By Frank Shostak*

Most experts agree that through the manipulation of short-term interest rates, the central bank by means of expectations regarding future interest rate policy, can also dictate the direction of long-term interest rates. In this way of thinking expectations regarding future short-term interest rates are instrumental in setting the long-term rates. (Note the long-term rates are an average of short-term rates in this way of thinking.)

Given the supposedly almost absolute control over interest rates, the central bank by correct manipulations of short-term interest rates could navigate the economy along the growth path of economic prosperity, so it is held. (In fact, this is the mandate given to central banks.)

For instance, when the economy is thought to have fallen below the path of stable economic growth it is held that by means of lowering interest rates the central bank could strengthen aggregate demand. This in turn will be supportive in bringing the economy onto a stable economic growth path.

Conversely, when the economy becomes “overheated” and moves onto a growth path above that which is deemed as stable economic growth, then by lifting interest rates the central bank could slow the economy back onto the path of economic stability.

But is it valid to suggest that the central bank is the key factor in the determination of interest?

Individuals Time Preferences and Interest Rates

According to great economic thinkers such as Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises, interest is the outcome of the fact that every individual assigns a greater importance to goods and services in the present against identical goods in the future.

The higher valuation is not the result of capricious behavior, but because of the fact that life in the future is not possible without sustaining it first in the present. According to Carl Menger,

Human life is a process in which the course of future development is always influenced by previous development. It is a process that cannot be continued once it has been interrupted, and that cannot be completely rehabilitated once it has become seriously disordered. A necessary prerequisite of our provision for the maintenance of our lives and for our development in future periods is a concern for the preceding periods of our lives. Setting aside the irregularities of economic activity, we can conclude that economizing men generally endeavor to ensure the satisfaction of needs of the immediate future first, and that only after this has been done, do they attempt to ensure the satisfaction of needs of more distant periods, in accordance with their remoteness in time.1

Hence, various goods and services that are required to sustain man’s life at present must be of a greater importance to him than the same goods and services in the future.

On this Menger wrote,

To the extent that the maintenance of our lives depends on the satisfaction of our needs, guaranteeing the satisfaction of earlier needs must necessarily precede attention to later ones. And even where not our lives but merely our continuing well-being (above all our health) is dependent on command of a quantity of goods, the attainment of well-being in a nearer period is, as a rule, a prerequisite of well-being in a later period. Command of the means for the maintenance of our well-being at some distant time avails us little if poverty and distress have already undermined our health or stunted our development in an earlier period.2

Similarly, Mises wrote that,

He who wants to live to see the later day, must first of all care for the preservation of his life in the intermediate period. Survival and appeasement of vital needs are thus requirements for the satisfaction of any wants in the remoter future.3

Life sustenance therefore serves as the standard of valuation regarding present goods versus future goods. According to Mises,

If he (the consumer) were not to prefer satisfaction in a nearer period of the future to that in a remoter period, he would never consume and so satisfy wants. He would always accumulate, he would never consume and enjoy. He would not consume today, but he would not consume tomorrow either, as the tomorrow would confront him with the same alternative.4

As long as the means at an individual’s disposal are just sufficient to accommodate his immediate needs, he will most likely assign less importance for future goals. With the expansion of the pool of means, the individual can now allocate some of those means toward the accomplishments of various ends in the future.

Life Sustenance and Zero Interest Rate

As a rule, with the expansion of the pool of means people tend to allocate more means toward the accomplishment of remote goals in order to improve their quality of life over time.

With scarce means, an individual can only consider very short-term goals, such as making a primitive tool. The meager size of his means does not permit him to undertake the making of more advanced tools. With the increase in the means at his disposal, he could consider undertaking the construction of better tools.

No individual undertakes a goal, which promises a zero return. The maintenance of the process of life over and above hand to mouth existence requires an expansion in wealth. The wealth expansion implies positive returns. It is through the generation of wealth, after allowing for the maintenance of life and well-being in the present, that savings become possible.

These savings in turn permit further expansions in wealth. The expansion in the pool of real wealth permits a greater allocation of savings toward longer-term goals, implying a greater preference for future goods, i.e., a lowering of interest rates.

While prior to the expansion of real wealth the need to sustain life and well-being in the present made it impossible to embark on various long-term projects, with more wealth this has become possible. The extra wealth that becomes available is invested because the expected future benefits outweigh the benefits of consuming them in the present.

Interest rates Guide Business Decision Makers

Since in the market economy interest is calculated in money terms, it would appear that money is a determining factor of the level of interest. Being the medium of exchange, money only facilitates the flow of real savings from lenders to borrowers, or from suppliers to demanders. Money however, has nothing to do with the fact that interest is the outcome of a higher valuation of present goods versus future goods.

Changes in interest rates instruct businesses about the feasibility of undertaking various capital projects. A fall in the interest rate will mean that a greater proportion of means was made available for these projects. Conversely, a rise in the interest rate will imply that less funding is available to these projects.

In setting an interest rate, both a buyer and a seller of real savings must allow for the fact that central banks relentlessly depreciate the purchasing power of money by means of the printing presses.

Hence, expectations for depreciation in the purchasing power of money will contribute to an increase in interest expressed in money terms. Conversely, expectations that money’s purchasing power will increase will contribute towards the lowering of interest.

Observe that monetary pumping, which erodes the purchasing power of money, also weakens the flow of real savings by setting an exchange of nothing for something. This weakens the formation of real wealth, which in turn increases people’s preference toward present consumption and hence to a rise in the underlying interest rates that corresponds to individuals’ time preferences. To conclude then over time, monetary pumping lifts the level of interest rates.

Does the Lowering of Interest Permit Greater Capital Formation?

Being the outcome of the fact that life sustenance imposes a greater importance to present goods versus future goods, interest as such does not cause more or less investment, as popular theories have it.

It is true that businessmen react to interest rates. In this sense, the interest rate can be regarded as an indicator. What permits an expansion of capital goods production is not interest rates as such but the increase in the pool of real savings. A greater allocation of real saved wealth toward the buildup of capital goods, manifested by the lowering of people’s time preferences — the lowering of interest rates. (Note again what enables the expansion of capital goods investments is the greater allocation of real saved wealth and not the lowering of interest rate as such, which just reflects the greater allocation of real wealth toward the capital investment.)

When interest rates are not tampered with, they serve as an important tool in facilitating the flow of real savings toward the build-up of a wealth-generating infrastructure.

Whenever the central bank tampers with interest rates it falsifies this indicator, thereby breaking the harmony between the production of present consumer goods and the production of capital goods, i.e., tools and machinery. An overinvestment in capital goods and an underinvestment in consumer goods emerges. While an overinvestment in capital goods results in a boom, the liquidation of this overinvestment produces a bust. Hence, the boom-bust economic cycle. On this Rothbard wrote,

…once the consumers reestablish their desired consumption/investment proportions, it is thus revealed that business had invested too much in capital goods (hence the term “monetary overinvestment theory”), and had also underinvested in consumer goods. Business had been seduced by the government tampering and artificial lowering of the rate of interest, and acted as if more savings were available to invest than were really there.5

Conclusions

To conclude, as long as life sustenance remains the ultimate goal of human beings they will continue to assign a higher valuation to present goods versus future goods and no central bank interest rate manipulation will be able to change this.

Any attempt by central-bank policy makers to overrule this fact will undermine the process of real wealth formation and thus lower people’s living standards.

The central bank can try to manipulate the interest rate to whatever level it desires. However they cannot exercise control over the underlying interest rates as dictated by people’s time preferences. When the central bank engages in a persistent lowering of interest rates this policy sets in motion an increase in the underlying interest rates as dictated by people’s time preferences. (The exact opposite of the central bank’s intention.)

It is not going to help true economic growth if the central bank artificially lowers interest rates whilst the people did not allocate an adequate amount of real savings to support the expansion of capital goods investments. It is not possible to replace real saved wealth with more money and the artificial lowering of interest rates. It is not possible to generate something out of nothing as suggested by Keynes and his many followers.

About the author:
*Frank Shostak’s consulting firm, Applied Austrian School Economics, provides in-depth assessments of financial markets and global economies. Contact: email.

Source:
This article was published by the MISES Institute.

Notes:
1. Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (New York: New York University Press, 1976), p. 154.

2. Ibid., p. 153.

3. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, 3rd rev. ed. (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1966), p. 486.

4. Ibid., p. 484.

5. Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty (New York: Collier Books, 1978), p. 189.

Criticism of Pakistan’s anti-money laundering and terrorism finance regime by the Asia Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG) is likely to complicate incoming Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan’s efforts to tackle his country’s financial crisis.

Addressing the criticism of the 41-nation APG, which reports to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an international anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism watchdog that earlier this year put Pakistan on a grey list with the prospect of blacklisting it is key to a possible Pakistani request for a US$ 12 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout.

A US demand that any IMF package exclude funding for paying off Chinese loans coupled with the APG/FATF criticism, against a backdrop of the Pakistani military’s efforts to nudge militants into the mainstream of Pakistani politics and the incoming prime minister’s mixed statements on extremism, could push Mr. Khan to turn to China and Saudi Arabia for rescue, a move that would likely not put Pakistan in the kind of straightjacket it needs to reform and restructure its troubled economy.

The APG criticism followed Pakistani efforts to demonstrate its sincerity by passing in February the Anti-Terrorism Ordinance of 2018, which gave groups and individuals designated by the UN as international terrorists the same status in Pakistan for the first time.

Pakistan, however, has yet to implement the ordinance by for example acting against Hafez Saeed, a leader of the banned group Lashkar-e-Taiba and the alleged mastermind of the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, who despite having been designated a global terrorist by the United Nations Security Council and having a US$ 10 million US Treasury bounty on his head, fielded candidates in last month’s election.

The APG, which just ended talks with Pakistani officials, has scheduled follow-up visits to Pakistan in September and October to monitor Pakistani progress in addressing its concerns, which focus on legal provisions governing non-profit and charitable organisations, transparency in the country’s beneficial ownership regime and the handling of reports on suspicious financial transactions.

Those concerns go to the heart of the effort by the Pakistani military and intelligence to mainstream militants who garnered just under ten percent of the vote in last month’s election but have a far greater impact on Pakistani politics. The military and intelligence have in the past encouraged militants to form political organizations with which mainstream political parties have been willing to cooperate and establish charity operations that have had a substantial social impact.

Similarly, Mr. Khan, who earned the nickname Taliban Khan, is likely to have to counter his past record of allowing government funds to go to militant madrassas, his advocacy for the opening in Pakistan of an official Taliban Pakistan office, and his support of the Afghan Taliban. His Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)-headed government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, gave in February US$2.5 million to Darul Aloom Haqqania, a militant religious seminary.

Dubbed a “jihad university,” Darul Aloom Haqqania, headed by Sami ul-Haq, a hard-line Islamist politician known as the father of the Taliban, counts among its alumni, Mullah Omar, the deceased leader of the Taliban, Jalaluddin Haqqani, the head of the Haqqani Network. Asim Umar, leader of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, and Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, Mullah Omar’s successor who was killed in a 2016 US drone strike.

Those may be policies that, at least initially, may be less of an obstacle in assistance on offer from China and Saudi Arabia to replenish Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves that have plummeted over the past year to US$ 10.4 billion, enough to cover two months of imports at best. Pakistan’s currency, the rupee, has been devalued four times since December and lost almost a quarter of its value.

Chinese loans have so far kept Pakistan afloat with state-owned banks extending more than US$5 billion in loans in the past year. PTI officials said this week that China has promised the incoming government further loans to keep Pakistan afloat and enable it to avoid reverting to the IMF, which would demand transparency in the funding of projects related to China’s US$50 billion plus investment in the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a crown jewel of its Belt and Road initiative.

And that is where the rub is. Despite Chinese officials reportedly urging Pakistan to reduce its deficit, neither China nor Saudi Arabia, which has offered to lend Pakistan US$4 billion are likely to impose the kind of regime that would put the country, which has turned to the IMF 12 times already for help, on a sustainable financial path.

Relying on China and Saudi Arabia would likely buy Pakistan time but ultimately not enable it to avoid the consequences of blacklisting by FATF, which would severely limit its access to financial markets, if it fails to put in place and implement a credible anti-money laundering and terrorism finance regime

Moreover, relying on China and Saudi Arabia, two of Pakistan’s closest allies could prove risky. Neither country shielded Pakistan from FATF grey listing in February. A Chinese official said at the time that China had not stood up for Pakistan because it did not want to “lose face by supporting a move that’s doomed to fail.”

By Anchal Vohra*

Introduction

The Syrian war began as a quest of the people to gain more political and economic rights. Seven years later — as President Bashar Hafez al-Assad scores significant victories in the civil war — governments in the West, independent international bodies and NGOs are building a case against some high-ranking officials of the Assad government for alleged war crimes.

Independent estimates say at least 400,000 people have died in the conflict and roughly half of the country’s population have been rendered homeless. Many of the dead are buried under the debris after shelling by local and Russian forces, or else murdered by the jihadi elements of opposition groups. Thousands have also been allegedly killed while detained in state prisons, upon the orders of the Syrian government.

This report examines these alleged extrajudicial killings in Syria. The piece is based on investigations by international NGOs, including Amnesty International, stories in the mass media, and this author’s personal reportage. The aim is to analyse these open-source materials and provide insights that may prove useful for Indian policymakers involved in framing the country’s policy on Syria. While the author acknowledges that opposition groups may be equally culpable in some of the crimes, this report focuses on allegations of state-sanctioned torture and murder of Syrian citizens.

Indeed, the US and European governments would like to hold to account the leaders of the current regime in Syria; but how will they do it? This report describes the case against Assad, and the evidence that activists, lawyers and journalists hold against him. It examines the credibility of some of the evidence that has been verified with money from Qatar, a known foe of the Syrian regime and supporter of certain rebel groups. The report discusses the grounds on which the German prosecutor issued an arrest warrant against Syria’s air force intelligence chief. It also examines the actions of international systems such as the United Nations, and ponders the role that India can play to ferret out the truth.

The graffiti that changed Syria

On 16 February 2011, a group of boys scrawled on the walls of Deraa in South West Syria the words, “Ejak el door ya Doctor (Your turn Doctor).” The graffiti was referring to Assad–who trained as an ophthalmologist in his early years — and implied that after the ouster of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak from Egypt in the Arab uprising, it was Assad’s turn to go.

The rebellious act was met with draconian response by the Syrian security officials, who saw in it the hand of jihadi and anti-regime organisations. They feared that such expression of protest might ignite a rebellion and did not bother over the question of whether the graffiti was scribbled by restive Syrians who wanted political gains, or by members of the anti-regime Muslim Brotherhood. They quickly rounded up the teenagers and allegedly tortured them upon the orders of President Assad’s cousin, Atef Najib, who was chief of security forces in Deraa. ^[1]

Only a few months later, on 29 April, 13-year-old Hamza al-Khateeb was arrested for participating in protests in Saida, 10 km east of Deraa. After a month in police custody, Hamza was dead, and his body was released to his family. Al-Jazeera, a channel funded by the royal al-Thani family of Qatar, reported on the boy’s death, showing photographs of his mutilated body. Before the mainstream media reported on the death, however, a video showing Hamza’s body bearing torture marks and bullet wounds had been anonymously uploaded on YouTube. ^[2]

These incidents were widely seen as part of the regime’s design to discourage agitation. The state has denied the charges, calling them propaganda being spread by sectarian elements backed by the trio of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. Sources in the Indian intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), and Syrian citizens living in Deraa and other parts of Syria have confirmed to this author the barbarity that accompanied the crackdowns.

In Deraa, excessive force was reportedly used by state forces to quell the opposition. It had the opposite effect, however, catapulting a largely Sunni town into a massive resistance force. In early 2011, thousands marched on the streets, calling for change. The final outcome, though, was not what was envisioned by the protestors, as those who were forced to flee were the ordinary Syrian civilians.

Many members of the Sunni sect who left Deraa and sought refuge in neighbouring countries are afraid of going back. Some fear incarceration because they supported the rebels, but most are afraid that for merely opposing the regime, they will be treated as traitors and consequently punished. ^[3] Years after the first case of brutality in the war by President Assad’s government came to light from Deraa, the city is back in the regime’s control. In its trail is a host of evidence of illegal incarcerations and executions reportedly committed by state forces.

A stack of testimonies and documents

Almost six million Syrians are today scattered in neighbouring countries and in Europe, crossing oceans and walking treacherous routes to flee the violence in their country of birth. Turkey, for one, is host to three million Syrian refugees, Lebanon some 1-1.5 million; 700,000 are in Jordan, and almost one million are in Germany. As activists spoke to them, many opened up about their time in prisons. ^[4] Over the last year and a half that this author has covered the region, many Syrians have alleged that either they or someone they know have been detained. However, fear of the regime runs deep and few are willing to give their names or testify. Only those who feel they are now safe in their new home country have managed to talk at length with activists and journalists covering the conflict.

Over the period 2015–16, the international human rights group, Amnesty International (AI), investigated the patterns and scale of abuse at the Saydnaya prison. Located some 30 km from Damascus, off the main highway linking major Syrian cities, Saydnaya is known as the Syrian government’s worst torture chambers. AI released its report, “Human slaughterhouse: Mass hangings and extermination at Saydnaya prison,” in 2017. They interviewed 84 individuals who made damning allegations against Syria’s state forces. In part, the report says the AI team spoke with “31 men who were detained at Saydnaya, four prison officials or guards who previously worked at Saydnaya, three former Syrian judges, three doctors who worked at Tishreen Military Hospital, four Syrian lawyers, 17 international and national experts on detention in Syria and 22 family members of people who were or still are detained at Saydnaya.” ^[5] The report provides detailed testimonies that reveal the torture of thousands at Saydnaya; many of them have now been executed.

According to AI’s account, the Saydnaya compound has two buildings — a white one and a red — with a holding capacity of 10,000 to 20,000 prisoners at a given time. The victims are tortured physically and mentally for months and then taken to the Military Field Court in the al-Qaboun area in Damascus for their trials, which AI says are nothing more than a sham that hardly lasts for a few minutes. On the day of the execution, the victims are hanged in a basement in the white building. The bodies are then loaded onto trucks and minibuses and transported to Tishreen military hospital for registration, where the cause of death is usually declared as “heart attack” or “respiratory failure.” They are then buried in mass graves on military land near Damascus, in the village Najha in the town of Qatana. ^[6]

AI estimates that in the period between 2011 and 2015, anywhere between 5,000 to 13,000 Syrians were killed by state forces. Many were executed and tortured while some were released, in either amnesty declared by presidential decrees or prisoner swaps. The Human Rights Watch (HRW), for its part, gives a higher figure of 17,000 executions over the same period.

AI, in their same report described the “torture architecture” at Saydnaya. At detention centres run by the various intelligence branches of the government, detainees are tortured and forced to sign a confession. They are then transported to Saydnaya, where guards beat up newcomers in what they call a “welcome party,” said Amnesty. The prisoners are thrashed for even whispering a single word. The guards regularly deny the prisoners medical aid, proper clothing and food. Most of the detainees who spoke to Amnesty were desperate to end their suffering and wished for death instead. ^[7]

In addition to AI, valuable evidence has been shared by a Syrian defector, known in media reports as “Caesar.” He/she photographed the corpses of some 11,000 Syrians at the Tishreen military hospital, reportedly taken from detention facilities and prisons. ^[8] The Syrian government has dismissed the photographs as “a lie” and suggested they were not taken in Syria at all. They have also hinted at a Qatari conspiracy, since the authentication of Caesar’s photographs had been funded by Qatar. Those forensic experts and prosecutors, however, were internationally acclaimed professionals. They have given a stamp of authenticity to Caesar’s photographs. The Human Rights Watch has also examined the photographs and vouched that they are real. In March 2017, Caesar gave an interview to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour while his face was not shown. He appealed to the US to confront Assad. Caesar said, “You cannot give back the lives to those that have lost it. But we ask you, out of your humanity, to stop the machinery of death.” ^[9]

An independent body of investigators has also been working since 2011 to collect evidence on Assad’s alleged war crimes. The work of this investigating team, called the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), is being funded mainly by the European Union. In one of its first efforts to establish the chain of command, CIJA collaborated with a Syrian investigator — a lawyer by profession — who physically transported hundreds of thousands of pages of official documents purportedly linking the president and other high-ranking officials, to war crimes. After passing innumerable checkpoints, then through friendly governments, this lawyer delivered the papers to CIJA’s office in a secret location in a European country. ^[10]

Formed by Bill Wiley, a Canadian and a former war crimes investigator, CIJA found itself dealing with a lot of evidence, available openly but unauthenticated. At the start, CIJA taught Syrians on what to look out for and how to obtain it. Today, CIJA comprises 140 personnel made up of lawyers, investigators and translators, all looking for pieces of evidence and putting them together. ^[11]

CIJA is sitting on material that is expected to play a significant role when, and if, an international tribunal is set up to bring the high-ranking officials of the Syrian government to trial.

Evidence collected: What next?

The forum for trying alleged war crimes such as those committed in Syria is the International Criminal Court or ICC, an international tribunal that sits in The Hague. An internal or domestic investigation is not the first resort, as those who are accused are the very same people supposed to govern the nation, and the institutions are perceived to be subservient to the ruling dispensation. However, the path of the ICC cannot be pursued at this juncture: Russia and China, both supporters of Assad, have wielded their veto power at the United Nations Security Council to ensure that these cases against the Syrian president do not reach the ICC. Blocked at the UNSC, countries supporting the cases against Assad and his people passed Resolution 71/248 at the UN General Assembly and established the International, Independent and Impartial Mechanism (IIIM) to hold the Syrian government to account from crimes committed since March 2011, and those (allegedly) still underway. ^[12] Passed in December 2016, it was supported by 105 countries at the UNGA; 52 countries abstained and 15 voted against it. The mandate of the resolution is to “collect, consolidate, preserve and analyze evidence pertaining to violations and abuses of human rights and humanitarian law.” ^[13] It will be headed by Catherine Marchi-Uhel, a former judge from France. Marchi-Uhel has acknowledged the failure of the UNSC to come to an agreement to have the ICC handle the alleged war crimes. ^[14] At the same time, the IIIM head feels confident, as she regards the mechanism to be unique in its aim to deliver a quasi-prosecutorial function. So far, governments have contributed over US$7 million to the IIIM. ^[15] The mechanism is working along with the UN’s Commission of Inquiry (CoI) on Syria as well as independent bodies such as the CIJA.

Moreover, certain governments in Europe, such as Sweden and Germany have begun to exercise the concept of “universal jurisdiction” to prosecute war crimes in Syria. A German court has already received complaints against 26 high-ranking Syrian officials for alleged war crimes. The force behind the case is Syrian activist-lawyer, Anwar al-Bunni, who was imprisoned for years before the uprising began for seeking political reforms; al-Bunni now lives in Berlin. He is representing four Syrians currently in Germany and is working to file similar cases in Norway and Sweden. In Germany, Bunni is being supported by Berlin-based European Commission for Constitution and Human Rights (ECCHR).

In a recent turning-point, a German federal prosecutor has issued a warrant of arrest against Syria’s Air Force Intelligence Chief, Jamil Hassan, for ordering his prison soldiers to torture detainees. This development has been welcomed by anti-Assad activists, who hope that when Jamil Hassan travels to Europe or a friendly country, he will be arrested and tried. At the same time, there are sceptics who think the probability of this occurrence is extremely low, suggesting that the warrant of arrest is merely symbolic. Patrick Kroker, a lawyer with the ECCHR told this author that the idea of the warrant is to “eventually” arrest and try General Hassan. “No one expects it to happen tomorrow,” he said. “But one day it might. We need to be ready.”

Testing the credibility of the evidence

Caesar’s photographs

“Caesar” himself did not see any executions as they happened. He was the military photographer and took pictures when assigned. Presumably, it was a bureaucratic practise to bring the bodies of those who die under state custody to Tishreen military hospital. There, they were catalogued. Caesar was simply doing his job until he suspected foul play. He saw similar torture marks on a number of bodies and got suspicious. He began to keep a record: every corpse had a number and upon the doctor’s checking of the body, another number was assigned. Investigators say that these numbers will be crucial in establishing the chain of command and proving that the executions did take place in prisons and detention facilities in Syria and not somewhere else as suggested by the Syrian government.

Are the photographs digitally manipulated? Stephen Cole, a digital imaging expert, confirmed to American news network CNN that they were not. David Crane, the first chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, says Caesar’s pictures will be crucial for any future international tribunal when the cases are finally tried. ^[16]

There is a catch, however. Both Cole and Crane were hired by Carter-Ruck, a British law firm that was paid for the deed by the Government of Qatar. When CNN revealed the images and their report, they too were informed by a Qatari covert official to connect with Carter-Ruck.

Indeed, Qatar has supported several rebel factions in Syria and has been actively involved in trying to bring down Bashar al-Assad. Therefore, the question is: Can any investigation funded by them be credible? Experts this author has spoken to say that the evidence must be analysed on their own merit and not based on who has funded their authentication.

CIJA documents

The documents gathered by CIJA have not been released in the public domain. They will only be accepted as evidence if the lawyers can prove they are real and that the people who signed on the orders were indeed high-ranking Syrian officials.

Oral testimonies

Syrians who are being given protection in the countries sheltering them are more likely to testify in a court of law. However, those languishing in camps and who manage to speak to journalists and activists may not come forward in court. While a lot of the personal accounts do present a picture of abuse of power on the part of the Syrian state forces, some of those who are opposing the regime have also been found to be either exaggerating charges or else fabricating them altogether. The war crimes inspectors would have to ensure that their stories are double-checked.

The ongoing case in Germany, for example, is largely based on testimonies of people who were allegedly tortured. Anwar al-Bunni, the Syrian lawyer in Berlin, says they have enough evidence to get warrants of arrest issued against Assad and his men. He says the issuance of the warrant by the top German court is in itself indicative of the credibility of the evidence.

India’s role

Indian officials who are familiar with India’s dealings with West Asia have acknowledged in off-the-record conversations with this author that the Syrian regime did indeed deal with the uprising with an iron fist. India continues to support President Assad’s government because of the belief that he is facing a resistance that, although rooted in popular discontent, is backed by Islamist jihadis and sectarian forces.

India prefers to keep the Syrian state intact and functioning, rather than have it spiral into total chaos as has happened in Iraq and Libya. Yet, as a major democratic power — and one that purports to regard as valuable its moral compass — India must dig deeper and play a larger role in ascertaining the truth behind the allegations against Assad and establishing the validity of the evidence that have been collected so far. A case can be made for a commission of investigators from various countries — and not merely from those against the Syrian regime — to look into Caesar’s photographs, CIJA’s documents and ECCHR’s investigations. With its missions in Syria, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, India can also conduct independent enquiries in the refugee camps in those countries. This will allow probers to collate the accounts of Syrians themselves who — in this author’s experience — could reveal stories of the extent of the Assad government’s excesses, if indeed there are. India can also seek access to Saydnaya prison and areas in Najha and Qatana where, as AI alleges, those executed have been buried.

Narratives and counter-narratives have blurred the truth in Syria. The world opinion is divided as most Western powers oppose Assad, while states such as China, India and Russia continue to support him. With its democratic tradition and strong institutions, India can play the role of an honest arbiter. Perhaps among the few countries to realise that there are no absolute heroic sides in the Syrian war, India must actively engage in the exercise to determine the truth.

Preferring to walk the middle path in its foreign policy, India must use in a more productive manner both its proximity to the Assad government and its global stature as a country determined to deliver on human rights. It must get involved, and not simply watch the events unfold from the sidelines.

Endnotes

^[1] Avi Asher-Schapiro, “The Young Men Who Started Syria’s Revolution Speak About Daraa, Where It All Began,” Vice, 15 March 2016.

^[2] Hugh Macleod and Annasofie Flamand, “The Young Men Who Started Syria’s Revolution Speak About Daraa, Where It All Began,” Al Jazeera , 31 May 2011.

^[3] Anchal Vohra, “Syrians in Lebanon: ‘They treat us like we are dirty’,” 1 July 2017, Deutsche Welle.

^[4] As told to the author by activists from international NGOs who met Syrians in refugee camps and heard their accounts of torture.

^[5] Amnesty International Report, “Human slaughterhouse: Mass hangings and extermination at Saydnaya prison,”.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] Louisa Loveluck, “The torture victims of Bashar al-Assad’s most infamous prison,” 16 December 2015, Telegraph.

^[9] Madalena Araujo and Jo Shelley, “Syrian defector to Trump: Stop Assad’s machinery of death,” CNN, 21 March 2017.

^[10] Ben Taub, “The Assad Files,” The New Yorker, 18 April 2016.

^[11] Richard Engel and Kennett Werner, “Investigators quietly probe allegations of Syrian war crimes,” NBC News, 29 March 2018.

^[12] Remarks by Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism on international crimes committed in the Syrian Arab Republic,” 27 February 2017.

^[13] Teri Schultz, “Syrian war crimes accountability mechanism short on funds,” 16 March 2018, Deutsche Welle.

^[14] Ibid.

^[15] Ibid.

^[16] Mick Krever and Schams Elwazer, “Gruesome Syria photos may prove torture by Assad regime Mick Krever and Schams Elwazer,” CNN, 3 February 2015.

Some 300 newspapers, large and small, joined in publishing, often on their front pages, editorials defending the First Amendment’s freedom of the press, often making note of their own efforts to combat current threats to that freedom posed by President Trump’s attacks on journalists and the entire Fourth Estate, which Trump routinely denounces in tweets and at rallies as “enemies of the people.”

However, missing from most of these full-throated editorials is any real defense of those who are in the trenches doing the hardest job of a free press, which is exposing the worst offenses of government: the war crimes, the craven systemic corruption of the political system, and the purveying of propaganda and disinformation in the furtherance of anti-democratic policies. (A good example would be the employment by most major news organizations of retired generals and colonels as war commentators without noting their roles on corporate boards of arms merchants that profit form war — a scandal that not one major news organization will expose.)

Nowhere does one read, in these coordinated impassioned editorial paens to press freedom, a condemnation of the five-year torture and pursuit of journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been holed up in the London embassy of Ecuador, hiding from a secret sealed indictment that since the days of the virulently anti-free-press Obama administration has been sitting in the Attorney General’s office waiting for his capture.

Assange is trapped in the cramped Ecuadoran embassy by a complicit British government that has threatened to arrest him if he exits the building, claiming he is wanted for jumping bail in a court case that was already long-ago mooted by the expiration of Swedish arrest warrant that itself was based upon trumped-up charges of “rape” made against Assange by women who say they had not wanted those charges made in the first place. His real crime, and the thing the US wants to extradite him from Britain for, is publishing leaked Pentagon documents and videotapes proving a policy in the Iraq war of massive and deliberate war crimes.

Although news organizations like the New York Times and Washington Post made the most of those Wikileaks documents, publishing their horrific evidence of war crimes, such as the helicopter gun-ship machine-gun slaughter of a group of innocent Iraqis, including two journalists, shown in graphic detail in a leaked gun-sight video, and profited handsomely from the circulation and attention they derived from those stories, both those papers have slammed Assange, shamelessly questioning his status as a “journalist,” impugning his integrity.

They have ignored the reality that any prosecution of him for the work done by Wikileaks in exposing war crimes opens the door to prosecutions in the future of other more “traditional” journalists.

These hundreds of supposedly outraged defenders of press freedom are also strangely silent about the federal prosecution of the very leakers who make it possible for them to publish stories about government crimes and abuse. Take for example the 26-year-old NSA contract worker Reality Winner, currently facing sentencing after being convicted of leaking a classified National Security Agency document, still unidentified publicly, with reports saying she may be handed a sentence longer than any prior government leaker. Even the news organization that she reportedly leaked the document to has not had the intestinal fortitude to go public with its own role in this event. It is not known whether that news organization even had the decency to pay for her defense, and there has been no hue and cry from the media against her prosecution, or even against her sentencing, for doing something — whistleblowing — that is fundamental to the working of a real free press.

It’s the same thing that happened to Bradley Manning, the courageous young soldier, now known as Chelsea Manning following a sex change operation, who provided Assange and Wikileaks with the evidence of systemic war crimes by US forces in Iraq. Manning spent 7 years in Leavenworth for her/his heroic act. Little outrage was expended in print by America’s supposed defenders of press freedom over Manning’s uniquely brutal persecution, which included pretrial torture in a Navy brig — only over the crimes that Bradley’s courage and determination brought to public attention.

There is also something else missing from the high dudgeon expressed in this spate of page-one editorials lionizing the role of the nation’s corporate news media, and that is any defense of the alternative media. The Washington Post is particularly hypocritical in this regard.

It was, after all, only two years ago that Amazon gezillionaire Jeff Bezos’ private newspaper playground published a page-one McCarthyite hit on over 200 alternative news sites, mostly online, which it said a completely anonymous and unresearched or vetted organization called PropOrNot was alleging were either agents of or “ignorant dupes” of Russia, publishing purportedly pro-Russian propaganda. The paper ultimately published a retraction and apology of sorts for this libelous and scurrilous piece of yellow journalism, but has not come to the defense of those organizations, which include Truthdig, CommonDreams, Counterpunch and numerous other journalistic organizations, including this one, that have long done the kind of real investigative journalism that the corporate media typically avoid: systemic corruption and criminality by the government. The NY Times also ran with this sordid Washington Post “scoop,” as did the Philadelphia Inquirer and others but none of them has ever stood up for the free press rights of the alternative media, preferring to compare their supposedly “higher-standard” articles to those of the unwashed alternative press.

The reality is that a nation either has a free press or it does not. And if journalists from the alternative media can be arrested and jailed with no editorial defense from the mainstream press, as happened repeatedly, for example, during the long Standing Rock native people’s resistance to the controversial XL Pipeline project running through Sioux traditional lands (a struggle that the corporate media studiously ignored until the number of non-indians involved in the protests grew so large, and the violence of police and military forces arrayed against them grew so violent that it could no longer be blacked out and left to the alternative media to cover), then there is no real press freedom of consequence in the US.

It was not the corporate media that broke the My Lai story, after all. It was the US alternative media. It was not the corporate media that exposed the US role in the Korean War, it was IF Stone in his little weekly by the same name. It was not the corporate media that exposed the fact that the FBI knew of a plot to assassinate the leaders of the Houston Occupy Movement, and did nothing to prevent it. It was…oh year, that was me in this publication [1] — a story that was picked up by much of the alternative media, but never covered by the corporate media.

A black-out situation that is all too typical of the mainstream media, which is fond of deciding what news is, as the NY Times puts it, “fit to print.”

Just as it is critical to the guarantee of a fair trial that even the most heinous of criminals receive a vigorous qualified defense, it is also critical that all threats to press freedom, even against the smallest and seemingly most inconsequential of news organizations, be collectively challenged and defended against.

So yes, let’s defend what’s left of this country’s supposedly Constitutionally protected Free Press right, but let’s defend all of it, not just the tame corporate version of it.

Because a press freedom is under serious attack these days, certainly by President Trump, but also by a corporate media itself that supports a censored internet and a two-tiered access to high-speed internet — both of which measures threaten alternative news media — and that fail to firmly support and defend the whistleblowers who often are critically important in bringing urgent stories of government and corporate wrongdoing to light.

By Peter Certo*

On an otherwise sleepy August day, President Trump signed the John McCain National Defense Authorization Act. Named for the dying Arizona senator who’s championed military budgets for his entire career, the bill increases U.S. military spending to an astonishing $717 billion.

According to my Institute for Policy Studies colleague Lindsay Koshgarian, that’s about double what American taxpayers were spending at the end of the Cold War, and upwards of $300 billion more than what we spent before the War on Terror.

The bill also contains language encouraging a confrontation with Iran, while also making it possible for the administration to continue offering weapons and support to the Saudi-led coalition that’s bombing Yemen. (Where, the very week the bill was signed, they bombed a school bus, killing 51 people — 40 of them children.)

You’d expect a bill of this magnitude to generate lots of critical coverage — and you’d be right! But only kind of.

The most controversial thing about this bill, to hear most of the media tell it, is that the president refused to thank John McCain when he signed it.

Countless outlets, from Newsweek to TIME to the Washington Post, reported the omission as a “snub” against the bill’s namesake senator, an occasional Trump critic. CNN’s Jake Tapper used an entire segment on his show to scold the president about it — and even sanctimoniously thanked McCain himself.

The New York Times ran the numbers: Trump spoke for 28 minutes about the bill, with 0 mentions of McCain.

I ran some numbers of my own: A Google news search on the story turned up nearly 150,000 pieces like this. That’s almost 3 times the number of results I got when I searched the same story, but replaced “John McCain” with the actual price tag of the bill: $717 billion.

To put it kindly, this is garbage.

If the media deems a petty snub more controversial than a massive, war-mongering spending bill, you can be sure Congress will follow. The bill passed by huge bipartisan margins in both the House and Senate.

I can assure you, Trump’s not going to speak more kindly of John McCain as a result of this coverage. But more school buses are probably going to get blown up — and so are more pressing human needs in our own communities.

For instance, my home state of Ohio has, by some measures, the most student debt of any state. According to Koshgarian, taxpayers there spent $15.5 billion on the Pentagon base budget alone this past year. For that money, we could’ve funded nearly 700,000 four-year Pell grants.

For Texas, the most uninsured state in the union, their $45 billion in Pentagon dollars could’ve covered 15 million adults and 16 million kids. That’s the entire state — and then some.

Flint, Michigan taxpayers, Koshgarian calculates, spent some $38 million. That could’ve paid for nearly 700 infrastructure jobs to fix things like, say, lead in their water pipes.

Nationally, that money could’ve provided solar power to the entire country. Or funded universal health care. Or debt-free higher education. Instead, we’ll be shelling out more money on fruitless, destructive wars and boondoggle weapons systems like the F-35 (which McCain himself has called “a scandal and a tragedy”).

The real scandal is that such expenditures aren’t deemed controversial — not by our lawmakers, and not by many of the outlets that cover them. Next time they say McCain’s name, they should report what his bill costs the rest of us.

*Peter Certo is the editorial manager of the Institute for Policy Studies and the editor of Foreign Policy In Focus.

By Ann Garisson*

He is the President of Rwanda and the current President of the African Union, feted by the Brookings Institute, one of the most venerable ideological pillars of US capital interests. So why is Paul Kagame manifesting more and more signs of paranoia? Let us consider just a few possibilities:

Assassination rumours

The Indian Ocean Newsletter reports that French intelligence warned Yoweri Museveni that Kagame was plotting to have his plane shot down over Rwanda, causing him to cancel a flight from Uganda to Burundi for a summit. If the said plot had come to fruition, it would have been Kagame’s second presidential assassination by plane shoot-down over Rwanda. In 1994, his men shot down the plane carrying Rwandan Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian Hutu President Cyprien Ntaryamira from Arusha, Tanzania, to Kigali, Rwanda. That shoot-down triggered the infamous hundred days of ethnic massacres known as the Rwandan Genocide.

Is the claim credible? No hard evidence has been proffered. The Indian Ocean Newsletter is one of several regional reports included in Africa Intelligence Report, an online journal that describes itself as “the first information site on Africa for a professional audience” and charges substantial fees for all site access or per-article access. Credible or no, Kagame has his online “attack dogs” busy denying it.

Are relations between Kagame and Museveni tense? No doubt about that. The two have been both partners and competitors in crime for many years, with recent emphasis on the competition. The most notorious moment of this partnership occurred in 2000 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where invading Rwandan and Ugandan forces fought each other over the gold and diamond smuggling trade.

More recently Kagame has been in the habit of kidnapping or assassinating Rwandan refugees whom he considers his political enemies in Uganda, triggering Museveni’s recent crackdown on Rwandan spies. He has also been trying to force Rwandans who have crossed into Uganda fleeing famine to return home. He knows from first-hand experience that significant numbers of refugees outside Rwanda may return as an insurgency, maybe even an insurgency backed by Uganda, like his own.

Speaking of insurgencies

An armed insurgency against Kagame has been reported. All the Rwandan exiles that I know seem to believe this, but no one knows or wants to say how serious it might be.

My own guess is that an insurgency could succeed only if significant numbers of Kagame’s own troops turned against him. He has been seen wearing a bulletproof vest in Rwanda. A video identified as Rwandan insurgents in training appeared on Facebook, where it was shared 237[263 now] times.

Political prisoner Victoire Ingabire in peril

According to her political party, the United Democratic Forces of Rwanda, internationally celebrated Rwandan political prisoner Victoire Ingabire was moved into a cell with a former military officer whom she feared would kill her. The party said that the threatening cellmate has been removed for now. Ingabire attempted to run against Kagame in the 2010 presidential election but went to prison instead. The African Union’s highest court, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, ruled that Ingabire should be freed because Rwanda denied her the rights guaranteed by the Rwandan Constitution, but the current President of the African Union scorns its highest court. In 2010, Victoire Ingabire’s courage radically changed international perception of the Kagame regime, exposing him as a totalitarian military ruler and war criminal. Congolese historian and activist Bénédicte Kumbi Njoko calls her African sister “a force of nature.”

7,000 Rwandan churches and mosques shut down

Kagame has shut down 7000 Rwandan churches and mosques during the first six months of this year. This is not a matter of rumour or speculation; it is reported by Reuters, Associated Press, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and Christian journals including Christianity Today, Baptist Press, Religion News Service, World Watch Monitor, and Christian Persecution News.  

One hundred twenty-three religious leaders have gone missing, pastors have been imprisoned, and Human Rights Watch has been expelled from the country—again. Rwanda’s population of 12 million is roughly 60 percent Roman Catholic, 26 percent Protestant, 11 percent Seventh-day Adventist, and 3 percent Muslim, so it is safe to say that the vast majority of those targeted are Christians of one sort or another.

This has caused shock around the world, and in the US Senate and State Department, making it one of Kagame’s most puzzling paranoid expressions yet.

Last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appeared in the Senate, where Arizona Senator Jeff Flake asked him, “The country of Rwanda, right now, and you may be familiar with this because of this week’s focus on religious freedom, has indicated a move towards severe restrictions on religious freedom, particularly from outside groups. What are the plans of the State Department to let them know that that is not in their interest or ours?”

Pompeo responded, “Senator, I share your concerns. I’ll need to get back to you in terms of what actions we think will fit. I know we’ll call it out. I know we’ll label it for what it is. We do need to see. It is tragic and anyway, I share your concerns. It’s a huge challenge for us.”

Indeed. Rwanda has been a longstanding US ally, military proxy, and geostrategic lynchpin in East Africa, Central Africa, and the rest of the African continent.

How will Christians and Christian Zionists react to this? Paul Kagame’s Rwanda has been hand in glove with Israel ever since he seized power in 1994. Both claim victim’s license to invade their neighbours—Congo and Palestine—and the US has staunchly supported that license politically, militarily, and financially. The US is Rwanda’s top bilateral donor.

Mike Pompeo attended the recent Christian persecution exhibition in Washington, DC, which prominently featured the case of Rwanda, alongside those of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Libya, Sudan, Nigeria, and Pakistan. So did Sam Brownback, the Trump Administration official assigned to look after the interests of Christians around the world, although his actual title is “Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom.” The Kansas Republican extremist is the first Catholic to hold the position. He is also a prominent member of “The Fellowship,” also known as “The Family,” which was the subject of Jeff Sharlet’s book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. Sharlet characterised Brownback himself as “God’s Senator” in a frightening 2006 Rolling Stone profile.

David Himbara, former economic advisor to Paul Kagame, and Justin Bahunga, Spokesman for the Rwandan Democratic Forces, and others say that Kagame shut down the churches, using building code violations as an excuse, because they were the last spaces in Rwanda where people felt safe from his totalitarian grip.

Wasn’t this an extraordinarily foolish move, especially given the theocratic tendencies of the Trump Administration? Didn’t Kagame know that even his staunchest defenders, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, couldn’t give this a positive spin? I asked David Himbara, who responded, “Totalitarian regimes aren’t always smart. They tend to shoot first and ask questions after.”

It is hard to imagine the State Department and the Pentagon cutting Kagame loose while he is still of greater use than not, but how much longer will that be? And what will it take to tip the balance?

* Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, United States of America. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at @AnnGarrison or ann@kpfa.org.

By Michael Lelyveld

China has sown confusion in international energy markets after reconsidering plans to slap tariffs on U.S. crude oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG).

The conflicting signals on China’s energy imports reflect Beijing’s uncertainty about the risks of retaliatory measures as it tries to match tariffs imposed by the United States in the escalating trade war.

The reversal also highlights China’s concern about its growing dependence on foreign oil and gas with imports of crude now nearing 70 percent of the country’s supplies.

But the U-turn on LNG tariffs may be particularly telling as China weighs the effect on its push to replace high-polluting coal with cleaner-burning gas.

The threatened tariff on LNG is likely to be a topic when a Chinese delegation visits Washington for trade talks later this month.

Although the United States supplied only about 6 percent of China’s LNG imports last year, the volumes have been poised to climb with new development and terminal projects driven in part by China’s growing demand.

U.S. volumes of the super-cooled fuel shipped to China through May more than tripled from low levels a year before, according to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

LNG has been high on the agendas of both countries since the first meeting between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping last year, in spite of trade frictions.

“The United States welcomes China, as well as any of our trading partners, to receive imports of LNG from the United States,” said a statement from the U.S.-China Comprehensive Economic Dialogue in May 2017.

In February, Texas-based Cheniere Energy signed two long-term contracts for supplying LNG to state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC) over the next 25 years.

As recently as July, Chinese analysts predicted that the government would keep the LNG trade from becoming a casualty of the tit-for-tat trade war.

“If we impose tariffs on U.S. LNG, we pay a much higher opportunity cost,” said Mei Xinyu, a researcher at a think tank affiliated with the Ministry of Commerce (MOC), according to Reuters.

“Duties on soybeans hurt the U.S. more, but duties on energy products would hurt both sides,” Mei said.

A chill through the industry

But on Aug. 3, the ministry said it would include LNG on a U.S. $60-billion (412-billion yuan) tariff list in response to reports that Washington had considered plans to more than double tariffs on U.S. $200 billion (1.3 trillion yuan) of Chinese products from 10 percent to 25 percent.

The retaliation sent a chill through the U.S. LNG industry, which had assumed China would continue to exempt the investments in shale gas development and export terminals that it had previously encouraged.

Claudio Steuer, a senior visiting research fellow at The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, said the tariff “will definitely price U.S.A. LNG completely out of the Chinese market,” Bloomberg News reported.

Shares of U.S. LNG developers dropped on the news.

There were also reasons, however, to question whether China’s move to punish LNG investors might work against its own interests.

The arguments against erecting tariff barriers to any LNG imports appear to have won out, at least for now.

On Aug. 8, the MOC issued a revised list of U.S. goods subject to tariffs, leaving off crude oil and LNG, although maintaining penalties on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and other fuels, the online pricing service Natural Gas Intelligence reported.

In light of the waffling back and forth, it is unclear whether the exception for LNG is permanent or how long it will last.

“LNG exports remain exempted from retaliatory measures, but that could change if the U.S. proceeds with a potential third tranche of tariffs in late September or early October,” Argus Media said on Aug. 8.

China relied on imports for nearly 40 percent of its gas consumption last year, with inflows of 94 billion cubic meters (3.3 trillion cubic feet) divided evenly between pipeline gas and LNG delivered by ship from abroad.

LNG imports saw especially strong growth of 50 percent from a year earlier as China pursued plans to cut coal use and smog in Beijing and the surrounding region last winter.

Pipeline supply problems in Central Asia helped to push China into the high-priced spot market for LNG.

In the first half of this year, China’s LNG imports outpaced pipeline deliveries by 30 percent, based on customs figures reported by oilprice.com.

Asian LNG traffic and spot market prices tend to peak in October and June with supplies for winter heating and summer cooling, tapering off in the “shoulder months” of lower demand.

This year, off-peak demand has been boosted by a record heat wave in Japan, the world’s leading LNG importer. Faced with power shortages, Japanese utilities have reluctantly resorted to burning oil for its generation needs, Reuters said in a separate report.

The heat wave had a similar impact on South Korea, now the third-largest LNG importer after it was surpassed last year by China.

Not the best time

The conditions suggest that this may not have been the best time for China to impose a 25-percent tariff on U.S. LNG.

The potential downside for China is that it could find itself in competition for Asian LNG cargoes if supply and demand problems multiply as they did last winter.

China has been scrambling to open more LNG receiving terminals to add to the 20 now in operation. But the country’s lack of adequate storage capacity may limit the amount of pre-buying it can do to prepare for winter.

The immediate reaction to China’s first announcement on Aug. 3 was a relatively mild increase of U.S. 25 cents (1.70 yuan) in Asian LNG benchmark prices to U.S. $10 (68.70 yuan) per million British thermal units (MMBtu), a rise of about 2.5 percent. Asian spot market prices are the highest in the world.

Analysts say the effects of the tariffs were more likely to be felt over time.

“In the short term, the tariff would likely raise LNG prices,” said Giles Farrer, research director of global gas and LNG supply at the international consulting firm Wood Mackenzie in a note cited by S&P Global Platts news service.

“Long-term market consequences are likely to be felt on new supply developments as it would restrict the target market for developers of new US LNG projects trying to find new long-term contracts,” Farrer said.

Edward Chow, senior fellow for energy and national security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the short-term effects would be limited by the flexible nature of the LNG trade.

“Once an LNG cargo is on the water, it is essentially fungible,” Chow said. “A U.S. cargo that doesn’t go to China will go elsewhere, while cargoes previously destined for elsewhere will go to China instead.”

With tariffs, China may have had to pay “a slight premium,” said Chow.

The greater significance of tariffs is that they would keep Chinese buyers from making long-term purchase commitments to new U.S. LNG capacity, which the projects need to obtain financing, he said.

Without contracts, China would have to rely more on the uncertain prices of the spot market if it gets into a bind.

“As a rapidly growing LNG market, it is in China’s interest to see new projects go forward,” Chow said.

On Aug. 12, Bloomberg reported that CNPC’s PetroChina may temporarily stop purchases of U.S. LNG spot cargoes through the winter, apparently reflecting concerns that tariffs could be assessed at any time.

The company would boost spot buying from other countries or swap U.S. shipments with other nations to avoid paying tariffs, the report said, citing sources “with knowledge of the strategy.”

Reshuffling LNG supplies

Mikkal Herberg, energy security research director for the Seattle-based National Bureau of Asian Research, agreed that the effect of imposing tariffs on a single LNG producer would likely be limited, given new production in other countries including Papua New Guinea, Russia and Australia.

“This could raise spot prices in the region but likely only for a short period as LNG supplies reshuffle and the market settles out,” he said.

Herberg noted that the sharp rise in China’s LNG prices last winter was due in part to gas shortages that were intensified by pipeline problems. These are unlikely to be repeated, since Central Asian suppliers are planning to increase deliveries this year, he said.

But China’s reluctance to impose tariffs on U.S. LNG imports suggests the government is unwilling to take the risk of contributing to potential shortages.

With or without tariffs, China has shown that it is willing to pay high prices if necessary to meet demand and pursue its anti-smog policies.

“They have paid really high prices last year when necessary,” Herberg said.

LNG prices for China reached a high of U.S. $11.70 (80.40 yuan) per MMBtu last winter, S&P Global Platts said.

Uri Avnery, a peace activist who became the first prominent Israeli to meet in public with Yasser Arafat, died on Monday aged 94.

Avnery, who was an Arab News columnist until 2016 (Click here to read Avnery’s Eurasia Review columns), met the Palestinian leader in 1982 during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and war with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

He crossed into west Beirut from the Israeli-held east to meet Arafat, sparking controversy back home.

It was the first time Arafat had met with an Israeli, and from this perspective, it could be called a “historic meeting,” Avnery wrote in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper in February.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas Monday described Avnery was an “icon of real and permanent peace” in the region, the Palestinian WAFA news agency reported.

“He was one of the first to have strongly endorsed the establishment of the independent Palestinian state and called for ending the Israeli occupation,” Abbas said.

A backbone of Israel’s peace movement, Avnery never lost hope an agreement could be reached with the Palestinians.

He pushed since the end of the first Arab-Israeli war, for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel as a means to bring peace.

Writing in Arab News in 2016 about the increasing levels of hatred between Israelis and Palestinians, Avnery said: “I am convinced that it is in the vital interest of Israel to make peace with the Palestinian people, and with the Arab world at large, before this dangerous infection engulfs the entire Arab, and Muslim world.”

Born in September 1923 in Beckum, Germany as Helmut Ostermann, Avnery emigrated to British-mandate Palestine with his family at the age of 10, fleeing Nazism.

Before becoming a prominent peace activist, he was a soldier and even part of a right-wing militia that fought both British and Arab forces.

He had no regrets about belonging to the group. “I fought for the freedom of my people against the British occupiers,” he said. “For the same reasons, I always thought that the Palestinians were entitled to their independence and freedom.”

In 1950, he founded an independent weekly magazine, Haolam Hazeh, which he edited for 40 years.

He started a political movement in 1965 and was elected to Israel’s parliament where he served eight years.

In 1979 he was voted in as part of a different movement and spent two more years in the Knesset before resigning.

His meeting with Arafat took place after he travelled to Lebanon at the invitation of the Israeli military as part of a reporting trip. It lasted about two hours and “dealt entirely with the possibility of peace between Israel and the Palestinian people,” he wrote.

It was broadcast the same night on Israeli television and Avnery was questioned by police but faced no charges.

In 2003, during the Palestinian uprising, Avnery traveled with other Israeli activists to Arafat’s headquarters in the occupied West Bank, to act as a human shield against what they said were Israeli plans to assassinate Arafat after a Palestinian suicide bombing.

Avnery wrote that working to prevent such an act was “the most patriotic thing” to do at that time since killing Arafat would have been a disaster for Israel.

In Israel, politicians across the political spectrum paid tribute to his work.

Arab politician Ayman Odeh called him “a dear man who dedicated his life to peace.”

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni described him as “a courageous journalist and rare, trailblazing man.”

He maintained “his principles despite attacks and planted in the heart of Israelis ideas of peace and moderation, even when they weren’t in the lexicon,” she said.

President Reuven Rivlin said that his fundamental disagreements with Avnery “were diminished in light of the ambition to build a free and strong society here.”

Avnery had been admitted to Ichilov more than a week ago after suffering from a stroke.

The news from Gaza on August 12 was distressing: The Ministry of Health announced that it would no longer be able to treat cancer patients in the Israel-besieged Strip. “Colon and lung cancer, as well as lymphoma patients, cannot be provided with the necessary therapy now,” said Dr. Mohammed Abu Silmiya, director of Abdulaziz Al-Rantisi Hospital for Children.

Israel is ultimately responsible for the Gaza siege, which has extended for more than 11 years. With direct US backing, Israel has launched three major wars on the Strip in the name of fighting terrorism, destroying much of the tiny region’s infrastructure. A hermetic siege has punished ordinary Gazans, who are now lacking everything, including the most basic needs of clean water and electricity. Now, even chemotherapy is no longer available.

But the war on the Palestinians has been a joint venture right from the start. The US has stood by Israel for many years and, as of late, orchestrated the demise of Gaza.

Washington does everything in its power to isolate the impoverished Strip. It warned Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party against reconciliation with its Hamas rivals. It fuels and sustains the Israeli war and siege on Gaza. And it backs Israel politically on every available platform to shield Tel Aviv from its war crimes in the Strip and throughout the Occupied Territories.

For many years, the US acted as if a peace broker. Although the American act failed to impress Palestinians, it perpetuated the illusion in the minds of US allies that successive administrations were forces for good, standing at an equal distance between two parties in an even-handed “conflict.”

The arrival of Donald Trump in the White House has ended the charade.

While the new administration brazenly defied international law by moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, it also took a series of measures to financially punish international bodies that extended recognition, political support or any sort of aid to Palestinians. In the course of a few months, the US took on the UN cultural agency, UNESCO, pulled out of the UN Human Rights Council and cut aid to the Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA.

The attack on UN organizations was led by US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, who has played a central role in the new, anti-Palestinian discourse. But she is not alone. In an article for CNN, Haley, along with US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, and US special representative for international negotiations Jason Greenblatt, articulated an American point of view that read like textbook Israeli Zionist narrative. They placed all the blame on Palestinians and spared Israel from any wrongdoing.

“Unfortunately,” they wrote, “Hamas’ malign activity is pushing Israel to engage in increasingly significant acts of self-defense. As in the case of past conflicts, Hamas starts a clash, loses the battle and its people suffer. That is the reality that needs to change.”

That was on July 23. A day later, Haley, using twisted language, chastised Arabs for failing Palestine and the Palestinians. In an eight-minute address to the UN, Haley spoke as if a pro-Palestinian activist, agonizing over the losses and suffering of the Palestinian people.

“Country after country claims solidarity with the Palestinian people… Talk is cheap. No group of countries is more generous with their words than the Palestinians’ Arab neighbors,” she said. “But all of the words spoken here in New York do not feed, clothe or educate a single Palestinian child. All they do is get the international community riled up.”

Welcome to “post-truth” America.

While the Arabs are expected — in fact, required — to stand in solidarity with their Palestinian brethren, the primary reason for the subjugation of the Palestinian people is the continued US support for Israel.

Since 1999, the US has supported Israel through 10-year long Memorandums of Understanding. According to these arrangements, support for Israel does not require Senate approval. The last US president to sign a decade-long commitment of funding to Israel, which is set to last from 2019 to 2028, was President Barack Obama, who provided Israel with more money than any other president in US history.

According to the US Congressional Research Service, as of April 2018, “Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance since World War II.” To date, “the United States has provided Israel $134.7 billion in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding.”

Most of that military assistance has been used to fight Palestinians and other Arab neighbors, to support the Israeli military occupation of Palestine, and to reinforce the blockade of Gaza. For Haley to rebuke Arabs for not doing enough to help Palestinians is simply disingenuous.

As harmful as the US military support for Israel and the manipulation of the comparatively limited aid to Palestinians has been, US interference in Palestinian political affairs has been equally destructive. This blatant interference is juxtaposed with complete insubordination to the Israeli government, regardless of the fact that Tel Aviv has moved sharply to the right, and is increasingly shedding any claims to true democracy.

Considering that the US’ anti-Palestine and pro-Israel stances have accentuated in recent months, one is hardly moved by Haley’s false sympathy with Gaza and the Palestinians. Only weeks before she criticized the lack of Arab support, she lectured the international community on Israel’s benevolent approach to what she saw as Palestinian violence.

“No country in this chamber would act with more restraint than Israel has,” she said on May 15, shortly after many UN ambassadors stood for a minute’s silence to mourn the 60 Palestinians who were killed while peacefully protesting the siege at the fence separating Gaza from Israel.

Haley’s peculiar attacks on unsupportive Arab governments is designed to distract from the US’ own role that has emboldened Israel and held Palestinians as prisoners to military occupation and an inhumane siege for far too long.

The Carrizo Plain National Monument is a little-known ecological hotspot in Southern California. Though small, it explodes in wildflowers each spring and is full of threatened or endangered species.

A long-term study led by the University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley tracked how hundreds of species in this valley fared during the historic drought that struck California from 2012 to 2015. It shows surprising winners and losers, uncovering patterns that may be relevant for climate change.

The findings are published in Nature Climate Change.

“The Carrizo Plain is one of the global hotspots of endangered species, with endangered species at every trophic level: plants, rodents, carnivores,” said lead author Laura Prugh, a UW assistant professor of quantitative wildlife sciences, part of the UW School of Environmental and Forestry Sciences. “It also is an ideal laboratory to see how an exceptional climate event affects a whole ecosystem.”

By studying this natural laboratory for many years, researchers found that drought actually helped ecological underdogs by stressing the dominant species. Similar patterns are likely to hold up for other ecosystems, Prugh said.

“We think that even though these extreme climate events, in the short term, can be pretty devastating for some populations, in the long run they might be important in maintaining biodiversity in the system, by keeping inferior competitors from getting pushed out of the system entirely,” she said.

The results also showed surprising losers: carnivores, ranging from foxes to barn owls. These suffered when their favorite prey species became scarce in year three of the drought.

“A lot of times when people think about drought what they’re really concerned about is plants, and there isn’t as much focus on animal populations,” Prugh said. “Our results show that when these extended droughts occur, we really want to pay attention to animals at the top of the food chain, because they’re likely to be hit pretty hard.”

Prugh began the project in 2007 as a postdoctoral researcher with co-author Justin Brashares, at the University of California, Berkeley, to study the giant kangaroo rat and other endangered species that are abundant in the Carrizo Plain. She sought to understand the relationship between different species to see how protecting one might affect the others.

Then in 2012, the drought began — a prolonged dry spell that studies show may be the worst that California has experienced in 1,200 years.

“We saw our sites turn from these areas that were just beautiful and filled with wildflowers in the spring to what really looked like the surface of the moon,” Prugh said. “We realized that we were in a unique position to look at how this historic climate event affected an entire community.”

Field crews collected data on 423 species spanning plants, birds, reptiles, mammals and insects. Their field season went from late March through late August from 2007 onward, with support from the National Science Foundation, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The laborious endeavor took many forms. Researchers cordoned off random plots of land and counted plants inside each square. They dug holes and put pitfall traps to catch insects, and identified everything that fell inside over a two-week period. They set live traps to catch rodents and other small animals during the day, and different traps to catch nocturnal rodents. The volunteer-run Carrizo Plain Christmas Bird Count provided the best numbers for birds. While driving around at night, researchers shone flashlights to look for reflections off the eyes of nocturnal animals. Observers counted the numbers of pronghorn antelope and tule elk from small airplanes.

Over the years, the fate of hundreds of species show how the prolonged drought affected the ecosystem:

• Plants suffered immediately from the drought, and the impacts grew gradually more severe every year
• Giant kangaroo rats remained plentiful during the first and second year of the drought, but in the third year their numbers plummeted 11-fold
• As populations of dominant species collapsed, plant and animals that had been rare became less so, including several other species of kangaroo rats
• Some 4 percent of 423 species were named “winners” because their overall numbers actually increased during the drought
• Toward the end of the drought, carnivores, such as coyotes, badgers and hawks, were the hardest hit, likely because their giant kangaroo rat prey had grown scarce

“If we’d given up earlier or narrowed our efforts, we would have missed this rare and powerful opportunity to quantify how an ecological community is impacted by a major environmental shock,” Brashares said. “Such shocks are intensifying on our rapidly changing planet, and we can’t predict and manage their effects if we don’t have studies in place to monitor them.”

Since the drought ended in 2015, the Carrizo Plain ecosystem has bounced back and the giant kangaroo rat population has also recovered.

“In terms of implications for climate change, it gives some cause for optimism in showing that ecosystems have a remarkable ability to handle some of these extreme events,” Prugh said.

Results suggest that focusing on how key prey species respond to a drought could help to predict the fate of top predators, Prugh said, and those key prey species could become a focus for conservation efforts.

A new study led by scientists from the University of Bristol has used a combination of genomic and fossil data to explain the history of life on Earth, from its origin to the present day.

Palaeontologists have long sought to understand ancient life and the shared evolutionary history of life as a whole.

However, the fossil record of early life is extremely fragmented, and its quality significantly deteriorates further back in time towards the Archaean period, more than 2.5 billion years ago, when the Earth’s crust had cooled enough to allow the formation of continents and the only life forms were microbes.

Holly Betts, lead author of the study, from the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, said: “There are few fossils from the Archaean and they generally cannot be unambiguously assigned to the lineages we are familiar with, like the blue-green algae or the salt-loving archaebacteria that colours salt-marshes pink all around the world.

“The problem with the early fossil record of life is that it is so limited and difficult to interpret – careful reanalysis of the some of the very oldest fossils has shown them to be crystals, not fossils at all.”

Fossil evidence for the early history of life is so fragmented and difficult to evaluate that new discoveries and reinterpretations of known fossils have led to a proliferation of conflicting ideas about the timescale of the early history of life.

Co-author Professor Philip Donoghue, also from Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, added: “Fossils do not represent the only line of evidence to understand the past. A second record of life exists, preserved in the genomes of all living creatures.”

Co-author Dr Tom Williams, from Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences, said: “Combining fossil and genomic information, we can use an approach called the ‘molecular clock’ which is loosely based on the idea that the number of differences in the genomes of two living species (say a human and a bacterium) are proportional to the time since they shared a common ancestor.”

By making use of this method the team at Bristol and Mark Puttick from the University of Bath were able to derive a timescale for the history of life on Earth that did not rely on the ever-changing age of the oldest accepted fossil evidence of life.

Co-author Professor Davide Pisani said: “Using this approach we were able to show that the Last Universal Common Ancestor all cellular life forms, ‘LUCA’, existed very early in Earth’s history, almost 4.5 Billion years ago – not long after Earth was impacted by the planet Theia, the event which sterilised Earth and led to the formation of the Moon.

“This is significantly earlier than the currently accepted oldest fossil evidence would suggest.

“Our results indicate that two “primary” lineages of life emerged from LUCA (the Eubacteria and the Archaebacteria), approximately one Billion years after LUCA.

“This result is testament to the power of genomic information, as it is impossible, based on the available fossil information, to discriminate between the oldest eubacterial and archaebacterial fossil remains.”

The study confirms modern views that the eukaryotes, the lineage to which human life belongs (together with the plants and the fungi, for example), is not a primary lineage of life. Professor Pisani added: “It is rather humbling to think we belong to a lineage that is billions of years younger than life itself.”

An earlier spring may sound nice, unless you’re a New England lobster.

New findings reveal that as coastal waters in the northeastern U.S. continue to warm–bottom temperatures in Long Island Sound have increased 0.7°F per decade over the last 40 years–resident lobsters are becoming increasingly susceptible to epizootic shell disease, a condition that has depleted the southern New England population and severely impacted the local lobster fishery.

The findings stem from a collaboration between William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science and Dominion Energy’s Millstone Environmental Laboratory. The lab maintains a unique, long-term record of lobster abundance and health in waters near Dominion Energy’s Millstone Power Station in Waterford, Connecticut.

The research, funded by NOAA’s Saltonstall-Kennedy Program and led by then postdoctoral associate Maya Groner of VIMS, suggests that the increased prevalence of shell disease in area lobsters stems from two factors–an earlier onset of warmth-induced spring molting, and hotter summers.

Groner and her co-authors–professors Jeff Shields and John Hoenig of VIMS along with Don Landers and John Swenarton of the Millstone Lab–published the results of their work in the most recent issue of American Naturalist.

“We used the lab’s mark-recapture dataset, now going on 37 years, to investigate relationships between temperature, molting phenology, and ESD [epizootic shell disease],” said Groner, currently a research ecologist at the Prince William Sound Science Center in Alaska. Phenology refers to the study of how plant and animal life is affected by seasonal changes.

“Our work shows that temperature increases due to climate change have caused a phenological shift in the molting patterns of lobsters, making them more susceptible to the disease,” said Groner. The team’s results pertain mostly to male and juvenile lobsters, as females have a different molting pattern, typically molting every two years in the region.

As the name implies, epizootic shell disease occurs when the bacterial populations that normally inhabit the surface of a lobster’s carapace change and begin consuming the cuticle, causing it to erode.

An earlier study by Hoenig, Groner, Shields, and colleagues using the same Millstone dataset showed that mortality due to epizootic shell disease can be as high as 70% in diseased lobsters. “This type of dataset is extremely rare,” said Shields, “and allowed us to determine that diseased lobsters have a much lower survival rate than healthy ones.”

The current study shows that when a diseased lobster molts, discarding and replacing its shell in order to grow, it essentially sets the disease clock back to zero. Thus when spring warmth–a seasonal cue for lobster molting–arrives earlier in the year, lobsters also molt earlier in the year, giving the disease a jumpstart on its progression into and through the summer months.

The researchers found that for every 1.8°F increase in the average May bottom-water temperature, lobsters molted about 6 days earlier in spring. In turn, during early-molting years–defined as those in which at least 5% of lobsters were observed to molt in May–disease prevalence in September doubled from about 15% to more than 30% relative to later-molting years. During the latter years, only 1% of lobsters were observed to molt in May, and the remainder in June or subsequent months.

The research team discovered that disease prevalence in October correlates even more strongly with summer heat. In years with 90 days exceeding 68°F they detected epizootic shell disease in around 65% of lobsters, but found only 40% were diseased when the summer had 50 or fewer days above that threshold. In years with both warm springs and warm summers, disease could exceed 80%. Indeed, 2012, one of the warmest years in recent history, had the highest disease prevalence of all years for both juveniles and adult males.

Broader impacts

In addition to the observed impacts in Long Island Sound, the researchers say their findings portend troubling possibilities for lobster populations elsewhere in the rapidly warming waters of New England.

“Recent increases in the prevalence of ESD in the Gulf of Maine–home to the largest lobster stock in the U.S.–have raised concerns that the disease is expanding northward,” said Shields. “If summer temperatures in the Gulf reach levels conducive to ESD within the next few decades–as expected under ‘business as usual’ climate projections–we’re concerned that it will lead to earlier molting in the spring and less molting during the summer, when lobsters are most susceptible to the disease.”

If that’s the case, he said, “then disease may increase substantially.”

The courts have played a central role in climate change policy, starting with a landmark Supreme Court case that led to the mandatory regulation of greenhouse gases in the United States. How do the courts address climate cases today? Who wins, who loses and what kinds of strategies make a difference in the courtroom?

Researchers at the George Washington University (GW) have published a study in Nature Climate Change that for the first time analyzes all U.S climate change lawsuits over a 26-year period.

“This first-of-a-kind study outlines the types of climate change lawsuits that are more likely to win or lose, and why,” said lead author Sabrina McCormick, PhD, MA, an Associate Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health at GW’s Milken Institute School of Public Health (Milken Institute SPH). “Efforts to affect U.S. climate change policy should consider current trends in the courtroom.”

McCormick and her colleagues collected and analyzed all climate change cases from 1990 through 2016, for a total of 873 lawsuits. The team also interviewed 78 lawyers, advocates and scientists involved in these cases in order to find out more about the evidence and strategies they typically use in building a case.

The researchers found the most common climate issues brought to court involved coal-fired power plants and other air quality concerns. Litigants asking the courts for more regulations to curb emissions more frequently lost than won such lawsuits, the study found. In such cases, the courts may be swayed by the industry argument that regulations to cut down on emissions will affect a plant’s bottom line, although effects on health and welfare have not been measured.

“At the same time, litigants who want to address climate change often win renewable energy and energy efficiency cases,” McCormick said. “The courts favored the pro-regulatory positions in these kinds of cases by a ratio of 2.6 to 1.”

Such cases may be an underappreciated opportunity for litigants who want more government regulation in the climate change arena, she said.

The study identified four typical goals of pro-regulatory plaintiffs in climate change lawsuits: force government regulators to take steps to reduce greenhouse gases; change corporate behavior; assign responsibility for impacts; and change the public debate.

Strategies that lawyers commonly cited in such lawsuits included the use of climate science and other types of data as well as collaborations to form a coalition of plaintiffs. Such coalitions can be an effective strategy, especially if they include individuals or states who have been harmed by some aspect of climate change, McCormick said.

Winning might not be the only consideration in bringing a lawsuit, said McCormick’s co-author Robert L. Glicksman, JD, the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law at the GW Law School. In some interviews, lawyers said that even if they lost a case, the arguments often lead to greater public awareness of the issues involved with climate change, Glicksman said.

“The Trump Administration’s refusal to even acknowledge human contributions to climate change, no less pursue any meaningful action to mitigate or adapt to it, coupled with Congress’s persistent inaction on climate issues, makes efforts to address climate change in the courts all the more important,” Glicksman said. “Our study assesses how such efforts have fared.”

Attempts by some political parties to pressure Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri into normalizing relations with Syria have further complicated the government formation process, which is deadlocked by disputes among several parties on portfolios and shares.

Officials following up Hariri’s consultations on the next cabinet, told Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper that ties with Syria have been added to the obstacles facing Hariri.

However, the Free Patriotic Movement’s caretaker Minister of State for Presidency Affairs Pierre Raffoul told a local radio station that Hariri’s outright rejection of establishing relations with the regime of Bashar Assad is not considered an obstacle to government formation.

Caretaker Justice Minister Salim Jreissati, also an FPM official, threw the ball in Hariri’s court when tweeting that the month of August could witness a solution to the “government captivity” if Hariri makes his choices.

Yet the obstacles remained even when the PM-designate proposed several solutions, al-Mustaqbal MP Nazih Najem told Asharq Al-Awsat.

He said that the stalemate is the result of attempts by some parties to make gains rather than work for the interest of the country and the people.

“The greatest share should go to the Lebanese people who have elected their representatives,” Najem told the daily.

Democratic Gathering lawmaker Bilal Abdullah also warned that promises made by Lebanese officials would disappear into thin air, if some politicians continued to interfere in Hariri’s mission to come up with a line-up.

The premier-designate warned last week that “the cabinet will not be formed” if the normalization of relations with the Syrian regime is included in the new government’s policy statement.
Original source

By Danijel Kovacevic

After media claims that he was about to removed from a blacklist, the US embassy in Sarajevo said the Bosnian Serb leader remained under sanctions because of the risk he represented to the 1995 peace agreement.

The US embassy in Bosnia told BIRN on Monday that American sanctions on Milorad Dodik could not be removed easily, despite local media reports that the US would soon lift a travel and property embargo against the Bosnian Serb leader.

Media reports said the president of Bosnia’s mainly Serbian entity would be removed from the list of persons sanctioned by the US Treasury Department early next year, or by spring at the latest.

The claim came only three days after the American authorities announced a blacklist for 2018, with Dodik’s name again on it; he was added to the list in January 2017.

The embassy recalled that the US sanctioned Dodik because he represented a significant risk to implementation of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the 1992-5 war in Bosnia.

“The sanctions are serious, they are not easy to introduce or withdraw lightly”, the US embassy told BIRN on Monday.

“Removing someone’s name from that list requires a long-term and independent administrative assessment … determined in Washington and not timely conditioned by political events or activities,” it added.

Media, including the Belgrade-based daily Blic, citing unnamed sources, claimed that personnel changes would take place in the US Treasury by the end of the year, and that the new people would be close to lobbyists that the Dodik’s Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, SNSD, recently hired.

At the end of June, the SNSD hired American political campaign experts and former Donald Trump campaign associates Jason Osborne and Michael Rubino.

The two former associates of Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, established the company Twin Rocks Global on July 13. Twelve days later, they were registered as official lobbyists of the SNSD.

Osborne and Rubio were performing unspecified “strategic guidance and counsel with regard to government affairs and public relations activity within the US” for the SNSD, according to a disclosure filed on July 25 with the Justice Department.

One result of the lobbying efforts was a meeting between RS Prime Minister Zeljka Cvijanovic and Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, a source from the SNSD told BIRN.

The US-based magazine Mother Jones said the SNSD agreed to pay 10,000 US dollars per month for three months to an American lobbying company for its services.

On January 17, 2017, the US Treasury confirmed sanctions against Dodik for obstructing the peace agreement that ended the war of 1992 to 1995, saying he had defied rulings of Bosnia’s Constitutional Court.

The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, OFAC, stated that the RS President was sanctioned “for his role in defying the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina in violation of the rule of law, thereby actively obstructing the Dayton Accords”.

“By obstructing the Dayton Accords, Milorad Dodik poses a significant threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” John E. Smith, Acting Director of OFAC, said.

The sanctions block Dodik’s access to assets or interest in property in the US or within the US’s jurisdiction. US individuals are also prohibited from engaging in transactions with him.

Dodik called it a “desperate move from the old [Barack Obama] administration”, and said that the Trump’s administration would change it. But nothing has happened.

The direct reason for the US sanctions was the January 9 celebration of a public holiday in the RS, the Day of Republika Srpska, which the country’s Constitutional Court had banned.

Dodik had also staged a referendum in September 2016, to garner public support for the celebration, which the Constitutional Court also banned on the basis that the holiday was linked to the Serbian Orthodox Church calendar and was thereby discriminatory against non-Serbs living in the entity.

(RFE/RL) — U.S. President Donald Trump said in an interview with Reuters that he isn’t considering lifting sanctions on Russia, but he would consider it if Russia gave him something he wants in Ukraine or Syria.

“I’m not considering it at all. No. I would consider it if they do something that would be good for us. But I wouldn’t consider it without that,” Trump said in the interview released late on August 20.

Trump then suggested areas where he could foresee making a deal with Russia over sanctions.

“We have a lot of things we can do good for each other. You have Syria. You have Ukraine. You have many other things,” he said.

Trump told Reuters that Putin did not ask him to lift U.S. sanctions during their summit in Helsinki last month. But he said the two in a private meeting that lasted nearly two hours did talk about Russia’s annexation of Crimea and incursion into eastern Ukraine, and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany that will supply natural gas to Germany.

“I mentioned Crimea, sure. I always mention Crimea whenever I mention Ukraine. Putin and I had a very good discussion. It was a very — I think it was a very good discussion for both parties. I mentioned the gas pipeline going to Germany,” Trump said.

On an issue related to sanctions — Russia’s faltering economy — Trump told Reuters Putin seemed eager for help.

“I think they would like economic development. And that’s a big thing for them,” he said.

“We had a very good, I guess, close to two-hour meeting. We had another good meeting with a lot of our representatives there. We talked about Israel, we talked about insecurity for Israel, we talked about Syria, we talked about Ukraine,” he said.

Osteoporosis is estimated to affect 200 million women across the world. In Germany, the prevalence of this chronic disease among people aged 50 years and older is around 15%. In recent decades, several authors have analyzed the impact of osteoporosis on the risk of cognitive decline, but, most of these studies have been conducted outside Europe.

The goal of the present study was to investigate the impact of osteoporosis on the risk of developing dementia in almost 60,000 patients followed for up to 20 years in more than 1,200 general practices in Germany.

“There is big interest in the relationship between osteoporosis and dementia,” explained lead investigator Prof. Karel Kostev, Dr MS, from the Epidemiology Team of IQVIA, Frankfurt, Germany. “This study is the first to address this question in a very large database enabling the case-control-comparison between patients with and without osteoporosis.”

This retrospective cohort study used data from the Disease Analyzer database (IQVIA), which compiles information on drug prescriptions, diagnoses, and demographic data obtained directly and in anonymous format from computer systems used by general practitioners and specialists. This database has already been used in several studies focusing on osteoporosis and dementia in recent years.

The study included patients diagnosed with osteoporosis between January 1993 and December 2012 (index date) and were followed for up to 20 years. After applying similar inclusion criteria, controls were matched (1:1) to osteoporosis patients using propensity scores based on age, gender, index year, several comorbidities, and co-therapies. The main outcome of the study was to determine the proportion of patients with all-cause-dementia diagnoses within 20 years of the index date.

The present study included 29,983 patients with osteoporosis and 29,983 controls without osteoporosis. After 20 years of follow-up, 20.5% of women with osteoporosis and 16.4% of controls had been diagnosed with dementia (p-value<0.001). At the end of the follow-up period, dementia was found in 22.0% of men previously diagnosed with osteoporosis and 14.9% of men without this chronic condition (p-value<0.001). Osteoporosis was associated with a 1.2-fold increase in the risk of being diagnosed with dementia in women and a 1.3-fold increase in the risk of being diagnosed with dementia in men.

“The major hypothesis to explain the association between osteoporosis and dementia is that these two conditions have similar risk factors noted co-author Louis Jacob, MD, from the university clinic of Paris 5, “These factors include APOE4 allele of the apolipoprotein E, a major cholesterol carrier, lower vitamin K levels, vitamin D deficiency, but also androgens and estrogens.”.

The main limitations of the study are missing data on bone mineral density and on lifestyle-related risk factors (e.g., smoking, alcohol, and physical activity). The strengths of this work are the number of patients available for analysis, the duration of follow-up, and the use of real-world data pertaining to diagnoses in primary care practices where diagnoses are continuously documented, allowing for unbiased exposure assessment (no recall bias).

By Andrew Lumsden*

Last month, Sir Ronald Sanders, Antigua and Barbuda’s ambassador to the United States, sought support in a speech before a meeting of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) in Geneva, Switzerland. He lamented that his country is “losing all hope” that its 15-year-long trade dispute with the United States will be amicably settled through private, bilateral negotiations. Sanders is, furthermore, considering asking the WTO’s head to mediate a solution.[i]

In 2003, Antigua and Barbuda, a nation little larger than Washington D.C., with a GDP barely exceeding 1 billion USD, challenged the world’s foremost economic power before the WTO over the latter’s crackdown on American participation in offshore online gambling, an industry which had been a pillar of the island nation’s tiny economy. [ii] Washington has refused to comply with WTO rulings in Antigua’s favor or agree to a financial settlement. Antiguan officials had hoped that the catastrophic devastation the island nation suffered in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma would compel Washington to change its position, but so far nothing has changed.

As the Council on Hemispheric Affairs noted in a 2013 report, the United States “must exist in the brave new world it helped create.”[iii] The U.S.’ handling of this dispute is inconsistent with the values that it champions, including moral leadership and the rule of law. Settling this dispute, particularly in the form of a humanitarian contribution would bode little cost for the U.S. economy and provide desperately needed relief to those still suffering from Irma’s devastation. Keeping this trade rift alive not only harms the reputation of the United States but may also set the stage for larger trade disputes in the future.

Antiguan Roulette

In 1994, Antigua and Barbuda enacted the Free Trade and Processing Zone Act, opening the door for companies based in the country to legally offer online gambling services. Antigua’s status as the only country offering such legal protection for online gambling enticed foreign companies and entrepreneurs to relocate to the island during the late 1990s. This influx led to dramatic growth in the local gaming industry. By 1999 there were 119 licensed online casino operators in Antigua, which employed more than 3,000 people, paid out over 12 million USD in wages and over 7 million USD to the government in licensing fees.[iv] By the year 2000, 61% of all online gambling activity on Earth was based in Antigua.[v]

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, around 60% of online gamblers were U.S. citizens. Federal and state officials in the U.S. were deeply alarmed by the growth of the cross-border online gambling industry.[vi] They feared it would expose minors to gambling and facilitate criminal fraud and money laundering operations.[vii] Although internet gambling was not specifically discussed in U.S. law at the time, the Department of Justice began cracking down on these online casinos in 1998. They argued that the practice violated the Wire Act of 1961, which restricts the placing of bets via wire-based methods of communication. [viii] That year, federal agents arrested 21 Americans for either operating or participating in online casinos, some based in Antigua.[ix] Several state attorneys-general also began pressuring U.S. banks and money transfer companies, including PayPal and Western Union, to block credit card and other transactions related to offshore online gambling, to great success.[x]

The Two Against the Ace

The U.S. crackdown had an immediate, severe impact on Antigua’s gambling industry. According to the Antiguan Directorate of Gaming, between 2001 and 2002, 12 licensed online gambling companies operating on the island either shut down or relocated. Around 700 industry jobs were lost, and state revenue from online casino licensing fees and taxes declined by 11.8%.[xi] Antigua approached the WTO in March 2003, arguing that U.S. gambling restrictions were not only damaging its economy but also violated Washington’s commitment to free trade enshrined in the 1995 General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). A WTO panel ruled in Antigua’s favor in 2004 and rejected a U.S. appeal the following year. The WTO ordered Washington to amend its gambling laws by April 2006. The U.S. failed to comply with the ruling.[xii]

In 2007, a WTO arbiter estimated that U.S. anti-gambling policies were costing Antigua an estimated 21 million USD a year.[xiii] In response to this estimate and Washington’s noncompliance, St. John’s requested permission to retaliate by suspending enforcement of U.S. intellectual property laws. This would allow Antigua to sell American media content, including films and music, over the internet without paying royalties to the creators.[xiv] The request was granted in 2013, but Antigua declined to implement the sanction and, instead, has sought a monetary settlement from the United States through private negotiations.[xv] These, however, have been unsuccessful, as Washington has maintained that the WTO had no right to demand changes to “fundamental legitimate public policies” of a member state, and that the data Antigua has presented detailing the gaming industry’s value to its economy was “unreliable.”[xvi]

Irma Changes the Game

Although Antiguan officials made a few public comments about the trade dispute over the following four years, it largely lost international attention until September 2017 when Hurricane Irma, a category five storm with winds up to 185mph, struck the nation. Irma made landfall on the small island of Barbuda on the sixth, destroying 95 percent of its buildings. This devastation, and fears that the island would be hit again by the oncoming hurricanes Jose and Maria, Barbuda’s 1,800 residents were evacuated.[xvii] Barbuda was spared from the other storms, but Irma caused roughly 300 million USD in damages, more than one-fifth of the nation’s GDP. [xviii] To this day, less than half of displaced Barbudans have been able to return.[xix]

Because of the broader economic damage it created, Hurricane Irma steeled St. John’s’ resolve to settle the trade dispute once and for all. In a WTO meeting, two weeks after the storm, Ambassador Sanders announced that the United States had only offered less than 2 million USD in restitution, a sum St. John’s considered unacceptable as it represents only one-one hundredth the total damages U.S. policies have cost Antigua over the past decade.[xx] In October 2017, Antigua and Barbuda’s Prime Minister, Gaston Browne, told the Los Angeles Times that U.S. restrictions have “destroyed” his country’s gambling industry, which now employs only a tenth the amount of people it did in the early 2000s.[xxi] He noted that U.S. damages to Antigua’s economy now amounted to over 200 million USD, and insisted that while he does not expect Washington to pay this amount in full, he asks that it provide “something substantive to compensate for the damages over the years.”[xxii]

Irma’s devastation and Antiguan officials’ pleas did little to soften Washington’s position. U.S officials did not speak publicly on the trade dispute in 2017, but blasted St. John’s after Sanders brought up the issue again at this year’s WTO dispute body meeting. The U.S.’ WTO envoy accused Antigua of failing to respond to the Trump administration’s offer of further negotiations and, of making “extreme demands,” arguing that St. John’s is trying to make “a political statement” instead of genuinely engaging in finding a resolution.[xxiii]

An American Gamble

The United States has little reason not to settle its Antiguan dispute with a payment at or near the calculated costs of Antigua’s trade damages, and, it is in fact in its best interest to do so. The U.S. argument that the WTO has no authority over a nation’s domestic legislation is no longer relevant. Furthermore, the U.S. argument that Antigua has submitted flawed data to the WTO in its claim is undermined by the fact that the WTO’s 2007 valuation of Antigua’s damages was based on an independent investigation. Washington has recently introduced a new defense, arguing that monetary settlements are not discussed as a resolution for disputes under WTO rules[xxiv] However, in 2014 the United States agreed to pay a 300 million USD settlement to Brazil regarding a WTO dispute over cotton subsidies.[xxv]

Allowing this dispute to continue could very easily have seriously detrimental consequences for the United States, and potentially the world, over the coming years. This is in part because the United States also relies on the WTO to counter trade practices by other nations that it feels are unfair and harmful to its economy. Since 2009, Washington has filed nearly 30 complaints with the WTO (five since President Donald Trump took office), primarily against China, India and the European Union (EU).[xxvi] Ironically, the United States has also been a victim of noncompliance. In 2011, the EU failed to end subsidies for the aircraft manufacturing company Airbus, as ordered by the WTO in a suit brought by the United States[xxvii]Furthermore, just this past January, the Trump Administration issued a scathing report detailing several cases of China flouting unfavorable WTO rulings, and, declaring Beijing’s noncompliance as a cause for unilateral imposition of tariffs against Beijing, the first of which took effect in July 2018.[xxviii] Continued U.S noncompliance with WTO rulings in the Antiguan dispute could, and likely will, be cited by other states to justify their own refusal to comply with future WTO rulings. This outcome would lead to the proliferation of tariffs and further undermine international economic stability and free trade.

The U.S-Antiguan dispute also threatens to eat away at Washington’s relationships with other Caribbean nations, many of which have already made it clear whose side they are on. During this year’s WTO-DSB meeting, the representatives of Barbados, Dominica, and Jamaica all issued statements supporting Antigua, while no WTO member spoke in Washington’s favor.[xxix] It is particularly important for the United States to maintain strong relationships with the Caribbean community, as rivals, particularly China, are working tirelessly to expand their geopolitical, economic and increasingly, military influence in the region.[xxx]

A Winning Strategy

An amicable settlement to this dispute, on the other hand, could be of great, long-term benefit to both the United States and Antigua and Barbuda. As Todd Tucker, a fellow at the New York-based Roosevelt Institute, suggested in 2017, the United States could pay restitution to Antigua in the form of direct humanitarian aid.[xxxi] This course of action would be mutually beneficial to the United States and the people of Antigua and Barbuda. A settlement could contribute substantially to ongoing reconstruction efforts, particularly on Barbuda, which still suffers from extensive infrastructural damage. Between February and June 2018, a 2 million USD initiative funded by China successfully repaired the roofs of more than 250 buildings on Barbuda, including homes and healthcare facilities.[xxxii] A U.S. settlement, which would likely total 100 times that amount, would accomplish so much more and enhance Washington’s image in the increasingly geopolitically competitive Caribbean region. Furthermore, even if Antigua has been unresponsive to recent outreach attempts as the United States has alleged, this settlement offer could simply be made in publicly.

As to the costs of a settlement, even a payment of the full amount of damages to Antigua, which now totals 315 million USD, would mean little for the United States. Washington spent 45 billion USD on foreign aid programs in 2017 alone.[xxxiii] A sizable portion of this money even went to countries with strained or adversarial relations with the United States, including China (29 million USD), Russia (17 million USD in 2016), [North] Sudan (151 million USD) and Venezuela (9 million USD in 2016).[xxxiv] Unlike these states, St. John’s has insisted that it considers Washington a generations-long “friend,” and cites its American artists who have “contributed much to the enjoyment and advancement of the world,” as its reasoning for not exercising its right to retaliate.[xxxv] Antigua deserves a friendly ending to this unfortunate dispute.

Conclusion

Whatever the outcome, the Antiguan-U.S. trade dispute highlights a critical flaw present in nearly all international institutions. Means of enforcement are limited and the overwhelming advantages that large, wealthy states have over their less powerful counterparts—which such organizations were designed to negate—persist. However, the United States, as the architect and longtime champion of the rules-based international order, has an obligation to adhere to the rule of law. An amicable settlement could provide much-needed relief to thousands of people in Antigua and Barbuda still struggling to recover from a historic storm.

*Andrew Lumsden, Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs

Additional editorial support provided by Research Associate Jonathan Goodman, Research Associate Rachel Rosenberg, Extramural Editor Bem Tannenbaum, Senior Research Fellow Jim Baer, and Director Larry Birns.

Notes:
[i] Tom Miles, “Antigua “losing all hope” of U.S. payout in gambling dispute,” Reuters, June 22, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-trade-antigua/antigua-losing-all-hope-of-u-s-payout-in-gambling-dispute-idUSKBN1JI0VZ.

[ii] “CIA World Factbook: Antigua and Barbuda,” Central Intelligence Agency, accessed July 9, 2018, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ac.html.

[iii] “Pirating in the Caribbean: Antigua and the United States face-off in a Trade Battle,” Council on Hemispheric Affairs, February 8, 2013, http://www.coha.org/pirating-in-the-caribbean-antigua-and-the-united-states-face-off-in-a-trade-battle/.

[iv] “Before the Panel of the World Trade Organisation on United States-Measures Affecting the Cross-Border Supply of Gambling and Betting Services: First Submission of Antigua and Barbuda,” World Trade Organization, October 1, 2003, http://www.antiguawto.com/wto/06_AB_1st_%20Submission_1Oct03.pdf.

[v] “Antigua Economic and Gambling Data,” Antigua Online Gaming Association, accessed July 5, 2018, http://www.antiguawto.com/WTO_Economic_gambling_data.html.

[vi] Isaac Wohl, “The Antigua-United States Online Gambling Dispute,” United States International Trade Commission, July 2009, accessed July 5, 2018, https://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/journals/online_gambling_dispute.pdf.

[vii] “Before the Panel of the World Trade Organisation on United States-Measures Affecting the Cross-Border Supply of Gambling and Betting Services: First Written Submission of the United States” World Trade Organization, November 7, 2003, http://www.antiguawto.com/wto/10_US_1st_Written_submission_7Nov03.pdf.

[viii] Ibid,.

[ix] Ibid,.

[x] David O. Stewart, “An Analysis of Internet Gambling and its Policy Implications,” American Gaming Magazine, accessed July 5, 2018, www.americangaming.org/sites/default/files/research_files/wpaper_internet_0531.pdf.

[xi] “Antigua Economic and Gambling Data,” Antigua Online Gaming Association.

[xii] “DS285: United States — Measures Affecting the Cross-Border Supply of Gambling and Betting Services” World Trade Organization, accessed July 5, 2018, https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds285_e.htm.

[xiii] Ibid,.

[xiv] Ibid,.

[xv] Tom Miles, “Storm-battered Antigua asks U.S. to settle 12-year old WTO bill,” Reuters, September 29, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-antigua-wto/storm-battered-antigua-asks-u-s-to-settle-12-year-old-wto-bill-idUSKCN1C4165.

[xvi] “Before the Panel of the World Trade Organisation on United States-Measures Affecting the Cross-Border Supply of Gambling and Betting Services: Comments of the United States to the Answers of Antigua and Barbuda,” World Trade Organization, November 13, 2007, http://www.antiguawto.com/wto/83_US_Cmts_AB_Ans_ArbQ_13nov07.pdf.

[xvii] Kate Lyons, “The night Barbuda died: how Hurricane Irma created a Caribbean ghost town,” The Guardian, November 20, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/nov/20/the-night-barbuda-died-how-hurricane-irma-created-a-caribbean-ghost-town.

[xviii]“Regional Overview: Impact of Hurricanes Irma and Maria” United Nations Development Program, accessed July 5, 2018, https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/UNDP%20%20Regional%20Overview%20Impact%20of%20Hurricanes%20Irma%20and%20Maria.pdf.

[xix] Gemma Handy, “Barbuda sees a comeback of national bird after Hurricane Irma,” British Broadcasting Company, June 25, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-44547090.

[xx] Miles, Reuters, 2017.

[xxi] Simmons, Los Angeles Times.

[xxii] Ibid,.

[xxiii] Miles, Reuters, 2017.

[xxiv] “WTO members review requests for panels on Canadian wine sale measures, US fish duties,” World Trade Organization, June 22, 2018, https://www.wto.org/english/news_e/news18_e/dsb_22jun18_e.htm.

[xxv] Vicki Needham, “US, Brazil settle cotton dispute,” The Hill, October 1, 2014, http://thehill.com/policy/finance/219434-us-brazil-settle-cotton-dispute

[xxvi] “Chronological list of disputes cases,” World Trade Organization, accessed July 9, 2018, https://www.wto.org/english/tratope/dispue/dispustatuse.htm

[xxvii] “The United States Challenges EU Non-Compliance in WTO Airbus Ruling,” Office of the United States Trade Representative, December 1, 2011, https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-releases/2011/december/united-states-challenges-eu-non-compliance-wto-ai.

[xxviii] Ibid; “Trade war begins as China strikes back against US over tariffs,” Al Jazeera, July 6, 2018, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/07/tariffs-effect-china-warns-counterattack-180706054543298.html.

[xxix] “WTO members review requests for panels on Canadian wine sale measures, US fish duties,” World Trade Organization.

[xxx]“Chronological list of disputes cases,” World Trade Organization.

[xxxi] Simmons, Los Angeles Times.

[xxxii] “China-funded roofing project on Barbuda meets target of 250 homes,” Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency, June 28, 2018, cdema.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1795:china-funded-roofing-project-on-barbuda-meets-target-of-250-homes-&catid=42:antigua&Itemid=268

[xxxiii] Theres Lessing, “US foreign aid: How is it spent?,” International Growth Centre, March 19, 2018, https://www.theigc.org/blog/us-foreign-aid-spent/.

[xxxiv] “U.S. Foreign Aid by Country: China,” United States Agency for International Development, accessed July 9, 2018, https://explorer.usaid.gov/cd/CHN; “U.S. Foreign Aid by Country: Russia,” United States Agency for International Development, accessed July 9, 2018, https://explorer.usaid.gov/cd/RUS; “U.S. Foreign Aid by Country: Sudan,” United States Agency for International Development, accessed July 9, 2018, https://explorer.usaid.gov/cd/SDN; “U.S. Foreign Aid by Country: Venezeula,” United States Agency for International Development, accessed July 9, 2018, https://explorer.usaid.gov/cd/VEN

[xxxv] Miles, Reuters, 2017.

The terror attack on Charlie Hebdo opened numerous debates between strategic and military experts, who argued extensively on the EU’s domestic and external intelligence operational capabilities. Some questioned the unholy cooperation on intelligence, while some called for a systematic restructuring of intelligence and security services institutions within the EU. Keeping in mind the immediate issue of foreign fighter returnees, which continues to engage intelligence and security establishments within the EU, demands to strengthen intelligence exchanges have reached an ever-higher pitch. The aforementioned debate is neither new nor unforeseen. With every successful terror attack, the experts’ pitch on effective intelligence cooperation continues to take on more importance. However, such demands for effective and efficient cooperation between intelligence agencies have drastically neglected the essence and doctrine of said institutions. This does not necessarily undermine the need for effective and timely intelligence cooperation, but rather points out the need for such institutions to maximize their operational capability within their area of operations. However, the EU over the past decade has adopted numerous measures to strengthen intelligence cooperation and inter-agency coordination. Sadly, in many cases this merely looks good on paper.

Understanding the EU’s Institutional Architecture

In an effort to overcome challenges in the field, the EU has employed new measures and increased operationally vital resources for intelligence analysis, cooperation, and inter-agency interaction. Within the EU, intelligence cooperation occurs at three different levels: law enforcement, internal security, foreign policy. Under EU architecture, intelligence assistance is predominantly received by security and foreign policy-centric institutions. This extensive interaction is made possible by many supporting institutions, such as the European Union External Action Service (EEAS) which principally focusses on EU-centric tasks. The responsibility for analyzing intelligence rests with the European Union Intelligence and Situation Centre (EUIntCen) which operates under defined jurisdiction, broadly exercising intelligence exchange with designated partners. It is a quasi-domestic intelligence agency which is also tasked with monitoring terror threats emanating inside the EU.

The responsibility to neutralize external threats rests with EU’s Military Staff Intelligence Directorate, which reinforces the Intelligence and Situation Centre while operating from a military standpoint. The joint reports published by the aforementioned institutions are released under the Single Intelligence Analysis Capacity (SIAC) framework. To provide real time geographical insight, the European Union Satellite Centre externally reinforces the aforementioned institutions on an as-needed basis and provides them with accurate imaginary intelligence.

Furthermore, the EU also hosts intelligence exchange between multiple law enforcement agencies. However, the exchange of information occurs in a limited capacity as the responsibility rests largely on the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol), whose focus is dictated by the requirements of EU member nations rather than EU-centric activities as a whole.

Exchanges of information used to occur externally of the EU. They were brought under its jurisdiction by the Europol Convention before formally acknowledging and ratifying Europol as a law enforcement agency of the EU. Today, Europol is the principal agency for exchanging a variety of intelligence. Information is received through partnered international organizations and external nations. Within the context of internal security, the European Union is majorly benefitting from such cooperation even though it operates outside of EU-centric policies. The intersection of aforementioned cooperation and coordination rests at the Berne Club (where intelligence agencies gather/exchange information pertaining all threats to society), along with its derivative, the Counter Terrorism Group (CTG), which focusses on radical Islamic fundamentalists. Although cooperation is predominantly inter-agency, the CTG has access to the EU’s IntCen and frequently updates key policymakers. The CTG has a membership of all 28 EU member nations plus Norway and Switzerland.

To summarize, the EU’s intelligence exchange network has exponentially widened in the past decade. Intelligence cooperation with respect to EU-centric policies has resulted in the formation of quasi-intelligence institutions. The EU is equipped with a dedicated law enforcement agency capable of assessing and analyzing real-time intelligence, reinforced by security institutions with a wide operational capability. Amidst controversies and limited institutional insight, this area remains unharnessed and systematically ignored by policymakers and academics.

Roadblocks in Intelligence Cooperation

The extensive changes and structural enhancement of security and intelligence infrastructure highlights the EU’s travel over rough seas. Furthermore, the challenges faced by the EU during intelligence exchange are extensive and will continue to hinder potential cooperation.

The main challenges are outlined below:

Intelligence sharing is preferential/need based. Nations establish joint intelligence exchange centers or share necessary intelligence with partner countries on a strictly as-needed basis. The need to provide real-time intelligence is a rationale which remains absent within regional or powerful economies. The fear of losing carefully nurtured confidential informants and access to methods employed to gather information, or deception, remains high.

Then there is the notion of zero-sum game. Some intelligence is more useful and worthier of being harnessed, limiting the flow of information to selected actors. This is admissible in cases with foreign intelligence when the information carries political weight worthy enough for a trade. Alternatively, putting aside the powerful economies which will be ready to exchange intelligence, and will be more than keen to assist in formulating a dedicated intelligence exchange mechanism for the EU, member nations from underdeveloped economies, to some extent, will not deem intelligence exchange to be in their interest.

Powerful economies are resourceful. Member nations do not only share intelligence on a preferential basis, but also have varying access to crucial resources. International intelligence and security establishments have mastered the art of providing greater access to powerful economies. Inviting powerful nations to participate in intelligence cooperation institutions by providing them lucrative incentives is not a new phenomenon.

The immediate years following the establishment of EU IntCen is a perfect example as to how powerful economies were given extensive access, which had control over shaping the cooperation mechanism of the institution. The difference between powerful and evolving economies eventually contributes to an aura of inferiority among the latter.

Bureaucratic interference. The bureaucracies of many nations have vested interests which often produce clashes and disagreements. This could principally be due to the difference in institutions’ operational mechanisms between law enforcement institutions and intelligence services (which further complicates joint task force operations against terrorism).

Most importantly, the ambition demonstrated by policymakers and political leaders does not meet the reality. For example, the ambition to reinforce and strengthen Europol’s ability to counter terrorism in the EU has never been realized as no intelligence and/or security institution is keen to cooperate and coordinate with a law enforcement agency.

Inadequate, ineffective, and inefficient cooperation architecture. Intelligence cooperation occurs between multiple agencies using dedicated liaison offices. The task of such dedicated offices is to coordinate with stakeholders for a smooth and timely flow of information. To ensure such a transition, trust plays an important role.

Working in joint professional environments will allow agencies to interact with each other more frequently, enabling actors to exchange operational mechanisms. However, in the light of previous unsuccessful attempts made by policymakers and political leadership to engage NATO with the EU immediately after the end of the Cold War, the absence of literature on joint-agency interaction further increases the complexity of the task.

Furthermore, there are limited technical security centric institutions which could enable the exchange of information and analysis at the same time. Although the EU continues to try and make this a reality, the impact for intelligence cooperation remains a matter of dispute.

An EU Dedicated Intelligence Agency?

Despite the European Union’s extensive efforts to strengthen intelligence cooperation since its establishment 15 years ago, the need for a dedicated FBI or CIA styled organization remains absent from discussions surrounding a dedicated intelligence agency. After the Madrid bombing of 2004, many member nations agreed to establish a CIA styled external intelligence agency.

Policymakers must note that, the main challenge of establishing a dedicated intelligence agency will come principally from member nation’s own intelligence institutions, as they themselves have weak operational architecture. With small member nations (equipped with limited resources) more inclined toward formulating a dedicated intelligence institution, the chances of success remain dim.

Furthermore, it remains unclear what particular challenges experts and member nations are keen on addressing. The European Union does not have a shortage of law enforcement officers, technicians, and intelligence analysts, but they extensively lack in inter-agency cooperation and coordination.

Conclusion

The author does not recommend policymakers formulate a new intelligence agency, especially to overcome challenges faced by previously established institutions. To begin with, the EU IntCen already operates with a quasi-intelligence architecture which policymakers must harness, maximize, and strengthen.

This is not to negate the pressing need of intelligence cooperation. Rather, policymakers should relocate available resources to establish a concrete cooperation policy. As a matter of fact, there are numerous unharnessed resources which are currently at the disposal of policymakers. However, in the light of Brexit and the EU migrant crisis, policymakers will be forced to employ more than just motivation to bring EU member nations to the table.

To get things started, the author advises that policymakers focus their attention on the following suggestions:

To begin with, the intelligence mechanism within the EU, and its possible future expansion, should not be exclusively focused on domestic intelligence architecture per se (for policymakers keen to establish an FBI styled intelligence institution). Policymakers must keep in mind that the European Union system comprises of a non-traditional intelligence ecosystem, which not only supports its needs but also fulfils the needs of individual member nations, which is an operational mechanism beyond the traditional boundaries of any intelligence system. Policymakers must ensure that intelligence institutions are used principally to exchange and analyze threats rather than fulfil the EU’s foreign policy objectives. This dedicated institution, if established, could provide a platform for policymakers and experts in varying fields to interact, causing certain discomfort within conservative political leadership.

Policymakers must not seek solace in a new intelligence establishment, but rather focus on enhancing and maximizing multilateral and bilateral partnerships in intelligence and security domains. To counter terrorism, information must be channeled from satellite centers, to intelligence analysis command centers, and to multilateral establishments. Policymakers, under no circumstances, should undermine the intelligence analysis and cooperation capability of the EU, and should not compare it with preexisting national institutions.

Policymakers have access to many unharnessed and unexplored resources, which should be adequately and cautiously relocated to necessary intelligence institutions irrespective of need or situation. One such example is the presence of more than one hundred staffers in developing and underdeveloped economies. These officers are either housed in trade departments or provide humanitarian assistance to relevant countries. A handful of them have experience in security institutions and even if they do, intelligence institutions within the EU have no formal division to incorporate their insight. The author again asserts policymakers to focus on strengthening IntCen’s ability to interact with security and intelligence analysts within EU offices established all over the globe in an effort to streamline the flow of real-time information.

Furthermore, policymakers must strengthen ‘cushioned’ infrastructure. This would pave the way for intelligence officers who are keen on gaining rapid experience using multilateral cooperation. IntCen also houses various representatives from member states and provides them necessary training. This training can be harnessed by creating a ‘train the trainers program’ whose focus will be to train departmental instructors in operating national intelligence systems, who would then train analysts preparing to enter various EU intelligence services.

It is important to note that numerous critical intelligence exchanges occur between the upper echelons of military and political leadership within the EEAS. The author recommends a bottom-to-top flow of communication which would enable intelligence analysts and strategic leadership to communicate frequently, which will provide them with an opportunity to assess the threat from multiple viewpoints. Also, policymakers must advocate common security and European interests between stakeholders in an effort to smoothen cooperation between multiple partners and responsible institutions.

*Anant Mishra is a former Youth Representative to the United Nations. He had previously served with the United Nations Security Council, the United Nations General Assembly as well as the Economic and Social Council. His previous assignments were in Rwanda and Congo. He also serves as a visiting faculty for numerous universities and delivers lectures on conflict and foreign relations.

By Roxana Andrei

On 20 July, Cyprus marked the 44th anniversary of the Turkish military occupation of the Northern part of the island, which followed the Cypriot Greek-supported coup of 15 July, 1974. On the occasion, the Greek Minister of Defense, Panos Kammenos, quoted by Kathimerini, assured “[…]the Greek people, the Greek nation, whether here in Cyprus or in the motherland, that the armed forces are ready to tackle any threat.” The 1974 events led to the establishment, in 1983, of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a de facto state recognized only by Turkey.

One of the protracted conflicts of Europe, the Cyprus conflict has defied resolution over the past four decades. Yet, until recently, it remained rather latent and attracted little attention outside the United Nations and the main state actors involved: Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, and Britain, the last three being Cyprus’ guarantor powers under the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee.

However, Cyprus has once again taken center stage in the geopolitical debates surrounding the Eastern Mediterranean, fueled by vivid discussions of possible new resource wars in the region, and the evolving role of Turkey. But what happened to trigger this change? First of all, Cyprus struck gas, twice: in 2011 and in 2018. Second, the Cyprus peace talks, led by the UN, collapsed dramatically in 2017 and left the international community in a state of pessimism regarding a possible reunification of the island. And third, Turkey decided to play a more assertive role in the regional energy game.

So what drives the Cyprus natural gas issue? Does it fall under the complex network of gas-conflict-cooperation in the Eastern Mediterranean? Or is it a consequence of Cyprus’ ongoing division, amplified by the involvement of the two regional competing actors, Turkey and Greece?

Background

Gas reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean were only recently discovered and remain largely underexplored, with their total actual size yet to be evaluated. Out of these, five major discoveries stand out: the Tamar and Leviathan fields, discovered in 2009 and 2010; offshore Israel (with an estimated capacity of 282 bcm and 621 bcm of gas respectively); the Aphrodite field, discovered in 2011 off of Cyprus (with 128 bcm); and the 2015 major discovery off the cost of Egypt, the Zohr field, which holds the largest capacity in the Eastern Mediterranean with an estimated of 845 bcm of natural gas. The discoveries have aroused the interest of European countries looking for supply alternatives outside Russia, as well as of the energy companies. As a result, negotiations, predominantly bilateral, have been launched between various countries of the region. Examples include the €12 billion deal for Egypt to buy gas from Israel’s Tamar and Leviathan fields and the tripartite memorandum of understanding between Cyprus, Greece, and Israel to build a gas pipeline to Europe.

Turkey Steps into the Eastern Mediterranean Energy Game

But the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean really started to simmer when, on 8 February 2018, the Italian company Eni and the French company Total announced a breakthrough gas discovery at the Calypso block off the Cypriot coast, estimated to be comparable as size to the giant Zohr field. Just three days later, the Italian Eni drill ship Saipem 12000 was stopped by Turkish military vessels on its way to a gas drill position in the Block 3 of Cyprus’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). The incident gave rise to an intense exchange of mutual accusations and diplomatic declarations; old and new tensions surfaced around the Calypso discovery and triggered a plethora of geopolitical and economic warnings about a new resource war on Europe’s doorstep. Outside analysis focused on the complex web of geopolitical competition and conflicts around the Eastern Mediterranean, and the focal point of concern became, this time, Turkey.

Turkey’s February military intervention in Cypriot waters raised fears that recent gas discoveries in the Eastern Mediterranean would worsen pre-existing tensions in the area, potentially creating new conflicts driven by competition over the newfound resources. Concerns were fueled by a series of reciprocal warnings, days after the discovery was announced, mostly between Turkey and Greece, and by clashing declarations at the highest political level. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned Greece, Cyprus, and foreign companies that, by continuing the gas drilling off the coast of Cyprus, they are violating Turkey’s sovereignty. He went on to announce that “[Turkish] warships, air force and other security units are following developments in the region closely with the authority to make any kind of intervention if necessary.”

Turkey’s election campaign in June took it one step further. In May, Turkey launched its first drilling ship, named Fatih after the Ottoman Sultan Fatih Mehmet, which was expected to be dispatched to drill for gas in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Turkey’s ambitious energy plans marked by this event were highly symbolic. Turkey’s energy minister, cited by Cyprus Mail, compared, much to the concern of Cyprus and Greece, the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul with the launch of Fatih: “The conquest of Istanbul opened a new era in world history and the deployment of the first drilling vessel marks the beginning of a new era in Turkey’s oil and gas drilling objectives.”

If the timing of the launch was controversial, the event itself was hardly a surprise. It was meant to support Turkey’s plans to become a global player in the oil & gas field, and to reduce its high hydrocarbons dependence. The launch was in following with the country’s National Energy and Mining Policy, announced in April 2017, which focused on the mobilization of domestic resources and greater diversification. But it was news of a giant discovery in the Calypso gas field in 2018 that fueled new attention and ambition, much more so than the impact of the discovery of modest reserves in the Aphrodite field in 2011. What raised concerns from Greece, Cyprus, and their European Union partners was the connection between Turkey’s official stance against drilling offshore Cyprus, backed by its military presence, and the political discourses regarding Cyprus during Turkey’s June elections. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)’s electoral ally, the ultranationalist National Movement Party (MHP), favors a hardline national security approach and, according to Sinan Ülgen from Carnegie Europe, it regards any Cyprus deal as treason. Greece and Cyprus’ fears were further aroused by an MHP electoral clip depicting Cyprus as a Turkish territory.

These new tensions came to complement existing concerns between the countries of the Levantine basin, notwithstanding the Syrian war, with Lebanon and Israel disagreeing over the delimitation of their EEZ, Israel and Turkey fighting over the Gaza issue, and Egypt, Cyprus, Greece, and Israel managing to forge a cooperative block, without Turkey, in the Eastern Mediterranean.

But is this just a matter of energy geopolitics, or is it a political issue stemming from Cyprus’ ongoing division?

Cyprus: A History of Division

In 1974, radical Greek Cypriots and troops from the Greek junta in power in Athens organized a coup and declared the unification of Cyprus with Greece. As a consequence, Turkey, one of the three guarantors of Cyprus (along with Britain and Greece) sent troops with the declared intention to protect the Turkish Cypriots. Inter-communal violence broke out across the island, with thousands ending up dead or disappeared on both sides. In 1983, the Turkish Cypriots declared the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and established their parallel administrative and political system. In 2017, international efforts to reunify the island, mediated by the UN, collapsed dramatically at the Crans-Montana talks. The Greek community, supported by Greece, refused to accept a federal Cyprus with Turkish troops on its soil and Turkey’s unilateral right to intervene, while the Turkish Cypriots, backed by Turkey, could not settle for the withdrawal of the approximately 30,000 Turkish troops still stationed in the North.

Turkey is the only country to have ever recognized the Northern entity while, at the same time, Ankara refuses to recognize the existence of the Republic of Cyprus (the Southern part). This is important for Turkey’s plans to start its own drilling in the Eastern Mediterranean, and it has major implications for Cyprus. In addition to not recognizing Cyprus, Turkey applies its own interpretation of international maritime law (contrary to the generally accepted UNCLOS – United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea). According to this individual interpretation, national territories have continental shelves up to 200 miles while islands are limited to territorial waters up to 14 miles and thus, for Ankara, Cyprus is an island with no rights to a continental shelf. In Turkey’s view, Cyprus has no legal right to declare an EEZ, and all agreements concluded by the Greek Cypriot authorities with international companies are legally invalid.

As a consequence, Turkish authorities accused Cyprus and the international companies drilling in the Block 6 and Block 3 off the coast of Cyprus of violating the sovereign rights of Turkey (which considers its own EEZ to extend to the blocks south of Cyprus) and of Turkish Cypriots. Moreover, in 2011, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus awarded in its own drilling rights for Block 3 to the Turkish company TPAO. Before the June elections, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, quoted by Ahval, declared that the Cyprus-Egypt agreement to delimitate the EEZ between the two countries was “null and void,” violating the “inalienable rights” of Turkish Cypriots to “benefit from the island’s resources.”

The Republic of Cyprus offered a rather swift diplomatic response, being assertive regarding its rights as protected by the international law, but also stressing, through the voice of President Nikos Anastasiades: “the necessity of avoiding anything which could escalate.” The government’s spokesman Prodromos Prodromou linked the situation to the Turkish electoral climate and declared that Cyprus will avoid letting itself be pulled into the spiral of resulting tensions. The Greek Cypriots refuse to consider any agreement with their Turkish Cypriot counterparts regarding the possibility of joint exploitation of hydrocarbons unless a deal regarding Cyprus is reached first. The immediate prospects for such a deal however collapsed at Crans-Montana last year.

But what about the unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus? The media focused overwhelmingly on the reactions of the main recognized actors and international players, but ignored the response of the element of discord itself. Kudret Ozersay, the foreign minister of the unrecognized entity, adopted a rather tempered line that echoed the South, declaring: “We aim at cooling down the waters, not warming them up.” However, the entity’s representative took a firm stance regarding Northern Cyprus’ determination to drill for gas with or without the Greek Cypriots: “I believe we will soon enter a period when everyone will see that nothing can be done in the region without first having the consent of the Turkish Cypriot people.” The president of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Mustafa Akıncı also called for a joint Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot committee to deal with the natural gas issue, linking the efforts in the gas cooperation to the future of a peaceful Cyprus, and accusing the Greek Cypriot leadership of refusing to share power and resources.

Looking Ahead: Gas for Cooperation or Conflict in Cyprus?

Despite the more virulent reactions and declarations of Greece and Turkey surrounding the Cyprus issue, it is to be noted that the Cypriot authorities, both the ones in the Republic of Cyprus, as well as the unrecognized ones in the Northern part, have chosen a more diplomatic voice in order to express their intentions and avoid further escalations as they exploit resources that both consider to be rightfully theirs notwithstanding the potential for future joint exploitation. Nevertheless, both parties continue to link the possibility of economic cooperation with finding a political solution to the protracted conflict that has divided Cyprus since 1974. Both Greek and Turkish Cypriots have expressed fatigue with failed negotiations over time, and it is in their interest to avoid a backslide toward conflict or a clash between other regional actors, as this would ultimately impede their successful exploitation of natural gas reserves.

Previous instances of cooperation in the energy field do exist between the South and the North. In 2016, their respective electricity networks were joined into one island-wide network and discussions for a further subsea link between Cyprus and Turkey’s electricity grid were launched.

Nevertheless, in the case of Cyprus, it might be that economics follow politics rather the other way around. Although instructive examples of past cooperation, both inside and outside the energy field, already exist, solving the chronic political issues between the South and the North and reaching a settlement of the conflict might be the better incentive for a peaceful and fruitful exploration of gas reserves. Should this ever come to pass, Cyprus would be able to play a central role in the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as on the wider European energy stage.

This article was first published by Geopolitical Monitor.com.