By Fatih Karimov

Iran can meet India’s need to cement and petrochemicals, said Ebrahim Jamili, the chairman of Iran-India joint business council.

He said India is the main consumer of agricultural fertilizers and Iran is a main producer of such products, Iran’s ISNA news agency reported on Jan. 28.

Signing a preferential trade agreement with India is necessary for Iran to boost its presence in international markets, he noted.

Iran can also increase technical and engineering exports to India, he added.

India was the 4th biggest importer of Iranian non-oil goods in the previous Iranian calendar year, which ended on March 20, 2014, according to the Iran Customs Administration.

Iran exported $2.417 billion of non-oil goods to India and imported $4.31 billion of non-oil goods from the country.

The post Iran Could Meet India’s Needs For Cement, Petrochemicals appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Spain’s government said that Corporal Francisco Javier Soria Toledo was killed Wednesday morning during the incidents that took place between Hezbollah and the Israeli Army in an area under the responsibility of the Spanish contingent.

Corporal Soria, married, 36 years old and from Malaga, was deployed in the “Córdoba 10″ Mechanized Infantry Regiment of the “Guzmán el Bueno” Brigade from Cerro Muriano, and had been part of the “Libre Hidalgo” mission since November 2014. The unit was deployed at the “Miguel de Cervantes” base in Marjayoun, in southern Lebanon.

The Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has been informed of the death by the Minister for Defence, Pedro Morenés, and by the Chief of Defence Staff, Fleet Admiral Fernando García Sánchez.

The Minister for Defence cancelled his scheduled trip to India.

The corporal had joined the Spanish Armed Forces in 2004 and this was his second tour of duty on the United Nations international mission UNIFIL – the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon.

The Ministry of Defence announced that Corporal Soria Toledo, who died on Wednesday morning, will be awarded the Military Cross of Merit with Red Distinction.

The post Spanish Soldier Killed In Lebanon appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Cemre Nur Öztürk

The European Parliament’s Policy Department on Economic and Scientific Policy released its report entitled “Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) Impacts on European Energy Markets and Manufacturing Industries” at the request of the Industry, Research and Energy Committee (ITRE), in early January 2015.

The TTIP is a trade and investment deal between the EU and US that has been in the process of being negotiated upon since July 2013. The eighth round of the TTIP negotiations took place in Brussels between 2 and 6 January 2015. In the simplest terms, the deal aims to stimulate trade between the EU and US by removing tariffs and regulatory barriers.

The impacts of the TTIP on trade and competitiveness, the security of supply, market access and the internal energy market, as well as its implications for renewable and sustainable energy technologies are examined in the third section of the Report entitled “Potential Impact of the TTIP on The Energy Sector”.

According to the Report, the EU’s trade in coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear fuel is not likely to be affected by the TTIP. Nonetheless, a free trade agreement could speed up the liquefied natural gas (LNG) licensing process, and in the long term, if the US increases its production, the trade of LNG across the Atlantic would also increase. However, such an increase in the US’s export of LNG would not be significant because its LNG export to the Asia Pacific, which exhibits more expensive gas prices, is more advantageous for the US.

According to the Report, refined petroleum products such as gasoline and diesel would have lower trade costs after the removal of tariffs and implementation of non-tariff measures as outlined by the TTIP, therefore, transatlantic trade in these commodities would increase.

The Report states that despite the TTIP’s lack of a direct mechanism to handle energy supply crises, it could help to increase EU energy security in the long term via an increase of gas import from the US. Nonetheless, the US’s removal of the ban on crude oil exports, which would also contribute to the EU’s energy security, is not addressed by the TTIP. If the US removes the export ban on crude oil, companies might prefer to ship their products to foreign recipients which are willing to pay higher prices instead of domestic consumers. Here, while US energy companies are in favor of this removal, US public opinion on the issue remains negative because the export of oil might result in an increase of fuel prices and manufacturing costs.

As stated by the Report, the TTIP simplifies the mobilization of companies overseas via harmonizing legislation on foreign direct investment and by protecting foreign investment against national measures such as expropriation. In this way, market access and foreign direct investment in upstream, midstream and downstream industries as well as oilfield services would be expected to increase with the ratification of the TTIP.

However, the TTIP will not grant full market access because it does not foresee the removal of all restrictive measures, particularly regarding the divergence between the EU and US legislation on environmental standards of energy sources.

The TTIP is likely to provide a mechanism entitled “investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS)”, which would provide the right to investing companies to issue claims against the host state before an independent international tribunal in the case that its rights have been breached. The Report warns that international companies might employ the ISDS mechanism to dispute environmental policies such as the ban of hydraulic fracking in the host states where they have made investments.

Finally, in the field of renewable and sustainable energy technologies, the tariffs and local content requirements on wind and solar energy technologies are likely to be lifted by the TTIP. Seeing that European companies export wind-powered generating sets in high quantity to the US, EU exports in this field are likely to increase in the absence of restrictive measures. When it comes to the solar energy sector, the EU is not competitive, therefore, if the TTIP is realized, US companies might come to dominate the EU market.

The post TTIP Impacts On European Energy Markets And Manufacturing Industries – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Over the last 100 years the Fed has had many mandates and policy changes in its pursuit of becoming the chief central economic planner for the United States. Not only has it pursued this utopian dream of planning the US economy and financing every boondoggle conceivable in the welfare/warfare state, it has become the manipulator of the premier world reserve currency.

As Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke explained to me, the once profoundly successful world currency – gold – was no longer money. This meant that he believed, and the world has accepted, the fiat dollar as the most important currency of the world, and the US has the privilege and responsibility for managing it. He might even believe, along with his Fed colleagues, both past and present, that the fiat dollar will replace gold for millennia to come. I remain unconvinced.

At its inception the Fed got its marching orders: to become the ultimate lender of last resort to banks and business interests. And to do that it needed an “elastic” currency.  The supporters of the new central bank in 1913 were well aware that commodity money did not “stretch” enough to satisfy the politician’s appetite for welfare and war spending. A printing press and computer, along with the removal of the gold standard, would eventually provide the tools for a worldwide fiat currency. We’ve been there since 1971 and the results are not good.

Many modifications of policy mandates occurred between 1913 and 1971, and the Fed continues today in a desperate effort to prevent the total unwinding and collapse of a monetary system built on sand. A storm is brewing and when it hits, it will reveal the fragility of the entire world financial system.

The Fed and its friends in the financial industry are frantically hoping their next mandate or strategy for managing the system will continue to bail them out of each new crisis.

The seeds were sown with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in December 1913. The lender of last resort would target special beneficiaries with its ability to create unlimited credit. It was granted power to channel credit in a special way. Average citizens, struggling with a mortgage or a small business about to go under, were not the Fed’s concern. Commercial, agricultural, and industrial paper was to be bought when the Fed’s friends were in trouble and the economy needed to be propped up. At its inception the Fed was given no permission to buy speculative financial debt or U.S. Treasury debt.

It didn’t take long for Congress to amend the Federal Reserve Act to allow the purchase of US debt to finance World War I and subsequently all the many wars to follow. These changes eventually led to trillions of dollars being used in the current crisis to bail out banks and mortgage companies in over their heads with derivative speculations and worthless mortgage-backed securities.

It took a while to go from a gold standard in 1913 to the unbelievable paper bailouts that occurred during the crash of 2008 and 2009.

In 1979 the dual mandate was proposed by Congress to solve the problem of high inflation and high unemployment, which defied the conventional wisdom of the Phillips curve that supported the idea that inflation could be a trade-off for decreasing unemployment. The stagflation of the 1970s was an eye-opener for all the establishment and government economists. None of them had anticipated the serious financial and banking problems in the 1970s that concluded with very high interest rates.

That’s when the Congress instructed the Fed to follow a “dual mandate” to achieve, through monetary manipulation, a policy of “stable prices” and “maximum employment.” The goal was to have Congress wave a wand and presto the problem would be solved, without the Fed giving up power to create money out of thin air that allows it to guarantee a bailout for its Wall Street friends and the financial markets when needed.

The dual mandate was really a triple mandate. The Fed was also instructed to maintain “moderate long-term interest rates.” “Moderate” was not defined. I now have personally witnessed nominal interest rates as high as 21% and rates below 1%. Real interest rates today are actually below zero.

The dual, or the triple mandate, has only compounded the problems we face today. Temporary relief was achieved in the 1980s and confidence in the dollar was restored after Volcker raised interest rates up to 21%, but structural problems remained.

Nevertheless, the stock market crashed in 1987 and the Fed needed more help. President Reagan’s Executive Order 12631 created the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, also known as the Plunge Protection Team. This Executive Order gave more power to the Federal Reserve, Treasury, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission to come to the rescue of Wall Street if market declines got out of hand. Though their friends on Wall Street were bailed out in the 2000 and 2008 panics, this new power obviously did not create a sound economy. Secrecy was of the utmost importance to prevent the public from seeing just how this “mandate” operated and exactly who was benefiting.

Since 2008 real economic growth has not returned. From the viewpoint of the central economic planners, wages aren’t going up fast enough, which is like saying the currency is not being debased rapidly enough. That’s the same explanation they give for prices not rising fast enough as measured by the government-rigged Consumer Price Index. In essence it seems like they believe that making the cost of living go up for average people is a solution to the economic crisis. Rather bizarre!

The obsession now is to get price inflation up to at least a 2% level per year. The assumption is that if the Fed can get prices to rise, the economy will rebound. This too is monetary policy nonsense.

If the result of a congressional mandate placed on the Fed for moderate and stable interest rates results in interest rates ranging from 0% to 21%, then believing the Fed can achieve a healthy economy by getting consumer prices to increase by 2% per year is a pie-in-the-sky dream. Money managers CAN’T do it and if they could it would achieve nothing except compounding the errors that have been driving monetary policy for a hundred years.

A mandate for 2% price inflation is not only a goal for the central planners in the United States but for most central bankers worldwide.

It’s interesting to note that the idea of a 2% inflation rate was conceived 25 years ago in New Zealand to curtail double-digit price inflation. The claim was made that since conditions improved in New Zealand after they lowered their inflation rate to 2% that there was something magical about it. And from this they assumed that anything lower than 2% must be a detriment and the inflation rate must be raised. Of course, the only tool central bankers have to achieve this rate is to print money and hope it flows in the direction of raising the particular prices that the Fed wants to raise.

One problem is that although newly created money by central banks does inflate prices, the central planners can’t control which prices will increase or when it will happen. Instead of consumer prices rising, the price inflation may go into other areas, as determined by millions of individuals making their own choices. Today we can find very high prices for stocks, bonds, educational costs, medical care and food, yet the CPI stays under 2%.

The CPI, though the Fed currently wants it to be even higher, is misreported on the low side. The Fed’s real goal is to make sure there is no opposition to the money printing press they need to run at full speed to keep the financial markets afloat. This is for the purpose of propping up in particular stock prices, debt derivatives, and bonds in order to take care of their friends on Wall Street.

This “mandate” that the Fed follows, unlike others, is of their own creation. No questions are asked by the legislators, who are always in need of monetary inflation to paper over the debt run up by welfare/warfare spending. There will be a day when the obsession with the goal of zero interest rates and 2% price inflation will be laughed at by future economic historians. It will be seen as just as silly as John Law’s inflationary scheme in the 18th century for perpetual wealth for France by creating the Mississippi bubble – which ended in disaster. After a mere two years, 1719 to 1720, of runaway inflation Law was forced to leave France in disgrace. The current scenario will not be precisely the same as with this giant bubble but the consequences will very likely be much greater than that which occurred with the bursting of the Mississippi bubble.

The fiat dollar standard is worldwide and nothing similar to this has ever existed before. The Fed and all the world central banks now endorse the monetary principles that motivated John Law in his goal of a new paradigm for French prosperity. His thesis was simple: first increase paper notes in order to increase the money supply in circulation. This he claimed would revitalize the finances of the French government and the French economy. His theory was no more complicated than that.

This is exactly what the Federal Reserve has been attempting to do for the past six years. It has created $4 trillion of new money, and used it to buy government Treasury bills and $1.7 trillion of worthless home mortgages. Real growth and a high standard of living for a large majority of Americans have not occurred, whereas the Wall Street elite have done quite well. This has resulted in aggravating the persistent class warfare that has been going on for quite some time.

The Fed has failed at following its many mandates, whether legislatively directed or spontaneously decided upon by the Fed itself – like the 2% price inflation rate. But in addition, to compound the mischief caused by distorting the much-needed market rate of interest, the Fed is much more involved than just running the printing presses. It regulates and manages the inflation tax. The Fed was the chief architect of the bailouts in 2008. It facilitates the accumulation of government debt, whether it’s to finance wars or the welfare transfer programs directed at both rich and poor. The Fed provides a backstop for the speculative derivatives dealings of the banks considered too big to fail. Together with the FDIC’s insurance for bank accounts, these programs generate a huge moral hazard while the Fed obfuscates monetary and economic reality.

The Federal Reserve reports that it has over 300 PhD’s on its payroll. There are hundreds more in the Federal Reserve’s District Banks and many more associated scholars under contract at many universities. The exact cost to get all this wonderful advice is unknown. The Federal Reserve on its website assures the American public that these economists “represent an exceptional diverse range of interest in specific area of expertise.” Of course this is with the exception that gold is of no interest to them in their hundreds and thousands of papers written for the Fed.

This academic effort by subsidized learned professors ensures that our college graduates are well-indoctrinated in the ways of inflation and economic planning. As a consequence too, essentially all members of Congress have learned these same lessons.

Fed policy is a hodgepodge of monetary mismanagement and economic interference in the marketplace. Sadly, little effort is being made to seriously consider real monetary reform, which is what we need. That will only come after a major currency crisis.

I have quite frequently made the point about the error of central banks assuming that they know exactly what interest rates best serve the economy and at what rate price inflation should be. Currently the obsession with a 2% increase in the CPI per year and a zero rate of interest is rather silly.

In spite of all the mandates, flip-flopping on policy, and irrational regulatory exuberance, there’s an overwhelming fear that is shared by all central bankers, on which they dwell day and night. That is the dreaded possibility of DEFLATION.

A major problem is that of defining the terms commonly used. It’s hard to explain a policy dealing with deflation when Keynesians claim a falling average price level – something hard to measure – is deflation, when the Austrian free-market school describes deflation as a decrease in the money supply.

The hysterical fear of deflation is because deflation is equated with the 1930s Great Depression and all central banks now are doing everything conceivable to prevent that from happening again through massive monetary inflation. Though the money supply is rapidly rising and some prices like oil are falling, we are NOT experiencing deflation.

Under today’s conditions, fighting the deflation phantom only prevents the needed correction and liquidation from decades of an inflationary/mal-investment bubble economy.

It is true that even though there is lots of monetary inflation being generated, much of it is not going where the planners would like it to go. Economic growth is stagnant and lots of bubbles are being formed, like in stocks, student debt, oil drilling, and others. Our economic planners don’t realize it but they are having trouble with centrally controlling individual “human action.”

Real economic growth is being hindered by a rational and justified loss of confidence in planning business expansions. This is a consequence of the chaos caused by the Fed’s encouragement of over-taxation, excessive regulations, and diverting wealth away from domestic investments and instead using it in wealth-consuming and dangerous unnecessary wars overseas. Without the Fed monetizing debt, these excesses would not occur.

Lessons yet to be learned:

1. Increasing money and credit by the Fed is not the same as increasing wealth. It in fact does the opposite.

2. More government spending is not equivalent to increasing wealth.

3. Liquidation of debt and correction in wages, salaries, and consumer prices is not the monster that many fear.

4. Corrections, allowed to run their course, are beneficial and should not be prolonged by bailouts with massive monetary inflation.

5. The people spending their own money is far superior to the government spending it for them.

6. Propping up stock and bond prices, the current Fed goal, is not a road to economic recovery.

7. Though bailouts help the insiders and the elite 1%, they hinder the economic recovery.

8. Production and savings should be the source of capital needed for economic growth.

9. Monetary expansion can never substitute for savings but guarantees mal–investment.

10. Market rates of interest are required to provide for the economic calculation necessary for growth and reversing an economic downturn.

11. Wars provide no solution to a recession/depression. Wars only make a country poorer while war profiteers benefit.

12. Bits of paper with ink on them or computer entries are not money – gold is.

13. Higher consumer prices per se have nothing to do with a healthy economy.

14. Lower consumer prices should be expected in a healthy economy as we experienced with computers, TVs, and cell phones.

All this effort by thousands of planners in the Federal Reserve, Congress, and the bureaucracy to achieve a stable financial system and healthy economic growth has failed.

It must be the case that it has all been misdirected. And just maybe a free market and a limited government philosophy are the answers for sorting it all out without the economic planners setting interest and CPI rate increases.

A simpler solution to achieving a healthy economy would be to concentrate on providing a “SOUND DOLLAR” as the Founders of the country suggested. A gold dollar will always outperform a paper dollar in duration and economic performance while holding government growth in check. This is the only monetary system that protects liberty while enhancing the opportunity for peace and prosperity.

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.

The post Ron Paul: ‘Two Percent Inflation’ And The Fed’s Current Mandate – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

The EU on Thursday, Jan 29, called for more help from Internet companies to fight online terrorist propaganda in the face of the terror attacks in France, the Associated Press reports.

Home Affairs Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos told reporters in Riga that the EU needs to deepen cooperation with the Internet industry “and to strengthen the commitment of social media platforms in order to reduce illegal content online.”

Already before this month’s shooting massacres carried out by Islamic extremists in Paris, EU officials had been reaching out to Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other companies to discuss ways of removing jihadist propaganda from the Internet.

“We are now taking this cooperation further by deepening dialogue … in order to develop concrete, workable solutions,” Avramopoulos said.

But policing the vast amount of material posted on social media is a major challenge.

Google said Wednesday that the sheer volume on its YouTube website, with about 300 hours of video material being uploaded every minute, makes it tough to catch all terror-related content.

Groups like Islamic State using online videos as recruitment tools. In a rare speech earlier this month, British domestic spy chief Andrew Parker said the group’s skill at using social media means it has been able to spread its message to virtually every home in Britain.

Omar Ramadan, head of the Radicalization Awareness Network, a European group tackling extremism, said removing terror-related content from the Internet wasn’t enough.

“If you’re only taking down content and not worrying about the people watching content, they will be searching for content elsewhere,” Ramadan told the AP on the sidelines of an EU interior ministers’ meeting in Riga. “We should prevent them from searching such content by feeding them counter-narratives, telling them that jihadist propaganda is a lie.”

Security officials say more than 3,000 Europeans have gone to Syria to join extremists there as foreign fighters, sparking worries they will bring the battle home when they return.

The post EU Wants Internet Companies To Help Fight Online Terrorist Propaganda appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Muslims have become easy scapegoat for economic worries in Germany – and elsewhere in Europe.

By Frank Griffel*

German is a language famous for expressing complex notions with a simple word: zeitgeist for “spirit of the age” or schadenfreude for “the pleasure at other people’s misfortune.” Yet even those who studied German probably have not heard of Abendland. Germans rarely encountered the word, though together with its implicit counterpart, Morgenland, it’s become the latest buzzword of a popular political movement in Germany.

Since autumn, there have been regular demonstrations in Dresden, a German city of half million, close to the border with the Czech Republic. The movement calls itself PEGIDA, an acronym for “Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes” and a name that reveals numerous elements of contemporary German political culture.

The protesters gathering before the city’s historic opera building refer to themselves as “patriotic Europeans.” They protest against the “Islamization” not of Dresden, not of Germany, but of the Abendland. Taken from the political vocabulary of the 19th century, the Abendland, literarily “the country of the evening,” is the place where the sun sets – “the West.” The German word Abendland, however, is distinguished from the English concept of the West in its implicit opposition to the counterpart, Morgenland –“the land of the morning,” the East, or more specifically the lands of Islam. PEGIDA protests the “Islamization of the Occident” – or all that is not “the Orient.”

The simple use of Abendland evokes German notions of justice, order, prosperity and political stability. “Islamization” means becoming like the Morgenland, “the Orient,” perceived as a domain of unjust sharia legislation, political despotism, poverty, chaos and civil war.

The PEGIDA demonstrations began in mid-October with just a few hundred. Aided by Facebook, the numbers swelled to 10,000 by December. Dresden is widely known as a target of a highly destructive US bombing raid during the last weeks of the Second World War and was also the third-largest city of the communist German Democratic Republic, or GDR. Like the rest of that country, reunification 25 years ago meant that it was abruptly overwhelmed by the political system and culture of former West Germany.

German culture prides itself on having stepped out of the shadow of Nazi Germany. Germans today, both in the former West and the East, despise all too blatant manifestations of nationalism and patriotism and, 70 years after the Nazis’ fall, remain wary that a new kind of Nazism might creep into its political culture. Unlike most other central European countries, no party with a xenophobic rhetoric is represented in the German Bundestag. In elections for the European Parliament in May, routinely an occasion for nationalist right-wing parties to gain higher percentages than in national or local elections, Britain’s UK Independence Party scored almost 27 percent, France’s Front National won 25 percent and Italy’s two right-wing parties together achieved 28 percent. Germany lacks a xenophobic right-wing party of comparable size. When last year a new party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, got 7 percent in the European elections, the country’s political establishment was highly alarmed. Yet most central and southern European countries with the exception of Belgium and Luxembourg have right-wing parties with xenophobic tendencies that score higher than 7 percent.

Collectively, Germans shun the nation’s own racist and anti-Semitic past. PEGIDA calls itself “patriotic Europeans” to dissociate from German patriotism and chauvinism. A united Europe is considered the recipe to overcome the dangers of a new Nazism. When PEGIDA protesters swelled in December, the country’s political and cultural elite united against it. In her New Year’s speech, Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke out against the demonstrations, and anti-PEGIDA marches were organized in Dresden and other cities. In January, Germany’s largest newspaper, the conservative Bild, assembled 50 popular politicians, artists, singers and soccer players who spoke out against xenophobia and Islamophobia. Other newspapers and celebrities joined in, following the lead of Germany’s three biggest parties, Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and “The Left,” to condemn the PEGIDA organizers without criticizing the ordinary citizens who join the protests.

This hypocrisy is shared by the German media which finds it hard to engage with PEGIDA. Not wanting to give xenophobia a voice on their networks and in their papers, journalists report on the marches without engaging with its spokespeople. For a long time, PEGIDA could not find a place to conduct a press conference. A local office for political education that opened its door “to allow for political dialogue” was heavily criticized. The press conference became necessary after vague threats against one of the organizers led Dresden police to cancel a scheduled march – prompting debate about the right of political expression in Germany. Like many European countries, Germany has harsh laws against hate-speech and Holocaust-denial. PEGIDA avoids anti-Semitism, focusing instead on Islam. Also in mid-January, the movement’s initial organizer had to step down after an online newspaper revealed that he had used xenophobic language in the past, which could lead to charges for “incitement of popular hatred.”

Those who demonstrate on Dresden’s streets Monday evenings – the same weekday of the marches that brought down the GDR – are German nationalists who rely on the term “Islamization” as a convenient label directed against all forms of immigration. Reports about alleged Islamic State associates from Germany and the terrorist attacks in Paris have further stirred an already existing Islamophobia.

For PEGIDA in Dresden and sympathizers in other German cities, Islam is a scapegoat for numerous political developments contributing to anxiety. In 2013, 1.2 million immigrants moved to a country of 80 million while ethnic Germans with no recent migrant background had low birthrates, shrinking to 80 percent of the population.

The demonstrations force Germany to have an open debate about its demographic future. Germany is among the European countries reporting decent economic growth with 1.2 percent last year. Business and political leaders realize that a shrinking population means a shrinking economy. Despite efforts to boost the German birthrate, immigration is currently the only way to avoid the demographic trap and a diminishing economy. Many Germans recognize that a country with a fertility rate of 1.4, not budging since 2007, should welcome rather than discourage immigration.

Some Germans struggle with this notion. European Union integration already meant the disappearance of national border controls and the national currency. National specifics in the educational system, for instance, or in mundane regulations such as food labeling have also been standardized. For many Germans, the changes happened in a top-down approach with little public participation. Those who feel uneasy hit the streets to protest what they believe politicians, the media and the wealthy business establishment have done to the country.

Such protests of resentment are not problematic as long as they lead to an open debate about their underlying causes, including a debate about the role of Islam in Germany. What is problematic is relying on Islamophobia to gain traction for a movement that is largely an expression of German nationalism. If PEGIDA indeed opens the gates for frank discussion about German immigration, it should also lead to debate about popular perceptions of Islam and how non-existent Islamization in Germany has become a symbol for the woes of nationalists.

*Frank Griffel is professor of Religious Studies at Yale University and director of the Council on Middle East Studies and Religious Studies.

The post Germany’s Nationalist Movement Rides On Wave Of Islamophobia – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Heath Hansen*

In 2014, the conservative movement marked the 50th anniversary of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, the 30th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s presidential re-election, the 20th anniversary of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America and the consequent Republican Revolution, and the fifth anniversary of the modern Tea Party movement. To commemorate these milestones, The Heritage Foundation hosted a four-part series of lectures and discussion panels entitled “Lessons for Conservatives: From Goldwater to the Tea Party.” Each event focused on one of the four major anniversaries.

While conservatives can glean much from the series, three principal lessons stand out: (1) ideas matter; (2) core conservative principles should not be compromised; and (3) cheerful persistence is critical to success.

Ideas Matter

In 1964, Barry Goldwater campaigned on a platform of limited constitutional government, individual freedom, and personal responsibility. In his Heritage lecture on the Goldwater campaign, Washington Post columnist George Will noted that such ideas were heterodox in national politics at the time, and as a result, Goldwater was widely considered an extremist.[1] This ultimately led to one of the most lopsided presidential elections in American history in which Goldwater received just 38.5 percent of the popular vote and won only six states.

However, the significance of Goldwater’s campaign extended far beyond his landslide loss. Even in defeat, Will stated, “Goldwater had forced the country to understand that there was another argument to be had.” More significantly, Goldwater’s ideas inspired a new generation of American conservatives and laid the groundwork for the modern conservative movement.

Among those inspired by Goldwater’s ideas was Ronald Reagan. By the time Reagan ran for president in 1980, America was ready for Goldwater’s brand of conservatism. Campaigning on a similar platform of liberty and limited government, Reagan marched to two landslide victories. Referring to Reagan’s 1980 victory, Will quipped, “Goldwater didn’t lose. It just took 16 years to count the votes.”

Reagan’s ideas were not just good for winning elections. In his remarks during the Reagan event at Heritage, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol recalled that Reagan’s unorthodox commitment to supply-side economics and tax cuts ultimately helped bring the economy out of a deep recession and produced extraordinary economic growth.[2] Over the course of Reagan’s presidency, the economy added nearly 17 million jobs, the unemployment rate fell from 9.7 percent to 5.5 percent, and stock market averages more than doubled.[3]

Despite Reagan’s popularity and a booming economy throughout the 1980s, conservatives had been unable to gain control of Congress for 40 years. That all changed in 1994 when Republican congressman Newt Gingrich unveiled an innovative approach to implementing conservative ideas in the Contract with America.

The ideas embodied in the Contract, such as restoring fiscal discipline in the federal government, promoting personal responsibility, and advancing economic freedom, all resonated with the American people. As a consequence, the Contract ushered in the Republican Revolution of 1994, as Republicans gained 54 seats in the House and took control of both chambers of Congress for the first time since 1953.

In his Heritage lecture, Gingrich implored conservatives to continue to articulate clear ideas and develop innovative solutions. He warned that conservatism cannot succeed by simply opposing progressivism. “The key is not right versus left, it is future versus past,” he stated. “We have an opportunity to be the movement that offers a dramatically better future by offering better ideas.”[4]

Taking a Stand

“It is said that American politics must rest on compromise,” observed University of Virginia professor of politics James Ceaser during Heritage’s Tea Party event.[5] However, he continued, “compromise is not the only virtue. One should say something in favor of the virtue of obstinacy from time to time.”

In fact, according to Ceaser, obstinacy is one of the modern Tea Party’s greatest attributes. Whereas some Republicans prefer to compromise so as to avoid messy partisan fights with the left, the Tea Party has stood on principle.

As a direct result of the Tea Party’s obstinacy, Ceaser stated, the nature of national political debates has changed. Specifically, he credited the Tea Party with “bringing the national debt onto the front burner” of the debate. Most importantly, Ceaser noted, this debate has led state governments to take bold steps to rein in public-sector unions.

Of course, the Tea Party has taken its cues from earlier conservatives. Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan both refused to compromise their conservative principles. Despite knowing that his unyielding conservatism would surely lead to defeat, Goldwater refused to moderate his message just to score political points.

Kristol noted that Reagan also was not afraid to take political risks to uphold his conservative principles. In fact, Reagan frequently rebuffed the consultant class that urged him to temper his conservative views for political gain. As Kristol stated, “Reagan succeeded because, at the end of the day, he knew what he believed.”

Cheerful Persistence

It may appear that the conservative movement is fraught with defeat, frustration, and unfair treatment. Indeed, Barry Goldwater endured harsh criticism and patently false attacks on his character. Will recalled that Goldwater was accused of being a racist by Martin Luther King; was depicted as a “dangerous lunatic” by 1,189 licensed psychiatrists; and was compared to Hitler on a national CBS News broadcast prior to the 1964 election.

Even Reagan endured setbacks, failing to unseat moderate, establishment-backed candidates before finally winning the Republican presidential nomination. Gingrich recalled losing two elections prior to winning in 1978, and then enduring 15 years of being in the minority party in the House of Representatives until finally becoming Speaker of the House in 1995.

Through the adversity, however, Goldwater, Reagan, and Gingrich all maintained a positive demeanor. Will noted that Goldwater was once referred to as the “happy malcontent.” Similarly, Reagan was often called a “happy warrior” because of his optimistic attitude and constant smile. Gingrich credited his own success to “cheerful persistence.”

In his Heritage lecture, Gingrich sternly warned that modern conservatives must not allow negativity to derail the movement. Rather than engaging in unconstructive, angry rhetorical battles with their detractors, conservatives should instead focus on promoting a positive agenda. “It is maniacally stupid and unprofessional,” Gingrich stated, “to think you can get away with a purely negative campaign.” He continued, “If a Republican wins on a negative campaign, they have no political capital and no consensus by which to govern.”

Gingrich went on to advise conservatives not to get discouraged by the intense opposition and frustrating election losses. “Historic change requires historic effort,” he remarked. “The only way to sustain historic effort is cheerful persistence.”

Conclusion

While it is important for modern conservatives, particularly those in the Tea Party movement, to continue to apply these lessons, modern conservatives cannot rely solely on their predecessors to sustain the movement. Conservatives must build on the lessons of the past by articulating new ideas that are based on conservative principles with which to meet the challenges of the day. And they should do so cheerfully.

*Heath Hansen is a Research Assistant in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics, of the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity, at The Heritage Foundation.

References:
[1] George F. Will, “Goldwater: The Most Consequential Loser in American Politics,” remarks delivered at The Heritage Foundation, May 21, 2014, http://www.heritage.org/events/2014/05/goldwater?ac=1.

[2] William Kristol, “Do We Need Another Reagan?” remarks delivered at The Heritage Foundation, July 9, 2014, http://www.heritage.org/events/2014/07/another-reagan?ac=1.

[3] Lee Edwards, The Essential Ronald Reagan: A Profile in Courage, Justice, and Wisdom (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), p. 93.

[4] Newt Gingrich, “Gingrich’s Contract with America: The Power of Conservative Ideas,” remarks delivered at The Heritage Foundation, July 23, 2014, http://www.heritage.org/events/2014/07/contract-with-america?ac=1.

[5] James W. Ceaser, “The Tea Party Turns Five: A Lasting Movement or Reactionary Politics?” remarks delivered at The Heritage Foundation, December 4, 2014, http://www.heritage.org/events/2014/12/tea-party-turns-five?ac=1.

The post Lessons For Conservatives: From Goldwater To The Tea Party – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

(Civil.Ge) — NATO Deputy Secretary General, Alexander Vershbow, met senior government officials and lawmakers in Tbilisi on January 29 to discuss reforms and implementation of the substantial package of cooperation, which the Alliance offered to Georgia at its summit in Wales.

Setting up of a joint “training and evaluation center” in Georgia is part of that package.

“Georgia and we are committed to have this center up and running later this year,” Vershbow said after meeting with PM Irakli Garibashvili.

“It will help Georgia to reform, modernize and strengthen security and defense sector and it will also be open to other NATO allies and to some other NATO partners as well since Georgia’s geography and the high quality of its own armed forces together create unique possibilities to train together broad group of partners and allies and to foster cooperation and interoperability,” he said, adding that he will be visiting one of the possible locations of this center on January 30.

“It [the joint training center] will also be a visible demonstration of NATO’s commitment to Georgia,” Vershbow said.

Speaking after meeting with PM Garibashvili, the NATO deputy secretary general hailed Georgia for being “exporter of security” and for “remarkable democratic and defense reforms.”

“So today we see a more mature democracy here in Georgia,” he said. “I very much welcome the determination of political leaders of this country to continue to follow along this course. I encourage all parties, all Georgians to cooperate for the benefit of people of this country, making sure that your institutions meet the highest democratic standards.”

“Priority has to be to implement reforms across the board, not only in the defense sector; it means a clear commitment to rule of law, to improving governance at any level,” Vershbow said.

PM Garibashvili reiterated that integration into NATO “is a firm choice of the Georgian people and we are doing everything in order to achieve this goal.”

Also on November 29, NATO deputy secretary general met Defense Minister Mindia Janelidze; State Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration Davit Bakradze; parliament speaker Davit Usupashvili and senior lawmakers from ruling and opposition parties, as well as representatives of UNM opposition party.

Parliament speaker, Davit Usupashvili, said that Georgia has “quite ambitious plans” within substantial package of cooperation with NATO.

“We’ve heard from the deputy secretary general that all the NATO-member states are ready to implement their commitments under this package,” Usupashvili said.

“We also spoke about situation in region… Threats in our region have increased, not decreased,” Usupashvili said, adding that situation in Ukraine was also discussed in this context.

The parliament speaker also said that there is a consensus among political groups in the Parliament that “NATO integration has no alternative for Georgia.”

“This is an important message for everyone… both for friends and enemies,” Usupashvili said.

Speaking after the meeting with the Georgian lawmakers, the NATO deputy secretary general said: “We stressed that we want to work with all the political forces in Georgia to help move Georgia along the path towards NATO’s open door.”

“A lot of the things that need to happen here in terms of democratic reforms, reform of the judicial system, reform of the ministry of interior and prosecutor’s office – all these things should unite political parties as well, because they are important for strengthening Georgia’s democratic system, which is just as important as military interoperability in terms of preparations for NATO membership,” Vershbow said.

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By Anthony Rusonik

In terms of genuine policy analysis, it is much too soon after Charlie Hebdo to draw conclusions and make recommendations. That is best left to the journalists, and those with agendas, axes to grind, knees to jerk. And while even the journalists concede there are too many unknowns at present to reach any definitive conclusions, there is no shortage of folks in the latter category, who are quite sure they have it all figured out.

For want of a better term, these folks may be divided into two opposite camps. We are all familiar with the populist segment, where the “vulgar” version of the argument traces back to the neoconservative tenet that Islam itself is the problem. This group contends that “radical” Islam is a redundant phrase. Therefore, the answer is a more aggressive Western military policy in the Middle East and a “Homeland Security” recipe for Europe. Shoot from the hip.

There are grains of truth in this argument, but just grains. Other voices are strong enough in their public reservations over this approach that there is no need to challenge it here.

Far more dangerous, and therefore the subject of this article, is the even more perverse claim that Western imperialism is the cause of radical Islam’s grievances. In particular, so the argument goes, America’s post 9/11 “War on Terror” Crusade that linked Al-Qaeda and fictional WMDS to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the Second Gulf War. In turn, of course, Saddam’s removal created the vacuum that led to the rise of ISIL.

This neoliberal approach, for want of a better term, is far more dangerous because most of the cited facts and sequences are in large part true. The real problem of the argument is where it stops, and the final conclusion that it draws. The proponents of this view stop just short of Obama’s premature exit from Iraq in their narrative tracing ISIL’s rise. Moreover, the rise of ISIL and its link to Charlie Hebdo is perhaps even more fictitious than that of Saddam to the WMDs.

Before we set out to prove this neoliberal argument false, we must first debunk anticipated criticism that this a straw man. In short, we need to prove that the view is widespread and held by people of power and influence, not just paranoid conspiracy theorists and self-referencing internet bloggers and false-flaggers/inside-jobbers.

One needn’t look far. This is the thrust of the explanation and prescription from Juan Cole to Tayip Erdogan. A good “mainstream” example of this thinking is found in the respectable and centrist Atlantic. In “France Declares Its Own ‘War on Terror,” Matt Schiavenza worries that Paris is on course to imitate Bush Junior’s “failed” policies in Iraq with a real risk of an-Abu Ghraib type reaction that provokes further Islamic radicalization.

Cole, of course, goes much further: “Having American troops occupy it [Baghdad] for 8 years, humiliate its citizens, shoot people at checkpoints, and torture people in military prisons was a very bad idea. Some people treated that way become touchy, and feel put down, and won’t take slights to their culture and civilization any longer. Maybe the staff at Charlie Hebdo would be alive if George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney hadn’t modeled for the Kouachi brothers how you take what you want and rub out people who get in your way.”

This type of polemic cannot go unanswered. It is both reckless and undignified. More to the point, it is loaded with the excessive and “context-devoid” moralism that is the hallmark of hyper-liberal critiques of foreign policy.

The first realist critique is just to point out selective fact usage. Whether moral or not, the US “occupation” of Iraq had very little to do with the rise of ISIL. Sure, Bush’s war led to the demise of Saddam, but neither that nor the American troop presence facilitated ISIL. On the contrary, the immediate facilitation was a lack of US troops. It was the premature withdrawal that created the vacuum before a functional Iraqi government – democratic or not – could take root.

That is what realism is, folks: a clear view on the role of military action as a tool for diplomatic interests in an anarchical world of nation states. Everyone – everyone who is honest and has read – knows that a stable dictatorship is better than a lawless vacuum. Anarchy, except for the briefest of moments as a dictator is toppled, is neither freedom nor democracy.

The second realist critique of this neoliberal view is that it is evident Al-Qaeda, ISIL, and other terror groups have morphed from rogue elements either outlawed or tolerated by a host of Arab/Islamic states into true global movements. These are organizations with deep roots in Western countries with significant Islamic populations. Where an element of the Western Islamic population is vulnerable to being attracted to these perverse misrepresentations of Islam, Western policy in the Middle East is almost irrelevant. The cruel irony that the neoliberals never mention is that President Obama – in a decisive break from Bush policy – determined to reduce US intervention in the Middle East to a minimum with the explicit goal of undercutting the perceived basis for radical Islamic growth.

Who can argue that Obama helped trigger the Arab Spring with his Cairo Speech? Obama’s determination to allow friends like Mubarak to fall in favor of anti-Western fundamentalists such as Morsi, to refuse to intervene in Syria, and to support diplomacy with Iran means that the current president follows a clear policy of non-provocation with Islam. Obama refuses to even associate the word ‘Islamic’ with ‘terror’ in the same sentence. For all his efforts, however, Obama is seen as weak and unreliable by both friend and foe alike in the Middle East. If anything, the president’s late response to Syria and ISIL has emboldened and grown the movement, not deflated it. His absence from the Paris March, it seems, is a calculated decision not to “offend” as opposed to the oversight angle spun by the White House staff.

On a more obvious level, consider France itself: No European democracy has distanced itself more from US policy than Paris. After the Six-Day-War, France imposed an arms sale embargo on Israel. In 1973, France refused to allow the American airlift to Israel to overfly French soil. At the 11th hour in 1991, France argued that Saddam should be given one more chance for diplomacy with a direct link applied to Kuwait and Israeli withdraw from the West Bank. In 2003, France refused the WMD premise as pretext for the Second Gulf War. Just days before the attack on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, France adopted the unprecedented Western position of co-sponsoring a UN Security Council Resolution in support of Palestinian statehood.

Need one ask – even of the neoliberals – what France received in return for its “progressive” policies towards the Middle East?

Perhaps the ironic point of convergence between neoliberal and neoconservative thought on Charlie Hebdo is that the model for analysis is “supranational” and thus beyond the grasp of either perspective.

The neoliberals are desperate to blame the Western state system and Crusader imperialism, while the neoconservatives are desperate to blame the Arab state system and exported Islamic fundamentalism.

The failure of neoliberal interpretation should now be clear. We would be remiss, however, if we did not challenge the idea that exported Islamic fundamentalism is the main problem at the moment. In yet another irony, we see that some of the most fundamentalist Islamic state systems and players of different Shia, Sunni, and Wahhabi stripes are not the immediate culprits here. There is no doubt Iran has exported terror in the past (Argentina) and continues to do so via Hezbollah and other proxies. The Iranians, however, are as unnerved by Sunni ISIL, which is a threat to their regime, as is the West. Hassan Nasrallah, always a clever one, provided an eloquent denunciation of Charlie Hebdo, if not the kosher supermarket attack. Saudi Arabia, no doubt complicit in the birth of what it intended as a controlled Sunni proxy to irritate Shia Iran and Alawite Syria, now lives in fear of its creation.

Again, from a realist perspective, this is not as bizarre as it first seems. Once radical movements come to power, particularly in the Mideast, they are often less dangerous and more conservative than when in opposition. Morsi, it must be acknowledged, brokered the Israeli-Gaza truce and admonished Hamas. Hezbollah, now rooted in the Lebanese government, has a stake in the game and therefore an interest in control. If it confronts Israel, it will do so when it is ready, if and when the more pressing threat to it –ISIL – is defeated. Iran, too, though still a very real threat to the West, is exhausted from years of terror export and the resultant sanctions. Tehran continues to signal that it wants to, in part, join the state system and engage in a measure of diplomacy and détente with the West. Given the rise of ISIL, one must confess that constructive dialogue with Iran may come to be Obama’s one solid foreign policy success, at least in the Middle East.

The supranational nature of the radical Islamic threat means that neoliberal approaches are of little value in the formulation of policy approaches on the international stage. Neoconservative state diplomacy offers little more.

What does seem clearer, therefore, is that the supranational character of militant Islam does in fact resemble Huntington’s view of a “clash of civilizations.” For the Charlie Hebdo terrorists, the problem isn’t the West’s behavior in the Middle East. Rather, it is the persistence of Western values of free speech, equality of gender, religion, and race that offends.

The critical key here, however, is to remember – always – that it is but a handful of Western “homegrown” Islamic terrorists who embrace this ‘clash.’

The first Western policy prescription, therefore, must be in constant awareness that domestic anti-terror measures, both legislative and covert, must operate on the basis of selective targeting and decisive intelligence.

On the “liberal” side, education, integration and equitable employment measures will be critical to balancing anti-terror laws, contentious restrictions on civil liberties, and a more selective immigration policy.

On the “conservative” side, it seems apparent that the enormous emphasis on electronic intelligence and surveillance designed to counter conventional threats from states and state-sponsored terrorists has left Western security services unprepared on the ‘humint’ equation.

For a decade after 9/11, Osama bin Laden eluded US Special Forces and continued to wage successful terror attacks with a “network” of hand-written notes and orders carried by trusted human messengers.

In his book on Israel’s Mossad, Gordon Thomas is time and again astonished by the lack of anti-terror cooperation and the “turf” competition between MI5 and MI6, CIA and FBI, and Mossad itself and Israel’s Shin Bet. Gordon’s astonishment turns to veiled anger as he catalogues the depth and ease of radical Islamic terror cell operation between Western countries where the intelligence services are reluctant to share information. He predicts a major attack on French soil, with a similar outcome in England almost inevitable for a lack of intelligence cooperation that he further argues must include an accord with Arab and Islamic states with interests threatened by fundamentalism. Thomas’ constant refrain in the book, with a reluctant praise for the Israelis, is that radical Islamic terror cells cannot be fought with conventional forces and electronic intelligence. All of Israel’s successes, he documents, have come through agents fluent in Arabic, able to recite the Koran, and infinitely familiar with the Kasbahs, alleys, hotels and souks of remote capitals.

At this stage post-Charile Hebdo, Thomas’s tactical analysis and prescription is all an honest policy analyst can offer unless and until a political solution is found. That solution is not forthcoming in Western apologies and appeasement.

The views in this article are solely those of author and do not necessarily reflect the views or position of Geopoliticalmonitor.com, where this article was first published.

The post Navigating The Charlie Hebdo Punditry Chorus – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor’s decision on January 16, 2015, to open a preliminary examination into the situation in Palestine is a potential first step toward reducing the impunity in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has left thousands of victims without justice, Human Rights Watch said.

The prosecutor’s decision followed overdue but positive moves by Palestinian authorities to join the ICC treaty and to accept the court’s jurisdiction over crimes committed on or from Palestinian territory since June 13, 2014. Governments that have criticized Palestine’s decision to give the ICC a mandate or have moved to sanction Palestine in retaliation should end such pressure and support universal ratification of the court’s treaty, Human Rights Watch said.

“As the prosecutor’s office determines whether the next step of a formal investigation is warranted, we expect it will scrutinize alleged crimes impartially regardless of who is responsible,” said Balkees Jarrah, international justice counsel at Human Rights Watch. “Other countries should refrain from trying to interfere with the examination and let the prosecutor get on with her job.”

During the preliminary examination phase, the ICC prosecutor will determine whether the criteria have been met to pursue a formal investigation. The prosecutor always opens preliminary examinations as a matter of policy after receiving declarations accepting the court’s jurisdiction. On January 1, 2015, the Palestinian government lodged such a declaration, giving the court a mandate back to June 13, 2014. The ICC prosecutor is conducting eight other preliminary examinations in situations around the world, including Afghanistan, Ukraine, Georgia, Colombia, and Nigeria.

Following the prosecutor’s announcement about initiating an examination, Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said he would recommend that his government not cooperate with the court. Israel, which is not party to the ICC treaty, also announced steps to lobby ICC member countries to cut funding to the court. The US State Department issued a statement condemning the ICC prosecutor’s decision. However, some of the court’s top financial contributors, including the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, pledged their continued support for the ICC.

The ICC prosecutor’s decision came after Palestinian authorities took steps to join the court in the face of strong objections expressed by some countries, including the United States and Israel. On January 2, 2015, Palestinian authorities transmitted a copy of Palestine’s ICC accession instrument to the United Nations Secretariat. As depository for the ICC treaty, the UN secretary-general officially accepted the document on January 6 and circulated a notification indicating that the ICC treaty would come into effect for Palestine on April 1, making it the 123rd member of the court.

The ICC jurisdiction in relation to Palestine now covers serious crimes, including war crimes and crimes against humanity, dating back to June 13, 2014, committed on or from Palestinian territory. Such crimes include indiscriminate attacks on civilians, whether committed by Israelis or Palestinians – including abuses during the 2014 conflict in Gaza. Palestinian ICC membership could narrow the accountability gap for serious international crimes and contribute to justice for victims of abuses, Human Rights Watch said.

Human Rights Watch documented unlawful attacks, including some that may amount to war crimes, during the 2014 hostilities in Gaza.

Israeli forces intensively bombarded the Gaza Strip from the air, land, and sea, severely affecting the civilian population. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than 2,250 Palestinians were killed, including 1,563 civilians, of whom 538 were children and 306 were women. Five months after the hostilities ended, thousands of unexploded remnants of war remain dispersed throughout the Gaza Strip, and about 100,000 people are still displaced; some 22,000 homes were destroyed or severely damaged during the conflict.

Palestinian armed groups fired thousands of indiscriminate rockets toward Israeli population centers; stored rockets in empty school buildings; summarily executed alleged Palestinian “collaborators” with Israel; and deployed their forces without apparently taking all feasible precautions to prevent harm to civilians, in violation of international law. Sixty-seven Israeli soldiers and five civilians in Israel, one a child, were killed.

On July 23, the UN Human Rights Council established a Commission of Inquiry to impartially investigate all parties’ conduct during the hostilities in Gaza as well as military operations in the West Bank beginning on June 13. Israel refused to grant the commission access to Gaza, which the commission has also not been able to reach via Egypt.

The ICC’s statute also classifies as a war crime the “direct or indirect” transfer of civilians by an occupying power into occupied territory – a category that would include the Israeli government’s facilitation of the transfer of its citizens into settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Another war crime under the statute is the “forcible transfer” of protected people in an occupied territory – in this case Palestinians – off their lands, such as by demolishing their homes and preventing them from returning.

Since Benjamin Netanyahu became Israel’s prime minister in 2009, Israel has begun construction of more than 10,400 settlement homes. Israeli demolitions in the West Bank during the same period left more than 5,333 Palestinians homeless. Demolitions left 1,103 Palestinians homeless in 2013 and 1,177 in 2014.

A number of countries have condemned Palestine’s decision to join the ICC, claiming that it will obstruct a return to peace negotiations. The US described the move as “counterproductive” and stated that it continued to “oppose actions against Israel at the ICC as counterproductive to the cause of peace.” Some US Congress members have threatened to cut off aid to the Palestine Authority if it uses Palestine’s ICC membership to pursue criminal charges against Israeli officials at the ICC. Israel halted the transfer of more than US$120 million in tax revenue that Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinian authorities. Canada, an ICC state party, denounced the Palestinian decision as a “concerning and dangerous development” and a “huge mistake.” All three countries filed communications with the UN stating their position that Palestine is ineligible to join the ICC on the ground that it does not qualify as a state under international law.

In the years leading up to Palestine’s decision to give the ICC jurisdiction, leading EU member states, including the United Kingdom and France, at various times publicly opposed any move by Palestine to seek access to the court. This position violated those countries’ obligations as ICC member states to support the court’s purpose of ensuring that serious international crimes do not go unpunished, Human Rights Watch said.

“If anything, the ICC’s involvement could help deter war crimes that today fuel animosity and undermine the trust needed for a peace accord,” Jarrah said. “Countries that rightly advocate for justice for international crimes in Syria, North Korea, and elsewhere should not insist on leaving Palestine an accountability-free zone.”

Palestine is the fifth member of the League of Arab States to join the ICC. Tunisia joined the court in 2011, Jordan ratified the ICC treaty in 2002, and Comoros and Djibouti are also ICC member states. Palestine’s decision to join the ICC treaty may help build momentum for further Arab League states to become members of the court, Human Rights Watch said.

In addition to the ICC treaty, Palestine also acceded to 15 other treaties, including the Convention on Cluster Munitions, the Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, and the Convention on the Political Rights of Women. In April 2014, Palestine had acceded to 20 other international treaties and conventions, most relating to human rights and the laws of war.

“Palestine’s accession to the ICC is a positive step for justice and the rule of law,” Jarrah said. “Countries that purport to share those values should applaud it.”

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Even as US President Barack Obama left New Delhi on Jan 27 for Saudi Arabia after his three-day visit, the “breakthrough” on the US-India civilian nuclear deal lost some ground on the list of key “takeaways” from the visit being put forth by various analysts and commentators.

This came as focus shifted to the not-so-done commercial aspects of the deal which the two leaders had achieved by flexing their political muscle. A true import of the significance of the nuclear deal can be obtained by evaluating it for three deliverables. First is the more obvious nuclear energy, second is the implied access to dual-use and high-end technology, and the third, a more nuanced interpretation, it cleared the way for a common strategic vision. This article examines these aspects of the nuclear deal.

The Agreement

Civilian nuclear cooperation between India and US saw major traction in 2005 when the US agreed in principle to support the initiative through a modification of US legislation, obtaining a waiver from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and a special waiver from the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) of which the US is a founding member. India was required to delineate the civilian and the strategic components of its nuclear programme, placing additional facilities under IAEA safeguards, strengthening export controls and enacting a nuclear liability legislation consistent with CSC (Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage1997). It was the last step that India was to take that log-jammed the initiative.

With the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy still fresh in the mind of the Indian public, the parliament in 2010 passed the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act (CLNDA); a law that made equipment suppliers ultimately responsible for a nuclear accident. It was a deviation from international norms which rested the liability on the operator of the nuclear power plants rather than the supplier of the equipment. This deviation raised concerns in the US and as India could not manage its internal political environment to amend the legislation, the deal stalled.

The US–India Civil Nuclear Agreement or Indo-US nuclear deal basically allowed India access to nuclear technology and fuel without giving up its nuclear weapons programme. The log-jammed 2008 agreement therefore became a symbol of US overreach to India on one end and India’s failure to match the effort on the other. This strategic hold-back, a major impediment (and irritant) to cooperation between the two countries has been addressed by the current resolution of the government-government issues concerning the nuclear deal, even though the commercial potential of the deal is yet to be realised. The White House quite pointedly stated that the deal was about “how to resolve issues.”

The Resolution

The road to the resolution of the log-jam passed through three rounds of dialogue (last of which was held in London recently) by a bilateral contact group, constituted after the visit by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to US in September 2014. The sticking points had been the US insistence on tracking of fissile material being used in the nuclear plants and liability of the nuclear equipment supplier of these nuclear plants in case of an accident.

The concerns of the international suppliers arise from provisions in Section 17 (b) and Section 46 of the CLNDA. The liability (under section 17) is capped (as is the case in all nuclear liability regimes), vide Section 6 of CLNDA at Rs.1,500 crore (subject to review). The central government is liable for any compensation/damages beyond the capped amount. Section 46 of CLNDA on the other hand has been seen to expose the nuclear suppliers to potentially unlimited amounts of liability under ordinary principles of tort law.

The first issue has been addressed by setting up an insurance pool (a risk transfer mechanism) led by General Insurance Co and four other insurance companies of a total amount of Rs.750 crore and the remaining Rs.750 crore by way of a sovereign guarantee. US concerns over section 46 would be allayed through a legal memorandum.

Despite the deal in its current form providing a level playing field to foreign nuclear equipment suppliers, including those from the US, it is the retreating state of the nuclear power industry post-Fukushima that has taken out the commercial zing from the deal. The commercial opportunity for the US nuclear equipment suppliers is now being tempered by one, India’s energy policy with regards to the percentage of nuclear energy mix; two, the progress of India’s own nuclear equipment manufacturing (indigenous pressurized heavy-water reactors (PHWR)); three, technical breakthroughs in alternate sources of energy, and finally the competition from other foreign manufacturers with better technical, cost and operational credentials.

The focus on US and foreign nuclear suppliers has put out of debate the relief the resolution of the deal (insurance pool and relief from tort litigation) will bring for the domestic vendors of the indigenous PHWR reactors who had expressed similar concerns regarding CLNDA.

Strategic Context

It is largely believed by the global community that nuclear energy and the deal itself, was a convenient cover for releasing India from global denial of dual-use technology. The ultimate aim was to make India a full member of the four technology control regimes i.e. NSG, the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), the Wassenaar Arrangement and the Australia Group. Therefore, not surprisingly, India and the US during the last two summit meetings have committed to continue to work towards India’s phased entry into these four technology-control regimes. It is also not surprising that the breakthrough on the nuclear deal was followed up by a joint strategic vision document which synergises India’s cooperation and security understandings with Australia and Japan.

Even though China, a day after US President Barack Obama backed India’s inclusion into the elite 48-member NSG, has extended conditional support for India’s membership bid saying that “prudence and caution” needs to be exercised on the issue, the road to the NSG membership will come with costs. Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying at the media briefing said that “We support the group to include new members and we support India to take further measures to meet the requirements for inclusion in the group.” China would probably be not so concerned with India’s membership of NSG but with the fact that it would open the doors for inclusion into MTCR and Wassenaar Arrangement.

China would therefore push, as it has done in the past on nuclear issues, for India- Pakistan parity. This would assuage Pakistan and at the same time ensure India’s membership to the four technology-control regimes becomes difficult. Pakistan has already started spinning out the narrative on how the nuclear deal will destabilise South Asia, besides the fact that it has not received similar treatment from the international community on the “pretext that it was involved in nuclear proliferation”.

Notwithstanding geopolitics and the distance the Indo-US nuclear deal may yet have to cover, it presents a “new and perhaps unprecedented opportunity” for not only deepening of Indo-US ties but also for an Indian presence in the Asia-Pacific region.

(Monish Gulati is Associate Director with the Society for Policy Studies. He can be contacted at mgulati@spsindia.in)

This article was published at South Asia Monitor.

The post India-US Relations: Beyond The Nuclear Deal – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Saudi Arabia’s Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman announced a massive Cabinet reshuffle on Thursday, appointing Azzam Al-Dakhil, new education minister, Ahmed bin Aqeel Al-Khateeb new health minister, Adel Al-Toraifi, minister of culture and information and Abdul Lateef bin Abdul Malik Al-Asheikh new minister of municipal and rural affairs.

King Salman, who ascended the throne last Friday, reappointed Prince Khaled Al-Faisal as governor of Makkah in place of Prince Mishaal bin Abdullah and Prince Faisal bin Bandar governor of Riyadh, replacing Prince Turki bin Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz. He removed Prince Bandar bin Sultan from the position of the secretary-general for National Security Council and special envoy of the king.

Walid bin Mohammed Al-Samaani is the new justice minister, who replaces Mohammed Al-Eissa while Saleh bin Abdul Aziz Al-Asheikh was reinstated Islamic affairs minister, replacing Sulaiman Abalkhail. He merged the higher education ministry with the Ministry of Education.

Other new ministers are: Mohammed Al-Suwaiyel, minister of telecommunications and information technology; Majed bin Abdullah Al-Qassabi minister of social affairs; Abdul Rahman bin Abdul Mohsen Al-Fadli, agriculture minister; Khaled bin Abdullah Al-Araj, minister of civil service; Saad bin Khaled Al-Jabari state minister; and Mohammed bin Abdul Malik Al-Asheikh, state minister.

Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal, Petroleum and Mineral Resources Minister Ali Al-Naimi, Finance Minister Ibrahim Al-Assaf, National Guard Minister Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, Labor Minister Adel Fakeih and Water and Electricity Minister Abdullah Al-Hussayen retained their positions.

Other Cabinet members are: Crown Prince Muqrin, deputy premier; Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Naif, second deputy premier and minister of interior; Prince Mansour bin Miteb, state minister and adviser to the king; Prince Mohammed bin Salman, defense minister; and Matlab Al-Nafeesa, state minister; and Musaed Al-Aiban, state minister.

Housing Minister Shuwaish Al-Dhuwaihi, Haj Minister Bandar Hajjar, Economy and Planning Minister Muhammed Al-Jasser, Commerce and Industry Minister Tawfiq Al-Rabiah, Transport Minister Abdullah Al-Muqbil will remain in their positions. Other ministers who retained their positions were: State Minister for Shoura Affairs Mohammed bin Faisal Abusaq, and State Minister Essam bin Saad bin Saeed.

King Salman appointed Khaled bin Abdul Mohsen Al-Muhaisen as president of the National Anti-Corruption Commission (Nazaha), replacing Mohammed Al-Sharief.

Intelligence chief Prince Khaled bin Bandar was relieved and Gen. Khaled bin Ali Al-Humaidan was named the new chief. Prince Khaled bin Bandar, Prince Mishaal bin Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz bin Musaed and Prince Abdul Aziz bin Sattam have been named advisers to the king with the rank of minister.

King Salman dissolved a number of bodies such as the Higher Committee for Educational Policy, Higher Committee for Administrative Organization, Civil Service Council, the Higher Commission for King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology, Higher Education and Universities Council, Higher Council for Education, Higher Council for Petroleum and Mineral Affairs, Supreme Economic Council, National Security Council (NSC), Supreme Council for King Abdullah City for Nuclear and Renewable Energy, Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, and Supreme Council for the Affairs of the Handicapped.

Two new councils have been established: The Council for Political and Security Affairs and the Council for Economic and Development Affairs. The two councils will be closely linked with the Council of Ministers. The commission of experts will continue as one of the agencies of the Cabinet’s general secretariat.

The Council for Political and Security Affairs will have nine members and will be chaired by Prince Mohammed bin Naif.

The 22-member Council for Economic and Development Affairs will be chaired by Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

King Salman also reshuffled the general committee for Cabinet under the chairmanship of Musaed Al-Aiban.

Other major appointments were: Prince Abdul Aziz bin Salman, deputy minister of petroleum and minerals with the rank of minister; Prince Turki bin Saud, president of King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology with the rank of minister; Hazim bin Mustafa Zagzoug, head of the king’s private affairs; Fahd Abdullah Al-Samari, adviser at the Royal Court; Mohammed bin Sulaiman Al-Ajaji, head of experts commission at the Cabinet; Yahya bin Abdullah Al-Samaan, assistant president of the Shoura Council; Abdul Rahman Al-Hussayen, president of the Control and Investigation Board; Mohammed bin Abdullah Al-Jadaan, president of Capital Market Authority; Sulaiman bin Abdullah Al-Hamdan, president of the General Authority of Civil Aviation replacing Prince Fahd bin Abdullah; Abdul Rahman bin Abdullah Al-Sanad, president of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, replacing Abdullatif Al-Asheikh; Nabeel bin Mohammed Al-Aamoudi, president of the Saudi Ports Authority, replacing Abdul Aziz Al-Tuwaijri; and Ibrahim bin Mohammed Al-Sultan, mayor of Riyadh. Mohammed bin Abdul Kareem Al-Eissa has been removed from his position as member of the Council of Senior Islamic Scholars, one decree said.

The post Saudi Arabia Announces Massive Cabinet Shake-Up appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Siraj Wahab

The passing away of celebrated cartoonist R.K. Laxman in Pune, India, on Monday came as a bolt from the blue. I grew up reading the Times of India, which was never complete without Laxman’s drawings.

His sharp lines and strokes and acute political understanding made him stand out from the crowd. He could describe in a cartoon what writers would take pages to articulate. He would always make you smile and reflect about issues, and was certainly a true genius.

His death, at 93, has led to a flood of memories. It was sometime during 1991 that we at Lokmat Times, the English newspaper from Aurangabad, India, invited him and another journalistic icon, Bahram Contractor, known widely as Busybee of the “Round and About” column, to attend the anniversary of our newspaper. Lokmat Times was then edited by the suave and sophisticated Alok Verma.

We were very excited to welcome him in Aurangabad. My illustrious colleague, the writer Lakshmi Murthy, and I were assigned by our editor to meet them at the airport and take them to Rama International Hotel.

Laxman, his wife Kamala, and Contractor, and his young wife Farzana, were thrilled to be at the event. It was a grand occasion. For people from a small town such as Aurangabad, the arrival of Laxman and Contractor was a big moment. Laxman was a frail man and always had his wife at his side. Contractor and Laxman shared an immense camaraderie and continually cracked jokes. Murthy and I were completely thrilled to be in their company.

Later that night, Laxman charmed everyone by sketching a few cartoons in the presence of our newspaper owner and founder Rajendra Darda.

During an interview, I remember him saying to us that he would think about a subject for hours and once he had the idea, he would do the cartoon in a matter of minutes. Laxman was an icon and the common man motif in all his cartoons, struck a chord with all ordinary Indians.

Laxman reflected our point of view. He articulated our anguish. He gave vent to the frustrations of the Indian middle class. He epitomized the changes that we were witnessing in India. He was the chronicler of our times.

One of the first things when I landed in Mumbai in 1991, to take up the post of Chief Sub-editor at Bombay Mid-Day, was to call on Laxman at the iconic Times of India building, and went to talk to him for a while. He gave me his blessings when I said that I was starting out on a new phase in my career in Bombay.

He urged me to remain true to my profession and never get carried away by fame. I later wrote down those words in my diary. When I left the Times of India that day, I was almost overcome with happiness because I had met for a second time a man who was both adored and feared in equal measure by the high and mighty in India.

With Contractor having passed away a few years ago, and now Laxman, Indian journalism is all the more poorer. They represented a generation who were determined to do the right thing. Laxman would always remain in the minds of many as the conscience of an entire nation. He has truly been immortalized by his outstanding body of work.

The post India’s Most Feared ‘Common Man’ – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By N. Sathiya Moorthy*

The comments and observations made by Sri Lanka Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera in New Delhi in what was the maiden overseas official visit by any top functionary from the new government in Colombo is a further reflection on their intention to rebalance relations with India, post-poll – reiterated earlier by President Maithripala Sirisena broadly and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe in relatively clearer terms.

Yet, Indian observers – as different from the government of India — need to be cautious and careful at the same time, not to read more than what the new Sri Lanka government has promised, and is capable of promising – particularly on ‘China ties’, which had come under avoidable strain under the previous leadership of president Mahinda Rajapaksa.

The fact that Samaraweera readily spent three hours on a Sunday weekend to discuss bilateral and multilateral issues with External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, that too, on the eve of the first session of the Sri Lankan parliament for the new government, is also indicative of the seriousness with which Colombo is approaching the India relations. Given the less-understood realities of Sri Lankan politics for one, and the intra and extra compulsions within the state structure and otherwise, Indian observers will have to be as much pragmatic as they will have to be patient.

Sri Lanka’s China links may not be as long and historic as that with immediate Indian neighbour. Nonetheless, there have been pit stops where it tends to pause and check. It may be in the absence of such review that the Rajapaksa government walked farther than required – and expected. The milestones include the 1952 ‘rice-for-rubber deal’, when Mao’s Communist China sold rice at lower than international prices in return for rubber purchased from a drought-hit Sri Lanka at higher than market rates. At the height of the ethnic war, China is reported to have sold weapons to fight the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), when none was forthcoming from elsewhere (starting with India) – without demanding or quoting a price.

The post-war Sri Lankan engagement with China has been mostly on the economic, and more so, investments side. Those investments, however much controversial from the Indian perspective, particularly in terms of geo-strategic priorities, came at a time when none wanted to invest in Sri Lanka and no nation but China had the funds and intention to invest in Third World nations and in such big doses. No third nation, starting with India and including the US and other Western friends of the new government in general and Prime Minister Wickremesinghe in particular is going to underwrite repayments to China. Nor is anyone of them going to sign on cheques for Sri Lanka to pay China for the war time weaponry purchases, which involve undisclosed sums.

‘Win-win situation’

In a statement after Ambassador Wu Jinaghao called on Prime Minister Wickremesinghe, the Chinese embassy in Colombo claimed in a statement that the latter had invited more Chinese businessmen to invest in Sri Lanka and also talked about improving bilateral ties to ‘mutual benefit’ and a ‘win-win situation’. Amid the political predicament in which President Sirisena is placed and the near silence that the Sri Lankan polity had maintained through the China engagement under president Rajapaksa, it needs to be seen how long, how much and how far would they walk, particularly in the reverse.

In context, the Chinese embassy also claimed that at a later day meeting with Ambassador Wu, President Maithripala Sirisena assured China that his ‘national unity government’ was willing to implement the consensus reached during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Sri Lanka last September. President Sirisena was a senior member of the Rajapaksa government at the time, and the Chinese statement said that he “also pledged to strengthen pragmatic cooperation in all fields with a view to enhancing bilateral ties”. The president also emphasised that Sri Lanka valued the friendly ties with China dating back centuries.

In his meeting with President Sirisena, Ambassador Wu reciprocated the friendship and goodwill extended and observed that China always attached great importance to its relationship with Sri Lanka, which he described as a ‘time-tested partner’. He also pledged China’s commitment to the development of a ‘strategic cooperative relationship’ between the two countries, the spokesperson said. Though Sri Lanka’s continued participation in President Xi’s 21st Century Maritime Silk Route (MSR) project did not seem to have figured in Ambassador Wu’s talks with the top two in the Sri Lankan administration, there have not been any adversarial comments from either, before or after assuming office.

Given the post-poll atmosphere in Sri Lanka and the ‘western liberal’ thought about Prime Minister Wickremesinghe’s United National Party (UNP), which in turn had been backing President Sirisena since his emergence as the common opposition candidate, the new government seems to be indicating a ‘rebalancing’ of the one-sided China relations thus far. Yet, there are issues and concerns that nations have to address in ways that indicate continuity with change – or, change with continuity. How the new dispensation is able to address such essentials of statecraft will take time for them to absorb and act upon.

As a pragmatic leader, with ready acceptance of ‘market economy’ principles and coming to power when the nation’s economy can do with greater impetus, Prime Minister Wickremesinghe would be more than careful in scrapping projects, funded by China or any other, unless it is seen as wholly unfeasible and/or threatening the nation’s security or its geo-strategic relations with India in particular and the rest of the democratic world, otherwise. In the interim, India and Indians can expect Sri Lanka not to provide the likes of berthing facilities for Chinese submarines, as had happened on two occasions under the Rajapaksa leadership in 2014.

Seen by the Sri Lankan government of the day as a part of the ‘five hub’ development programme outlined in president Rajapaksa’s ‘Mahinda Chintanaya’ manifesto for his first electoral outing in 2005, the ‘naval and maritime’ hub did make the Indian neighbour uncomfortable at times. The ‘submarine’ berthing, though reportedly with prior intimation to India made more news when China sought to explain that they were meant for checking Somali piracy in the Indian Ocean – the kind of operations in which navies do not deploy such vessels.

Port city, a test case?

The test case relates to the Colombo Port City Project, which Prime Minister Wickremesinghe had wanted scrapped, in statements both in parliament and outside ahead of the presidential polls, citing environmental clearance issues. After assuming office, he however said that they would not scrap the project but would revisit environmental issues before taking a decision. China too seems eager and willing to reciprocate in kind.

The state influenced media opinion in China has been in favour of cooperating with the new Sri Lankan government in reviewing ongoing contracts. The China Communications Construction Corporation (CCCC), contractors for the project, has since offered to cooperate with Sri Lanka in reviewing environmental clearance issues for the project. A detailed news report in Colombo-based Daily Mirror has also pointed out how the project (like the Hambantota port and Norchcholai power projects, also involving China) had evolved over the long term, and taken some concrete shape in the late ‘90s (under president Chandrika Bandaranaike-Kumaratunga, CBK).

According to the report, several feasibility studies, both by local academics and overseas investors, had been done before the project was taken up. It also recalled that a Singaporean firm had got involved earlier but could not proceed with it, owing to high costs. The waterfront project became feasible only after it was linked to the Colombo Port expansion project, which again is under China’s care, after India did not show interest even at the tendering stage. In this context, the Daily Mirror report also indicated how CCCC had engaged Western firms as project consultants.

Continued dependence

The power change in Colombo, however, may have lessened Sri Lanka’s continued but immediate dependence on China – and also Russia, among others – at least on the political and diplomatic front. With the US-led West insistent on ‘credible’ if not ‘independent’ investigations into ‘war time accountability issues’, the Rajapaksa government ended up ever more dependent on China with its veto power in the UN Security Council and a few stops to pull in the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). With the peaceful power transfer, the West may go easy on the UNHRC probe and expect the new government to stand by its post-poll proposal for a ‘credible, domestic probe’ and at the same time working with the UN.

When the probe is effected to the satisfaction of the international community (read: West) and also the Tamil polity nearer home, Sri Lanka’s dependence on China – and also Russia – may become less. This could not only ease pressure on India on this score, but also ensure that India would not have to deploy the legitimate ‘sovereignty’ clause that it had to employ at UNHRC-2014, to abstain from voting on the US-sponsored resolution, after backing the earlier versions in the two preceding years, which in turn had recognised Sri Lanka’s ‘internal mechanisms’, which Prime Minister Wickremesinghe has said, his government would insist upon.

On the ethnic issue and the rest, Indian concerns regarding a ‘new Sri Lanka’ under a new leadership would as much relate to the decisions and indecisions of the common Western friends of the two South Asian neighbours under the changed political circumstances in both over the past year. On the strategic security issues, India may be happy if Sri Lanka addressees traditional Indian concerns, which have become more relevant after China set its foot towards acquiring super power status and a dominant role in the vast and varied Indian Ocean neighbourhood.

As and when those legitimate concerns get addressed, India may be watching with interest and curiosity, though not outright anxiety, as to how the new Sri Lankan leadership handles larger geo-strategic concerns, where the US is the key player in what essentially is the ‘traditional sphere of Indian influence’. As National Security Advisor A.K. Doval indicated in his keynote address at the annual Galle Dialogue, hosted by the Sri Lankan Navy, in late 2014, keeping Indian Ocean as a ‘zone of peace’ would serve the interests of the riparian nations all across than warding off one or the other of non-territorial big powers.

*N. Sathiya Moorthy is Director, Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation, the Indian public-policy think-tank, headquartered in New Delhi. email: sathiyam54@gmail.com

The post Sri Lanka: Rebalancing The India-China Act And More – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Muhammad Umar*

Narendra Modi thinks he can pull the wool over our eyes, but he is not fooling anyone. Modi used President Xi Jinping’s visit to leverage Russia, and the visit by Vladimir Putin, to force President Barack Obama into his arms.

The ‘US-India Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean Region’ should have many folks in Moscow reconsidering their strategic and political partnership with India. The document called for increased maritime security cooperation in the South China Sea, and East China Sea, which means that India will face-off with Russia, armed to the teeth with Russian nuclear submarines, and weapons.

Although China and Russia have annual joint naval exercises in this region, Russia has never gone to the extent of offering to partner with China to safeguard the East and South China Seas, mainly due to the fact that Russia had always aligned itself with India’s foreign policy, a policy that in the past few months has drastically changed.

In the joint document released on the 25th of January, India and the US also agreed to improve security cooperation in South, Southeast, and Central Asia. A region where Russia and China have been working hard to improve economic, as well as people-to-people relationships, in hopes of creating a vibrant, and economically prosperous Eurasia region. And if India tries to muscle in to this region with American support, it will likely lead to a conflict between Moscow and New Delhi.

It is no secret that the Americans fear China’s fast growing global influence, and will go to any extent to prevent China from replacing the US as the next hegemonic power, which includes going out of their way, without any concern for the consequences of their actions, to equip India with what it requires to counterbalance China.

The US has a history of successfully neutralizing countries that it perceives as a threat to its global hegemony. The Americans neutralized Germany in the 19th century, the Russians in the 20th, and they are now trying to do the same to the Chinese in the 21st century.

India knows this, and is taking advantage of the United States to build up its own military capabilities in a bid to upset the current world order. The Americans are underestimating India’s ability to use American weapons and technology against them, which is what India has essentially agreed to do to the Russians in the Asia Pacific region.

The United States is already using Japan to stand against Chinese expansion in the South China Sea, and now want India to also play a role.

Russia must realize that a partnership with China, instead of India, will benefit both the Russians and the Chinese, it will also pose a substantial challenge to America’s global dominance.

In addition to defying American hegemony, through this partnership, China could most probably help Russia resolve its dispute with Japan over the Kuril Islands, and Russians could do the same for China over its dispute with Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands.

There are two things that China, Russia, and the US need to understand; the first is that India is using them as leverage against each other to gain the maximum amount of incentives from all of them; and the second is that Modi is a very ambitious man, he wants to take over America’s current position in South Asia, and the South Pacific region.

Let us not forget that India violated the international community’s trust, when it used the Canadian supplied Cirus research reactor, and the American provided heavy water for that reactor to develop its first nuclear bomb in 1974. If the nuclear cooperation deal with the Americans is successfully implemented, there is no guarantee that India will not do it again.

Modi is trying once again to deceive Russia by dispatching his External Affairs Minister to meet with her counterpart, and give him false assurances. Just as Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee did in 1998 after a series for nuclear explosions, when he quickly dispatched his Minister of External Affairs, Jaswant Singh to Beijing.

Keeping all this in mind, Russia must take a decision to refocus and rethink their foreign policy towards India, and China. The Indians have already agreed with the Americans to use Russian nuclear submarines against Russia in the East China Sea, and if Russia continues to buy India’s false guarantees, it might not be long before India decided to also point Russian tanks and guns at Russia.

*The writer is an assistant professor at the National University of Sciences and Technology in Islamabad. He tweets @umarwrites.

The post Russian Guns Pointed At Russia From India – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

“The involvment in the affairs of other states constitutes interference”, said Argentine Cabinet Chief Jorge Capitanich, in response to calls to shed light on the case of Alberto Nisman, the special prosecutor in charge of investigating the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center back in 1994 that killed 85 people in Buenos Aires. Nisman was found dead on January 18 in his apartment in the Argentinian capital.

Capitanich’s remarks were more specifically aimed at the US State Department and certain US Congress-members. He in particular slammed the “imperialist vision” of US Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who doubted Argentina’s capacity to properlyinvestigate the case and urged Barack Obama to pay “greater attention” on what is happening in the country.

Capitanich stressed that “the Republic of Argentina is an autonomous, sovereign and independent country” and that to government member has interfered in the work of investigators into the case.

Before his death, Nisman accused President Cristina Fernandez and other government officials of covering-up Iran’s alleged responsibilities in the AMIA bombing.

The government has called an emergency congress meeting to discuss the creation of a new Federal Intelligence Agency (AFI), on direct proposal of the President, in place of the Intelligence Secretariat, whose former chief – removed in December – worked closely with Nisman. A decree issued today calls the assembly from February 1-28.

The post Argentina Slams US ‘Interference’ In Nisman Case appeared first on Eurasia Review.

France is pledging tanks and armored vehicles to bolster NATO forces in Poland, where leaders are increasingly uneasy about Russia, the Associated Press reports.

In a joint statement Friday, Jan 30, after a meeting between French President Francois Hollande and Polish Prime Minister Eva Kopacz, the two governments also called for a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine, where fighting has intensified between pro-Russia militias and government troops.

NATO has no permanent presence in Eastern Europe but since last April members have been cycling forces and military equipment through the region in response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

The French military equipment is expected to remain in Poland for two months.

The post France Pledges To Send Tanks To Bolster NATO Forces In Poland appeared first on Eurasia Review.

As the mass media continues to  widely cover a government reshuffle by the new King Salman, who also removed two sons of his predecessor Abdullah, Saudi authorities postponed the flogging of the journalist and activist Raif Badawi for a third time, reports MISNA.

Badawi, 31, was sentenced last September by the Jeddah Court of Appeals to 10 years in prison, 1,000 lashes, distributed over 20 weeks, with 50 each round, and fined about $319,000 for “insulting Islam”.

After a first 50 lashings on January 9 in public outside the al-Jafali mosque in Jeddah, Badawi’s next two floggings were delayed for health reasons: the injuries from the first flogging hadn’t healed. The reasons for this postponement are unclear.

The case however has had no political consequences, including with the US ally and the matter was not even brought up by the Nobel peace prize laureate Barack Obama, who met this week in Riyadh with King Salman. The United Nations defined flogging “at the very least, a form of cruel and inhuman punishment… prohibited under international human rights law, in particular the Convention against Torture, which Saudi Arabia has ratified”.

“It is impossible for a human being to bear 50 lashings a week”, protested his wife Ensaf Haidar, who is living as a refugee in Canada with their children, assisted by Amnesty International that is fighting for the immediate and unconditional release of the blogger, who it says is a “prisoner of conscience” detained merely for exercising his right to freedom of expression.

Badawi is the founder of the “Free Saudi Liberals” forum for public discussion on the role of religion in Saudi Arabia. He has been detained since 17 June 2012 in Jeddah’s Briman prison. Amnesty reminds that also his lawyer, Waleed Abu al-Khair, is in prison serving a 15 year sentence for peace activism.

The post Saudi Arabia Postpones Again Flogging Of Blogger Raif Badawi appeared first on Eurasia Review.

A weak trade performance and a sharp reversal in military spending held GDP growth to 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter. This brought the full year growth (Q4 to Q4) to 2.5 percent, a modest slowing from the 3.1 percent rate in 2013. The growth rate of final demand in the fourth quarter was even weaker at 1.6 percent, as inventory accumulations added 0.82 percentage points to growth.

The slowdown in the fourth quarter was predictable as third quarter growth was driven in part by a 16.0 percent jump in military spending. Military spending is highly erratic and sharp swings are usually reversed, as was the case in this quarter. Military spending declined at a 12.5 percent annual rate, subtracting 0.58 percentage points from growth in the quarter. The general path for military spending is likely to be downward in the near future, although not enough to be a major drag on growth.

Other categories of government spending rose modestly in the quarter, with non-military federal spending rising at a 1.7 percent rate and state and local government spending growing at a 1.3 percent rate. We are likely to see continued modest growth in these sectors.

Trade was also a big subtraction from growth, as imports grew much more rapidly than exports. After adding 0.78 percentage points to growth in the third quarter, net exports subtracted 1.02 percentage points from growth in the fourth quarter. Trade is likely to be an ongoing drag to growth in future quarters as the higher dollar makes U.S. goods and services less competitive and austerity policies in Europe continue to depress growth in a major trading partner.

Investment spending was also weak in the quarter. Non-residential investment rose at just a 1.9 percent annual rate with equipment investment actually shrinking at a 1.9 percent annual rate. The slow pace of growth in investment spending likely reflects both the continuing weakness of demand growth and probably an ongoing shift to production offshore. The latter will accelerate if the recent rise in the dollar is not reversed. Housing construction grew at a 4.1 percent annual rate, adding 0.13 percentage points to growth. Housing is likely to continue to increase at roughly the same pace in future quarters.

Health care spending continues to be reasonably well-contained, with nominal spending rising at a 5.2 percent annual rate. This is somewhat above the 4.0 percent rate over the last year, but down from last quarter’s 6.1 percent rate. Other areas of consumer spending grew rapidly, with overall consumption growth rising at a 4.3 percent annual rate. Durable goods were again a driving factor, growing at a 7.4 percent rate, but non-durable consumption also saw strong growth, rising at a 4.4 percent annual rate. Gasoline and energy consumption rose at a 12.2 percent annual rate adding 0.25 percentage points to growth.

The pace of growth of consumption is likely to be slower in future quarters. With car sales already at a very high level, they are unlikely to increase much in the future. Similarly, the jumps in gasoline consumption and also clothes will probably not be repeated. The current saving rate of 4.6 percent is low by historical standards, so it is not plausible to expect it to fall still lower on a sustained basis.

The sharp drop in energy prices brought the rate of inflation as measured by the GDP deflator to zero. The core PCE deflator rose at just a 1.1 percent annual rate in the quarter, well below the Fed’s 2.0 percent inflation target.

The surge in inventory accumulation brought the annual rate to $113.1 billion. This is probably about $50-$60 billion higher than the trend rate, which means that inventory accumulation will likely be a drag on growth in future quarters.

On the whole this report suggests that the economy will continue on a modest growth path that is not qualitatively different from prior years in the recovery. The relatively weak 4th quarter numbers may be a surprise to fashion driven economists, but it was predictable given the composition of growth in prior quarters.

The post US 2014 GDP Growth Lags 2013 Rate, Due To Slower 4th Quarter Growth – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

There has been welcome progress in the NGO sector in Somalia during recent years, with many new organisations setting up around the country. However, questions have been asked about the degree to which they are helping to support peace and development work, with international aid money flowing in and the potential for corruption increasing.

By Abdiwahab M. Ali*

After the 1991 downfall of government led by Siad-Barre, a new era of great decadence began in Somalia, which continues to this day. The country found itself in the midst of an intense struggle for power, featuring prominent Somali clans and warlords. The bloody civil war which ensued was followed by several humanitarian crises, with an estimated 350,000 peopel dying as result of f ighting, kidnappings and other problems linked to conflict.

Although more than 20 peace-building conferences on Somalia have been held since the demise of Siad Barre, none has brought lasting peace in Somalia. They have failed because of a lack of local participation, and the influence of clan-based interests where there has been. Regional and international interventions in Somalian affairs have further complicated matters.

However, in the wake of disintegration of the Somalian state in 1992, numerous NGOs were formed. This upshot of the civil war has helped to bolster the strength of indigenous voices, and contributed to the rise of self-help groups aimed at improving people’s lives in the absence of government.

Somalians have seen tremendous growth in the size, scope, and activities of the non-profit sector. They all claim to be dedicated to improving people’s lives and livelihoods, curbing poverty, fighting against injustice and exploitation.

They have often been established with the backing of international actors, including the UN and several other international agencies, which work to implement relief and humanitarian interventions with local partners.

The credibility gap

But as the sector develops, so do arguments over the actual impact it has on the lives of those it claims to serve.

Indeed, when I visited Somalia last year, I was very worried to see that many local NGOs have disappeared, with few replacing them.

Problems but potential: the status of NGOs in Somalia

Research has shown that NGOs experience a number of common problems and dilemmas, including internal decision-making processes, recruitment, retention of staff, layoffs, and accountability, evaluation, structural growth, and fund raising activities.

From my experience and observations of local people and organisations, it appears the much of the decline of Somalian NGOs is self-inflicted. Below are four common challenges facing then:

Donor dependency

NGOs are non-profit generating organisations, and must offer their services for the greater cause of Somalis. However, some community organisations are driven less by vision, morals and beliefs, and more by the need to generate earnings. Such money-minting behaviour is an indication of the presence of vested interests, and erodes the local credibility of such organisations. It is also typical for the founders of NGOs in Somalia to be their chief executive as well. Often, what they do is establish an organisation, develop a donor-recipient relationship with foreign NGOs, take photographs of supposed work which has taken place, and use these as false evidence for having completed a project, in order to gain access to donor funds.

Corruption and poor leadership

These problems are a nation-wide hindrance not just to NGOs, but to democracy and good governance generally. As youth specialist Mohamoud Yosuf says:

Some NGOs in Somalia put their principles into practice, but too many are becoming part of the problem, instead of the solution. They’ve last their public image of being honest brokers. Some locals dub them ‘brief-case’ NGOs – organisations which exist only on paper, in order to make their owners money. They need to work for the sake of their community

Gender bias

Many who claim to be helping minorities and vulnerable groups in Somalia, including women, children and the elderly, actually ignore those very same people. No properly inclusive process can function in this way.

Geographical location

A great fault, which has surprised me a lot during my research, is how many local NGOs run very similar projects, with the same objectives. And these are often in the same, usually urban, areas. Clearly there are disadvantages to working in rural settings, but it is important not to neglect people living and working away from towns and cities.

Correcting the trend

The general growth in Somalian NGOs is to be welcomed. They provide vital services, and reach sectors of the population who otherwise would not be able to access services.

But the private actions and public image of these local NGOs is far from positive. By taking the following steps, they will be able to regain the full confidence and trust of local people and international organisations in Somalia.

First, efforts should be made to formulate good organisational structures: being flexible, innovative and inclusive of all those relevant to the issue they are working on.

Second, the accountability, transparency, and efficiency of NGOs needs to be improved. Although a large undertaking, establishing an independent authority to assess actual and claimed NGO achievement would be one step towards doing this.

Third, and most importantly, the civil society sector in general and local NGOs in particular should turn to grassroots communities and evaluate themselves and their performance. They should work collectively, wherever possible avoiding competing for resources and sharing technical know-how.

And last but no means least, donors should think twice about to whom they give aid, providing funding based on the reality on the ground, not merely for the sake of funding.

Trying to avoid past mistakes will make it much easier to promote social justice and development, across all of Somalia.

*Abdiwahab M. Ali is a Somalia-based freelance writer and researcher

This article was originally published by Insight on Conflict and is available by clicking here.

The post That Sinking Feeling In Somalia? The Trouble With NGOs In Horn Of Africa – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.