Quantcast
Channel: Eurasia Review
Viewing all 73339 articles
Browse latest View live

Iraq: Hundreds Detained In Degrading Conditions, Says HRW

0
0

The Iraqi interior ministry is holding at least 1,269 detainees, including boys as young as 13, without charge in horrendous conditions and with limited access to medical care at three makeshift prisons, Human Rights Watch said Monday. At least four prisoners have died, in cases that appear to be linked to lack of proper medical care and poor conditions and two prisoners’ legs have been amputated, apparently because of lack of treatment for treatable wounds.

Two detention centers are in the town of Qayyarah, 60 kilometers south of Mosul, and the third at a local police station in Hammam al-Alil, 30 kilometers south of Mosul. At least one detainee has been held in Qayyarah for six months, with many others detained since November 2016. According to the Qayyarah prison staff, at least 80 of their detainees are children under 18, with the youngest being 13. Children are in Hammam al-Alil as well.

“The deplorable prison conditions in Qayyarah and Hammam al-Alil show that the Iraqi government is not providing the most basic detention standards or due process,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Iraqis should understand better than most the dangerous consequences of abusing detainees in cruel prison conditions.”

On March 3, 2017, Human Rights Watch visited two of three houses in Qayyarah the Iraqi government has been using since retaking the area in August to detain men and boys suspected of being affiliated with the Islamic State (also known as ISIS). On March 12, researchers visited the local police station at Hammam al-Alil, which is holding 225 people accused of varying crimes, including ISIS-affiliation, in four rooms. Human Rights Watch was unable to interview detainees, but spoke to prison staff.

The prisons are under the authority of the Interior Ministry’s intelligence service, which provides services there together with the Justice Ministry. Staff said that Iraqi security and military services combatting ISIS hand over people they detain to the intelligence service, which holds the detainees in the facilities while individually interrogating them.

The intelligence service then takes the detainees before an investigative judge to assess whether there is enough evidence to bring charges for supporting ISIS under Provision 4 of the Federal Iraqi Counterterrorism Law (no. 13/2005). The judge then either orders their release or transfers the detainees to Baghdad to face charges.

Prison staff in Qayyarah said they had released about 80 detainees and transferred another 775 to Baghdad by early March 2017. Iraq’s Criminal Procedural Code (no. 23/1971) requires detaining authorities to bring detainees before an investigative judge within 24 hours. But Qayyarah prison staff said they had held some detainees for as long as four months, while Human Rights Watch learned of the case of the man held without charge for six months.

Prison staff in Qayyarah said that the investigative judge had cleared at least 300 men for release who are now being held unlawfully after the National Security Service, a security body under the prime minister with a mandate to screen people fleeing ISIS-controlled areas, intervened. Security forces’ failure to comply with a judicial order for release is a crime under Iraqi law. If the security forces are failing to comply with judicial orders in a systematic manner as part of a state policy to ignore such orders and detain people arbitrarily, this could represent a crime against humanity.

Prison staff in Hammam al-Alil said they had released 115 detainees and transferred another 135 to Baghdad. They said they have been holding at least 60 men since the detention site opened in November, 2016.

The prison staff and Justice Minister, Haidar al-Zamili, who met with Human Rights Watch on February 2, 2017, said that detainees held on terrorism charges have no right under the counterterrorism law (no. 13/2005) to communicate with their family during the investigation period, and that the Qayyarah detainees have not been allowed to communicate with their families. A local judge overseeing the cases told Human Rights Watch that once a detainee has been brought before the investigative judge, they have the right to contact their families, but that family visits are being delayed because of the delays in bringing detainees before the judge.

They also said that despite the Iraqi constitution and Criminal Procedure Code (no.23/1971) guaranteeing detainees the right to a lawyer during interrogations and hearings, none had been provided with a lawyer present during their interrogations and many did not have a lawyer during their hearings before the investigative judge.

Human Rights Watch observed that the facilities are all extremely overcrowded, so that no detainee can lie down to sleep. Because of the overcrowding and lack of proper ventilation, the makeshift prison cells are overheated, with an incredible stench. Detainees at the Hammam al-Alil prison called out to the visiting Human Rights Watch researchers, begging them to crack open the door because they said they could not breathe. The detainees have either no time or minimal time outside their cells, eat inside their cells, and have no access to showers and limited access to bathrooms. The facilities have no medical support, contributing to the deaths and amputations, prison staff said.

While the staff said they were trying to improve conditions, they could not reduce the overcrowding. The overcrowding may have been exacerbated due to a temporary freeze, in early 2015, on transfers of prisoners to Baghdad due to the cost of such transfers, a Qayyarah court official told Human Rights Watch on March 11, 2017. He said that the transfers had resumed in mid-January. Prison staff in Hammam al-Alil said that on March 11, they were asked to accept another 11 prisoners but refused, saying there was simply no more room.

One interrogator in Hammam al-Alil said that he sometimes beats ISIS suspects, and an observer who visited the prison in February 2017 said he witnessed the ill-treatment of three detainees.

Detainees charged and convicted may still be entitled to release under the General Amnesty Law passed in August 2016 (no.27/2016), staff said. The law offered amnesty to anyone who joined ISIS or another extremist group against their will, and did not commit any serious offense, like torture or killing. The head of the Iraqi parliament’s legal committee, Mohsen al-Karkari, told Human Rights Watch during a meeting on February 7, 2017, that it was a roundabout way to limit the scope of the wide-reaching Iraqi counterterrorism law and release of thousands of terror suspects. According to the Justice Ministry, authorities have released 756 prisoners since the law was passed.

Human Rights Watch learned from a reliable source that the Iraqi government had sent a committee to review conditions in the facility a few weeks before the Human Rights Watch visit. The committee promised to send up to 20 more interrogators from Baghdad, to speed up investigations. On March 2, 2017, 10 interrogators had arrived at the Qayyarah prisons.

The evidence documented by Human Rights Watch strongly suggests that conditions at the Qayyarah and Hammam al-Alil facilities are hazardous, unfit to hold detainees for extended periods of time, and do not meet basic international standards. As a result, holding detainees there probably amounts to ill-treatment. The state of the facilities and severe understaffing pose severe risks to the prisoners, the prison administration, and the local community.

The authorities should transfer all detainees from these facilities to official prisons built to accommodate detainees, and equipped to meet basic international standards. Until that happens, the Interior and Justice Ministries should, as an urgent priority, improve the conditions, and speed up the investigative process so that it can transfer the prisoners out of the facility as quickly as possible. The ministries should provide all detainees a medical screening upon arrival, and ensure access to medical care.

The authorities should also ensure that there is a clear legal basis for detentions, that all detainees have access to legal counsel, including during interrogation, and that detainees are moved to facilities accessible to government inspection, independent monitors, relatives, and lawyers, with regular and unimpeded access. They should immediately notify families of the detention of their loved ones and under which authority, promptly take detainees before a judge to rule on the legality of their detention, and immediately comply with any judicial order for release.

Judges should order the release of detainees or prisoners being held in inhuman or degrading conditions.

When prosecuting children alleged to have committed illegal acts, they should be treated in accordance with international juvenile justice standards. International law allows for authorities to detain children pretrial in limited situations, but only if formally charged with committing a crime, not merely as suspects. The authorities should release all children not yet formally charged.

“The Iraqi authorities should immediately release the children it is holding in these hellholes unless they promptly charge them with a crime,” Whitson said. “Iraq should recognize and treat children accused of ISIS affiliation as the victims of illegal and unconscionable recruitment and exploitation by the group.”


Forecast Calls For ‘Sunshine’ On Korean Peninsula – Analysis

0
0

The bombshell disclosures, mass protests, and obstinacy from the president to the very end – the epic downfall of Park Geun-hye will reverberate in South Korea for years to come.

Yet the consequences won’t be limited to the domestic sphere. The president’s removal comes at a delicate time for the alliances and interests that underpin East Asian security. If President Trump’s rhetoric doused the US alliance system in gasoline; Park’s downfall could just be the spark that ignites it.

Background

Relations with the North are a key consideration for any South Korean government, and over the years, different governments have tried different policies in their attempts to coexist with a volatile and dangerous regime in Pyongyang. Broadly speaking, these policies can be divided into two categories: engagement and deterrence.

The standard bearer for the former was former president Kim Dae-jung’s Sunshine Policy. This policy lasted from 1998 to 2008, and it saw the South actively trying to engage the North and establish points of economic and political contact, but all within the two red lines of not tolerating military threats from the North and not making any attempt at integration. The idea underpinning the policy was that, using economic and political engagement, the two Koreas could emphasize the cultural and economic links that unite them and minimize the ideology that divides them. The subtext also being that liberal engagement could usurp the authoritarian Kim regime from within as economic liberalization produced inevitable political reform. This is the same logic that has guided US policy toward China since Deng Xiaoping.

The Sunshine Policy ended in 2008, when newly elected conservative President Lee Myung-bak ended aid programs to the North and scrapped several agreements that had previously been agreed upon. President Lee believed that the Sunshine Policy was falling short of its goal of altering the North’s behavior, and that much of the South’s aid money was finding its way into missile and nuclear weapon development. The final nail in the coffin came in 2009, when the North performed its first successful nuclear weapons test.

President Lee was succeeded by the now impeached President Park, who continued her predecessor’s hard line in relations with the North.

Impact

More sunshine around the corner? With the impeachment now upheld, the question becomes: Who will replace President Park when new elections are held within 60 days? Currently leading in the polls is Moon Jae-in of the Democratic Party of Korea (deobureo minjudang). Moon represents the best hope of the liberals returning to the Blue House after a decade-long absence, but he will first have to come out on top against other Democratic Party candidates in a primary. Another rising star of the progressives is Lee Jae-Myeong, a self-taught former factory worker who describes himself as the ‘Bernie Sanders of South Korea.’

Both Moon and Lee hold foreign policy views that are starkly different from President Park. Both support a pivot toward engaging the North, citing the failures of deterrence over the past decade. They also believe that a singular reliance on the United States is hurting South Korea vis-à-vis China. Neither would have green-lighted the THAAD deployment, which threatens to impact the South’s economic relations with China, though it remains to be seen if they would be willing to order the weapons off the Peninsula, as the missiles will be in place by the time the presidential election is held (surely by design on the part of the Trump administration). Broadly speaking, the liberal candidates want to move the South away from Washington and toward a triangular and more flexible alignment with China.

One potential starting point for a new burst of sunshine would be to restart the Kaesong industrial complex, which President Park scuttled back in February 2016. Kaesong was the crowning jewel of the original Sunshine Policy, but the jointly run industrial park has been intermittently closed and opened over the years as tensions flare on the Peninsula.

Beijing suddenly finds itself holding all the cards. The fall of the Park administration is a fortuitous turn of events for the Chinese government. It had already been applying some intense economic pressure in terms of the THAAD deployment. China’s government-run media outlets have issued clarion calls for consumers to use their wallets to voice anger with the South Korean government; there have been (tolerated) protests organized by students and retirees; and tourism officials have barred operators from sending tour groups to the South.

One particular South Korean store chain, Lotte, has reportedly had over half of its stores closed in China over a variety of regulatory and safety infractions.

The backlash will likely be reined in quickly, however, as too much anti-Korea sentiment risks tilting the upcoming presidential elections in an unwelcome direction for the more pro-China candidates like Moon Jae-in.

The whole situation has turned out to be a clinic for geopolitical importance of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). By virtue of proximity and, critically, its willingness to bring its economic leverage to bear in diplomatic and security matters, China is one country that South Korea should be mindful about crossing due to economic blowback. The TPP was supposed to reorient trade flows away from China and toward US allies, and in doing so take the bite out of these kinds of threats. That the TPP is now dead on arrival suggests that it will be harder and harder for the South to side with Washington on zero-sum security matters in the future.

The North is also watching closely. North-South relations over the past decade have been fraught to say the least, with everything from the sinking of the Cheonan to a laundry list of missile and nuclear tests serving to block out the sunshine that might have otherwise warmed the Peninsula if the liberals were in power. Pyongyang will certainly view these presidential elections as an opportunity to extract new concessions from its southern neighbor, and as such, moderate its behavior in a way that suggests a new Sunshine Policy could bear fruit.

Trump administration lined up for a dose of geopolitical reality. The fall of President Park illustrates a surprising strength of institutions in South Korea’s democracy – not bad for a country that isn’t far removed from corporatist authoritarianism. And like any good democracy, there has always been a robust level of public debate in the South. One enduring topic is the utility of the US-ROK alliance in the modern era, and whether it does more harm than good in terms of providing peace on the Peninsula.

Those South Koreans who don’t support the alliance have a lot to be happy about ahead of new presidential elections. Trump’s constant questioning of the alliance during his own presidential campaign has undercut America’s would-be supporters in South Korea (though it should be said that support remains generally high). Then there’s the state of North-South relations over the past few years, of which a powerful argument can be made that deterrence and singular reliance on the United States has simply not worked, and that the South less safe since the end of the Sunshine Policy. And finally there’s the China factor, which suggests that the current policy of antagonizing the Middle Kingdom is making the South less prosperous as well.

Without taking a side as to whether these statements are actually true, taken together they will make for a convincing argument for a return to liberal rule in two months, especially when most of the dissenting voices are politically tainted due to the Park scandal.

What’s Next?

It’s very likely that the liberals are going to win the South Korean presidential election, and after they do they will seek to reorient the South away from Washington and toward Beijing. When that happens, the fate of the THAAD will serve as a barometer of just how serious the new government is about its strategic rebalancing. The THAAD’s removal would serve as a powerful symbolic gesture to bring the North back to the negotiating table and get ROK-China economic ties on track again. It could also be the death knell of the US treaty system in East Asia, at least in its current form.

This article was published by Geopolitical Monitor.com

Brexit Might Pave Way For An Independent Scotland – Analysis

0
0

By Ryan McMaken*

The BBC reports  (and here) that Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon has announced she’ll seek a new referendum on Scottish independence to be held in late 2018 or early 2019:

That would coincide with the expected conclusion of the UK’s Brexit negotiations. The Scottish first minister said the move was needed to protect Scottish interests in the wake of the UK voting to leave the EU. … She will ask the Scottish Parliament next Tuesday to request a Section 30 order from Westminster. …The order would be needed to allow a fresh legally-binding referendum on independence to be held.

These “Scottish interests” to which Sturgeon refers stem from the long-asserted position by Scottish politicians that a majority of Scottish voters opposed Brexit, and wish to remain part of the European Union. In response to the successful referendum to withdraw from the EU, Scotland has instead said it must somehow be allowed to be a part of both the EU and the UK:

But speaking at her official Bute House residence in Edinburgh, Ms Sturgeon said the people of Scotland must be offered a choice between a “hard Brexit” and becoming an independent country.

The Scottish government has published proposals which it says would allow Scotland to remain a member of the European single market even if the rest of the UK leaves, which Mrs May has said it will.

Sturgeon wants the option of withdrawing fro mthe UK if the final UK bote on Brexit does not sufficiently address Scottish demands.

Predictably, the two leaderships in the two largest political parties have opposed a new referendum.

UK PM Theresa May claimed that “a second independence referendum would set Scotland on course for ‘uncertainty and division’ and insisted that the majority of people in Scotland did not want another vote on the issue.”

Meanwhile, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, according to the AP, said “The 2014 Scottish independence referendum was billed as a once-in-a-generation event. …The result was decisive and there is no appetite for another referendum.”

Why Not Have Another Vote?

Regardless of how one feels about Scottish independence, it’s unclear why two politicians from England — Corbyn and May — should have any say over whether or not the Scots should vote on independence.

If the Scots don’t want another vote on independence, they need do nothing more than decline to participate, or to simply vote “No” in the next referendum.

Given the response we see from May and Corbyn, however, it appears that little has changed ideologically since the 2014 Scottish referendum when national politicians drew on old-fashioned nationalism in their opposition to independence. These opponents of independence included David Cameron, Nick Clegg, and Nigel Farage, all of whom called for “unity” in British politics in 2014. They succeeded: 55 percent of Scottish voters chose “No.”

Opposition to a second referendum is likely to draw on similar sentiments, but this time will be the added claim that “we already did that” since, according to this position, voters are only allowed to vote on matters such as secession every 20, 30, or 40 years. Anything more often than that, we are told, would produce “uncertainty and division.” By this logic, of course, the practice of parliamentary elections at least once every five years should be curtailed or abolished since voters, presumably, are confused when voting is allowed as anything more than a “once-in-a-generation event.”

The Usual Economic Fear-Mongering

At the core of the anti-secession argument is an ongoing claim that an independent Scotland would be locked out of global trade without access to European markets without membership in the EU.

As pointed out during the UK referendum on Brexit, however, membership in the EU, if anything, restricts participation in global trade more than it enhances it. Even the EU admits that “growth in global demand is coming from outside Europe, noting that 90% of global economic growth in the next 10–15 years is expected to be generated outside Europe, a third of it in China alone.”

Moreover, the importance of the EU as an export market for the EU has been declining in recent decades. 15 years ago, the EU accounted for over 50 percent of all UK exports. By 2015, the number had fallen to 44 percent, reflecting the shift toward markets outside of the EU.

So, unless the goods and services produced in Scotland are somehow specially suited to only the EU and not to the rest of the world, it is very likely that — as with the UK — the EU is shrinking in importance as a trading partner for Scotland as well.

The Benefits of Unilateral Free Trade

As with any country, the path to a higher standard of living in Scotland is not going all-in with the EU. The most promising path is simply unilateral free trade. Were the Scots to embrace this, the cost of living would go down as Scottish consumers would be free to avail themselves of any goods and services foreigners were willing to sell them. At the same time, this new access to a bevy of previously-more-costly goods and services would open up Scotland to new avenues of greater innovation and entrepreneurship. The Scots would also be more free to trade worldwide outside both the EU and the UK.

While trade talk often centers on tariffs, the biggest modern impediment to trade is often regulatory in nature. In the case of the EU, all countries are restricted to trading partners that meet the demands of the EU regulatory state. This can include everything from corporate welfare to environmental regulations to labor rules. In other words, when EU trade regulations favor French special interests — as is often the case — an independent Scotland would only be allowed to import goods into Scotland that aren’t seen as a threat to French lobbyists. Obviously, that can prove to be a crippling limitation in many cases.

Nor is it a mere coincidence that two of the wealthiest countries in Europe — Switzerland and Norway — are not members of the EU. Critics claim that Scotland should not be compared to Norway because — although Scotland does possess oil wealth — it does not have oil wealth at levels comparable to Norway. That’s fair enough, although it is clear that Norway’s wealth is not simply a product of its oil wealth. After all, Venezuela has considerably more oil than Norway.

But what about Switzerland? Much of Switzerland’s success comes from decisions it has made that depend nothing at all on natural resources. Switzerland is a safe haven for wealth, and has taken steps to ensure it remains attractive to global investors. There is no reason that Scotland could not do the same — save for the fact that Scottish politicians refuse to adopt Switzerland’s relatively laissez-faire economic institutions.

Just as the fear-mongers’ claims of a post-Brexit-vote economic collapse proved to be pure fantasy, the same would be true of Scottish independence — assuming the Scots are willing to embrace free trade and a stable, investment-friendly economy.

Scotland and England: Stronger Apart?

Although English politicians tend to let pan-British nationalism wag the English dog, there is no reason to believe that Scottish independence would have a negative impact on the UK rump state. If anything, Scottish secession would shift UK politics in a more laissez-faire direction in the absence of Scottish voters who have tended to favor Labour-type politics, and thus more state interventionism in the economy.

Fortunately, however, the opposite would be unlikely in Scotland. While many Scots would not doubt want to pursue more interventionist policies in the wake of independence, the realities of international markets would force the Scots toward more laissez-faire — assuming, of course, the Scots wish to maintain their standard of living. As it is under the status quo, the Scots can afford their interventionism because they benefit from subsidization from the UK state in the form of transfer payments and other forms of government spending funded by English taxpayers. They also benefit by being tied to the large British economy which means Scottish exporters can ride the coattails of the English economy. In the case of an independent Scotland, the Scots would be forced to take a more favorable look at adopting institutions and policies more like those of Switzerland.

The Brexit Rationale Carried Forward

In terms of political institutions, the case for Scottish secession may have been already made by pro-Brexit opponents of Scottish independence. Nigel Farage and George Galloway for example — both opponents of Scottish secession — made the case for Brexit by claiming the British laws should be made by British people, and that political institutions should be controlled locally. One need not be the world’s most rigorous logician to see that the same logic can be applied to the Scots. Scottish independence, one might say, is simply applying the logic of Brexit to Scotland. Of course, to maintain the appearance of consistency, the Scots might need to eschew submitting themselves to the EU parliament without guarantees of future options to secede. But, in either case, the Scots could claim it’s none of England’s business.

About the author:
*Ryan McMaken is the editor of Mises Wire and The Austrian. Send him your article submissions, but read article guidelines first. (Contact: email; twitter.) Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

Source:
This article was published by MISES Institute

Macedonia: President Ivanov Defends Refusal To Offer Mandate

0
0

By Sinisa Jakov Marusic

The office of Macedonian President Gjorge Ivanov on Monday said the obstacles preventing him from awarding a mandate to the opposition Social Democrat leader Zoran Zaev had not been removed.

This is despite calls by the opposition and the international community for the President not to further delay the formation of a new government.

“President Ivanov maintains his position from his March 1 public address. The obstacles preventing awarding the mandate for a new government are not cleared,” Ivanov’s cabinet said in a press release.

Ivanov refused to award Zaev a mandate to form a government on March 1, despite the opposition leader having assembled a majority in parliament.

He claimed that Zaev’s alleged acceptance of the so-called “Albanian Platform” of a group of ethnic Albanian parties might destroy the country.

Last Friday, Zaev unveiled his new government platform in a fresh attempt to persuade the President to give him the mandate, saying the platform contained proof that the new government will not violate the terms of the constitution.

Meanwhile, the political parties that form the new majority in parliament on Monday started talks on electing a new parliament speaker, in an attempt to address the second “procedural” obstacle that Ivanov listed for not offering the mandate.

According to estimates, if talks between the Social Democrats, SDSM, and the ethnic Albanian partiess go well, the session of the parliament could take place on Wednesday or Thursday.

“We hope to wrap this as soon as possible, so we can move things forward,” a senior SDSM source told BIRN on Monday under condition of anonymity.

In March 1, besides objecting to the “Albanian Platform”, Ivanov said he could not give Zaev a mandate because there was still no speaker who would formally inform him about the parliamentary majority.

Since the December 11 elections, has parliament convened only once to start its constitutive session.

However that session on December 30 was interrupted shortly after the verification of the MPs’ mandates as there was no majority in parliament to elect a new speaker.

Since December 11 early elections failed to produce a clear winner, the SDSM have accused Ivanov of deliberately stalling the election of a new government, despite his merely procedural role in awarding the mandate, to help the former ruling VMRO DPMNE party to cling onto power.

SDSM’s Zaev now commands a majority of 67 of the 120 seats in parliament.

VMRO DPMNE over the weekend repeated that the best solution would be another snap election, in which the “Albanian Platform”, which it insists was imposed by another country, Albania, would be the main issue.

Alternatively, it has called on Zaev to outright reject the platform, which was a joint precondition agreed between the main ethnic Albanian parties for their participation in any future government.

The platforms contains a set of measures designed to boost Albanian rights in Macedonia, starting with increased official use of Albanian.

Since VMRO DPMNE failed to form a government coalition with the Albanian parties, the party and its supporters on the streets have launched an aggressive campaign against the newly announced opposition-led government, insisting it has the potential to destroy Macedonia’s sovereignty and integrity.
– See more at: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/macedonia-president-defiant-over-pm-mandate-03-13-2017#sthash.H9NfRcYF.dpuf

Stability In The Time Of Change – Analysis

0
0

By Rakesh Sood

In recent weeks, there has been a flood of commentary lamenting the demise of ‘the liberal rule-based international order’; the system that came into being after World War II and has since been led and shaped by the West under U.S. leadership for the last seven decades. While cracks in this ‘order’ have been showing up in recent years, it is after the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President that a conviction has grown that the seven-decade-old ‘order’ is dead and change is now upon us.

Yet the lengthening shadows of this change have been visible in other parts of the world for nearly a decade; at least from 2008 with the global financial crisis which presaged the unravelling of the Washington Consensus. History tells us that the wheels of change never stop. Sometimes, when they move slowly, it is only possible to judge the distance travelled by looking in the rear-view mirror, and at other times, like the present, change appears to be rushing at us through the windscreen even as we search for a ‘new stable and normal’ in the age of uncertainty.

Myth of the ‘liberal order’

But in mourning the passing of the old and familiar, a myth is being generated about this liberal international order. While it is true that there is greater volatility and churning in the world today than before, it is equally true that parts of the world have been going through these changes for much longer. What is new is that the tides of change are now lapping at the shores of the Western world.

West Asia has been in turmoil at least since the turn of the century when the growth of jihadist extremism seared itself on the global consciousness with 9/11 though its shoots were visible in the region a decade earlier. The reordering of Central Asia and Eastern Europe began with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and has now been unfolding for nearly a quarter century.

China’s rise started four decades ago and gathered steam after globalisation. It was facilitated by the U.S., initially justified as part of the Cold War logic which saw the USSR as the mortal enemy, and after the Cold War, on the hopeful myth that a prosperous China would gradually move towards a more plural political system, becoming part of the liberal order. As the myth evaporated in recent years, President Barack Obama was placing China in the category of ‘free riders’, while announcing the ‘US pivot to Asia’!

China’s rise is accompanied by the rise of other emerging economies and a shift in the geopolitical centre of gravity from the Euro-Atlantic to Asia and the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Defining the characteristic of this change is a new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers that predicts that by 2040, the E7 (emerging countries of China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Mexico and Turkey) will be twice the economic size of G7, the seven major advanced economies!

Out of sync

The post-World War II order marked the end of colonialism and was intended to be based on the democratic principle of equality of sovereign states, but this idea quickly fell prey to the realities of the Cold War. The UN became an arena for the power play between the two superpowers. By the time the Cold War ended, the institutional structures of the UN were out of sync with the new political reality. The U.S. became ‘the sole superpower’ but hubris and the decision to invade Iraq soon eroded the authority of its unipolar moment.

In hindsight, the liberal international order was not ‘global’ and consequently, ‘liberal and rule-based’ only in a small part of the world, the West. It is here today that populism, nationalism and illiberalism have emerged, reflecting a decisive rejection of the status quo. This is only partly due to economic reasons that got aggravated after 2008. The rejection of the status quo is equally a cultural rejection, a rejection of globalisation that enriched Corporate America but not the average worker in Middle America. It has contributed to the creation of a global elite and the backlash against it has taken the form of anti-immigration, nationalism and populism. A tired and ageing Europe, preoccupied with its experiment of a post-sovereignty EU, and Mr. Trump’s victory mark the end of the myth.

A post-West world

Populism breeds the politics of agitation often exploiting insecurities by distorting facts. In today’s age of information overdose, this has taken the form of making everything into a half-truth. A truth if questioned enough loses its shine and a lie if repeated enough times becomes a half-truth. Doing this in a 24/7 news cycle together with the echo chamber of social media has only become easier than before. This is why at the Munich Security Conference last month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov aptly described the current change as a shift to a “post-West world”.

The biggest challenge of coping with this shift is absence of credible multilateral institutions. Greater normative damage is done when the gap between myth and reality becomes unmanageable. A classic example is NATO, a creation of the Cold War but even today described in the West as a central pillar of Western, liberal order!

In such times of change, is the idea of stability an oxymoron? Much depends on how it is defined. Clearly, in times of change stability cannot be a defence of the status quo. However, breaking it up into crisis stability, deterrence stability and arms race stability makes the objectives relatively discrete and modest.

The nuclear dimension cast a dark shadow over the Cold War but the equation in a bipolar world was relatively simpler. In today’s world, with the focus on Asia and the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the dyad has been replaced by nuclear chains with variable linkages. New competitions are underway even as the firebreak between nuclear and conventional is getting blurred. Conventional precision-strike weapons can be as destructive and nuclear weapons can be designed for variable yields depending on the intended targets. Under such circumstances, arms race stability is hardly feasible.

Therefore deterrence stability and crisis stability assume greater significance. Shifting from single-warhead missiles to MIRVed missiles and missile defence technologies impact deterrence stability which rests on mutual vulnerability. Today, more and more countries are exploring both areas. Soon, this will lead to doctrinal and deployment changes. Developments in North Korea provide easy justification for the U.S. (and South Korea) to consider deploying missile defences in East Asia but these can easily trigger concerns in Beijing. Unless addressed, China will find ways, both symmetric and asymmetric, to ensure that its deterrent credibility is maintained.

Ensuring crisis stability

In addition to deterrence stability, it is vital to ensure crisis stability. This requires communication links and risk reduction mechanisms which need to be designed and made operational sooner rather than later. This is not a question of legality, of claiming that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty recognises five nuclear weapon states, as China has been doing during the Nuclear Suppliers Group debates last year on the question of India joining; it is a question of acknowledging ground reality that demands that all states with nuclear weapons share an imperative to move towards establishing crisis stability mechanisms.

The Cuban missile crisis in 1962 helped drive home the realisation to the U.S. and Soviet leaderships that nuclear weapons were qualitatively different. It began the process of the search for strategic stability, arms control and crisis management.

The stability mechanisms put in place, together with a bit of luck, helped to ensure that nuclear weapons were not used during the last seven decades. But today’s world is an age neither of hegemons nor of prescriptive norms; it is an age of uncertainty and change which increases the likelihood of crisis escalation. A new initiative for a modest degree of stability is needed if the nuclear taboo has to hold. Given the growing convergence between the leaders of India and Japan, these two countries are well placed to launch such an initiative.

This article originally appeared in The Hindu.

Virus Lethal To Amphibians Spreading Across Portugal

0
0

A new strain of ranavirus is currently causing mass mortality in several species of amphibian in the Serra da Estrela, the highest mountain range in continental Portugal. This infectious agent is hypervirulent and also affects fish and reptiles, which complicates the situation, according to a study boasting the collaboration of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid.

An emerging virus is affecting amphibian populations in Portugal, but this is not the first time amphibians have been a source of worry in the country. In 2009, hundreds of midwife toads (Alytes obstetricans) were found dead in Serra da Estrela Natural Park.

A research study published in the journal Scientific Reports raises a new alert on this genus of virus, which has also been discovered in Spain and elsewhere in Europe. As Jaime Bosch, a researcher at the National Museum of Natural Sciences and co-author of the study, tells SINC: “Ranaviruses have been known about for a long time, although in recent years globalisation is setting off mass mortalities throughout the world, and new strains also keep appearing, probably from Asia.”

The fact that these viruses also affect fish and reptiles complicates the situation enormously, firstly because they can spread easily and also because of their persistence in the environment, even after amphibians disappear.

“They have probably been infecting amphibian populations in Spain for several decades. In 1992 we discovered what turned out to be the first known case in our country, although at the time we didn’t even know exactly which organism caused the problem,” the scientist adds.

In autumn 2011, another curious episode of mortality arose in the Serra da Estrela, which not only affected midwife toads but also other species of amphibians in the park. The episode was in contrast to all mortality patterns previously associated with chytridiomycosis on the Iberian Peninsula and Europe.

Tests carried out on dead animals confirmed that not only was there infection by chytrid fungi; they then discovered the new strain of ranavirus in all species analysed.

“Viruses of this genus are found all over the world and can infect various groups of animals. But different strains have different degrees of virulence and the one circulating in the Serra da Estrela belongs to a hypervirulent group called CMTV-Ranavirus,” explains Gonçalo M. Rosa from the Portuguese Centre of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes (CE3C). “This new strain has been linked to annual mass mortality of several species of amphibian, similar to the mortality recorded in northern Spain.”

The ranavirus is highly infectious to several species at various life stages and can reach various altitudes. “This strain has the potential to affect practically all species in the systems in which we discovered them,” M. Rosa emphasises.

It therefore represents a crucial challenge for wildlife conservation and makes it necessary to urgently optimise conservation strategies for amphibians.

The ranavirus in Spain

The best-known case in Spain is that of the Picos de Europa National Park, where scientists have been working since 2005. “Several amphibian populations at the park have practically been wiped out, and we have not yet been able to find a method to diminish the effects of the disease,” the researcher laments.

In addition to this case, another is currently being studied in Pontevedra and, in recent years, they have detected three further episodes of mass mortality related to these viruses in other areas of Spain, which have not yet been published. “At the moment, the only option to combat these viruses is to prevent them from spreading, since treating animals is not possible, and eliminating them from the natural environment even less so,” explains Bosch.

Establishing severe border controls could prevent new strains entering through the exotic pet trade. Monitoring the species introduced – mostly fish – would be fundamental to end their most abundant reservoirs.

Making Resistant Superbugs Sensitive To Antibiotics

0
0

New research is paving the way for the development of innovative drugs that restore antibiotic susceptibility in antibiotic-resistant superbugs such as Klebsiella pneumoniae, a main cause of fatal lung and bloodstream infections worldwide.

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen and Ross University School have discovered a new way to restore antibiotic susceptibility in multidrug-resistant (MDR) Klebsiella pneumoniae and Escherichia coli strains. The results of this research have recently been published in two internationally renowned scientific journals, Scientific Reports and Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, which are published by Nature Publishing Group and the American Society for Microbiology, respectively.

The ‘Achilles heel’ of resistant superbugs

The research team led by Prof. Luca Guardabassi, DVM, Ph.D., from The Department of Veterinary Clinical and Animal Sciences at Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences at Copenhagen University and director of One Health Center for Zoonoses and Troprical Veterinary Medicine at Ross, took a novel approach to identify genes that are essential for these superbugs to grow in the presence of antibiotics.

Using cutting-edge technology in genomics, the researchers measured the contribution of every single bacterial gene to antibiotic resistance, leading to the identification of several genes that are vital for survival of MDR K. pneumoniae in the presence of colistin, the last resort antibiotic for treating infections caused by these bacteria. As a proof of principle, it was shown that inactivation of one of these genes, dedA, made colistin-resistant MDR K. pneumoniae completely sensitive to this antibiotic. The same research team also discovered similar genes that upon inactivation restore susceptibility to beta-lactam antibiotics in MDR E. coli.

“Our discovery shows that resistant superbugs are not invincible. They have an ‘Achilles heel’ and now we know how to defeat them”, said Guardabassi, principal investigator in this project.

The first step towards innovative antibiotic ‘helper’ drugs

This discovery opens new perspectives on the possibility to defeat resistant superbugs by combining antibiotics with ‘helper’ drugs that reverse antibiotic resistance. To date the β-lactamase inhibitors are the only type of antibiotic helper drugs used in clinical practice. These drugs reverse antibiotic resistance by inhibiting the bacterial enzyme responsible for degradation of the β-lactam antibiotics. Differently from β-lactamase inhibitors, the targets identified by the researchers at the University of Copenhagen and Ross are not directly implicated in the mechanism of antibiotic resistance. These targets are present in all bacteria, including susceptible strains, and thus can be used to indiscriminately potentiate antibiotic activity against both resistant and susceptible strains.

“In contrast to β-lactamase inhibitors, the antibiotic helper drugs conceptualized by our research would also improve efficacy of the ‘helped’ antibiotic against susceptible strains. This is a desirable feature for a helper drug as it would reduce the risk of treatment failure due to factors other than antibiotic resistance (e.g. biofilms, immunosuppression, etc.), allow dose reduction for toxic antibiotics such as colistin, and possibly even prevent selection of resistant mutants” said Guardabassi.

The latter hypothesis is presently under study using colistin in combination with an antifungal drug that is known to interfere with one of the targets identified by this research in MDR K. pneumoniae.

This research was carried out in collaboration with the Sanger Institute and was supported by UC-Care, the interdisciplinary research center funded by the University of Copenhagen to combat antibiotic resistance . The overall aim of this collaboration is to discover new strategies to defeat resistant bacteria in humans and animals.

“It is extremely important to contain the thraet posed by MDR bacteria. These new results create optimism for the future treatment of infectious diseases. Ahead of us now is the major task of exploring the potential of new drug targets, so that hopefully we can prevent the number of people with untreatable infections from escalating further”, said Professor Anders Miki Bojesen, who coordinates the UC-Care research activities at the Department of Veterinary Clinical and Animal Sciences.

Facts about antibiotic resistance

Every year, more than 25,000 Europeans die as a result of infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It has been estimated that in 2050 antibiotic resistance will cause 10 million deaths every year and as reduction of 2% to 3.5% in Gross Domestic Product globally.

MDR E. coli and K. pneumoniae are among the major contributors to the health and economic burden of antibiotic resistance on a global scale. Within the past 10 years, the prevalence of these resistant superbugs has increased worldwide. Of particular concern is the emergence of strains that have acquired resistance to carbapenems. Due to the lack of any valid new therapeutic alternative, an older antibiotic, colistin, has become the last resort drug for managing infections caused by these superbugs. However, this antibiotic has toxic side effects and its use has selected for colistin-resistant mutants that are resistant to all antibiotics. Therefore, the need to find alternative solutions is pressing, and the results of this new research are a promising break-through in the effort to defeat these resistant superbugs.

Two Schools Under One Roof: Lesson In Ethnic Unmixing From Bosnia’s Segregated School System – Analysis

0
0

What about one inclusive people that welcomes differences while looking for similarities? Who stands in the way?

By Tea Hadžiristić*

In 2015, an episode of Radio Free Europe’s Perspektiva sent ripples through Bosnian press and social media. The brainchild of Sarajevo-based filmmaker Ada Sokolović, Perspektiva sends popular musicians to various ex-Yugoslav cities to talk to high school students about issues they face – nationalism, segregation, homophobia, bullying, poverty, misogyny, etc. In Bosnia, episodes often reveal both ingrained nationalist attitudes about ‘mixing’ with others, as well as students who reject such attitudes.

The Mostar episode, which talked to students in both segregated and unified schools, exhibited high-school students who had never crossed Mostar’s unofficial dividing line between the east (Muslim) and west (Croat) of the city, the former Boulevard of the Revolution. Students from both sides talked about fear of what would happen if they did traverse this border. Though these sorts of divides are more or less common knowledge, a furore arose following one segment showing a Croat student who claimed that he could easily distinguish between Croats and Muslims based on appearance (claiming that the latter are darker as a rule) and that he had never once been to the ‘other’ part of town.

What the episode and response to it showed (as do more recent episodes in Bosnian cities, such as Sarajevo, Jajce, Banja Luka, and Prijedor) was that the influence of wartime divides on Bosnia’s young people has been underestimated. It also seemed to demonstrate how segregated schooling had directly contributed to keeping generations born after the war physically and emotionally divided, and how deeply ingrained fairly new ideas about the unacceptable nature of ethnic mixing had become in two short decades since the war.

Two schools under one roof

Segregated schooling, called “two schools under one roof” (bcs. dvije škole pod jednim krovom), is common in the central and southern parts of the country primarily populated by Muslims (Bosniaks) and Croats.

As the term suggests, the main features of the system are that students effectively constitute two distinct schools in one building. Students attend school in two shifts, with a long break in between to minimize contact. In some schools, they enter in different entrances or must use different stairwells, or risk disciplinary action – by teachers or other students. They use different textbooks, have different teachers, and even an entirely different administrative system. Even in so-called ‘unified’ schools such as the Mostar Gymnasium, Bosniak and Croat students are enrolled in different curricula – together in gym class and in the computer lab, but learning apart in different language, religion, geography, and history classes (what Bozic calls the ongoing ‘historiography war’[1]).

Indeed, at the heart of segregated schooling is the reification of supposedly irreconcilable identities: while Bosniak students learn Bosnian history, Croat students learn the history of neighbouring Croatia. While Bosniak students are taught the language they speak according to newly minted rules of Bosnian grammar and spelling, Croat students are taught the same language using Croatian grammatical standards.

Learning in the same school and using the same curricula, proponents argue, would submit the will of one group to the other. The Minister of Education of the Central Bosnian canton, Katica Čerkez, argues that it would be unacceptable for schools to unify and thus force one language on all of the students, given that “we all have our own language.” The fact that students are already enrolling in schools dominated by ‘other’ ethnic groups due to better academic options, and thus evidently doing so comfortably in another language, apparently presents to her no irony.

Still mobilising minor differences

Many prominent linguists agree that Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian belong to the same dialect continuum and are mutually intelligible [2]. Using the term ‘BCS’ to collectively refer to these languages is a norm in the academic community.[3] In Bosnia, the entire country speaks the same dialect (ijekavica), while each town has its own oft-recognizable slang, accent, and vocabulary.

In fact, one would be hard-pressed to find two people in Bosnia who could not understand each other, but the absurdity of the language question is so far gone that it is rarely questioned even by local social critics. The “idea of mutual incomprehensibility” (Pupavac) is reinforced by the international community, which sometimes treat the three dialects as distinct languages (for example, having all three options on their website) and provide translations of documents into each. The fact that minor dialectical differences have ballooned into a major stumbling block to unified education in Bosnia is thanks to two decades of concerted efforts by ruling ethnonationalist political parties to mobilize minor differences between ethnic groups.

Indeed, segregated schooling in Bosnia and Herzegovina is the direct result of wartime ethnic cleansing and attempts to ethnically ‘unmix’ the Bosnian population.In Bosnia and Herzegovina, this process began with the 1991 electoral victories of ethnonationalist parties, as well as the irredentist nationalism growing in neighbouring Serbia and Croatia. In her classic text, Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia, Jasminka Udovički outlines how Slobodan Milošević and Croatian president Franjo Tuđman had by 1990 reached a tacit agreement to partition Bosnia between the two countries, each making claims about the necessity of unifying members of each ethnic group in a single state. For Tuđman, claims to Bosnian territory were focused on the borders of the fascist Independent State of Croatia which existed during the Second World War. By 1992, the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) was in conflict with the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) after a brief period of working together.

The conflict was centred in Herzegovina and central Bosnia, where a majority of Bosnia’s Croat population lived. The autonomous region of Herceg-Bosnia was declared in 1991, and while its existence was never truly acknowledged, cities under its military purview adopted the Croatian flag, currency, official language, and school curriculum.

While schools became ‘Croatian’, non-Croats fled or were expelled from these areas (ethnic cleansing par excellence), effectively achieving homogeneity. In zones controlled by the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), a Serbian curriculum was imported, while in ARBiH-controlled areas a version of the prewar Bosnian system was used, modified to include Islamic education and greetings[4]. The disintegration of a schooling system which had been functionally unified since Austro-Hungarian rule began in 1878 was well under way during the war.

Segregated schooling

While war and ethnic cleansing initially separated students and ‘unmixed’ many previously multiethnic towns in the region, it was in the postwar period that segregated schooling was institutionalized. The Dayton Peace Accords (formally, the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina) ended the war in 1995, creating the Serb entity (Republika Srpska) and the Muslim-Croat Federation. While Republika Srpska is a fairly unitary entity, the Federation consists of ten cantons, and myriad levels of institutional and political control which often lead to uneven applications of laws among cantons.

After the war, as some of the two million forcibly displaced people and refugees returned to their previous homes, returnees often experienced discrimination in areas where they had effectively become minorities. In areas where Bosniaks returned to Croat-controlled territories, schools continued to teach curricula from neighbouring Croatia, while schools bore symbols of the Croat state, such as the checkerboard coat of arms.

Returnees were so anxious about sending their children to such schools that many preferred either to bus their children to faraway schools where they wouldn’t be minorities, or organized informal home-schooling. As Pašalić Kreso puts it, “their options were limited to choosing between total assimilation and complete rejection,” and the majority leaned toward the latter, given how recent the conflict was.[5]

Witnessing the incomplete integration of returnees, the OSCE ordered Federation schools to effectively share their buildings with returnee (“minority”) students of different ethnicities. Hence the genesis of “two schools under one roof” began in the 1997-2000 period of return and attempts at integration. The creation of these segregated schools was aided at the time by the lack of a state-level education ministry, though its creation in 2004 failed to make much of an impact.

In effect, segregated schools are the result of a failure of a policy of re-integration of returnees. Former Minister of Science, Education, Culture, and Sport Fahrudin Rizvanbegović told a Bosnian portal that at the time, ‘two schools under one roof’ was a huge step forward, which was initially aimed at bringing schoolchildren together at least physically. Initially supported by the UN, OSCE, and American ambassador, it was conceived that the schools would eventually be unified in curriculum and use the same textbooks. Rizvanbegović recounts that several ‘unified’ textbooks were printed by the World Bank, only to be rejected by Croat politicians. The international community quickly found that “such a system only exacerbates segregation” [6] and that the model was an evident failure.

Ethnically isolated and ethnically overfed

What was originally conceived of as a temporary solution to get returnees enrolled in school has stubbornly remained the norm in about 57 schools in the Federation. ‘Two schools under one roof’ is most prevalent in the Central Bosnian, Herzegovina-Neretva, and Zenica-Doboj Cantons. Rather than move towards integration and reconciliation, the system has merely reinforced boundaries. A Sarajevo high school teacher told NBC News that the postwar generation was “young, intolerant, ethnically isolated and ethnically overfed,” suggesting that segregated schooling paralyzes the two-decade-old conflict in a particularly harmful way.

Indeed, the model posed additional burdens upon anyone who would choose to ‘mix’ with others, something that Azra Homadžić found involves “effort, risk, and the possibility of being hurt on the long road of (re)building relationships.” What had been thought of as the ‘necessary evil’ of segregation became the goal of local politicians.

In response to the inability of the two schools under one roof model to achieve its aim, its dismantling has been called for by various international actors since 2003: the Peace Implementation Council (the body responsible for enforcing the Dayton Peace Accords), the Office of the High Representative, the OSCE, the Council of Europe, and the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, without success. Reforms have mainly been blocked by political parties and slowed by the country’s inefficient education system: each of the Federation’s cantons has its own ministry of education, which makes addressing the problem even more cumbersome.

Homogenous voting blocks and the Dayton accords

Local initiatives to end the model were spurred in recent years by advocacy group Vaša Prava, who lodged a discrimination suit in regards to two segregated schools in Herzegovina. In 2014, the Federation’s higher court ruled that the Herzegovina-Neretva canton had to put an end to segregated schooling – with the implication that all segregated schools in the Federation ought to do the same.

The ruling has yet to be implemented, with local politicians claiming that they “don’t know” how to end segregation. The Minister of Science, Education, Culture, and Sport of the Central Bosnian Canton, Joza Jurina, told Radio Free Europe that segregation was not discriminatory, but rather a way of guaranteeing each of Bosnia’s three constituent peoples the right to schooling in their own language.

The ineffectiveness of political leaders to implement laws or court rulings should not merely be ascribed to a lack of know-how. Indeed, for the ruling ethnonationalist parties of the country, ethnic segregation suits them quite well, as it solidifies ethnic divisions, breeds fear and mistrust, and leads to homogenous voting blocks.Ethnic segregation suits them quite well, as it solidifies ethnic divisions, breeds fear and mistrust, and leads to homogenous voting blocks.

In short, it keeps them in power. Wartime ethnic cleansing is continued by other means, with similar goals: ethnic homogeneity. And as Ljuljjeta Goranci-Brkic puts it “obstructing the process of return, manipulating war crimes and victims, provoking violent interethnic incidents, threatening, and economic discrimination are tactics used to keep groups homogenized.”[7]

According to Asim Mujkić, Bosnia is “a democracy of ethnic oligarchies”[8] run by political elites who use nationalist politics to “obscure the process of economic dispossession”[9] of the populace. The continued rule of ethnonationalist parties is linked to country’s constitutional arrangement which was defined by the Dayton Accords. By enshrining the three ‘constituent peoples’ (Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs), not only does Dayton constitutionally exclude ‘Others’ (Roma, Jews, Bosnians,[10] the undeclared, and others) from political representation,[11] it also petrifies an “increasingly dysfunctional political system.”[12]

By insisting on the division of the Bosnian population on broad ethnic lines, parties who prey on the resulting ethnic factionalism have by and large remained popular, reinforcing these divisions yet again. For ruling parties, the current constitutional structure offers limited incentives for institutional change.[13]

Focus on divisions and differences is thus dominant not only among nationalist parties but within the international community as well as local critics. One of the poignant things about Perspektiva’s Bosnian episodes is not just the ways in which many students reify the differences between ethnic groups by using ‘us and them’ terminology, but how supposed critics of this discourse often fall into the same trap. In the Mostar episode, political scientists who comment on the students’ thoughts champion integration and unity, but primarily argue that this will teach students to respect differences (rather than, say, find similarities).

Student-led resistance

Resistance to segregation has popped up in several Bosnian towns in the past years, led mostly by students themselves. Most recently, resistance to segregating previously unified schools in Jajce led to continued protests by students, who threatened to boycott classes if a separate Bosniak institution was created.

Though it appears that the system does not have many outspoken advocates, attempts to challenge it on the part of parents have not been widespread. Former teacher Jasminka Drino Kirlić points out that although politicians often cite parents’ wishes as a reason to maintain segregated schooling, no polls support this notion. Pašalić Kreso claims that more than half of parents “do not agree with the policy of dividing and segregating schoolchildren, and are facing serious difficulties as they attempt to explain to their children why it exists.”[14] While legal rulings on the discriminatory nature of such schools languish, it seems to have fallen to students themselves to reject further or continued divisions.

The success of future models of education will depend on ending the veneration of ethnic identity and focusing on fostering a truly inclusive education system for the country as a whole – which, admittedly, seems unlikely, at least without institutional change as a whole.

However, unifying schools in name while retaining separate curricula in the name of language rights or minority rights will only continue the process of ethnic unmixing that began during the war. Vanessa Pupavac argues that the promotion of linguistic human rights since the 1990s has linked language rights to identity recognition, which exacerbates ethnic divisions. She claims that in the Western Balkans, “linguistic human rights discourse, despite its conscious goal of preventing discrimination, has actually helped legitimize ethnic divisions” because nationalist politicians use language rights to assert differences between groups.[15]

Gordana Bozic points out that despite recent events, there is continuity in the way that the educational system in Bosnia has been used as a tool for bolstering ethnic identity since the Austro-Hungarian era.[16] Struggles for ethnic autonomy in education meant that in the late 1800s, “education became a mechanism for translating confessionalism [i.e., religion] into nationalism,”[17] focusing particularly on language and alphabet as a battleground for identity. Indeed, the Romantic era idea of the ineluctable link between nationhood and language re-emerged during the war, when the idea of separate languages “helped support political claims to separate statehood based on a Romantic ideal of one nation.”[18]

Given that partition remains a looming threat, establishing Bosnia and Herzegovina as a unified and multiethnic state in which its citizens can thrive ought to be in the interests of anyone who wishes to put an end to the frozen conflict of more than two decades. Desegregating schools would be a first step towards undoing the violence of ethnic cleansing spurred by the war and the unmixing that was then inscribed into law after it.

*Tea Hadžiristić is a writer and researcher living between Toronto and Sarajevo. She holds a MSc in International Relations Theory from the LSE.

This article was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is available by clicking here. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of TransConflict. 

Footnotes

  1. Gordana Bozic , “Reeducating the Hearts of Bosnian Students: An Essay on Some Aspects of Education in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” East European Politics and Societies 20:2, 2006.
  2. Peter Trudgill, Sociolingiustics, 4th ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2000), Snježana Kordić, Jezik i nacionalizam (Zagreb: Durieux 2010), and Ronelle Alexander, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: A Grammar with Sociolinguistic Commentary (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).
  3. Vanessa Pupavac, “Discriminating language rights and politics in the post-Yugoslav states,” Patterns of Prejudice 40:2, 2006.
  4. Adila Pašalić Kreso, “The War And Post-War Impact On The Educational System Of Bosnia And Herzegovina,” International Review of Education 54, 2008.
  5. Adila Pašalić Kreso, “The War And Post-War Impact On The Educational System Of Bosnia And Herzegovina,” International Review of Education 54, 2008.
  6. Gordana Bozic , “Reeducating the Hearts of Bosnian Students: An Essay on Some Aspects of Education in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” East European Politics and Societies 20:2, 2006.
  7. Ljuljjeta Goranci-Brkic, “Interethnic Dialogue and Cooperation for Integrated Education in BiH: The Practice and Experiences of the Nansen Dialogue Center Sarajevo,” Integrated Education in Conflicted Societies.
  8. Asim Mujkić, “We, the Citizens of Ethnopolis,” Information 14, no.1 (March 2007), p.113.
  9. Jasmin Mujanović, “The Baja Class and the Politics of Participation” in Arsenijević, Damir (ed.), Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Fight for the Commons (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014), p.138.
  10. In BiH, citizens who choose to identify as ‘Bosnian’ rather than one of the three ethnic identities are in the minority and are not structurally validated by the country’s constitutional structure.
  11. Hodžić and Stojanović, “New/Old Constitutional Engineering.”
  12. Ismet Sejfija and Danica Fink-Hafner, “Citizens’ Protest Innovations in a Consociational System: The Case of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Teorija in Praksa 53, no.1 (2016), p.197.
  13. Sejfija and Fink-Hafner, “Citizens’ Protest Innovations,” p.186.
  14. Adila Pašalić Kreso, “The War And Post-War Impact On The Educational System Of Bosnia And Herzegovina,” International Review of Education 54, 2008.
  15. Vanessa Pupavac, “Discriminating language rights and politics in the post-Yugoslav states,” Patterns of Prejudice 40:2, 2006.”
  16. Gordana Bozic , “Reeducating the Hearts of Bosnian Students: An Essay on Some Aspects of Education in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” East European Politics and Societies 20:2, 2006.
  17. Gordana Bozic , “Reeducating the Hearts of Bosnian Students: An Essay on Some Aspects of Education in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” East European Politics and Societies 20:2, 2006.
  18. Vanessa Pupavac, “Discriminating language rights and politics in the post-Yugoslav states,” Patterns of Prejudice 40:2, 2006.”

China Seeks Stability As Economy Slows – Analysis

0
0

By Michael Lelyveld

As China’s economic growth sinks to a 25-year low, the government is going to great lengths to portray the country as a safe place to invest.

In recent weeks, regulatory agencies have pledged to prevent “asset bubbles” and punish “financial crocodiles” that prey on small investors. The message aimed at both domestic and foreign markets is that China can control investment risks.

With the announcement of lower economic targets for 2017, risk reduction and stability have become the government’s top concerns.

“Stability is of overriding importance,” said Premier Li Keqiang as he presented the government’s work report to the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s rubber-stamp legislature, on March 5.

“We must not allow the red line to be crossed concerning financial security, people’s wellbeing or environmental protection,” said Li, according to state media.

Li has set this year’s goal for gross domestic product growth at “about 6.5 percent,” the slowest pace in 25 years and a step down from the 2016 rate of 6.7 percent.

The slowdown follows signs that China’s traditional economic engine of investment may be faltering.

Last year, fixed-asset investment (FAI) rose 7.9 percent, slipping from 10 percent in 2015 and 15.7 percent in 2014, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

Growth of foreign direct investment (FDI) fell to 4.1 percent in 2016 from 6.4 percent a year earlier, before suffering a steep year-to-year drop of 9.2 percent in January.

China’s nonfinancial outbound direct investment (ODI) soared 44.1 percent last year as capital fled toward safer markets and higher returns abroad. But in January, ODI plunged 35.7 percent from a year earlier after the government tightened its capital controls.

In a remarkable series of steps before China’s annual legislative sessions, regulators announced stiff penalties for alleged investment violations, market speculation and predatory practices.

Targets included insurance companies, financial institutions and opaque investment groups involved in merger and takeover activities.

On Feb. 26, Liu Shiyu, chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), blasted the big investors as “barbarians” and “robbers” with unusual vehemence.

“In the capital market, being a financial mogul is only a half-step away from being a financial crocodile,” Liu said.

Tougher enforcement regime

The crackdown follows last year’s hostile takeover battle by insurance interests for China Vanke, the country’s leading property developer, and a series of deals backed by highly leveraged or obscure funding sources.

Among those singled out for punishment, Yao Zhenhua, chairman of Foresea Life Insurance, was barred from the industry for 10 years by the China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC).

The regulator also suspended Evergrande Life from stock trading for one year, citing its use of insurance funds for “short-term speculation” that caused “grave social consequences,” the South China Morning Post reported.

The Vanke takeover bid was led by Foresea parent Baoneng Group. The insurance unit aggressively sold high-risk policies that resembled investment products paying up to 8 percent annually to raise cash, Nikkei Asian Review said.

The regulatory crackdown on the companies may be symptomatic of a tougher enforcement regime in the financial sphere.

Last week during the NPC sessions, the CSRC announced stiff penalties against two companies for making false asset claims in a restructuring deal.

The agency charged office service provider China Nine Top and AnShan Heavy Duty Mining Machinery with “extremely dirty tricks and severe violations of the rules,” the official Xinhua news agency said.

Separately, the CSRC said it confiscated 1.2 billion yuan (U.S. $173 million) in illicit profits from an alleged share price manipulation scheme involving the Shenzhen and Hong Kong stock exchanges.

In a report on its activities, the CSRC said it launched over 300 probes of illicit investment practices and market manipulation last year.

“The CSRC is committed to fighting against misbehaving financial magnates who will stop at nothing for money and power,” said the agency, as quoted by The New Paper of Singapore.

On March 1, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate (SPP) said indictments were filed against 36,300 suspects last year in 23,700 financial crime cases, Xinhua reported.

Regulators have been trying to tame high risks and volatile forces in the market that led to a 41-percent plunge in the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index over four months in mid-2015, wiping out small investors.

Walking a fine line

At the same time, the CSRC has encouraged the market with eased rules for initial public offerings (IPOs), which were stalled during the crisis to keep speculators from selling existing shares to chase higher returns.

The regulatory task mirrors the challenge facing the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) in managing monetary policy this year.

“The government has to walk a fine line to keep the world’s second largest economy steadily expanding while avoiding financial risks,” Xinhua said.

The Xinhua commentary quoted a senior official of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) planning agency as citing eight “major risk areas.”

The list includes “bad loans, liquidity strains, bond defaults, shadow banking, external market shocks, property bubbles, government debt and online financing.”

The goal seems to be avoidance of a sudden decline rather than hoped-for growth.

At a meeting of the Central Leading Group on the economy, President Xi Jinping set the theme of “seeking progress while maintaining stability” for the government’s work this year, state media said.

“For 2017, the significance of stability could not be more emphasized,” Xinhua said in another commentary on the government’s goals.

In what appeared to be a lukewarm assurance of stability last week, Finance Minister Xiao Jie told reporters that government debt risks “are generally within control,” acknowledging “illegal debt-raising practices by local governments.”

Another significant risk is a property bubble, which is partially linked to the government’s concerns with speculation and the Vanke takeover bid.

Last month, the government claimed success in cooling the growth of housing prices after increases slowed in January for the fourth month in a row, but the evidence appeared scant.

The NBS survey of 70 large and mid-sized cities found month-to-month increases for new housing in 45 markets, a slight improvement from 46 in December and 55 in November.

Average month-to-month price growth in January fell to 0.2 percent from 0.3 percent a month before, Reuters said.

The claim of progress in deflating the housing bubble followed government pressure on local authorities to impose restrictions on second and third home purchases for speculative investment by well-heeled buyers.

“Houses are built to be lived in, not for speculation,” said President Xi in a widely cited statement on property price curbs.

Risks of a real estate crash

But the government’s claims of success in battling the bubble are debatable.

While month-to-month increases have been modest, the NBS data for January showed year-to-year price hikes of 24.7 percent in Beijing, 23.8 percent in Shanghai and 48.8 percent in Shenzhen. Of the 70 cities, only four recorded price declines from a year before.

The issue of housing speculation is critical for China because the runaway sector has spurred demand for energy-consuming products including coal, steel, aluminum, cement, and flat glass.

Overbuilding in the property market has contributed to cheating on government targets for cutting production overcapacity in the coal and steel sectors, as well as increased outbreaks of smog.

The risks of a real estate crash are also linked to the government’s concerns with stock market manipulation, since China’s huge pool of capital constantly seeks out alternate opportunities for higher returns.

“This is the regulatory behavior you get with a giant ball of liquidity sloshing around,” said Derek Scissors, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

In his address to the NPC, Premier Li promised steps to deal with problems that have pushed housing prices beyond the reach of poorer buyers.

Li said the government would “reasonably increase” land supplies for housing in markets with the highest price increases while trying to cut the backlog of unsold homes in third and fourth-tier cities, but he offered no new ideas.

By enumerating the many risks to stability, the NDRC is signaling that the government will take a more coordinated approach to economic management instead of letting liquidity flow from one speculative bubble to another.

The government sees the management effort as critical to stability at a time when it is cutting overcapacity industries, closing “zombie” enterprises by curbing credit and eliminating jobs.

“China will accelerate building a supervision coordination mechanism and strengthen macro-prudential regulation to prevent systemic risks,” Xi reportedly told his economic leading group.

But in the course of promoting stability over growth, regulators seem likely to classify a broader range of investment activities and transactions as outside the law.

“Financial supervisors should fix weak links and act hard against illegal activities,” Xi said.

Stoltenberg Says NATO Adapting To More Dangerous World

0
0

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg published his annual report on Monday showing how in 2016 the Alliance, “took further steps to keep our almost one billion citizens safe.”

The report highlights how NATO is adapting to the new security environment by strengthening its collective defense and projecting stability beyond its borders.

Four multinational battlegroups are being deployed to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. At least seventeen Allied countries will contribute troops.

While enhancing its deterrence measures in the eastern part of the Alliance, NATO has had political dialogue with Russia and held three meetings of the NATO-Russia Council last year.

The Secretary General underlined how the Alliance is doing more to project stability, such as by training local forces in Afghanistan and Iraq to fight terrorism. NATO has also sent training teams to countries including Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia.

NATO AWACS planes are supporting the Global Coalition to Counter-ISIL and a new Intelligence Division has been created by NATO to deepen its understanding of the threats it faces.

Stoltenberg explained how the Alliance has turned a corner on defense spending. In 2016 twenty-three Allies increased their defense expenditure in real terms by 3.8 %, which added up to ten billion US dollars.

The Secretary General confirmed only five Allies spent 2% or more of GDP on defense in 2016. He said, “It is realistic that all Allies should reach this goal. All Allies have agreed to it at the highest level and it can be done.”

Stoltenberg pointed out European Allies together spent 2% of GDP on defense as recently as the year 2000. He was encouraged that Romania plans to reach 2% this year and both Latvia and Lithuania expect to do the same in 2018.

The Secretary General encouraged Allies to redouble their efforts on defense spending and said it would be a key focus at the upcoming meeting of NATO leaders.

Spain Second-Placed EU Country Receiving Funding Under Juncker Plan In 2016

0
0

Spain is the second-placed country of the European Union in terms of receiving funding under the Juncker Plan in 2016, with a total of 2.7 billion euros, which means an estimated mobilised investment of some 14.7 billion euros.

​In the two years in which Juncker Plan has been in force, Spain has received 3.42 billion euros allocated to 40 projects (9.5% of the EU total), with an estimated mobilized investment of some 23 billion euros, thus placing Spain as the second-highest beneficiary of this measure since it was set up, behind only Italy. These figures have been extrapolated from reports by the European Commission and the European Investment Bank (EIB), tasked with managing the plan.

At a sector level, SMEs and mid-cap companies have been the main recipients of funding under the Juncker Plan, with 40% of the total obtained through the Innovation and Infrastructure Window (IIW), managed by the EIB, and 100% of the total under the SME Window, managed by the European Investment Fund (EIF). Also noteworthy due to their weighting in the funding are the projects designed to improve energy efficiency and climate action.

In the EU as a whole, 422 operations have been approved, with a total sum of 30.2 billion euros. Of this amount, 22 billion have been approved under the IIW Window and the remaining 8.2 billion under the SME Window.

The Juncker Plan plans to mobilise 315 billion euros of investment in total throughout the European Union by mid-2018, of which 52% of this goal has now been met. The plan is made up of three pillars:

Pillar I: the European Fund for Strategic Investment constitutes the financial arm of the plan.

Pillar II: creation of the European Investment Advisory Hub and the European Investment Project Portal, with the aim of guaranteeing that investments reach the real economy.

Pillar III: improved environment for investment through the elimination of obstacles to investment and an improved regulatory framework, pushing through the creation of the Capital Market Union.

The European Fund for Strategic Investment (EFSI) is composed of a 16-billion euro guarantee from the EU Budget complemented by 5 billion euros from the EIB. The EIB is tasked with managing the Fund. Within the framework of the EFSI, the EIB can back higher risk projects in priority activity areas for the future of the European economy. The aim is to finance projects which, due to their nature, cannot be financed by the EIB but which arouse a great interest due to their knock-on effect on the European economy. An independent Investment Committee selects the projects based on criteria of feasibility and economic attraction.

Keep Your Eye On The Balkans – Analysis

0
0

By Col. Robert E. Hamilton*

(FPRI) — “All wars result from conflicts of one kind or another, but not all conflicts lead to war”[1]

Renewed war in Bosnia-Herzegovina is not something that Western policymakers may wish to consider, but it is a distinct possibility unless the international community acts to assist the country in addressing its problems. These problems are similar to those which were a major cause of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina that began in 1992. In short, the country’s post-Dayton constitution institutionalizes identity divisions among Bosnia-Herzegovina’s people, in much the same way that the Yugoslav constitution did.

Institutionalized identity divisions occur when states label people according to ethnic, religious, or other objective criteria, and then apportion benefits based upon these labels. In a state with institutionalized identity divisions, a shock or crisis can catalyze conflict among identity groups, since leaders will use these identities as potent and readily available means of mobilizing followers. This escalating conflict inside a state often invites intervention by other states, further escalating the conflict.

In 1992, the presence of institutionalized identity divisions, a dual economic and constitutional crisis, and intervention by Bosnia-Herzegovina’s neighbors—primarily Serbia—plunged the country into a bloody three-year civil war. Today, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s constitution perpetuates the institutionalization of identity divisions in the country, providing a structural basis for the escalation of ethnic conflict. Any number of conceivable events—a move by Republika Srpska toward independence, an ethnically or religiously motivated attack, or a prolonged economic crisis—could be a catalyst for conflict. Whether this conflict then escalates to civil war would then be determined by the role of external actors. While Bosnia-Herzegovina’s neighbors are playing much more constructive roles than they did in the 1990s, Russia is playing an increasingly malevolent role by attempting to stoke ethnic tensions, especially among Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Serb minority. In these conditions, efforts at stabilization by the international community, along with courage by Bosnia-Herzegovina’s political leaders, may be critical to avoiding another bloody Balkan war.

Renewed War in the Balkans is not a Remote Prospect

In April 2016, I spent two weeks in the Balkans. My objective there was to research the causes of the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but almost everyone I interviewed was more interested in talking about the next war there than the last one. The prospect of renewed war in the Balkans is not something Western policy-makers may wish to consider. After all, the West has enough problems to deal with at the moment from immigration, to terrorism, to a revanchist Russia, to the rise of right-wing populism. But renewed war in the Balkans— specifically in Bosnia-Herzegovina—is not a remote prospect, and unless the West pays greater attention to the situation there, it could be surprised by the renewal of a conflict that most Europeans and Americans considered settled long ago.

My research on the conflicts in the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia points to three main factors that contribute to the outbreak of violent separatism. The first of these are institutionalized divisions in identity within a state. By this, I mean state policies that label people according to ethnic, religious, or other objective criteria, and then apportion economic gains, territory, political power, or other benefits based upon these labels. In a state with institutionalized identity divisions, a shock or crisis can catalyze conflict among identity groups by suddenly putting the relationship of each group to power and other benefits up for renegotiation. In these conditions, leaders will reach for the most potent and readily available means of mobilizing followers, and state-sponsored identities often prove to be both potent and available. This mobilization of groups along lines of identity and escalation of conflict among them is the second factor necessary for the outbreak of a violent separatist movement. The third factor is external intervention – since even the most fractured and incoherent states usually have the capacity to defeat a separatist movement that receives no external support, such support is critical to the escalation of conflict.

One way to view these three factors is as fuel, spark, and accelerant for a fire. Institutionalized identity divisions provide the fuel; a shock or crisis provides the spark; and external intervention provides the accelerant. In Bosnia-Herzegovina today, ample fuel is present in the way the post-Dayton political system classifies groups and apportions power and other benefits among them. These institutionalized identity divisions among Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks are at least as stark as they were at the end of the Yugoslav period, prior to the outbreak of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992. This article reviews the causes of the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the current situation and conflict potential there; it concludes by offering suggestions for stabilizing the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Origins of the 1992-1995 War in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Josip Broz Tito

Josip Broz Tito

The outbreak of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992 follows the pattern discussed above: institutionalized divisions in identity combined with a political crisis and external intervention to catalyze a large-scale separatist war. Although Yugoslavia formally attempted to construct a non-ethically and non-religiously-based Yugoslav identity, other state policies undermined that effort and reinforced the distinct Serbian, Croatian, and Muslim (or Bosniak) identities that had been formed by the different historical experiences of the groups. Construction of such a unifying identity was always going to be a daunting challenge since the Yugoslavia that emerged from the Second World War was the most diverse state in Europe, with five nations, four languages, four religions, and two alphabets all officially recognized within its borders.[2] Nevertheless, Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito believed the construction of a unifying identity was both possible and essential to the success of the socialist state. And there are reasons to believe he was correct; after all, inter-communal violence between Serbs and Croats did not have deep historical roots. As Reneo Lukic and Allen Lynch observe, despite the violence during the Second World War, “there was no history of group violence between Serbs and Croats before the 1920s.”[3]

After an early post-war effort at unification and homogenization around a common Yugoslav identity, changes to the federal constitution throughout the 1960s and 1970s amounted to a policy of acknowledging the primacy of older, national identities and institutionalizing these by devolving political and economic power from the federal center to the national republics. The failure to create a common Yugoslav identity meant that Tito’s personal legitimacy was a main factor holding the country together. Tito has been called the only true Yugoslav national symbol, so his death naturally dealt a blow to the ideal of a supra-national Yugoslav identity. To make matters worse, the period after his death was a period of continuous economic and political crisis in Yugoslavia. By 1987, foreign debt, only $4.7 billion just fifteen years earlier, ballooned to almost $22 billion;[4] inflation stood at 167% annually,[5] and the unemployment rate stood at over 16%.[6] Added to the economic crises was a constitutional crisis, made even more destabilizing by the structure of the Yugoslav state. As Mark Beissinger and Ljubomir Hajda note, the constitutional changes that devolved power from the federal center to the national republics overlaid national divisions on top of center-periphery divisions, so that crises over distribution of power or economic resources inevitably became nationality crises as well.[7]

The dual economic and constitutional crises in Yugoslavia paved the way for the emergence of radical nationalist leadership, personified—but certainly not represented exclusively—by Slobodan Milošević. Milošević consistently pursued two goals: the recentralization of power within the Serbian republic through revocation of the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina and the recentralization of Yugoslavia itself, with the ultimate goal of reversing the process of decentralization that had been underway for decades and restore the unitary Yugoslav state of the early post-war period.[8] Resistance to Milosevic’s plans by the leadership of the other Yugoslav Republics, especially Slovenia and Croatia, set the conditions for escalation of conflict.

President Clinton talking with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Photo Credit: CIA

President Clinton talking with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Photo Credit: CIA

So by the early 1990s, Yugoslavia’s overlapping, institutionalized political, economic, and national identities combined with the dual economic and constitutional crises and the emergence of  a nationalist Serbian leadership in Belgrade to provide ample fuel for a conflagration. At this point, only the spark and the accelerant were missing. Neither was long in coming. Declarations of sovereignty by Slovenia and Croatia in the summer of 1991 were followed by wars of secession in both. In the fall of 1991, the existence of Serbia’s Plan Ram (Frame) became public when its details were published in the Belgrade weekly Vreme.[9] Ram, which envisioned a future in which “all Serbs with their territories would live together in the same state,”[10] deeply alarmed the leadership of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In response, the national assembly declared Bosnia-Herzegovina a sovereign and independent state. In the spring of 1992, Bosnia-Herzegovina moved to formalize its independence from Yugoslavia by holding a referendum. As expected, this referendum, held from 29 February-1 March, resulted in a majority vote for independence. Immediately after the referendum, Serb forces launched their attacks in an attempt to forestall international recognition of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s independence by presenting the world with a military fait accompli.[11]

The road to war in Bosnia-Herzegovina began with the institutionalization of identity divisions in the republic by the Yugoslav government; proceeded through the crisis period of the 1980s, which provided nationalist politicians both the motive and opportunity to mobilize followers along the lines of these identity divisions; and culminated in a violent separatist movement supported by Serbia and—for a time—Croatia. After a series of atrocities—perpetrated by all sides, but most visibly and egregiously by Serb forces—extensive diplomatic and limited military intervention by the broader international community brought an end to the war.

Post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina

While the Dayton Agreement ended the war and set up a functioning set of state institutions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, it did nothing to address the main cause of the war, which lay in the divided and institutionalized identities in the country. Indeed, the structure of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s state institutions imposed at Dayton may make renewed conflict more likely by closely binding access to political power and economic gains to ethnic identity in the same way the Yugoslav system did after the devolution of power from the center to the republics. This is not a criticism of the Dayton Accords themselves; the main purpose was to end the war and create short-term stability in Bosnia-Herzegovina to allow for the development of a more durable and resilient state. Instead, the dangerous situation is due to inattention by the international community and self-interested behavior by Bosnia-Herzegovina’s political elites, which has allowed what was intended to be a temporary constitutional structure to become permanent. The result, as noted earlier, is that many Bosniak, Serb, and Croat scholars, policy-makers, and civil society leaders see renewed war as not only possible, but likely.

This largely held opinion comes from the current Bosnian constitutional structure, still largely unchanged since 1995, institutionalizes identity divisions at multiple levels in the government and society of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Based upon Article 4 of the Dayton Accords, the constitution of Bosnia-Herzegovina locates sovereignty not in the state itself but in its “constituent peoples,” or the Serb, Croat, and Bosniak ethnic groups of the country.[12] This tripartite division is reflected in the institutional structure of the state, as well. The bicameral legislature is composed of a House of Peoples, which “shall comprise 15 Delegates, two-thirds from the Federation (including five Croats and five Bosniaks) and one-third from the Republika Srpska (five Serbs);” and a House of Representatives, which “shall comprise 42 Members, two-thirds elected from the territory of the Federation, one-third from the territory of the Republika Srpska.”[13] Even the presidency is a tripartite institution, consisting of “one Bosniak and one Croat, each directly elected from the territory of the Federation, and one Serb directly elected from the territory of the Republika Srpska.”[14] Far from being a model for governance of a multi-ethnic state, this constitutional model almost guarantees conflict by institutionalizing ethnic identities and tying them to access to political power. As constitutional scholar Edin Šarcevic notes, whereas a citizen’s state is based on the constitutional premise of placing the “abstract man as the inviolable quantity within the political system.” the Bosnian constitution “has suspended this basic premise, and by placing ‘constituent nations’ at the foundations of the state community has established a contradictory system that cannot function without generating conflict.”[15]

Even the study of the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina has been ethnically institutionalized. There are separate Serb, Croat, and Bosniak documentation centers to study the war, with the Croatian center located in Mostar, the Serb center in Banja Luka, and the Bosniak center in Sarajevo. The potential for three separate histories of the war to be propagated among Bosnia-Herzegovina’s three major ethnic groups is exceptionally destabilizing because instead of a single, generally accepted set of historical facts and figures about the war, each center can (and does) publish and propagate its own set of “facts.” Among these that I heard while at the Croatian Documentation Center in Mostar is the following: in the 1992-1995 war, Bosniaks killed “ten times as many Croats as Croats killed Bosniaks,” but “they” (Bosniaks) present it as the opposite.[16]

Alija Izetbegović

Alija Izetbegović

Interviews with scholars, policy-makers, and civil society leaders in Bosnia-Herzegovina support the contention that the current situation is unstable. Perhaps the most troubling internal development is the increasing rift between Bosniaks and Croats, ostensible allies and federation partners under the constitution. In Mostar, local Bosnian-Croat politicians warn that a clash between the Euro-Christian and Islamic worlds is playing out in the Balkans,[17] and that Bosniak President Alija Izetbegović is setting up an Islamic state, where Serbs and Croats will be relegated to “the status of the Algerians in France”.[18] These same leaders are deeply suspicious of Turkish influence in the Balkans, arguing that the current Turkish government is pursuing a neo-Ottoman policy designed to re-establish hegemony over the Balkans. For proof of Turkey’s neo-Ottoman designs, they point to the 2001 book, Strategic Depth, by former Turkish Foreign Minister and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, which they claim is a roadmap for the “reincarnation of the Ottoman Turkish Empire.”[19] The wider Islamic world is also a source of great mistrust and concern for Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Croats, with much made of the “great interest” shown in Bosnia-Herzegovina by Iran and Malaysia, among others, and the cultural and alleged intelligence penetration of the country by these countries.[20]

If relations between Croats and Bosniaks are worsening, then relations between Serbs and Bosniaks can only be described as grave. Evidence of this fact is readily available: on 25 September 2016, Republika Srpska held a referendum on establishing its own “national day,” which received 99.8% approval among those who voted.[21] This referendum is widely regarded as a trial run for a referendum on independence, which Republika Srpska’s President Milorad Dodik has promised to hold by 2018. The Economist began its article on the referendum with the following sentence: “The threat of a new war in Bosnia is so strong that ‘you can feel it in the air,’ warns Aleksandar Vucic, the prime minister of neighbouring Serbia. It would take only a spark, he thinks, to ignite it.”[22]

Recent mayoral and local council elections confirm the fact that identities in Bosnia-Herzegovina are hardening along nationalist lines. In these elections, on held 3 October 2016, Bosniak, Croat, and Serb nationalist parties thoroughly dominated their non-nationalist rivals. In Republika Srpska, Dodic’s Alliance of Independent Social Democrats won 30% more municipalities than in the last election, and in the Muslim-Croat Federation, “nationalists won convincingly, even though more than 100 political parties contested the elections.”[23] In the capital of Sarajevo, the Bosniak nationalist Party of Democratic Action won every electoral district for the first time ever, and voters in the majority-Bosniak town of Velika Kladusa elected a convicted war criminal, Fikret Abdic, as mayor.[24]

With identities in post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina as divided and institutionalized as they are, a spark leading to a conflagration could take several forms. The independence referendum promised by Dodic would certainly be such a spark. Another might be a religiously motivated terrorist attack. Although the Islamization of Bosnia-Herzegovina is nowhere near as stark as is believed in some parts of Republika Srpska and the Bosnian Croat heartland of Herzegovina, the combination of ethno-religious tension in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the relative proximity of the country to the Middle East, and the existence of Islamic terrorist groups wishing to strike at Western symbols could portend danger. It is easy to imagine a religiously motivated mass killing of Croatian Catholics or Orthodox Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The consequences of such an attack in terms of the escalation of violence between the country’s Christian and Muslim groups, however, are almost unimaginable. Finally, a period of political and economic crisis, like that experienced by Yugoslavia in the 1980s, could gradually raise the heat level to the point that a conflagration becomes likely.

Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić with Russian President Vladimir Putin (Source: kremlin.ru)

Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić with Russian President Vladimir Putin (Source: kremlin.ru)

In these dangerous conditions, the role of external actors is critical. In the 1990s, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s neighbors—especially Serbia and Croatia—were key contributors to both the outbreak of war and to the high level of human rights abuses characterizing it. Today, the situation looks significantly different. Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić, whose pro-Europe government was re-elected to a new four-year term in April 2016, has largely played a constructive role in Bosnia-Herzegovina, by opposing the recent referendum in Republika Srpska, for example. A key reason for this change in policy is Vučić’s stated goal of bringing Serbia into the European Union during his tenure. Croatia—already a European Union and NATO member—has also played a benign role in Bosnia-Herzegovina to the chagrin of some local Bosnian Croat leaders, who complain that they receive little to no support from Zagreb in what they see as their fight against domination by Bosniaks. This situation has occurred, they say, because Croatia has been “chained” by the West, forcing it to accept Western positions on Bosnia-Herzegovina, even though these are detrimental to Bosnian Croats.[25]

The role of Western states and international institutions is ambiguous. On the one hand, prospective or actual membership for Balkan countries in Western institutions is likely to incentivize them to peacefully resolve any differences they may have. Croatia is currently a member of both institutions; Bosnia-Herzegovina has been extended a Membership Action Plan (MAP) by NATO,[26] and the EU recently voted to allow its membership application to proceed; and Serbia, though uninterested in NATO membership, is making significant progress toward joining the EU, as already noted. On the other hand, the UN’s High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina has not played as active a role as it might have, declining to block Republika Srpska’s recent referendum despite having the power to do so, for example.[27]

Russia has played an especially malevolent role in the country, and one that seems bent on destabilizing it. In contrast to Bosnia-Herzegovina’s neighbors and Western countries, who opposed the recent Bosnian Serb national day referendum and have largely shunned the Serb nationalism of Republika Srpska’s President Dodic, “Vladimir Putin, Russia’s leader, egged on Mr. Dodi[c], receiving him in Moscow on September 22nd.”[28] And Russia’s activities in the Balkans have not been confined to support for Dodic as Russia is also attempting to rewrite the recent history of the region. As Gordana Knezevic notes,

It was Russia that vetoed the resolution proposed by Great Britain on the Srebrenica genocide. Russian media are actively contributing to the revisionist project with efforts to rehabilitate Milosevic, who died in custody in The Hague in 2006. Contrary to the evidence gathered by The Hague tribunal in the course of the unfinished trial, Milosevic is now being painted as a peacemaker and as someone who wanted only to save Yugoslavia, rather than the man ultimately responsible for the worst atrocities on European soil since World War II.

What Can Be Done?

View of Grbavica, a neighbourhood of Sarajevo, approximately 4 months after the signing of the Dayton Peace Accord that officially ended the war in Bosnia. Source: Public Domain (PD-USGov-Military)

View of Grbavica, a neighbourhood of Sarajevo, approximately 4 months after the signing of the Dayton Peace Accord that officially ended the war in Bosnia. Source: Public Domain (PD-USGov-Military)

What can be done to prevent the outbreak of another war in Bosnia-Herzegovina? The place to start is with the identities of the three major groups in the country and the institutions that regulate interactions among them. The objective, which is admittedly highly aspirational, should be to work over time to build a sense of shared national identity in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Despite widespread assumptions to the contrary, the distinct Serb, Croat, and Bosniak identities are not fixed and primordial, but rather—like identities everywhere—are subject to construction and reinterpretation over time.

And, as many scholars have shown, the state and its policies can play a significant role in that process of identity construction. Although the Yugoslav state was unsuccessful in its attempt to build an overarching Yugoslav identity, many of its contemporaries succeeded in changing the self-identification of the people they governed. Among these was the Soviet Union, which trimmed its official list of recognized Soviet nationalities from 188 in 1926 to 95 in 1959.[29] This trimming was done to demonstrate the “drawing together” and “merging” of national groups that Marxist theory predicted and that the Soviet government claimed was underway. As one scholar has noted, even though these classifications “did not follow locally-recognized distinctions, the act of delimitation made difference ‘official,’ and as such it had very real effects.”[30] The United States also changed the ways its citizens self-identified. Although citizenship in the United States has no ethnic dimension, the U.S. government still classifies people according to ethnic criteria, and these classifications have been shown to affect how people self-identify. Scholarship on ethnic categories in the United States has shown that, for example, a 1977 directive from the Office of Management and Budget, which “mandated the categories to be used by all federal departments and agencies when collecting and disseminating data on race and ethnicity,” defined racial and ethnic categories that “now serve, in slightly revised form, as the official ethnic and racial categories for American society at large.”[31]

So the state and its policies can significantly affect the self-identification of the people it governs. Despite assumptions to the contrary, identities in Bosnia-Herzegovina are not so adversarial that conflict among them is inevitable; as already noted, there was no history of conflict between Serbs and Croats anywhere in the Balkans before the 1920s.[32] Despite its violent nature, inter-ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia is a phenomenon of the 20th century, not one with ancient and deep historical roots.

Finally, despite claims to the contrary by some, Bosnia-Herzegovina is not an artificial state. Indeed, it has existed as a political and administrative entity since the Middle Ages and was administered as a separate unit by the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires as well as by Yugoslavia.[33] The perception of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s “artificiality” comes from the focus in the Balkans on an ethnic definition of citizenship, but other European and North American states have successfully built national identities based upon civic, not ethnic criteria.

The process of constructing an overarching national identity in Bosnia-Herzegovina will not be a short or simple process, and the Bosnian government in its current form may not be able to achieve this goal. Instead, the construction of a single, civic national identity in Bosnia-Herzegovina will require extensive and long-term engagement by Western states and international institutions. To begin this process, some have argued for a “Second Dayton.” One of the reasons the Dayton Accords were successful is that the negotiating teams were sequestered with little to no media coverage, and all sides committed—after strong pressure from the United States—to remain in the negotiations until a deal was reached. A second round of negotiations of this type is probably necessary to restructure the constitution of Bosnia-Herzegovina: something that is essential to the continued coherence of the state, but which the country’s political elites have been unable to do themselves. Indeed, legal scholar Edin Šarcevic has argued for a “deliberate suspension of the domestic political actors as the subjects of constitutional power, and their replacement by the ‘foreign factor.’ Over the past thirteen years, this factor has been the true bearer of internal sovereignty, and is responsible for the minimal reforms that have enabled the state to function.”[34]

The constitutional structure that emerges from such an effort must provide mechanisms and incentives for elites to cooperate and for people to develop other identities that cut across rather than reinforce the existing Serb, Croat, and Bosniak identities. One way to do this is to modify the territorial structure of the state since the current division of the state into two ethnically defined entities serves to perpetuate rather than erode these distinctions in identity. As Ambarkov has noted, there are historical models of autonomy that focus on the protection of religious and socio-cultural identities without tying these to territory, which have been shown to work in the Balkans.[35] So a shift away from territorial autonomy and toward non-territorial religious and cultural autonomy is a model that might hold promise.

Along with working to break down the divisions in identity within Bosnia-Herzegovina, bringing long-term stability to the country will require the cooperation of external actors. As noted, the international community will need to be extensively involved in the constitutional reform process. Closer to home, continued non-interference by Bosnia-Herzegovina’s neighbors, especially Croatia and Serbia, is crucial. To this point, encouraged at least in part by the conditionality of their processes for EU (for both) and NATO (for Croatia) membership, Zagreb and Belgrade have played mostly constructive roles. Continued meddling and attempts at destabilization by Russia are to be expected, since they cost Russia very little and serve to sow instability within Europe, a key Russian foreign policy goal of the last several years at least. But in the absence of the fuel for conflict provided by divided and institutionalized identities, external attempts at fomenting conflict will face significantly longer odds. Ending Bosnia-Herzegovina’s decades of ethnic strife and setting the country on a path to stability and resiliency is admittedly a daunting task, especially at a time when Europe faces so many other, more immediate problems. But failing to deal with the root causes of this strife now may set the stage for much larger and deadlier problems in the future.

 

The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Army War College, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

About the author:
*U.S. Army Colonel Robert E. Hamilton
is a Black Sea Fellow at FPRI

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

Notes:
[1] Reneo Lukic and Allen Lynch, Europe From the Balkans to the Urals: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996) p. 174.

[2] Lukic and Lynch, p. 76.

[3] Ibid, p. 77.

[4] “Razvoj Privrednih Djelatnosti U SFR Jugoslaviji” (The Development of Business Activity in the SFR of Yugoslavia), internet resource at: http://www.znaci.net/00001/120_5.pdf, accessed 10 Oct. 2016.

[5] OECD Economic Surveys: Yugoslavia (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, Paris, 1988), p. 9.

[6] Susan L. Woodward, Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945-1990 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1995), p. 377.

[7] Lukic and Lynch, p. 80.

[8] Ibid, 151

[9] Lukic and Lynch, 204.

[10] Ibid, 204.

[11] Ibid, 205.

[12] https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Bosnia_Herzegovina_2009.pdf, accessed 29 Sep. 2016.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] “Ethnic Segregation as a Desirable Constitutional Position?”, interview with Edin Šarcevic, internet resource at: http://www.bosnia.org.uk/news/news_body.cfm?newsid=2528, accessed 29 Sep. 2016.

[16] Vladimir Solic, interview with the author, 19 Apr. 2016.

[17] Zeliko Raguz, interview with the author, 19 Apr. 2016.

[18] Vladimir Solic, interview with the author, 19 Apr. 2016.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Turnout was a fairly low 55.8 per cent.

[22] “A Referendum by Serbs Threatens Yet More Trouble for Bosnia”, The Economist, Sep. 27th, 2016, online resource at: http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21707877-banned-vote-separate-bosnian-serb-national-day-has-some-people-talking-war-referendum, accessed 30 September 2016.

[23] Gordana Knezevic, “Bosnian Elections a Triumph for Nationalist Parties”, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, internet resource at: http://www.rferl.org/a/bosnia-elections-nationalist-parties-triumph/28029427.html, accessed 10 Oct. 2016.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Zeliko Raguz, interview with the author, 19 April 2016.

[26] MAP is the final step before membership, although Bosnia-Herzegovina’s MAP invitation came with the condition that all defense articles much be registered as belonging to the central government.

[27] “A Referendum by Serbs Threatens Yet More Trouble for Bosnia”, The Economist, Sep. 27th, 2016, online resource at: http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21707877-banned-vote-separate-bosnian-serb-national-day-has-some-people-talking-war-referendum, accessed 30 Sep. 2016.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver, “Demographic Sources of the Changing Ethnic Composition of the Soviet Union”, Population and Development Review 15:4 (Dec. 1989), 612-613.

[30] Mathijs Pelkmans, Defending the Border: Identity, Religion and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 4.

[31] Victoria Hattam and Joseph Lowndes in Skowronek and Glassman (Eds.), Formative Acts: American Politics in the Making, (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 210.

[32] Lukic and Lynch, p. 77.

[33] Ibid, p. 209.

[34] “Ethnic Segregation as a Desirable Constitutional Position?”, interview with Edin Šarcevic, internet resource at: http://www.bosnia.org.uk/news/news_body.cfm?newsid=2528, accessed 29 Sep. 2016.

[35] Nikola Ambarkov, “Ottoman Millet System And The Political System Of Both Yugoslavias As Pre-Consociational Experience For The Macedonian And The Bosnian Multicultural Society”, in Iustinianus Primus Law Review 6:1 (2014), pp. 1-13.

How Ambassador Haqqani’s Confession Endorses Seymour Hersh’s Account Of Bin Laden’s Killing? – OpEd

0
0

In his March 10 article [1] for the Washington Post, Pakistan’s ambassador to the US at the time of Osama Bin Laden’s execution, Husain Haqqani, has confessed to his role in facilitating the assassination of Bin Laden in May 2011.

Haqqani identified the then-president Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani as his “civilian leaders”, and revealed, “In November 2011, I was forced to resign as ambassador after Pakistan’s military-intelligence apparatus gained the upper hand in the country’s perennial power struggle. Among the security establishment’s grievances against me was the charge that I had facilitated the presence of large numbers of CIA operatives who helped track down bin Laden without the knowledge of Pakistan’s army — even though I had acted under the authorization of Pakistan’s elected civilian leaders.”

Haqqani wrote: “The relationships I forged with members of Obama’s campaign team also led to closer cooperation between Pakistan and the United States in fighting terrorism over the three and a half  years I served as ambassador. These connections eventually enabled the United States to discover and eliminate bin Laden without depending on Pakistan’s intelligence service or military, which were suspected of sympathy toward Islamist militants.”

The former ambassador said, “Friends I made from the Obama campaign were able to ask, three years later, as National Security Council officials, for help in stationing U.S. Special Operations and intelligence personnel on the ground in Pakistan. I brought the request directly to Pakistan’s civilian leaders, who approved. Although the United States kept us officially out of the loop about the operation, these locally stationed Americans proved invaluable when Obama decided to send in Navy SEAL Team 6 without notifying Pakistan.”

This confessional statement by Ambassador Haqqani lends further credence to Seymour Hersh’s account of the assassination of Bin Laden in his book and article, The Killing of Osama Bin Laden [2]. According to Hersh, the initial, tentative plan of the Obama Administration regarding the disclosure of the execution of Osama bin Laden to the press was that he had been killed in a drone strike in the Hindu Kush mountains on the Afghan side of the border. But things didn’t go as planned during the operation as a Black Hawk helicopter crashed in Osama Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound and the whole town now knew that an operation is underway.

Therefore, the initial plan was abandoned and the Obama Administration had to go public within hours of the operation with a hurriedly cooked up story. This fact explains so many contradictions and discrepancies in the official account of the story, the biggest being that the United States Navy Seals conducted a raid deep inside Pakistani territory on a garrison town without the permission of Pakistani authorities.

Moreover, according to a May 2015 AFP report [3], Pakistan’s military sources had confirmed that there was a Pakistani defector who had met several times with Jonathan Bank, the CIA’s then-station chief in Islamabad, as a consequence of which the Pakistani intelligence disclosed Bank’s name to local newspapers and he had to leave Pakistan in a hurry in December 2010 because his cover was blown.

Seymour Hersh has posited in his investigative report on the Bin Laden operation in Abbottabad that the Saudi royal family had asked Pakistan as a favor to keep Bin Laden under protective custody, because he was a scion of a powerful Saudi-Yemeni Bin Laden Group and it was simply inconceivable for the Saudis to hand him over to the US.

Additionally, it should be kept in mind that the Pakistani military and Saudi Arabia have very deep and institutionalized links: thousands of Pakistani retired and serving army officers work on deputations in the Gulf States; furthermore, during the ’80s, when Saudi Arabia lacked an efficient intelligence set-up, the Pakistani Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) virtually played the role of Saudi Arabia’s foreign intelligence service.

But once the Pakistani walk-in colonel, as stated in the aforementioned AFP report, had told then-CIA station chief in Islamabad, Jonathan Bank, that a high-value al Qaeda leader had been hiding in an ISI’s safe house in Abbottabad, right next to the Pakistan’s Military Academy, and after that when the CIA obtained further proof in the form of Bin Laden’s DNA through the fake vaccination program carried out by Dr. Shakil Afridi, then it was no longer possible for Pakistan’s security establishment to deny the whereabouts of Bin Laden.

In his book, Seymour Hersh has already postulated various theories that why it was not possible for Pakistan’s military authorities to simply hand Bin Laden over to the US. Here, let me only add that in May 2011, Pakistan had a liberal and US-friendly Pakistan People’s Party’s government in power. And as Ambassador Haqqani has pointed out in his article that the then-army chief, Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, and the ISI head, Shuja Pasha, were complicit in harboring Bin Laden, thus it cannot be ruled out that Pakistan’s military authorities might still have had strong objections to the US Navy Seals carrying out a raid in the garrison town of Abbottabad.

But Pakistan’s civilian administration under the former President Asif Ali Zardari must have persuaded the army chief and the ISI head to order the Pakistan Air Force and the Air Defense Corps to stand down during the operation. Ambassador Haqqani’s role in this saga ruffled the feathers of Pakistan’s security establishment to an extent that Husain Haqqani was later implicated in a criminal case regarding his memo to Admiral Mike Mullen and eventually Ambassador Haqqani had to resign in November 2011, just six months after the Operation Neptune Spear.

Moreover, Greg Miller of the Washington Post posited in his last year’s May 5 report [4] that Mark Kelton, the CIA station chief in Islamabad at the time of Bin Laden’s execution in Abbottabad, was poisoned by the ISI. The only purpose of this leak, five years after the operation, seems to be to discredit Seymour Hersh’s account in which he has proven beyond doubt that Pakistan’s government fully cooperated with the US during the operation. It is not a coincidence that this news report was released only within a month of the publication of Seymour Hersh’s book: The Killing of Osama bin Laden.

It should be remembered here that Mark Kelton succeeded Jonathan Bank in January 2011, after the latter’s name was made public by the ISI due to Bank’s “suspicious activities.” Hersh has mentioned in his report that the Pakistani walk-in colonel had met Jonathan Bank and had told the latter that Bin Laden was hiding in a compound in Abbottabad under the protective custody of the ISI. But in order to be sure, the US needed further proof, that’s why they arranged the fake vaccination program run by Dr. Shakil Afridi to obtain Bin Laden’s DNA samples.

The original deal between the Obama and Zardari administrations was that the story would be made public a week after the operation, as mentioned by Hersh in his report, that Bin Laden had been killed/captured in the Hindu Kush mountains on the Afghan side of the border. The crashed Black Hawk in Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound, however, made that impossible.

The Obama Administration had to improvise within hours of the operation with a hurriedly cooked up story, and they tried to gain maximum political mileage out of the incident in order to secure a second term for Obama in the US presidential elections of 2012. This fact explains so many contradictions and loopholes in the official version of the story, as I have already mentioned.

Although Seymour Hersh has claimed in his version of the story that the Pakistani military authorities were also on-board months before the operation, let me clarify, however, that according to the inside sources of Pakistan’s security establishment, only the Pakistani civilian administration under the Zardari-led and the US-friendly Pakistan People’s Party administration was on-board; and the military authorities, who were instrumental in harboring Bin Laden and his family for five years, were intimated only at the eleventh hour.

Moreover, even though Ambassador Haqqani has maintained in his confessional statement that the US “officially kept us out of the loop about the operation,” but in the same sentence, he further states, “the locally stationed CIA operatives [who were issued visas by the Zardari Administration] proved invaluable when Obama decided to send in Navy SEAL Team 6 without notifying Pakistan.” Thus, this “official” denial can only be construed as nothing more than an excuse for the sake of plausible deniability.

Sources and links:

[1] Ambassador Husain Haqqani’s article for the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/10/yes-the-russian-ambassador-met-trumps-team-so-thats-what-we-diplomats-do/

[2] Seymour Hersh: The killing of Osama bin Laden: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

[3] Pakistan military officials admit defector’s key role in Bin Laden operation: http://www.dawn.com/news/1181530/pakistan-military-officials-admit-defectors-key-role-in-bin-laden-operation

[3] CIA station chief in Islamabad was poisoned by Pakistan’s military intelligence service: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-bin-laden-raids-shadow-bad-blood-and-the-suspected-poisoning-of-a-cia-officer/2016/05/05/ace85354-0c83-11e6-a6b6-2e6de3695b0e_story.html

Sri Lanka: President Sirisena Not Visiting India

0
0

Sri Lanka’s Presidential Secretariat said that there is no scheduled visit by President Maithripala Sirisena to India in the next few days.

The Ceylon Today newspaper stated last Friday that the President is due to attend a ceremony to be held in Nalanda University in Bihar in India with the spiritual leader Dalai Lama.

“That report is incorrect and it has not verified any basis of the reported visit,” the Presidential Secretariat said in a statement.

The Presidential Secretariat further said that President Maithripala Sirisena will not make any visit to India near future.

Limbert Says Iran Has No Intention To Recreate Persian Empire – Interview

0
0

John Limbert, the former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for Iran, dismisses the view that Iran intends to revive the Persian Empire.

Limbert, a fluent Persian speaker, also tells the Tehran Times that he does not “think the Trump administration has thought out an approach” toward Iran.

Following is the text of the interview:

Q: In an article headlined “Dealing with a Difficult Iran: Get Smart”, dated March 2, you wrote that the U.S. has followed three approaches toward Iran, namely “containment”, “regime change”, and “engagement”. Do you think these approaches have been successful?

A: It’s difficult to define “success” since the goal was never clear.  The engagement of President Obama had some success beginning in 2013 as shown by the JCPOA and the ability of officials to talk with each other.

Q: Which one of these three approaches is the Trump administration pursuing toward Iran?

A: I’m not sure. I don’t think the Trump administration has thought out an approach.

Q: In the article you said: We should ask ourselves, what are our goals?  What do we want to achieve in this relationship?  So what do you think the U.S. is seeking?

A: The answer depends on whom you ask. As far as I know, there are no defined goals.

Q: Some claim Iran’s goal in the region is to recreate “a new Persian Empire”. Do you agree with such an argument?

A: No. About the “new Persian Empire”, I don’t know if states have used this line, but it has appeared in the writings of Henry Kissinger and Admiral Stavridis, head of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Q: Let’s turn to President Trump’s policy toward Saudi Arabia. First he criticized Saudi Arabia, but later he retreated from that position. What is your view of such policy shifts?

A: With President Trump’s positions, I have no explanation for what he does. Your guess is as good as mine.

*Source: Tehran-Times


Perfect Storm Of Fire And Ice May Have Led To Snowball Earth

0
0

What caused the largest glaciation event in Earth’s history, known as ‘snowball Earth’? Geologists and climate scientists have been searching for the answer for years but the root cause of the phenomenon remains elusive.

Now, Harvard University researchers have a new hypothesis about what caused the runaway glaciation that covered the Earth pole-to-pole in ice.

The research is published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Researchers have pinpointed the start of what’s known as the Sturtian snowball Earth event to about 717 million years ago — give or take a few 100,000 years. At around that time, a huge volcanic event devastated an area from present-day Alaska to Greenland. Coincidence?

Harvard professors Francis Macdonald and Robin Wordsworth thought not.

“We know that volcanic activity can have a major effect on the environment, so the big question was, how are these two events related,” said Macdonald, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences.

At first, Macdonald’s team thought basaltic rock — which breaks down into magnesium and calcium — interacted with CO2 in the atmosphere and caused cooling. However, if that were the case, cooling would have happened over millions of years and radio-isotopic dating from volcanic rocks in Arctic Canada suggest a far more precise coincidence with cooling.

Macdonald turned to Wordsworth, who models climates of non-Earth planets, and asked: could aerosols emitted from these volcanos have rapidly cooled Earth?

The answer: yes, under the right conditions.

“It is not unique to have large volcanic provinces erupting,” said Wordsworth, assistant professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science. “These types of eruptions have happened over and over again throughout geological time but they’re not always associated with cooling events. So, the question is, what made this event different?”

Geological and chemical studies of this region, known as the Franklin large igneous province, showed that volcanic rocks erupted through sulfur-rich sediments, which would have been pushed into the atmosphere during eruption as sulfur dioxide. When sulfur dioxide gets into the upper layers of the atmosphere, it’s very good at blocking solar radiation. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which shot about 10 million metric tons of sulfur into the air, reduced global temperatures about 1 degree Fahrenheit for a year.

Sulfur dioxide is most effective at blocking solar radiation if it gets past the tropopause, the boundary separating the troposphere and stratosphere. If it reaches this height, it’s less likely to be brought back down to earth in precipitation or mixed with other particles, extending its presence in the atmosphere from about a week to about a year. The height of the tropopause barrier all depends on the background climate of the planet — the cooler the planet, the lower the tropopause.

“In periods of Earth’s history when it was very warm, volcanic cooling would not have been very important because the Earth would have been shielded by this warm, high tropopause,” said Wordsworth. “In cooler conditions, Earth becomes uniquely vulnerable to having these kinds of volcanic perturbations to climate.”

“What our models have shown is that context and background really matters,” said Macdonald.

Another important aspect is where the sulfur dioxide plumes reach the stratosphere. Due to continental drift, 717 million years ago, the Franklin large igneous province where these eruptions took place was situated near the equator, the entry point for most of the solar radiation that keeps the Earth warm.

So, an effective light-reflecting gas entered the atmosphere at just the right location and height to cause cooling. But another element was needed to form the perfect storm scenario. After all, the Pinatubo eruption had similar qualities but its cooling effect only lasted about a year.

The eruptions throwing sulfur into the air 717 million years ago weren’t one-off explosions of single volcanoes like Pinatubo. The volcanoes in question spanned almost 2,000 miles across Canada and Greenland. Instead of singularly explosive eruptions, these volcanoes can erupt more continuously like those in Hawaii and Iceland today. The researchers demonstrated that a decade or so of continual eruptions from this type of volcanoes could have poured enough aerosols into the atmosphere to rapidly destabilize the climate.

“Cooling from aerosols doesn’t have to freeze the whole planet; it just has to drive the ice to a critical latitude. Then the ice does the rest,” said Macdonald.

The more ice, the more sunlight is reflected and the cooler the planet becomes. Once the ice reaches latitudes around present-day California, the positive feedback loop takes over and the runaway snowball effect is pretty much unstoppable.

“It’s easy to think of climate as this immense system that is very difficult to change and in many ways that’s true. But there have been very dramatic changes in the past and there’s every possibility that as sudden of a change could happen in the future as well,” said Wordsworth.

Understanding how these dramatic changes occur could help researchers better understand how extinctions occurred, how proposed geoengineering approaches may impact climate and how climates change on other planets.

“This research shows that we need to get away from a simple paradigm of exoplanets, just thinking about stable equilibrium conditions and habitable zones,” said Wordsworth. “We know that Earth is a dynamic and active place that has had sharp transitions. There is every reason to believe that rapid climate transitions of this type are the norm on planets, rather than the exception.”

Increase In Extreme Sea Levels Could Endanger European Coastal Communities

0
0

Massive coastal flooding in northern Europe that now occurs once every century could happen every year if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, according to a new study.

New projections considering changes in sea level rise, tides, waves and storm surge over the 21st century find global warming could cause extreme sea levels to increase significantly along Europe’s coasts by 2100. Extreme sea levels are the maximum levels of the sea that occur during a major storm and produce massive flooding.

The increase in frequency of these events that are today considered exceptional will likely push existing coastal protection structures beyond their design limits, leaving a large part of Europe’s coastal zones exposed to flooding, according to the study’s authors.

“Unless we take different protection measures, 5 million people will be exposed to coastal flooding on an annual basis,” said Michalis Vousdoukas, a coastal oceanographer at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission and the lead author of the new study published in Earth’s Future, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Northern Europe will see the strongest increase in extreme sea levels. Areas along the Mediterranean and the Black Sea could see these 100-year extreme sea level events several times a year. In the North Sea region, extreme sea levels could increase by nearly 1 meter (3 feet) under the worst-case scenario. The Atlantic coasts of the United Kingdom and Ireland could see similar increases in extreme sea levels, while lower but still considerable increases in extreme sea levels are projected for the Norwegian and Baltic seas.

Information about the number of people at risk from flooding can be used to determine how large the social and economic impact of these events will be, said Marta Marcos, a researcher at the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies in Spain, who was not involved in the new study.

“In terms of adaptation strategies and policymaking, it is very relevant,” she said.

Considering all components

The new research considers how all components that can influence extreme sea levels, including the mean sea level, tides, waves and storm surge, will be affected by climate change. The researchers used information about these different components to project changes in extreme sea levels by 2100 under different greenhouse gas scenarios. Using all of these components provides a more accurate projection of how extreme sea levels will change this century, according to the study’s authors.

Under the most extreme scenario, where greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise throughout this century, extreme sea levels along Europe’s coastlines could increase by 81 centimeters, or more than 2 ½ feet, on average, by 2100. That means 5 million Europeans who are currently under threat of flooding from extreme sea level events that occur every 100 years could face that same risk annually, according to the new study.

Even under a more moderate scenario where greenhouse gas emissions peak in 2040, 100-year extreme sea levels could increase by 57 centimeters, or nearly 2 feet, on average, by the end of the century, with these events occurring every few years, according to study’s authors.

The changes in one of these components, wave energy flux, is detailed in a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. That study finds that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, the energy waves carry to the coast will change significantly around the world by the end of the century.

In the southern hemisphere, extreme waves could carry up to 30 percent more energy by 2100, according to the new study. This means stronger waves will become more frequent, and have a greater impact on the coast, said Lorenzo Mentaschi, also at the JRC and lead author of the GRL study. The new GRL study attributes the changes in wave energy to the intensification of weather patterns, like the Antarctic Oscillation, El-Nino Southern Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation.

The new research will be provided to EU policymakers. The data will also be made public so it can be used by scientists, engineers and coastal managers.

Share Of Renewables In EU Energy Consumption Still Rising

0
0

In 2015, the share of energy from renewable sources in gross final consumption of energy reached 16.7% in the European Union (EU), nearly double 2004 (8.5%), the first year for which the data are available.

The share of renewables in gross final consumption of energy is one of the headline indicators of the Europe 2020 strategy. The target to be reached by 2020 for the EU is a share of 20% energy from renewable sources in gross final consumption of energy. However, renewables will continue to play a key role in helping the EU meet its energy needs beyond 2020. For this reason, Member States have already agreed on a new EU renewable energy target of at least 27% by 2030.

These figures come from an article issued by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union.

Highest share of renewables in Sweden, lowest in Luxembourg, Malta and the Netherlands

Since 2004, the share of renewable sources in gross final consumption of energy grew significantly in all Member States. Compared with a year ago, it has increased in 22 of the 28 Member States.

With more than half (53.9%) of energy from renewable sources in its gross final consumption of energy, Sweden had by far in 2015 the highest share, ahead of Finland (39.3%), Latvia (37.6%), Austria (33.0%) and Denmark (30.8%). At the opposite end of the scale, the lowest proportions of renewables were registered in Luxembourg and Malta (both 5.0%), the Netherlands (5.8%), Belgium (7.9%) and the United Kingdom (8.2%).

The Netherlands and France: furthest away from their goals

Each EU Member State has its own Europe 2020 target. The national targets take into account the Member States’ different starting points, renewable energy potential and economic performance.

Among the 28 EU Member States, eleven have already reached the level required to meet their national 2020 targets: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Croatia, Italy, Lithuania, Hungary, Romania, Finland and Sweden. Moreover, Austria and Slovakia are about 1 percentage point from their 2020 targets.

At the opposite end of the scale, the Netherlands (8.2 percentage points from reaching its national 2020 objective), France (7.8 pp), Ireland and the United Kingdom (both 6.8 pp) and Luxembourg (6.0 pp) are the furthest away from their targets.

EU Court Rules Employers May Ban Headscarves

0
0

The European Court of Justice ruled Tuesday that employers may ban headscarves or burkas in the workplace.

“An internal rule of an undertaking which prohibits the visible wearing of any political, philosophical or religious sign does not constitute direct discrimination,” ruled the ECJ, noting, “However, in the absence of such a rule, the willingness of an employer to take account of the wishes of a customer no longer to have the employer’s services provided by a worker wearing an Islamic headscarf cannot be considered an occupational requirement that could rule out discrimination”

On February 12, 2003, Samira Achbita, a Muslim, was employed as a receptionist by G4S, a private undertaking which provides, inter alia, reception services for customers in both the public and private sectors. At the time of Ms Achbita’s recruitment there was an unwritten rule within G4S that prohibited employees from wearing visible signs of their political, philosophical or religious beliefs in the workplace.

In April 2006, Ms Achbita informed her employer that she intended to wear an Islamic headscarf during working hours. In response, the management of G4S informed her that the wearing of the headscarf would not be tolerated because the visible wearing of political, philosophical or religious signs was contrary to the position of neutrality G4S adopted in its contacts with its customers. On May 12, 2006, after a period of absence from work due to sickness, Ms Achbita notified her employer that she would be returning to work on May 15 and that she would in future be wearing the Islamic headscarf.

On May 29, 2006, the G4S works council approved an amendment to the workplace regulations, which came into force on June 13, 2006. These provided that ‘employees are prohibited, in the workplace, from wearing any visible signs of their political, philosophical or religious beliefs and/or from engaging in any observance of such beliefs’. On June 12, 2006, Ms Achbita was dismissed because of her continuing insistence on wearing the Islamic headscarf at work. She challenged that dismissal in the Belgian courts.

The Hof van Cassatie (Court of Cassation, Belgium), before which the matter was brought, queried the interpretation of the EU directive on equal treatment in employment and occupation. In essence, it wished to know whether the prohibition on wearing an Islamic headscarf, which arises from a general internal rule of a private undertaking, constitutes direct discrimination.

In its judgment today, the Court of Justice noted first of all that, under the directive, the ‘principle of equal treatment’ means that there is to be no direct or indirect discrimination whatsoever on the grounds, inter alia, of religion.

Although the directive does not include a definition of ‘religion’, the EU legislature referred to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and to the constitutional traditions common to the Member States, which have been reaffirmed in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Therefore, the concept of religion must be interpreted as covering both the fact of having religious belief and the freedom of persons to manifest that belief in public.

The Court of Justice found that G4S’s internal rule refers to the wearing of visible signs of political, philosophical or religious beliefs and therefore covers any manifestation of such beliefs without distinction. The rule thus treats all employees of the undertaking in the same way, notably by requiring them, generally and without any differentiation, to dress neutrally. It is not evident from the material in the file available to the Court that that internal rule was applied differently to Ms Achbita as compared to other G4S employees, the Court said, accordingly, such an internal rule does not introduce a difference of treatment that is directly based on religion or belief, for the purposes of the directive.

The Court noted that it is not, however, inconceivable that the national court might conclude that the internal rule introduces a difference of treatment that is indirectly based on religion or belief, should it be established that the apparently neutral obligation it encompasses results, in fact, in persons adhering to a particular religion or belief being put at a particular disadvantage.

Nevertheless, such a difference of treatment would not amount to indirect discrimination if it was justified by a legitimate aim and if the means of achieving that aim were appropriate and necessary. While emphasizing that the national court hearing the case has sole jurisdiction to determine whether, and to what extent, the internal rule meets those requirements, the Court of Justice provides guidance in that respect.

It states that an employer’s desire to project an image of neutrality towards both its public and private sector customers is legitimate, notably where the only workers involved are those who come into contact with customers. That desire relates to the freedom to conduct a business, which is recognized in the Charter.

In addition, the ban on the visible wearing of signs of political, philosophical or religious beliefs is appropriate for the purpose of ensuring that a policy of neutrality is properly applied, provided that that policy is genuinely pursued in a consistent and systematic manner. The national court must ascertain whether G4S had, prior to MsAchbita’s dismissal, established a general and undifferentiated policy in that respect.

In this instance, it is also necessary to ascertain whether the prohibition covers only G4S workers who interact with customers. If that is the case, the prohibition must be considered strictly necessary for the purpose of achieving the aim pursued.

It should also be ascertained whether, taking into account the inherent constraints to which the undertaking is subject, and without G4S being required to take on an additional burden, it would have been possible for G4S to offer Ms Achbita a post not involving any visual contact with those customers, instead of dismissing her.

The Court therefore concluded that the prohibition on wearing an Islamic headscarf, which arises from an internal rule of a private undertaking prohibiting the visible wearing of any political, philosophical or religious sign in the workplace, does not constitute direct discrimination based on religion or belief within the meaning of the directive.

By contrast, such a prohibition may constitute indirect discrimination if it is established that the apparently neutral obligation it imposes results, in fact, in persons adhering to a particular religion or belief being put at a particular disadvantage. However, such indirect discrimination may be objectively justified by a legitimate aim, such as the pursuit by the employer, in its relations with its customers, of a policy of political, philosophical and religious neutrality, provided that the means of achieving that aim are appropriate and necessary. It is for the Belgian Court of Cassation to check those conditions.

Former KKK Leader David Duke Expresses Admiration For Assad – OpEd

0
0

White supremacist and Donald Trump supporter David Duke describes himself on his Twitter page as “one of the 100 most read and quoted people in the world”.

We’re not sure who is exactly doing the counting, but the former Knights of the Ku Klux Klan leader is a prolific Twitter user who churns out more tweets per hour than Trump at his more irate.

Although most of hate-filled messages are directed at Jews, Muslims and the “liberal media” he still finds time to reach out to those few people in the world he actually likes and admires.

One of those is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The mass-murdering regime leader in Damascus has been subject to a slurry of grovelling tweets over the past two-days by the white supremacist.

“Brilliant interview conducted by a Chinese journalist,” Duke said in one tweet on Monday.

It was linked to a video showing Assad making the fawning reporter laugh when the president cringingly referred to Syria’s emergency response team The White Helmets as “al-Qaeda” and “terrorists”.

A day earlier when someone described the Syrian leader as a war criminal, Duke jumped to his defence.

“Assad is a modern day hero standing up to demonic forces seeking to destroy his people and nation – GOD BLESS ASSAD!” he said, obviously oblivious to the fact of who really is doing the destroying in Syria.

Hours earlier in another pro-Bashar tweet – showing a Syrian woman riding in a car decked in the regime flag with Assad’s face decked across the windscreen – he used the hashtag #TrumpRussia.

“President Assad solves problems – DEATH TO ISIS & ALL THEIR SUPPORTERS! Does (((AMERICA))) have a problem with that?” he said.

This message appeared to be directed at the US president who has also spoken positively of Assad in the past.

David Duke is one of the most reviled people in 20th and 21st century US politics. But he has managed to have a hit-and-miss career in politics as a former member of the Louisiana house of representatives until 1992 when he largely fell into obscurity.

With the election of Donald Trump and his administration’s links to far-right groups in the US, Duke is likely eying a possible comeback.

Duke’s recent statements of support for Bashar al-Assad aren’t new.

Duke visited Syria in 2005 and heaped praise on its leader, likely due to Assad’s association with the so-called “Axis of The Resistance” against Israel.

But words are about as far as Assad ever got to defying Israel and Bashar instead turned his guns on the Syrian people.

Perhaps the most bizarre of the tweets sent by Duke in support of Assad was one showing Bashar and his wife Asma surrounded by children.

“This is what true love, loyalty looks like.”

We don’t know if he was referring to Asma or the children, but the image is a chilling contrast to the fate of tens of thousands of other Syrian kids who have been murdered by Bashar’s bombs.

Original source

Viewing all 73339 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images