 countries sell more weapons around the world. Increased activity in Canadian arms sales converges with Canada’s decision not to sign an international treaty designed to regulate the global arms trade.

The United Nations (UN) Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) came into force on December 24, 2014 but Ottawa has opted-out and instead joined the club of non-signatories: Russia, China, Syria, and North Korea. The United Kingdom (UK), Germany, France, and Spain signed without hesitation, and even the United States (US) signed the treaty though has yet to ratify it. The Canadian government’s official position was that its internal control mechanisms were strong enough to manage the export of its military items.

Criticism against Canada’s business ventures with governments looking to arm themselves against internal and external threats to national security position their case on the issue of human rights and abuses that have led to the deaths of many innocent people. The case has been made that the sale of arms is simply good business, good for the Canadian economy, and good for the global economic pulse. However, such an argument is too one-sided, and fails to put into perspective the consequences of selling arms to countries with such spotty human right records.

The Canadian defense sector is comprised predominantly of companies dealing in electronics and firms focusing on the production of sub-systems that eventually become part of a final product. Communications and radar equipment, sensory equipment and electronics used for navigation, other computer systems and software, and various defense systems comprise this sector. Light armed vehicles (LAVs) and an assortment of munitions are also largely produced as part of Canada’s defense sector.

Over a decade ago, the Canadian aerospace industry contributed some 80,000+ civilian jobs to the Canadian economy. Today, the aerospace industry provides more than $28 billion to Canada’s GDP and contributes some 211,000 jobs. 70% of the industry’s activity focuses on manufacturing. 2015 Defense industry statistics have been published and made available through the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada (AIAC). There is little doubt that Canadians have profited from the production of weaponized machines and components even if they are not entirely aware of where they are going.

Whereas the Ottawa Convention once showed Canada’s determination to achieve disarmament and that cooperative efforts toward that goal are indeed possible, Canada’s role in the global arms trade today exemplifies that the opposite holds true, which is all the more contradictory given Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s humanitarian and diplomatic rhetoric. Indeed, Canada occupies a unique global position, demonstrating that even countries determined to build peace cannot abandon the claim that conflict and war fuel the economy, provide for millions of Canadians, and that doing so under the guise of responsible conviction is feasible.

Canada has faced budgetary pressures just as the US has, and in keeping necessary production going, Canada has turned to buyers categorized by Ottawa’s defense relationships. Outside of the US, the UK was the largest export destination in 2015 ($100 million CAD of military exports). Saudi Arabia held second place for Canadian military exports in 2015 with total sales to Riyadh accounting for 14% of Canada’s military exports.

Thailand accounted for a sizeable purchase of Canadian arms and components. However, in 2016, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister, Stéphane Dion prevented the sale of arms to Thailand in favor of a $15 billion CAD export of military vehicles arranged under the Stephen Harper administration to Saudi Arabia – a country scoring lower on its overall freedom rating than Thailand. Canada’s LAVs are being sold to the Saudi Arabian National Guard, which is tasked with protecting against internal threats and could be used against the country’s Shia Muslim minority.

General Dynamics Land Systems Canada (GDLS-C) retains a 15-year contract to produce military vehicles for Saudi Arabia and is still collecting the necessary materials to begin production. The deal is expected to create 3,000 Canadian jobs.

Thailand is currently not engaged in military action with any other country, however, internal security tensions are on the rise, and it still has a longstanding insurgency in its southern provinces, meaning there is demand among the government for military hardware from Canada. The same kind of hardware Canada has provided to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has seen its need for new military hardware increase rapidly over the past few years. As a result of its military engagements in Yemen – labeled part of the Sunni-Muslim Kingdom’s Cold War in the Middle East – it has been incurring military losses, meaning it only stands to reason that lost military equipment needs to be replaced. Canada is in the midst of entrenching itself in a position of providing those states with the requisite weaponry to replace such losses and maintain their military postures.

Under the export control policy guidelines that were put in place in 1986, many of Canada’s sales contradict Ottawa’s institutional position on the export of military good and technologies. For instance, Canada claims to control its exports to countries that pose a threat to Canada and its allies, that are either part of or that can easily become part of hostilities, and to countries with governments associated with persistent records of egregious action and violations of the human rights of the people they are tasked with protecting. Adding to the existing controversy is the assessment process undertaken by Ottawa in its lead-up to signing export permits. This process lacks transparency and it is difficult to decipher just how Ottawa follows through on its risk analyses.

Canada’s military exports demonstrate that Ottawa is almost certainly looking for the biggest buyers of weapons and technology. Countries around the world are increasingly showing interest in acquiring advanced weapons component and technologies, and military platforms from Western countries. Canadian-made weapons now fuel the hybrid war ongoing in eastern Ukraine – a war in which both the regular and irregular armed forces on the both the Russian and Ukrainian sides have violated the laws of war. The 2004 sale of Bell 4I2 Helicopters to Pakistan brought home about $346 million CAD with a further $22 million CAD from the sale of aircraft machinery to Indonesia. Canada also sold millions of dollars worth of “Twin Pac” helicopter engines to Indonesia during the Cold War.

Ottawa has no control over the use of goods and technologies after they have been exported, unearthing the paradoxical side of Canada’s positions on disarmament that while states may be big buyers of Canadians arms and arms components, states can also act as important conduits for doing business with violent non-state actors (VSNAs). Arms acquisition by states in volatile regions will likely have an impact but it is difficult to say where exactly that impact will be. Effects can be seen externally and internally but one might expect to see a greater impact on the domestic side of the ledger. Enhanced arms sales are not being considered in a much broader and more strategic context of intra-state, inter-state, and regional/global security.

Much like the US, Canada is increasingly paying attention to the economic potential of becoming involved in proxy wars. In many conflicts around the world, it has become an unsettling truth that military power is the only way to reach a solution. Given that many countries do not have the necessary military industry to support their wars against other states and armed groups, they are able to turn to countries like Canada for their military equipment.

This article was published by Geopolitical Monitor.com

A recent Vox eBook examined the the potential issues facing various EU members when it comes to negotiating with the UK over Brexit. This column, taken from the eBook, examines Spain’s negotiating position, including the possible stumbling block of Gibraltar.

By Luis Garicano*

Brexit was a bombshell in Spain, its impact surpassing that of the general election which the country itself was holding three days later. Spaniards were stunned, worried about both the political and economic implications. Indeed, according to a Bertelsmann study of public opinion in large European countries (De Vries and Hoffman 2016), Spain was the country most against Brexit, with 64% of Spaniards declaring their position against it.

Unlike in other countries, the worry does not extend to a potential contagion into Spain’s politics. Among the mainstream political parties only one, Podemos, has flirted with Euro-scepticism (it once advocated leaving the Euro, as the Communist Party, one of its allies, still does). In fact, Spaniards have historically been among the strongest supporters of the European integration project (as well as among its main beneficiaries). As of 2016, 74% of Spaniards would vote ‘Remain’ if a similar referendum were held in Spain (De Vries and Hoffman 2016). However, Spain is worried about the future, and there is generalised concern about what Brexit may mean for Spain and for Europe. There are several reasons for this.

First, the UK-Spain relationship is the picture perfect illustration of the economic and political benefits that the EU, and the Single Market, can bring about, as I show in the next section – large flows of people in both directions, as British retirees seek out Spain’s quality of life and Spanish youth seek jobs and education in the UK; a peaceful, workable non-solution to the Gibraltar question, one of the most intractable territorial disputes left in Europe; large flows in trade of goods and services in both directions; and very large foreign direct investments by companies from both countries in the other. Untangling this web, as a hard Brexit would require, would be very costly to companies and workers all over Spain (and, of course, the UK). This economic cost is a particular concern given that the country is just coming out of a brutal economic crisis and levels of unemployment are over 20%.

More broadly, Spain wants a strong Europe. All political parties in the Spanish parliament are in favour of strengthening the Union, including deepening the Eurozone towards a fiscal union, common border and security policy, immigration policy, and so on. Spaniards worry that Brexit may be the beginning of the unravelling of a European project that has been a crucial pillar of Spain’s return to democracy and prosperity.

Finally, Spaniards’ worry also has a more local angle, as the referendum has potential – albeit unclear – implications for the regional dispute in Catalonia. A growing minority of Catalans have been agitating for independence for Catalonia. The way Europe deals with a potentially independent Scotland’s likely accession request in the aftermath of Brexit is being closely followed in Spain, even though all parties acknowledge the crucial differences between the constitutional and legal status of Scotland and Catalonia.

In spite of these worries, some in Spain see opportunities in Brexit. Most notably, the Spanish government sees Gibraltar as a colony of the UK on Spanish soil. There is unconcealed glee in the Spanish conservative government about the broad support that remaining in the EU has commanded in Gibraltar, and many in government see a unique opportunity to solve an issue that has enormous symbolic value to many Spaniards. Spain will also fight to attract the financial service industry and manufacturing jobs that may abandon the UK post Brexit.

A highly integrated market: The four freedoms in action

As we pointed out above, Spain is one of the clear success stories of the European integration project, and the Spain-UK relationship in particular features a highly integrated market, with benefits from trade widely spread among the entire population. Spanish and UK citizens have taken advantage of the four freedoms that are basic to the Single Market: free movement of goods, services, people and capital.

Free movement of people has resulted in huge bilateral migration flows. Migration will be the crux of the negotiations, as it was the key driver of the Brexit vote and limiting freedom of movement within the EU is likely to be the one request by the UK that is most difficult for the EU to accept.

And yet the picture of bilateral flows between Spain and the UK could not be further from that painted by the ‘Brexiteer’ politicians Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage. In fact, Spain has quite an unusual position among European countries in that the balance of immigration is “favourable” to the UK – many more Brits choose to live in Spain than Spaniards in the UK.

In the age of EasyJet, the estimates vary hugely, but Eurostat estimates that 306,000 UK-born citizens have Spanish residence. However, if one also counts those who live for part of the year in Spain, the figure reaches a stunning figure one million full- and part-time residents, according to a study by the Institute for Public Policy Research (Finch 2010). On the other side, official Spanish Statistical Institute (INE) estimates suggest that 102,498 Spaniards live in the UK, although again the true number is likely much larger.¹

The potential issues at stake that must be sorted out in negotiations for all of these citizens are many. From access to health care, to housing and work permits, to visa-free travel, Brexit may change it all, and according to multiple press reports, it appears to be a source of anxiety and even anguish, particularly for less mobile UK pensioners in Spain.

The freedom to trade goods and services has resulted in large bilateral flows and a substantial trade surplus for Spain. The most recent data (released by ONS in March 2016) show that Spain exported goods and services to the UK worth a total of £24 billion in 2014 and imported £14.8 billion.² Thus Spain had a bilateral trade surplus of £9.2 billion, well over 1% of Spanish GDP (depending on the volatile exchange rate). After Germany (which had a £25 billion surplus), this is in absolute terms the largest positive imbalance with the UK of any country in the EU, and the fourth largest worldwide after Germany, China and Norway.

This overall surplus is composed of a surplus in the trade of both goods and services. The UK is the fourth largest market for Spain’s goods and services, accounting for 7% of the total. In terms of goods trade, the UK is particularly important for the exports of transport equipment (20%), machine tools, chemicals, metals, mining, and vegetables.

The large services surplus is due mostly to tourism. The UK is the main buyer of Spain’s tourism, with 15.8 million British tourists visiting Spain in 2015 and the UK accounting for 21.1% of total tourism income (Greenwood 2016).

Thus it is hard to overstate the risk that a ‘hard Brexit’ would pose, through trade, for Spain’s economy. No country is more vulnerable than Spain to the trade disruption, given the trade surplus (in GDP terms), and no country has a larger interest in the softest of Brexits. There is a large downside for both countries from any disruption to all of these flows – and no conceivable upside – from the negotiations. All that remains to ask is how bad will the damage be.

Freedom of capital movement has resulted in enormous FDI flows. According to a recent report (Greenwood 2016), the UK is the main destination for Spain’s FDI, accounting for 14% of the total outflow. This outflow has been directed particularly towards finance, telecoms and electricity. Spain has the largest investment in the UK’s financial services of all EU countries, and is second worldwide after the US, through two of the largest Spanish banks (Santander and Sabadell). Almost one out of every five pounds of foreign investment in the UK’s banking sector is represented by these two Spanish banks (17%, according to Greenwood 2016). Both banks have huge exposure to the UK through their affiliates, with these affiliates accounting for around a quarter of their assets and profits in Q1 2015.

The flow in the opposite direction is also large. The UK is the fifth largest investor in Spain, focusing on telecoms and tobacco (Greenwood 2016).

In sum, the relationship is a clear success for the UK-led project of a European Single Market, and one that will be expensive for both parties to unravel. For the UK, the highest human and economic cost will be from unravelling the freedom of movement (with significant potential losses to large UK contingents of residents in Spain). For Spain, the main potential vulnerabilities are in trade and FDI flows.

For both, potentially enormous vulnerabilities derive from potential financial and macroeconomic turbulence as the new steady state is reached. This has the potential to be a really nasty transition.

Spain’s priorities

Spain´s has three priorities, which are not necessarily compatible.

1. The politics: Preserving the Union.

As one of the most pro-European countries, Spain is committed to preserving and deepening the Union. This obviously suggests that Spain will support the European Parliament involvement and the European Commission´s leadership in the negotiations, avoid obvious bilateral discussions (quiet discussions, one imagines, must be always taking place), and push for an arrangement that falls neatly into existing categories – that is EEA or Switzerland, or if not, Canada. Thus political considerations would lead us to expect Spain to militate strongly against intermediate “soft” solutions such as that proposed by Pisani-Ferry et al. (2016).

2. The economics: Preserving the tangled web of the four freedoms.

The economics point in quite a different direction. As we have seen, the UK-Spain relationship is a very tangled web indeed, with large benefits to both parties, and, in trade of goods and services, particularly to Spain. To disentangle it would involve massive costs. A hard Brexit is emphatically not in the interest of either the UK or Spain. The economics (unlike the politics) suggest that Spain would be likely to militate against any disruptive Brexit and look for middle of the road solutions. However, this pragmatism is unlikely to extend to all British aspirations. In particular, Spain has a very recent memory of large outward migration flows (throughout the period of the dictatorship) that have recently been revived again with the crisis, and it will be extremely difficult for the government to accept a limitation to the freedom of movement.

3. Gibraltar: A potential make or break issue.

Gibraltar, a small peninsula with large strategic value, was lost by Spanish after its capture in 1704, during the War of Spanish Succession, by an Anglo-Dutch fleet and was ceded to Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. After multiple wars and sieges, it has become a highly succesful enclave within the EU with a high degree of self-government. The status of Gibraltar, officially a colony, is nevertheless contentious, as is the status of its airport, which was built on land that the Treaty of Utrecht set as neutral territory.

The management of this dispute has been greatly facilitated in the context of the EU. The border between Spain and Gibraltar was only reopened in 1985, and since then trade and people have flowed freely between the two territories. Gibraltar has become the second richest territory in the Union.

The current Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, José García-Maragallo, has stated clearly – and his position has been echoed by the Spanish Permanent Representative to the United Nations on a recent meeting on decolonisation – that after Brexit a new understanding must be found, and that it must involve co-sovereignty of the UK and Spain over Gibraltar. In his words, ”they will have to choose between British outside the Union or Hispano-British inside the EU”.  Only co-sovereignty will allow Gibraltar to have the treaties apply to it.

In the solution the Spanish government is pushing for, Gibraltar citizens would preserve access to the European Single Market, obtain both nationalities, and conserve a large degree of autonomy. Spain and the UK would be jointly in charge of defence, foreign affairs, border control and immigration. Crucially, the Spanish flag would fly on Gibraltar.³

How much of an obstacle this issue – tiny in terms of welfare for the two countries, but with huge symbolic value – may pose in the negotiations remains to be seen, but it is sure to have a considerable weight in them.

What can we expect Spain’s negotiating position to be?

From the perspective of its commercial, investment, and migratory interests, Spain could be willing to accept a soft Brexit, that is, a modified EEA with some governance mechanism for the participation of the UK in joint decision making.

However, Spain has been adopting a low profile in the international arena for many years now, and its Europeanism suggests that it is highly unlikely to deviate from the position taken by France and Germany, and will thus demand that the Commission leads and the Parliament has a say in the negotiations, once Article 50 is invoked. Spain will likely be a disciplined soldier on the European side, and demand that access to the Single Market continues to require a commitment to all four freedoms, and most notably to freedom of movement of people inside the Union.

A potential stumbling block is Gibraltar. Everything we have heard from the Spanish government up till now suggests that it is unlikely any deal in which Gibraltar retains access in any form to the EU will be reached that does not involve joint (Spanish and British) sovereignty over the peninsula.

The Gibraltar issue highlights the likely result of the negotiation between the EU27 and the UK – the UK’s death by a thousand cuts. Every country involved in the bargaining has veto power, and every one of them is likely to have a shopping list – some issue that is important enough to block progress. For the Poles it may be freedom of movement, for the Irish it may have to do with Northern Ireland. The ability of the UK government to resist these demands, with the clock ticking, simply does not seem to be there.

As a result, the UK is likely to find itself, at the end of these two years, with a very bad deal. By the time 27 countries have finished putting together their “Yes, but what about Gibraltar?” like objections, the pro-Brexit politicians will either have to start explaining to voters the distance between the fantasy they invented and the reality, or be prepared to back off from Brexit.

Editor’s note: This column first appeared as a chapter in the VoxEU eBook What To Do With the UK? EU perspectives on Brexit, available to download here.

About the author:
* Luis Garicano, Research Fellow with the Productivity and Innovation Programme, Centre for Economic Performance; Professor of Economics and Strategy, Departments of Management and of Economics, London School of Economics; and Research Fellow, CEPR

Authors’ note: In the interest of full disclosure: I am a Spanish citizen, my kids leave in Holland, and my job is in London. Thus my life will be directly affected by the negotiations which are the object of this chapter, as will the lives of many other UK and European residents.

Even though the author is in charge of economic, industrial and innovation policy for the Ciudadanos Party in Spain, the analysis presented here is undertaken in a personal capacity as an academic observer and LSE professor. None of what is here written should be taken to be the position of the party or a recommendation of what it should do; it most emphatically is not. I thank  Carles Casajuana, the previous Ambassador of Spain to the UK, for a useful conversation and Jesús Fernandez Villaverde for comments on the first draft. All errors are my own.

References:
De Vries, C. and I. Hoffman (2016), “Keep Calm and Carry on: What Europeans think about a possible Brexit”, EUpinions 2016/2, BertelsmannStiftung.

Finch, T. (2010), Global Brit: Making the most of the British diaspora, London: Institute for Public Policy Research.

Greenwood, N. “Referéndum de Reino Unido sobre la permanencia en la UE: consecuencias para las economias británica, de la UE, y Espanola”, Cuadernos de Información Económica, Confederación Española de Cajas de Ahorro. Mayo Junio 2016.

Pisani-Ferry, J., N. Röttgen, A. Sapir, P. Tucker and P. Wolff (2016), “Europe after Brexit: a proposal for continental partnership,” Bruegel External Publication, Brussels.

Endnotes:
[1] On the other hand, in the last (2011) census, 79,814 Spanish-born residents were recorded in England and Wales.

[2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/internationaltrade/adhocs/005436annualimportsandexportsofuktradebycountryfrom1999to2014

[3] For a good description of the positions of Spain and Gibraltar on these issues, see the article by Andrés Machado in El Mundo, “Picardo repica a Maragallo: Ni en cuatro años ni en 4000 ondeara la bandera Española en Gibraltar”, 6 October 2016.

Scientists have found evidence in a chunk of bedrock drilled from nearly two miles below the summit of the Greenland ice sheet that the sheet nearly disappeared for an extended time in the last million years or so.

The finding casts doubt on assumptions that Greenland has been relatively stable during the recent geological past, and implies that global warming could tip it into decline more precipitously than previously thought. Such a decline could cause rapid sea-level rise. The findings appear this week in the leading journal Nature.

The study is based on perhaps earth’s rarest geologic sample: the only bit of bedrock yet retrieved from the ice sheet’s base, more than two decades ago. The authors say that chemical isotopes in it indicate that the surface was exposed to open sky for at least 280,000 years over the last 1.4 million years. The reason would have been natural, probably tied to cyclic natural climate changes that have caused ice ages to wax and wane. The scientists say that in the most conservative interpretation, there might have been only one ice-free period that ended 1.1 million years ago. But, more likely, they say, the ice vanished multiple times for shorter periods closer to the present. Greenland contains about 684,000 cubic miles of ice–enough to raise global sea levels about 24 feet if it were to melt completely.

“Unfortunately, this makes the Greenland ice sheet look highly unstable,” said lead author Joerg Schaefer, a paleoclimatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “If we lost it in periods of natural forcing, we may lose it again.” With human-induced warming now well underway, loss of the Greenland ice has roughly doubled since the 1990s; during the last four years by some estimates, it shed more than a trillion tons.

No one knows exactly what it might take to make the ice collapse, or how long that might take. Some models project that it will melt partially or completely over the next 2,500 to 10,000 years, depending on the amount of greenhouse gases humans pour into the air. Ice loss from Greenland now accounts for about a quarter of the currently rising sea level of about 3 millimeters a year, but this could accelerate. Projections of sea-level rise during this century hover around 3 or 4 feet, but many, including the one from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, do not take Greenland into account. More drastic models put the potential rise much higher.

Coauthor Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Pennsylvania State University, said the study “doesn’t say that tomorrow Greenland falls into the ocean. But the message is, if we keep heating up the world like we’re doing, we’re committing to a lot of sea-level rise.” This could take centuries or millennia, he said.

The rock core was recovered in July 1993 by a U.S. scientific team working in southeast Greenland at the highest part of the ice sheet. It took them five summers to drill through 3,056 meters (about 10,000 feet) of ice and sediment. Then they punched 1.55 meters (5 feet) into the underlying bedrock. The ice cores have since formed the basis of many important paleoclimate studies. Scientists tried early on to analyze the rock as well, but only in the last year or so have lab techniques become sophisticated enough to tease out the needed information, said coauthor Robert Finkel of the University of California, Berkeley, who participated in the ice drilling.

Within the rock, the scientists found traces of radioactive beryllium-10 and aluminum-26–isotopes produced by tiny particles from outer space that constantly bombard the planet’s surface. The isotopes decay at known rates, and since they cannot be created if the rock is covered with ice, their abundance can be tied to how long ago the rocks were exposed. Modelers agree that the region where the core came from would be one of the last to melt were the ice sheet to disappear. The authors thus concluded that the ice sheet must have been down to less than 10 percent of its current size when this site was ice-free.

The question of how stable the Greenland ice sheet has been in recent geologic times has been controversial. While some recent studies report evidence that it has remained largely unchanged, there is also evidence that it disappeared in the more distant past, and several studies suggesting that the ice wasted to various extents at different points in more recent times. Studies of seafloor sediments off various parts of Greenland have found remains of pollen and other materials dated to a periodic warming cycle about 400,000 years ago, and this has been interpreted to mean that Greenland could have been largely ice-free then. Other studies suggest that the ice surface was substantially reduced during the last major warming cycle some 120,000 years ago, raising sea levels by 12 to 18 feet. But these studies give no clear picture of how long such episodes lasted, and the evidence they use is less direct. “Here we have no question–we interrogated the surface directly,” said Robert Finkel. “Was there ice over you or not?”

Jeff Severinghaus, a paleoclimatologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who was not involved in the study, called the evidence “very direct and incontrovertible.” The study “challenges some prevailing thought on the stability of the ice sheet in the face of anthropogenic warming,” he said. “We can now reject some of the lowest sea-level projections, because the models underpinning them assume continuous ice cover during the last million years.”

Thomas Stocker, a climate scientist at Switzerland’s University of Bern who also was not involved, said, “It shows that the Greenland ice sheet has been much more dynamic than thought.” He agreed that the results have implications for projections of sea level rise.

Scientists have been arguing back and forth about the potential forces that might tip the Greenland ice into quick decline. These could include water percolating from the surface to lubricate the ice sheet’s bottom, or massive ice streams discharging icebergs into the ocean. “This study shows we are missing something big about how the system works, and we need to find out what it is, fast,” said Schaefer.

While the rock core took five years to emerge and more than 20 years for lab techniques to catch up, such research may move faster now. A consortium of U.S. scientists has designed a new drill capable of penetrating deep ice much faster, with the aim of bringing up bedrock rather than ice cores. The apparatus could take a half-dozen samples each year from Greenland or Antarctica said Severinghaus, who is involved in the project. But it has not yet been deployed; the obstacle is funding, which would probably have to come from the U.S. government.

Sri Lanka’s President Maithripala Sirisena requested citizens not to create unnecessary fears among the people and in other sectors about the Indo-Lanka trade agreement.

“That agreement will be signed after presenting it to the Cabinet and then to the Parliament. If there will be contrary matters in that we will remove them and will sign it as an agreement which will be accepted by everybody,” Sirisena added.

Sirisena made these remarks at the voting of financial heads of the Defense Ministry, presented to the Parliament on Tuesday.

“As a government, we will come into new agreements not only with India but also with all economically strong countries from which we can get economic cooperation,” Sirisena further stated.

Sirisena lamented that misleading and incorrect opinions on the actions taken by the government are being spread by some interested parties. “Those who consider the national security in the country and the betterment of the people, should act according to their own conscious,” he said.

“The new constitution is still in the status of discussion and under the amendments. The government has not come into an agreement on that as yet,” the President stated.

Sirisena said that the government considers the ideas of the scholars and intellectuals when coming into trade or commercial agreements, establishing a new constitutions and bringing new acts.

“If the national security is used for the political advantages and gaining of power in the future, everybody will have to be saddened again. In this program for national security, not only criticism, but also proposals on better plans and suggestions are also essential,” Sirisena further stated.

“The government is committed to fulfill its responsibilities for the national security. We will not weaken the security sectors but strengthen them. The government will take steps to provide required training, modern technology and the resources to our security sectors, to be able to face the situations like cyber crimes,” Sirisena said.

By Salvador Llaudes*

After almost a year and two inconclusive general elections, Spain finally has a Government, led again by Mariano Rajoy, the President of the centre-right Popular Party. Unlike the situation in the previous term, his Government lacks an absolute majority, and therefore a more important role for the Parliament is envisaged. The new situation raises at least three questions: Just how damaging has this ‘lost’ year been for Spain? How will the country now play its cards in the international arena, especially in the EU post-Brexit? And will the new role of the Parliament be useful for Spanish foreign policy?

As underlined in a recent ‘non-paper’ prepared by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, having a caretaker government has had negative consequences regarding the international and European projection of Spain, including a decrease in its influence. A caretaker government, by definition, does not have the capacity to fully exercise power, which has meant a loss of pro-activeness and thus the ability to launch new initiatives and respond forcefully to the various challenges facing the country. It has also not been able to ratify political agreements or even renew the mandates of the country’s ambassadors abroad and been obliged to cancel several State visits and summits.

n this situation, Spain had to face the negotiations with David Cameron for the “February Agreement”, which aimed to avoid a Brexit. Obviously, the role played by the Government was very limited. And since the UK’s vote to withdraw from the EU, the absence of Spain in the subsequent debate has been even more evident, as it hasn’t been invited to be part of the new ‘hard core’ of the EU, which is currently under construction. This new core includes Italy, aside from –obviously – Germany and France. Thus, Spain has not benefited so far from the opportunity that the Brexit vote presents to fill the space left by the UK in the European integration process.

The absence of a Government therefore has proven very damaging for the country. But in reality, Spain has been punching below its weight (especially in Europe) for at least the last decade. One can point to several explanations for this under-performance: the end of the success story in the EU with Spain’s entry into the euro club and Aznar’s Atlantic adventure in league with Tony Blair, following Bush and abandoning Spain’s traditional alignment with the Franco-German European core; the failure of the European Constitution in 2005 and the lack of a successive clear European perspective and leadership in Zapatero’s years; the continuous enlargements of the EU; and an economic crisis that has hit Spain especially hard.

However, not all is lost for this Iberian country. In the complicated period in which the EU is currently living, with some member states even calling into question basic values and policies of the European project, including the Schengen Agreement, Spain remains the country where the most pro-European attitudes are to be found, even if they are not as strong as they once were. Spain has not challenged Schengen, the euro, European External Action, a common migration and asylum policy or more economic integration. On the contrary, it is pushing for more of these same policies, which is well reflected by a political system that has no Eurosceptic parties in the Parliament. Moreover, the country’s economic recovery seems a reality as foreign direct investment is on the rise and projections of growth estimate a 3.2% increase for this year (it is growing the most among the ‘big countries’ in the eurozone, despite the long period with a caretaker Government). At the same time, and despite continued high levels of unemployment (19.3%), the rate has decreased 7% in only three years (at the beginning of 2013, it had reached a maximum of 26.3%).

In addition to these arguments and statistics, there is one change of symbolic importance for Spanish foreign policy in the new Cabinet: the appointment of Alfonso Dastis as the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, replacing the very pro-European José Manuel García Margallo. Dastis is an interesting choice for these times of uncertainty in the EU, as he is the former Permanent Representative of Spain to the European Union and a career diplomat who has worked almost his entire career on EU affairs and relations between Spain and the Union. While it is true that he is not a politician and will therefore have to work to gain his colleagues’ trust, and that he lacks experience in other traditional areas of importance for Spain, such as Latin America and the Mediterranean, his new position should mean a renewed impulse in Spain’s attitude towards the European Union.

In the future, all policies (including foreign policy) will be more closely monitored by a Parliament that will likely have more power than before. For that reason, Rajoy’s Government (including the MFA-led by Dastis) needs to change its approach in this new term (which could be either short or long – it is yet to be seen) towards that institution. The new situation does not necessarily mean that the Parliament will act by systematically blocking the initiatives of the Government, but rather that there will be a strong requirement of more consensus between the parties. This, in turn, could eventually also result in a stronger position in various fora, including negotiations at the European Council level.

The best news of the last few days is that Spain finally has a new Government. This whole year has been a lost opportunity for the country, especially as regards the reconfiguration of power in the EU after the UK voted to leave the club. Nevertheless, and bearing in mind the difficult situation in the continent (2017 promises to be a tumultuous year with contested elections in three of the founding member states – the Netherlands, France and Germany), the still-solid foundations of Spanish Europeanism both across the political spectrum and throughout Spanish society, the country’s strong economic recovery, the fresh leadership in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the potentially constructive role the Parliament can play, give hope to a country that faces a new opportunity to regain centrality in the European project.

About the author:
*Salvador Llaudes, Analyst, Elcano Royal Institute | @sllaudes

Source:
This article was published by Elcano Royal Institute. This text was first published at the European Policy Institutes Network (EPIN) on December 2016.

By Ben Flanagan

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has been slapped down over controversial comments he made regarding the UK’s key ally Saudi Arabia.

The UK government was forced to distance itself from remarks by Johnson, made at a recent conference in Rome involving religion and proxy wars.

Prime Minister Theresa May’s official spokeswoman said that while the premier had “full confidence” in Johnson, his comments were his own personal view and did not reflect government policy.

The Foreign Office was also keen to emphasize the UK’s good relations with Saudi Arabia following Johnson’s remarks, which many commentators saw as a diplomatic blunder.

“As the foreign secretary made very clear on Sunday, we are allies with Saudi Arabia and support them in their efforts to secure their borders and protect their people,” the office told Arab News in a statement.

“Any suggestion to the contrary is wrong and misinterpreting the facts.”

Sources in the British government confirmed to Arab News that Johnson is still intending to travel to Saudi Arabia this weekend, where he is expected to engage in talks with government officials.

The visit will come just days after The Guardian newspaper published footage of Johnson at a conference in Rome last week, in which he broke with convention by publicly criticizing a UK ally.

The timing of the news was particularly unfortunate, given that it was around the same time Theresa May was speaking in Bahrain, where she pledged to boost defense ties with the Gulf, and acknowledged the “threat that Iran poses to the Gulf and to the wider Middle East.”

Chris Doyle, director of the London-based Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, said that Johnson’s comments will not be well-received in the Gulf.

“They won’t be seen as positive and constructive at all,” he said of Johnson’s remarks. “I think that Saudi Arabia will take this very badly — and perhaps not just Saudi Arabia.”

May’s official spokeswoman did not specify whether Johnson will apologize for his remarks.

Doyle suggested that the foreign secretary is more likely to claim that some of his comments were taken out of context, and not directly aimed at Saudi Arabia.

“There is quite a lot of room for interpretation for his comments in a number of areas,” Doyle told Arab News.

By Sinisa Jakov Marusic

Nikola Gruevski, leader of Macedonia’s main ruling VMRO DPMNE party, has been condemned for suggesting that if 19th and 20th century Macedonian freedom fighters were alive today, they would assassinate his main political opponent, Zoran Zaev, head of the Social Democrats.

“This breaks all the limits … It is inhumanely low and shameful to threaten an opposition leader with a death sentence, whatever he might be … There are radicals from all political sides who may interpret this as a call for a lynch,” university professor Nenad Markovic said.

While Markovic sees Gruevski’s statement as a message directed mainly to VMRO DPMNE supporters to close ranks ahead of the December 11 elections, he said that such “sloppy political messages” could also motivate people to vote against them.

“Everyone who sees him or herself as at least a mild critic of a politician who sends these messages is now probably more motivated … to come out and vote against him,” Markovic said.

On Monday, addressing a party rally in the town of Delcevo, Gruevski claimed that if the leader of the Ottoman-era guerrilla organisation VMRO, Goce Delcev, were alive today, he would have sent one of his top revolutionaries to “end the story” with Zaev.

“If Delcev were alive today, he [Zaev] would not be able to even say hello to him. He would have been assigned only to Kjoseto [one of his henchmen] to end the story with this kind of man,” Gruevski told the rally.

Delcevo, a town named after the Macedonian national hero, was the site of an opposition rally just several days before at which Zaev said that Gruevski had broken all of Delcev’s principles for a free and prosperous Macedonia over the ten years since his party had been in power.

Andon Kjoseto is a controversial figure in Macedonian history as, according to historical records and his own memoirs, he acted as an assassin for VMRO, mainly targeting people who were pronounced traitors to the cause of freeing Macedonia from Ottoman rule, including his own brother.

In 2014, the government courted controversy when it backed the erection of his bronze statue in front of Skopje’s main criminal court in which Kjoseto is depicted with a dagger in his hand.

Journalist and government critic Saso Ordanovski on Tuesday told A1 On news portal that Gruevski was trying to infuse fear among his critics and added that, “in a normal country, that alone would result in his election defeat”.

The high stakes elections comes against a backdrop of a longstanding crisis that revolves around opposition accusations that Gruevski masterminded the illegal wiretapping of some 20,000 people, including his own ministers. Gruevski has denied the claims.

One of Gruevski’s main punchlines in these elections has been that if Zaev, whom he deems a a traitor, comes to power, he would put into effect a secret plan to turn Macedonia into a federal state and formally divide it along ethnic lines between Macedonians and Albanians, who make up a quarter of the population. Zaev has denied this as a fabrication.

The opposition insists that since Gruevski’s party came to power in 2006, he has established a regime based on corruption and injustice.

The allegations of high-level crime, which the opposition insists are contained in the wiretaps they released in batches in 2015 are being investigated by the Special Prosecution, SJO,which was established last year as part of an EU-brokered political crisis deal.

Among other things, the SJO charges that Gruevski ordered a physical attack on the opposition mayor of the Centar municipality in Skopje, Andrej Zernovski [which he evaded], during protests in front of the municipal HQ in 2013.
– See more at: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/macedonia-s-gruevski-slammed-for-making-lynch-threats–12-07-2016#sthash.gNBmeieq.dpuf

With less than three weeks for the current incumbent to retire from service, the India government has still not appointed the new Chief of the 1.4 million strong Indian Army. The government claims it does not want alternate power centres. Certain other sources feel that a long pending demand for a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) is being considered, and the delay is due the decision in this regard. A third school of thought revolves around the internecine struggle for power within the army itself.

An earlier analysis by this author dealt with the politicization of armed forces in the US in the run up to the Presidential elections and what could be learnt from it in the Indian context.

With Donald Trump as the President-elect, he has announced a slew of names, former Generals to key appointments such as Secretary of Defence, National Security Advisor and Secretary of Homeland Security, and the most sought after Secretary of State may also go to a former General. The Indian state is yet to reach that level of trust for it to appoint a former General to such key appointments in Cabinet. In fact it is still unable to decide whether the principle of civilian control over the armed forces can be tested to the extent of having a 5-star General as its Chief of Defence Staff. Certain other factors add to the feisty debate.

The Indian government could not have come up with a weaker excuse as that of alternate power centres. The process of transition in the Indian Army (or the Air Force or the Navy) is meant to obviate just that. Within a reasonable period of the retirement date of the present incumbent General Dabir Suhag, ideally the officer next in line, Lieutenant General Praveen Bakshi should have been brought in as the Vice Chief. He would then have had adequate time to learn from his predecessor thus ensuring a smooth transition on 1st January 2017. Instead, Lieutenant General Bipin Rawat was brought in as the Vice Chief, leaving Bakshi to continue as the Eastern Army Commander. Even if for a moment this argument is ignored, with less than three weeks for him to take over, citing ‘alternate power centres’ seems a bit far fetched at this stage.

To the credit of Prime Minister Modi, he has stressed upon the need for senior defence management reforms and for jointness in command since he has entered office. Therefore if the appointment of the CDS is indeed being considered, would it not work in his favour by at least announcing the step than by keeping it under the wraps?

In any case, with the bureaucratic stranglehold on military affairs in India, it may well take more than even the Prime Minister for such a decision. As is well known, the buraeucracy suffers from an inexplicable fear of the power that the military is allowed to wield, and naturally a 5-star CDS seems to be the epitome of this unfounded fear. Unfounded because the armed forces in India have always taken pride on their apolitical stance. Yet the fear remains. And naturally again, the bureaucrats cleverly pass it on the political leadership in order to keep the armed forces subservient to their own will.

If a CDS is under consideration, then it remains to be seen how much clout is the government ready to yield to the office? Would it be a full fledged 5-star General’s appointment, functioning as the single point military contact to the political leadership, and with the three Service Chiefs being subordinate to him? This would essentially devolve operational powers from the Chiefs, leaving them free to deal with training, equipment and administration; in turn these operational issues then become the forte of the theatre commanders (Army Commanders as they are called).

However such a move would require extensive preparatory steps because it would effectively mean a revamp of structures as are known presently. Or would it just be another watered down version? A few years back the appointment of the Chief of Integrated Staff Committee (CISC) was just that- a watered down version to keep the debate at bay, with virtually no role as envisaged for the office.

What could not be a more unfortunate turn of events for one of the finest armies in the world, would be the internecine struggle for power within the army itself that is causing this undue delay. It is well known that an underlying current exists in the form of rivalry between two fighting arms, the Infantry and the Armoured Corps (Suhag is from the Infantry, as is his protege Rawat, while Bakshi is from the Armoured Corps).

Much has been documented as well, on this issue, including a deliberate attempt to undermine the service profiles of officers by policies which can be termed dubious at best. The veracity of this claim can be well established by the fact that even Courts of Law have questioned such policies being in vogue. If this were indeed true, it would definitely be the final nail in the coffin. The Indian Army may not have to look outwards for threats; its intrinsic ability to create fissures would suffice then.

Two Bangladeshi and a Dutch trade union have sued FIFA in a Swiss court in legal proceedings that challenge the world soccer body’s awarding to Qatar of the 2022 World Cup because of the Gulf state’s controversial labour regime. The case could call into question group’s status as a non-profit and, if successful, open the door to a wave of claims against FIFA as well as Qatar and other Gulf states who employ millions of migrant workers.

The legal proceedings come at a crucial moment in efforts by trade unions and human rights groups to work with Qatar on reforming its kafala or labour sponsorship system that puts workers at the mercy of their employers.

Those efforts, a unique undertaking in a part of the world in which governments by and large refuse to engage and repress or bar their critics, have already produced initial results. The question is how far Qatar intends to push ahead with reform and to what degree it will feel the need to do so in a world in which the rise of populism has pushed human and other rights onto the backburner.

Trade unions and human rights argue that Qatar since winning World Cup hosting rights six years ago has had sufficient time to bring its labour system in line with international standards and that its moves so far fall short of that.

A key milestone alongside the trade unions’ legal action and a separate Swiss judicial inquiry into the integrity of the Qatari World Cup bid is a looming deadline set by the International Labour Organization (ILO) for Qatar to act on promises of reform that it has made.

The ILO warned last March that it would establish a Commission of Inquiry if Qatar failed to act within a year. Such commissions are among the ILO’s most powerful tools to ensure compliance with international treaties. The UN body has only established 13 such commissions in its century-long history. The last such commission was created in 2010 to force Zimbabwe to live up to its obligations.

The Netherlands Trade Union Confederation (FNV), supported by the Bangladesh Free Trade Union Congress (BFTUC) and the Bangladesh Building and Wood Workers Federation (BBWWF), filed their complaint against FIFA on behalf of a Bangladeshi migrant worker, Nadim Sharaful Alam.

Mr. Alam was forced as is the norm in recruitment for Qatar to pay $4,300 to a recruitment agency in violation of Qatari law and FIFA standards that stipulate that employers should shoulder the cost of hiring. To raise the money, Mr. Alam had to mortgage land he owned, according to FNV lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld. Mr. Alam is also demanding compensation for being the victim of “modern slavery,” Ms. Zegveld said.

The FNV said in a statement that it wanted the court to rule that “FIFA acted wrongfully by selecting Qatar for the World Cup 2022 without demanding the assurance that Qatar observes fundamental human and labour rights of migrant construction workers, including the abolition of the kafala system.” FIFA is a Swiss incorporated legal entity.

The trade unions’ further demand that the court order FIFA to ensure that in the run-up to the World Cup workers’ rights are safeguarded by pressuring the Gulf state to enact and implement adequate and effective labour reforms takes on added significance following the group’s decision to take over responsibility for preparations of World Cups starting with the Qatar tournament.

A Swiss government-sponsored unit of the Paris-based Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which groups 34 of the world’s richest countries, last year defined FIFA as a multi-national rather than a non-profit that was bound by the OECD’s guidelines. The decision meant that the soccer group would be responsible for upholding of the human and labour rights of workers employed in Qatar on World Cup-related projects. A court ruling upholding that principle would reinforce FIFA’s status as a business rather than a non-governmental organization.

FIFA has repeatedly said that it was “fully committed to do its utmost to ensure that human rights are respected on all FIFA World Cup sites and operations and services directly related to the FIFA World Cup.” FIFA has recently included provisions for labour standards in World Cup contracts that kick in with the 2026 tournament.

The decision to take on responsibility for World Cups means that FIFA no longer can hide behind assertions that it has no legal authority to impose its will on host countries. In a letter to Ms. Zegveld and the trade unions’ Swiss lawyers date 16 October 2016, FIFA Deputy Secretary General Marco Villiger asserted however that “FIFA refutes any and all assertions…regarding FIFA’s wrongful conduct and liability for human rights violations taking place in Qatar.” Ms. Zegveld noted that FIFA had refrained from denying the violations themselves.

A recent survey of construction companies involved in World Cup-related infrastructure projects in Qatar called into question whether the Gulf state and FIFA were doing all they could do to enforce international labour standards.

Less than a quarter of the 100 companies approached for the survey by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre deemed it appropriate to respond. Less than 40 percent publicly expressed a commitment to human rights and only 17 percent referred to international standards. Only three companies publicly acknowledged rights of migrant workers.

A human rights researcher with extensive experience in studying recruitment of migrant labour in Asia said the system was controlled by an international crime syndicate that benefitted from collusion between corrupt senior government officials, company executives, and recruitment agencies that cooperated across national borders at the expense of millions of unskilled workers. “Billions of dollars are involved, all off the books, not taxed that come from migrant workers,” the researcher said.

A trade union court victory could open the door to an avalanche of cases by migrant workers demanding compensation for illegal recruitment practices as well as being victims of a system that curtails freedom of contract as well as basic human freedoms and workers’ rights. Those cases could target not only FIFA but also Qatar and other Gulf states that operate a kafala system. “This could just be the beginning,” said a trade union activist.