Turkish diplomatic sources said that US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson would visit Ankara on Thursday to discuss with his Turkish counterpart, Melvut Cavusoglu, bilateral relations and efforts to fight terrorism.

He is also scheduled to meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, according to the same sources.

Discussions will also touch on the issue of handing over exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, who is currently residing in the US and accused by Ankara of orchestrating the failed July 2016 coup attempt.

The sources told Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper that Tillerson would review with Turkish officials developments in Syrian and Iraq and the establishment of safe zones in northern Syria.

An official statement by the US State Department said: “US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will travel to Ankara, Turkey, on March 30, to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other senior Turkish government officials, continuing the United States’ high-level engagement with our NATO Ally.”

“Secretary Tillerson will reaffirm Turkey’s important role in ensuring regional stability, and he will discuss the way forward with our campaign to defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq,” the statement added.‎

The Secretary of State will visit NATO in Brussels, Belgium on March 31st, according to the statement.

Meanwhile, US sources said on Friday that the US Secretary of State’s visit to Ankara would be decisive with regards to the US-led campaign to regain the city of Raqqa.

Turkish officials have warned that Washington’s reliance on Kurdish forces to liberate the ISIS’ de facto capital would damage its relationship with Ankara.

The US administration is currently discussing whether to continue supporting Kurdish forces’ advance on Raqqa, or shift US support to Turkey and its allies.

By Said Abdul Razzak, original source

Due to the increasing Iranian threat, Netanyahu should do everything in his power to negotiate a peace agreement with the Palestinians now in the context of a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. In so doing, he will not only neutralize the Palestinian threat but potentially mitigate the Iranian menace at least to a certain degree; otherwise, he will simply continue to play into Iran’s hand.

By Dr. Alon Ben-Meir*

Although Prime Minister Netanyahu is known for his focus on the Palestinian and Iranian threats to Israel’s national security, in recent months he has increasingly sounded the alarm over Iran in particular rather than the Palestinians. As the defeat of ISIS in both Iraq and Syria is all but inevitable, Netanyahu’s main concern now is that Iran will insist on maintaining a strong foothold in Syria by establishing a significant military presence as recompense for its continuing support of the Assad regime throughout the civil war. This, of course, should not come as a surprise to Netanyahu or anyone else familiar with Iran’s ambitions to become the region’s hegemon, as it views Syria as the linchpin that will preserve its influence from the Gulf to the Mediterranean.

For Netanyahu, however, to put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the back burner is a terrible mistake. In fact, because of the increasing Iranian threat, Netanyahu should do everything in his power to negotiate a peace agreement with the Palestinians now in the context of a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. In so doing, he will not only neutralize the Palestinian threat but potentially mitigate the Iranian menace at least to a certain degree; otherwise, he will simply continue to play into Iran’s hand.

Iran’s involvement in Syria is not new and precedes the civil war by several decades. What is new, however, is that Tehran is now determined to establish—in addition to Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon—a third front in Syria against Israel.

Israel’s high military command are particularly concerned about the possibility that once hostilities break out between Israel and Hamas, it could potentially be joined by Hezbollah (or vice versa), and Iran may decide to join the foray or instigate the hostilities in the first place and force Israel to fight on three fronts. This would also provide the Palestinians in the West Bank the opportunity to rise against the occupation.

In a speech at the Foreign Ministry commemorating the Israelis who were killed in the 1992 embassy bombing in Argentina (in which Iran was implicated), Netanyahu statedthat “The regime in Tehran aspires to plant its flag atop the ruins of the free world. It continues to threaten to annihilate Israel.”

Although Netanyahu realizes that he cannot persuade the Trump administration to revoke the Iran nuclear deal, he wants to make certain that Washington remains attentive to Iran’s mischievous and destabilizing conduct in the region and continues to hold Iran accountable to its commitment to fully adhere to the deal.

In addition, Netanyahu wants to ensure that Washington understands the danger that emanates from Iran’s military presence in Syria by establishing a base not far from the city of Quneitra, only a few miles from the border of the Golan Heights. To that end, he also conferred with Russia’s President Putin, expressing in no uncertain terms that Israel will not tolerate such an outcome once ISIS is defeated.

It should be noted that while ISIS’ defeat is all but certain, by all military calculations it will take at least six months to bring about its demise. In the interim, Iran is systematically consolidating its presence in Syria by increasing its military hardware, including short- and medium-range rockets, with no objection from Assad, who views Iran’s continuing presence for the foreseeable future as pivotal to his hold on power.

Although Moscow and/or Washington may support Netanyahu’s position, neither can do much about it now as the war against ISIS continues with the participation of Iran. In addition, Tehran is carrying on with the transfer of an array of weapons to Hezbollah, including rockets. In spite of the fact that Israel has and continues to intercept and destroy many such weapons shipments, significant quantities still manage to reach their destination in Lebanon.

It is now estimated that between Hamas and Hezbollah, they have nearly 200,000 short- and medium-range rockets; many of them can reach any target in Israel from Metula in the north to Eilat in the southern tip. Together, they can rain more than a thousand rockets each day for nearly seven months.

Given the increasing tension between Israel and Hamas, and with Hezbollah, a major breakout of hostilities cannot be ruled out. Although Israel’s Defense Forces are not oblivious to such a possibility, they are faced with a nightmarish scenario regardless of how and when such a conflagration may occur.

Even though Israel’s air defense system is one of the most sophisticated in the world, Israel will still be unable to intercept all incoming rockets. Out of the thousand rockets Hamas and Hezbollah can fire daily, a few dozen could still land on many Israeli urban centers, causing hundreds of casualties and massive structural damage, especially in areas where shelters are either limited or do not exist.

In addition, businesses would be closed for weeks, supplies of food and medicine will become increasingly scarce, schools will be shut, and hospitals will be overwhelmed. Moreover, the military will be stretched, especially if Israel ends up invading Gaza and Lebanon while bombing Iranian installations in Syria, overpowering the Palestinian uprising, and protecting settlers in the West Bank.

To prevent such a nightmarish scenario, the Israeli government may feel that they are justified to conduct widespread bombing on all three fronts. Given the fact that much of Hezbollah and Hamas’ rockets are embedded in civilian communities, there will likely be tens of thousands of civilian casualties. Moreover, attacks against Israel by Iranian forces in Syria may well force Israel to bomb targets in Iran, focusing in the main on the country’s nuclear installations.

How the Arab world, Europe, the US, and Russia will react is hard to predict. One thing, however, is clear: much of the Middle East will be on fire and it will be hard to fathom how perilous the consequences will be.

Yes, Israel will technically win the war, but it will be the most devastating victory in the annals of warfare in modern times.

This may seem like an unlikely scenario, but the probability of it is increasing every day. If Netanyahu is truly concerned about Iran establishing a permanent military base in Syria from which it can seriously threaten Israel’s national security as he professes, he cannot rule out such a terrifying possibility.

His seriousness about the Iranian threat is now tested by his action or inaction on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I maintain that there is no better time to look very carefully at the two state-solution to be preceded by a process of reconciliation, in the context of a comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace, especially now that the Arab states share his concerns about the Iranian threat.

More than any time before, the Arab states led by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, and Qatar are in a position to exert significant influence over the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to enter into serious negotiations, provided that Israel shows a genuine appetite for real peace.

Netanyahu and some of his recalcitrant ministers can demonstrate that by first stating that Israel has no intentions of annexing more Palestinian territories, and second by declaring a moratorium on the expansion of settlements for at least one year.

If Netanyahu’s coalition partners do not support such an initiative, he should have the courage to fire them and establish a new government with the left and center parties that support a negotiated peace with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu has only paid lip service to the idea of a Palestinian state, but if Israel’s very existence is on the line because of the Iranian threat as he persistently asserts, he has the capacity and public support to pursue that objective. He has a propitious opportunity to forge peace and usher in a more promising and secure future that Jews in and outside Israel are yearning for.

*Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of TransConflict.

By Felix K. Chang*

(FPRI) — China may be hoping that the recent easing of tensions in the South China Sea marks a turning point in the region—one that leads to the countries of the Asia-Pacific abandoning their confrontational approach to China. In February, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi could point to some “clear progress” toward that end. After being stalled for years, negotiations between China and several Southeast Asian countries finally produced a draft of a new code of conduct for the disputed waters.

China could also cite progress on another front: relations with the Philippines. Throughout the term of former Philippine President Benigno Aquino III, which ended in June 2016, the Philippines had been a thorn in China’s side. Not only did it offer the United States access to its military bases, the country also won a legal victory against China’s South China Sea claims at the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), an international tribunal in The Hague. But the election of a new Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, created an opportunity for China.

Duterte’s violent anti-drugs campaign drove a wedge between the Philippines and United States. And so, as Washington publicly criticized Duterte, Beijing offered him $24 billion of economic inducements. That made it easier for Duterte to overcome domestic opposition to his pivot away from the United States. He soon ended joint Philippine-U.S. military exercises and naval patrols in the South China Sea. While he has not terminated his predecessor’s base-access agreement, he may yet do so.

Enduring Challenges

Even as some challenges to China have receded, others remain, and new ones have emerged. Certainly, last year’s leadership change in Vietnam did little to alter that country’s determination to counter Chinese actions in the South China Sea. Satellite images showing that China is building new logistical and military facilities in the Paracel Islands (which Vietnam also claims) have led Vietnamese leaders to do more, not less. Hanoi continues to improve the security of the islands that it occupies.

New Challenges

Meanwhile, Indonesia has become more vocal. Once, Indonesia was content to smooth over its maritime dispute with China by obliquely asserting that no “territorial” dispute existed. Today, Indonesia has taken a clearer line. As Chinese fishing boats, sometimes accompanied by the Chinese coast guard, have pushed deeper into Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone in the South China Sea, Indonesian authorities have stepped up their patrols of the region. In February 2017, Indonesian President Joko Widodo unexpectedly revealed that he would welcome a joint naval patrol with Australia in the South China Sea.  His suggestion was all the more surprising given the rocky security relationship between Australia and Indonesia.

While it refrained from taking up Widodo’s suggestion, Australia did urge Southeast Asian countries to use the PCA’s rejection of China’s claims as the basis for their new code of conduct with China.  For the moment, that quelled concerns over whether Australia would gradually accept Chinese behavior in Southeast Asia as its economic ties with China grew. Some had wondered whether such a process would accelerate, particularly after the stormy conversation between Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and President Donald Trump in January.

But possibly the most worrisome to China is Japan’s vigorous activity in Southeast Asia. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe routinely visits the region, often bringing with him promises of greater economic and military cooperation. He has offered both the Philippines and Vietnam offshore patrol vessels to monitor the waters they dispute with China. Tokyo has also encouraged Japanese companies to expand their engagement with the region through trade and infrastructure development. A year ago, Japan sent one of its newest attack submarines, the Oyashio, on a tour of Southeast Asia, the first time a Japanese submarine has done so in 15 years. In May 2017, Japan intends to send its largest warship, the helicopter carrier Izumo, to the region. The carrier will spend three months there before it sails onto the Indian Ocean to participate in a joint India-U.S. naval exercise.

Future Progress

It appears that even without the United States leading the way, other countries of the Asia-Pacific are not yet ready to resign themselves to Chinese ambitions in the South China Sea. Resistance to China may have reached less of a turning point than a plateau. The South China Sea is now far more militarized than ever before. All claimants to its waters have strengthened their claims to the region and their defenses on their respective island outposts. Even the Philippines is continuing with its plans to upgrade the airfield and harbor facilities on Thitu Island in the Spratly archipelago. While a period of intense confrontation in the South China Sea may have passed, it does not mean that further Chinese progress will be easy.

About the author:
*Felix K. Chang is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is also the Chief Strategy Officer of DecisionQ, a predictive analytics company in the national security and healthcare industries. He has worked with a number of digital, consumer services, and renewable energy entrepreneurs for years. He was previously a consultant in Booz Allen Hamilton’s Strategy and Organization practice; among his clients were the U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Department of the Treasury, and other agencies.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI

By Hani Hazaimeh

The Council of Arab Foreign Ministers on Monday approved 17 draft resolutions, including the rejection of unilateral steps that “jeopardize the historic and legal status” of Jerusalem.

The draft will be presented to Arab leaders at their summit on Wednesday.

It followed an announcement by Jason Greenblatt, US envoy to the Middle East, that he looks forward to attending the Arab Summit as an observer “to discuss how best to work together against extremism and toward peace and prosperity.”

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Al-Safadi said at a press conference held at the Dead Sea resort that all draft resolutions submitted by the Arab League’s permanent representatives to the Arab League had been agreed upon.

Al-Safadi said the draft agenda prepared by the Council of Arab Foreign Ministers included 17 resolutions addressing all current Arab issues.

In response to a question about the possibility of transferring the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Al-Safadi said that Arabs have repeatedly stressed the need to establish a just and lasting peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis in accordance with international covenants and resolutions, and within the two-state solution to ensure an independent Palestinian state on the Palestinian national territory with East Jerusalem as its capital. Al-Safadi also said Arab foreign ministers rejected unilateral steps that “jeopardize the historic and legal status” of Jerusalem.

This was an apparent reference to US President Donald Trump’s previously stated intentions to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, the city at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinians seek a capital in east Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, along with the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Al-Safadi said the resolution is one of “about 17” to be adopted later this week at the gathering of Arab heads of state. He said the ministers also reaffirmed the need to establish a state of Palestine alongside Israel.

Meanwhile, US envoy Greenblatt tweeted: “The US president believes peace between Israelis and Palestinians might be possible and that the time has come to make a deal and I believe that such a peace agreement will reverberate positively throughout the region and the world.”

Last month, Greenblatt met with senior Palestinian and Israeli officials, during which he reaffirmed the US commitment to achieving peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

There was high drama last week when Rep. Devin Nunes announced at the White House that he had seen evidence that the communications of the Donald Trump campaign people, and perhaps even Trump himself, had been “incidentally collected” by the US government.

If true, this means that someone authorized the monitoring of Trump campaign communications using Section 702 of the FISA Act. Could it have been then-President Obama? We don’t know. Could it have been other political enemies looking for something to harm the Trump campaign or presidency? It is possible.

There is much we do not yet know about what happened and there is probably quite a bit we will never know. But we do know several very important things about the government spying on Americans.

First there is Section 702 itself. The provision was passed in 2008 as part of a package of amendments to the 1978 FISA bill. As with the PATRIOT Act, we were told that we had to give the government more power to spy on us so that it could catch terrorists. We had to give up some of our liberty for promises of more security, we were told. We were also told that the government would only spy on the bad guys, and that if we had nothing to hide we should have nothing to fear.

We found out five years later from Edward Snowden that the US government viewed Section 702 as a green light for the mass surveillance of Americans. Through programs he revealed, like PRISM, the NSA is able to collect and store our Internet search history, the content of our emails, what files we have shared, who we have chatted with electronically, and more.

That’s why people like NSA whistleblower William Binney said that we know the NSA was spying on Trump because it spies on all of us!

Ironically, FISA itself was passed after the Church Committee Hearings revealed the abuses, criminality, and violations of our privacy that the CIA and other intelligence agencies had been committing for years. FISA was supposed to rein in the intelligence community but, as is often the case in Washington, it did the opposite: it ended up giving the government even more power to spy on us.

So President Trump might have been “wiretapped” by Obama, as he claimed, but unfortunately he will not draw the right conclusions from the violation. He will not see runaway spying on Americans as a grotesque attack on American values. That is unfortunate, because this could have provided a great teaching moment for the president. Seeing how all of us are vulnerable to this kind of government abuse, President Trump could have changed his tune on the PATRIOT Act and all government attacks on our privacy. He could have stood up for liberty, which is really what makes America great.

Section 702 of the FISA Act was renewed in 2012, just before we learned from Snowden how it is abused. It is set to expire this December unless Congress extends it again. Knowing what we now know about this anti-American legislation we must work hard to prevent its renewal. They will try to scare us into supporting the provision, but the loss of our liberty is what should scare us the most!

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.

Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan’s westernmost province, welcomes everyone – including a novelist with no guidebook; it is heralded as a museum without walls.

This region of Azerbaijan stretches on over 5,500 square kilometers and borders Armenia, Iran and Turkey. Despite of the economic blockade imposed by Armenia government against Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan (for over two decades), the birthplace of Architect Ajami ibn Abubakr Nakhchivani – and home of Prophet Noah – has dedicated most of its territory solely to illuminating research into: ancient civilizations, global archeology, human history, Azerbaijani historiography and sociology and is testimony of ancient life and inventions that have enabled men to live in harmony with nature. Some of these culturally peculiar monuments are: Alibay Kehriz, Alinja Mint, Arafsa site and its Sacred Place.

Strolling in the Tabriz Street of Ordubad City, tourists will be fascinated by the historical monument of Alibay Kehriz (a kehriz constructed by Alibay): it was built in the floating deposits of Ordubad river and is a simple shape kehriz monument that continues to preserve its characteristic nature up to this day. The stairs of this monument proceed down perpendicularly to the kehriz stream. The base, bottom half of kehriz has been enlarged in size, overtime: its length is 1.8 meters, it has a width of 1.5 meters and a height of 2.3 meters.

The walls of Alibay Kehriz have been carved neatly, however at the top section there is a big rock piece that has remained untouched. Based on the early plans and its current structure: the length of the monument is 4.93 meters; its width is 1.5 meters; and has a depth from the ground surface of up to 4.56 meters. The height of the entrance from the ground surface is 1.9 meters. The fresh water resources of Alibay Kehriz is used by locals for daily consumption.

In the East of Khanagah, Julfa Region is located Alinja Mint: it was built as a vault where precious items and monetary currency would safely be deposited.

In war times, the Alinja fortress garnered a reputation for its defense walls and for safeguarding the state treasures and members of the families of Azerbaijani feudal rulers; it served as the headquarters of minting currency during different periods.

In early XIV century, Alinja Mint was the center of silver coins, the minting of these items was done under the orders of Elkhanilar and Teymurilar; many coin samples were found in the area; indeed, Jalairi Sultans had established a well – organized process of coin minting.

The late Bronze and the early Iron ages are represented in Julfa region with Arafsa Cultural monument, located on the right banks of Alinjachay (branch of Araz river) in Alinjachay Village.

This territory is 5 acres of archeological treasures where monochrome painted clay tableware samples belong to II millennium BC. In 1974, Professor V. Aliyev and other International Scholars encountered obsidian fragments and other traces of a civilization that had been living in Arafsa since the II millennium BC. Pieces of black clay tableware of monochrome paint and polished stone labor tools (grain stones, graters, mortar and pestle) were discovered in this attractive archeological site that has recently emerged as an important destination to French tourists.

Based on the international archival documents, Arafsag settlement had taken this name in 1590, it reflects the heritage and the name etymology of Sak Turks; a local ethnic group that lived in Nakhchivan, since the II millennium BC. According to the archeological discoveries conducted by Prof. I. V. Fedorov in 1895; the local tribes have migrated from Nakhchivan to the north and subsequently spread over the Middle and Central Asia, in Altay and on large swaths of the Siberian territory.

It must be emphasized that based on meticulous investigations conducted by L. N. Gumiliyev, I. M. Dyakanov, E. E. Kuzmina, it is scientifically certain that the background of Sak tribes derives from the Turk-Azerbaijani tribes. The component of Arafsa consists of ‘Ar – ev – sak’ meaning “the place (land) of Sak, courageous people.” Per historical sources and based on research conducted by Prof. Rzayev F.; the territory of Nakhchivan has 23 habitable settlements that are archeologically related, scientifically proved, to be connected with the Sak Tribe (Sakazur, Sigat, Sakli, Kansak, etc.)

The Sanctuary of Arafsa Sacred Place was established in the middle ages in the village of Arafsa, Julfa Region, is located on top of a hill, to the left of Alinjachay. This ancient place, consists of two big rooms, with balconies to the south and the north. The main pilgrimage attraction is the grave in the central room, found to be somewhat large in its size. The name of this sacred place has been taken from the name of the village, a rural site that once was a metropolis and an ancient bastion of the Sak Turkish tribes; many years ago, this site has served as a center of religious dervishes.

The City of Ordubad, Arazin Necropolis, Alinja Mint and the Sanctuary of Arafsa Sacred Place are unique archeological sites where tourists are infinitely connected to their passion.

Source: Rzayev F.; “The traces of Kas and Sak Turks in Nakhchivan: the problems of Azerbaijan onomastics.” B., 2003 Nr. 11.

By Prerana Priyadarshi and Sarral Sharma*

On March 11, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won a clear mandate in the legislative assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Uttarakhand. In UP, the BJP single-handedly won 311 of 403 seats, and with allies, Apna Dal (Soneylal) and Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party (SBSP), secured a total of 325 seats. In Uttarakhand, it bagged 56 of 70 seats.

The BJP’s emphatic victory in both the states is likely to impact the upcoming presidential election and the states as well as the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. These results will also change the dynamics for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in the Rajya Sabha. It will further embolden the ‘Modi factor’ – which began to be doubted following the BJP’s defeat in the 2015 Bihar election – and may also pacify the recent criticism over the demonetisation issue.

UP Poll Arithmetic

The BJP’s performance in UP is almost a repeat of the 2014 general election. The aggregate vote share of the BJP and its allies was 41.4 per cent in this election – a marginal decline of 2.2 per cent compared to the 43.6 per cent from 2014. However, the party’s vote share has witnessed a sharp increase of 24 per cent, and has risen to 39.6 per cent in 2017, from 15 per cent in 2012. Similarly, its seats have increased tremendously from 47 in 2012 to 312 in 2017.

Apart from the ‘Modi’ factor, the BJP’s surge in UP is largely attributed to the ‘social engineering’ it devised to woo the non-Yadav Other Backward Caste (OBCs) voters; the non-Jatav Dalits; and other non-Muslim communities. The party’s poll strategy suggests it targeted an estimated 55-60 per cent of the population, focussing on issues such as corruption, law and order, and development, among others. The BJP’s alliance partners in UP – AD(S) and (SBSP) – further aided in consolidating the votes of non-Yadav OBC communities such as the Kurmis, the Rajbhars and the Patels.

Evidently, the Samajwadi Party (SP)-Indian National Congress (Congress) alliance failed to convert their combined 28 per cent vote share into seats. The alliance had been formed to repeat the 2015 Bihar election arithmetic to counter the BJP’s surge in the state. However, factors such as the anti-incumbency sentiment, infighting over the leadership within the SP and the weaker state leadership of the Congress worked against the alliance.

Of the total 403 seats, the SP contested from 298 and the Congress from the remaining 105 in 2017; and although the SP had single-handedly won the majority with a vote share of 29 per cent in 2012, and had won 22.2 per cent in 2014 and 21.8 per cent in 2017, its alliance with the Congress seems to have yielded little benefit in 2017. For the Congress, it has been a downward trend: 11.6 per cent in 2012; 7.5 per cent in 2014; and 6.2 per cent in 2017.

For the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the vote share increased from 19.6 per cent in 2014 general election to 22.2 per cent in 2017; but down from 26 per cent in 2012 assembly election. The BSP’s Dalit-Muslim stratagem failed to convert the vote share into seats, and ended up winning merely 19. Conversely, the strategy appears to have benefited the BJP more in the minority-dominated seats where a likely Muslim vote split took place between the BSP and the SP. Moreover, former BSP leaders like Swami Prasad Maurya, Jugul Kishore and Dinanath Bhaskar, among others, left the party and won as BJP candidates in this election.

More importantly, the BSP, now with just 19 lawmakers in UP, might struggle to get Mayawati re-elected to the Rajya Sabha when her term ends in August 2018.

Uttarakhand Debacle

Location of Uttarakhand in India. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

Chief Minister Harish Rawat’s defeat on both seats he contested (Kichha and Haridwar-rural) indicates a strong anti-incumbency sentiment against the then ruling Congress in Uttarakhand. Congress’s defeat in Uttarakhand can also be attributed to other internal and external factors. First, Rawat has been criticised for antagonising senior Congress leaders such as Vijay Bahuguna, Harak Singh Rawat, Satpal Maharaj and Yashpal Arya – who subsequently defected and joined the BJP. Second, the BJP raised the corruption issue mainly highlighting the liquor licence allotment; mining scams; and Rawat’s alleged sting operation video. Lastly, the ‘Modi factor’ may have worked in the BJP’s favour as the party won all five Lok Sabha seats with a total vote share of 56 per cent.

In the absence of senior leaders other than Rawat and Indira Hridayesh, the Congress failed to consolidate its electoral base. Interestingly, the Congress polled 33.5 per cent in 2017, which is only a meagre 0.7 per cent decline from 34.02 per cent in the 2012 assembly election. Meanwhile, the BJP witnessed a near 13 per cent surge from 33.38 per cent in 2012 to 46.5 per cent in 2017. The BJP’s seat share increase from 31 in 2012 to 56 in 2017, which suggests that it effectively sliced the vote share of other regional parties.

Conclusion

With the BJP’s massive gains in the recent elections, speculations are already rife regarding the formation of a new Mahagathbandan (grand alliance), on the lines of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)-Janta Dal United (JDU)-Congress combine in Bihar, before the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. However, the foundation of such an alliance will depend on the outcome of the assembly elections in Gujarat and Karnataka, scheduled for late 2017, and 2018 respectively. It will be useful to study how the regional parties, with their varied political ideologies, coalesce at the national level to challenge the mighty NDA. Until then, the BJP is likely to exploit the apparent ‘Modi wave’ to expand its political presence across the country.

* Prerana Priyadarshi and Sarral Sharma
Researchers, IReS, IPCS

A US counterterrorism airstrike conducted March 19 in Paktika province, Afghanistan, resulted in the death of Qari Yasin, a well-known al-Qaeda leader, the Defense Department confirmed in a news release yesterday.

“The death of Qari Yasin is evidence that terrorists who defame Islam and deliberately target innocent people will not escape justice,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in the release.

Yasin, a senior terrorist figure from Balochistan, Pakistan, had plotted multiple al-Qaeda attacks, including the Sept. 20, 2008, bombing on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad that killed dozens of innocent people — among them US Air Force Maj. Rodolfo I. Rodriguez and U.S. Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Matthew J. O’Bryant.

Yasin, who had ties to Tehrik-e Taliban, was also responsible for the 2009 attack on a bus carrying the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore, Pakistan, the release said. In that attack, six Pakistani policemen and two civilians were killed, and six members of the team were injured.

By Stella Paul

As the midday sun rises higher over Gulf of Mannar, a drone hovers over the blue mass of sea water. Below, a motley crowd of fishermen gathers, straining their eyes at a drone.

A few metres from the crowd, conservationist Prasanna Weerakkody operating the drone raises it to 500 metres, before moving it slowly in different directions, allowing the device to film a large swathe of water.

One day, he believes, the roving camera of this drone will send images of one of the most elusive sea mammals in this ocean: the dugong.

“Dugong usually swims at a depth of about 5-10 metres. Being mammals, they also come above water every few minutes to inhale fresh air. The drone has the capacity of rising one km high, but we usually operate it at 400-500 metres. This is enough to capture images of dugong,” says Weerakkody, whose organisation – Ocean Resources Conservation Association (ORCA) – is a partner of the four-year Global Environment Facility (GEF) funded, multi-agency environmental initiative: the Dugong and Sea Grass Conservation Project.

Saving the Ocean’s Most Vulnerable

The dugong – a manatee-like creature known locally as “sea pig” – is listed as vulnerable to extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which is also a partner in the conservation project.

The world’s only vegetarian sea mammal, the dugong lives at a depth of 5-15 meters, feeding on sea grass. Its natural habitat is vast – stretching from Eritrea in East Africa to Vanuatu in the Pacific. However, there is no documented information on their numbers in Sri Lankan waters. Very little is also known about their behaviour and movement, such as when and how they move, which part of the sea or grass bed they frequent and why, and which seasons are the most favourable. In short, most questions that one can raise about a dugong here are unanswered.

The main reason, says Arjan Rajasurya, Project Manager at IUCN Sri Lanka, is that the dugong is a very “secretive” animal which rarely shows up. “There may be a dugong right under a boat, but you will not know of its existence because it does not jump through the water like a dolphin or squirt water like a whale,” he explains.

The secretiveness is proven by the fact that none of the officials involved in the multi-agency conservation project has ever seen a live dugong.

And yet as many as 13 dugongs are known to have been killed in the past three years, many of them reported by the local media. Sri Lanka’s National Aquatic Resources Research and Development Agency (NARA) – a marine research organisation – has also carried out autopsies on some dead dugong.

Locals – especially fishermen whose gill nets catch and kill dugongs – are also tight-lipped and seldom come forward to share information on the sea mammal, probably fearing punitive actions by the government or backlash from other fishermen.

Besides gathering missing information on the mammal and its habitat and chalk out a strategy to protect both, the 4.88 million dollar Dugong Conservation project, which took off in mid-2015, also aims to curb illegal fishing and bridge the communication and awareness gap with the locals. To help achieve this, use of a drone was decided as a crucial component, say the project partners.

Killer War Tool as Marine life Protector

Technically, a drone is an unmanned aircraft with powerful cameras that capture images below. It can be either remotely controlled or fly on its own using software such as onboard sensors and GPS. Extensively used by security forces in war zones, the drone has lately gained a reputation as a dangerous killer machine that drops bombs on people – ‘terrorists’ and civilians alike.

The most extensive – and controversial – use of drones has been in Pakistan and in the Middle East where the war against terror has been raging for years.

However, here in the deep waters of Sri Lanka, the technology is a last-mile effort to save critically endangered marine animals by monitoring their movement, studying their habitat and preventing their capture and killing by illegal fishers.

According to Weerakkody, who leads a dedicated team of marine life experts, this is probably the first time ever that drone technology is being used for marine conservation. “This is a Phantom basic pro robotic machine fitted with a camera that can shoot over 2 K video, which is almost three times as clear as the picture on your HD TV.”.

Apart from the drone, the ORCA team is using a side-scan sonar device that captures echoes from an object on the sea floor and creates its images after measuring the strength of how “loud” the return echo is.

However, this device can only work if it is placed on a moving object – such as a boat or an underwater vehicle – which produces a sound. So, if a dugong is right next to the sonar, but the solar carrier is still, the device will not be able to capture its image. Also, given that the dugong is a shy and secretive animal, it will most likely swim away when it senses a moving vehicle nearby.

An Everyman’s Mobile App

While the drone and the side-scan sonar are handled by highly skilled experts like Weerakkody, the project is also designing technologies that are user-friendly and can be used by community members with little or no training.

Channa Suraweera, Project Manager at Sri Lanka’s Department of Wildlife Conservation, demonstrated one such design to IDN: an application that can be used by locals to report sighting of a dugong or any other large sea animal.

Based on Smart Survey software, the app gives multiple options for a user to report what has been seen: a dugong, a dolphin, a whale or any other sea animal. In a few seconds, with a few clicks, someone can send a text and a photograph which will be stored at a government-run server. The department will analyse this information and add this is to a database on sea mammals which is currently being built.

“As of now, we have very little data on dugong and we cannot build an entire database on our own. So we built this app to involve the general public in collecting information and sharing it with us,” said Suraweera.”It’s very easy to use and any mobile phone user with an internet connection can provide us with data. Once we have enough data, we can create a concrete plan to protect the dugong. We can also use the data to popularise tourism in the country, especially in the southern part of the ocean where whales are seen.”

Promoting Digital Communication

Suraweera explained that he mobile app is actually a part of a larger plan to build a fully computerised marine conservation coordination centre given the current communication gap among various government agencies, locals and civil society organisations on the issue of sea mammal conservation.

Once established, the centre will help loop in each of these agencies – including the Sri Lankan Navy and Coast Guard – and providing training in the latest digital technologies developed by the department. “It will be a centre that will strengthen communication and also help create a robust digitised database on marine conservation,” Suraweera predicted.

High End Technology for a Biodiverse Future

Mekala Christopher is a young boatman in Kalpitiya who often ferries officials and tourists to the high sea to see corals and dolphins. On several occasions, Christopher has seen a drone in the sky, but he says he has “no idea what it is actually for” and that he is also unaware of the massive conservation initiative to protect sea mammals such as the dugong.

According to Suraweera, if this conservation project is to succeed, members of the local community like Christopher must have a way to extend their support to it. “This project can only create guidelines and a framework for action, but the real action can be taken only by locals. They need to take part in the information sharing system,” he says, pointing at the fishermen’s village on the shore.

Veerakkody, on the other hand, hopes that the future will see deployment of more drones with more sophisticated features. The accomplishments of the drone in the project’s first year have been satisfactory: images have revealed that the sea grass bed is largely fine, except for some sporadic damage caused by fishing trawlers. But a higher end drone with more advanced technology such as a 4k camera could help better monitor their movement and map the habitat. “Those devices could decide the course of tomorrow’s conservation,” he says confidently.

By Ajit Kumar Singh*

On March 11, 2017, at least 12 personnel of the 219th battalion of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were killed and another four injured when Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist) cadres ambushed a road opening party in the dense forests near Kottacheru village under Bhejji Police Station in the Sukma District of Chhattisgarh. Commenting on the attack, acting CRPF Director General (DG), Sudeep Lakhtakia stated, “The troops were part of the road clearing party that has been securing an under-construction road between Bhejji and Kottacheru. They were ambushed by Naxals [Left Wing Extremists, LWEs] who set off multiple hidden IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) on the ground and opened fire.

The squad effectively retaliated before twelve made the supreme sacrifice.” However, no casualty among the Maoists was reported. Meanwhile, the Maoists looted six INSAS (Indian Small Arms System) assault rifles, four AK-47 assault rifles, a light machine gun, at least 1,587 rounds of ammunition, an Under-Barrel Grenade Launcher (UBGL), a 51mm mortar, and two radio sets from the slain personnel.

On March 8, 2017, four Maoists were killed in an encounter with personnel of the 205th battalion of the Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) of the CRPF in the forest area of Baskatwa under Gurpa Police Station in the Gaya District of Bihar. Acting on a tip-off of a meeting of top Maoist leaders in the area, the Security Forces (SFs) launched an operation. On seeing SFs, the rebels opened fire, leading to an encounter in which the four Maoists were killed. SFs recovered the rebels’ bodies along with their arms, including two INSAS rifles, one Self Loading Rifle (SLR) and one AK-47. The slain Maoists were identified as Anil aka Deepak, ‘zonal commander’ of the ‘Magadh area committee’, Rajesh Ravidas, a ‘sub-zonal commander’; Nepali Yadav and Uttam.

On February 1, 2017, the Maoists triggered a landmine explosion near Mungarbhumi in the Koraput District of Odisha, killing eight Police personnel and injuring another five. The explosion targeted a Police van carrying 13 Police personnel, on its way to the Police Training College in Angul District.

According to partial data collated by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), at least 92 persons have been killed in Left Wing Extremism-linked violence across the country in 2017 thus far (data till March 13, 2017). These included 23 civilians, 27 SF personnel and 42 LWEs. During the corresponding period of 2016, such fatalities stood at 111 (27 civilians, 19 SF personnel and 65 LWEs). There is thus a marginal improvement in terms of overall fatalities and, more importantly, civilian deaths. However, the dwindling ratio of SFs to LWEs killed is definitely worrisome. SFs have secured a kill ratio of just 1:1.55 during the current year, thus far, as against 1:3.55 during the corresponding period of 2016, and 1:3.7 through 2016.

There were a total of 433 fatalities in 2016 (123 civilians, 66 SF personnel, 244 LWEs) in LWE-linked violence across India, as against 251 fatalities (93 civilians, 57 SF personnel, 101 LWEs) in 2015. After recording a decline in overall fatalities for two consecutive years, overall fatalities saw a steep increase through 2016, and were the highest recorded since 2011 when 602 fatalities were recorded.

Maoist activities [LINK: MAP] were reported from 104 Districts in 13 States in 2016, and have already been recorded from 64 Districts in 14 States in 2017.

These numbers, however, appear to be significant underestimates. According to data provided by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (UMHA), at least 500 deaths (213 civilians, 65 SF personnel, 222 LWEs) were reported from across the country in 2016, as against 319 deaths (171 civilians, 59 SF personnel, 89 LWEs) in 2015 in LWE-linked violence. There were another 79 fatalities (32 civilians, 14 SF personnel, 33 LWEs) during the first two months of 2017. During the corresponding period of 2016, there were 99 fatalities (39 civilians, 10 SF personnel, 50 LWEs).

According to UMHA, at least 106 Districts in 10 States were Maoist affected. The UMHA assessment notes,

The States of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and Bihar are considered severely affected. The States of West Bengal, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh are considered partially affected. The States of UP [Uttar Pradesh] and MP [Madhya Pradesh] are considered slightly affected. There is major improvement in Andhra Pradesh, which was considered severely affected earlier. The CPI (Maoist) are making forays into Southern States of Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu and planning to link up the Western Ghats to the Eastern Ghats through these states. The CPI (Maoist) are planning to expand their area of activities and carve out a base for themselves in the tri-junction of Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. They are attempting incursions into Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, which has serious long-term strategic implications.

The significant increase in number of civilians killed (UMHA data) – 24.56 percent – in 2016 as against fatalities in this category in 2015 gives cause for concern. The primary reason for this steep rise is the growing belief among the Maoists that more and more civilians are acting as ‘police informers’, and that SFs are mostly dependent on local information in their anti-Maoist operations. The continuous losses the rebels have suffered at the hands of SFs underline and reinforce their belief.

In the most successful operations ever conducted by the SFs against the CPI-Maoist, since its formation in September 2004, SFs killed at least 30 Maoists in two successive encounters in the Bejingi Forest area, between Ramgarh and Panasput, in the Malkangiri District of Odisha on October 24 and 27, 2016. The slain Maoists included Bakuri Venkata Ramana Murthy aka Ganesh aka Prasad aka Ramireddy, ‘official spokesman’ of the Andhra Odisha Border Special Zonal Committee (AOBSZC) and ‘secretary’ of the ‘east division unit’ of the party; and Chemella Krishnaiah aka Bhaskar aka Daya, ‘secretary’ of the Koraput-Srikakulam ‘joint division’ of the AOBSZC.

Indeed, CPI-Maoist’s ‘East Division secretary’, Pratap Reddy aka Ramchandra Reddy aka Appa Rao aka Chalapathi, in an interview published on July 21, 2016, stated, “I must add that in the conspiracy to eliminate the Maoists party, the ruling classes and the State Government have been exploiting people in the tribal areas by converting them as police informer and agents. Such people are being given arms by the police and a special police officer (SPO) network created. It is such elements that we are eliminating.”

Not surprisingly, most of the civilians killed were branded as ‘police informers’. According to UMHA data, 123 of the 213 civilians killed, i.e. 57.74 per cent, in 2016 were of alleged ‘police informers’. In 2015, the proportion of supposed ‘police informers’ killed stood at 55.55 per cent. This proportion has been increasing steadily since 2013, when it was 40.07 per cent, rising to 40.99 per cent in 2014. Significantly, SFs have always denied that targeted civilians were ‘police informers’ and have argued that Maoists are killing civilians to infuse fear among them and, in turn, secure their support at a time when they are facing increasing setbacks.

Indeed, through 2016, SFs continued to strengthen their position in their fight against LWEs. According to UMHA data, the kill ratio in 2016 stood at 1:3.41 in favour of SFs, more than double the ratio in 2015 (1:1.50). At its worst, the ratio had dropped to 1:0.59 in 2007. The number of encounters with Police has also increased from 247 in 2015 to 328 in 2016, clearly indicating more engagement of the SFs’ on the ground. On the other hand, during the same period, the number of attacks on SFs carried out by the Maoists came down from 118 in 2015 to 111 in 2016. Similarly, incidents of snatching of arms came down from 18 in 2015 to just three in 2016. SFs recovered 800 arms in 2016 in addition to 724 in 2015. 1,840 Maoists were arrested through 2016, in addition to 1,668 arrests in 2015. Mounting SF pressure has also resulted in significant surge in the number of Maoist surrenders, which increased from 570 in 2015 to 1,442 in 2016.

Further, while the Maoists held 41 ‘Jan Adalats’ (‘People’s Courts’, kangaroo courts organized by the rebels) in 2015, the number fell considerably in 2016, to 21. The number of ‘jan adalats’ has been continuously declining since 2014, indicating diminishing control over areas in which such kangaroo courts could be organized.

Acknowledging their diminishing influence, CPI-Maoist ‘East Division secretary’, Pratap Reddy, in his July 21, 2016, interview, admitted,

The multi-pronged attacks by the state government through its security forces as well as own mistakes has led to the Maoists being in the situation now… we have faced setbacks… I would like to remind you that the party has faced difficult times in the past and regained its strength and lost glory… These hard times are only temporary… I can confidently say that the party will overcome this situation…

The recent surge in successful major attacks against SFs is a clear demonstration of the Maoist commitment to such ‘pledges’. Though the respective State Governments and the Union Government have adopted several measures during last many years to contain this menace, they have failed to address several other challenges. Most importantly, though the Central Government has deployed more than “100 Battalions of Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) and a number of CoBRA Teams in LWE affected States” as “the strategy of the Government is aimed at addressing security vacuum in LWE affected areas” it has so far failed to take along the respective State Governments in enhancing their Police strength and quality. According to the latest data made available by the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D), none of the Maoist-affected States has been able to achieve its sanctioned Police strength. For instance, Chhattisgarh, the worst LWE-affected state has a police-population-ratio (policemen per hundred thousand population) of 214.92, against the sanctioned strength of 255.39. At the bottom end among Maoist affected States, Bihar has a ratio of 90.68, as against a sanction of a low 119.17. Similarly, the Police-area-ratio (policemen per 100 square kilometers area) is abysmal. However, among the Maoist affected states, Bihar has the best Police-area ratio at 99.61 (though much lower than the sanctioned strength of 130.92), while Andhra Pradesh has the worst ratio, at 30.95 (against the sanctioned strength of 36.93). More disturbingly, there is an acute shortage at the level of Police leadership as none of these States have a sanctioned strength of IPS (Indian Police Service) officers in position. Chhattisgarh has the lowest deficit – 12.62 per cent – among IPS ranks, while Odisha has the worst – 42.02 per cent. The national average in all these categories is itself dismal.

Indeed, past experience has shown that major insurgencies in India, prominently including Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Tripura, have been successfully defeated with the help of strong State Police Forces. It is, consequently, imperative that existing deficits be urgently addressed – both in terms of quality and the quantity – so that SFs can further intensify their operations on the ground, irrespective of the occasional reverses they have suffered. It is necessary, moreover, that SFs learn from and avoid the repetitive mistakes that have characterized the most significant of their misfortunes, as each major rebel success bolsters the sapping morale of the Maoists, and creates potential for new recruitment and resurgence.

* Ajit Kumar Singh
Research Fellow, Institute for Conflict Management

The recent low-tech attack by a lone wolf in London may well be a harbinger of things to come in the struggle against ISIS extremism. Singapore must be prepared at several levels to meet the challenge.

By Kumar Ramakrishna*

On Wednesday, March 22, 2017, Adrian Elms alias Khalid Masood, a 52-year old British convert to Islam, drove his rented Hyundai 4×4 at high speed onto the sidewalk of Westminster Bridge in London, mowing down terrified pedestrians, killing three of them in the process. A fourth victim later died in hospital. Masood crashed his vehicle into the perimeter fence surrounding Westminster Palace, emerged with two large knives and entered the British Parliament grounds where he stabbed a police officer to death before being shot dead himself by other on-site security personnel.

The self-styled Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) through its Amaq news agency eventually claimed responsibility for the attack, calling Masood a “soldier of the Caliphate” and claiming that he had “carried out the operation in response to calls to target citizens of the coalition”. The early consensus appears that Masood had carried out the attack on behalf of ISIS, having been inspired – but not explicitly instructed – to do so by immersion in ISIS propaganda. Masood in short is very likely another example of the so-called “lone wolf” terrorist inspired but not necessarily directed by an organised terrorist network whose cause he had become ideologically committed to.

A Disturbing Recent Trend

In particular, the mode of Masood’s action – a vehicle-ramming attack, sometimes accompanied by an on-foot gun and/or knife assault – appears to be in the process of becoming an ISIS trademark. On 14 July 2016, for example, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhel, a Tunisian who was resident in France, drove a 19-tonne cargo truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, killing 86 people and maiming 484 others, before being shot dead in an exchange of gunfire with police.

As in the latest London incident, ISIS claimed responsibility for the Nice attack, saying that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had answered its “calls to target citizens of coalition nations that fight the Islamic State”. Then on 19 December 2016, Anis Amri, a failed Tunisian asylum seeker, drove a truck into a Christmas market next to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin, killing 12 and injuring 56 people.

Amri had commandeered the truck after killing its driver but was shot dead by Italian police near Milan four days later. Yet again ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, saying the attacker had answered its calls to target the citizens of states that are fighting against it. That this vehicle-ramming-plus-knife assault tactic may well be coming into current ISIS vogue was further suggested by an incident occurring just hours after the London incident.

A 40-year old French national called Mohamed R. was arrested by police in the northern Belgian city of Antwerp for trying to enter the main pedestrianised shopping street at high speed. The police also found a rifle and bladed weapons in his car.

Cars, Trucks, Knives and ISIS: Nothing Very New

Some observers argue that the latest apparent shift in ISIS tactics is borne out of necessity. As the United States and Russian-led coalition continues to put the squeeze militarily on ISIS positions in Iraq and Syria, the ISIS leadership may be expected to take the strategic decision to begin preparations for a shift from a territorially-based entity to a global insurgency.

That is, instead of being physically concentrated around Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq, the ISIS meme will be kept alive in the form of what FBI Director James Comey has called a “terrorist diaspora” – where thousands of foreign fighters will ultimately fan outwards from the Middle East, heading back towards Europe, Africa, as well as East Asia and even Southeast Asia.

One operational consequence of this strategic shift would be that complex, multiple-assault type actions like the devastating attacks on Paris on 13 November 2015 which were basically coordinated from ISIS Central, will become less likely. While returning foreign fighters may tap local black markets to secure the weapons needed for fairly sophisticated attacks, tightened security measures in the wake of Paris and Brussels may make that option less appealing.

Hence relatively low-tech measures – like what we witnessed in London – may make more tactical sense. Worse, one need not even be a trained fighter to perpetrate such low-tech attacks – merely a fanatical lone wolf-type commitment to the ISIS creed would do. This is why the Soufan Group has warned of the “weaponisation of everyday life” – as exemplified by the use of cars, trucks and knives for terrorist purposes – as a dangerous emerging trend.

Genesis of the Lone-Wolf Idea

Reinforcing such an operational trend is the fact that ISIS and its Al Qaeda cousins have long prepared themselves doctrinally for such a shift towards decentralized action by a mix of trained local cells and lone wolves. In the mid-2000s the Syrian Al Qaedaist ideologue Abu Musab Al-Suri had famously argued against centralised direction from the core Al Qaeda leadership, favouring instead action by independent small cells acting on their own initiative to exploit local opportunities to strike at enemies.

Furthermore, capitalising on the rise of social media platforms in the mid-2000s, organs such as the online English magazine Inspire, the brainchild of the late “bin Laden of the Internet,” Anwar Al-Awlaki, the chief ideologue for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen, promoted lone wolf action, calling on supporters to “do your own terrorism and stay in place”.

In 2010, moreover, Inspire urged followers to choose “’pedestrian only’ locations and make sure to gain speed before ramming their vehicles into the crowd in order to ‘achieve maximum carnage’”. Hence, when the late ISIS spokesperson Abu Muhammad al-Adnani called on ISIS supporters worldwide in September 2014 to “single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies”, and amongst other things, “slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car,” he was really stating nothing new.

What we witnessed in London last week was always going to be part of the ISIS terror toolkit. We are likely however to see more of such low-tech attacks.

SG Secure: Now, More Than Ever

Even the most casual observer will recognise that the densely populated urban city-state of Singapore is not immune to the type of low-tech attack London just experienced. While physical measures like concrete barriers and bollards are certainly part of the defence against such threats, they are insufficient. This is where the recently launched SG Secure national movement with its emphasis on promoting community cohesion, vigilance and resilience is timely.

At one level, the wider community must be prepared to know what to do in an emergency, and act as the security forces’ extra eyes and ears to detect suspicious activity suggesting terrorist incidents are about to occur. At a second level, being aware of telltale signs of radicalisation into violent extremism on the part of family members, friends and colleagues, is equally important to enable early intervention to prevent a vulnerable individual from acting out any lone wolf terrorist fantasies.

At a third and final level, security forces, no matter how well trained, cannot be everywhere at once. Hence perhaps the call in some quarters for suitable and willing able-bodied members of the public to volunteer for training in self-defence techniques may be worth further exploration. After all, there have been low-tech terrorist incidents overseas where alert and courageous members of the public collectively disarmed lightly armed individual attackers before help arrived.

If Singaporeans can demonstrably live up to the moniker of “Lion City”, a layer of psychological deterrence may well be added to the SG Secure mix, further enhancing our nation’s security in the face of the emerging low-tech “weaponisation of everyday life”.

*Kumar Ramakrishna is Associate Professor, Head of Policy Studies and Coordinator of the National Security Studies Programme in the Office of the Executive Deputy Chairman, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

To meet skyrocketing demand for electricity, African countries may have to triple their energy output by 2030. While hydropower and fossil fuel power plants are favored approaches in some quarters, a new assessment by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has found that wind and solar can be economically and environmentally competitive options and can contribute significantly to the rising demand.

“Wind and solar have historically been dismissed as too expensive and temporally variable, but one of our key findings is that there are plentiful wind and solar resources in Africa that are both low-impact and cost-effective,” said Ranjit Deshmukh, one of the lead researchers of the study. “Another important finding is that with strategic siting of the renewable energy resource and with more energy trade and grid interconnections between countries, the total system cost can be lower than it would be if countries were to develop their resource in isolation without strategic siting.”

The research appeared online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (PNAS) in an article titled, “Strategic siting and regional grid interconnections key to low-carbon futures in African countries.” The lead authors are Deshmukh and Grace C. Wu, both Berkeley Lab researchers in the Energy Technologies Area. Much of the initial research was funded by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), which is based in Abu Dhabi. Individual fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Link Foundation to Wu and Deshmukh supported the expanded analysis on wind siting.

“As a region, Africa is in an unparalleled energy crisis rife with electricity deficiency, lack of access, and high costs,” said Wu. “How African countries and the international community tackle this crisis in the coming decades will have large social, environmental, and climate implications.”

One-of-a-kind open-source planning framework and tool

The Berkeley Lab study is the first of its kind for Africa, using multiple criteria “such as quality of the resource, distance from transmission lines and roads, co-location potential, availability of water resources, potential human impact, and many other factors” to characterize wind and solar resources. Looking at the Southern African Power Pool (SAPP) and the Eastern Africa Power Pool (EAPP), which together include 21 countries accounting for half the continent’s population, it found that many countries have wind and solar potential several times greater than their expected demand in 2030.

The tool they used to make these evaluations, the Multicriteria Analysis for Planning Renewable Energy (MapRE, at mapre.lbl.gov) was developed at Berkeley Lab in collaboration with IRENA and is open-source and publicly available to researchers and policymakers.

“Usually project developers will just choose the site with the least levelized cost and best wind speeds, but in reality those aren’t the best sites,” Deshmukh said. “Often times you want development closer to transmission infrastructure or to cities so you don’t have to assume the risk involved in developing transmission infrastructure over long distances, let alone transmitting electricity across those distances. It’s difficult to quantify those costs. Our tool enables stakeholders to bring all these criteria into their decision-making and helps them prioritize areas for development and preplanning of transmission.”

Siting and grid interconnections are key

Not only did the researchers find plentiful wind and solar resources in Africa, another key finding was that system costs and impacts could be lower with robust energy trade and grid connections between countries. And if wind farms are strategically sited so as to manage peak demand, costs can be lower still.

“System costs can be further reduced if wind farms are sited where the timing of wind generation matches electricity demand rather than in areas that maximize wind energy production,” Wu said. “These cost savings are due to avoided natural gas, hydro, or coal generation capacity.”

For example, the researchers found that in a high-wind scenario in the Southern Africa Power Pool, strategic siting and grid interconnections would reduce the need for conventional generation capacity by 9.5 percent, resulting in cost savings of 6 to 20 percent, depending on the technology that was avoided.

“Together, international energy trade and strategic siting can enable African countries to pursue ‘no-regrets’ wind and solar that can compete with conventional generation technologies like coal and hydropower,” Wu said. “No-regrets options are low-cost, low-impact, and low-risk.”

With Berkeley Lab’s MapRE tool, policymakers will be able to do a preliminary evaluation of various sites on their own without having to rely on developers for technical information. “This information brings policymakers level with project developers,” Deskhmukh said. “It reduces costs for everybody and allows for a much more sustainable planning paradigm.”

In addition to Africa, the researchers have uploaded data for India and plan to add more countries, most likely in Asia. And they have held five workshops in Africa for regulators, academics, utilities, and energy officials to share the approach and findings. “They’ve been super enthusiastic,” Deshmukh said. “We’re seeing impacts on the ground.”

The amount of wind and solar currently deployed in Africa is tiny, he said. But with global prices having declined dramatically in the last decade or so, renewable energy has become a competitive alternative. And while hydropower is a significant and familiar resource in Africa, climbing costs and persistent droughts are making it less attractive.

“Just based purely on economics today wind and solar are attractive,” Deshmukh said. “It makes economic sense. Through planning around multiple stakeholder criteria and prioritizing wind and solar projects for regional energy trade, policymakers and financiers can increase their cost-competitiveness.”

Investigators have shown that certain screening methods that detect the genetic material of Zika virus can be used to ensure that donated blood supplies remain free of the virus.

The methods, called Zika virus nucleic acid amplification technology assays, demonstrated similar excellent sensitivities to assays currently used for screening for transfusion-transmitted viruses. The methods were substantially more sensitive than most other laboratory-developed and diagnostic Zika virus assays.

“The results of this study, that evaluated 17 Zika virus assays in 11 laboratories and documented excellent sensitivity of the two donor screening assays manufactured by Roche and Grifols, were critical to support the decision by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration [FDA] and blood industry to implement investigational screening of donors in Puerto Rico in April 2016 and the entire U.S. by the end of 2016”, said Dr. Michael Busch, senior author of the study. “Given the sensitivity of these assays, the FDA approved clinical trials using individual donation screening and rescinded earlier policies precluding transfusion of blood collected in Puerto Rico and deferral from donation by donors who had travelled to Zika risk countries throughout the U.S. This screening has detected over 350 infected blood donations in Puerto Rico and dozens of infected donations in the continental U.S.”

The research is published in Transfusion and is part of a special “Themed Issue” that focuses on Zika virus.

Two other articles in the special issue report on the first blood donations in the continental United States found to be positive for Zika virus infection. The first notes that of 358,786 donations screened, 23 were initially reactive on Roche cobas Zika, a test approved under a FDA’s investigational new drug application. Fourteen of these donors, all from Florida, represented probable Zika virus infection based on reactivity in additional nucleic acid tests or anti-Zika immunoassays. Risk factors included recent travel to Zika virus-active areas and potential sexual exposure.

In the second article, the Grifols Procleix Zika assay was used to test 466,834 donations, and five confirmed infected donors with travel exposures were detected outside areas considered as having active transmission. These donors most likely represent travel-acquired “tail-end infections” who had prolonged red blood cell-associated Zika virus RNA. The estimated specificities of both the Roche cobas Zika test and Grifols Procleix Zika tests were >99.99%.

As noted in an accompanying editorial, 10 articles in the special issue are categorized into five themes: nucleic acid testing to detect Zika virus, nucleic acid testing to screen the blood supply in the United States, pathogen reduction of Zika virus in blood components, inactivation of Zika virus during the manufacture of plasma derivatives, and defining those at high risk for complications from transfusion-transmitted Zika virus.

“As the papers in this issue illustrate, building on experience with prior emerging infectious diseases, much has been learned in the relatively brief period of a year both about the nature of the virus and its epidemiology. This knowledge is invaluable as we refine the response to this epidemic,” wrote the authors of the editorial. “However, in addition to uncertainty regarding whether Zika virus will spread further or become endemic in some areas, there is also much that remains unknown about the complications of infection itself.”

he science and engineering workforce in the United States is aging rapidly, according to a new study. And it is only going to get older in coming years.

Economists at The Ohio State University found that the average age of employed scientists increased from 45.1 to 48.6 between 1993 and 2010, faster than the workforce as a whole.

The study estimates that, all else being the same, the average age of U.S. scientists will increase by another 2.3 years in the near future.

“The aging of the scientific workforce is not over – not by a longshot,” said David Blau, co-author of the study and professor of economics at Ohio State.

Some researchers have raised concerns that older scientists may not be as creative or productive as those at the beginning of their careers, and might be keeping younger scientists out of the field. But those possibilities haven’t been proven, said co-author Bruce Weinberg, also a professor of economics at Ohio State.

“We don’t have the answers yet, but we are continuing to investigate the implications of our aging scientific workforce,” Weinberg said.

The study was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The main source of data for the study came from the 1993 to 2010 National Science Foundation’s Survey of Doctorate Recipients. Blau and Weinberg used detailed information on age, field of degree, job tenure, previous and current employment, occupation and sector of employment on about 73,000 scientists aged 76 or younger. They supplemented this with Census data.

Findings revealed that a substantial majority of the recent aging of the scientific workforce can be attributed to the large number of people in the baby boom generation getting older.

But there is another significant factor at work: Scientists have been working longer since mandatory retirement of university professors ended by law in 1994.

“We have scientists who prior to 1994 would have been forced to retire who are now working to older and older ages,” Weinberg said.

In 1993, 18 percent of scientific workers were aged 55 and older, but that nearly doubled to 33 percent in 2010. Meanwhile, the share of all workers 55 and older increased much more modestly, from 15 to 23 percent in the same time period.

Blau and Weinberg created a model to estimate what the future holds for the age distribution of scientific workers. Results suggested that the average age of scientists will go up an additional 2.3 years in the future, all else being the same.

“Even after the baby boom generation is long gone from the workforce, the scientific workforce will still continue to get older,” Blau said. “Scientists are retiring later and that will continue to have an effect.”

The growth in the number of women and the number of immigrants working in science had no real effect on the age of the workforce, the study found.

Results showed that the average age of scientists in nearly all fields is on the rise. Even computer and information science – which historically has had a much younger workforce than most other fields – has seen a graying of the workforce. In fact, the average age of computer scientists is increasing more rapidly than other fields, narrowing the historical gap.

This study is part of a larger project by Blau and Weinberg to determine what happens to the productivity and creativity of scientists as they get older.

“The conventional wisdom has been that scientists become less creative and less innovative as they age,” said Weinberg. But some of his own research has suggested otherwise.

“My work suggests the conventional story isn’t as true as we might think,” he said. “Many of the scientific fields people think about are not typical and over time people are starting to be more productive at later ages.”

The ongoing project will shed more light on this issue, the researchers said.

By S. Binodkumar Singh*

On March 6, 2017, three protestors were killed in Police firing at Maleth, a Village Development Committee (VDC) in Saptari District, as Police tried to chase away the cadres of the United Democratic Madhesi Front (UDMF) protesting against a mass meeting of the main opposition Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML) as part of its campaign for local level elections. Another 25 UDMF cadres and three Policemen were also injured in the clash. The death toll, later, rose to five, as two persons succumbed to their injuries, one on March 8, 2017, and another on March 10, 2017, in the course of their treatment at the BP Koirala Institute of Health Sciences.

Irked by the Saptari incident, UDMF – which consists of seven Madhes-based parties including the National Madhes Socialist Party (NMSP), Nepal Sadbhawana Party (NSP), Madhesi Janaadhikar Forum- Republican (MJF-R), Tarai Madhes Democratic Party (TMDP), Sadbhawana Party (SP),Tarai Madhes Sadbhawana Party (TMSP) and Federal Socialist Forum-Nepal (FSF-N) – announced a two-day general strike in the Tarai region at an emergency meeting held in Kathmandu, on March 6, 2017. UDMF leaders also threatened to withdraw their support to the Pushpa Kamal Dahal-led Government. UDMF’s constituent parties have a total of 39 votes in Parliament, and have been demanding an amendment to the Constitution, changing the demarcation of Districts and constituencies before the holding of local level elections. The Constitution Amendment Bill primarily deals with the aspirations of ethnic Madhesis and Tharus on the delineation of provinces in the newly established federal system.

UDMF cadres restarted taking to the streets on February 21, 2017, protesting the announcement of the dates for local elections by taking out a torch rally in Rajbiraj, the District headquarters of Saptari. On February 20, 2017, a cabinet meeting held at Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal’s official residence in Kathmandu decided to hold the local level election across the country in a single phase on May 14, 2017, amid opposition from the agitating Madhes-based political parties. Significantly, Prime Minister Dahal had given an assurance on February 17, 2017, that he would work on election preparations and the Constitutional Amendment simultaneously. On February 19, 2017, Dahal had reiterated that he would declare an election date only after reaching an agreement with the agitating Madhes-based parties.

The conflict escalated when UDMF cadres clashed with the Police on February 26, 2017, as they staged a demonstration at Gaur, the Rautahat District headquarters, in a bid to thwart a function being organized by the CPN-UML. Further, on March 2, 2017, CPN-UML and UDMF cadres clashed at Rajbiraj in Saptari District while the former were distributing pamphlets. Again, on March 3, 2017, UDMF cadres tarred the face of CPN-UML District Committee member Pratap Narayan Chaudhary, who, among other CPN-UML cadres, was distributing pamphlets at Machha Hatiya in Saptari District.

Earlier, protesting against the adoption of the new Constitution on September 20, 2015, the Madhesis had blockaded border points with India from September 23, 2015 and only ended the blockade on February 5, 2016, after 135 days. According to partial data compiled by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), 32 persons, including 29 civilians and three Security Force (SF) personnel, were killed in blockade-related violence.

On November 29, 2016, in order to end the political logjam, the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist Centre (CPN-Maoist Centre)-led Government registered a seven-point Constitution Amendment Bill at the Parliament Secretariat after the Madhesi parties had served an ultimatum, which ended on November 28, 2016, to bring an amendment proposal.

However, the Government’s move came amidst strong objections from the main opposition party, the CPN-UML. In particular, the party objected to the proposal to change boundaries of Province No. 4 and Province No. 5. Significantly, on December 1, 2016, CPN-UML started to obstruct Parliamentary proceedings, terming the Constitution Amendment Bill anti-national. Since then, nine opposition parties including CPN-UML have obstructed House business, demanding that local level elections be held before the Constitution Amendment process.

On February 20, 2017, in order to appease these opposition parties, the Government decided to hold the local level elections on May 14, 2017, after a gap of 20 years. The last local elections in Nepal had been held in May 1997. Remarkably, nearly three months after the registration of the Constitution Amendment Bill, with the opposition parties softening their stance and allowing deliberations on it, Parliament finally began general discussions on the Bill on February 23, 2017.

The opposition parties have, however, already declared that they will not allow the Bill to be endorsed by the House. On February 23, 2017, CPN-UML Chairperson K.P. Sharma Oli stated that his party would not let Parliament pass the Constitution Amendment Bill as it was ‘against the people’s will’, a position he reiterated on February 26, 2017. Meanwhile, on March 7, 2017, CPN-UML Secretary Pradeep Gyawali warned “We demand that the Government create political and administrative environment to hold the local polls. The elections can be and must be held, as the failure to conduct the polls will lead to the new Constitution’s failure.” Moreover, turning down the Government’s plea to halt its election campaign and demanding that Government ensure full security to party rallies, CPN-UML senior leader Jhalnath Khanal declared, on March 8, 2017, “We have demanded that the government ensure full security to peaceful party rallies. If the government fails to perform its duty and we have to defend ourselves, the situation might become complex.” Significantly, CPN-UML’s campaign, which was halted for three days following the Saptari incident, resumed from Hetauda on March 10, 2017.

Exerting pressure on the political parties to expedite preparations for elections, the Supreme Court ruled, on February 22, 2017, that it is constitutionally mandatory to hold all three tiers of elections – local, provincial and federal – within the stipulated date of January 21, 2018. Further, on March 3, 2017, the Supreme Court ordered the Government to furnish a written statement about the Government’s preparations for holding all three tiers of elections in line with the provisions of the new Constitution. Meanwhile, in view of the upcoming local elections, Election Commission (EC) spokesman Surya Prasad Sharma announced, on March 9, 2017, that the Election Commission would deploy the chief election officer, election officers and other support staff to the ground from April 16, 2017.

However, at a meeting held in Kathmandu on February 24, 2017, the Federal Alliance, a coalition of Madhes-based and other ethnic political parties and organizations, asserted that the Alliance could not accept local level polls. Further, on March 4, 2017, the Alliance reiterated that the local level elections announced for May 14 should be postponed as they had been announced in a hurry. On March 7, 2017, the Alliance gave a seven-day ultimatum to the Government to endorse the Constitution Amendment Bill with revisions and withdraw the decision to hold the polls. It also decided to withdraw support to the Government if the deadline was not met. Although the Government enjoys a majority in Parliament without the support of the Alliance, the latter has been extending its support all the same. 41 lawmakers belong to the constituent parties of the Federal Alliance.

On March 8, 2017, UDMF submitted a five-point memorandum to Prime Minister Dahal demanding the withdrawal of the local elections’ programme, Amendment of the Constitution, keeping the local level structure within the provincial jurisdiction and implementing the three-point agreement reached during the formation of the Government. The Front also demanded a high level commission be formed to probe the Saptari incident, and steps be initiated to punish the guilty, declare the deceased martyrs, compensate the bereaved families and provide free treatment to the injured. The Front warned that it would withdraw support to the incumbent Government if its demands were not addressed within seven days. Dahal had assured the UDMF leaders that he would hold discussion with the ruling parties and the opposition and decide accordingly.

However, after a meeting with ruling coalition members on March 1, 2017, Prime Minister Dahal disclosed, “The parties have made it clear that they would vote against the Constitution Amendment Bill.” Further, on March 9, 2017, emphasizing the inevitability of the elections, Dahal said, “The new Constitution has ensured rights of the legislative, the executive and the judiciary to the citizens at the grassroots. And to implement the Constitution, elections are the only way out.”

Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal is under tremendous pressure with the main opposition party CPN-UML warning of stringent protests if the local polls were not held within the stipulated date and the agitating Madhes-based parties threatening to withdraw support and intensify protests after the seven day ultimatum if the Government failed to meet their demands. As election preparations proceed, the impasse is likely to continue.

*S. Binodkumar Singh
Research Associate, Institute for Conflict Management

By Tushar Ranjan Mohanty*

At least five persons, including two Frontier Corps (FC) personnel, were injured in a targeted hand grenade attack in the Cinema Chowk area of Turbat town in Balochistan on March 12, 2017. FC sources said that two unidentified assailants riding a motorcycle lobbed a hand grenade on on-duty FC personnel, injuring two troopers and three civilians. The attackers managed to escape from the scene.

On March 7, 2017, militants targeted an Army vehicle with an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) in the Awaran District, killing one soldier. Sources disclosed that unidentified militants had planted an IED on the roadside, which they detonated with a remote control device while targeting the security vehicle.

On February 28, 2017, at least three FC personnel and one civilian were injured in an IED blast on the Sariab Road in Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan. The bomb, which was planted on the roadside, targeted an FC vehicle while it was on patrol. The explosion left the vehicle partially damaged.

On February 16, 2017, three Army personnel were killed when an IED, targeting an Army convoy, exploded in Awaran town. The dead were identified as Captain Taha, Sepoy Kamran Satti and Sepoy Mehtar Jan. Another two soldiers were also injured in the attack.

The terrorist violence against Security Force (SF) personnel in Balochistan during the first 75 days of 2017 was just a continuation of the targeted killings that had seen an escalation through 2016. While the civilian and militant categories saw just five and six fatalities, respectively, in this period in 2017, at least 12 SF personnel were killed in 15 incidents of militant-orchestrated attacks. 2016 saw the highest fatalities among SFs over the preceding five years, with 153 killed. According to partial data compiled by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), of the 153 SF personnel killed in 2016, 131 lost their lives in Northern Balochistan, while the remaining 22 were killed in Southern Balochistan.

While the province recorded a surge in SF fatalities through 2016, overall fatalities registered a marginal .31 per cent decrease. According to the SATP database, Balochistan recorded 633 fatalities through 2016, including 251 civilians, 229 militants and 153 SF personnel; in comparison to 635 total fatalities, including 298 militants, 247 civilians and 90 SF personnel in 2015. 2016 had been a year of mixed trends in different categories in comparison to the previous year. While militant fatalities declined by 23.15 percent, SF and civilian fatalities registered an increase of 70 percent and 1.61 percent respectively.

Fatalities in Balochistan: 2011-2017

While the overall fatalities had recorded a meagre diminution, the major proportion of these fatalities came in the form of suicide attacks. The number and lethality of suicide attacks in Balochistan increased considerably, from just one such incident resulting in two fatalities in 2015, to seven attacks in 2016 resulting in 224 deaths and 434 injuries. The most deadly of all suicide blast came on August 8, 2016, when a suicide bomber blew himself up at the emergency ward of Quetta’s Civil Hospital, killing at least 74 persons and injuring another 100. 74 persons includes 55 lawyers who had gathered at the hospital to mourn the death of BBA President Bilal Anwar Kasi in a gun attack earlier in the day.

Two other prominent suicide attacks of the year were:

November 12, 2016: At least 52 persons were killed and another 102 were injured in suicide attack at the shrine of Shah Norani in Khuzdar District.

October 24, 2016: At least 61 SF personnel were killed, and another 164 were injured as terrorists stormed the New Sariab Police Training College (PTC), some 13 kilometres away from Quetta, in the night.

Though, the Province registered a decrease in the number of bomb blasts from 60 in 2015 to 43 in 2016, the resultant fatalities increased from 80 in 2015, to 262 in 2016, particularly as a result of the suicide bombings. Similarly, the number of major incidents (each involving three or more fatalities) decreased in comparison to the previous year, but fatalities in these incidents increased: as against 74 major incidents in 2015, 2016 had recorded 59, but the resultant fatalities increased from 397 to 500.

These trends nullify the Government’s claim of ‘containing militancy’ through the implementation of National Action Plan (NAP). This is despite the fact, as the Balochistan Home Department disclosed on August 20, 2016, that 13,575 terrorists were arrested and 337 were killed in some 2,825 operations in the Province in 2015-16. The Home Department issued a report over progress in the implementation of NAP. According to the report, 4,223 different types of guns and 248,327 bullets and mortar shells were seized until August 2016 since January 7, 2015.

Meanwhile, the increase in civilian and SF categories was the result, on the one hand, of the extra-judicial killings of civilians by SFs, and the retaliatory target killing of SF personnel by the ethnic Baloch insurgents. Through 2016, at least 251 civilians were killed in Balochistan, of which some 138 were attributable to one or other militant outfit. The remaining 113 ‘unattributed’ fatalities were overwhelmingly the work of the State apparatus and its surrogates. Of the 3,815 civilian fatalities recorded in Balochistan since 2004 [data till March 19, 2017], at least 1,051 civilian killings are attributable to one or other militant outfit.

Of these, 361 civilian killings (205 in the South and 156 in the North) have been claimed by Baloch separatist formations, while Islamist and sectarian extremist formations -primarily LeJ, TTP and Ahrar-ul-Hind (Liberators of India) -claimed responsibility for another 690 civilian killings, 631 in the North (mostly in and around Quetta) and 59 in the South. The 363 civilian killings attributed to Baloch formations include at least 155 Punjabi settlers since 2006. The remaining 2,764 civilian fatalities- 1,668 in the South and 1,096 in the North-remain ‘unattributed’. A large proportion of the ‘unattributed’ fatalities, particularly in the Southern region, are believed to be the result of enforced disappearances carried out by state agencies, or by their proxies, prominently including the Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Aman Balochistan (TNAB, Movement for the Restoration of Peace, Balochistan). The large and continuously mounting number of unattributed civilian fatalities reconfirms the widespread conviction that Security Agencies engage in ‘kill and dump’ operations against local Baloch dissidents, a reality that Pakistan’s Supreme Court has clearly recognized.

Nearly 1,000 bodies of political activists and suspected separatists have been found in the restive Balochistan province over the past six years, according to the Pakistan Government’s official figures. A media report noted, “According to the Federal Ministry of Human Rights, at least 936 dead bodies have been found in Balochistan since 2011.” Most of the bodies were dumped in the regions of Quetta, Kalat, Khuzdar and Mekran-areas where Balochistan’s separatist insurgency has its roots. Rights activists said the figures pointed to large-scale extrajudicial killings, the report added. Relatives assert most of the victims were picked up by security agencies. Thousands of people have disappeared without trace in Balochistan since a separatist insurgency gained momentum in 2007. A military-led operation was launched in early 2005 to counter the uprising by ethnic Baloch groups, who want a greater say in decision-making and exploitation of the Province’s abundant natural resources, such as minerals and gas.

The Voice for Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP) has recorded 1,200 cases of dumped bodies and asserts that there are many more it has not been able to document. VBMP chief Nasrullah Baloch added that most of the bodies “are of those activists who have been victims of ‘enforced disappearances’-people who are picked up by authorities and then just go missing”. His allegations were largely in line with a 2013 report by the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) that recorded “credible reports of continued serious human rights violations, including disappearances of people, arbitrary arrests, torture and extrajudicial killings”.

Meanwhile, the claim of the Federal Government’s ‘Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances’ added salt to the wounds of the Baloch people. The Chairman of the Commission, retired Justice Javed Iqbal, told a Senate standing committee on December 19, 2016, that only 96 people were missing in Balochistan and the matter had been politicised.

The representative of Balochistan at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and European Union (EU), Mehran Marri, stated, on August 13, 2016,

The situation in Balochistan is as grave as ever. Pakistan’s military operations have been continuing unabated. The Army Chief, the Prime Minister and the stooge ministers, who are sitting in the Baloch Cabinet had a meeting and they agreed on a National Action Plan to further isolate Baloch activists, freedom-loving nationals and the population from the rest of Pakistan, and certain other elimination process of genocide through a plan called the National Action Plan.

The pro-Government Balochistan National Party-Mengal (BNP-M) also underlined the prolonged Baloch discontent. BNP-M president Sardar Akhtar Jan Mengal asserted, on March 5, 2017, that successive rulers of the country over the preceding 70 years had given nothing to the people of Balochistan, except hunger, poverty, unemployment and lawlessness. He alleged that the rulers had deliberately kept Balochistan backward. The rulers had never paid attention to the development of Balochistan and deprived its people of their due rights, including their share in the natural resources of their own Province. He claimed that no development could be seen in Balochistan under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), and that this project would not benefit the people of Balochistan, as not a single development project had been launched in the region as part of the mega project.

Dubbing China as a ‘great threat’ to the Baloch people, UNHRC Balochistan representative Mehran Marri said that “China really-really is spreading its tentacles in Balochistan very rapidly, and therefore, we are appealing to the international community. The Gwadar project is for the Chinese military. This would be detrimental to international powers, to the people’s interest, where 60 percent of world’s oil flows. So, the world has to really take rapid action in curbing China’s influence in Balochistan in particular and in Pakistan in general.” Asserting that CPEC would convert the Baloch people into minorities in their own homeland, Noordin Mengal, a human rights campaigner from Balochistan, stated that, with an influx of outsiders as a result of the project, the identity of the Baloch was being threatened.

Concern about demographic changes in Balochistan was reiterated in a report by the Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FPCCI) on December 28, 2016, which noted that, at the current rate of influx of Chinese nationals into Balochistan and after completion of the CPEC, the native population of the area would be outnumbered by 2048. The report added that, conservatively, 0.44 persons per thousand migrate from china because of economic reasons, resulting in an inflow of more than 600,000 people per year in Pakistan. At present, the Baloch are 55 per cent of the total population of Balochistan. The current growth rate of Balochistan’s population is 2.36 per cent. On the existing rate of migration from China at 0.44 persons per thousand and rate of population growth at 0.43 per cent, the share of Chinese in Balochistan’s population is destined to accelerate with the completion of the CPEC. Incoming investors and settlers have better capacities to offer attractive prices for land acquisition-often exceeding the growing market value. The unskilled people of the province will face increasing challenges in maintaining their lives without land ownership, their only productive asset, the report observed.

Moreover, while Balochistan is the starting point of the CPEC, the lion’s share of the project has been assigned to Punjab, according to Federal Ministry of Interior statistics shared with the Parliament on September 2, 2016. At present, 53 per cent of the total projects are assigned to Punjab. According to official statistics, out of the total of 330 projects, 176 are in Punjab while only eight projects have been allocated for Balochistan.

This has also upset the Baloch people. Balochistan Republican Party on September 3, 2016 alleged that Balochistan’s abundant resources were being diverted for the benefit of Pakistan’s dominant province, Punjab. Munir Mengal, the President of Baloch Voice Foundation, asserted, on March 13, 2017, that CPEC was a ‘strategic design’ by Pakistan and China to loot Balochistan’s resources and eliminate their culture and identity.

The Federal Government is trying to ‘solve’ the problem of Baloch discontent through demographic re-engineering, instead of addressing the challenges of development and justice, settling large numbers of workers from the other Provinces in Balochistan, and providing land and a range of facilities to ‘outsiders’ there. On September 8, 2015, in a meeting of the Senate’s Standing Committee on Interior, Senator Jehanzeb Jamaldini observed:

The government settled four million people in various parts of Balochistan in the past three decade…With broader demographic changes in the province, the Government is converting the majority into a minority.

The Aghaz-e-Haqooq-e-Balochistan (Beginning of the Rights of Balochistan) package, which was launched by then Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani with much fanfare on November 23, 2009, has proved an eyewash. On its own admission, the Government has only been able to implement 15 of the 61 proposals contained in the package-and the success of these 15 has also been challenged.

Islamabad has pursued a predatory policy with regard to the people and resources of Balochistan for decades, and there is no present indication that this is beginning to change. If anything, things are getting worse.

*Tushar Ranjan Mohanty
Research Associate, Institute for Conflict Management

The Smart Nation initiative heralds an era of unprecedented automation and connectivity. There are also risks. To keep the Smart Nation initiative on an even keel, Singaporeans need to develop a deeper appreciation of the high-tech drive.

By Tan Teck Boon*

It has been more than two years since Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong launched the Smart Nation initiative. When announced in November 2014, the Smart Nation initiative was unprecedented in that it would transform Singapore into the world’s first smart nation – an ultra-modern nation-state where cutting-edge technology is weaved into the lives of citizens.

Sure, governments around the world are building smart cities at a rapid pace, but Singapore would be the first to turn the entire country into a mega-smart city. Signs of this high-tech drive can be seen across the island.

Smart City Singapore

In line with this Smart City drive, two housing estates, Yuhua and Punggol, have placed smart homes on trial presumably, to assess their suitability for wider implementation down the road. Outfitted with the latest smart sensors and gadgets, these futuristic homes are not just eco-friendly and energy efficient but also safer for elderly residents.

The country’s less-than-perfect transportation system is getting a high-tech upgrade too. Designed to solve the so-called first-and-last-mile problem, self-driving taxis are already plying the One-North business district area. Fuel-efficient and significantly safer, these high-tech vehicles will one-day complement the country’s fixed route transportation system and help ease traffic gridlocks.

The smart nation will also leverage on telemedicine – a term referring to medical care delivered remotely – to provide better healthcare for citizens. By leveraging on Internet-enabled medical devices, teleconferencing equipment and wearable health trackers, patients will soon be receiving medical care in their homes freeing them from making non-essential visits to the hospital. The result will be a more efficient and streamlined healthcare system.

These are just a few examples of the benefits the Smart Nation initiative will deliver.

Potential Risks

Nonetheless, this high-tech push also has risks for the nation. It is entirely possible that unwelcomed consequences will follow. The most worrisome fallout is likely to be cybersecurity. The reason is that the extensive application of digital technology in the smart nation could also inadvertently expose the country to large-scale cyberattacks and data theft.

We saw what malicious hackers are capable of when a handful of them managed to breach the database of Target and stole the credit card numbers of 40 million customers apparently by hacking the US retailer’s Internet-enabled heating and air-conditioning system. What if malicious hackers turn their attention to the digital devices and systems that power the smart nation?

As the smart nation comes online, Singaporeans should also recognise why it is vitally important for the country to embark on this high-tech drive. Indeed, with a deeper appreciation of the Smart Nation initiative, citizens will be less likely to waver in the event of a massive digital breach, for example. More precisely, the country should recognise that the high-tech drive is in many ways, a necessity and that relinquishing it is not really an option.

Underline Natural Constraints and Vulnerabilities

We often take for granted that Singapore meets almost all of its energy needs from a small handful of countries and that Malaysia provides a substantial amount of the country’s water supply. It would be worth pointing out that the Smart Nation initiative will help the country get more out of these precious resources. Coupled with government policies to promote resource efficiency, the water and energy saving technologies that come with the smart nation will ensure that Singapore remains viable even as demand for these vital necessities shoot up.

It is also worth underlining the fact that the Smart Nation initiative will optimise land use in space-constrained Singapore. The country is undergoing rapid population ageing and the government projected that one in four citizens, or 900,000 Singaporeans, will be aged 65 and above by 2030. Two years ago, that figure stood at just 440,000. In land-scarce Singapore, building more nursing homes is not the answer. But thanks to smart homes and telemedicine, elderly citizens will one day be able to “age in place” while drawing on the support of their community and loved ones.

Currently, the amount of land in Singapore devoted to roads is roughly 12 percent – a figure not significantly different from that devoted to housing. Experts have noted that a fleet of shared self-driving cars could slash the number of vehicles in Singapore by two-thirds. With fewer cars on the road, there will be less traffic congestion and more land can be devoted to recreational use, housing and even farming – not roads. In short, the smart nation will optimise precious land resources.

Broader Smart Nation Narrative?

The Smart Nation initiative is as much about the application of cutting-edge technology as it is about improving the quality of citizens’ lives. As we go forward, it may also be necessary to broaden the Smart Nation narrative.

Unlike other countries, going “smart” is not a matter of choice for Singapore but one might contend, a necessity to cope with the country’s natural constraints and vulnerabilities. Broadening the smart nation narrative to encompass this key facet will help ensure that confidence in this high-tech drive does not waver during difficult and challenging times.

As Singapore transforms into a smart nation, there will be unwelcomed consequences. However, we can keep them at bay by recognising the deeper significance of the Smart Nation initiative. That will ensure that the high-tech drive stays on course. With some luck, a broader smart nation narrative will even set the country on the path of a smarter nation.

*Tan Teck Boon is a Research Fellow with the National Security Studies Programme in the Office of the Executive Deputy Chairman, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

By Deepak Kumar Nayak*

On March 14, 2017, a man identified as Kaushal Paswan (30) was shot dead by Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist) cadres near Mahuraushan village in the Gaya District of Bihar. Superintendent of Police (SP), City, Avakash Kumar disclosed that Paswan, a native of Pashewa village, was a member of an anti-Maoist outfit- Bhakt Sangharsh Samiti- formed in 2016 by some Dalits as a vigilante group against Maoists, after they had killed some members of the Bhuian and Paswan communities during the State Assembly polls in 2015.

On March 8, 2017, four CPI-Maoist cadres were killed in an encounter with personnel of the 205th battalion of CoBRA (Commando Battalion for Resolute Action) of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) in the forest area of Baskatwa under Gurpa Police Station in Gaya District. Acting on a tip-off about a meeting of top Maoist leaders in the area, the Security Forces (SFs) launched an operation and, on seeing SFs, the rebels opened fired, leading to an encounter in which the four Maoists were killed. SFs recovered four bodies of the rebels along with their arms. The arms included two Indian Small Arms System (INSAS) assault rifles, one Self Loading Rifle (SLR) and one AK-47 assault rifle. The slain Maoists were identified as Anil aka Deepak, ‘zonal commander’ of ‘Magadh area committee’, Rajesh Ravidas, a ‘sub-zonal commander’; Nepali Yadav and Uttam.

On March 1, 2017, cadres of the Tritiya Prastuti Committee (TPC) killed a villager, identified as Jitendra Kharwar, at Goreya village in Rohtas District. TPC is a CPI-Maoist splinter group and operates out of Jharkhand, the neighboring State.

On February 21, 2017, Mantu Khaira, ‘zonal-commander’ of the CPI-Maoist was killed in an anti-Maoist operation in Dahibara forests under Anandpur in Banka District. SFs recovered two SLRs, an AK-47 and some grenades at the encounter site.

On February 20, 2017, CPI-Maoist cadres killed one Sunil Yadav at Champapur village in Lakhisarai District. Sunil was the husband of the deputy mukhiya (village head) of Champapur village.

On January 30, 2017, Sanjay Pandey, a munshi (accountant) with Raj Kumar Constructions, engaged in construction of rural roads, was beheaded for not paying extortion money to the Naxals [Left Wing Extremists (LWEs)] in Jamui District. Maoist leaflets found near the dead body declared that those executing Government plans with the help of the Police and without obtaining CPI-Maoist permission would meet a similar fate.

According to partial data collated by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), Bihar has already accounted for at least nine Maoist-linked fatalities, including four civilians and five Maoists, in the current year (data till March 19, 2017).During the corresponding period of 2016, the number of such fatalities stood at eight (one civilian, two SF personnel and five Maoists).

Indeed, the declining trend in fatalities recorded in the State since 2011 registered a sharp reversal in 2016. According to the SATP database, 32 persons, including eight civilians, 15 SF personnel and nine Maoists, were killed in the State in 2016, in comparison to nine persons, including four civilians, three SF personnel and two Maoists, killed in 2015.

The surge in civilian fatalities, which doubled in 2016 as against 2015, is worrisome indeed. Worse, SFs appear to have been pushed on the back foot in the State. The Maoists continued to improve their kill ratio against SFs, at 1:1.66 in their favour, as against 1:1.5 archived in 2015.

The surge in Maoist-related violence in 2016 was substantially the result of three major incidents (each involving three or more fatalities), in which three civilians, 10 SF personnel and seven Maoists were killed, in comparison to no major incident registered in 2015. The most significantof these was recorded on July 18, 2016, when 10 COBRA commandos were killed and another five injured, in a CPI-Maoist orchestrated Improvised Explosive Device (IED) blast and subsequent encounter in the Chakarbanda-Dumarinala forests of Aurangabad District. Three Maoists were also killed in the encounter.

The Aurangabad incident will go a long way in denting the morale of the SF personnel not just in Bihar but across all theatres of LWE conflict in India. The manner in which the Maoists planned and trapped the elite counter-insurgency personnel speaks volumes of the hold the ultras enjoy in the region , across Aurangabad, Gaya and Jamui, the epicentre of Maoist-violence in Bihar. Incidentally, according to SATP data, out of the total of 32 fatalities in the State in 2016, 29 (seven civilians, 13 SF personnel and nine Maoists) were reported from these three Districts alone.

In addition to incidents of killing, the Maoists in Bihar have also escalated other violent activities through 2016, including abduction (two reported incidents in which six persons were abducted), arson (10 incidents), bomb blasts (four occasions), attacks on railway property (three incidents), among others. During 2015, the Maoists were involved in three incidents of abduction in which three persons were abducted, and three incidents of arson. No incident of bomb blast or attack on railway property was recorded during 2015.

The Maoists also issued four bandh (shut down strike) calls on different issues in 2016, in comparison to five such calls in 2015. The Maoists had given three such calls in the State in 2014.

Union Ministry of Home Affairs (UMHA) data confirms the spike in the Maoist-linked incidents in the State in 2016, with 129 Maoist-linked incidents recorded in 2016, as against 110 such incidents in 2015. A total of 163 such incidents were recorded in 2014. Similarly, there was a marginal spike in Maoists involved in attacking economic targets in 2016, with 10 such incidents, as compared to nine such attacks in 2015. A total of 31 such attacks were registered in 2014.

Disturbingly, out of the 38 Districts of the State, 22 Districts- Arwal, Aurangabad, Banka, Begusarai, Bhojpur, East Champaran, Gaya, Jamui, Jehanabad, Kaimur, Khagaria, Lakhisarai, Munger, Muzaffarpur, Nalanda, Nawada, Patna, Rohtas, Sitamarhi, Sheohar, Vaishali and West Champaran –are among the 35 worst LWE- affected Districts identified by the UMHA across the country. According to SATP, Maoist activities were recorded in at least 17 Districts in 2016 as against 22 in 2015.

On March 14, 2017, Kundan Krishnan, Inspector General (IG, Operations), Bihar Police, admitted that there were challenges in carrying out operations in some part of Munger, Lakhisarai and Chakarbandha in Gaya; south GT road in Aurangabad and Gaya Districts, besides Charkapathar and Narganjo in Jamui, owing to the difficult terrain in these areas. He added, “Maoist violence has certainly shown a declining trend in the State. But four Bihar districts along the Jharkhand border, known for their difficult topography, namely, Aurangabad, Gaya, Lakhisarai and Jamui-still have pockets of left-wing extremist (LWE) activity.”

Apart from CPI-Maoist, the TPC, also made its presence felt in the State. On January 3, 2016, TPC cadres assaulted two persons, identified as Ramvilas Ram and Ramdeep Ram in Aurangabad District. The fear of a TPC backlash is such that it forced the mukhiya (village head) Ramji Ram not to lodge a Police complaint even though the victims belonged to his family-70-year-old Ramvilas Ram (father) and Ramdeep Ram (brother). TPC cadres had demanded 20 per cent of the grant sanctioned by the Government for welfare schemes in Ramji’s panchayat (village level local self government institution). The March 1, 2017, killing (mentioned above) of a civilian in Rohtas District was the latest TPC-related incident.

Another, Maoist splinter, People’s Liberation Front of India (PLFI), which also operates out of Jharkhand, has been active in Bihar. Additional Director General of Police (ADG, Headquarters), Sunil Kumar, noted, on March 9, 2016, “Looking at the increasing activities of the PLFI, the officials of both the States [Bihar and Jharkhand] have decided to share information. Earlier, PLFI was more active in Jharkhand. So, their input will be valuable for us.”

Meanwhile, SFs arrested at least 104 LWEs in the State, including two ‘area commanders,’ two ‘zonal commanders’ and a ‘supreme commander’ of the Revolutionary Communist Centre (RCC), in addition to 153 arrests in 2015. Till March 19, 2017, another 11 LWEs had already been arrested in the current year.

SF personnel also recovered a huge amount of arms, ammunition and explosives in Bihar. On September 8, 2016, Police seized a huge consignment of explosives being smuggled from Jharkhand, in the Barachatti Police Station area in Gaya District. The recoveries included 10,350 detonators and 6,500 gelatin sticks. Further, on November 10, 2016, Police uncovered two mini gun factories and recovered a country-made revolver and a large number of arms-making hand-driven machines and barrels at Gorho village under Asarganj Police Station in Munger District.

Under the State’s new surrender policy of 2013, in which the Bihar Government provides financial assistance, including up to INR 250,000 to top leaders who surrender; INR 10,000 as immediate assistance and INR 3,000 per month for rehabilitation, as well as rewards for each weapon surrendered, the State recorded the surrender of 24 LWEs in 2016, in addition to seven surrenders in 2015.

Unfortunately, Bihar Police continues to lag in terms of capacities to deal with the evolving challenges created by the Maoists. According to the latest Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D) data, Bihar has 90.68 Police personnel per 100,000 populations, as against a sanction of 119.17, as on January 1, 2016, the worst ratio in the country, and far below the national average of 137.11. The Police/Area Ratio (number of policemen per 100 square kilometers) is 99.61, as against the sanctioned strength of 130.92. The State was found to be lagging in construction of fortified Police Stations, with 40 out of the sanctioned 45 yet to be constructed. By comparison, in neighbouring Jharkhand, out of 73 sanctioned fortified Police Stations, only two were yet to be completed; in Odisha, out of 52 sanctioned fortified Police Stations, 18 remained to be constructed; and in West Bengal, out of 17 fortified Police Stations, just one was yet to be completed. Moreover, 36 of 1,064 Police Stations are without any wireless sets. These are only a sampling of the enveloping deficits that afflict Police capacities in the State.

Significantly, on January 31, 2017, A.R.K. Kini, the Union Secretary (Security) in the Cabinet Secretariat, expressed concern over Bihar Police’s failure to implement the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and System (CCTNS) project, despite the Centre bearing the entire cost of the project. The Centre has already provided INR 250 million out of the total INR 680 million earmarked to the State for this project.

The persistent lack of political sagacity across successive regimes in addressing these issues and deficits has bolstered the Maoists in the State at a time when they are suffering major reverses across most other theatres in the country. The Maoists have demonstrated tremendous resilience in very trying circumstances in the past, and the failure to deal consistently and effectively with them will create opportunities for their consolidation once again, giving them a base in Bihar to engineer a recovery in other parts of the country as well. There is, quite simply, no room for a divergent State approach on this issue, at a time when a nationally coordinated strategy appears to be making significant gains.

* Deepak Kumar Nayak
Research Assistant, Institute for Conflict Management

Why despite the pain in the South of the Eurozone and the anger in the North do the majority of the people still support the euro?

By Miguel Otero-Iglesias*

Most analysts believe the Europeans support the single currency because they are scared of the potential consequences of its break-up. As Barry Eichengreen has put it, a unilateral exit of any of the member states of the eurozone would trigger the mother of all financial crises. No wonder nobody dares to leave. However, this interpretation is overly pessimistic. It fuels the view that the eurozone is an inhospitable island from which it is impossible to escape. This is misleading. The euro is popular due to positive factors: because it facilitates economic exchanges and because it is one of the most potent symbols of European integration. The social literature on money argues that currencies are like languages. They help create a sense of community. This paper aims to show that despite (or because of) the recent crisis, the euro might have started this very same process among eurozone citizens.

Analysis

The euro, the common European currency that arrived on the streets of Berlin, Paris, Rome and Madrid, among other European capitals, on 1 January 2002, has just celebrated its 15th anniversary. This is surprising for some. Since its inception many have predicted its demise. However, there is a cognitive gap between how people see the euro from outside and from within the eurozone. Outside, the feeling is that the single currency was a big mistake, is not working and is doomed. Yet, inside, a large majority of citizens, both in the creditor countries to the north and the more indebted countries to the south, are in favour of the euro. What explains this? The usual answer is that people do not want to leave the single currency because of the redenomination costs and a fear of the unknown. Leaving the euro is like jumping into the abyss. Who wants to do that? The perception might be overly pessimistic, though. The euro brings a number of material benefits that are generally overlooked. Furthermore, in its short history it appears that the common currency has generated social bonds and a common identity, underappreciated outside the eurozone.

Indeed, outsiders have an extremely negative view of the single European currency. The list of prominent scholars, especially from the Anglo-American world, who have predicted, or suggested, the break-up of the euro is long, and growing longer by the year. Five years ago, Martin Feldstein –who had already predicted in 1997 that the euro would lead to conflict in the Old Continent– sentenced that ‘the euro should now be recognized as an experiment that failed’.¹ Some months later in 2012, when the first Grexit scenario was imminent (there was a second one in 2015), Paul Krugman wrote: ‘Suddenly, it has become easy to see how the euro –that grand, flawed experiment in monetary union without political union– could come apart at the seams. We’re not talking about a distant prospect, either. Things could fall apart with stunning speed, in a matter of months, not years’.²

Last year Mervyn King, the former Governor of the Bank of England, added his voice to the chorus by warning that ‘if the alternative is crushing austerity, continuing mass unemployment, and no end in sight to the burden of debt, then leaving the euro area may be the only way to plot a route back to economic growth and full employment’.³ For the same reasons Joseph Stiglitz believes that ‘it is important that there can be a smooth transition out of the euro, with an amicable divorce… Europe may have to abandon the euro to save Europe and the European project’.⁴

This negative view of the euro is not only dominant among economists. The political scientist Andrew Moravcsik, one of the world’s leading experts in European Studies, has recently written that ‘fifteen years ago, when the EU established its single currency, European leaders promised higher growth due to greater efficiency and sounder macroeconomic policies, greater equality between rich and poor countries within a freer capital market, enhanced domestic political legitimacy due to better policies, and a triumphant capstone for EU federalism. Yet, for nearly a decade, Europe has experienced just the opposite’.⁵

Reading these analyses, and observing the rise of Euroscepticism across the Old Continent, one might be led to believe that the majority of the citizens of the eurozone want to go back to their national currencies. However, the Eurobarometer surveys –the most comprehensive measurement of public opinion in the EU– present a different picture. Support for the single currency among eurozone citizens has been constant over the past 10 years, despite the deep recession (see Figures 1 and 2). It stood at 70% in 2007 before the crisis, it reached a bottom of 62% in 2013 just after the first Grexit scenario, and it has climbed up again to its historic peak of 70% at the end of 2016, the last measurement.⁶

Thus, more than two thirds of eurozoners support the single currency and this figure has not changed much over the years. To the contrary, in Greece, the country most affected by the crisis, euro support stood at only 47% in 2005, while 10 years later, in 2015, following the second near-Grexit event, it reached 70%. It seems that the closer the Greeks were to the abyss the more they wanted to avoid it. This stands in clear contrast with the evolution of euro support outside the Eurozone, which in the same timespan fell almost 20 points from 56% to 37%, with massive drops in the Czech Republic (-39 points), Denmark (-25) and Bulgaria (-22). Incidentally, the UK has always been the least supportive country of the euro, at 29% in 2007 and 17% in 2016, the year of the Brexit vote.

These figures confirm the general trend. Outsiders are convinced the euro is a bad idea, while insiders have a more positive view. The disparity leads to the following questions: what explains the euro’s social resilience? What makes people cling to the single currency? Or, looked at from the angle that is usually adopted, why is the euro’s break-up so difficult?

The fear of exiting

The first to have delved into this question was Barry Eichengreen.⁷ In his much-cited 2007 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper he lists the economic, political, technical and legal barriers that any country would have to overcome in order to exit the euro. Starting with the economic ones, Eichengreen explains that a country like Italy –which has accumulated a public debt of 130% of GDP, the world’s third largest in volume terms after the US and Japan– would immediately get credit downgrades and the interest it would have to pay for the next issuance of debt would be prohibitive. Default would be almost impossible to avoid.

Krugman, Stiglitz and others, taking Argentina as an example, believe that a return to national currencies and the consequent devaluations would help the Southern countries of the euro to stimulate internal demand, export more and then quickly regain market access. But Eichengreen is sceptical. As he puts it: ‘would reintroducing the national currency and following with a sharp depreciation against the euro in fact help solve these countries’ competitiveness and debt problems? The presumption in much of the literature is negative’. The competitiveness gains generated by a devaluation of around 25% of the new Portuguese escudo or the Spanish peseta would immediately be offset by creeping inflation, especially if the price of petrol were to rise again above US$100. In order to avoid this, the Government would have to either convince foreign creditors that it is serious about fiscal rectitude (so as to eliminate the spectre of further devaluations) or build an institutional framework that would foster sufficient dialogue between employers and workers to avoid wage increases. A herculean task in these countries.

On top of the economic difficulties, a country leaving the euro would also face negative political consequences. Unless the exit is negotiated in good terms with the rest of the euro partners, the diplomatic backlash would be damaging. The exiting country would be portrayed as a traitor to the European integration project and treated as a pariah, with expulsion from the EU as a real possibility. In fact, legally the only way to exit the euro is by leaving the EU since in the treaties there is no provision to that effect. Other legal obstacles would be to redenominate all the domestic contracts in the new currency and pay international contracts and debts and loans signed or issued overseas denominated in euros in a currency that would be much weaker.

Finally, there would also be the technical difficulties of introducing a new currency (a process that can take years) and the prior introduction of capital controls to avoid capital flight and the collapse of the banking system. In the recent euro crisis, capital controls were introduced in Cyprus and Greece in a relatively smooth manner, but this only occurred because the two countries decided to stay in the euro. The current capital controls would create much greater disruption should the exit from the euro be imminent, especially if the decision to exit is not previously backed by a legitimate democratic mandate, either by being part of the electoral programme of the Government or via a binding referendum. As Eichengreen suggests, all these obstacles mean that an exit would trigger the mother of all financial crises. No wonder, therefore, that people in the eurozone do not want to leave the single currency.

The social glue of the euro

Eichengreen’s analysis gives support to those that think that the main reason why the euro membership is still intact is because of fear. The governments and the people are so scared about the possible consequences of breaking up the single currency that they are willing to suffer the euro’s straitjacket. But perhaps this perception is too negative. People might want to stay in the euro because they see positive aspects in it too. Despite the recession, many citizens in the south of the eurozone are convinced that the EU and the euro offer stability. Their discontent with EU institutions has increased in the aftermath of the crisis, but trust in their national institutions is even lower. They find that the problems in their economies are not due to the euro, but rather of a domestic nature. One should not forget that countries like Portugal, Spain and Greece are relatively new democracies (they were dictatorship until the 1970s) with an institutional framework less robust than that of the eurozone’s core countries.

For many citizens of the south, membership in the rich club of the eurozone secures high living standards and democratic rule. On the other hand, higher levels of inequality and corruption and an underdeveloped civil society make many of them believe that if they were to abandon the euro, and possibly the EU, the extractive elites of their countries would have even more unfettered power. In this regard, the euro functions as a straightjacket for society as a whole, crucially also for the elites who are now constantly monitored by Brussels. As the Spanish sociologist Pérez-Díaz has pointed out, with the euro, Spain has imitated Ulysses’ strategy of tying himself to the mast. He also makes another important point. The weaker a country becomes in the international arena, the more it clings to the euro.⁸ This happened to Greece and Spain, and it is likely to occur to Italy and France. As the old saying goes: the euro was created for two types of countries: those that are small and those that do not yet know that they are small.

The stability of the euro is a feature that cannot be emphasised enough. Before the single currency, most people with a certain amount of wealth in the southern countries of the Eurozone would stash away around 30% of their money in a hard currency (dollars or Deutsche Marks, for example), if possible overseas. The same trend returned in 2011 and 2012 at the peak of the euro crisis when redenomination risks were high, and it receded after July 2012 once Mario Draghi, backed by Angela Merkel, said that the ECB would do ‘whatever it takes’ to support the single currency. The euro’s value has remained relatively stable despite undergoing an existential crisis. Spanish and Portuguese pensioners know how to value that, and the same goes for businessmen and women who do not need to fear devaluations, and the middle class tourists of these countries who have now a hard currency that they can use all over the world like their German and French peers.

The price stability that the euro offers is obviously also valued in the north of the Eurozone. There the euro might not be seen as an anchor of democracy as in the south, but the elimination of exchange-rate risks and transaction costs are on their own a great advantage. Before the single currency, German and Dutch exporters would always fear that the forthcoming devaluation of the lira or the franc could ‘unfairly’ help their Italian or French competitors. Equally, if they travelled south as tourists they would always be afraid of overpaying given that they had to pay, and mentally count, in another currency. These concerns are now eliminated. The euro just makes life simpler. Furthermore, apart from these transactional and functional advantages, many in the North, and the South, are proud to use a common currency. Consciously or subconsciously they know that it represents the coming together of different countries with different languages and cultures, and with a bloody past that should not be repeated.

In this regard, it is important to analyse money not just as an economic phenomenon but also as a cultural and sociological one. As Eric Helleiner has pointed out, currencies can foster a common identity in many different ways, even if they are not loved.⁹ Thus far, research on the social and identity impact of the euro is underdeveloped, but those that have investigated the phenomenon, such as Giovanni Moro and his co-authors in the ‘The Other Side of (the Euro) Coin’ project, have no doubts that ‘people living in the Eurozone (whether it be a lucky or unlucky condition) are citizens of the EU in a way that is different from that of their fellow citizens of non euro EU countries’.¹⁰ This is one of the reasons why outsiders have such difficulty in understanding the insiders. The daily use of euro notes, for instance, is transformed in a repeated and standardised pattern that is common to all eurozone inhabitants. The euro has created a common code. By being the unit of measurement for a number of social facts and relations it has become ‘a medium of meaning’. As Moro points out, ‘in a Union characterized by the “poligamy of languages”, the euro is the only existent common language’.

This common language and symbolism not only operates internally but also externally. It is interesting to see, as Kathleen McNamara highlights, that ‘the € symbol has come to signal the EU’s de facto logo, recognizable from afar and universally readable in any language. Note that very few currencies have their own widely recognized graphic symbol or currency sign: The British pound (£), Japanese yen (¥), and US dollar ($), and now the euro (€)’. Thus, ‘the value of the euro against other currencies has become another standardized, numerical focal point representing Europe, offering an external face of a consolidated Europe to the world’.¹¹ Many Eurozone citizens might feel some pride in this.

Thus, from a social point of view, money functions like a language. It brings people closer and creates a sense of community because the citizens that share a common currency experience monetary phenomena such as interest rates, depreciation and appreciations together. Over time, this creates a bond. The work of Helleiner is relevant again here. In his view, the feeling of being in the same boat ‘appears to be particularly noticeable in situations in which the collective monetary experiences are of a quite dramatic nature’. In some of these cases, the ‘speculative attacks on the national currency are often portrayed in militaristic terms as an attack on the national community as a whole’. The debt crisis in the eurozone was certainly such a dramatic, even existential moment, which affected everyone within it. Throughout the crisis many eurozoners, leaders and citizens alike, felt they were under fire from financial market speculators based in London and New York. Coincidentally in 2010, when the Greek crisis broke out, the late Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa summarised the general feeling by using the military metaphors suggested:

‘A mighty army has advanced on the citadel of the European currency with the cry: “It will never work!”… The besiegers were thousands… Their reasoning was as follows: the euro area is not a political union and can never become one… The citadel, therefore, is doomed to capitulate. Equally strong and simple was the credo of the defenders, who countered: “It can work!”.’¹²

Helleiner also highlights that although certain people might strongly disagree about how a particular currency is managed and therefore for them the collective monetary experience of the eurozone crisis might not foster a sense of positive allegiance, these same people would nonetheless have to recognise that the value of their currency is dependent on the trustworthiness of the authority issuing it and on the fellow citizens using it. ‘This dependence, in turn, may have helped to contribute to a greater sense of belonging to, as well as to greater faith in’ the Eurozone community, for instance. This would particularly be the case when the currency in question remains ‘reliable as a medium of exchange and stable in value over time’, as has been the case with the euro. As mentioned above, the social effect of the relative stability in the euro’s value throughout the crisis is a very important aspect. As Helleiner reminds us, ‘Simmel, for example, suggested that stable money can become a powerful symbol of trust and social stability because of its certainty as a measure of value. In a chaotic and changing world, it can seem a constant and stable reference point over time’.¹³ Arguably, the euro has performed this anchor role throughout the crisis.

Hence, if one takes the social literature on money, it becomes clear that over the past years the euro might have helped develop a sense of community in the eurozone. Not only because people share a common language when they calculate value, but also because they have experienced a number of (in some cases traumatic) phenomena together. Incidentally, a comparative study by Thomas Risse and his collaborators of parliamentary discourses and media coverage in the different eurozone countries shows that the public opinion agendas at specific moments of the euro crisis were very similar. This creates bonds, even if there are disagreements. From this point of view, ‘Controversies about European policies and the subsequent politicisation of the EU are good, not bad for the sense of community and for construction of a European polity’.¹⁴ Furthermore, the resilience of the euro’s value in the midst of an existential crisis such as that undergone in the eurozone between 2010 and 2012 might have strengthened the trust in the common currency, not only in the South, used to weaker and more unstable currencies, but also in the North, where people have always feared that the euro would become a weak currency. Eurobarometer data show eurozoners have a stronger European identity than those outside. The euro might not be the only reason, of course. But it is true that those that favour the euro also tend to feel more European.

Conclusion

The economic, political, technical and legal constraints identified by Eichengreen and others might partly explain why a majority of eurozoners want to keep the single currency. But they imply that they do so because the costs of leaving are too high. This is a negative, constraining, approach. By focusing more on the social aspects, in particular how the euro functions as a common language, observers both outside and inside the monetary union might find more positive elements that explain why people might actively want to continue using the single currency despite the pain in the South and the anger in the North. Citizens in the eurozone are certainly not in love with the euro, but they find it so convenient and a fact of life, especially the younger generations, that they do not want to go back to the old national currencies.

About the author:
*Miguel Otero-Iglesias, Senior Analyst, Elcano Royal Institute | @miotei

Source:
This article was published by Elcano Royal Institute.

Notes:
¹ M. Feldstein (2012), ‘The failure of the euro’, Foreign Affairs, January/February.

A church-based election watchdog has criticized the Philippine government’s plan to indefinitely postpone village polls that were originally scheduled for October last year.

The election of the country’s village leaders was originally slated for on Oct. 31, 2016, but President Rodrigo Duterte put them off to October this year. Now Duterte says he wanted polls postponed indefinitely and leaders appointed due to alleged influence of drug money in local politics.

The move has outraged election watchdogs.

“There is no substitute to periodic elections in a democracy to check the accountability of elected officials [and] to get a fresh mandate,” said Rene Sarmiento, chairman of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting.

The National Movement for Free Elections also expressed concern.

“Postponing elections undermine a democratic process instituted to ensure every individual citizen’s right to choose their leaders and make them accountable,” said Eric Alvia, secretary-general of the movement.

Sarmiento said village polls could only be postponed “for legitimate reasons.”