The world is now aware of the victory of incumbent Rouhani over the challenger Raisi in Iran’s recent Presidential elections. However, it must be brought to notice that irrespective of the identity of the victor, whether it be Rouhani or Raisi, India will have to seek the same path for its Iran strategy – the need to act fast and selfishly. India had struck a deal with Iran and Afghanistan a year ago, concerning the Chabahar project and the trade corridor to Afghanistan. This deal ensured that India gains strategic connectivity up to Central Asia bypassing Pakistan while deepening the country’s ties with Pakistan’s western neighbours. However, subsequent tensions between Iran and the US led to a cautious stance on India’s part, where the government asked its firms to go slow on Iran projects. While the objective may have been to assess the impact of possible sanctions on Iran, the widespread belief was that India did not want to upset its new friend, the US, by maintaining friendly relations with Iran.

Change: The only constant in foreign policy

Policy decisions of a country often operate in contrasting ways to maintain a nation’s varying interests. India’s new friend, the US, supported Pakistan militarily during the decades of the Cold War. In the 1971 Indo-Pak war, it deployed an aircraft carrier of its famed Seventh Fleet in the Bay of Bengal as a show-of-force against India. Even now, the US has been known to sign cheques to Pakistan for the war on terror, despite allegations that Pakistan has failed to act decisively on Hafiz Saeed, Syed Salahuddin or Masood Azhar. India’s closest friend for decades, Russia, is selling arms to Pakistan today, including combat air crafts and attack helicopters. These defence sales indicate a shift in Russian foreign policy towards Pakistan, despite it losing thousands of soldiers to alleged Pakistan-backed Mujahedeen elements during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

India’s relations with the US were recently rocked by the contentious H1B visa issue in its technology sector, a $160 billion sector, contributing over 10% to India’s GDP. India chose not to participate in the recent Belt and Road Forum held in China on the grounds that the CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor) project runs through part of Kashmir, hence violating India’s sovereignty. However, India’s allies, the US and Russia, participated in the event by sending their delegations. Given that none of these actions undermined India’s ties with the US or Russia, perhaps it is time that India acts selfishly, focusing primarily on its interests to ensure co-operation with Iran.

India must be a master of its own policy

Irrespective of the disapproval of its powerful allies, India must resume its original Iran strategy. This is the opportune moment for India to dig deeper ground with Pakistan’s western neighbours. Intelligence sharing in the neighbourhood is a key need, even for economic co-operation projects. India’s argument regarding the Jadhav case, the allegation that he was abducted by Pakistani intelligence in the border areas, only highlights the need for more rapport with Iran. India needs to build connectivity with Afghanistan and Central Asia, be it for energy or trade, and its infrastructure projects in Iran are crucial in securing these relations.

If India’s allies raise concerns regarding Indo-Iran relations, it is only fair that India adopts a strong stance, asking the US and Russia to take on a severe stand against Pakistan until the US demands on terror groups have been met. India will benefit from being selfish in this case, or the nation will definitely become a victim of the varying policy agendas of her allies and global powers, the US and Russia.

India can be the friend Iran needs

During the election campaign, the hardliners in Iran were loud about Rouhani’s inability to raise the promised investments and jobs. Public spending on projects is expected to be in focus, as job creation is a socio-economic concern. Another issue that arises is that possible sanctions may hold back investments from private companies and restrict foreign funding. Indian firms have an opportunity to partner on public tenders in Iran. Iran needs a reliable partner for its economic development agenda now more than ever especially if Rouhani has to prove his naysayers wrong after resuming office. Last year, India made the first move with the Chabahar project deal. But, if India continues to dither on its Iran-strategy on the pretext of not upsetting the US, Iran will cease to view India as a reliable partner.

India, Iran and lost opportunities

India needs to act fast. India’s laxity may lead to these projects eventually going to the very powers that opposed the Rouhani regime in the first place – Myanmar being a prime example. Even China has made serious inroads into Iran for trade deals and its OBOR (One Belt, One Road) project. Neither countries have been known to slow their pace in order to appease their allies. By doing exactly that, India is only losing its opportunity. Till the US sanctions remain, foreign funding from the West remains restricted. Once the sanctions are negotiated, they will make a bee-line to the world’s newly opened market. Iran is an open terrain for China, given its deep funding pockets through its banks and funds. If India can structure its funding solution, it still has a fair chance of competing in Iran’s projects, unlike most markets that recently opened up to global investments. Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, also stressed the need for removal of obstacles for banking co-operation with India during the recent foreign secretary meeting.

If India wants to be Iran’s long-term ally, while addressing geostrategic interests, it needs to act fast and selfishly. If India fails to do so, this will be a golden opportunity lost.

*Sourajit Aiyer is the author of 2 books in UK and Germany and has written for 38 publications of 13 countries. He has worked with leading financial companies in Mumbai, London, Delhi & Dhaka, and has been invited to speak at conferences in India and abroad.

Originally published in Indian Economist and republished with permission

By R. Eric Petersen*

The US Congress enacted the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (JFK Records Act), as amended, to bring together all materials related to the November 22, 1963, assassination of the 35th President that were created or held by a government office, and to house those records in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

NARA reports that there are 268,116 records comprising more than five million pages of paper documents in the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection. Of those, NARA states that “approximately 88% of the records … are open in full.” Another 11% are available in part with sensitive portions removed. Approximately 1% of documents identified as assassination-related, numbering between 3,000 and 3,600 records according to some media reports, remains withheld in full.

The JFK Records Act, 44 U.S.C. 2107 Note, set a deadline of 25 years from its enactment for each assassination record to be publicly disclosed, subject to some limitations. The deadline falls on October 26, 2017, and has raised some interest about the potential extent of disclosure of redacted portions of records that are partially available, and those that are withheld in full. No legislation related to the JFK Records Act has been introduced in the 115th Congress.

The October 26 deadline marks the end of the final, statutorily mandated assessment of assassination records, and might mark the conclusion of a long process of records preservation and assessment for the suitability of their release that began in the days and weeks following President Kennedy’s death.

The JFK Records Act prohibited the destruction or alteration of assassination records, and required each government office, including Congress, various investigatory commissions and panels, executive branch entities, independent agencies, courts, and involved state or local law enforcement agencies, to identify and organize its assassination records, determine which were officially disclosed or publicly available in a complete, unredacted form, and which were covered by the Act’s standards for postponement of public disclosure. Officially disclosed records were to be made available immediately in 1992, following enactment of the JFK Records Act.

Postponed records were to be submitted to the Assassinations Records Review Board, an independent agency established by the JFK Records Act. The Review Board was to be composed of impartial private citizens with national professional reputations in their fields appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. The Review Board’s responsibilities were to determine whether a record constituted an assassination record and whether an assassination record or particular information in a record qualified for postponement of disclosure.

Grounds for postponement include:

• Threats to military or intelligence operations or the foreign relations of the United States.
• Undisclosed intelligence sources or methods.
• Potential identification of intelligence agents whose identities require protection.
• Identification of a living person who provided confidential information who would be at risk of harm. Unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.
• Compromising confidentiality requiring protection between a government agent and a cooperating individual or a foreign government.
• Public disclosure of a security or protective procedure currently utilized by the Secret Service or other government agency responsible for protecting government officials.

The Review Board concluded its duties on September 30, 1998, and transferred its records to NARA. In its final report, the Review Board stated that it had reviewed and voted to release more than 27,000 previously redacted assassination records, and worked with various agencies to publicly release more than 33,000 of their previously restricted assassination records. All remaining postponed records have been subject to periodic review by the agency originating a postponed record and NARA. When a record is determined to qualify for continued postponement, an unclassified written description of the reason must be provided and published in the Federal Register.

In anticipation of the October 26, 2017, deadline, NARA in 2014 established a team of archivists and technicians to evaluate materials subject to postponed disclosure and to process those materials for public release, along with an explanation of their activities. NARA reports that it has “identified a small number of records, or portions of records” related to grand jury or personal tax return information, and some records subject to a deed of gift that restricts their disclosure, that will not be released in October. As of March 2017, NARA states that it has not been informed of any agency appealing the planned release of its documents, but their understanding is “that agencies are still reviewing the documents subject to release.”

Under the JFK Records Act, postponed agency assassination records are scheduled to be released on October 26, 2017, unless the President certifies before then that continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations, and that the harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure. There is no publicly available, authoritative source describing the contents of redacted and withheld records, but NARA states their assumption “that much of what will be released will be tangential to the assassination events.”

About the author:
*R. Eric Petersen, Specialist in American National Government for CRS

Source:
This article was published by CRS as CRS INSIGHT IN10709 (PDF)

Authorities in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region are confiscating all Qurans published more than five years ago due to “extremist content,” according to local officials,.

The move is part of an ongoing campaign against “illegal” religious items owned by mostly Muslim ethnic Uyghur residents.

Village chiefs from Barin township, in Kashgar (in Chinese, Kashi) prefecture’s Peyziwat (Jiashi) county, recently told Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service that hundreds of the Islamic holy books printed before 2012 had been seized since authorities issued an order recalling them on Jan. 15.

The Qurans were appropriated as part of the “Three Illegals and One Item” campaign underway in Xinjiang that bans “illegal” publicity materials, religious activities, and religious teaching, as well as items deemed by authorities to be tools of terrorism, they said.

Emet Imin, the party secretary of Barin’s No. 1 village, told RFA that authorities had confiscated 500 books in the recent campaign sweep of households beginning in January

“They can keep Qurans that were published after August 2012, according to an order from the top, but they are not allowed to keep any other versions,” Imin said.

Imin said that according to the order he received from his superiors, there were “problems” in the earlier version of the Quran related to “some signs of extremism.”

“Therefore, we issued a notice on Jan. 15 urging residents to hand over older Qurans and warning them they would bear the consequences if banned versions were found in their homes,” he said.

I will prefer to say at the outset that Saudi Arabia has become subservient to the US administration and the notion that ‘Iran is a bigger threat.’ This has helped the US in soliciting arms orders worth US$350 billion.

Now, OPEC-led by Saudi Arabia, is being convinced to allow US Shale oil producers to increase their output under ‘mutual coexistence’. Both the Saudi decisions indicate that its foreign and economic policies have become subservient to the US.

The history of the relationship between OPEC and the US shale oil industry has evolved a great deal since the cartel discovered it (OPEC) has a monstrous rival eating up its market.

To convince Saudi Arabia to give more space, US bankers providing funds to Shale oil producers came to Vienna and key OPEC members are getting ready to visit Texas in a bid to understand whether the two industries can coexist or are poised to embark on another major fight in the near future.

The complete surrender by Saudi Arabia is evident from the statement of Khalid al-Falih, its Oil Minister, who said, “We have to coexist.”

One can recall that he pushed through OPEC production cuts in December, reversing Riyadh’s previous strategy of pumping as much oil as possible and try to push US Shale oil producers out of business, by keeping oil prices low.

OPEC has already decided to extend a helping hand to US Shale producers, but keeps seeking supplies at a level to hold prices below $60 per barrel.

Some analysts believe that now OPEC realizes supply cuts and higher prices only make it easier for the shale industry to earn a higher profit after it found ways of slashing costs.

Iran has already consented to support Saudi Arabia justifies its decision. “For all OPEC members $55 (per barrel) and a maximum of $60 is the goal at this stage,” said Bijan Zanganeh, Iran’s oil minister. “This price level is not high enough to encourage too much shale? It seems it is good for both.”

Some OPEC members seem keen to show they have shed any prior naivete about shale, making it a key topic during Thursday’s meeting after barely mentioning it before. Shale’s limitations, including rising service costs, also were discussed.

“We had a discussion on (shale) and how much that has an impact,” said Ecuador Oil Minister Carlos Pérez. He expressed helplessness, “But we have no control over what the US does and it’s up to them to decide to continue or not?”

“In terms of the threat, we still don’t know how much (U.S. shale) will be producing in the near future,” Nelson Martinez, Venezuela’s oil minister said after the talk.

OPEC meets again in November to reconsider output policy. While most in the group now appear to believe that shale has to be accommodated, there are still those in OPEC who think another fight is around the corner.

“If we get to a point where we feel frustrated by a deliberate action of shale producers to just sabotage the market, OPEC will sit down again and look at what process it is we need to do,” said Nigerian Oil Minister Emmanuel Kachikwu.

By Giancarlo Elia Valori*

The attack perpetrated in Manchester on May 23 last is a turning point for the Daesh-Isis war in Europe and, in the future, in the rest of the Mediterranean. We must focus our attention on two factors, in particular: firstly, the attack on the Manchester Arena is the first terrorist attack in Europe perpetrated by a Libyan jihadist, although born in Great Britain in 1994 from parents opposed to Gaddafi’s regime.

The generation of millennials, to which the Manchester terrorist partially belongs, is the generation in which so far the largest number of boys (and girls) ready for the “martyrdom” fi sabil Allah (on the way to Allah) have been found.

If you think about it, this is obvious.

The young people born after the end of the Cold War are tabulae rasae; they have been raised up in schools, in families, and especially on the media – and so much so on the web – to be manipulated as quickly as the way in which styles, trends, symbols and jobs change.

They have no identity so as to adhere to the gig economy, the “gigonomics” or “micro-job economy” theorized by many American and European gurus and so-called economists. They have no memory so as to be adaptable to new consumption styles and trends, without too much advertising effort. They have no history so as to be transferable and interchangeable, in the future, in the new large spaces of the geoeconomics that will be created by mass poverty.

The first clue to study is the following: the Daesh-Isis jihadist myth is both the substitute and the opposite of this postmodern passive revolution – in Gramsci’s sense of the term – with which the global ruling classes in the West accept and even stimulate the worst behaviours of masses so as to later use them in their favour.

While some years ago the “two-thirds” society was theorized, in which the “affluent” two thirds abandoned the poor third to its destiny, today we have the “three thirds” society: a very small walk of society getting increasingly rich; a third of middle class divided between new poor and members of the establishment; a huge mass of old and new poor abandoned to their destiny.

Currently politicians protect the rich and gives them the spoils of the middle class that is close to its end. They tell the poor to go to hell by creating for them a mythical and media-like Disneyland distracting them from their condition and destiny.

Hence the Caliphate myth against Western uprootedness; the obsession of a faked identity against the destruction of identity; the mnemonic and silly – but far too strong – jihad doctrinarism against the Western “weak thinking”.

Finally, against the infinite present of Euro-American consumption, the jihadist myth of the “near-end times” of the Sunni Mahdism which, by no mere coincidence, was the first political and military goal to be destroyed by the Ottomans’ Caliphate, namely the true one.

Therefore, while there is persistent economic crisis in our “extreme West”, savings are made on processes and products and hence the labour costs and the number of workers are reduced. Workers are scarcely paid, they are delocalized and hence a great amusement park is built for them until old age.

Resuming a Marxist analysis model, which is often not useless, the myth of the Syrian-Iraqi Caliphate is also the great identitarian and even professional myth of many uprooted and marginalized young people in the outskirts of our cities.

As proletarians and bad guys went to Fiume as volunteers with Commander D’Annunzio, proletarians and petty criminals consider themselves blameless and recreate a mythical, warlike, ennobling and inspiring identity – and with a salary.

A Western amusement park for the poor in which you survive only if you accept to remain poor and devoid of identity, at the same time – the identity which is provided, as a substitute, exactly by the jihad of the new Syrian-Iraqi Caliphate.

This reminds us of the terrible and enlightened Nietzsche of the Posthumous Fragments, when he imagined our times as an immense mass of “Chinese” on which the “soothing oil” is poured, thus making them go on – like “soma”, the acceptable hallucinogenic drug of Orwell’s 1984.

No longer religion as the “opium of the people”, but the myth of desiring desire, of the instinctive matter, of the immediate and irrational fulfilment and satisfaction.

It is no coincidence that in all the propaganda dedicated to Daesh and Al Qaeda’s youth, as well as in magazines and online material, the focal point is the end times and the urgency of conversion to Islam, before it is too late – a conversion to be carried out also and above all with the sword jihad.

The second more strategic factor to be studied is that – given the scarce presence of the Caliphate’s jihadists in Raqqa and Mosul during and after the evacuation following the victory of the Syrian forces of Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies – we can only infer that many Daesh militants fled before the Caliphate’s fall into those regions and retreated behind the lines so as to quickly spread to Europe and other areas of our “extreme West”, probably protected by tribes such as Zu-bi and al-Masalmeh that participated in the initial uprisings against Bashar el Assad.

What we generally call “terrorism” is primarily an instrument of psychological war, considering that it is terror – and the most brutal one, in particular – to indefinitely block the enemy’s reactions, our reactions.

It was Genghis Khan’s tactic and now it is the primary instrument of the jihad presence in the “enemy” territory, in our territory.

After terror, there comes the sequence of other war actions, all linked to the primacy of a well-known Islamic psywar technique: the systematic deception of the enemy, namely us.

Taqyya – namely the lawful deception, a sort of “honest dissimulation”, just to use the title of Torquato Accetto’ book of 1641, which Croce brought back to fame – has sound Qur’anic foundations.

The basic criterion for understanding the issue is the one found in Al Tabari’s commentary of Qur’an verse 3:28, which reads as follows: “Let not the believers take the disbelievers as Auliya (friends, supporters) instead of the believers, and whoever does that will never be helped by Allah in any way, except if you indeed fear a danger for them. And Allah warns you against Himself (His Punishment), and to Allah is the final return. ”

Al Tabari’s commentary on this Qur’anic verse is enlightening and vey topical: “Let not believers take disbelievers as friends and allies rather than believers. Whoever does that has nothing to do with Allah, except when taking precaution against them in prudence, obeying them if they are in power but always preserving animosity towards the infidels.”

Hence the theory of deception and later – as first stage of the jihadist clash – the terror which blocks the infidels’ reaction for the desired time – and the more terrifying the better.

Then, in sequence, the other techniques of psychological and material war, which always go hand in hand in the Islamic universe.

Furthermore, the Qur’anic doctrine of war is linked to two psychological and political characteristics: the recognition of the possible “repression” made by infidels against the Islamic community seen as a whole – just as it happened at the beginning of Muhammad’s preaching by the Mecca’s Quraysh enemies – and the absolute right of Islam to its universal expansion – and its being peaceful or not only depends on the “infidels”.

A theory of war which is both victimist and arrogant at the same time .

In fact, in recent years, the Muslim Brotherhood has always repeated that “Europe will be conquered peacefully” and hence the sword jihad is not needed.

Is it Taqyya? Certainly so, but rather Western stupidity and myth of the so-called “multiculturalism”.

It is worth recalling that there are as many as 40 major Islamic texts on war and its techniques, written in the period between the 8th and the 15th century AD.

Without a philosophy of war you cannot understand Islam, not even the so-called “moderate” Islam.

The jihad techniques, however, are Qital, “fighting” or even “killing”, witnessed in the Qur’an since its first Mecca’s Surahs; Ghazw, namely the direct fight or raids for expanding the territory subject to Islam; Siriya, namely the fight ordered by the Prophet or by one of his successors, but not directly led by Muhammad or by Islamic people; Baatha, a mission or expedition which can be diplomatic, but does not rule out the armed clash.

Terror, at first, and then the sequence of these techniques – obviously modernized.

Furthermore, in the Qur’anic texts of the Wahhabi tradition, there is a final chapter on jihad – which is not the case in other interpretative traditions.

Moreover, in the Wahhabi world, which is at the origin of contemporary jihad, also the verses prohibiting suicide (195 of Al Baraqah, Al Nisa’29-30) are not considered, besides translating as a vital and generic obligation the fact of “giving” (even life) fi sabil Allah, “on the way to Allah” – a “giving” that was previously referred specifically to the tax to be collected by the “infidels”.

Hence, to recap, now the Caliphate’s network will soon extend to Europe and will start to spread terror, so as to later use normal warfare techniques, but always according to the sequence we have seen above.

We should not forget that the first great battles of Prophet Muhammad were all against Medina’s Jewish tribes – and this is an essential factor.

The final clash will be between Judaism and Islam – the clash for the End Times – and Christianity is “infidel” because it derives from Judaism and accepts Jesus, the Mediator and Risen Christ, not as a Prophet (which would also apply to the Qur’an), but as Filius Dei and Deus.

If there is an Israeli reaction against one single Muslim, as was the case with Osama Bin Laden, it can be inferred – on the basis of the theology that Ibn Taymiya developed against Tartar Islam – that the jihad can be declared.

Also other theologians of the Islamic war infer that the mere existence of the State of Israel can justify the jihad. All the wars between Jews and Palestinians, secular and non-secular Arab countries, jihadist Islam and the Jewish State were exactly a jihad, ending only with the victory of believers and the arrival of “End Times” – another eschatological and military factor at the same time.

Islam clearly perceives that the current West does no longer want and possess eschatòn.

It wants and possesses the recurring cycle of births and deaths, which will continue to recur in a similar form – the Nietzschean Eternal Return or Recurrence.

However relegated to an increasingly reduced consumption cycle.

The carnivalesque, materialistic and satanic vision of the Cycle that Nietzsche had in Sils Maria.

But what is eschatòn? It is the neutral form of the Greek word “end”. End Times.

For us “infidels”, initially the theme is that of the Letter of Saint Paul to the Romans.

Conversely, the katechòn about which Saint Paul speaks is precisely the Antichrist.

It holds the Evil because it is held back by the Saint who is partially present in the world; it prevents it from being seen, it keeps time still. It masks, tames and stabilizes it. And it cannot do evil in all its power.

It is on its relationship with the Evil, in its temporary “holding and standing still” – as Carl Schmitt maintained – that the West bases Politics, with the “social contract” and the previous Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes, whose king becomes the only one who can do evil to defend his subjects’ lives, property and freedom.

It is the beginning of dialectics.

Macbeth, the protagonist of Shakespeare’s tragedy, rose to power and lost it due to the same and only witchcraft of the three witches, who predicted he would lose everything when the “walking forest” came against him – an apparent paradox.

Katèkhon does not lead to eschatòn.

In the first Letter to the Corinthians Saint Paul maintained that, after the end of time, “we will all be changed” (15: 51).

The model is the model of resurrection narrated by Ezekiel, with the dry bones wrapped with muscles and skin coming back to life

In Saint Paul, however, faith in the Kingdom – which is still an acceptable model for an Islamic person, namely a perfect future Caliphate in universal Islam – becomes only faith in the Risen Christ, that even replaces the Kingdom.

And faith in the Risen Christ may even defer His return indefinitely; it can “contain” evil on its own and defeat the katechòn without the Fullness of Time coming.

As we can see, it is in the subtleties of theological, Catholic and Islamic analysis that we can properly read the political-religious dimension of jihad and its possible cultural, strategic, and even military contrast on our part.

Moreover, if the Risen Christ does not want to reappear, instead of building his Kingdom – as the jihadist Islam believes it can do against the “sinners-infidels” (sinners insofar as infidels) – Saint Paul’s eschatòn becomes internal. The return of Christ and the end of time are secondary, because we are all in Christ, who has already resurrected.

It is the notion of pleroma, namely Christ who always fills the world with Him and brings it to Salvation within the Church, but also within mankind.

Thinking of the constant mechanism inimicus-hostis, personal enemy- public enemy, which – as already seen – characterizes the practice and the doctrine of jihad, we cannot fail to note the radical nature of the separation between the West, founded by the Judeo-Christian theology, and Islam.

The Catholic theology is a specific theory of the End Times, but of parusia, namely the Fullness of the Spirit, which has to face the Islamic theology of the End Times, which is a doctrine of the war to which, afterwards, Allah responds by destroying this phase of the visible world.

In this regard it is important to reflect upon the Qur’anic verse stating that “Allah is the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth. If he wishes, he could destroy you and bring about another creation” (Al Fatir, 16).

This means that, without any mediation, our universe will be destroyed and later Allah, if He so wishes, will create another one we cannot even imagine. He will bring us back to life and will separate the souls going to Hell and those going to Paradise.

There is no possibility in Islam to stop the katechòn. Everything happens inside Allah and not even the elimination of all “infidels” is a harbinger of the end of time, but only one of its preconditions.

Hence the nihilism of current jihadists – to use our historical-political notions and definitions: they know they only have to destroy the world of infidels, and later Allah only – without any sign – will recreate a new one.

A kind of nihilism which, apart from its theological foundations, reminds us much of the Russian nihilism of the mid-19th century. However, it also reminds us of the nihilism of the so-called millennials, who put their bodies to test, climb up to the top of skyscrapers, attempt suicide and are violent without a cause.

Certainly this is an action of the Enemy that, in Islamic theology, Allah creates from “smokeless fire” and is expelled from the Grace of God when he refuses to pay tribute to Man, created by Allah with clay and not with fire, without using fire.

The devil will die at the end of time after having deceived mankind – but this is his task.

Nevertheless it is precisely mankind who is the sole enemy of Iblis, the devil; Allah cannot obviously be his enemy.

It has always been above the enemy – and here lies the ambiguity of Islam about Evil, an unresolved theology according to which what is evil for us may appear to Allah in a different way.

These are probably remnants of gnosticism in Islamic theology while, in Catholic theology, Jesus, the Risen Christ, is already the Lord of History and has already defeated the devil.

The devil who is Man’s enemy, but also enemy of God’s designs.

However, it is exactly the ritual of violence that sometimes imitates the Satanist death rituals so widespread among Western youth, which creates the terrorist specific death ritual shaping the deep identity of Islamic jihadists.

For Daesh-Isis militants, participating in the materialization of Evil, which will destroy this unfaithful world, is a gnostic way of “calling God” after the end of this world.

We always revert to the game of the reverse and the opposite about which we have previously spoken.

Polytheistic gnosticism in the West, gnosticism of the One to be called int0 History for the Islamic jihad.

It is also worth noting how the Daesh-Isis use of the web is obviously for propaganda purposes, but it is also identitarian and often overlapping with the advertising or political mechanisms (assuming that there is a difference today) with which the Web is used in the West.

I do not want to reiterate the usual trivial platitude of those who say that Isis videos are “well-done” or that the communication of the two Caliphate’s magazines, namely Dabiq and Rumiyah, seems to be developed by excellent professionals who know the Western media rules.

Quite the reverse. I wish to say that the Western political mix – namely the “idea-platform-specialists” that made Obama, Trump and Macron rise to power and made Brexit possible, and will keep on doing harm in the future – is currently the same paradigm of Daesh- Isis.

Barack Obama used the VoteBuilder platform that enabled him to collect 72 million US dollars in tiny donations, but above all enabled him to know the tastes, trends, preferences and idiosyncrasies of a huge mass of his potential voters.

Conversely, Donald Trump used his ProjectAlamo platform, which identified potential voters through the LookalikeAudiencies software, measuring also the efficacy of advertising with the BrandLift system.

Cambridge Analytics’s planned Brexit at communication and political levels (which is currently the same thing).

On the contrary, Daesh-Isis uses its social media or traditional networks especially to urge a response from its users.

It is very likely for the Caliphate – especially now that it is moving to Europe and probably in the United States – to use platforms that are very similar to those of the West, with a view to tracking news, data, areas of possible protection-flanking and new militants, in addition to information about the “infidel” enemy.

The Caliphate’s communications are often included – by pre-selected audiences – in the most popular Arab news websites, such as Al Ahram. In the social media fora, indicators increasingly appear for collecting messages according to the various entries: shar’ia, militancy, news from the Caliphate, Qur’an interpretations, etc.

It is certainly possible to obscure and create networks tracking this mass of jihadist big data simultaneously, but it is also worth recalling the cultural, theological and political postulates we mentioned earlier.

About the author:
*Professor Giancarlo Elia Valori is an eminent Italian economist and businessman. He holds prestigious academic distinctions and national orders. Mr Valori has lectured on international affairs and economics at the world’s leading universities such as Peking University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Yeshiva University in New York. He currently chairs “La Centrale Finanziaria Generale Spa”, he is also the honorary president of Huawei Italy, economic adviser to the Chinese giant HNA Group and member of the Ayan-Holding Board. In 1992 he was appointed Officier de la Légion d’Honneur de la République Francaise, with this motivation: “A man who can see across borders to understand the world” and in 2002 he received the title of “Honorable” of the Académie des Sciences de l’Institut de France.

Source:
This article was published by Modern Diplomacy

By Ngala Killian Chimtom

Hermine Tomaino Ndam Njoya is arguably Cameroon’s largest coffee farmer. Her farm spans some 150 hectares, and she depends on the labour of a whole village to keep the farm alive.

But what sets her apart is not just the size of her farm. What makes her different is that she is a woman excelling in a venture generally reserved for men.

Growing up in her native Noun commune in Cameroon’s West Region, she saw her parents tend their coffee farm with great care. “So I fell in love with coffee,” she says, smacking her lips after a sip of the aromatic drink.

Coffee was first introduced to Cameroon by German colonialists who realised that the country’s western highlands and grass fields offered the perfect conditions for grow the prized commodity. It has since played a significant role in Cameroon’s GDP. Yet, the sector has known changing fortunes.

An overall trend in decline of Cameroonian coffee production and exports began in the 1990s, with the lowest point being reached during 1992-1994, the years of liberalisation of the sector that came along with government’s disengagement.

Until 1989, Cameroon’s production accounted for two percent of the global total. That figure has since fallen to a mere 0.002 percent.

The reasons for the downward trend are many and varied. According to Omer Maledy Gaetan, executive secretary of the Cocoa and Coffee Inter-professional Council, CICC, the costs of inputs like fertilisers spiked in the wake of the government’s decision to eliminate subsidies and price protections for the sector in the 1990s.

The increased costs of production, coupled with low market prices at the time, discouraged farmers, many of whom turned to food crop cultivation instead.

“Without fertilisers, insecticides, fungicides and sprayers, it was hard for many farmers to sustain their farms,” says coffee farmer, Issah Mounde Nsangou.

Yet, Cameroon had been one of Africa’s leading producers of coffee.

“In 1980, we were ranked 8th [as a] world coffee producer. In 1992, when we liberalised the sector, Cameroon was ranked 12th in the world. Today, we are ranked 30th,” says Maledy.

However, while many farmers cut down their coffee plants to plant food crops, Ndam Njoya understood that price fluctuations were only cyclical and that resilience was needed to stay the course until better times.

“I actually went out telling other farmers to not cut down their cocoa farms. I told them that prices may be down now, but they will still rise because demand for coffee is ever rising,” she tells IDN, “and today, many of them are regretting their decision.”

That regret is definitely driven by rising coffee prices which in turn are driven by rising global demand. In 2015, demand rose by six percent, and will continue to rise. A seemingly unquenchable thirst for coffee by millennials in the world’s largest consumer – the United States – is driving prices up to record highs.

According to Chicago-based researcher Datassential, people in the 19-34  age group account for about 44 percent of U.S. coffee demand. Rising demand in China, Japan, and India is also driving up prices for the beans. And all this is compounded by shrinking production in coffee producing countries like Brazil due to harsh weather conditions.

In normal circumstances, all this should be good news for Cameroonian farmers. But Ndam Njoya believes that without a shift in policy priorities, the farmers who produce the beans would still be left out of the benefits.

“It is the middlemen who benefit most,” she says, noting that the incomes earned by farmers on their coffee pales in comparison with the price that is paid by the end consumer.

Referring to research carried out by her own daughter, Amatullah Ndam Njoya, she notes that “in Kouoptamo, a small village in Western Cameroon, farmers are constrained to sell 15 kg of their green (unroasted) coffee to middlemen for 9.57 dollars – that is, for a price of 0.64 a kilo. When this coffee is brought to Douala, the port city located six hours away, it is sold to exporters at a price of 3.26 dollars a kilo. When someone buys a 354Ml tall black filtered coffee from Starbucks for a price of 1.75 dollars, assuming 17 g of coffee is used to make 250 ml of coffee, they are essentially paying 24.07 dollars a kilo. This means that small farmers are earning only 2.66 percent of the final value of their product.”

Complaining about this great injustice, Ndam Njoya suggests measures that can be taken to allow small farmers to take a fairer share in the benefits of the coffee they produce.

For example, farmers need market information which can even be more useful if they know “the tastes and preferences of their customers. This means we need to train our own quality-graders – people who can taste our coffee and determine the quality. Good quality coffee will fetch a higher price.”

She is also calling for the training of baristas who can prepare and serve coffee in coffee shops, but that will depend on how well Cameroon develops a coffee consumption culture. And, here, Ndam Njoya has taken the lead.

Sipping coffee in what she has called her “Coffee House” in the nation’s capital, Yaounde, she says her intension is not only to “encourage Cameroonians to consume coffee, but also to educate them on the whole range of activities that can be developed along the value chain.

“We want people to have all the information concerning coffee, where they can find whichever type of coffee … it’s like a coffee museum.”

But it’s also where she markets coffee she has transformed. “Here we train people who prepare and serve coffee, or baristas. The barista can serve you all kinds of coffee: it can be espresso, cappuccino or macchiato. You can have coffee in the form of a hot drink or as a cold drink. We have even introduced ginger into our coffee to give it a unique taste.”

She cites the example of Ethiopia that consumes 71 percent of the coffee it produces as evidence that transforming locally could bring greater returns to the farmers.

“And besides Cameroon, we have a very huge market in Nigeria. We can take advantage of that and start exporting processed coffee to Nigeria.”

That may still be a long way coming. Only 10 percent of Cameroon’s coffee is processed locally. Government has made pronouncements to the effect that local transformation of agricultural products should be a priority. But that has remained little more than political talk.

By Hannah Brockhaus

Pope Francis met with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a private audience which focused on religious freedom as well as reconciliation with native people of Canada.

According to a brief May 29 communique from the Vatican, Pope Francis and Prime Minister Trudeau conversed on the topics of integration and reconciliation with indigenous people, as well as religious liberty and current ethical issues.

In their 36-minute meeting which the Vatican described as “cordial,” they touched on the positive bilateral relations between the Holy See and Canada, “along with the contribution of the Catholic Church to the social life of the country.”

Afterward “in the light of the results of the recent G7 summit, attention turned to various matters of an international nature, with special attention to the Middle East and areas of conflict,” the communique stated.

During the visit, Trudeau extended an invitation to Pope Francis to visit the country of Canada, during which time he could bring the Church’s apology for harm done to indigenous people in Canada in the mid-19th through 20th centuries when 150,000 children from native tribes were forced to undergo “enculturation” to the state through attendance at residential schools.

Some 6,000 children died in the schools and though they were state-owned, a number were managed by Catholics. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which ran from 2008-2015, called for action on 94 points, one of which was an apology from the Catholic Church.

In 2009, Benedict XVI did apologize for the Church’s participation in the system during a meeting with the head of the Canadian National Assembly, Phil Fontaine, showing “his pain and anguish caused by the deplorable conduct of some members of the Church,” adding that “acts of abuse can never be tolerated by society.”

The Prime Minister’s spokesman, Cameron Ahmad, said Trudeau’s main agenda for the conversation with Francis was reiterating the open invitation to the Pope to come to Canada and for “reconciliation” with the indigenous communities on this point.

Ahmad also said that other important topics for Trudeau included the climate, religious and ethnic diversity – such as interreligious dialogue – and immigration.

At the end of the meeting, the Pope gave Trudeau a medallion symbolizing forgiveness, joy and mutual acceptance. It also references the scripture passage from Matthew 5:7, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.”

Francis also gave him a copy of his environmental encyclical Laudato Si, as well as copies of his 2015 Apostolic Exhortation on the family “Amoris Laetitia” and his 2013 exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium.”

Along with the three customary documents, the Pope also gave the prime minister a copy of his message for the 2017 World Day of Peace, which he signed, just like the one he gave to U.S. President Donald Trump during their meeting last week.

For his part, Trudeau gifted Francis a copy of “Relations de Jesuits du Canada,” a rare 6-volume edition that documents the Jesuits’ reports on Canadian territory, and a Jesuit vocabulary in a special edition.

The meeting was not Trudeau’s first visit to the Vatican. A Catholic, he met St. John Paul II in 1980 during the papal meeting of his father, former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau with the pope.

Afterward, Trudeau met with Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Secretary for Relations with States Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher.

Absent from Trudeau’s agenda for the audience were any topics related to life-issues, particularly that of euthanasia. Assisted suicide was legalized by the federal government in Canada on June 17, 2016. It now falls to the local provinces to reform the medical system to be in conformity with the new laws.

Canadian bishops from the provinces of Ontario and Quebec met with Pope Francis recently for their ad limina visits in April and the beginning of May. During the meetings the bishops all expressed concerns regarding the threat to freedom of conscience in relation to euthanasia’s legalization.

By Maja Zivanovic

Serbia’s President-elect, Aleksandar Vucic, will sworn in on Wednesday in parliament but the ceremonial inauguration will take place later in June, Serbian media have reported.

The newspaper Vecernje Novosti on Sunday said Vucic will sworn in in parliament over the constitution and a replica of the 12th-century Miroslav Gospel – one of the oldest surviving documents in Old Church Slavonic, listed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

Media reports said that Vucic thereby wanted to pay respect towards both the contemporary state and Serbian tradition.

The outgoing Prime Minister and head of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party won 54.9 per cent of the vote in the April 2 presidential election, securing a five-year term as President.

The actual inauguration will take place in the second part of June with world leaders and officials reportedly among the guests.

“The inauguration ceremony will mark a new political era. It will be after June 20,” a senior Progressive Party official Nebojsa Stefanovic said, Serbia’s Tanjug news agency reported on May 22.

The first event marking Vucic’s assumption of his new post will be organised on the same date when departing President Tomislav Nikolic took over his duties five years ago.

Nikolic was sworn in parliament in the presence of ex-President Boris Tadic and rest of the presidential candidates in the 2012 elections, as well as Serbian Orthodox Church Patriarch Irinej and the diplomatic corps.

Former President Tadic was inaugurated in 2004 at a glamorous event in front of about 2,000 guests, but which was marred by minor incidents, as MPs from the far-right Serbian Radical Party were shouting while wearing T-shirts with the image of their leader, the then war-crimes suspect Vojislav Seselj on them.

It is still unknown who will be the guests at Vucic’s event.

As Vecernje Novosti reported on Monday, Nikolic on Wednesday will hand Vucic the state seal, a flag, and other insignia during the ceremony.

The new President will then attend a military review in front of the building of the Presidency, followed by a meeting with former presidents.

Under the constitution, the President is Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces, with powers to appoint, promote and relieve military officers from duty.

The President also signs bills into law, nominates the Prime Minister and other top officials including ambassadors and foreign diplomats.

The role is largely ceremonial, representing the country at home and abroad as well as granting amnesties and awarding honours and medals to citizens.

But many analysts expect Vucic to continue playing a major role behind the scenes in the Serbian politics.

By Aziz Abdel Maqsoud*

At 11pm on the night of April 3, 2016, Bibi Sahra was woken by a group of armed soldiers storming into her family home.

The 37-year-old, from the village of Qala Taqai in Baraki Barak district, recounted how the door of the bedroom was kicked in and half-a-dozen Afghan army soldiers in camouflage gear entered. A voice booming out over a loudspeaker warned everyone not to move.

“Me and my husband Ajmal, who’s a farmer, and our three little daughters were terrified and took refuge in the corner of the room,” she said. “One of the soldiers, without any questions, immediately hit my husband several times with the butt of his Kalashnikov.”

Sahra said that she tried arguing with the soldiers as her girls began crying and screaming.

“A soldier pushed me and threw me into the corner of the room and I hurt my head, while they still were beating my husband,” she continued. “After that soldiers put handcuffs on my husband and blindfolded him with a black scarf, for as long as I live I’ll never forget how the soldiers beat my husband and took him away.”

Night raids are a controversial tactic long-used in Afghanistan as a counter-terrorism measure. For Afghans, any intrusion into private homes is considered highly offensive, and such raids are seen as an unacceptable violation of privacy. Together with civilian casualties, they have alienated many citizens from their own government and security forces.

Local doctors in the eastern province of Logar say that it is women who bear the brunt of the psychological trauma of such raids. Mental health specialists warn that many women are left with long-lasting fear and anxiety or suffer flashbacks.

Sahra herself is now receiving treatment at the Nayab Aminullah Khan Logari hospital in the provincial capital of Pul e-Alam.

She said that following the raid on her house – the only weapon found was a shotgun, which the soldiers confiscated – her husband was taken away, along with other men from the village.

Sahra spent the next four days trying to find out what had happened to him, approaching local officials, tribal leaders and village elders.

“Eventually on the fifth day, officials from the office of the Logar governor informed me that my husband had been imprisoned by the national directorate of security on charges of collaborating with the Taleban,” she said.

After eight months in prison, he was acquitted and released. But Sahra said that she has been left in a state of permanent anxiety by the events of that night, and suffers from constant headaches.

“The doctor told me that I have mental health issues and that I need to rest,” she said.

HIGH COSTS FOR LOCAL PEOPLE

Night raids have always been a contentious measure. They caused huge resentment towards the NATO forces among ordinary Afghans, and in 2012 responsibility for such operations were transferred to Afghanistan’s national forces.

According to a memorandum of understanding, night-time missions to search civilian houses for insurgents were to be conducted by the Afghan military “in cooperation with United States special forces”, and in compliance with national law.

Then in 2013, the Afghan government under then-president Hamid Karzai pledged to stop night raids altogether.

However, his successor Ashraf Ghani quietly allowed them to resume. Military experts insist that such efforts are essential to disrupt and dismantle militant networks.

Defence ministry spokesman Dawlat Waziri told IWPR that these operations are a vital tool in their fight against the insurgents, allowing the security services “to accomplish major tasks with fewer forces and in the minimum time possible”.

Officials said that this year alone Taleban strongholds in Helmand, Baghlan, Kunduz and Nangarhar provinces had been destroyed as a result of night raids. More than 230 members of the Afghan security forces held hostage by the Taleban had also been freed from five locations around the country.

In one high-profile night raid in late April, the Taleban’s shadow governor for Baghlan province, Mawlawi Lal, was killed along with a number of other insurgents in the Dand-e-Ghori area of Pul-e-Khumre city.

But in Logar, officials warn that such successes come at a high cost to local people.

Provincial council member Abdul Wakil told IWPR that people were living with the aftermath of such trauma in many of the province’s districts. Pul-e Alam, Baraki Barak, Charkh and Mohammad Agha districts had been particularly badly affected.

People from across Logar, especially from rural areas, had approached the council to complain about night raids by the security forces, Wakil continued.

Shima Zargar, director of women’s affairs in Logar province, said that although it was usually men who were arrested, female family members suffered greatly as a consequence.

“Night raids, as well as the assassinations and kidnapping carried out by the Taleban, have caused terror among women, and as a result many have developed mental illness,” she continued, calling on the ministry of public health to build a dedicated psychiatric hospital in the province.

Mohammad Zarif Nayeb Khel, Logar’s deputy director of public health, said that every day dozens of women sought help for psychological problems at hospitals and clinics around the province. Others went abroad to access mental health services.

Rahela, 43, said that she had travelled to Peshawar in Pakistan to seek treatment at the Rahman Baba hospital following a night raid on her own home in November 2012.

She said that soldiers had blown up the gate to her compound in the village of Pork in central Logar before storming into her house where she and her husband were sleeping with their five children.

“I suddenly heard the sound of a strong explosion, the room filled with dust and the windows shattered. At the same time, I could hear my husband and my children screaming. A voice came over a loudspeaker and said that no one was allowed to leave their rooms,” she said.

“None of us at dared move. When I looked through the window, the soldiers had come into our yard and were approaching our room. I was still standing next to the window. The soldiers broke down the door to our bedroom and came into the room.

“My husband and I have two girls and three boys. My eldest son is 25 years-old. We all stood there in the corner of the room shaking with fear. Then an Afghan soldier shouted at us to put our hands up and I saw foreigners come close and put black hoods over the heads of my husband and my [eldest] son and took them away.”

The soldiers then went into the room next door where Rahela’s brother-in-law and his three children were sleeping. Her husband, brother-in-law, eldest son and a nephew were all taken away by the troops.

“Later, a translator came and told us to leave our rooms and go into the yard…They took us away about 100 metres into a wheat field and made us stand there for almost two hours, barefoot.”

Rahela’s brother-in-law and nephew were detained in Baghram prison for three months before being released. However, her husband and eldest son were imprisoned for 18 months before finally being allowed to return home.

More than four years later, Rahela said that she was still mentally scarred by the events of that night. Every time she hears the sound of aircraft or sees men dressed in Afghan National Army uniforms, she begins to shake with fear and has a flashback to the night of the raid.

Syed Jalil Ahmad, a neurologist in Logar province, adding that if left untreated chronic stress could lead to clinical depression. They often complained of insomnia, difficulty in breathing, loss of appetite and high blood pressure.

“Sufferers live in a constant state of fear,” he concluded.

Haji Syed Habibullah, a 56-year-old from the village of Pangram in Charkh district, also said that he would like to take his wife to Peshawar for treatment to help her overcome the trauma of a night raid on their house four years ago.

He related how Afghan soldiers had woken him and his family at gunpoint in the early hours of April 26, 2013.

“The soldiers took me and my wife along with our four youngest children to another room where my older sons were sleeping. They took my mother along with my two older sons to the yard. They blindfolded and beat me brutally in front of my kids, my wife and my mother. My wife and children screamed and cried. When they pulled me out of the house they searched my home.

“Then they put me in a military helicopter that had landed near our house and took me to Kabul where I was imprisoned for eight months. They accused me of being a Taleb and involved in fighting in Charkh district. I was accused of placing roadside bombs for Afghan troops, involvement in armed attacks on Afghan military outposts and of terrorising girls to prevent them attending school in Charkh district.”

Habib was released after a Kabul court proved his innocence. His wife Shazia, however, found it harder to recover and complained of constant headaches and frequent night terrors.

The district clinic had been unable to help her, and several visits to the Nayab Aminullah hospital in Pule-e-Alam had also made little difference to her mental state.

“Many of my friends have advised me to take Shazia to the Rahman hospital in Peshawar, Pakistan, but since I barely have money to take her from our village to Pul-e-Alam, how can I take her to Peshawar?” Habib said.

SAFEGUARDING CIVILIANS

Logar governor spokesman Salim Saleh said that Afghan and US forces had carried out around 60 night operations in the province over the last year.

He said that they were a necessary part of counter-terrorism efforts, but acknowledged that they were also a source of trauma for local residents.

“Although the night raids by government forces have been successful, and these operations have had a significant role in cracking down on the Taleban, they have also spread horror and terror among the public,” Saleh said.

Military experts stress that gathering detailed and accurate intelligence ahead of such raids was vital to safeguard civilians.

“If we have accurate information about the target, then we can quickly eliminate and destroy the enemy,” said Atiqullah Amarkhel, a former ANA general who is now a defence analyst. “If this information is not correct, unfortunately, innocent people will die. Taleban fighters try to take shelter in houses and place their fighters among the civilian population and when the security forces target these areas, that’s when civilians also die.”

Civil society activist Mohammad Musa Mahmoudi said that ordinary people found themselves trapped between the government and the insurgents. Night raids were traumatic, he said, but so was the intimidation, kidnapping and assassinations carried out by the Taleban.

At least the government followed legal process when carrying out arrests, Mahmoudi continued, whereas the armed insurgents simply acted with impunity.

The public could not live lives free of fear as long as the current situation of insecurity and poverty continued, he said, adding, “As long as security is not guaranteed, jobs aren’t created and women’s rights continue to be denied, it’s impossible to talk about reducing mental illness and psychological problems.”

This article was published at IWPR

The Greek crisis is typically seen as a sovereign debt crisis. Using a new dataset, this column explores the dynamics of national wealth accumulation in Greece over the past two decades. It argues that, despite certain idiosyncrasies, the Greek crisis can be better characterised as a balance of payments crisis. This implies that Greece shouldn’t be seen as an outlier amongst the periphery Eurozone countries.

By Paul-Adrien Hyppolite*

There are currently two conflicting views of the Eurozone Crisis, in both policy and academic circles – it is either considered to be a sovereign debt crisis, or a balance of payments crisis. Looking closer, one readily admits that the type of crisis must be country-specific. The Greek crisis is widely seen as a sovereign debt crisis, while those in Ireland, Portugal, and Spain are characterised as balance of payments crises (Baldwin and Giavazzi 2015, IEO 2016). These views are difficult to reconcile, and thus Greece is willingly depicted as an ‘outlier’ and the ‘exogenous trigger’ (Wyplosz 2015) of the Eurozone crisis.

As a consequence, there is a great temptation to resort to a political explanation of the Greek crisis, based solely on fiscal indiscipline. However, Gourinchas et al. (2016) highlight the role of the sudden stop suffered by the private sector in the output drop. This suggests there may have been, before the crisis, broader pernicious dynamics at play in the economy that have not been investigated so far.  The objective of this column is to study the dynamics of national wealth accumulation prior to and during the Greek crisis.

Construction of the national balance sheet

To do so, I rely on a dataset that tracks the evolution of the balance sheet of each of the main economic sectors.¹ International guidelines provide a comprehensive framework to construct such a ‘national balance sheet’.²

All economic assets (Figure 1) – that is, all assets over which ownership rights can be enforced and which provide economic benefits to their owners – are recorded at their current market or fair value whenever possible.³

Then, national balance sheets make it possible to derive wealth series. National wealth can be either decomposed as the sum of domestic and foreign wealth, or as the sum of private and government wealth.⁴

The problem is that Greece has no such official national balance sheet yet. It is nonetheless possible, using data from several reliable sources, to build one that is consistent with the aforementioned guidelines.⁵

Figure 1 Composition of a national balance sheet, breakdown by asset classes

The resulting 1997-2014 series teach us that:

• The national wealth-income ratio follows an inverted V-shaped curve, culminating in 2011.⁶
• The accumulation of domestic capital has been the main driver of national wealth. The concomitant build-up of a negative net foreign asset position has also influenced the trajectory of national wealth, first by limiting its increase prior to the crisis, before reinforcing its decline.
• Private wealth rose sharply until 2007 before collapsing.
• The pre-crisis growth in private assets was supported by fixed assets (mostly dwellings), while the increase in private liabilities came from loans granted by domestic banks.
• During the crisis, dwellings have plunged in value, while deleveraging has remained relatively modest.
• Despite the well-known increase in public debt, government wealth remained positive until 2013 due to the sustained growth of public assets, namely fixed assets (mostly public infrastructure) before the crisis and domestic corporations’ equity at the beginning of the crisis.⁷

The following figures about government wealth provide some information on a specific, yet critical, component of national wealth.⁸

Figure 2 Historical series of government wealth, assets, and liabilities, as percentage of national income (1997-2014)

Figure 3 Breakdown of government assets by asset classes, as percentage of national income (1997-2014)

Figure 4 Breakdown of government non-financial assets (i.e., fixed assets and natural resources), by asset classes (end of year 2012)

Figure 5 Breakdown of government liabilities by asset classes, as percentage of national income (1997-2014)

Analysis of national wealth accumulation

Breaking down the real growth rate of national wealth into a savings/investment-induced growth rate, and a real capital gains/losses-induced growth rate (Table 1), we find that, before the crisis:

• Real capital gains on the domestic capital stock explained the bulk of the increase in national wealth;
• Investments in overvalued domestic assets were sustained by net borrowings from the rest of the world.

Subsequently, the crisis involved the bursting of the real estate bubble, destroying the entire wealth accumulated through new investments before the crisis.

Table 1 Decomposition of national wealth accumulation between foreign and domestic wealth (1997-2014)

Going further into a sectoral breakdown (Table 2), we learn that:

A. Before the crisis

• households were the primary beneficiaries from real capital gains and the main driver of domestic investment;
• the government and corporations contributed to domestic capital accumulation in similar proportions in terms of investment flows; and
• the rising external indebtedness was mostly driven by borrowings from the government, followed by banks, as well as by significant real capital losses of domestic corporations.

B. During the crisis

• Greece experienced a prolonged investment slump in both the private and public sectors;
• official bailouts resulted in persistent external government borrowings, while domestic banks adjusted their net foreign asset position following the drying-up of the interbank market; and,
• real capital gains on net foreign assets have been concentrated on government tradable debt and domestic corporations’ equity.⁹

Table 2 Sectoral decomposition of national wealth accumulation between foreign and domestic wealth (1997-2014)

A balance of payments crisis

These findings offer insight into the unsustainable macroeconomic dynamics that preceded the crisis – capital accumulation was artificially driven up by a real estate bubble,¹⁰ and was especially pernicious because investments in overvalued assets were financed through external borrowing.

That leads us to depart from the conventional explanation of the Greek crisis, which appears actually closer to a balance of payments crisis than to a sovereign debt crisis, thereby sharing strong similarities with the crises of other periphery countries.¹¹ The key difference between them thus simply comes down to the relative involvement of the various economic sectors in domestic investment, and their financing through external borrowing. In Greece, the government was relatively more involved in this process than domestic firms (Figure 6). Hence, the crisis started as an external public – instead of private – debt crisis.

Figure 6 Government’s contribution to net capital formation as a share of corporations’ contribution to net capital formation (1997-2008)

How can this stronger public-sector involvement be explained? One hypothesis is that the government had to ‘step in’ by substituting to domestic firms because the latter were credit-constrained. Indeed, external borrowings by Greek firms in the form of corporate bonds remained virtually non-existent over the pre-crisis period, while foreign savings channelled by Greek banks mostly benefitted households.

These credit constraints may be related to the small size of firms. As shown in Figure 7, Greece displays the smallest share of medium-sized and large firms within the Eurozone and, among small firms, the highest concentration of micro firms.¹²

Figure 7 Relative size of Greek firms  

So, is the ‘fiscal indiscipline theory’ irrelevant?

However, only one third of the pre-crisis increase in government external debt can be attributed to public investments. The rollover of public debt held by domestic creditors accounts for another third,¹³ while the last third is due to higher final consumption expenditure. But what is really specific to Greece compared to other periphery countries is not the increase in government expenditure per se, but rather the government inability to raise its revenue at the same pace – which is all the more worrying as the value of public and private assets significantly increased (Figure 8).

Figure 8 Historical series of private assets, government assets, and government revenue, as percentage of national income (1997-2014)

Hence, the fiscal and macroeconomic dimensions of the crisis are actually closely interrelated – without dysfunctions in the tax administration and a mismanagement of public assets, government revenue would have increased with the real estate bubble and the new public investments; conversely, without the real estate bubble, declining national saving, and firms’ credit constraints, the government would not have had to borrow as much from the rest of the world to roll over its debt and support domestic investment.

So, to the widespread view that the Greek crisis is all about fiscal indiscipline, I propose a more balanced approach in which the fiscal slippage plays an important role, but against the background of broader macroeconomic dynamics.

Policy implications

This study has policy implications, both at the domestic and Eurozone levels.

First of all, as the external imbalance of the government has kept deteriorating, a priority remains to reach a credible deal between Greece and its creditors to achieve public debt sustainability.

But beyond this familiar issue, two conclusions regarding domestic policies emerge. On the fiscal front, securing a strong revenue base is critical to avoid future fiscal slippages. This requires combatting tax fraud¹⁴ and monetising underexploited public assets.¹⁵ On the corporate front, eliminating credit constraints that have impeded business financing is vital to lay the foundations for durable growth. This implies, on the real side, removing the regulations that may distort the size of firms, introducing size-based fiscal incentives to encourage partnerships, and on the financial side, deepening the domestic credit and equity markets.

However, any policy response that would stick to a domestic agenda would be incomplete. The Eurozone crisis demands a collective response since its source must be found in the misallocation of capital flowing from core to periphery countries. As of now, much has been done to design mechanisms to tackle the next crisis, but much less to prevent it from happening.

On the macroeconomic front, the objective comes down to working towards a cross-country allocation of savings to productive investments. This calls for:

• removing national regulations that keep preventing the free allocation of capital;
• facilitating firms’ access to funding through non-banking channels; and
• monitoring capital flows to avoid the emergence of regional asset bubbles.

Finally, on the fiscal front, the domestic effort needs to be coupled with a fight at the EU level against offshore tax evasion.¹⁶

About the author:
* Paul-Adrien Hyppolite, Graduate from the École normale supérieure, Arthur Sachs scholar at Harvard University

References:
Artavanis, N, A Morse and M Tsoutsoura (2016), “Measuring income tax evasion using bank credit: Evidence from Greece”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 131(2): 739-798.

Baldwin, R and F Giavazzi (2015), The Eurozone Crisis: A consensus view of the causes and a few possible solutions, VoxEU.org eBook, 7 September.

Gourinchas, P-O, T Philippon and D Vayanos (2016), “The analytics of the Greek crisis”, working paper prepared for the 2016 NBER Macroeconomics Annual, 14 June (see also the summary on VoxEU.org: “The Greek Crisis: An autopsy”, 5 August).

Hyppolite, P-A (2016), “Towards a theory on the causes of the Greek depression: An investigation of national balance sheet data (1997-2014)”, ELIAMEP Crisis Observatory and Center for European Studies, Harvard University, working paper.

Hyppolite, P-A and N Roussille (2016), “A more ambitious agenda is needed to help achieve public debt sustainability in Greece”, Harvard Kennedy School Review, 17 August.

IEO (2016), “The IMF and the crises in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal: an evaluation by the Independent Evaluation Office”, Independent Evaluation Office of the International Monetary Fund, 8 July report.

Piketty, T and G Zucman (2014), “Capital is back: Wealth-income ratios in rich countries 1700-2010”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(3): 1155-1210.

Roussille, N (2015), “Tax evasion and the ‘Swiss cheese’ regulation”, Paris School of Economics, mimeo.

Wyplosz, C (2015), “The Eurozone crisis: Too few lessons learned”, in R Baldwin and F Giavazzi (eds) The Eurozone Crisis: A consensus view of the causes and a few possible solutions, VoxEU.org eBook, 7 September.

Endnotes:
[1] Three economic sectors can be distinguished—households, the government, and corporations. The ‘households’ sector notably includes the Orthodox Church. The ‘government’ sector is to be understood in a broad sense—it incorporates central and local governments as well as social security administrations. Finally, the ‘corporations’ sector encompasses both financial and non-financial corporations.

[2] Those guidelines have been elaborated by the UN and Eurostat. Following the publication of the latest versions (SNA 2008, ESA 2010), a few national statistical institutes have begun to publish retrospective national balance sheets. These are the data used by Piketty and Zucman (2014).

[3] As a first best, statisticians therefore draw on market quotes, comparables, market surveys, etc. to value the balance sheet assets. As a second best, they use the historical value, cumulate past investment flows (net of capital depreciation) and adjust for market valuation using a relevant price index. As a last resort, they estimate the net present value by discounting future revenue streams. This third valuation methodology is notably used to determine the value of natural reserves like proven reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals.

[4] Each economic sector has a ‘wealth’ equal to the sum of its financial plus non-financial assets minus its liabilities, and national wealth is defined as the sum of the wealth of all economic sectors. Domestic wealth and foreign wealth are respectively equal to the sum of non-financial assets and of net foreign assets of all economic sectors. Private wealth is nothing else than the wealth of the households sector.

[5] I refer the reader to Hyppolite (2016) for all the details regarding the construction of the dataset.

[6] So, compared to output, national wealth grew faster before the crisis and has declined more sharply during the crisis. The same observation can be made with the 2008 financial crisis in the US. Profound and prolonged economic crises therefore seem to destroy relatively more wealth than income.

[7] This can notably be linked to the 2008 bank support plan through which the Greek government purchased preference shares issued by distressed banks. Most strikingly, even after the recent wave of privatisations, the concentration of domestic assets in government hands appears significantly higher in Greece than in other member states of the Eurozone. Historical data for other countries are available in the World Wealth & Income Database. In terms of order of magnitude, public assets today account for about 230% of national income in Greece, 150% in France and Spain, 110% in Germany and 90% in Italy.

[8] In particular, public assets grew at roughly the same pace as public debt between 1997 and 2009, and the government wealth to national income ratio remained pretty stable around 25%. Then, in 2010-2011, it abruptly rose due to the sharp decline in the market value of government tradable debt. Finally, in 2012-2014, the surge in public debt following the official bailouts and the parallel decline in the value of public assets led to a marked decrease in government wealth.

[9] Thanks to these capital gains, Greece has managed to stabilise its external imbalance. However, as far as the government sector is concerned, the real capital gains have up to now not been sufficient to stabilise its net external position.

[10] ‘Real estate’ is meant in the broadest sense of the term—it includes residential and commercial property, land and infrastructure.

[11] A domestic boom, fuelled by a real estate bubble, inflated by foreign capital flows, and followed by an acute trend reversal when foreign creditors realised that debts would not be paid off.

[12] Medium-sized and large firms are defined as firms with more than 50 persons employed, small firms as firms with less than 49 persons employed and micro firms as firms with less than 10 persons employed.

[13] This is the logical consequence of the decline in national saving in the context of the real estate bubble.

[14] Artavanis et al. (2016) estimate that roughly 50% of self-employment income went unreported in Greece in 2009. This represents €28.2 billion, or €11 billion in foregone tax revenues for this year alone (i.e., 30% of the fiscal deficit).

[15] Monetisation could take various forms: re-pricings, concessions, leases, etc.

[16] Roussille (2015) estimates that the value of offshore assets held by Greek households in Switzerland alone was €67 billion in 2013 (i.e., 52% of the ‘official’ financial wealth of households, or 12% of private wealth). We point out in Hyppolite and Roussille (2016) that if the government could track down this hidden wealth in Switzerland, it would receive a one-time revenue of at least €8 billion and subsequently increase its annual revenue base by about €600 million.

In the years since the 2008 economic crisis, financial transactions taxes (FTTs) have gone from a fringe idea to a policy that is in mainstream policy debates. They are seen as a way to both raise large amounts of money and to slow the pace of churning in financial markets. For this reason, most progressive Democrats have come out in support, and even the Clinton campaign provided a hat-tip to some form of taxation on high frequency trading.

This is a welcome change from where things stood before the crisis, when the only people supporting FTTs were the far left of the party. As a long-time proponent of an FTT, I welcome this change, but even many of the proponents of FTTs don’t realize the full benefits of such a tax.

To get some bearing, it is first worth recognizing how much money is potentially at stake. The Joint Tax Committee projected that a modest tax of 0.03 percent on all trades of stocks, bonds, and derivative instruments, along the lines of a proposal by Representative Peter DeFazio, would raise more than $400 billion over the course of a decade. This is roughly equal to 0.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP. This would be enough money to cover 60 percent of the cost of the food stamp program.There have been proposals for larger FTTs. The Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution analyzed an FTT with a varying rate structure on stocks, bonds, and derivative instruments. They calculated that the maximum revenue would be achieved with a rate on stocks of 0.34 percent, with lower tax rates on other financial instruments. This tax would raise more than  $800 billion, or 0.4 percent of GDP, over the course of a decade.

Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison have sponsored bills for a 0.5 percent scaled tax on stocks and other financial instruments. The Congressional Progressive Caucus in its “Better Off Budget” has adopted this tax. Their own estimates put the take from the tax considerably higher than the Tax Policy Center numbers.

Without trying to adjudicate between these estimates, it is clear that there is potentially a large amount of money at stake with an FTT. If we think that the government will want to tax away more money to fund infrastructure, healthcare, and other areas of public spending, FTTs seem like promising way to go. In addition, the idea of reducing some of the short-term trading in financial markets is attractive. The evidence on whether reductions in trading volume can reduce the likelihood of bubbles and crashes is not conclusive, but it seems worth a shot.

However, there is another important aspect of an FTT that has gotten much less attention. The burden of an FTT is borne pretty much in full by the financial sector. The basic story is that trading volume can be expected to decline roughly in proportion to the percentage increase in trading costs. This means that if a tax increases the cost of trading by 40 percent, then can expect trading volume to decline by roughly 40 percent.

This is a very important point. In the case of most items we buy, say food or housing, we value the item itself, so that if we had less food or housing because a tax raised the price, we would feel some loss. That is not the case with trading financial assets. At the end of the day, we don’t care how much we traded, we care what happened to the value of our assets after trading. (Let’s ignore the possibility that some people see trading like gambling and enjoy the process itself.) If we trade less because of a tax, it doesn’t matter to the average consumer, unless it reduces the value of our assets.

In the case where trading volume falls in proportion to the increase in the cost per trade, there would be little change in the total amount spent on trading. If we pay 40 percent more on each trade, but carry through 40 percent fewer trades, the total amount spent on trading would not rise. (Total trading costs actually fall somewhat in this example, but we can ignore that point.)

The issue then is whether our portfolios will be smaller as a result of fewer trades. That seems unlikely. Trading is mostly a zero sum game. If you end up selling your stock at a high price, then some sucker paid too much for it and will incur a loss. On average, there is a loser for every winner, meaning that the trading costs are simply a waste.

There is a story that trading makes the market more efficient, better allocating capital to its best uses. There clearly is something to this story, if there was no market in which to sell Apple stock, no one would ever buy its shares in the first place. This would mean that Apple and other companies would not be able to use the stock market to raise capital.

However we almost certainly reached the point where the markets were deep enough to efficiently allocate capital long ago. Trading volumes have more than doubled in the last two decades and are an order of magnitude larger than they were in the seventies. Someone would be hard pressed to argue that capital was better allocated in the housing bubble years than fifteen or twenty years earlier when volume might have been less than half of its current level.

This means that the only losers from an FTT are the people who earn their money from doing the trades, not the pension funds or middle income people with 401(k)s. In effect, an FTT will allow the financial sector to serve its function of allocating capital from savers to investors more efficiently. If an FTT raises $40 billion a year, then it will reduce the amount of annual revenue of the financial sector by roughly $40 billion. If the tax revenue is $80 billion, then the financial sector will be roughly $80 billion smaller.

However, the really great benefit from these savings is that they will come out of the pockets of many of the richest people in the country: Wall Street traders and hedge fund partners. An FTT will radically reduce the income of a group of people who stand at the very top of the income ladder. By reducing the opportunities to get rich through trading, we will force many of these high flyers to look for jobs in designing software, biotech, or other areas in which their skills may still command a premium, even if they don’t provide the millions they could expect on Wall Street.

And, the increased flow of people into these other high-paying professions will put downward pressure on the pay there as well. In effect, we will be reducing the number of very high paying positions in the economy, meaning that these positions will on average pay less as a result. We can think of an FTT as the equivalent of job-killing robots for the very high paid crew.

This is a great example of a clearly defined policy that will directly reverse some of the upward redistribution of income over the last four decades. Of course FTTs still face an enormous uphill battle before they could be implemented. As with other policies that would reverse the upward redistribution the problem is not the difficulty of designing the policy, the problem is the power of the rich people who don’t want a fairer and more efficient economy.

This article originally appeared in The Hill. and is reprinted with permission.

A new Columbia Engineering study, led by Pierre Gentine, associate professor of earth and environmental engineering, analyzes global satellite observations and shows that vegetation alters climate and weather patterns by as much as 30 percent.

Using a new approach, the researchers found that feedbacks between the atmosphere and vegetation (terrestrial biosphere) can be quite strong, explaining up to 30 percent of variability in precipitation and surface radiation. The paper (DOI 10.1038/ngeo2957), published May 29 in Nature Geoscience, is the first to look at biosphere-atmosphere interactions using purely observational data and could greatly improve weather and climate predictions critical to crop management, food security, water supplies, droughts, and heat waves.

“While we can currently make fairly reliable weather predictions, as, for example, five-day forecasts, we do not have good predictive power on sub-seasonal to seasonal time scale, which is essential for food security,” Gentine said. “By more accurately observing and modeling the feedbacks between photosynthesis and the atmosphere, as we did in our paper, we should be able to improve climate forecasts on longer timescales.”

Vegetation can affect climate and weather patterns due to the release of water vapor during photosynthesis. The release of vapor into the air alters the surface energy fluxes and leads to potential cloud formation. Clouds alter the amount of sunlight, or radiation, that can reach the Earth, affecting the Earth’s energy balance, and in some areas can lead to precipitation. “But, until our study, researchers have not been able to exactly quantify in observations how much photosynthesis, and the biosphere more generally, can affect weather and climate,” said Julia Green, Gentine’s PhD student and the paper’s lead author.

Recent advancements in satellite observations of solar-induced fluorescence, a proxy for photosynthesis, enabled the team to infer vegetation activity. They used remote sensing data for precipitation, radiation, and temperature to represent the atmosphere. They then applied a statistical technique to understand the cause and feedback loop between the biosphere and the atmosphere. Theirs is the first study investigating land-atmosphere interactions to determine both the strength of the predictive mechanism between variables and the time scale over which these links occur.

The researchers found that substantial vegetation-precipitation feedback loops often occur in semi-arid or monsoonal regions, in effect hotspots that are transitional between energy and water limitation. In addition, strong biosphere-radiation feedbacks are often present in several moderately wet regions, for instance in the Eastern U.S. and in the Mediterranean, where precipitation and radiation increase vegetation growth. Vegetation growth enhances heat transfer and increases the height of the Earth’s boundary layer, the lowest part of the atmosphere that is highly responsive to surface radiation. This increase in turn affects cloudiness and surface radiation.

“Current Earth system models underestimate these precipitation and radiation feedbacks mainly because they underestimate the biosphere response to radiation and water stress response,” Green said. “We found that biosphere-atmosphere feedbacks cluster in hotspots, in specific climatic regions that also coincide with areas that are major continental CO2 sources and sinks. Our research demonstrates that those feedbacks are also essential for the global carbon cycle–they help determine the net CO2 balance of the biosphere and have implications for improving critical management decisions in agriculture, security, climate change, and so much more.”

Gentine and his team are now exploring ways to model how biosphere-atmosphere interactions may change with a shifting climate, as well as learning more about the drivers of photosynthesis, in order to better understand atmospheric variability.

Paul Dirmeyer, a professor in the department of atmospheric, oceanic and earth sciences at George Mason University who was not involved in the study, noted: “Green et al. put forward an intriguing and exciting new idea, expanding our measures of land-atmospheric feedbacks from mainly a phenomenon of the water and energy cycles to include the biosphere, both as a response to climate forcing and a forcing to climate response.”

The 20th of May 2017 was a red letter day for Middle East politics.  Not only was Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, re-elected by a substantial majority to a second term of office, but it was the day that US President Trump, on the opening leg of his first foreign tour, landed in Saudi Arabia to a right royal reception and, within hours, was signing a multi-billion dollar deal with his hosts.

Shortly afterwards the President made a keynote speech to some 50 leaders of the Arab world.  In its closing passages he turned to Iran, but you could scour the transcript for any word of congratulation to the re-elected Rouhani.  Instead Trump was unremitting in his condemnation of the Iranian regime.

“From Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen,” he said, “Iran funds, arms, and trains terrorists, militias, and other extremist groups that spread destruction and chaos across the region. For decades, Iran has fuelled the fires of sectarian conflict and terror…Until the Iranian regime is willing to be a partner for peace, all nations of conscience must work together to isolate Iran, deny it funding for terrorism…”

To what extent has Rouhani been complicit in the regime’s involvement over the years in acts of terror, and its support for terrorist organisations like Hezbollah and Hamas?  There is no escaping the conclusion that – moderate though Rouhani can be dubbed in comparison with hardline elements within the Iranian body politic – as Iran’s president for the past four years, and as a leading servant of the state for decades earlier, he bears a heavy share of the guilt.

An early supporter of Iran’s first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, he was a leading light in the Iranian revolution of 1979 and subsequently held a string of important government posts, controlling aspects of the nation’s defence forces, and acting as security adviser to the president, and secretary of the Supreme National Security Council.

And yet Rouhani was never as extreme as the hardline caucus – the guardians of the revolution – that was a permanent feature of the Khomeini administration, and has remained so.  When in 2005 the presidency was won by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose extreme views Rouhani was never afraid to criticize, he resigned as secretary of the security council. Following Ahmadinejad’s second term, Rouhani ran for president against several hardline candidates, promising moderation and more engagement with the outside world.  He won with more than 50 percent of the vote.

Yet it must be remembered that in Iran the title Supreme Leader means what it says.  The regime is strictly controlled, and it would have been impossible for Rouhani to have stood in the presidential election without the explicit support of Ayatollah Khamenei who must have adjudged him sufficiently mainstream in terms of Iran’s revolutionary orthodoxy.  As for his political agenda, Rouhani made no secret of his desire to reopen negotiations with the West on the nuclear issue, linked to the lifting of the sanctions that had crippled the Iranian economy. Khamenei must have felt that a move away from Ahmadinejad’s confrontational tactics might yield some economic and political benefits.

An easing of sanctions certainly followed the signing of the nuclear agreement, and by adhering strictly to the terms of the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – the basis of the nuclear deal – Rouhani ensured that sanctions were progressively lifted.  Even Trump signed a sanctions waiver on 17 May. Although by the time of the election economic benefits had not filtered down to the general population, and unemployment remained very high, there was a general feeling that Rouhani had improved the country’s international standing.  His liberalisation policy was popular among the upper-middle classes and the intelligentsia.

The feeling did not extend to the conservative element within Iran’s polity.  They had opposed the nuclear deal on two grounds: it would inhibit Iran’s bid for regional hegemony by restricting its development of nuclear power, and opening up Iran to greater interchange with the rest of the world would pose a threat to the integrity of the Iranian Islamic revolution.  Indeed, immediately after the signing of the JCPOA, the Supreme Leader made it clear that Iran’s hatred of western democracy was unaffected. “Even after this deal, our policy towards the arrogant US will not change.”

Scores of potential candidates in Iran’s presidential election were rejected, one by one, by Iran’s Guardian Council, doubtless with the approval of the Supreme Leader.  The choice finally offered to Iran’s electorate narrowed to just two – Rouhani and a genuine hardline conservative, Ebrahim Raisi, one of the so-called “principlist” or osulgarayan group of fanatic supporters of the Supreme Leader.  Not surprisingly the general perception was that Khameini favoured Raisi – although he was careful never to endorse Raisi publicly.

Rouhani’s victory, while undoubtedly a personal triumph, must be leaving him decidedly uneasy on a number of grounds.  He knows that any efforts he makes to liberalise conditions domestically, or to increase the country’s standing internationally, will be opposed by the enormously powerful hardline elements embedded within the administration.  He will be aware that the Supreme Leader, while prepared to allow him another term of office in which to expand foreign investment and ease the domestic economic situation, will permit no policy initiatives that impact on the basic aims of the Iranian revolution – the political domination of the region, the global expansion of Shia Islam, and the eventual overthrow of western democracy.

Rouhani accordingly must be mulling rather nervously over Donald Trump’s remarks to the assembled Sunni Arab leaders in Riyadh, amounting as they do to a call to arms against Iran. “Until the Iranian regime is willing to be a partner for peace, all nations of conscience must work together to isolate Iran, deny it funding for terrorism…”

Rouhani hopes that some at least of the other five states which signed the nuclear deal, Russia in particular, will oppose Trump’s push towards Iran’s international isolation.  He also hopes, as he declared during the election campaign, to improve relations with at least some of the Sunni Arab states.  If he fails in either hope, his triumph will be bitter-sweet indeed.

By Paul K. Driessen and Mark J. Carr*

Are you are still wondering whether to Exit Paris? Overseas and US officials, environmentalists and bureaucrats urge you to Remain. But you promised voters you would Exit. Please keep your promises.

Exit Paris isn’t about the environment. It’s about letting us utilize our fossil fuel energy to create jobs, rebuild our economy, and Make America Great Again. It’s about avoiding immense transfer payments from the USA to foreign governments, bureaucrats and parties unaccountable to Trump-voting taxpayers.

Worse, even if the USA Remains, and the repulsive payments flow, Paris offers no help in removing real air pollutants. Carbon dioxide isn’t one of them, by the way: it’s plant food, not poison.

Exit Paris: Business

Some high profile American companies recently signed a note urging Remain. Follow the money. Many leaders of those companies didn’t support your election and voted Hillary. And they expect to get billions from us taxpayers and consumers, for locking up our fossil fuels and switching to renewable energy.

We who voted Trump, your base, want Exit. Just as you promised.

Remain, so that we maintain markets for American energy technologies? Some companies will make off like bandits. The rest of us will get skewered. Global buyers of energy systems understand the benefits of America’s world-beating fossil technologies. They understand the life-cycle value of after-sales support poorly delivered by our international competitors. Trust Chinese warranties? We don’t either.

Why ask corporations about Remain or Exit Paris? They pass Remain-driven energy costs on to consumers. Instead, ask consumers about ever-increasing energy bills. You’ll get a different answer.

Corporations have shareholders in the USA, of course, and some of them elected you. But corporations also have European shareholders. Corporations there must survive political economies aligned with Paris’s unaccountable bureaucratic control of energy, jobs, economic growth and living standards. You have to choose: shareholders, entrepreneurs, consumers and families – or rent seekers and bureaucrats.

Renewable energy lobbyists, Obama holdovers – and misguided souls in your own administration – say Remain, to keep a seat at the table. That’s nonsense. Businesses were flogged by the past administration and no longer recognize their obligations to shareholders, much less to societies they are supposed to serve with reliable, affordable power that creates and preserves jobs.

Those companies responded to incentives in a massively hostile American political economy. Those hostilities represent decades-long campaigns by anti-energy groups that got rich while claiming to represent shareholders, and by foreign governments seeking transfer payments. You promised change.

Exit Paris: Group of Seven

Mr. President, you’ve been pressured mightily at the G7 to Remain Paris. Hugely-invested and conflicted world leaders will give you no peace. Your delegation will hound you. Keep your Exit staff close. Why?

Because America got snookered into signing the Arctic Council’s May 11, 2017, Fairbanks Declaration. Now the same pro-Remain forces will claim America wants that language. What language?

Start with Perambulatory Paragraphs 8 & 9: “Reaffirming the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the need for their realization by 2030.” And this: “U.N. Sustainable Development Goal 13.a: Implement the commitment undertaken by developed country parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to a goal of mobilizing jointly $100 billion annually by 2020 from all sources to address the needs of developing countries in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation, and fully operationalize the Green Climate Fund through its capitalization as soon as possible.”

They want to take our money, while they shackle our economy. But there’s more.

Paragraph 31 (p. 6): “…we welcome the updated assessment of Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic, note with concern its findings, and adopt its recommendations.…The Arctic states, permanent participants, and observers to the Arctic Council, should individually and collectively lead global efforts for an early, ambitious, and full implementation of the Paris COP21 Agreement….”

Your State Department Obama-carry-overs slipped this one past their boss, Secretary Tillerson – and you, by extension. This is where the real art of the deal comes in. Take a leadership role and terminate this. Don’t get sandbagged. Don’t sandbag the people who voted for you. Resist the pressures you’ll face in Sicily. Anything but Exit Paris undermines your credibility and betrays voter trust and America’s future.

Exit Paris: Diplomacy

One reason cited to Remain Paris and Remain UNFCCC and their climate treaties is to “avoid diplomatic blowback.” There certainly will be that, but it’s a cost far more easily borne than the sum of what we paid yesterday and will be told we must pay tomorrow in lost energy, jobs and money. Follow the money:

Emerging nations want the USA to Remain because they expect billions in cash from us every year – plus free technology transfers – at US corporate, taxpayer and consumer expense. Advanced countries want us to Remain because we will inadvertently fund and sign onto programs that they use to seize ever-greater bureaucratic control over energy, resources, jobs and living standards, within their own borders and ours.

The Chinese want us to Remain because it protects access to our market for energy technologies. Do you believe Chinese press releases and speeches that claim they are switching massively to renewable energy? Neither do we. But we see them building more coal-fired power plants in China, Africa and elsewhere.

Europeans want us to Remain in Paris to ensure that our fossil fuels, energy prices, economy, jobs, living standards and ability to compete globally are as shackled by climate insanity as theirs already are.

Some say Remain Paris for a seat at the table. Will the planet otherwise forget American leadership? Better that the deal crumbles without us making huge transfer payments and shackling our economy. Even better is that you lead America and the world back from the climate hysteria precipice.

Anti-America, anti-energy forces unite at the UN and its UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Its director, Ambassador Espinosa of Mexico, spoke recently at Georgetown University – to advocate greater bureaucratic control over energy, natural resources, jobs, living standards and human lives. The past administration was in lock-step with this. You should absolutely be against every part of it.

Exit Paris: Science

Paris is a horrible idea, since unassailable empirical evidence demonstrates that: Carbon dioxide makes plants grow faster and better. Atmospheric CO2 levels trail rather than lead warming. Water vapor is a much more potent greenhouse gas. Thanks to carbon dioxide, agricultural productivity has increased over recent decades by over $3.2 trillion. Scientists project up to $10 trillion more in improved crop yields over the coming decades.

Climate science is absolutely not settled. Smart scientists who support you prove there’s no credible path to climate cataclysm due to fossil fuel use and CO2 increases. Doomsayers have gotten rich by peddling false, alarmist, anti-scientific claims, while the rest of us have suffered. This must not continue.

To support Exit Paris, you should reverse the absurd, scientifically unsupportable claim that carbon dioxide “endangers” our welfare. Doing that will substantially remove the ability of subsequent administrations to restore policies that demonize fossil fuels and CO2. Many of the policies addressed and corrected by your recent environmental Executive Order are vulnerable until the endangerment finding disappears. Much of the mischief and job killing of the last eight years can be laid at that doorstep.

Exit Paris, because even outgoing EPA officials admit it will not noticeably affect Earth’s temperature.

Exit Paris: US Politics

Paris intentionally provides for ever-tightening restrictions on American citizens and businesses – thus far with no vote by us or the Senate. Who rewrote our Constitution to allow a president, in his final days in office, to impose such a far reaching treaty on us without our advice, consent, approval or vote?

If you need Exit support of fellow elected officials or a constitutional avenue, submit Remain Paris to the Senate. The measure will crash on that rocky shore, giving you all the support you need to Exit Paris.

Your voters heard you promise to Exit Paris. The support you still enjoy from your voters is because we see that you are keeping your promises. Keep this one, too, Mr. President.

Please Exit Paris. Those who voted for you will remember and approve. Those who detest and resist you will still detest and resist you if you Remain.

Thank you for considering our heartfelt analysis.

Sincerely,

Paul K. Driessen and Mark J. Carr

*Driessen is an environmental policy analyst and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death. Carr consults on energy, environmental, transportation and agricultural policy. (To contact President Trump about this vitally important Exit Paris issue, go here to sign CFACT’s Say No to Paris petition.)

Islam, A Religion Of Peace

Ramadan is one of the sacred months of the Muslim lunar calendar; ashhor al-Horum, but probably the most sacred of all and the most important socially in the sense that it is a month of prayer and celebration during which people pray more, recite the Quran and help out the needy.

Fasting from dawn to dusk is not only about abstaining from eating food, taking liquids and engaging in sexual intercourse but also about stopping speaking ill of others or undertaking any violent action against anybody and most importantly enduring the hardships of hunger to help out the indigent on a frequent basis. So it is about loving the other, caring about him and sharing food and money with him.

Religiously speaking, it is the most important month of the year in the sense that Allah revealed the Holy Book Koran through the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad, PBUH and it is worth the equivalent of thousand months. In this regard the Koran says clearly:

“Indeed We have revealed it (Qur’an) in the night of Power. And what will explain to you what the night of Power is? The night of Power is better than a thousand months. Therein descends the Angels and the Spirit (Jibreel) by Allah’s permission, on every errand: (they say) “Peace” (continuously) till the rise of Morning!” ( 97:1-5)

Ramadan, the nine month of the Islamic calendar is all about respect, compassion, love of the other and self-restraint. Self-restraint from thinking ill, doing ill and speaking ill such as backbiting and gossip:

“O ye who believe! Fasting is prescribed to you as it was prescribed to those before you, that ye may (learn) self-restraint.” (2: 183).

The Prophet Muhammad, PBUH, addressed his companions on the last day of Sha`ban, saying:

“Oh people! A great month has come over you; a blessed month; a month in which is a night better than a thousand months; month in which Allah has made it compulsory upon you to fast by day, and voluntary to pray by night. Whoever draws nearer (to Allah) by performing any of the (optional) good deeds in (this month) shall receive the same reward as performing an obligatory deed at any other time, and whoever discharges an obligatory deed in (this month) shall receive the reward of performing seventy obligations at any other time. It is the month of patience, and the reward of patience is Heaven. It is the month of charity, and a month in which a believer’s sustenance is increased. Whoever gives food to a fasting person to break his fast, shall have his sins forgiven, and he will be saved from the Fire of Hell, and he shall have the same reward as the fasting person, without his reward being diminished at all.” [Narrated by Ibn Khuzaymah]

Sharing And Caring

The world is not a fair environment; there are rich people but also many poor people. There are the haves and the have nots and as such Ramadan is a month of compassion and piety. The faithful by fasting for hours during daylight are thus meant to experience hunger, to experience thirst for only a month whereas the indigent have to live with hunger and lack of means. Therefore this month is a test month to make the pious think about the wretched of the land and come to their rescue now and then with money, food and care.

The importance of helping out the needy is highlighted even more at the end of the month-long fast by the obligatory charity every Muslim have to make to the indigent to validate his fast. It is zakat al-Fitr.

Islam is a community-based religion meaning that communities are morally instructed care about the needs of their people and create a close-knit social fabric where the poor do not feel left out and do not feel different. Is not it the case after all that the Muslim prayers when performed at the mosque people stand in lines irrespective of their wealth or power position? It is not said anywhere in the scriptures that the wealthy and powerful stand up front.

The Meaning Of Ramadan

Many people think of Ramadan as a month of privation followed excessive eating, a month of praying, staying out late at night reveling and having a good time and then next day failing to fulfill normal workload on the excuse that one is fasting.

Ramadan is not this, it is the entire contrary. It is a month of testing and endurance, a month of prayer and piety, a month of giving and helping out the other. It is a month of peace with oneself and the whole world.

So the month of Ramadan, highlights among the faithful such important values as:

1. Generosity: It is not only about money, it is most importantly about care and concern, brotherhood of men and compassion. The poor have to feel that they are not left out in the open to endure privation alone; the community is there to extend a helping hand to them when needed;
2. Compassion: Deep awareness and feeling of distress and pity at the suffering or misfortune of another accompanied by the wish to relieve it and the desire to alleviate it. Sometimes just a kind word or a gesture of concern can make the world a better place.
3. Kindness: The state and quality of being kind and considerate towards the rest of the community so that people will feel equal in spite of social differences. Kindness is the cement that keeps the community united as one and ready to face outside challenges.
4. Solidarity: The feeling or expression of union in a group formed by a common interest and unanimity of purpose and attitude.

In principle Islamic society is a close-knit gathering of the faithful irrespective of color, culture or social standing. It is the ummah (nation of the faithful) wherever they reside and whoever they are. Indeed, the concept of one ummah is highlighted furthermore during the Hajj (pilgrimage, one of the five pillars of Islam) when people from all over the world meet to strengthen their faith through a number of rituals meant to bring the faithful together and make them one in their love of Allah and in their love of each other.

Allah has called on the Muslims to unite, to help out each other and indeed all the pillars of Islam are about unity of purpose and commonality of destiny.

Shahada (Profession Of Faith)

The profession of faith is statinging with much conviction, “la ilaha illa Allah, Muhammad rasulu Allah.”  This saying means “There is no true god (deity) but God (Allah), and Muhammad is the Messenger (Prophet) of God.”  The first part, “There is no true god but God,” means that none has the right to be worshiped but God alone, and that God has neither partner nor son.  This profession of faith is called the shahada, a simple formula which should be said with conviction in order to convert to Islam.  The profession of faith is undoubtedly the most important pillar of Islam.

Salat (Praying)

Muslims perform five prayers a day.  Each prayer does not take more than a few minutes to perform.

Prayer in Islam is a direct link between the worshiper and God.  There are no intermediaries between God and the worshiper. In prayer, a person feels inner happiness, peace, and comfort, and that God is pleased with him or her.

The Prophet Muhammad  said: {Bilal, call (the people) to prayer, let us be comforted by it.} Bilal was one of Muhammad’s  companions who was charged to call the people to prayers. Prayers are performed at dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, and night.  A Muslim may pray almost anywhere, such as in fields, offices, factories, or universities.

Giving Zakat (Support Of The Needy)

All things belong to God, and wealth is therefore held by human beings in trust.  The original meaning of the word zakat is both “purification” and “growth.”  Giving zakat means “giving a specified percentage on certain properties to certain classes of needy people.”  The percentage which is due on gold, silver, and cash funds that have reached the amount of about 85 grams of gold and held in possession for one lunar year is two and a half percent.  Our possessions are purified by setting aside a small portion for those in need, and, like the pruning of plants, this cutting back balances and encourages new growth.

A person may also give as much as he or she pleases as voluntary alms or charity.

Fasting The Month Of Ramadan

Every year in the month of Ramadan, all Muslims fast from dawn until sundown, abstaining from food, drink, and sexual relations.

Although the fast is beneficial to health, it is regarded principally as a method of spiritual self-purification.  By cutting oneself off from worldly comforts, even for a short time, a fasting person gains true sympathy with those who go hungry, as well as growth in his or her spiritual life.

The Pilgrimage To Makkah

The annual pilgrimage (Hajj) to Makkah is an obligation once in a lifetime for those who are physically and financially able to perform it.  About two million people go to Makkah each year from every corner of the globe.  Although Makkah is always filled with visitors, the annual Hajj is performed in the twelfth month of the Islamic calendar.  Male pilgrims wear special simple clothes which strip away distinctions of class and culture so that all stand equal before God.

The rites of the Hajj include circling the Kaaba seven times and going seven times between the hillocks of Safa and Marwa, as Hagar did during her search for water.  Then the pilgrims stand together in Arafa and ask God for what they wish and for His forgiveness, in what is often thought of as a preview of the Day of Judgment.

The end of the Hajj is marked by a festival, Eid Al-Adha, which is celebrated with prayers.  This, and Eid al-Fitr, a feast-day commemorating the end of Ramadan, are the two annual festivals of the Muslim calendar.

Islam In Pain: Torn Apart By Chaos

Ramadan is here, but the Muslim world is in pain. It is not in peace with itself. It is torn apart by civil wars, by violence and discontent.

Chaos is coming to the Middle East in the aftermath of the failure of the so-called Arab Spring, and it is coming big. However, one wonders, quite rightly, if the chaos in question, brought about by the national chapters of the multinational of terrorism al-Qaeda and extremists of different Islamic colorations, is not the chaos prophesied or sown by President Bush Jr and his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice after the fall of Saddam’s Iraq?

The very al-Qaeda that was felt out by the Arab uprisings years ago and that was beheaded by the American military machinery when killing, in a daring operation executed by the Navy Seals in Abbotabbad, Pakistan, its charismatic leader Bin Laden.

Al-Qaeda is coming back, in the form of ISIS, with the promise of more death and chaos in the region. Bin Laden might be dead, but the nihilist philosophy of the movement is still alive and kicking with Al-Baghdadi, thank you very much.

ISIS does not want a democratic Middle East because that would mean its demise, since it is a theocratic absurdity and not a democratic movement. It is a faceless beast that thrives on chaos and it has lethal dormant cells in this part of the world in addition to many sympathizers and followers worldwide.

How Did Chaos Come To The Region?

Actually, many analysts believe that chaos came to the region when the Tunisian vegetable seller Bouazizi set fire to his body, and by so doing igniting the Arab uprisings, but the truth of the matter is that the door to chaos was opened by the invasion of Kuwait undertaken by the megalomaniac pan-Arab dictator Saddam Hussein. At the height of his career, after the war with Iran, he believed strongly that he could do anything and get away with it, and since he owed so much money to Kuwait and was not ready to pay it back, he decided to rob the bank named Kuwait and settle the problem once for all.

Thus, on July 1st, 1991, he sent his army into Kuwait on the ground that it was part of historical Iraq before the arrival of British colonialism. On discovering oil in this territory, the British decided to create a mini state to serve their purpose of controlling oil flow in the region, maybe Brunei Darussalam is a similar case in South East Asia, and even today Malaysia has not swallowed the bitter pill of the British creation of this small state out of its national territory.

By invading Kuwait and robbing its wealth, Saddam Hussein inadvertently opened the gates of hell on the region. Fearing the fact that emboldened by his act in this small country, he would sweep through Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf States; the West expected the worst and started preparations to counter his moves.

If Saddam had succeeded in controlling the Gulf States, he would have controlled the oil routes and the flow of this important commodity necessary for the whole world and especially for the developed countries whose economies rely on it heavily. Has this have happened, the world would have gone anew on a recession as in 1973 when the Arab countries imposed an oil embargo on the West following the Ramadan War.

So to avoid this happening again, the West moved quickly to put an end to the threat represented by Saddam to its interests and to the security of the friendly countries of the area. America armed with the resolutions of the United Nations, put together a large coalition of 34 countries to liberate Kuwait.

The Gulf War I, codenamed Operation Desert Storm took place from 17 January 1991 to 28 February 1991, and the coalition, in no time, achieved the declared objectives of this campaign. The Iraqi army was defeated and expelled from Kuwait and the door of hell and chaos on the area was opened wide.

While most the armies of the coalition returned home after completing the assigned mission, American troops remained in the area to protect their allies and with them remained an unanswered question: why did not President Bush Sr. order the American troops to go in hot pursuit of Iraqi defeated soldiers? The answer is that such a project is another episode for which the US had a different agenda.

However, the Americans still, indirectly, encouraged the Shi’ites to rise against Saddam which they did in the southern provinces but their revolt was crushed in blood. It seems that the Americans when encouraging such a move had two things in mind, knowing better the demonic psychology of Saddam in addition to making Saddam regain confidence in his power after the defeat and, also, increase the enmity of the Shi’ites against his rule to utilize them appropriately in the second episode of the onslaught on his rule.

Following this bloody episode, the Shi’ites became the fifth column of the Americans by which they would prepare the final assault on Saddam Hussein and his eviction from power for ever. The Shi’ites role was not only to assist the Americans in their designs but also lead the country after the fall of Saddam, given that they are numerically a majority in the country and was always ruled by a Sunni minority.

In the interval to the Gulf War II of 2003, the Shi’ites helped the American intelligence community in preparing for this final chapter of war on Saddam. They were instrumental in collecting military and civilian data for use by the Americans and in training their troops to have access to power and usher in chaos in the region.

The Neo-Inquisition

The Charlie Hebdo unfortunate and condemnable criminal act cannot be justified at all, whether in the Islamic religion or any religion, for that matter. It is an abominable act of violence and terrorism. It is a terrible face-off between religious radicals and intellectual extremists that were at each other’s throat for some time; each believing to be, the one and only, to hold the universal truth, when truth is in fact multifaceted.

Alas, this heinous and inhuman act is going to justify the upcoming emotional and physical violence and, probably, who knows, the repeat of the Inquisition, after the fall of Grenada in 1492 and the Reconquista of Muslim Spain. The European Muslims are already in the grip of moral terror and nobody can protect them now. Maybe, like what happened with the Moors and the Jews of Spain, they will be given the choice of either to convert to Christianity or leavei and that is what probably Eric Zemmour is referring to when he invoked mass deportation: indirect coercion.

As for the writer Michel Houellebecq, he is actually missing the point, the next President in 2022, or even before then, is going to be Le Pen and not a Muslim. He knows that very well. His book is a tool to spread fear and, maybe, make the Muslims leave without any political, economic or ethical price. It would be nice, to get rid of the “Islamic evil” without any effort or cost. The political fiction of Houellebecq is ridiculous. How can 5 million Muslims win a presidential election, even if some other party gives them their votes or enters in alliance with them? How could they get a majority in the parliament and how could they sustain this majority?

Houellebecq cultivates fear in a horrendous way, he asserts that when Muslims arrive to power, though they will pretend to be moderate, yet they will allow polygamy, suppress women and bar them for working and going out, outlaw alcohol and make fasting Ramadan and praying five times compulsory.
However, in the midst of all this verbal violence, there are some voices that are calling for tolerance, like the journalist Christoph Hasselbach, who wrote in the German Qantara:ii

“We cannot deceive ourselves here: living together is not going to get any easier. This is why it is all the more important to remain level-headed. Yes, this is an horrific attack on our freedom, which can never be justified. We will not let anyone take this freedom from us. But nor must we let anyone take away our tolerance. There is no reason to put all Muslims under general suspicion or to doubt the model of a peaceful coexistence.”

Islamophobia On The Rise

Prior to the Paris two brutal and violent incidents, there were demonstrations against Islam in various European cities; the most prominent were the Pegida protests of Germany. In France a controversial essayist, Eric Zemmour has called for mass deportation of the Muslims. To where, bearing in mind that most of them are second, third or even fourth generation French citizens?

All of this denotes, one and only one thing, probably a European desire to get rid of the migrants because, by now, they have become a true social burden on these countries: so much for the “multi-cultural society” discourse.

Western State Terrorism

None wants to be apologetic for any form of terrorism, but one wonders why there is no debate on the state terrorism of the West on the Muslim world. The West has been emasculating the Muslim world uninterruptedly since the 19th century, to exploit unashamedly its riches. At times, using violence and, at other times, comploting, and this still continues today, and by so doing, deny democracy to the people of this vast area.

When the US-led coalition declared war on Saddam, they used all kind of weapons to bring down Iraq to its knees, killing and maiming thousands of civilians in this country. Iraq is gone to the dogs forever. Now, it is a fragmented country, where Sunnis and Shi’ites are exterminating each other, slowly but surely. Not to mention that the destruction of Iraq, undertaken methodically by the West, has led to the appearance of an absurd regime that calls itself The Islamic State -IS- and wants to take, by sheer force, the whole Islamic world to the time of the Caliphate, a rather ridiculous move and action. Today, sensible Muslims are wondering, quite rightly, who is behind this laughable and dangerous creation, and who wants to make the Muslims the laughing stock of the world?

In Afghanistan, the West and its military arm, NATO, has been destroying systematically the poorest country of the world and with it the wretched lives of its people, for over a decade, and today the former are pulling out of the country, without having achieved anything, but more hatred and more radicalism, which will breed more violence and more terrorism in the future.
They did not, even, apologize to the living, for their war crimes; they just called them collateral damage. Therefore, that means that the life of a single Western person is worth that of thousands in the Muslim world.

American Jihad

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the West put pressure on Saudi Arabia to call for Jihad against the invading Red Army. Pakistan was solicited to train the thousands of young people coming from all over the world to fight. When the Soviets were defeated and sent home packing, there was pressure on Pakistan to send the Jihadists back to their countries of origin and those who escaped been rounded, created with Bin Laden al-Qaeda, with the aim of punishing America for its ungrateful treatment, which they duly did.

Since then, the Islamists are on the rise because the can of worms was opened and nobody could control the spread of the vermin, anymore. The result started with the unfortunate and unpardonable 9/11 and it continues unabated today with condemnable terrorist attacks in the West and Muslim world alike.

A Last Thought

The Muslim world is faced, today, more than ever, with many challenges: poverty, illiteracy, corruption, patriarchy, nepotism, absolutism, etc. it surely needs peace to get on with its development and democratic drive.

May this Ramadan bring peace and well-being to all Muslims, wherever they are? Amen.

Suicide attacks outside an ice cream parlour and a government building in Baghdad on the morning of May 30, 2017, were despicable acts of violence, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday. The attacks killed at least 27 people and wounded at least 50, according to government sources.

In the first attack, a suicide attacker detonated a car bomb outside an ice cream parlour just after midnight in the Karrada district of Baghdad, where many people were on the streets breaking their Ramadan fasts. The Islamic State (also known as ISIS) claimed responsibility for the bombing, which killed at least 15 people and wounded at least 27.

The second attack occurred several hours later in Karkh district, near the headquarters of the government’s pensions directorate, killing at least 12 people and wounding at least 23. No group has taken responsibility for the bombing.

Human Rights Watch expresses its deepest sympathies to all those affected by the May 30 attacks, particularly during this holy month. Iraqi civilians have suffered decades of unlawful violence by armed groups and government, and international forces. Following mass-casualty attacks during 2017 in multiple countries worldwide, it is a stark reminder of the threat posed by individuals driven by hate or by violent or extremist views.

The principles of democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and tolerance remain the strongest bulwarks against the fear, hate, and division that those who commit these attacks seek to sow.

By Michael Lelyveld

Another month, another record for Chinese steel manufacturers.

Despite complaints from competitors around the world, China’s steelmakers set an all-time high for output in April, breaking their previous monthly record in March.

Normally, a one-percent month-to-month increase might hardly be noticed. But China’s crude steel production of 72.78 million metric tons comes at a time when the government claims to be making steep cuts in production capacity.

The problem of China’s booming steel production is symptomatic of the government’s priority for growth over reform, cited by Moody’s Investors Service in its decision to downgrade the country’s sovereign debt last week.

“The importance the authorities attach to maintaining robust growth will result in sustained policy stimulus, given the growing structural impediments to achieving current growth targets,” Moody’s said in a statement on May 24.

“Such stimulus will contribute to rising debt across the country as a whole,” it said.

The conflicts over steel have been prime examples of China’s pursuit of high economic growth rates, leading the government to argue that it is reducing production capacity while steel mills are increasing production at the same time.

On May 11, the official English-language China Daily reported that the steel and iron industries had reduced excess production capacity by 31.7 million tons so far this year.

The cuts announced after a meeting of the cabinet-level State Council were hailed as an achievement, fulfilling nearly two-thirds of the government’s goal to slash surplus capacity by 50 million tons in 2017.

“China is taking the initiative to reduce production capacity based on its own national conditions. The efforts are to make the growth model and economic structure move to new economic drivers,” said Premier Li Keqiang, as reported by state media.

That would be good news for foreign steelmakers who have complained for years about the glut of Chinese steel on the market. It would also be welcomed by citizens who have struggled under clouds of smog from coal-fired steel plants.

Record suggests otherwise

But the record output suggests that the capacity cuts have little or nothing to do with how much steel China is producing.

In 2016, China’s crude steel output of 808.4 million tons accounted for 50.4 percent of global production, according to World Steel Association data.

Last year’s production edged up 0.5 percent in a year when the government said it had lowered capacity by 65 million tons.

So far this year, China’s production has climbed 4.6 percent from a year earlier despite the capacity cuts, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reported.

The increases are possible, in part, because China’s excess capacity vastly exceeds its reduction goals.

Before the government ordered the industry to start cutting in early 2016, China’s crude steel capacity stood at 1.13 billion tons, according to a Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) official quoted by Reuters at the time.

But China produced only 803.8 million tons in 2015, leaving it with a huge surplus capacity of more than 326 million tons and a capacity utilization rate of 71 percent.

The excess was more than four times the volume of U.S. crude steel production last year.

The problem was actually worse because China’s domestic steel demand was likely to remain at 630 million to 700 million tons during the next five years, the MIIT official said. The remaining production would be exported at low prices, triggering antidumping measures and trade complaints abroad.

In April, President Donald Trump ordered an investigation into whether steel imports are harming U.S. national security.

Last week, China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOC) rejected claims that the country is responsible for “global steel overcapacity, saying its exports have little impact on the U.S. steel industry,” the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Instead, the MOC argued that shrinking demand is the “root cause” of overcapacity around the world. The country’s overwhelming share of the world market may make that argument a tough sell.

In February 2016, the State Council announced plans to cut capacity by 100 million to 150 million tons “over the next five years,” Xinhua reported.

As the year progressed and foreign pressure increased, the government pushed industry to move faster on cuts. As a result, officials claimed that China over-fulfilled its 2016 goal of decreasing capacity by 45 million tons, phasing out 65 million tons last year.

The added reductions claimed so far this year would raise the total of capacity cuts to nearly 100 million tons.

But that would still be less than 30 percent of the surplus cited in 2016, leaving plenty of slack for steelmakers to boost production in response to higher prices from the government’s stimulus spending, infrastructure investment and the real estate boom last year.

Study casts doubts

A study released by the environmental group Greenpeace East Asia in December casts doubt on whether China’s steel industry even cut as much capacity as targeted in the original 2016 goal.

The study compiled by industry consultants Custeel E- Commerce Co. found that the totals included capacity that was already idled. Fifty-four million tons of production was restarted to take advantage of higher prices, while 12 million tons of new capacity was added, it said.

If the findings are correct, China raised capacity by 36.5 million tons last year instead of reducing it. An increase of that size would also offset all of the cuts that have been claimed for this year.

As a result, China’s capacity surplus may still be as large as it was before the government’s downsizing initiative started.

Last year, China’s Foreign Ministry also claimed that the country had reduced capacity by 90 million tons during the previous five years, but according to figures from the China Iron and Steel Association and MIIT, capacity climbed by more than 70 percent since 2008.

Derek Scissors, an Asia economist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, said that China’s claims of capacity cuts have come from the government rather than producers.

“There are a number of ways firms and provinces can claim to be reducing capacity, for example, counting idle or planned capacity, without doing so,” said Scissors.

“The production numbers show capacity is not being cut. Claims that it is are just government propaganda,” he said.

Government accounting problems

Recent official and state media reports have acknowledged problems with the government accounting.

Participants at last month’s State Council meeting “decided to eliminate illegal production that adds to overcapacity and prevent production occurring after shutdowns from flaring up again,” China Daily reported.

Xinhua said in May that some firms could be “bowing to government pressure (and) could just halt production temporarily to meet their assigned tasks, instead of seriously eliminating capacity.”

In March, another statement by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the government’s top planning agency, said that “steel overcapacity has not been reversed fundamentally and the recent price rally could result in vulnerabilities,” according to Xinhua.

The NDRC cited the impact on jobs and finances as reasons for more gradual capacity reductions.

“Given the obstacles, such as unemployment and debts, the drive cannot be completed in one fail (sic) swoop—it requires resilience, composure, and innovation,” said the agency, as quoted by Xinhua.

Last year, the government predicted that 1.8 million jobs would be lost due to capacity closures in the steel and coal industries.

The government says it paid out 30 billion yuan (U.S. $4.4 billion) to support 726,000 laid off workers in the two industries last year and plans assistance for 500,000 more in 2017.

While the government has repeatedly argued that current steel production and capacity levels are unsustainable, it has promoted major investment initiatives that may make steelmakers resistant to downsizing in the long term.

China’s ambitious “Belt and Road” trade infrastructure program and the Xiongan New Area project to develop a new city center in Hebei province south of Beijing are both seen as opportunities to utilize more steel.

Last month, China Daily reported that the Xiongan development is expected to spark a “building materials boom.”

In a May 18 editorial, The New York Times also cited the capacity issue as one of China’s motives for pursuing the Belt and Road strategy.

“China itself is eager to open new markets to nourish its own growth and to absorb an overproduction of steel, cement, and machinery,” it said.

By Jutta Wolf

The Group of Seven (G7) leaders has in its ‘Taormina Communiqué‘ underscored that “Africa’s security, stability and sustainable development are high priorities”. But it has yet to respond to UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ specific call for the need to invest in young people, with stronger investment in technology and relevant education and capacity building in Africa.

The two-day G7 summit in Italy, in which the leaders of six other industrial nations – Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the U.S. also took part, concluded on May 27 in Taormina, a hilltop town on the east coast of Sicily, Italy.

Speaking at a session on reinforcing the partnership between the G7 and Africa, the UN Secretary-General noted on the concluding day that the international community has a role in helping the continent adapt as it heads for a new wave of industrialization.

African leaders joined the session. They included: President of Niger Mahamandou Issoufou; Kenya’s President Uhura Kenyatta; Tunisia’s President Beji Caid Essebsi; Nigeria’s Deputy Prime Minister Yemi Osinbajo; and Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Haile Mariam Desalegn.

Representatives of African organizations such as the African Union Chairperson Alpha Condé, African Union Commission Chairperson Mahamat Moussa Faki, and President of African Bank for Development Akinwumi Adesina also attended.

Beside Guterres, OECD Secretary General Angel Gurría, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde, and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim attended the Summit as well.

Emphasizing the need to help Africa adapt as it heads for a new wave of industrialization, the UN Chief told G7 leaders, “Failing to do so might have dramatic consequences for the well-being of the people of Africa; increase fragility, causing massive displacement and risking to boost unemployment, especially for young people.”

Africa has the fastest growing youth population in the world, which must be supported with education and training in tomorrow’s jobs, he added.

“High levels of youth unemployment are not only a tragedy for young people themselves, but can also undermine development and generate frustration and alienation that, in turn, can become a threat to global peace and security,” Guterres cautioned.

Investment in youth must include education and training for girls and women. Gender inequality is costing sub-Saharan Africa $95 billion a year, which at six per cent of the region’s gross domestic product is “a needless loss of inclusive human development and economic growth,” the UN chief said.

In paragraph 18 of the 39-point Communiqué, the G7 leaders admitted that gender equality is fundamental for the fulfillment of human rights and a top priority for them, as women and girls are powerful agents for change.

“Promoting their empowerment and closing the gender gap is not only right, but also smart for our economies, and a crucial contribution to progress towards sustainable development,” the Communiqué stated.

And this against the backdrop that “women and girls face high rates of discrimination, harassment, and violence and other human rights violations and abuses.”

Affirming what the UN Women has been stressing, the G7 said: “Although girls and women today are better educated than ever before, they are still more likely to be employed in low-skilled and low-paying jobs, carry most of the burden of unpaid care and domestic work, and their participation and leadership in private and public life as well as their access to economic opportunities remains uneven. Increasing women’s involvement in the economy – such as by closing the gender gaps in credit and entrepreneurship and by enhancing women’s access to capital, networks and markets – can have dramatically positive economic impacts.”

The G7 assured that they have undertaken significant measures to tackle gender inequality, but admitted, “more needs to be done.” They therefore remain committed to mainstreaming gender equality into all their policies.

While assuring that Africa’s security, stability and sustainable development are high priorities for the G7, paragraph 26 of the 39-point Communiqué said: “Our goal is indeed to strengthen cooperation and dialogue with African countries and regional organizations to develop African capacity in order to better prevent, respond to and manage crises and conflicts, as regards the relevant goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”

A stable Africa means a stable environment for investment, the Leaders’ Communiqué said, adding: “In this regard, we note the forthcoming launch by the EU of the External Investment Plan (EIP) as an important tool to boost investment in the continent, as well as the envisaged G20 Partnership Initiative with Africa and the investment pledge made at the Tokyo International Conference for African Development (TICADVI).”

The G7 leaders also consider it important to continue their efforts to expand reliable access to energy in Africa. “Unlocking Africa’s potential requires empowering millions of people through innovation, education, promoting gender equality and human capital development.”

The G7 leaders realize that decent employment, better health services, and food security will also contribute to building a more resilient society in a rapidly changing world.

“We aim to work in partnership with the African continent, supporting the African Union Agenda 2063, in order to provide the young generation in particular with adequate skills, quality infrastructures, financial resources, and access to a sustainable, prosperous and safe future,” the G7 leaders pledge. Because such advances promise to help reduce migratory pressure, relieve humanitarian emergencies and create socio-economic opportunities for all.

Noting that a majority of African countries have improved their competitiveness and business environments, an important aspect that the G7 appeared to have ignored, the UN chief stressed: “Our shared challenge is to build on these gains and to change the narrative about Africa – from crisis-based narrative to an opportunities-based narrative. We know that the full and true story of Africa is that of a continent with enormous potential for success.”

He also called for moving manufacturing and traditional activities, such as agriculture, higher up the global value chain, as well as investing in infrastructure thus linking links regions, countries and communities.

“Smart digital platforms, smart grids, smart logistics infrastructure can link urban and rural, and better connect the people of Africa to each other and the world,” Guterres stated, adding: “More than just the transfer of technology, we need to maximize the power of innovation for the people of Africa.”

Such support and innovation will help to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Africa’s framework for socio-economic transformation, known as Agenda 2063, the UN Chief said.

Ramadan is a time of selfless devotion and a month of above-ordinary worship. It is time of taking a spiritual inventory and reflecting deeply on all matters of moral significance- what it means to be a Muslim, and where does one fit in this vast panoramic community that we know as ‘humanity’.

It is a month long spiritual marathon and a time to cleanse the heart and the mind from a yearlong consumption of spiritual pollution or toxins. More importantly, it is a time for practicing Muslims to celebrate the most radical ideas that Prophet Muhammad introduced to an anarchical, Godless society who practiced, among other atrocities, female infanticide.

Number thirty, killing a person unjustly is equivalent to killing all mankind. Life is a sacred blessing granted by the Creator, as such, no human-being is at liberty to unlawfully destroy it. Therefore those parents who ruthlessly buried their infant daughters out of shame are bound to face God’s judgement.

Twenty nine, with forbearance and patience all wounded hearts are mended, and all relationships are strengthened. Vengeance only perpetuates hate and bloodshed. So, forgive the one who transgresses against you; reach-out to the one who cuts you off; give to the one who deprives you or denies you your rights, and, difficult as it may be, forgive those who may have oppressed you.

Twenty eight, speak good or maintain silence. The tongue is the primary vehicle through which ideas, affirmations, and objections of life are conveyed. No other organ in the human body is capable of building more relationships or destroying them more than the human tongue.

Twenty seven, as in justice, kindness and compassion cannot be selective. Be kind, compassionate and fair, even to those who may seem ‘unworthy’.

Twenty six, side with justice even against your loved-ones or against your own self. One should not be blinded by any personal, tribal, or systemic biases set against the marginalized and the disenfranchised.

Twenty five, deal with others in the best manners and employ your best language. Nothing demonstrates your faith more than your character, nothing demonstrates your character more than your manners, and nothing confirms your good manners more than the sensitivity of your language.

Twenty four, one’s gratitude towards God is gauged by one’s gratitude towards other human-beings. From birth onward, each one of us has depended on the compassion and love of other human beings. The same while his or her is on their deathbeds. One’s gratitude is enhanced when one evaluates his or her blessings by looking at those who are less fortunate than them.

Twenty three, give utmost care to all that is entrusted to you. Be trustworthy to all people, including those of other faiths or no faith at all.

Twenty two, seek beneficial knowledge until you find yourself in the grave. Not all knowledge is beneficial and not all beneficial knowledge is spiritual.

Twenty one, control your emotions to avoid volcanoes of anger and tsunamis of wrath. The capacity to overcome anger is the most underestimated power that anyone could possess. He who can control such emotional storms is stronger than the rest.

Twenty, Divine blessings are rotational or function like a pendulum. What you possess today in terms of authority or fortune belongs to others tomorrow. No one, no nation, no race and no faith has exclusive right or claim to it.

Ninteen, whosoever is devoid of gentleness is devoid of all goodness. God grants with the gentle attitude what He would never grant with the harsh one. Even when it does not come naturally, one must take a gentle approach to all matters.

Eighteen, don’t cheat anyone because he or she has cheated you. There are certain wrongs that you do not have the right to get even by doing the same onto the offender. Doing so will put one on a dangerous moral slippery slope.

Seventeen, dignity is found in humility. Above any person of knowledge there is another who is more knowledgeable. Likewise, above all rich person there is another, and above all those with authority, there is another who is more powerful. The best form of humility is the one intentioned to please God.

Sixteen, the legitimate leader of the people is the one who is their tireless servant. Leadership is not designating exclusive privileges and rights to the one whom authority is vested on.

Fifteen, without the right balance, nothing is sustainable. Life is a balancing act. Balance is essential to the spiritual and material well-being as well as all other things in life.

Fourteen, love for your brother that which you love for yourself. One must also hate for one’s brother that which one hates for oneself. Brotherhood is a multilayered concept that includes brotherhood in humanity.

Thirteen, the wealthiest among you is the one who is given contentment of the heart. True wealth is a spiritual state of mind. It is taming one’s greed and appreciating what God portioned for the individual.

Twelve, Islam can neither be coercive nor compulsive because. Faith resides in the heart and the heart never embraces what is forcefully imprinted on it by way of coercion or compulsion.

Eleven, no one is racially superior to another so long as their essence is the same. All human-beings are children of Adam and Adam is made of dust.

Ten, no jihad is greater than one’s own struggle to overcome one’s evil tendencies. That process of self-purification to tame the elusive impulses of lust, envy, rage and such is the most difficult task to undertake.

Nine, tame your ego with deliberate deprivation. No selfish behavior should be promoted, especially when seeking access to power.

Eight, with right intentions all things fall in their right places. While worldly matters may be judged based on their results, in the spiritual realm all matters are judged based on their intentions.

Seven, faith is a lifeline that each one needs. It is the mechanism through which one navigates his or her way out of the darkness of spiritual ignorance. The highest level of faith is state of relentless God-consciousness and self-policing as each will be summoned before The Judge of all judges.

Six, stand with and empower the poor, the needy, and the oppressed. If one, due to circumstances, found oneself incapable, the least one could do is to provide moral support, or at least hate it in one’s heart.

Five, inquiry is the most effective cure for ignorance. When one does not have all the facts or is not sure, one should ask those who do know, regardless of their faith.

Four, in one capacity or another, each one of you is a leader. Each is a shepherd in a particular setting of life or another- family, community, work, etc. Each shall be judged based on how each discharges his or her responsibility.

Three, the best form of jihad is speaking truth to power. Never assist a tyrant, never capitulate to his oppression, and never trade bloody anarchy for repression.

Two, your neighbors have special rights upon you. Not only should they never be the target of your vices and evils, you should never go to bed bellyful while your neighbor is hungry. Your neighbors are those who live in forty houses in every direction.

One, there is only One Absolute Truth. It is The Truth that transcends all other truths. It is what all other truths stem out of or mimic. It is the Divine Litmus Test through which all proclaimed truths are authenticated. And that never-changing Truth is God. He created all things and set time in motion.

Though nowadays the ritualistic aspect of the month veils its more profound meaning, it is never too late to embrace Ramadan’s radically transformative power.

The notion of democracy is built on the premise that all citizens of a State are equal and that the nation offers an opportunity to all members of the society to participate in the process of self-governance. Democracy, considered by most to be the best way to govern a nation, succeeds only when a full cross section of society takes part in the process in equal measure. This in turn should lead to the common person’s participation in the political process of the nation as a normal pattern. In India—the world’s largest democracy by population—this two-step process is still falling short with participation of the general public after the completion of the electoral process being negligible and restricted to the elite few. The poorer sections of society are deprived of a voice and does not take part in the governance process till the next democratic elections. In other words, the democratic success of the nation is not shared by all.

Since becoming independent from British rule, India has practised democracy, and over the past 70 years, has also adapted the concept to create a uniquely Indian model. The democratic process as practised in India has its advantages and also its share of challenges that make it cumbersome and less than optimal in a number of instances. Ever since the first elections held in 1952, there is no doubt that there has been multi-fold increase in the level of political awareness in the country as a whole. This is a positive move forward in a nation where a large part of the population are still uneducated and live a hand-to-mouth existence.

Paradoxically, simultaneous to the increase in political awareness, there is also the increase in the misuse of the electoral system by political parties and politicians to achieve narrow and parochial objectives. Over a period of a few decades the political parties have willingly compromised on values, ethics and morality in order to gain power through the electoral process, laying aside the imperatives of broader national interest. The responsibilities towards the nation at large that should sit heavily on the elected members of parliament does not merit a mention in the priorities of most of the politicians.

Further, the politicians have also been responsible for the use of unaccounted money and the criminalisation of politics; and they have promoted and entrenched casteism and communalism within the society, which has led to deep rooted religious and sectarian divide within the nation.

In the Indian practice of democracy, value-based politics the mainstay for the well-being of any nation, has been squandered and sacrificed at the altar of power worship. The quest for power has subsumed all altruistic purposes and initiatives.

Changing Trends

It is an inherent characteristics of politics that its nature will be undergoing a process of continuous change. Indian democracy has also developed its own incremental trends, primarily based on the influence of a pluralistic society with many minorities in terms of religion, caste, and language. The prevailing multi-party system emerged as an anti-dote to the monolithic Congress Party, which was formed out of the independence movement, to fulfil the need for a viable opposition. From the first elections in 1952, the process has become increasingly free and fair, although those attributes have not yet been established across the entire nation. However, the maturing of democratic traditions are visible across the board.

To a certain extent the results of the 2014 national elections brought the electoral political evolution full circle. In this election, over 550 million voters exercised their franchise across 28 States and seven Union Territories. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 282 of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha (Lower House of Parliament), achieving a single-party majority for the first time in three decades. This result was similar to the ones in elections held in the immediate post-independence era, when the Congress held electoral hegemony across the entire nation.

Although the peoples’ trust in the Congress Party continued for about 15 years in the post-independence jubilation, by the late 1960s regional and caste-based parties had started to come to power in the states. However, Congress continued to win majority in the Central elections, staying in undisputed power and in control of the nation. By the early 1990s, yet another visible trend had manifested itself in the Indian electoral politics—the politics of coalitions. This was brought on by the regional parties making in-roads into national politics through the election of their representatives into the Central parliament. The result was that truly national parties could not get the majority to claim power and had to rely on these representatives to form government. The era of coalition governments had arrived.

Coalition governments have obvious disadvantages. First, the expansion of the influence of regional parties translated to the decrease in the share of votes for the national parties. This meant that, in extreme cases, the national party did not have any influence or input into state governance. A centralised direction for a concerted national developmental agenda therefore became almost impossible to craft and implement. Second, with a number of regional parties being represented at the Centre, the clear demarcation that had so far existed between national interest and parochial state concerns started to become less marked. National developmental initiatives started to get skewed or stopped altogether by the superimposition of regional or state interests. Third, the formation of the government started to become a political ‘circus’, which the people of the nation watched with alacrity and disdain. It can be stated that progress as a nation became a low priority in this scramble for power through the grabbing of ministerial berths in return for ‘support’ in the legislature.

The 2014 voting pattern is indicative of the voter impatience with coalition politics that has delayed, and at times stopped, the implementation of national developmental policies. There is a prevalent feeling of having been ‘let-down’ by the Central Government. Coalition politics, which came to the fore in the 1980s, almost immediately led to the fragmentation of Central power. Even discounting parties with only one or two elected representatives in the Lok Sabha, there were six ‘major’ parties in parliament. The 2014 elections brought this number down to three. This change can also be attributed to voter exasperation with minor parties at the Centre, seen as show stoppers in national governance.

Even so, it is not necessary that having come full circle, electoral politics will lapse into a relatively unchanging and stable state. The fundamental characteristic of politics is its inherent need to evolve on a continuous basis.

Analysing the move towards centralisation of power as a trend in Indian political development brings out two disparate but vaguely connected factors. First, it demonstrates the political maturation of the Indian voting public and its understanding of the need to have a strong Central government. Second, regional parties have lost credibility with the public when they are considered for representation at the Centre, even if they have performed well at the State level. Their biased priorities have been viewed as not being in consonance with the overall national interests.

Over a journey of seven decades, Indian democracy has altered in visible ways. For a number of years during the coalition phase of the democratic evolution, parliamentary elections were seen as the sum total of State elections. There was nothing national about the results. Further, the elections were contested on the basis of the Party identity, whether regional of national. The 2014 elections changed this with the introduction of another trend. These elections moved towards being more presidential and the dynamics changed with one individual—in this case Mr Narendra Modi—being projected as the prime ministerial candidate. Even though the incumbent Congress Party did not formally follow the same pattern, by default, the party’s Vice President was considered to be the alternative Prime Minister during the canvassing period.

The other noticeable change was that the 2014 elections brought out truly national issues at the strategic level, which were then debated as being critical to the nation’s development. The shift in emphasis to national issues was country-wide, indicating a subtle shift in voter priority. Local issues, which were the focus of regional parties, were relegated to be dealt with at the State level and the discerning voters deemed them immaterial to the national debate. This was a welcome change in direction and contributed to the BJP winning a ruling majority. This trend could also be considered the maturing of the governance system within the democracy.

Through the more than three decades of coalition governments, the election process had established a trend where State elections had become the primary venues for political contest. National elections had been reduced to secondary status, which was confirmed by the statistics of poorer voter turnout for national elections. The trend is gradually being reversed. Analysis now indicates that the voters are starting to distinguish and discriminate between State challenges and Central Government issues. As the electorate is becoming progressively younger, better educated and politically more aware, national issues are assuming greater importance. Economic development of the nation as a whole and the domestic stability needed to achieve this, which in turn is based on national security imperatives, have become priorities with the demographic changes.

Yet another trend that is noticeable, even in a cursory analysis, is the steady increase in the number of political parties and the number of candidates in successive elections from the first held in 1952. The increase in number of political parties could be attributed to a sense of dissatisfaction amongst the population of an extremely diverse nation. The dissatisfaction is also the root cause for the emergence of regional parties and the support that they get in the electoral process. However, in more recent times there is also rising awareness that regional parties tend to create and support biased agendas that may not be in alignment with national requirements.

The 2014 elections saw the highest number of candidates and political parties in the fray so far—8251 candidates and 464 registered parties. Of these only 35 parties managed to win at least one seat in parliament, not counting the independent candidates who are unaffiliated to any political party. The implication of such large number of candidates and political parties contesting the election are two-fold. One, the elections become fiercely competitive, at times even leading to violence, and two, in a first-past-the-post electoral system, only a small percentage of candidates actually win with a majority, i.e. winning with more than 50 percent of the votes cast. This leads to a sense amongst a large part of the electorate of not being represented in parliament.

On the positive side of the equation, there has been a salutary change in the representation of the people in parliament. Today, without doubt, all sections of the population are represented in parliament, not only the educated middle-class as was the norm in the early days of democratic elections. The fact that regional parties continue to rule in many States indicate the entrenchment of people power—a confirmation of the empowerment of the common people. Even so, Indian democracy is in a constant process of developing discontinuities in its political system. Therefore, the evolving trends in democratic development, the electoral process and the political system cannot be predicted based on the analysis of one election. This is particularly so when the 2014 election has been so different in its results to the previous ones. Whether a one party majority will be returned in 2019 is anybody’s guess.

Although most of the trends that have been analysed have positive impacts on the development of democracy and contribute towards institutionalising the necessary processes, there are some aspects of Indian democracy that have the potential to impact and slow its forward march. It is an indication of the growing sense of nationalism that the average person has an increasing realisation of India’s rise as a developing power in the world. Less understood is the fact that to sustain the rise and assume its rightful place in the sun, the nation needs urgent and substantive investment in all dimensions of national security. This can only be achieved with a powerful Central Government, which is then capable of catering for the external and internal dimensions of the equation. The ills that mar the democratic process therefore needs to be studied and remedial action instituted if India is to continue on the path to power that it has chosen for itself.

Challenges to Democracy in the Indian Context

There are few unique challenges to the democratic process in India brought about by its multi-ethnicity, culture, languages, religions and societal make up. While some of the issues are gradually being ironed out, some others are becoming further ingrained in the body politic of the nation and assuming a life and dimension of their own.

1. The Multi-Party System

India currently has about 730 political parties that are recognised by the Election Commission. The shift from one-party dominance to multi-party competition also leads from cohesion to fragmentation of the fabric of society. The divisiveness that accompanies the establishment of a multi-party system is accentuated since the smaller parties normally represent the vested interests of small and minority groups. The proliferation of political parties invariably leads to coalition governments, at the Centre and a number of States, which cannot be as efficient as a government run by a single party with adequate majority.

In India the rapid movement of the political process towards a multi-party system may have been the result of the inability, brought on by hubris, of the dominant Congress Party to accommodate dissent in the early years of independence. This autocratic tendency continues to haunt the current, now much reduced in stature, Congress Party. The failings of the original Congress Party of the post-independence period created a number of breakaway groups pursuing similar political ideologies.

2. Regional Parties

The rise of the regional parties in Indian politics coincided with the decline in the influence of national parties, although whether the rise of one was because of the decline of the other cannot be clearly determined. Although the rise of regional parties initially started in the geographically peripheral states, now the phenomenon has spread across the whole nation. The interesting fact is that purely in terms of vote share, the regional parties have claimed between 48 to 50 percent, a figure that has remained fairly steady for the past two or three decades. The gradual centralisation that is taking place post the 2014 elections does not seem to have diminished the regional party vote share, although the changes if any would only become visible around the next election cycle. What this does is to skew the ratio of vote share to individual seats, which is dissimilar in different states, and indicates the influence of regional parties on national politics.

The strength of the regional parties is normally derived from an area or a community harbouring a sense of being deprived and not getting a fair deal from the policies of the Central Government. This emotive state is exploited by regional leaders who convert it into vote banks. During the coalition period in Central governance, the regional parties played the role of ‘king-makers’ even if they held only a few seats in parliament. The fundamental disadvantage of such a situation is that opportunistic alliances to obtain political power could be created, leading to political expediency. On the other hand, the rise to prominence of regional parties in the national political equation has led to a trend of regionalisation of national issues, a direct reflection of the diversity of the Indian political environment. This reverse movement of national issues pervading into regional politics has led to a consolidation of the democratic process even though in a tangential manner. On the whole, the emergence of regional parties and the influence that they bring to bear on national politics has been detrimental to the overall progress of the nation.

3. Communalism in Politics

Communalising the society was one of the primary methods used by the British to keep the Indian society divided. At independence, the Indian constitution proclaimed the lofty ideal of the country being a secular state that gave the ‘right to religious freedom’ to all its citizens. That the ideal did not work is obvious from the fact that the entire concept has come full circle with one section of the society now even demanding that the word ‘secular’ be expunged from the Constitution. In modern India, communal riots are lurking beneath the veneer of peaceful coexistence between different religions and communities. Such riots have become more common in recent times.

The communal divide started on the eve of independence, when the sub-continent was rocked with extreme communal violence in the wake of the partition that created the separate nations of India and Pakistan. The political parties of India are the main culprits in continuing to cater to communal identities in their efforts to create vote banks. In a subtle manner this has created a situation wherein loyalty to one’s own religion and community has supplanted the loyalty to the nation in a broad way.

4. Money-power, Corruption and Scandals

The Indian political scene suffers from a stranglehold of money-power, since unaccounted wealth is used to prop up politicians during the election periods. The election process itself is corrupted in many areas of the process, made so with ease by the use of money to ‘buy’ votes or even to ‘capture’ voting booths during the actual elections. The political process has been shown to be intimately connected to corruption across the board, with politicians being the biggest culprits. The other side of the equation is that the financial scams that have involved politicians have neither been questioned not investigated fully. The common people view this as a travesty but are unable to do anything about it, adding to their frustration regarding the political, governance and democratic processes.

However, the voting public does take corruption in high places into account when the electoral cycle comes around and punish the wrong doers at the ballot box. A graphic example of this was the plight of the Rajeev Gandhi Government, which had for a brief period re-established one-party rule at the Centre. During its tenure, scandals regarding kick-backs in defence equipment procurement surfaced and the large support base that it had enjoyed gradually fell away. The government was voted out of power at the next elections. The average person is intolerant of open corruption in high places that does not seem have any accountability.

The criminalisation of politics and the readily visible nexus between politicians and criminals is another aspect that diminishes the status and stature of the parliament. Over the years, many criminals have been elected to parliament and the political class has not initiated any constitutional amendments to remedy this lacuna. Criminals participating in the electoral process and winning seats in the parliament directly questions the legitimacy and veracity of the process. Correcting this anomaly is a major challenge to ‘cleaning up’ politics and one that should be taken up on priority. However, the criminal-politician nexus makes it difficult for an incumbent government to undertake such an initiative.

Conclusion

Although political awareness is improving in India, the middle-class remains strangely apathetic to the electoral process, not considering voting as a priority civic duty. There is a visible trend towards cynicism regarding the political process, a belief that nothing will change. In a recent interview, the US Secretary for Defence and former US Marine General James Mattis stated that the biggest threat to a nation emanates from the people’s cynicism towards the system that in turn creates spiritual and personal alienation of the people from the community and the government. Since the middle-class also form the most educated segment of society, this attitude can completely distort the election results and create far-reaching impact on the political process. This distortion affects all aspects of the developmental process of the nation further creating glaring areas of discrepancy in the overall development model.

In a mature democracy, elections are contested on issues of national importance and challenges that people face on a daily basis, underpinned by the requirements to ensure the economic stability and prosperity of the nation. In the Indian context, both these factors are only of peripheral interest and the elections are almost always contested on narrow and sectarian issues. This bias has led to India not yet having developed a broadly accepted national identity of its own that can be embraced by people across the entire country. In a cyclical manner, the same drawback of the lack of a recognisable national identity contributes to regional issues being considered more important than national challenges—a self-perpetuating cycle emerges. Extrapolating this situation to the tactical level of politics it can be seen that in the Indian context there are far too many divisive forces in play at the regional, State and local level on a day-to-day basis. They directly influence the electoral and political processes, impinging on the correct practice of democracy. Overcoming such forces is a difficult climb up a mountain of partisan, communal and sectarian opposition.

India fritters away a large part of its collective energy and resources in combating and containing the divisive and counter-productive initiatives in all parts of the country. In combination with the fact that it lacks a visionary strategy to realise the full potential of what is actually a powerful nation, there is a sense of the elephant’s march having come to a halt at an unsurmountable and indestructible wall. The regionalism that prevails within the political process has also brought to the fore a leadership of ‘small’ men and women who consider power as the ultimate goal in politics. For them it does not seem to matter that, in the process the very essence of democracy is being gradually but effectively trampled into oblivion.

India needs to establish an egalitarian democracy. This can only be achieved if the socio-economic challenges to the nation can be addressed and ameliorated—a tall order in an internally divided nation that does not as yet subscribe to the notion of a national identity. The journey is bound to be long and hard. While there is light at the end of the tunnel, there is no accepted goal towards which the nation needs to travel as and when the darkness of the tunnel gives way to light and sunshine. India continues to be its own worst adversary.