By Daniel McAdams

Sen. Tom Cotton is hoping people will forget all the pre-Iraq War II talk promising that it will be a “cakewalk” and that “we will in fact be greeted as liberators.” He is hoping no one will remember when the Bush Administration sold the Iraq war based on the Rumsfeldian lie that total victory would take “five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that…”

No, he wants us to forget the Iraq war altogether and simply concentrate on the sublime beauty of steadily bombing Iraq from the air as was the strategy in the Clinton Administration — a strategy that left untold thousands of innocent civilians dead in both sudden and slow, painful ways.

But this time he wants us to visualize the sublime beauty of attacking Iran in such a manner.

Bombing Iran would be a piece of cake, he asserted in an interview with the neoconservative “Christian” activist group Family Research Council. It would only take “several days” and it would:

…be something more along the lines of what President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox. Several days air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior. For interfering with weapons inspectors and for disobeying Security Council resolutions. All we’re asking is that the president simply be as tough as in the protection of America’s national security interest as Bill Clinton was.

Cotton was also disgusted that the Administration’s negotiators did not keep “the credible threat of military force on the table throughout” the negotiations with Iran. This threat of deadly force, he bizarrely claimed “always improves diplomacy.” Well perhaps, if by diplomacy one means “either your brains or your signature will be on the agreement.”

Senator Cotton mischaracterized the framework agreement, falsely claiming that Iran did not give up a single thing and in return the US made all the concessions. Iran’s agreement to give up 97 percent of its uranium reserves is not a concession? Nor is giving up the vast majority of its centrifuges?

The interviewer from the Family Research Council, an organization which claims to promote traditional family values, made no objection to the proposal from Senator Cotton that would, if carried out, end the lives of countless innocent families in Iran. Persian families apparently don’t count.

Senator Tom Cotton makes the previous generation of neocons, whose lies led the US into dozens of disastrous military conflicts over the past 20 years, look like a bunch of peaceniks. No wonder Bill Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel gave Cotton a million dollars. He must have the neocon old guard giddy with excitement and anticipation.

This article was published by the RonPaul Institute.

The post Sen. Tom ‘Cakewalk’ Cotton: Let’s Bomb Iran, It’ll Be A Breeze! – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama,

I am enclosing a copy of Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President 2001-2015 (Seven Stories Press), which contains over 100 letters that I sent to you and President George W. Bush (from 2001 to 2015). They were almost entirely unanswered and unacknowledged.

One of these letters asked you about the White House’s policies regarding letters it receives. I raised this issue early in your first term with the Director of the Office of Presidential Correspondence, Mike Kelleher, who said there was no specific policy regarding responses, but that he would get back to me after the Office of Presidential Correspondence considered the matter. He did not.

Citizen correspondence is important both for you as President and them. For the citizens, it is an opportunity to circumvent the barriers presented by the media and governmental institutions to directly access the White House. For presidents, letters help, as you have said, escape “the bubble” (e.g. the ten letters from citizens you read each evening). Letters from citizens also convey ideas and observations that alert you to conditions, issues, and urgencies at hand and occasionally provide you with an opportunity to publically discuss the point raised by an ordinary citizen who penned such a letter.

Just the other day, when you were visiting Ohio, a chance question to you from a person in the audience elicited your view that mandatory voting would “be transformative” and exists in a number of other democracies, such as Australia. Those few words alone will stimulate a public discussion in an era of low voter turnout, including the pros and cons of having a None of the Above (NOTA) option for voters.

Letters can be very valuable by asking questions that offer you an opportunity to respond on matters or issues not ordinarily addressed by the press corps or officials or members of Congress. (Incidentally, the first annual review of the White House press corps and its interaction with the president appears in the current issue (March/April 2015) of the Columbia Journalism Review funded by the Helen Thomas Fund. She would like that!)

There are many other potential benefits of sending letters to presidents. For example, during Secretary of Energy Steven Chu’s entire four-year term, many of the major anti-nuclear power groups could not obtain a meeting with him. Although he had met numerous times with representatives from the nuclear industry, he would not respond to our several letters and calls so that he hear and respond to the empirical positions and recommendations of experienced groups whose overall views he did not share. I wrote asking if you could intervene and urge him to meet with us. Also, you needed to know about this rejection by your Secretary of Energy. There was no response.

I understand that you and your staff send courtesy responses to invitations to events around the country and you respond to letters about highly visible issues, such as the auto industry bailout, with form letters. Of course, you also respond to political allies and supporters in some fashion. But, that leaves out many letters reflecting the knowledge and position of many engaged Americans who should neither be stonewalled, nor overlooked.

Here is what I recommend:

1. Issue a policy on responding to letters with whatever classification you choose to make so that people can know what to expect.
2. At the very least, these active citizens should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of their letters and emails. This is what the Prime Minister of Canada does, regardless of whether the letters are supportive or critical. Additionally, the prime minister refers letters to the appropriate ministry for further review. Without even an acknowledgement, citizens might become cynical and/or stop writing.
3. Have your staff select the letters with ideas, proposals or suggestions that they think would make a good annual public report to the American people. Include critical letters that point out shortcomings. This has a salutary effect on “the bubble” and goes beyond the few letters that all presidents use as political props.

I’ll conclude with an invitation, which you may wish to reconsider, that appears in my book Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President 2001-2015.  On May 4, 2012, I sent a letter to you urging you to address a proposed gathering of a thousand leaders of the nonprofit civic community at a hotel ballroom near the White House, at your scheduled convenience. These leaders head diverse groups supporting justice for consumers, workers, small taxpayers, the poor and other environmental, health, housing, transportation and energy causes. These organizations represent many millions of Americans across the country who support them with donations and volunteer time. There was no reply. Then, I sent the letter to the first Lady Michelle Obama’s East Wing. Her staff at least responded, writing that you had no time. Well, what about any time this year?

Jimmy Carter addressed just such a group of civic leaders after his election in 1976. The event was very successful and helped give greater visibility to this very important civic sector in our society. I found your White House’s response disingenuous, in as much as you have traveled across the country and the world directly promoting by name for-profit U.S. companies and the jobs these companies create. (In India, it was for Boeing and Harley-Davidson motorcycles.) Well, the nonprofit sector employs millions of Americans and its growth and services are good for the society, are they not?

I hope you and the family will enjoy perusing this book and possibly gaining some insights and ideas that will enhance your service to our country, its people and its interaction with the rest of the world. This volume could have been called a “bubble buster,” except we could only wonder whether these letters were ever given access through that self-described encasement.

Sincerely yours,

Ralph Nader

The post Letters To A President: Return To Sender – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

After spending five long years negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, the Obama administration is now pushing for the fast-track authority from Congress that would make it easier to get the final deal approved. One serious problem is that the TPP is not likely to include rules on currency, which is leading lawmakers from both parties to consider opposing the agreement. They are right to be concerned.

A good deal, from the American perspective, would have rules preventing countries from strategically depressing the value of their currency. Japan, Malaysia and South Korea have all been identified as engaging in such manipulation. While this point may seem obscure, the cost of the dollar relative to other currencies is hugely important in determining the size of our trade deficit, which is in turn a major obstacle to growth and employment.

To understand the relationships at work here, imagine that the dollar suddenly rose in value by 20% against the Vietnamese dong and the Japanese yen. Since we sell our goods and services in dollars, people living in Vietnam and Japan would then need 20% more of their currency to buy products from the United States.

This means that a Ford or General Motors car produced in the United States would cost 20% more for a person living in Vietnam or Japan. The same would be true of Microsoft’s software or any other item that we might try to sell overseas. Naturally when our prices rise, we expect that people will buy fewer goods and services from us.

The opposite happens on the import side. Our dollar would buy 20% more Japanese yen or Vietnamese dong. So we might be more inclined to buy Japanese cars because they would cost us 20% less than they would have before the rise in the dollar.

If we sell fewer goods to other countries even as we buy more goods from them, we end up with a larger trade deficit. Currently the U.S. trade deficit is running at more than a $500 billion annual rate, roughly 3% of our GDP. This has the same impact on demand in the U.S. economy as if families or businesses just pulled $500 billion out of circulation and stuffed it under their mattresses.

A large trade deficit is bad for our economy. In fact, as former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke has argued it is difficult to see how we get back to full employment as long as we import so much more than we export.

Conversely, if we snapped our fingers and our trade deficit went to zero, we would have more demand for U.S. goods and millions of additional jobs. Firms would have to compete for workers, which would put workers in a position to demand better pay and better benefits.

It would be one thing if the value of the dollar were rising and falling against other currencies purely as a result of market forces. That, however, is not the case. Many countries deliberately prop up the value of the dollar against their currencies. They do this by buying up trillions of dollars via international currency markets.

It would be possible to crack down on this practice by limiting large-scale purchases of foreign currency in the TPP. But the Obama administration seems totally uninterested in getting this done. President Obama has been in office six years and has done nothing to curb currency manipulation.

That’s a shame. If we don’t take this chance to make the dollar more competitive and bring our trade deficit down, who knows when another opportunity will arise?

This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times, and is reprinted with permission.

The post One Lethal Loophole In The TPP – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

The US military is planning to ask the Canadian government to upgrade missile sensors in the Arctic, in order to improve detection of different types of missiles, according to a senior US defense official.

The upgrade requests for the Canada-US North Warning System and DEW Line – the distant early warning line – are being directed at the Canadian government and the US policy leaders, Admiral William Gortney, the head of the Canada-US NORAD program and of Northern Command, said at a news conference in Pentagon on Tuesday.

“We’re just now bringing it up through our policy leaders as well as with the Canadian government,” Gortney said.

So far there is no timetable on the proposal, but Gortney warned that the current technology will become obsolete within ten years. He outlined the best case scenario as replacing the existing system with a new version that would have the capability to track shorter-range cruise missiles.

“The question is, what sort of technology do we want to use to reconstitute that capability? We don’t want to put in the same sorts of sensors because they’re not effective against the low-altitude, say, cruise missiles. They can’t see over the horizon,” Gortney said.

America’s calls for upgrades come as the US prepares for its turn to head the Arctic Council later this month.

A decade ago, the Canadian liberal government declined the offer to join Washington’s ballistic missile defense program (BMD). However, it has been helping the US to keep track of the airspace through NORAD.

Canadian Defence Minister Jason Kenney said that missile-defense cooperation is being assessed, but the government will wait for the review from the House of Common Defense committee before making any decisions.

But up to now, we haven’t seen information that has changed our opinion on BMD,” Kenney said at a news conference last month.

Increasing Canadian presence in the Arctic has been one of the key priorities of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who recently pledged a multi-billion dollar investment into everything from naval ships to weather satellites.

The government also announced that it is looking to improve its Arctic surveillance capabilities.

The post US Wants Canada To Upgrade Arctic Missile Sensors appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Gaurav Agnihotri

OPEC has been the most talked about international organization among investors, analysts and international political lobbies in the last few months.

When OPEC speaks, the world listens in rapt attention as it accounts for nearly 40 % of the world’s total crude output. With its headquarters in Vienna, Austria, one of the mandates of 12- member OPEC is to “ensure the stabilization of oil markets in order to secure an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consumers, a steady income to producers, and a fair return on capital for those investing in the petroleum industry.” (Source: opec.org).

However, OPEC has been in the line of fire from the western world in light of its stance of not reducing the production levels of its member nations (excluding Iran). Most view this as a strategy to squeeze the American shale production and other non OPEC nations.

All is not well for OPEC

Simply put, the world has too much oil at the moment which has resulted in the reduction of price levels from approximately $100 to $50 a barrel, and OPEC (as well as US shale producers) has a major role to play in this supply glut. With the decline of average annual crude prices, OPEC earned around $730 billion in net oil export revenues in 2014 (Source: EIA), a big decline of 11% from its previous year. The EIA even predicts that OPEC’s net oil exports (excluding Iran) could fall to as low as $380 billion in 2015.

With the huge reduction in its revenues and growing discomfort among its members such as Venezuela, Libya and Nigeria over its current production levels, is OPEC really getting weaker?

Image Source: EIA

Iran Nuclear Deal: A warning sign for OPEC?

With announcement of a historic nuclear deal framework between Iran and six global powers: America, France, Britain, China, Russia and Germany on April2, 2015, there is a good possibility that Iranian crude oil exports will increase greatly after June 2015 when the final nuclear deal is signed. Iran is all set to pump close to 300 million barrels of crude into the market, thereby kick starting another potential decline in oil prices.

This might be one of the most crucial junctures for OPEC and it has to consider the possibility of reducing its current production quotas, mostly due to its internal issues of which the cartel has many.

Venezuela’s Woes

Containing some of the largest proven oil and gas reserves in the world, Venezuela is one of the founding members of OPEC. However, the country is reeling under a major economic recession since 2014 with an inflation rate of 68.5% (as on December 2014).

Cheap oil has created a huge financial crisis for Venezuela as its economy is heavily dependent on oil exports and oil revenues constitute about 95% of its total foreign exchange earnings. As per its state run oil company PDVSA, the country loses about $700 million a year with every $1 drop in the international oil price.

For a nation that is suffering from shortage of basic requirements such as food and toilet paper, any further reduction in oil prices would result in a total economic collapse. Therefore, it would be in Venezuela’s interests to reduce its production levels especially after the Iran nuclear deal.

Nigeria’s dilemma

Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer and among the top 5 global exporters of LNG. An OPEC member since 1971, Nigeria’s oil and gas sector represents about 75% of its total government revenues and 95% of its total export revenues. The African nation’s economy is heavily dependent on crude oil prices as its foreign exchange reserves (built as a result of net positive oil revenues) have reduced substantially over the past two years.

Much like Venezuela, Nigeria needs international crude prices to be in the range of $90- $100 a barrel which is not possible unless OPEC reduces its supply.

Iraq’s Issues

After Saudi Arabia, Iraq is the biggest crude oil producer in OPEC. It also has the fifth largest proven crude oil reserves in the world. With an increase in its government budget spending, the country requires a stable international oil price of $105 per barrel to achieve its break-even point. The current oil price levels are nowhere near this. Apart from this, issues such as the ongoing ISIS insurgency, western sanctions, heavy economic dependency on oil (more than 90%) and poor infrastructure have added to Iraq’s woes.

The OPEC ‘heavyweights’

Apart from being the largest exporter of the total petroleum liquids in the world, Saudi Arabia is also the main driving force behind the cartel’s stubborn supply policy. The Saudis, along with Kuwait and UAE have been defending the decision of not reducing the OPEC production levels in order to retain their global market share. It is interesting to note that even if the oil price remains at the current levels, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and UAE would have enough cash reserves to remain in the game for several years.

In short, these OPEC heavyweights have little to worry about from the current low oil prices for the time being.

United we stand, divided we fall.

In December 2014, the Energy Information Administration warned OPEC to reduce their production levels. According to the EIA, these cuts would be helpful for OPEC members such as Venezuela, Nigeria, Iraq and Iran as reduced OPEC supply and the corresponding increase in oil price would safeguard their uncertain future economic growth.

Leaving the heavyweights to one side; it is quite evident that OPEC, as a group, has become somewhat weakened. Apart from its falling export revenues and the growth of non OPEC producers, especially US shale production, OPEC now stands divided into two factions. One faction that is being led by Saudi Arabia wants to maintain and even increase its production levels while the other faction consisting of Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran, Iraq and Algeria requires just the opposite for safeguarding their national interests. In fact, the latter requires crude prices to be as high as $100 per barrel in order to balance their falling budgets (Source: IMF).

Last year, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister Ali Al Naimi said “It is not in the interest of OPEC producers to cut their productions, whatever the price is.”

A number of mitigating factors make this year’s June meeting of OPEC more interesting than ever.

Source: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/How-Much-Longer-Can-OPEC-Hold-Out.html

The post How Much Longer Can OPEC Hold Out? – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Davinder Kumar*

Cyberspace has become a full-blown war zone as governments across the globe clash for digital supremacy in a new, mostly invisible, theatre of operations. Once limited to opportunistic criminals, cyber-attacks are becoming a key weapon for governments seeking to defend national sovereignty and project national power. One can see the emerging contours of cyber warfare from strategic cyber espionage campaigns, such as Moonlight Maze and Titan Rain, to the destructive, such as military cyber strikes on Georgia and Iran and the new dimension of recent attacks on corporates like Sony Entertainment. Human security and international conflict are entering a new phase and domain in their long histories of existence. The shadowy battlefield called cyber space requires a new breed of warriors, Cyber Warriors.

A cyber warrior, like his Special Forces counterpart, is a distinct breed requiring a very high standard of professionalism, training, ethics, discipline, initiative and focus. He will have to be proactive, innovative, a self-starter with a technical aptitude and a strong desire for learning so as to keep himself abreast of emerging technologies and be able to build his knowledge and skills through continuous updating. The organization, work culture, age and physical fitness standards would have to be totally flexible – the emphasis being on knowledge, merit, aptitude, attitude and capabilities.

Organisations in India are also witnessing a huge growth in cyber-attacks and intrusions. The 2014 Annual Security Report reveals that 2013 was a ‘particularly bad year’ with cumulative annual threat alert levels increasing by 14 per cent since 2012. Another report by Norton (Symantec) indicates that India lost up to USD 8 billion to financial crimes in 2014. While the National Cyber Security Policy, announced in July 2013, stipulates the availability of 500,000 cyber warriors by 2018, the country faces a big challenge with a shortage of more than 470,000 trained cyber security professionals as of last year. Considering that it takes about three years to have a well-trained cyber warrior and that there are varied issues of training infrastructure, quality of talent availability, attrition, continuous upgradation, budget, certification standards and retention, an innovative approach is required which maximises the available resources in a given time frame.

One such approach is to establish a ‘Cyber Wing’ in each the four divisions of the National Cadet Corps (NCC) of India.

Parliament passed the National Cadet Corps Act in 1948, thus creating the National Cadet Corps (NCC). The motto of the NCC is Unity and Discipline. The Aims of the National Cadet Corps are:

• To develop qualities of character, courage, comradeship, discipline, leadership, secular outlook, spirit of adventure and sportsmanship and the ideals of selfless service among the youth to make them useful citizens.
• To create a human resource of organised, trained and activated youth, to provide leadership in all walks of life including the Armed Forces and always available for the service of the nation.

These aims have a very large coincidence with the requirements of a cyber-warrior as mentioned above. Cyber space is a playground of the millennials and the NCC provides just the right pool to pick up India’s cyber warriors. The Senior Division of NCC has 365,000 young boys from colleges; the Junior Division has 658,000 young boys from schools; the Senior Girl’s Division has a strength of 69,000 and the Junior Girls Division 73,000 members. This pool of over a million young boys and girls, even at 15 per cent acceptance rate, should provide the country with nearly 150,000 cyber warriors in the next three years, who could then be trained and organised as Integrated Cyber Defence Teams comprising of operators, technicians, analysts, intelligence experts and developers of cyber weapons and tools. These teams would train among themselves, with other countries in exchange programmes, with the cyber command/units and be available to the Defence Forces on call. The cadets must be given encouragement by way of financial rewards, recognition, scholarships for further studies in cyber security including in countries abroad and be provided with appropriate certifications. They must be given preference for enrolment in the cyber warrior cadres of the country, the Armed Forces and the industry. They must have a viable, attractive and challenging career path. Selected NCC cadets should be able to work from their homes and tasked for computer network exploitation, cyber forensics and vulnerability discovery of nominated networks and systems. Their identity must be kept secret; they must be given necessary resources and legal protection; and they must report only to select officials.

India’s vulnerability to cyber-attacks is going to increase exponentially with the development of infrastructure and programmes such as Digital India, National Optical Fibre Network, e-Governance, e-commerce and e-Services. The NCC provides a ready resource for picking up India’s cyber warriors in the available time frame. This will also start the organisational transformation of the NCC and make it a 21st century force relevant to the aims set for it by Parliament.

*Lieutenant General (retd.) Davinder Kumar is former Signal Officer-in-Chief of the Indian Army. Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India

Originally published by Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (www.idsa.in) at http://www.idsa.in/idsacomments/ACyberWingintheNationalCadetCorpst_DavinderKumar_060415.html

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US officials said Thursday that sanctions currently imposed on Iran are to be lifted gradually, as a potential nuclear deal is carried out, reported AFP. “Sanctions will be suspended in a phased manner upon verification that Iran has met specific commitments,” U.S. State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke told reporters.

Earlier the same day, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said that Iran would not sign a nuclear deal “unless all sanctions are lifted on the same day,” according to Reuters.

Iran has faced harsh economic sanctions in past years, often causing hardship for civilians, due to its development of a potential nuclear program.

Original article

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Could the new Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank be China’s economic ‘Achilles Heel.’

In recent decades, China’s become the ‘workshop of the world.’ Out of this, China benefited from high employment and economic growth. The world benefited from cheaper consumer products.

But in accepting inward investment, China often restricted foreign investors to joint ventures or minority stakes. China also often required technology transfer.

This enabled China to develop world-class expertise in high tech areas. These now include energy and infrastructure, particularly electricity transmission and oil and gas technology. These are just the things China now wants to export.

Consider State Grid Corp of China (SGCC) and China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC). Together they now employ more of China’s working age population than the People’s Liberation Army, China’s military.

After building up (and perhaps overbuilding) China, these globally-competitive Chinese state champions now face politically-destabilizing layoffs without refreshed project pipelines.

Similarly destabilizing is China’s growing international reserve hoard — now estimated at around US$4 trillion. That’s triple the size of any other country’s.

China accumulated these reserves through a weak yuan export policy. The expanding dollar hoard has now itself become destabilizing for both China and the world.

This helps explain China’s motives for creating the AIIB. The ‘good’ reason is to recycle China’s reserves into internationally-useful new infrastructure.

The ‘real’ reason, however, may to steer new contracts to China’s state-controlled infrastructure champions like State Grid and CNOOC to keep their large workforces employed.

These two linked outcomes are now crucial to the Communist Party. The reason: China’s shallow, brittle social contract between rulers and ruled now rests almost wholly on rising personal incomes.

Choking pollution is straining this social contract. Rising unemployment could break it.

Viewed this way, it’s easy to see the AIIB as an export pressure valve aimed at channeling new infrastructure projects to State Grid, CNOOC and others.

All up, this represents sensible economics. Recycling China’s trade surpluses benefits everyone. It also helps stimulate the global economy and should have a positive effect on fighting global climate change.

But it’ll be astonishing if most of the money won for AIIB-funded infrastructure projects don’t flow to Chinese infrastructure state champions like State Grid and CNOOC.

This is the ‘devil’s bargain’ all parties have signed up for — whether they say it or not. It’s also more or less reasonable. It is China’s money.

Under a best-case scenario, the AIIB can foster broader technical standards, upgrade infrastructure, increase economic efficiency and combat climate change.

But it also means other countries have more power over events at the AIIB than they might think. China needs this outward investment economic pressure valve just as much as the rest of the world needs new infrastructure.

It’s upon this Chinese jugular the AIIB’s other members and her investment recipient countries can press. The result can be more equal bargain for the AIIB’s non-Chinese members.

This can be achieved through applying China’s own economic playbook.

This could include requiring Chinese state infrastructure champions building AIIB-funded infrastructure in other countries to do so only through joint ventures, limited minority stakes and with requirements to transfer advanced intellectual property.

In large part, this is how State Grid’s 2007 contract to upgrade the Philippine grid is structured.

Other requirements could include requiring companies tendering for AIIB projects to be majority privately owned. This is important for probity’s sake.

If China’s the AIIB’s main shareholder and most AIIB contracts flow to Chinese state-controlled companies — the appearance of conflicts of interest and self-dealing will be hard, if not impossible, to avoid.

To avoid this, greater privatization of State Grid and CNOOC (among others) could be required for these two companies to undertake AIIB-funded infrastructure works. Otherwise, the AIIB could be viewed as a ‘state aid’ funnel for incestuous Chinese investment.

Finally, AIIB contracts should require technology transfer as well and training and control of overseas infrastructure by local staff.

Having this requirement in place could have avoided State Grid’s biggest kerfuffle to date: the Philippine government’s expulsion of Chinese technicians over inspecific worries of an electricity grid virus.

Given minority stakes, technology transfer and local control — these risks are eliminated.

In the cause of electricity infrastructure, technology transfer could include sharing China’s ‘smart grid’ expertise.This would assuage unease over viruses, grid vulnerability and Chinese back doors to overseas critical infrastructure.

In the case of oil and gas, this could include local control of infrastructure and sharing of all exploration data.

The creation of China’s AIIB represents an immense opportunity to solve a host of problems at once. If it adheres to global best practice everyone can gain. But if it acts merely as a funnel for Chinese Communist Part crony investments, the result could be disaster.

The post AIIB: Is It China’s ‘Achilles Heel?’ – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

In early February this year, the Myanmar parliament approved a proposal by President Thein Sein to allow people with temporary identification “white cards,” most of whom were Rohingya, to vote on a referendum on constitutional amendments to the country’s junta-backed constitution, which could come as early as May. Obviously, as most keen observers would tell you the government measure was a face-saving one under international pressure and never meant in intent and purpose.

As it has become almost a routine and comical in Myanmar these days, led by ultra-racist and bigoted monks, hundreds of Buddhists took to the streets in Myanmar’s commercial capital Yangon on February 11 to protest the government’s decision to allow people without citizenship, including Rohingya, to take part in the referendum. Such protest marches are widely suspected of being stage managed and done at the behest of the policy makers within Thein Sein’s government.

In the Arakan (Rakhine) state capital of Sittwe (formerly Akyab), the fascist RNDP leaders who had hitherto played a major role in recent genocidal campaigns against the minority Rohingya community were quick to organize protest marches demanding disenfranchisement of the Rohingya. Copycatting the tactics of Hitler’s Sturmabteilung (SA) Brown Shirts, the racist Buddhist crowd – led by hundreds of Buddhist monks, waved placards reading “Never accept white card” and shouted “Anyone who allows foreigners to vote is our enemy.”

As expected, Thein Sein government quickly reversed the decision disenfranchising millions of White Card holders. This oft-practiced tactics allows Thein Sein to kill two birds with a single stone. It helps to sell his image as a reform minded moderate ruler to the outside world who is also mindful of public reaction and support in his own country.

More problematic, however, was the NLD’s (the party led by Suu Kyi) objection to such voting rights of the White Card holders. Through such objections in the parliament, she and her party, once again proved what an evil politician she has become and how chauvinist her party is. It is surely no friend of the disadvantaged and persecuted people inside this den of hatred called Myanmar. By the way, with foreign born British children and husband (now dead), she still has not given up on her dream to become the president of the country, and is willing to sit in the lap of the military leaders, or so it seems, to please the ruling regime and dance at its tunes.

White Cards were initially issued beginning in 1993 as a temporary measure pending a process to verify residents’ claims to citizenship against criteria set out in Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law. All the White Card holders, which includes millions of Rohingya and other ethnic and religious minorities such as the Kokang and Wa, and people of Chinese and Indian descent are now being confiscated by (or forced to surrender to) the state. The White cards were accepted by Myanmar’s former military junta for the 2010 elections, which saw Thein Sein’s civilian-military hybrid government take power from the regime. The Rohingya community currently has five representatives in the national and state legislatures.

U Kyaw Hla Aung, a lawyer whom the Amnesty International called a prisoner of conscience, holding his NRC, a document from the 1950s that proves that he has lived in Myanmar for a long time

Many of the older citizens who were born under the British rule of Burma one time had the National Registration Card bearing their Burmese citizenship where the Rohingya name was clearly written down. [See the attached picture of U Kyaw Hla Aung, a lawyer whom the Amnesty International called a prisoner of conscience, holding his NRC, a document from the 1950s that proves that he has lived in Myanmar for a long time. He has been imprisoned multiple times for defending the rights of his people. He now lives in a bamboo hut in a camp for internally displaced people near Sittwe.]

But after Ne Win came to power all such documents were confiscated, and many were only given temporary cards towards national identification. And now with the White Cards confiscated, and their homes and neighborhoods already destroyed, and forced to live in concentration camps, most Rohingyas are naturally very apprehensive, and so are the human right activists. Many Rohingya families have lost everything, including documents like the White Cards, which they possessed in ethnic cleansing drives by the Rakhines in recent years.

It is unclear whether those who surrendered their cards would be able to begin the citizenship process, because they do not or may not have any other form of national identification. Government reps, however, say that those who give up their white cards receive a “receipt” to prove that they had a temporary identity card and can begin the citizenship verification process in June. Previous experiences of targeted minorities like the Rohingya people have been rather unpleasant, which adds to their dilemma about surrendering such cards.

A pilot project to verify the citizenship of Rohingya and other Muslims has foundered on Rakhine objections and the government’s insistence that the Rohingyas identify themselves as “Bengali.” Rohingya reject the term because it suggests they are illegal migrants from neighboring Bangladesh, when their tie to Arakan is older than most Rakhines.

The published reports suggest that in the Arakan state alone some 10,000 White Cards were confiscated by the authorities or surrendered by the Rohingyas every day since February, and at this rate, the government will confiscate all those cards by the end of May.

Yanghee Lee, the United Nations special rapporteur on Myanmar, said in a panel discussion at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva on March 18 that the expiration of the temporary white cards beginning in March 31, 2015 and surrender thereof by May 31, 2015 raised more uncertainties about the status of the Rohingya and further increased their vulnerability. Lee also warned that Myanmar was backsliding because of continued discriminatory restrictions on the freedom of movement of Muslim internally displaced persons, which also infringed on other basic fundamental rights, the news release said.

Chris Lewa, director of the Arakan Project, a research and advocacy group that focuses on the northern part of Rakhine state, denounced the citizenship verification process and the cancellation of white cards, because it could lead to a total exclusion of the Rohingya in Myanmar, the news release said.

She believes that the withdrawal of the white cards goes beyond denial of the right to vote and risks leaving the Rohingya without any legal documentation and the right to reside in Myanmar.

Chris Lewa and Yanghee Lee are not alone in such criticisms of the Myanmar regime. I its October 2014 report, the Brussels-based think tank Crisis Group warned that disenfranchising white card holders in Rakhine State could be “incendiary”. “It would be hard for (Rohingya) to avoid the conclusion that politics had failed them, which could prompt civil disobedience or even organized violence,” said the report.

Only time would prove whether the Myanmar government is sincere with the citizenship process for the stateless Rohingya or the current process is only a smokescreen to ultimately expel them from the land of their ancestors. I hope that the Myanmar government is smart enough to reject the second option which is a sure recipe for creating an international crisis that would threaten the security of the entire region for decades.

The post Is Myanmar Playing Politics With The White Cards? – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

The dispersant used to remediate the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is more toxic to cold-water corals than the spilled oil, according to a study conducted at Temple University. The study comes on the eve of the spill’s fifth anniversary, April 20th.

In this collaborative study between researchers from Temple and the Pennsylvania State University, the researchers exposed three cold-water coral species from the Gulf to various concentrations of the dispersant and oil from the Deepwater Horizon well. They found that the dispersant is toxic to the corals at lower concentrations than the oil.

The researchers’ findings, “Response of deep-water corals to oil and chemical dispersant exposure,” were published online in the journal Deep-Sea Research II.

Approximately five million barrels of crude oil escaped from the well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in 2010, and nearly seven million liters of dispersants–chemical emulsifiers used to break down the oil–were used to clean it up. Normally applied to the water’s surface, the spill marked the first time that dispersants were applied at depth during an oil spill.

“Applying the dispersants at depth was a grand experiment being conducted in real-time,” said Erik Cordes, associate professor of biology at Temple, who has been studying Gulf of Mexico coral communities for more than a decade. “It was a desire to immediately do something about the oil coming out of the well, but they really didn’t know what was going to happen as a result.”

Following the 2010 spill, Cordes and his collaborators discovered several damaged Gulf coral populations that were coated with a dark colored flocculent slime that was found to contain oil from the spill and residues from the dispersants.

“We wanted to know if the damages that had been witnessed could have been caused by the oil, the dispersant itself, or a combination of both,” said Danielle DeLeo, a Temple doctoral student in Cordes’ lab, who was the study’s lead author. “We know that the corals in the Gulf were exposed to all of these different combinations, so we have been trying to determine the toxicity of the oil and the dispersants, and see what their impact would be on the corals.”

The researchers exposed the corals to a range of concentrations for both the dispersant and the oil to determine a lethal dose for each. They were surprised to find that the lethal concentration is much lower for the dispersant, meaning it is more toxic than the oil.

“It doesn’t take as much dispersant to kill a coral as it does oil,” Cordes said, adding that the oil in combination with the dispersant increases the toxicity of the oil.

Using dispersants is supposed to reduce the impact of oil spills on the environment, said Cordes, “but there’s increasing evidence that’s not what’s happening.”

Cordes said that his lab will be carrying out additional studies to try to replicate the concentrations of oil and dispersant that the corals were exposed to during the Gulf oil spill, but this is the first step in determining the toxic levels of dispersants and their impact on the environment. He said their findings could assist in developing future strategies for applying dispersants at oil spills that may be more helpful than harmful to the environment.

The post Dispersant Used To Clean Deepwater Horizon Spill More Toxic To Corals Than The Oil appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Levels of radon in Pennsylvania homes – where 42 percent of readings surpass what the U.S. government considers safe – have been on the rise since 2004, around the time that the fracking industry began drilling natural gas wells in the state, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The researchers, publishing online April 9 in Environmental Health Perspectives, also found that buildings located in the counties where natural gas is most actively being extracted out of Marcellus shale have in the past decade seen significantly higher readings of radon compared with buildings in low-activity areas. There were no such county differences prior to 2004. Radon, an odorless radioactive gas, is considered the second-leading cause of lung cancer in the world after smoking.

“One plausible explanation for elevated radon levels in people’s homes is the development of thousands of unconventional natural gas wells in Pennsylvania over the past 10 years,” said study leader Brian S. Schwartz, MD, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Bloomberg School. “These findings worry us.”

The study, conducted with Pennsylvania’s Geisinger Health System, analyzed more than 860,000 indoor radon measurements included in a Pennsylvania Department of Environment Protection database from 1989 to 2013. Radon levels are often assessed when property is being bought or sold; much of the study data came from such measurements. The researchers evaluated associations of radon concentrations with geology, water source, season, weather, community type and other factors.

Between 2005 and 2013, 7,469 unconventional natural gas wells were drilled in Pennsylvania using hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) to liberate natural gas from shale.

Up until recently, most natural gas wells were created by drilling vertically into porous zones of rock formations like sandstone to release the gas. These are known as conventional natural gas wells. In recent years, there has been a huge uptick in the drilling of unconventional natural gas wells in 18 states throughout the country. In contrast to the conventional wells, gas is not sitting in shale waiting to be pumped out.

Instead, the gas is contained in the shale, which needs to be broken apart to release large volumes of natural gas. This is done by first drilling deeper into the ground vertically and again horizontally. Then, in the fracking process, millions of gallons of water containing proprietary chemicals are pumped in to help extract the gas.

The disruptive process that brings gas to the surface can also bring heavy metals and organic and radioactive materials such as radium-226, which decays into radon. Most indoor radon exposure has been linked to the diffusion of gas from soil. It is also found in well water, natural gas and ambient air.

Averaged over the whole study period, houses and other buildings using well water had a 21 percent higher concentration of radon than those using municipal water. Houses and buildings located in rural and suburban townships, where most of the gas wells are, had a 39 percent higher concentration of radon than those in cities.

Since radon is naturally occurring, in areas without adequate ventilation — like many basements — radon can accumulate to levels that substantially increase the risk of lung cancer.

The study’s first author is Joan A. Casey, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of California-Berkeley and San Francisco, who earned her PhD at the Bloomberg School in 2014. She said it is unclear whether the excess radon in people’s homes is coming from radium getting into well water through the fracking process, being released into the air near the gas wells or whether natural gas from shale contains more radon than conventional gas and it enters homes through cooking stoves and furnaces.

Another possibility, she said, is that in the past decade buildings have been more tightly sealed, potentially trapping radon that gets inside and leading to increased indoor radon levels. In the past, most radon has entered homes through foundation cracks and other openings into buildings.

“By drilling 7,000 holes in the ground, the fracking industry may have changed the geology and created new pathways for radon to rise to the surface,” Casey said. “Now there are a lot of potential ways that fracking may be distributing and spreading radon.”

Natural gas typically travels via pipeline at 10 miles per hour, meaning radon can go statewide in one day. Radon has a half-life of about four days, meaning it has lost 95 percent of its radioactivity after 20 days.

The state of Pennsylvania recently took a comprehensive set of measurements near 34 gas wells, including air samples for radon near four wells, which did not show high levels of the radioactive gas. But the researchers say their study, which looks at levels in hundreds of thousands of homes and other buildings, is a better way to assess the potential cumulative impacts of all the wells.

“I don’t think we can ignore these findings,” Schwartz said. “Our study can be improved by including information that was not available for our analysis, such as whether natural gas is used for heating and cooking, whether there is any radon remediation in the building, and general condition of the building foundation. But these next studies should be done because the number of drilled wells is continuing to increase and the possible problem identified by our study is not going away.”

The post Increase In Levels Of Radon In Pennsylvania Homes Correspond To Onset Of Fracking appeared first on Eurasia Review.

New EU rules for a new scheme of authorisations for vine plantings, allowing for a yearly limited expansion in the EU’s wine area, were published by the European Commission on Thursday.

As agreed in the 2013 Common Agricultural Policy reform, the new scheme will apply from 1 January 2016, replacing the transitional planting rights regime.

According to EU Commissioner for Agriculture & Rural Development Phil Hogan, “The new system provides flexibility for the European wine sector to gradually expand production, in response to growing world demand. At the same stage, Member States have a range of safeguards to apply in order to address possible social and environmental risks in specific wine production areas.”

A recent external study concluded that, despite growth in the volume and value of EU exports to third countries since 2008 – and a marked improvement in the trade balance – the EU continues to lose market share on world markets. Furthermore, the total consumption at world level is forecasted to increase up to 2025, while continuing to decrease overall in the EU. Therefore, this market trend shows that the EU wine sector will be increasingly depending on exports in the future.

Today’s publication sets out rules for which unanimous agreement was expressed both by the Member States and the European Parliament. They confirm how the Member States should manage (at national level) the system of free, non-transferable planting authorisations.

The rules also outline the safeguard mechanism for new plantings – authorisations limited to 1% growth in a Member State’s vine surface per year, with options for Member States to apply – where properly justified – growth limits at national or regional level, or for areas with/without geographical indication. The rules also clarify the transition from the current system to the new scheme and how valid planting rights can be converted into authorisations. Rights in the reserve that are not granted to producers by the end of 2015 will cease to exist after that date.

The post EU Commission Publishes New Vine Planting Rules appeared first on Eurasia Review.

China’s AIIB could be source of sour grapes or valid concerns on standards for US and Japan.

By Will Hickey*

March 31 marked the deadline for charter founders to line up for the new China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, 亚洲基础设施投资银行, or AIIB initiative. At the last moment Norway, Taiwan and others rushed to find the good graces of the Chinese opportunity. Many countries seek Asian influence, and Washington has been miffed by Chinese rejection of its traditional actors – the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank. The US and Japan, initially cool but now perhaps contemplating some eventual partnership, will remain on the sidelines.

A Chinese proverb says “they sleep in the same bed but dream different dreams.” The AIIB founding members are a diverse group with a range of investment agendas:

South Korea, marginalized in the Asian Development Bank, and despite US misgivings, expects to take a stake of upwards of 5 percent in the AIIB. With it heavy equipment industry, Hyundai, Doosan and infrastructure prowess in everything from roads to ports to bridges with GS, Hanwha and POSCO, South Korea will not play second-place against Japanese industry.

Australia, another country the US had leaned heavily on not to join, counts China among its main export markets for coal, copper and iron ore through its mining giants BHP, Rio Tinto and Leighton – creating the industrial might for major infrastructure projects.

The United Kingdom, the first major EU country to clamor for AIIB membership, mystified Washington by keeping it out of the loop during secret negotiations. While the UK’s major interests in accomodating China are unclear, it undoubtedly hopes to regain Asian influence lost after the handover of Hong Kong in 1997.

Switzerland, Germany and France no doubt seek to market their engineering and technical skills via an ABB, Thyssen or EDF to any big-scale infrastructure projects in Asia for water, power plants or electrification.

In short, a new development bank with China’s financial support via its $4 trillion in reserves is too big to pass up.

A main question regarding the new Chinese initiative is will it be effective or merely an iconoclast offset to established western development interests? The Chinese development model of technology transfer and infrastructure development, including highways, ports, railways, has brought millions out of poverty and into a middle class existence. Exporting this model, and not just labor-intensive manufactured products to western nations, could prove the next leg up in China’s ascent as a credible, newly emerging superpower.

Of course, skepticism abounds. In fact, the US stated “We are wary about a trend toward constant accommodation of China, which is not the best way to engage a rising power.” Oddly, these words are reminiscent of the heated 1944 economic maneuverings at Bretton Woods between British economist John Maynard Keynes and US technocrat Harry Dexter White. The British system was in decline, the rising actor of the United States was challenging pound sterling supremacy that the British Empire did not want to relinquish. Yet, as the Guardian pointed out in 2014, “Strategically, the United States cannot keep on shoring up an obsolete economic order in Asia.”

Asia is in need of approximately $800 billion in infrastructure per year. However, investment today is not merely defined in financial capital, but also human capital. The IMF and the World Bank have demonstrated human capital effectiveness perhaps too well, with a deep bench of talent, gathered from much of the developing world, and now in need of reform. Perhaps no other organizations have such an agglomeration of financial, economic and legal knowledge to work with on hand for their many projects, most no doubt politically mandated and recently geared towards European “rich-country” challenges including Greece and Ukraine.

The Chinese model of development has been traditionally a “one size fits all” straightjacket due industrial planning and state-sponsored enterprises that tend to ignore such matters as human and labor rights, and the environment. It is capital-intensive investment, with an engineering mindset intensely focused on processes and physical results.

These are not minor concerns in formation of a new regional investment bank. Domestically, China’s one-party state brooks no dissent regarding labor-related protests, equitable pay, air pollution or other industrial project environmental concerns. Acidic smog in major Chinese cities is off the charts with health concerns taking a backseat to full-speed growth, mostly due to burning coal for steel production and electricity generation. The Three Gorges Dam, 长江三峡水利枢纽工程, was planned and mandated from Beijing, without significant local input. Historical sites were submerged, some aquatic species, such as river dolphins, destroyed, and villages relocated without debate and many not receiving promised compensation in return in the process. Recent chemical and refinery spills in major Chinese rivers such as the Hei and Yellow rivers have poisoned many.

The overall track record is not good.

Sri Lanka and perhaps Nicaraguaga can serve as international examples. In the former, Chinese investment in a costly port and useless airport was approved under former Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa for his hometown, Hambantota, a non-strategic location. Such projects were no doubt to pave inroads for a larger Chinese presence in South Asia, but proved costly for Sri Lanka. Newly elected leader Maithripala Sirisena has sought to renegotiate or cancel them, despite Beijing’s objections. In Nicaragua, large-scale Chinese investment would no doubt be the driver of a second canal across the pan-American isthmus. If the Three Gorges dam were any benchmark, the project’s outcome could prove controversial: a technological marvel, but wracked  with social and environmental concerns.

The post Nations Line Up To Join China-Led Infrastructure Bank – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

The Obama administration is attempting to “salvage the Summit of the Americas” and avert another summit disaster by removing Cuba from its list of “state sponsors of terrorism,” Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) Co-Director Mark Weisbrot said today. This latest sign of a softening of U.S. policy toward Cuba “falls far short” of the change in relations that had been a U.S. goal before the summit: the reopening of embassies. Obama’s announcement is expected to come as early as tomorrow.

“The Obama administration is hoping to avert another disastrous summit like in Cartagena, or Bush’s 2005 summit in Mar del Plata, by announcing this widely anticipated move,” Weisbrot said. “It’s pretty minimal, though, withdrawing one insult that everyone saw as ridiculous to begin with.”

In recent days, the Obama administration has also attempted to walk back its March 9 designation that Venezuela represents an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” in order to enact recent sanctions against Venezuelan officials. Deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes explained “the United States does not believe that Venezuela poses some threat to our national security” in an April 7 press briefing, and President Obama told the EFE news agency, “We do not believe that Venezuela poses a threat to the United States, nor does the United States threaten the Venezuelan government.”

“What does it mean for the rule of law in the United States that the U.S. declares a ‘national emergency,’ and names Venezuela as ‘an extraordinary threat to U.S. national security,’ in order to enact sanctions and then the president says that no, actually, ‘we didn’t mean that?’” Weisbrot asked. “They made these declarations because they are required under U.S. law when imposing unilateral sanctions of this type. And the requirement is there for a reason: so that our government does not violate international laws and norms by imposing sanctions when there is no legitimate threat to the United States. These sanctions violate Article 19 and 20 of the OAS charter, and here is the U.S. government lecturing others about the rule of law.

“The Obama administration is clearly feeling pressure from the rest of the region, which has almost unanimously rejected the sanctions and the threatening rhetoric.

“These overtures to Cuba and Venezuela are not going to change anyone’s mind about Washington’s attitude toward the region,” Weisbrot said. “It’s like a half-hearted non-apology from the neighborhood bully after everyone has joined together and stood up to him.”

Both UNASUR (the Union of South American Nations) and CELAC (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, which includes all countries in the hemisphere except the United States and Canada), issued statements before the summit calling on President Obama to rescind the executive order imposing sanctions against Venezuela.

The post US Trying To Salvage Summit By Removing Cuba From Terror List appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Clément Doleac*

After Mexico’s 1982 economic crisis, the country abandoned its previous enthusiastically embraced Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) development strategy, inspired by the Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean (ECLAC) of the United Nations.[1] Since then, the Mexican economy has seen pounded by incredible surges of transformations.[2] Free trade agreements, massive privatization, and financialization have become new pillars of the economy, and have led to a complete reconfiguration of the country.[3] However, twenty years after the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the positive outcomes of this economic model adjustment have been little, and the expected economic boom never occurred.[4] In fact, poverty and inequality increased during the 1980s and the 1990s, and remains widespread.[5] NAFTA has predominantly benefited the U.S. and Canada: Mexico’s two main trading partners. Mexican authorities might now consider renegotiating NAFTA, and promote an alternative economic development policy, in order to overcome their persistent dependency on the U.S. economy, as well as improve their numerous deficiencies in various economic sectors.

From One Misguided Economic Paradigm to Another: 1973-1994

Since the emergence of the new political order after the Mexican revolution in 1928 and its stabilization in the 1930s, nationalization, state planning, and sovereignty have largely governed economic policy in the country.[6] Based on the dominant model of economic development at that time of ISI, promoted by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean of the United Nations (ECLAC-UN), Mexico practiced protectionism, focusing on its own industrial production and consumer market.[7] The goal was to achieve autonomy by attaining self-sufficiency.

ISI is an economic and trade policy that advocates to replace imports with domestic production. Over the decades, ISI was based on the thesis that a country should reduce its foreign dependency by bolstering local production of industrialized products.[8] During the rule of the Mexican hegemonic party, the Institutional Revolution Party (Partido de la Revolucion Institucional, PRI) (1928-2000), whose economic model was based on the nationalized industries inherited from the 1930’s (oil industry, electricity sector, railroad industry) and the redistribution of land (from squirearchy, to local cooperatives called ejidos, which were maintained under local collective administration).[9] This economic model, based on conceptions of the industrialization process and the redistribution of income, which was applied throughout Latin America, but primarily by Brazil, Mexico and Argentina.[10]

The ISI model has seen its successes and its failures. The main problem was the enormous amount of investment needed to complete the industrialization process. Self-sufficiency and protectionism were not easily capable of attracting major foreign investors. Mexican authorities, moreover believed that they could find enough investment income to complete this development process thanks to the oil boom of the 1970’s. New oil possibilities were discovered in the states of Chiapas, Tabasco, and Veracruz, when the production rose from 400,000 barrels per day to 1,700,000 per day between 1970 and 1985.[11] The oil industry subsequently gained importance in the Mexican economy, but new resources created by the oil boom were never efficiently redirected towards the country’s most modernizing industrialization project. On the contrary, Mexico lost its competitive edge in the industrial sector because of the strong attraction of the oil sector: investment and exportation were concentrated in the oil sector, with less attention directed towards the other export sectors. As stated by Rafael I. Paniagua-Ruiz, “Oil became progressively […] the motor of economic growth, at the expenses of the competitiveness of the manufacturing sector.”[12]

But in 1982, plunging oil prices in the international market led to a financial crisis and the debt default of the government. This crisis in effect dug a grave for the ISI model, as well as for the administrations of the following three Mexican presidents, Miguel de la Madrid (1982-1988), Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) and Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León (1994-2000). Counseled by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), these aristocratic and self-confident presidents chose a new path of neoliberalism: free trade promotion, privatization of the public sector, and reduction of public spending.[13]

This policy, accompanied by high interest rate levels and the creation of a strong peso, led to a drastic reduction of inflation, but also hindered economic growth in the country. The Mexican economy enjoyed ten times more than the traditional international investments in the economy, and the private sector flourished thanks to massive privatization. The Mexican economy gained prominence in the international arena, with Mexico joining the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1986, and in 1994, as well as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The still non-democratic authorities have also concurrently ratified the North-American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and the United States of America. These radical developments, taken together starkly contrasted with the economic stagnation and massive impoverishment rampant in Mexico during the 1980’s.

A Boon in Trade and Investment After NAFTA’s Difficulties Begin

Supposedly representative of the new economic era due to the inception of NAFTA, 1994 was far from a positive year. The opening of Mexico’s non-competitive economy led to an enormous deficit of $18.5 billion USD in the country’s trade balance. Additionally, indigenous populations from the poor, southern region of Chiapas, Mexico, witnessed a guerrilla movement, established the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, or EZLN), and the declaring of combat against the Mexican central government, considered illegitimate, due to the electoral fraud of 1988, which has been recognized later on.[14] The principal presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta of the PRI, was shot dead during his electoral campaign, which lead to an intense institutional crisis of legitimacy. Due to a guerrilla re-emergence (Mexico knew several guerrilla movements during since the 1960s till the 1980s) and the assassination of PRI’s presidential candidate, international investors panicked, and hastily revoked their funds.[15] Therefore, a new financial crisis arose in Mexico, that in effect devaluated the peso by 50 percent. Twelve years after 1982, Mexico was again unable to face its outstanding debt, with an economic situation even worse than ever before.[16]

But this time, because of Mexican authorities’ acceptance of neoliberal economic policies, neither the US government nor the International Monetary Fund (IMF) wished to let Mexico drown.[17] It would have been the in live proof of the failure of economic neoliberalism.[18] In order to save the myth, the U.S. government authorities lent $9 billion to Mexico, and helped its neighbor with a financial swap of around $12.5 billion. Additionally, the IMF lent $17.8 billion to Mexico, seven times more than officially permissible by Mexico for allowed IMF quotas.[19]

The 50 percent devaluation of the peso led to a drastic reduction in the Mexican labor force cost, and also reduced the price of comparable Mexican products compared to U.S. and Canadian goods. Therefore, Mexican exports saw significant growth; maquiladoras, factories for parts assembly for industrial products all along the U.S. border, created 100,000 jobs, a major boost for the sector.[20] Since their appearance these assembly plants have been a staple of economic growth for Mexico, principally allowing it to export products to the U.S. market. Today, maquiladoras garner $80 billion a year, around 30 percent of the Mexican Domestic Gross Product (GDP). Despite what the country had hoped, Mexican economic growth has become more and more dependent on the U.S. market, evidenced by the United States absorbing around 80 percent of Mexican exports.[21]

Since 1993, Mexico has noticeably become even more integrated in the North American economy. Between the United States and Mexico, trade multiplied five times in the period between 1993-2011.[22] While Mexico today receives 11 percent of American exports, the United States absorbs 80 percent of all Mexican goods. Trade between Mexico and Canada increased as well, also multiplying by a factor of five. In 2010, the intra-regional trade was very important, and several industrial sectors were nearly fully integrated: for example, 75 percent of the automobile industry in North-America, in comparison to 70 percent for the automobile sector among the European Union and 30 percent of that of Asia.[23]

In 2013, international investments accounted for 31.5 percent of Mexico’s GDP—a big step up from the 8.5 percent in 1990.[24] Also in the latter year, numerous international firms arrived in Mexico (General Motors, Boeing, Citigroup, Gold Corp, Walmart, etc.). However, only 44 percent of these investments originated from the United States. In contrast, those of the European Union made up around 60 percent of the total.[25]

The commercial balance between the United States and its two economic partners in NAFTA has risen each year. Currently estimated to be $106 billion, the balance represents 15 percent of the United States’ deficit. Also, the United States, which has benefited from the inexpensive Mexican workforce, did not lose as many jobs as it had feared at the time of NAFTA’s ratification. The United States lost around 700,000 jobs between 1994 and 2010, but concurrently has created around 40 million new positions because of the electronic and information boom.[26] During the period 1993-2015, the job creation in the United States has been of around 30 millions net.[27] Although the working class may have lost jobs in the United States, many more were created for the qualified labor force.

Low Economic Growth, Job Destruction, Poverty, and Immigration

Economic results have been very disappointing for Mexico. The country’s GDP grew only an average 2.9 percent annually between 1993 and 2010, compared to 4.9 percent for Argentina, 4.1 for Brazil and 6.8 for Chile. The average annual growth per capita between 1960 and 1980 was 3.5 percent, 0.7 percent between 1980 and 2000, and of 0.6 percent between 2000 and 2013.[28]

In Latin America, even if the difference between the periods between 1960-1980 and 1980-2000 are similar, or even worse, to the Mexican panorama, with figures diminishing from 3.3 percent to 0.4 percent in average annual growth of the GDP per capita, since 2000, the average annual growth in Latin America at the time was three times more than the current one in Mexico.[29]

The devastation of jobs in Mexico’s primary sector has been significant since the ratification of the NAFTA. As stated by the Council for Economic and Policy Research, the “NAFTA removed tariffs (but not subsidies) on agricultural goods, with a transition period in which there was a steadily increasing import quota for certain commodities. […] Not surprisingly, U.S. production, which is not only subsidized but had higher average productivity levels than that of Mexico, displaced millions of Mexican farmers.”[30] International agriculture entreprises from the United States, such as ABC Farm and Monsanto, quickly took over the field in Mexico against communitarian ideals and small-scale Mexican farmers.

Economic growth is not the only indicator of NAFTA’s failure: the wage gap between Mexico, and the United States and Canada, is very significant. In 2012, the GDP per capita in Mexico was equivalent to 30 percent of the United States’ GDP per capita, and 32 percent in 2011, reflecting a relatively modest increase.[31] Poverty also remains high in Mexico. According to data gathered by the Mexican government, the number of people unable to afford housing, adequate clothing, transportation, healthcare, education and food in 2012 was nearly the same as in 1994 and accounted for 52.4 percent of the population, which is now at 52.3 percent.[32]

Mexican authorities were aware that the jobs of many small farmers would be in jeopardy, but they held the belief that the farmers would be able to find alternative jobs. The agricultural sector was also expected to quickly adapt to a high-tech renovation of the field. And in fact, the production of vegetables and fruits have grown considerably, from 17.3 million tons in 1994, to 28.2 million tons in 2012, creating millions of seasonal jobs for the period.[33] But Mexican production focused on the demands of the American market, which means the focus was on counter-seasonal products, and on very specific vegetables, such as onions, strawberries, tomatoes, and cucumbers, amounting to nearly 70 percent of Mexico’s current production.[34] Mono-culture and the intensification of production led to a reduction of population in rural areas, and decreased production for the local market. Mexico must now import corn and rice, staples in the Mexican diet, in order to meet domestic demand. In 2010 Mexico imported 7.27 million tons of yellow corn, 2.93 million tons of white corn, and around 0.7 million ton of rice paddy to meet the local demand of traditional products.[35]

Furthermore, most of the farmers who lost their jobs at the time were unable to find other work, and were forced out of desperation to migrate to the United States. The flow of migrants to the United States in 1994 was around 43,000 and rose to 770,000 six years later in 2000. The migration rates later lowered, mainly because of the militarization of the border post 9/11, and because of the 2001 economic recession in the United States.[36]

Border Industrialization and Maquiladoras

Economically speaking, one of the most impressive aspect of NAFTA for Mexico has been the increased production of manufactured goods and generation of industrial jobs by the maquiladoras. This model had been implemented in Mexico prior to NAFTA, but under reduced conditions. Since 1965, the Mexican government has created various free trade zones in order to receive production units from the United States, with intentions of subcontracting U.S. industrial production. Within these free trade spaces, Mexico could import resources and partially manufactured products for assembly, essentially creating poor quality jobs with little aggregate value to the manufactured product. The base of the term maquiladoras is maquilar in Spanish; the government was quite literally, simply applying a bit of makeup to industrial products, to add some little transformation, mainly assembly, and re-exporting these products to the United States. At the time of these earlier free trade zones, most enterprises present were U.S.-based, but European (Philips in Ciudad Juarez) and Asian (Sony and Hunday) ones also participated.

These free trade zones benefited a specific exemption from the ISI model at that time, which was based on self-sufficiency and protectionism. Gaining importance in the 1990s with NAFTA, these zones enabled Mexican enterprises to benefit from free trade and free tax zones called PITEX (Programa de Importación Temporal para Exportación). Progressively, maquiladoras became the only factor contributing to the industrialization of the country, greatly structuring the sector. Today, these maquiladoras produce 80 percent of exports in Mexico, mostly for the United States. Mexico is now seen as a cheap site to assemble products before exportation to the United States. The increase in maquiladoras had also very negative effects on the conditions of working class women, many times sexualized and wildly exploited. The number of femicided women rose considerably in Northern Mexico during these last twenty years.[37]

Another sector of Mexico saw exponential growth: service. These developments are evidenced by the arrival of supermarkets and call centers. The growth of these sectors provided employment for young migrants returning to Mexico from the United States, who could then work in the call centers with the English that they had acquired abroad. As in the industrial sector, these kinds of employment are mainly for unskilled workers and are notoriously underpaid.

Repercussions of NAFTA and the new economic model in Mexico are undeniable. Primarily, the downsides have been a concentration of the industry in maquiladoras and U.S.-bound exports. The intensification of agriculture on off-season crops and the development of the service sector are also notable and negative outcomes. Overall, newly created jobs are poorly paid, produce really little added value, and only deepen Mexican dependency on the U.S. economy. Furthermore, the re-configuration of the industry and disruption of traditional agriculture in Mexico led to a massive flow of migration to the United States.

Mexico as a North American Country

The 2000-2001 recession in the United States demonstrated the limitations of the new economic model and integration policy promoted by the U.S., IMF, and implemented via NAFTA. While Mexico’s GDP growth was seven percent in 2000, it fell 0.3 percent in 2001, and only grew slightly in the following years at 0.9 percent in 2002 and around one percent in 2003.[38] The maquiladora crisis led to massive lay off of 200,000 people between 2001 and 2003, in Mexico. Economic growth in Mexico coincides with a strong dependence on the U.S. In 2008-2009, the Mexican GDP plunged more than the U.S. GDP, and once again there was a massive depletion of jobs; Mexico has been more of a victim than the U.S. in this sense.[39]

This dependence is a problem, both politically and economically. After the ratification of NAFTA, the number of poor Mexicans increased from 40 to 60 million, as according to the Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social (CONEVAL).[40] Millions of small and medium Mexican enterprises have closed, prices have increased due to an adjustment to international markets, and subsidies were cut for Mexican farmers. Also, American goods arrived much faster than the capital necessary to industrialize the country. The local Mexican market is now flooded with “made in USA” products, while the country’s exports are merely assembled in the country, with little added value in the process. Mexican export growth is at the mercy of the U.S. market’s absorption capacity, which is limited, because already filled with products from other countries, such as China. Domestically, the free trade policy led to a collapse of traditional Mexican industries (small and medium-sized enterprises and industries, SMEs and SMIs), which are facing an unsustainable competition: U.S. products are heavily subsidized (agriculture and steel), and the goods are available at reasonable prices. In Mexico, banks do not lend at less than a 25 percent interest rate, while it is way more affordable to borrow money in the United States. This strong asymmetry prevented the Mexican industry from investing, resulting in a high rate of bankruptcy.

In the competition for assembly of products and manufactured goods, Mexico is now obligated to maintain low wages to profit from maquiladoras, if it wants to maintain cheap prices for the experts, able to compete with Chinese and Asian production, and reduce consumerism in the local market so as not to disturb the equilibrium of the Mexican trade balance. This economic policy, which is just one among many other outcomes, which can lead to an unbearable inequality in the distribution of the wealth. Based on NAFTA, this economic model allowed neoliberal governments to partly dismantle what constituted the base of a welfare state, born out of the Mexican Revolution, and created during the mandate of former President Lazaro Cardenas and Avila Camacho (creation of the Mexican Social Security Institute in 1943, raise of wages, social insurance, etc.)[41] While preparing the foundation of the ALCA, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, American presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were willing to extend the new free trade area from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.[42]

Free Trade and Drug Trafficking

Also, since its transition to a weak democracy in 2000, Mexico has aligned its foreign policy with the United States, specifically regarding Latin America and the War on Drugs.

Drug trafficking has become a major component of U.S.-Mexican relations. According to the U.S. Secret Service, the southwestern border of the country is the main entrance and drug storage area for the U.S. market (cocaine, heroin, marijuana, synthetic products), which is the biggest drug market in the world. The situation has worsened in Mexico, particularly since the 1980s; until then, drug traffickers were mostly smugglers whose main function was to bring Colombian cocaine to the United States, and had a tacit agreement with Mexican federal authorities, allowing a certain degree of peace.

Since the opening of the Mexican economy at the time, the country has ceased to merely be a transit space, and is now a space of production and consumption. Mexican cartels have become richer and stronger. The most powerful have become true transnational corporations protected by militias and paramilitary groups. Overarching income of narco-trafficking fluctuates around $20 billion USD per year. This money has plagued almost all economic and political sectors of the country, fueling violence and corruption. A survey commissioned by the Mexican Senate has estimated that about 72 percent of Mexican municipalities could be infiltrated by men or women in the drug trafficking industry, and 8 percent could be completely controlled by cartels. Encouraged and perpetuated by the United States’ War on Drugs, the Mexican government has lead a war against the cartels since 2004, resulting in thousands of casualties: the homicide rate in the country has doubled, from around 10 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2004, to more than 20 in 2012.[43]

Pacific Alliance and the Asian Market: Mexico Seeks New Alternatives

NAFTA definitely allowed Mexico to raise its export potential, but only to the benefit of the North American market. The Mexican economy is completely dependent on its northern neighbors. Mexico depends on its export industry, but also on remittances received from emigrants living in the United States, and from the direct foreign investment in the country, primarily coming from the United States. In 2005 it was estimated that trade relations with Canada and the U.S. represented 95 percent of Mexican total expenditure, including oil exports, manufactured goods, agricultural export, and import of capital goods with high value added.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the government of Mexico has tried to connect with global economic partners by promoting similar free trade agreements—a strategy of the United States as well. The U.S. has ratified free trade agreements with El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Peru, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Chile, and the Dominican Republic. Mexico and Canada have also promoted such economic policies. Mexico has ratified free trade agreement with Japan, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Guatemala, Uruguay, El Salvador, and Honduras. The United States government is now trying to negotiate a Trans-Pacific Free Trade Agreement with the European Union.[44]

More recently, in 2011, Mexico joined the Pacific Alliance, a free trade alliance including Colombia, Peru, Mexico, and Chile that aims to stand up to the incredible trade power of China. Through this partnership, Mexico is trying to diversify its economic standings and to export more towards Latin America and Europe: the goal is to retract its dependency on the United States. The Pacific Alliance, for instance, represents a potential market of around 100 million inhabitants, and a 70 percent GDP growth during the period 2007-2012 (previous to the Pacific Alliance. Mexico is looking to develop its relationship with other Latin American countries of similar ideological beliefs; for example, Colombia and Chile, who present a counter-bloc to confront Brazilian hegemony, and the growth of other regional blocs, such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América) ALBA and the Mercosur or Mercosul (Mercado Común del Sur, Mercado Comum do Sul), which promote more protectionist policies and anti-free market standings (or at least anti U.S. conceived free market trade agreements). The multiplication of economic and trade partners has become the main goal of Mexican foreign policy in Latin America, in order to challenge South American leadership in the hemisphere.

Mexico, like other countries in South America, developed an important trade relationship with China. Trade between the two countries rose from $4.4 billion USD in 2000, to $62.6 billion in 2012. Even though China and Mexico are in direct competition for the U.S. consumer market, Mexico is the second highest receptor of Chinese produced goods. In 2013, because of the increase of oil in the international market and the constant rise of wages in China, it became cheaper to produce or assemble products in Mexico, rather than in China. Mexican authorities are hopeful that Mexico will become a new “little China” in North America.[45]

However, a direct cooperation has evolved between Mexico and China. China opened its market to Mexican pork and tequila, and many bilateral agreements were ratified during an official visit of Chinese president Xi Jinping in June 2013, including an agreement related to the energy sector in prevision of the opening of the oil market in Mexico, and also regarding infrastructure. Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), the state-owned Mexican petroleum company announced, for example, a loan from the Export-Import Bank of China of almost $1 billion to allow the purchase of new oil boats and the exploration of new oil fields in deep offshore waters of the Mexican Gulf.

A “Successful” Economic Strategy at the Cost of its People

Neoliberalism in Mexico, as we have demonstrated, is wildly unsuccessful. The economy is terribly dependent on the U.S. market, the jobs created are poor in quality, and added value to manufactured goods is low. Mexico’s agricultural sector has been devastated by the competition from heavily subsidized U.S. crops, and the industrial and service sector can only offer low-paid, unskilled work. Mexico is industrializing its economy, but only for low-cost manufacturing in which it faces ferocious competition with other countries, such as China. Mexico has become the assembly gate for the enormous U.S. market, but poverty and inequality persist.

Mexico’s strategic response to overcome these hard-hitting weaknesses is to increase its economic partners, and to wait for external conditions to evolve in order to obtain the lowest possible cost in production. As reported by the Washington Post, “Mexico’s poverty rate fell 0.6 percent between 2010 and 2012 to 53.3 million people,” a number prevailing three decades ago.[46] Inequality is increasingly important as of late. The top 10 percent of the Mexican elite own 40 percent of national income, while the poorest 10 percent only saw 1.5 percent of the country’s total revenue.[47] As stated by Alice Krozer and Juan Carlos Moreno-Brid of the World Economics Association, “prior to 1976, there was a relatively stable relationship between productivity growth and wage growth in manufacturing […] their subsequent delinking under trade liberalization meant that increasing export competitiveness had little effect on living standards […] by the end of the 1990s, the average wage was only just recovering to its 1976 level, although productivity had increased by about 80% in the meantime; in the same period, the real minimum wage fell 80%, and the share of wages and salaries in GDP fell from 40% to 18.9%.”[48]

These figures indicate that profit margins greatly increased, but the rise in profit was only accumulated by the richest in Mexico. Economic growth in Mexico is fueled by exploitation of the poor, considering that a fundamental element of its economic growth is based on a low-cost workforce.

A successful economic model intends to improve the quality of life, and promote economic abundance for a country’s population, ideally providing access to better education and health care. The economic model in Mexico is evidently rooted in capitalizing on severe inequality and widespread poverty, provoking economic growth and profits margins for an elite minority. Such a model is not only unsuccessful, but also immoral.

*Clément Doleac, Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs

[1] See more in -MUSSET Alain et GHORRA-GOBIN Cynthia, Canada, Etats-Unis, Mexique, Sedes, 2012 ; BIZBERG Ilan, « La sociedad civil en el nuevo regimen politico », Foro internacional, Vol. XLVII, Numéro 4, Octubre-Diciembre 2007, pp. 785-816., El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico ; BEY Marguerite, « Réformes néolibérales et tensions sur les ressources dans la décentralisation au Pérou et au Mexique », Revue Internationale de Politique Comparée, Vol. 17, n° 3, 2010 ; BEY Marguerite, DEHOUVE Danièle (dir.), La transition démocratique au Mexique, Regards croisés, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2006 ; BIZBERG Ilan, “La transformation politique du Mexique: fin de l’ancien régime et apparition du nouveau ? », in Critique Internationale, n°19, avril 2003.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] WEISBROT Mark, LEFEBVRE Stephan, SAMMUT Joseph, “Did NAFTA Help Mexico? An Assessment After 20 Years” Council for Economic and Policy Research, February 2014. Consulted on http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/nafta-20-years on April 8, 2015.

[5] KROZER Alice, MORENO BRID Juan Carlos, “Inequality in Mexico”, World Economics Association, pp.4-6 of World Economics Association Newsletter 4(5), October 2014. Consulted on http://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/newsletterarticles/inequality-in-mexico/ on April 8, 2015.

[6] BIZBERG Ilan, “La transformation politique du Mexique: fin de l’ancien régime et apparition du nouveau ? », in Critique Internationale, n°19, avril 2003 ; GILLY Adolfo, La revolución interrumpida, México, ERA, 2000.

[7] BAER Werner, “Import Substitution and Industrialization in Latin Amercia: Experiences and Interpretations” in Latin American Research Review, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring, 1972), pp. 95-122.

[8] STREET, James H.; DILMUS James, “Structuralism, and Dependency in Latin America.” Journal of Economic Issues, 1992 16(3) p. 673-689.

[9] BIZBERG Ilan, “La transformation politique du Mexique: fin de l’ancien régime et apparition du nouveau ? », in Critique Internationale, n°19, avril 2003 ; GILLY Adolfo, La revolución interrumpida, México, ERA, 2000.

[10] STREET, James H.; DILMUS James, “Structuralism, and Dependency in Latin America.” Journal of Economic Issues, 1992 16(3) p. 673-689. BAER Werner, “Import Substitution and Industrialization in Latin Amercia: Experiences and Interpretations” in Latin American Research Review, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring, 1972), pp. 95-122 ; ARNAUD Pascal, “ Industrialisation et crise économique : le Brésil et le Mexique, 1970-1982 » Revue Tiers Monde, 1982, Volume 23, Numéro 91, pp. 669-677.

[11] PANIAGUA-RUIZ, Rafael, “Crise financière et problème de la dette: les limites de l’intervention publique entre 1978 et 1981” in Revue Tiers Monde, 1984, vol. 25, issue 99, pages 659-667.

[12] Ibid.

[13] KUCZYNSKI Pedro-Pablo, “L’Amérique latine et la crise de la dette”, Revue d’économie financière, 1990, Volume 15, Numéro 1, pp. 171-178

[14] SI PAZ, “Chiapas – Peace Process, War Process, on January 3, 2000. Consulted on http://www.sipaz.org/en/chiapas/peace-process-war-process/334-1994.html ; THOMPSON Ginger, “Ex-President in Mexico Casts New Light on Rigged 1988 Election” The New York Times, March 9, 2004. Consulted on http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/09/world/ex-president-in-mexico-casts-new-light-on-rigged-1988-election.html on April 6, 2015.

[15] Historia de México, coordinación de Gisela von Wobeser, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Secretaría de Educación Pública, 2010. (Reimpresión, 2014).

[16] CAMDESSUS Michel, “La crise financière mexicaine, ses origines, la réponse du FMI et les enseignements à en tirer,”Revue d’économie financière, 1995, Volume 33, Numéro 33, pp. 35-45.

[17] Ibid.

[18] TRUMAN Edwin, “The Mexican Peso Crisis:Implications for International Finance” in Federal Reserve Bulletin, March 1996.

[19] TRUMAN Edwin, “The Mexican Peso Crisis:Implications for International Finance” in Federal Reserve Bulletin, March 1996.

[20] CEPR

[21] VILLAREAL Angeles, “U.S.-Mexico Economic Relations:Trends, Issues, and Implications” in Congressional Research Service, July 1, 2014.

[22] PARIS Frank, MARTINAUD Claude, BOILLET Pierre-Yves, Canada, Etats-Unis, Mexique, Capes-Agrégation Géographie, Collection: Je prépare, Dunod, 2012. ; MUSSET Alain et GHORRA-GOBIN Cynthia, Canada, Etats-Unis, Mexique, Sedes, 2012.

[23] Ibid.

[24] http://www.economia.gob.mx/news-and-events/press-room/headlines/10154-boletin14-021-en

[25] http://www.economia.gob.mx/news-and-events/press-room/headlines/10154-boletin14-021-en

[26] WEISBROT Mark, LEFEBVRE Stephan, SAMMUT Joseph, “Did NAFTA Help Mexico? An Assessment After 20 Years” Council for Economic and Policy Research, February 2014. Consulted on http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/nafta-20-years on April 8, 2015.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid.

[29] WEISBROT Mark, LEFEBVRE Stephan, SAMMUT Joseph, “Did NAFTA Help Mexico? An Assessment After 20 Years” Council for Economic and Policy Research, February 2014. Consulted on http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/nafta-20-years on April 8, 2015.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid.

[32] The method and the details of measure provided per the Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social (CONEVAL) is findable on the following link http://www.coneval.gob.mx/Medicion/Paginas/Medici%C3%B3n/Pobreza%202012/pobreza_2012_ingles/2012_poverty_measurement.aspx Consulted on April 8, 2015.

[33] WEISBROT Mark, LEFEBVRE Stephan, SAMMUT Joseph, “Did NAFTA Help Mexico? An Assessment After 20 Years” Council for Economic and Policy Research, February 2014. Consulted on http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/nafta-20-years on April 8, 2015.

[34] Ibid.

[35] WEISBROT Mark, LEFEBVRE Stephan, SAMMUT Joseph, “Did NAFTA Help Mexico? An Assessment After 20 Years” Council for Economic and Policy Research, February 2014. Consulted on http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/nafta-20-years on April 8, 2015.

[36] Ibid.

[37] reference

[38] WEISBROT Mark, LEFEBVRE Stephan, SAMMUT Joseph, “Did NAFTA Help Mexico? An Assessment After 20 Years” Council for Economic and Policy Research, February 2014. Consulted on http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/nafta-20-years on April 8, 2015.

[39] Ibid.

[40] The definition of the poverty guideline by the CONEVAL can be seen on http://www.coneval.gob.mx/Medicion/Paginas/Medici%C3%B3n/Que-es-la-medicion-multidimensional-de-la-pobreza.aspx

[41] DION Michelle, “The Political Origins of Social Security in Mexico during the Cárdenas and Ávila Camacho Administrations”, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Winter 2005), pp. 59-95. Consulted on

ttp://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/msem.2005.21.1.59?sid=21106307668183&uid=3739256&uid=2&uid=4 on April 9, 2015.

[42] More details about the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas can be find on http://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/trade-policies/potential-trade-agreements/the-free-trade-area-of-the-americas-ftaa/ Consulted on April 8, 2015

[43] MCKIBBEN Cameron, “NAFTA and Drug Trafficking: Perpetuating Violence and the Illicit Supply Chain” Council on Hemispheric Affairs, March 20, 2015. Consulted on http://www.coha.org/nafta-and-drug-trafficking-perpetuating-violence-and-the-illicit-supply-chain/ on April 8, 2015.

[44] More information on http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/in-focus/ttip/

[45] REUTERS, “En México la mano de obra es más barata que en China” in la Jornada, April 5, 2013. Consulted on http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2013/04/05/economia/027n3eco on April 6, 2015.

[46] COHEN Luc, “Mexico’s Poverty Rate: Half Of Country’s Population Lives In Poverty”, in the Huffington Post, July, 29 , 2013. Consulted on http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/29/mexico-poverty_n_3673568.html on April 8, 2015.

[47] KROZER Alice, MORENO BRID Juan Carlos, “Inequality in Mexico”, World Economics Association, pp.4-6 of World Economics Association Newsletter 4(5), October 2014. Consulted on http://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/newsletterarticles/inequality-in-mexico/ on April 8, 2015.

[48] Ibid.

Additional References:

-SARTORI Giovanni, Partidos y sistemas de partidos : marco para un análisis, Madrid, Alianza, 1992.

-BARTRA VERGES Armando, Los herederos de Zapata: movimientos campesinos pos revolucionarios en México 1920/1980, México, ERA, 1985.

-GILLY Adolfo, La revolución interrumpida, México, ERA, 2000.

-BIZBERG Ilan, “La transformation politique du Mexique: fin de l’ancien régime et apparition du nouveau ? », in Critique Internationale, n°19, avril 2003

-BEY Marguerite, « Le programme social progreso-oportunidades au Mexique », Revue Tiers-Monde, n°196, octobre-décembre 2008.

-BEY Marguerite, « Réformes néolibérales et tensions sur les ressources dans la décentralisation au Pérou et au Mexique », Revue Internationale de Politique Comparée, Vol. 17, n° 3, 2010.

-BEY Marguerite, DEHOUVE Danièle (dir.), La transition démocratique au Mexique, Regards croisés, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2006.

-BIZBERG Ilan, « La sociedad civil en el nuevo regimen politico », Foro internacional, Vol. XLVII, Numéro 4, Octubre-Diciembre 2007, pp. 785-816., El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico.

-COMBES Hélène, « La guerre des mots dans la transition mexicaine », Mots, Les langages du politique, 2007/3 n°85, p. 51-64.

-MUSSET Alain et GHORRA-GOBIN Cynthia, Canada, Etats-Unis, Mexique, Sedes, 2012.
– MUSSET Alain, Le Mexique, Que sais-je ?, Presses Universitaires de France (PUF), 2010.

Press:

-XINHAUT ENGLISH NEWS, « Xi Jinping meets with President of Trinidad & Tobago », 2 juin 2013

-REUTERS, « China, Mexico vow broad cooperation as Xi visits; no trade pact soon », June 4, 2013.

-SALIBA, Frédéric, « Chine et Mexique réchauffent les relation », Le Monde, June 5, 2013.

-DE CORDOBA, José, GUTHRIE, Amy, « Mexico, Chine seek to jump-start trade », Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2013.

-CASTILLO, Eduardo, « Leaders of Mexico, China promise broadened relations, move toward more balanced trade », Canadian Press, 20 juin 2013

-RAMIREZ, Sergio, « Tous ces canaux mènent à Pékin », Courrier international, 12 août 2013

-REUTERS, “En México la mano de obra es más barata que en China” in la Jornada, April 5, 2013. Consulted on http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2013/04/05/economia/027n3eco on April 6, 2015.

The post The North American Free Trade Agreement: A Qualified Failure For Mexico – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Clément Doleac*

The seventh Summit of the Americas will be held this weekend in Panama on April 10-11, providing what could be the ideal moment to analyze the fractured diplomatic forces at work in the Western Hemisphere. Since the Summit’s inception, the agenda has been analyzed as progressively shifting to the left, pushed by a number of mainstream forces among Latin America’s leadership. The United States and its close allies, such as Honduras, Panama, and Canada, are gradually becoming more isolated in the Americas. The Organization of American States (OAS), a hemispheric organization representing a declining order in which the U.S. was the paramount regional hegemon, is registering each time as being less pertinent as a united forum for the discussion of diplomatic issues in the region.[1] The Cold War-era divisions between the Latin American left wing and Washington is still open, and continues to cut deeper as long as Washington does not effectively contain its hostile influence on the rest of the hemisphere.

The Slow but Progressive shift of the Hemisphere to the left

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) has written ad nauseum regarding hemispheric diplomacy and its progressive shift to a leftist habitat for regional institutions such as UNASUR. Since the beginning of the Cold War, and as a result of Washington’s constant aggressions and interferences in Latin America, which backed some of the worst dictators, oppressive of democratic institutions and progressive governments, regional organizations and American states were pressured to officially align with Washington.[2] The only opportunity during this time for defenders of social and human rights, the promoters of freedom and democracy, was the armed struggle against dictatorships and imperialism. Through this, and all across Latin America, left-wing guerrillas emerged because democracy appeared impossible to achieve through legal means.

The overthrow of elected President Arbenz in Guatemala, due to his promotion of progressive land reform in the early 1950s, announced the beginning of a long history of US-supported coups in Latin America. The case of Cuba is also exemplary in nature. During the Batista dictatorship in Cuba, a number of democratic political parties attempted to regain power, but failed. This left only one option available for progressive activists: the incorporation of guerrilla movements, and Castro’s armed struggle at the end of the 1950s. In Chile, over a decade later, Washington’s interventionism was evident during the overthrow of Salvador Allende by the military. The United States then subsequently backed Augusto Pinochet, who led one of the most controversial dictatorships in the hemisphere.[3]

Since the return to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, and the end of the Cold War, the subsequent U.S. administrations have been obligated to recognize the legitimacy of democratic rule and the emergence of some of the more progressive movements in the hemisphere. A fact representative of this evolution has been the election in 2005 of a Secretary General of the Organization of American States who had not been pre-approved by Washington: José Miguel Insulza.[4] As confirmed by Gonzalo Escribano, COHA Guest Scholar, Mr. Insulza was a moderate Chilean socialist who “complied with the expectations at the time of his first election, but…would eventually be challenged from both the left and the right.” Once in office, Insulza stood up to Washington on a number of critical occasions. During his term as Secretary General, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) initiative, driven by US policymakers since the 1990’s with the intention of expanding the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the whole hemisphere, was officially left to die. Insulza took a significant stand against US interests after he facilitated the negotiations to revoke the 1962 resolution, promoted by the US, through which the Cuban government remained on the outside the organization.”[5]

Also, thanks to this progressive shift to democracy among Latin American governments, the left has returned to the political scene as part of the so-called “Pink Tide” governments. Pushed by the election of leftist figures such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela (1998), Lula Inacio Da Silva in Brazil (2003), Nestor Kirchner in Argentina (2003), as well as, more recently, Evo Morales in Bolivia (2006) and Rafael Correa in Ecuador (2007), Latin American governments and top leaders have been questioning the progressive nature of Washington’s policies in the hemisphere. Even within the OAS, the most pro-U.S. organization in the region, Washington has met staunch criticism, even by the closest of its allies.

For example, in 2012, during the Summit of the Americas held in Cartagena, Colombia, many expressed their rejection and criticism of the U.S.-led war on drugs in the hemisphere. As stated by the Wall Street Journal at that time, “a subtle revolt against U.S. anti-drug policy [was] spreading within the top echelons of Latin American governments…[and] the uprising [was] being led by some of Washington’s closest allies in Latin America.” This included Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who has openly and increasingly questioned U.S. drug policy.[6] After having enjoyed $8 billion in U.S. military aid and ten years of U.S. military assistance in the name of the war on drugs, the Andean country is still one of the top producers of cocaine, and also one of the most violent countries in the hemisphere.[7] Even former Mexican President Felipe Calderon (2006-2012), who chose to be an unquenchable engine of the war on the drug cartels in Mexico in 2006 and welcomed the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) operations in the country, has since suggested that Washington retool its battered anti-drug policy, blaming the problem of organized crime on the drug consumption market in the United States.[8] Additionally, former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who favored free-trade with the United States, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, Mexico’s president when NAFTA was implemented, and former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria, all claimed that the priorities of Washington’s drug policy need to be reviewed, and that regional governments should consider expediting the decriminalization of marijuana.[9]

The Slow Overthrow of the OAS

What can appear as subtle change, however, have in fact been irreversible evolutions within the OAS. During the last decade, Latin America began to promote a number of other regional inititatives, explicitly excluding the United States and Canada. Perhaps the most radical alternative, or supplement, of these organizations has been the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA, Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra America), founded in 2004, by, among others, Cuba and Venezuela. In 2008, the government of Cuba joined the Rio Group, a regional body created in 1986, which defines itself as a body “with the aim of producing ‘Latin American solutions to Latin American problems,’” a clearly anti-U.S. intervention rhetorical posture.[10]

Moreover, a new diplomatic bloc, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), was created in 2010. It included every country in the Western Hemisphere but the United States and Canada. The difference between the OAS and CELAC is that the latter includes Cuba which is not included within the OAS. What is most important and symbolic is that Cuba was the president pro tempore of the new CELAC, and reunited 33 head of states in the country for the 2013 summit. At the same time, many OAS member states asked for the reintegration of Cuba into the OAS.[11] These facts have emerged as part of a progressive “Cubanization” of the inter-American agenda, as stated by Natalia Saltalamacchia for the Council for Foreign Relations.[12]

These alternative regional institutions are representative of the strong discontent towards U.S. domination across the hemisphere, and the decline of Washington’s leadership in the Americas.

As COHA has consistently argued, Washington has been losing its influence in the Americas.[13] The constant interferences of Washington in the internal political affairs of the region has cost the OAS dearly, and has led Latin American governments to fear and, therefore, oppose U.S. hegemony.

The examples of U.S. violent and non-democratic interferences are numerous. According to Maurice Lemoine, with Le Monde Diplo, as a member of the counter-hegemonic organization, ALBA, Honduras has been a laboratory for such quasi “constitutional coup[s],” highlighted by the ousting of President Manuel Zelaya in 2008 and the unconstitutional movement backed by the United States.[14] This type of coup is typically tolerated by the international community and leads to the “forced resignation” of elected and legitimate authorities by eliciting the support of the private media, the military, and the corporate sector.

Furthermore, in Venezuela 2002, a small group of military leaders kidnapped President Hugo Chavez, and administered power to the President of the Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce (Fedecamaras), Pedro Carmona.[15] In 2010, a situation in Ecuador focused on President Correa mirrored the sequence of events in Honduras. There are also other cases of actual or threatened coups against elected governments, such as the two coups (1991 and 2004) against elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the constitutional coup against Fernando Lugo in Paraguay in 2012, which led to the suspension of Paraguay in the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR).[16]

In each one of these cases, Washington has been suspected, if not sharply demonstrated, to have been responsible for the outcomes.[17] These irreparable actions against democracy, as well as civil and human rights, have had serious consequences. As stated by Nicholas and Larry Birns, writing for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, “what the US has to face at this juncture…is how little support its tone and policies have among various countries in the area.”[18]

Cuba and Venezuela: The Salt in the Wound

As stated by the Americas’ Society/Council of the Americas, “when President Bill Clinton convened the first Summit of the Americas in 1994, the founding idea was to unite the region’s democracies under a common vision of creating a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA).”[19] To date, this forum has become more irrelevant each year due to the rupture of views between the United States and the rest of the hemisphere. Aside from negotiations on free trade agreements, very little is left to be accomplished, and now the most important debate for the new Summit of the Americas has been over whether Cuba is to join it.[20] Over the last 21 years, the region has seen a marked shift from a Latin America under Washington’s hegemony to the hemisphere backing the reintegration of Cuba. As stated by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “the world has moved forward, even though Washington has not.”[21]

Washington is now widely considered to be out of the game in the Western Hemisphere. For example, regarding the political situation in Venezuela, the United States is the only country in the hemisphere to declare Venezuela a threat to its security. Moreover, the Secretary General of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR, Unión de las Naciones Sur-Americanas), Ernesto Samper, has said very recently that the Summit of the Americas would be the ideal moment to “resume dialogue and to redesign relations in the hemisphere.”[22] The South American organization is asking “US President Barack Obama to repeal the executive order issued on March 9, accusing Venezuela of being ‘an unusual and extraordinary threat’ to the security of the United States.”[23] The ALBA and the CELAC have predictably also condemned the recent sanctions against Venezuela, which means that only Canada remains tied to Washington.

The Summit could be tense this year. Crucial issues, such as democracy and human rights, violent crime, immigration, global competitiveness, social development and climate change, are likely to be part of the agenda.[24] Cuba and Venezuela and their respective relationship with Washington will probably overshadow these issues, but they will not go entirely unattended.

Latin American countries want to see rapprochement between the United States and Cuba, but at the same time, the recent confrontation between Venezuela and the United States, and the unilateral sanctions mobilized by the Obama administration against Venezuelan top officials, will not strategically help Washington. Cuba is certainly the closest ally of Venezuela in the Americas, as much as Venezuela is that of Cuba. President Obama has shown a willingness to undertake a cautiously progressive stance towards Cuba, but is using the Cold War-era imperialist approach for Venezuela, an approach that is well-known for its human rights violation and crimes in the hemisphere.[25] This Summit can be a decisive moment and a positive turning point for diplomatic history in the hemisphere, but will depend on the decisions of Presidents Obama, Castro, and Maduro. For now, Cuba and the United States are not likely to do more than re-open embassies reciprocally, as called for by the White House. Even if Washington tries another hemispheric policy, the wounds are numerous and the imperialist inheritance is heavy for president Obama; the changes will only come slowly.

*Clément Doleac, Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs

[1] DOLEAC Clément, “Are the Imperialist Roots of the Organization of American States too Deep to Extirpate Today?” on Council on Hemispheric Affairs, on December 4, 2015. Consulted on http://www.coha.org/are-the-organization-of-american-states-imperialist-roots-too-deep-to-extirpate-with-today/ on April 6, 2015.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Reference on Chile

[4] DOLEAC Clément, “Between Independence Or Disappearance: The Organization of American States and the Challenge of The 2015 Elections” in Council on Hemispheric Affairs, on January 26, 2015. Consulted on http://www.coha.org/between-independence-or-disappearance-the-organization-of-american-states-and-the-challenge-of-the-2015-elections/ on April 6, 2015.

[5] ECRIBANO Gonzalo, “Insulza’s legacy” in Council on Hemispheric Affairs, on April 2, 2015. Consulted on http://www.coha.org/insulzas-legacy/ on April 6, 2015.

[6] CROWE Darcy, “Latin American Leaders to Question U.S. Drug Policy at Summit” in the Wall Street Journal, on April 12, 2012. Consulted on http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303624004577340212625723878 on April 6, 2015.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] SALTALAMACCHIA Natalia, “The Panama Summit and the Withering Inter-American Ideal” in Council for Foreign Relations, on March 19, 2015. Consulted on http://www.cfr.org/councilofcouncils/global_memos/p36298 on April 6, 2015.

[11] SABATINI Christopher, “Giving Cuba a Seat at the Table: The 2015 Summit of the Americas”, Americas Society – Council of the Americas, December 16, 2014. Consulted on http://www.as-coa.org/articles/giving-cuba-seat-table-2015-summit-americas on April 6, 2015.

[12] SALTALAMACCHIA Natalia, “The Panama Summit and the Withering Inter-American Ideal” in Council for Foreign Relations, on March 19, 2015. Consulted on http://www.cfr.org/councilofcouncils/global_memos/p36298 on April 6, 2015.

[13] BIRNS Larry and BIRNS Nicholas, “Brazil Between Caracas and Washington: Rousseff and Vieira Try To Chart a Middle Course At A Time of Hemispheric Polarization” on Council on Hemispheric Affairs, on March 23, 2015. Consulted on http://www.coha.org/brazil-between-caracas-and-washington-rousseff-and-vieira-try-to-chart-a-middle-course-at-a-time-of-hemispheric-polarization/ on April 6, 2015 ; DOLEAC Clément, “Are the Imperialist Roots of the Organization of American States too Deep to Extirpate Today?” on Council on Hemispheric Affairs, on December 4, 2015. Consulted on http://www.coha.org/are-the-organization-of-american-states-imperialist-roots-too-deep-to-extirpate-with-today/ on April 6, 2015.

[14] LEMOINE Maurice, “Latin American coups upgraded,” in Le Monde Diplo, on August 2014. Consulted on http://mondediplo.com/2014/08/06coups on March 3, 2015. COHA, “Attempted Coup And Misguided U.S. Sanctions in Venezuela”, in Council on Hemispheric Affairs, on March 12, 2015. Consulted on http://www.coha.org/attempted-coup-and-misguided-u-s-sanctions-in-venezuela/ on April 6, 2015.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] BIRNS Larry and BIRNS Nicholas, “Brazil Between Caracas and Washington: Rousseff and Vieira Try To Chart a Middle Course At A Time of Hemispheric Polarization” on Council on Hemispheric Affairs, on March 23, 2015. Consulted on http://www.coha.org/brazil-between-caracas-and-washington-rousseff-and-vieira-try-to-chart-a-middle-course-at-a-time-of-hemispheric-polarization/ on April 6, 2015.

[19] SABATINI Christopher, “Giving Cuba a Seat at the Table: The 2015 Summit of the Americas”, Americas Society – Council of the Americas, December 16, 2014. Consulted on http://www.as-coa.org/articles/giving-cuba-seat-table-2015-summit-americas on April 6, 2015.

[20] Ibid.

[21] WEISBROT Mark, “Obama absurdly declares Venezuela a security threat” in Al-Jazeera, on March 10, 2015. Consulted on http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/3/obama-absurdly-declares-venezuela-a-national-security-threat.html on April 6, 2015.

[22] Based on a twitter message of Ernesto Samper.

[23] “Samper: Summit of the Americas is the perfect scenario for dialogue”, in El Universal, March 23, 2015. Consulted on http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/150323/samper-summit-of-the-americas-is-the-perfect-scenario-for-dialogue on April 6, 2015.

[24] LUXNER Larry, “Cuba, Venezuela likely to overshadow Central American issues at Panama summit” in The Tico Times, on April 5, 2015. Consulted on http://www.ticotimes.net/2015/04/05/cuba-venezuela-likely-to-overshadow-central-american-issues-at-panama-summit on April 6, 2015.

[25] WEISBROT Mark, “Obama absurdly declares Venezuela a security threat” in Al-Jazeera, on March 10, 2015. Consulted on http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/3/obama-absurdly-declares-venezuela-a-national-security-threat.html on April 6, 2015.

The post The Summit Of The Americas: An Open Wound – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By John R. Haines*

Frustrating former Soviet republics’ ambitions of European Union and NATO accession underlies Russia’s instrumental use of territorial disputes—both historic and contrived ones—in the borderlands of its near abroad. As one recent commentary observed, “as the war in Ukraine erupted last spring, observers largely unfamiliar with the former Soviet republics of Eastern Europe scrambled to understand the importance of the sub-national regions that suddenly waged great influence in the conflict between Russia and the West.”^[1]

The dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the loss of its eastern and central European buffer between the Russian homeland and the NATO states of western European left Russia with a single European bridgehead—the Kaliningrad enclave—at a distance 1000 kilometers from Moscow. What was once a matter of Russia’s internal policy overnight became one of foreign policy. Russia suddenly found itself at a distance of some 1300 kilometers from its Moldovan and western Ukrainian borderlands with the Eastern Balkans, with one-half of the intermediate territory no longer Russian.  In 1992, Russia acquired a second, equally distant European bridgehead in eastern Moldova with the declaration of a Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic in separatist Transdniestria. Since then, PMR-Transdniestria has acted as a stop on Moldova plans for EU and NATO accession, and the hopes of some Moldovans for unification with neighboring Romania.

Short of overt military intervention, Russia has limited instruments at its disposal for the protection of its geopolitical and geostrategic interests in the eastern Balkans and the northern Black Sea littoral. These limits notwithstanding, Russia exerts indisputable regional hegemony in its near abroad. Fomented territorial disputes within former borderlands have been an effective if crude instrument of Russian policy now for three decades.  It has used that instrument willingly, if discriminately, in its near abroad while holding in reserve a failsafe to unfreeze “frozen” conflicts.  The Transdniestrian bridgehead (seconded by another separatist Moldovan region, the vocally pro-Russia Gagauzia) undergirds Russian hegemony in Moldova, and radiates outward into the eastern Balkans and importantly, into southwestern Ukraine’s pivotal Odessa region.

There is regular speculation about Russian intentions to establish a so-called land bridge from Crimea and the Donbas westward along the Black Sea littoral to Odessa. Short of willfully disregarding the complications associated with seizing and holding a broad swath of contended territory in the face of determined resistance by (in all likelihood, Western armed) Ukrainian armed forces and paramilitaries, that scenario is unlikely under the present circumstances. Russia’s demonstrated preference for disruptive proxy forces and other hybrid instruments is at odds with a suggested large-scale (and in all likelihood, long-term) military operation requiring it to deploy conventional armed forces en masse.

The Republic of Moldova, Moldovan Transdniestrian
& Ukraine’s Budzhak Region[3]

Thus the recent suggestion by Romanian Foreign Affairs Minister Bogdan Aurescu that Russia might seek “new separatist areas, like the so-called Bugeac People’s Republic,”^[4] using Budzhak’s Romanian name.

Ukraine’s Strategic Budzhak

Ukraine’s Budzhak Region[7]

Budzhak & Northern Black Sea Littoral[8]

• Ukraine’s Odessa region, the northern Black Sea’s geopolitical epicenter.
• Moldova’s autonomous Gagauzia and separatist Transdniestria regions.
• Romania’s Black Sea hydrocarbon and Bugeac shale gas fields.

Building on Mackinder’s concept of the pivot area, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote that the importance of geopolitical pivots:

“[I]s derived not from their power and motivation but rather from their sensitive location and from the consequences of their potentially vulnerable condition for the behavior of geostrategic players. Most often, geopolitical pivots are determined by their geography, which in some cases gives them a special role in either defining access to important areas or in denying resources to a significant player.”^[9]

Brzezinski continued, “The identification of the post-Cold War key Eurasian geopolitical pivots, and protecting them, is thus also a crucial aspect of America’s global geostrategy.”^[10] So, as the western anchor of an Odessa region that stretches from the Danube delta to the Tylihul estuary—and the geographic center of a larger littoral arc sweeping north from Bulgarian Northern Dobruja and Romanian Bugeac through Ukraine’s Odessa region—Budzhak is indisputably a, perhaps the, key geopolitical pivot in the northern Black Sea.

Ethnic Composition of Ukraine’s Budzhak Region[13]

Here as elsewhere, ethno-nationalism is, in Janusz Bugajski’s phrase, a combustible substance, especially given the larger region’s stuttering progress toward the European Union and NATO.  It is standard Russian practice to seek out and exploit these soft spots—witness its actions in the western Balkans.^[14]

Despite being a largely neglected borderland, Budzhak has disproportionate strategic value as a figurative geographic wedge between Ukraine and Bulgaria along the critical Black Sea littoral. This importance would increase greatly were the region to ally with its neighbors Gagauzia and Transdniestria to the north and west. A strategic locus and combustible ethnic patchwork make Budzhak a near perfect fit for the Russia hybrid warfare playbook:

“[P]ulling political, economic, and military levers—all of which fall short of traditional invasion—to exploit ethnic conflicts in countries that used to be in its orbit. And the goal is to leverage these tensions, which are often relics of the Soviet Union’s messy consolidation and collapse, to gain influence in former Soviet states, while preventing these countries from moving closer to the West.”^[15]

“War Without War, Occupation Without Occupation”

Is Russia the proverbial “black knight in the Eastern neighborhood”?^[16] A November 2014 report by the Ukraine-based DaVinci Analytic Group speculates how Russia might exploit the region’s ethnic patchwork:

“We expect Russia to activate separatism in the Bolgrad, Izmail, Reni, Artsyz, Kiliya and Tarutinsky districts with additional attempts in the Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi and the Sarata and Tatarbunarskiy districts. Shortly before, Russia will purposely destabilize Gagauzia and Taraclia in parallel with Transdniestria [see footnote]. The initial gambit may focus on an independent Gagauzia, which can make territorial claims in Moldova and Ukraine.  […]  The spring of 2015 is a critical period for the Kremlin, which sees it as the most favorable time to initiate a new round of aggression against Ukraine.”^[17]

DaVinci’s speculation is congruent with the observation elsewhere that Russia acts through small-scale gestures aimed at destabilization rather than full-blown military actions. These gestures, suggested the Bulgarian Defense Ministry, include “disinformation, propaganda campaigns, media manipulation, exploiting social networks for disinformation, and using sympathetic local leaders to manipulate voting blocs and cause confusion.”^[18]

One analysis described Russia’s strategy as “a form of political synecdoche”:

“[W]here a war inside a breakaway province stands for a potential war inside the de jure state, and where the occupation of the separatist region creates the constant threat that the country as a whole will be occupied.  This war without war and occupation without occupation is nearly as effective, more flexible, and decidedly cheaper than a real occupation.”^[19]  [emphasis added]

It continued, “The key element of Putin’s strategy is to use…breakaway regions as perches from which to threaten the larger states that once governed them,”^[20] here, meaning Ukraine and NATO member Romania. It is in a manner of speaking, a scenario for controlling the Odessa region without occupying it.

Is Gagauzia “a ‘Donbass’ Inside Moldova”? ^[21]

Many see ATU-Gagauzia as a likely “perch” from which to spread destabilization into southern Moldova and Budzhak, then north across the rest of the Odessa region and possibly south into Romania’s hydrocarbon-rich Bugeac region. Some, like Ukrainian political scientist Oleg Pasternak, believe Gagauzian separatism will spill into Budzhak, especially were Gagauzia to secede from Moldova.^[22]

Moldova, it can be said, faces the problem of long-term liminality and geopolitical ambiguity.^[23]  In an underpublicized but in many respects highly significant episode of modern European history, Moldova declared parts of its ethnically distinctive southeastern region a “national-territorial autonomous unit” in 1995.^[24]  The region, known as Gagauz Yeri^[25] in the official language, Gagauzca,^[26] incorporated all Gagauz-majority districts and others that elected to opt-in via local referenda.  The result was a Bantustan-like geography of four non-contiguous districts, all but the smallest lying along Moldova’s southern border with Ukrainian Budzhak.

The Gagauz descended from ethnic Turks who fled the Ottoman Empire in the 19^th century for the protection of Imperial Russia and converted to Orthodox Christianity.  While they account for only about 4 percent of Moldovans, Gagauz comprise more than 80 percent of the population of Gagauz Yeri.^[27] There also are small Gagauz enclaves in southern Moldova’s adjoining Basarabeasca and Taraclia districts.  Unsurprisingly, Turkey has been actively engaged in Gagauzia for two decades, and in 2000 the Comrat government opened a representative office in Ankara.

The Republic of Moldova[28]

In late March, voters in ATU-Gagauzia elected a pro-Russian Başkan, Irina Vlah, to lead the regional government in Comrat.  She defeated nine candidates to win an outright majority (51.01 percent) in the first round and avoid a runoff, far outpacing her nearest rival (at 19.05 percent). While Vlah ran as an independent, she served in the Moldovan parliament for the Party of Communists until January, when she resigned citing the Communists’ collaboration with Moldova’s pro-European parties to form a governing coalition in Chişinau, the national capital. Her victory in March had much to do with the support she received from another ex-Communist, Igor Dodon, who in November led Moldova’s Party of Socialists to a 26-seat plurality in the 101-seat national parliament. Dodon managed to draw a large share of Moldova’s traditionally Communist Russophile electorate to the Socialists, who in all previous elections had failed to win a single seat.^[29]  For Russia, Vlah’s election may be important to stem Gagauzia’s perceived slow drift toward Turkey.

What is the significance of a former Communist parliamentarian’s election as governor of a small autonomous region in southeastern Moldova?  By one assessment, the election was won not by Ms. Vlah but by Russia, with the support of which “a Barbie doll would have won in the first round.”^[30] In a more serious vein, Dmitri Trenin tweeted^[31] that it shows the competition for Moldova between Russia and the European Union, far from being over, is getting more intense. “The fact that Gagauzia is pro-Russian is no secret,” Vlah told Deutsche Welle in a post-election interview.^[32] While that truism is unremarkable in and of itself, what may turn out to be remarkable, however, is that Vlah’s election may mark the start of something remarkable.

Pro-Romanian Moldova Heads West, Everyone Else Goes East

“[T]he rather small territory of the Republic of Moldova hosts at least three geopolitical conflicts: Transdnistria, the South Bessarabian conflict, and the problem of the Moldovan-Ukrainian border. […] The respective conflicts intersect and influence each other.  [T]he South Bessarabian conflict is in close connection with the Transdnistria one, as well as with the conflict related to the Moldovan-Ukrainian border. […] Geographically, [the South Bessarabian] conflict results from the borderline drawn in the summer of 1940 and politically, in the movement of Bessarabian Romanians and the proclamation of the Republic of Moldova’s independence.”^[33]

Autonomist Gagauzia and separatist Transdniestria—to which, it can fairly be added, the Bulgarian ethnic enclaves in southern Moldova centered on Taraclia—share an abhorrence of Moldova’s ambitions of unifying with neighboring Romania,^[34] and oppose Moldova’s hoped-for accession to the European Union.

In November 2013 the Moldovan government signed a European Union Association Agreement establishing the framework for bilateral negotiations over Moldova’s hoped-for membership.  That agreement was swiftly and forcefully rejected by ATU-Gauguazia. A February 2014 consultative referendum—condemned as illegal by the Chişinau government,^[35] which froze financial accounts in an attempt to deny it the use of government funds—asked whether Moldova should seek closer ties with the European Union, or alternately, the Russia-led Eurasian Customs Union; and a separate question whether ATU-Gaugauzia had the right to secede if Moldovan sovereignty was lost.  Voters were given three separate ballots printed on different colored paper.

As one Russian commentary colorfully put it, Chişinau’s efforts to block the referendum “pulled the chair out from under the skinny legs of ‘Moldovan statehood’ by aggravating the country’s political situation.”^[36] With 70 percent of eligible voters participating, 97.2 percent rejected closer ties with the European Union and 98.4 percent supported closer ties with the Eurasian Customs Union.^[37] An even higher 98.9 percent endorsed Gagauzia’s right to secede under the sovereignty question, which was understood to mean Moldova’s unification with Romania.

After declaring Russia would start showing a “special interest” in ATU-Gagauzia (and Taraclia), Ambassador Farit Muhametshin publicly supported the referendum.  When denied funding by the Chişinau government, a Russian businessman, Yuri Yakubov—who, claiming roots in Gagauzia, said he “could not help a rush of patriotism and a desire to help his fellow citizens”^[38]—gave the Comrat government an estimated €55,000-€75,000 to fund the plebiscite.^[39]

There also have been rumblings in southern Moldova’s Bulgarian enclaves. Russia advocates a “United Gagauzia” to unify Moldova’s Gagauz and Bulgarian enclaves into a single autonomous unit that would cover most of southern Moldova. The addition of the Bulgarian enclave, Taraclia, would, as one Russian commentary put it, “allow Gagauzia to ‘open a window’ to Ukraine,” especially to Ukrainian Gagauz.^[40]

In April 2013, the Taraclia district council—the political center of Moldova’s 65,000 Russian-speaking Bulgarians (two-thirds of all Taraclians)—unanimously demanded ATU Gagauzia-like status for Taraclia as a national-territorial autonomous unit.  Taraclia’s demands—“justice for the Bulgarian community” and “preservation of Bulgarian ethnic identity”^[41]—were modeled on similar ones by the Bălţi municipal council in 2012 (which later dropped the one for an autonomy referendum).^[42]

Rumors surfaced in Budzhak, during late 2014 of a separatist plot centered in Bolhrad, a two-thirds ethnic Bulgarian city in region’s northwest (and the birthplace of Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko).^[43] There were unconfirmed allegations of involvement by former Soviet officers, including a former brigade commander, Oleg Babich; and other allegations regarding purported separatist sympathies held by public figures like Anton KIsse, a Ukrainian parliamentarian and chairman of the Association of Bulgarians in Ukraine.  What has greater potential to crystalize pro-separatist sentiment among Budzhak ethnic Bulgarians is Ukraine’s controversial series of military mobilizations (four so far) to conscript manpower for the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Some news accounts go so far as to describe a “rebellion” among Budzhak Bulgarians.^[44] For its part, the Bulgarian government has remained (publicly, at least) circumspect about Ukraine’s mobilization of ethnic Bulgarians, to not inconsiderable domestic criticism.^[45]

The Uses & Limits of Hybrid Warfare in Transdniestria & Gagauzia

Anatol Tsaranu^[46] wrote that Ukraine’s government believes “the situation in eastern Ukraine developed according to ‘the Transdniestria scenario’,”^[47] and that the unresolved situation in Transdniestria poses a continuing threat to Ukraine’s Odessa region. The risk here is separatism spilling over from Transdniestria and/or Gagauzia into the Ukraine’s Odessa region—or more likely, that it would be actively exported into Budzhak, where favorable conditions for ethnic unrest might already exist—bolstered by the menacing presence of Russian armed forces in the region.

Ethnically diverse and largely ignored by Kyev, Budzhak is fertile ground for political disruption. Among the several tools in its hybrid warfare toolbox, Russia has long operated in the region through front groups and cutout organizations. One technique used to great effect in Moldova was to organize Transdniestrian branches of established Russian media portals and place them under control of the internal security service.  In early 2006, the Russian media outlet Lenta established Lenta-PMR [Лента ПМР), which in reality was controlled by Dmitry Soin, a senior intelligence officer in the PMR-Transdneistria State Security Ministry known by the acronym MGB.^[48] In July 2009 a known Soin associate, Roman Konoplev, formed what purported to be a new Transdniestria-focused Russian media portal, Dnestr (Днестр), that in fact used a Russian domain name as a subterfuge. Soin himself occasionally wrote anti-Moldovan, anti-Romanian commentaries under his own name, usually ending with a call for Transdniestria’s unification with Russia.^[49]

In 2005 Soin organized a front group known as Proryv or “Breakthrough,”^[50] a self-described “Eurasianist International youth organization” that registered as political party in Transdniestria.^[51] At the time, he directed the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership, and chaired the Transdniestrian branch of the Russian National Strategy Council (a putative think tank, it was in fact a Russian front organization). Soin eventually fell out with the PMR-Transdniestria political leadership, and decamped from Tiraspol in March 2013 for Odessa while remaining a member of the Transdniestrian parliament.^[52] He reemerged in public in April 2014 when he announced formation of the “Union of Transdniestrians in Ukraine,” a group purporting to represent Ukrainians in Transdniestria. According to Soin, “The situation on the [Transdniestria-Ukraine] border was on the verge of exploding” because of illegal restrictions on border crossings imposed unilaterally by Chișinău. He pledged the UTU would work to overturn prohibitions on dual Moldovan-Ukrainian citizenship, and support for opening a Ukrainian consulate in Transdniestria.^[53] Soin’s usefulness ended abruptly in August 2014 when Ukrainian authorities arrested him in Kyev on an Interpol warrant charging him with two murders while he was an MGB officer.

Classic hybrid warfare techniques executed through front groups and cutout organizations are inconsistent with an aggressor’s objective to take and hold physical territory, even if they raise the specter of activating separatist forces. This alone substantially dilutes arguments that “Moldova is the next Ukraine,” notes Dan Dungaciu of the Romanian Academy Institute of Political Science and International Relations.^[54]  Russia sees Transdniestria and Gagauzia instrumentally, i.e., as means to an end, meaning a federal Moldova. Re-integrating Transdniestria and Gagauzia into a newly federalized political structure would likely foreclose Moldova’s pathways to unification with Romania and to European Union and NATO accession, at least for the foreseeable future.  It would also give Russia the option to escalate Budzhak separatism as a means of pressuring Ukraine, for which the presence of a non-EU, non-NATO Moldova “wedge” on its western flank would necessarily complicate its own accession ambitions as well as its defensive posture.

Concluding Thoughts

A Russian commentary—substituting the intentionally provocative Bessarabian for “Moldovan”—asked rhetorically:

“Are Bessarabian authorities seeking civil war [in Gagauzia] given the likelihood of escalating the conflict beyond the region—primarily in Transdniestria and the Ukrainian part of Budzhak, home to the second largest Gaugauzia community outside Gagauz Yeri as well as twice the number of Bulgarians living in Moldova—and the inevitable involvement of external forces?  The long-deferred formation of a Gagauz-Bulgarian Budzhak republic could gain quite tangible contours in the event of Bessarabia’s absorption into Romania.  […]  Unfreezing all of the ‘frozen’ conflicts inside the old borders of Soviet Moldova may sweep away not only Gagauzia and Transdniestria, but also Moldovan statehood along with Northern Bukovina and Ukrainian South Bessarabia.”^[55]

Novorossiya Imagined c. 1913[57]

Historical Novorossiya[61]

As the historical map makes clear, Budzhak was never part of Novorossiya. While this makes the notion of a “People’s Republic of Bessarabia” seem absurd from an historical perspective, it is an instrumental claim for territorial change, not an historical one.^[62]  In a much-cited January 2015 commentary, Marcin Kosienkowski asked whether Budzhak is “next in line” for Russia. Next in line for what, is perhaps a fair reply. Russia will no doubt continue to interfere in the internal affairs of Moldova and Ukraine for the purpose of derailing their respective ambitions of European Union and NATO accession. It unlikely either will be targeted for full-blown military action, however. The lone foreseeable exception is if the Moldovan government moved formally to unify with Romania, in which event Russian armed forces in Transdniestria would likely support PMR-Transdniestria’s and/or ATU-Gagauzia’s secession.

That being said, nothing precludes the possibility of a small conflict morphing unintentionally into a larger and hotter one. In May 2014, the Romanian government barred Russian deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozon from using Romanian airspace on a return flight from Transdniestria to Moscow. Rogozin tweeted in response,

“Upon a U.S. request, Romania has closed its air space for my plane. Ukraine doesn’t allow me to pass through again. Next time I’ll fly on board TU-160.”^[63]

Rogozin’s reference of course is to Russia’s largest strategic bomber. It must be added in fairness that Russia has no monopoly on the use of symbols incongruent with their historical referent. Consider the language used by the post-Trianon Romanian government to bind new provinces to the Old Kingdom:

“Bessarabia […] torn by Russia more than hundreds of years ago from the body of the ancient Moldova […] from now on and forever joins its mother, Romania.”^[64]

The position of Ukraine’s ethnic Romanians today is an interesting one. A June 2014 forum held by a regional Romanian cultural association known as “Bessarabia” called for Ukraine to disintegrate Izmail from Odessa and reestablish its pre-1954 status as a standalone region.^[65] The attendees balanced this demand by protesting “Kremlin plans to create a ‘Budzhak Republic’ behind the leadership of pro-Russia politicians in Gagauzia.”^[66]  The forum was conducted entirely in Romanian with no Ukrainian translation, and was attended by Romania’s consul general in Odessa and the Romanian parliamentary deputy.^[67]   It is all the more interesting since Odessa’s ethnic Romanian population is reliably estimated at around 700 persons, far fewer than the number of ethnic Romanians in Ukraine’s Chernivtsi and Transcarpathian regions. The Romanian government, however, betrays its regional ambitions by counting all Budzhak Moldovans as “Romanians” which raises the count to 130,000 people. Russia for its part plays the Romanian question both ways, criticizing the Romanian government’s alleged territorial ambitions in Moldova and Budzhak while at the same time analogizing the aggrieved state of Ukraine’s ethnic Romanians and Transcarpathian Hungarians for the purpose of fomenting ethnic dissent inside the Odessa region.^[68]

In an insightful March 2014 commentary published on Polit.ru, Aleksey Murav’yev wrote that Transdniestria and Gagauzia today dwell within a “mono-ethnic state”—a Romanized Moldova—and Budzhak within “a pseudo empire”—Ukraine.  As a result, “these orphan lands…these no man’s lands,” he wrote, cling “to a pseudo-Soviet identity which freezes them in the last century.”  He concludes with this observation:

“[These lands] can only be preserved and their instability can only be quelled by a large empire in which the idea of ‘the nation’ is strongly grounded in the state and in the culture.  Of course, an imperial structure is no panacea, but it can allow these ‘no man’s lands’ to exist without having to define themselves by a single ethnic or a religious identity.  The problem of modern Russia is that it has moved in the opposite direction—from a Soviet empire to a nation-state.  The rise of nationalism, Orthodoxy, and other phenomena testify to just such a direction.  Making these no man’s lands part of Russia will not solve their problems, and pulls Russia backward instead of allowing it to move forward.

“Modern Russia, being neither the Soviet Union nor Imperial Russia, tries nevertheless to think of itself as both.  In reality, however, Russia has nearly returned to its early borders—Central Russia, coupled to the Urals, Siberia, and the Far East.  The continued existence of the old federal infrastructure only complicates the situation, along with persons who refuse to accept there no longer is—and never again will be—a Soviet Union.”^[69]

Will Budzhak join what is piquantly described as PMR-Transdniestria and ATU-Gagauzia’s “theatrical and performative form of sovereignty”?^[70] That remains to be seen.  It is unfair to blame Russia alone for the territories’ problems, for Bucharest and the pro-Romanian government in Chișinău undeniably contribute each in its own way to the general discordance. That being said, there is no moral equivalence between the status of a Russian legacy bridgehead located 1300 kilometers from Moscow (Russia’s constant references to NATO actions in Kosovo notwithstanding) and Romania’s interest in countering the threat to regional peace and stability posed by its contentious borderlands—and neither has moral equivalence to Ukrainian territorial sovereignty. Russian-fomented discord in Budzhak and neighboring PMR-Transdniestria and ATU-Gagauzia has one goal and only one goal:

“For those in the breakaway regions, occupation without formally occupying and annexation through carefully orchestrated, mass participatory endeavors like referenda open new domains where values, fears, and norms are reconstituted into a daily experience of threat and there is only one entity capable of restoring “order”: the Russian Federation…”^[71]

The first line of the title is from Neville Chamberlain’s statement during the 1938 Czechoslovakia crisis, which reads in full: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.”

About the author:
*John R. Haines is a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and directs the Princeton Committee of FPRI. Much of his current research is focused on Russia and its near abroad, with a special interest in nationalist and separatist movements. The translation of all source material is by the author unless noted otherwise.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

Notes:
[1] Eric Jones (2015). “Gagauzia: Strategic Pressure Point.” http://foreign-intrigue.com/2015/03/gagauzia-strategic-point-of-pressure/. Last accessed 4 April 2015.

[2] Frank G. Hoffman (2007). Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars. (Arlington, VA: The Potomac Institute for Policy Studies), p. 28.  LTC Frank Hoffman, USMC (ret.) is a Senior Research Fellow at the National Defense University.

[3] http://www.condei.ro/eliminarea-ucrainei-de-la-marea-neagra-poate-deveni…. Last accessed 1 April 2015.

[4] Embassy of Romania (2015). “ForMin Aurescu: the security interests of Bucharest it is “crucial” that Ukraine is stable.” Romanian Headlines.  http://londra.mae.ro/sites/londra.mae.ro/files/romanian_headlines_-_15-2…. Last accessed 1 April 2015.

[5] Budzhak [Russian: Буджак] is called Bugeac in Romanian, the region’s other principle language.  The region’s Ukrainian and Bulgarian speakers use Budzhak.

The post ‘A Quarrel In A Far-Away Country': The Rise Of A Budzhak People’s Republic? – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has broken his silence on the nuclear agreement reached in Lusanne last week and in no uncertain terms connected the fate of negotiations to the immediate lifting of sanctions.

The leader, who is the final arbiter of nuclear decisions, addressed all the key issues of concern to Iran and stated that he is neither “for nor against” the negotiations since “details are key” and “nothing important has happened so far.”

With the June 30 deadline to reach a final deal approaching, the leader raised the prospect of extending the deadline for the first time and stated that such an extension might be necessary just as previous deadlines were also extended.

Emphasizing Iran’s principle of “negotiating with dignity,” the Ayatollah assured the Iranian people that Iran will never sign an agreement that compromises Iran’s dignity and sovereignty. He once again expressed support for Iran’s negotiation team and refrained from criticizing them, which has been the case with a number of hard-line politicians and media pundits such as the editor of conservative daily Kayhan, Hossein Shariatmadari, who has lambasted the Lusanne statement for being one-sided.

Also, what is remarkable about the leader’s speech is his dismissal of a White House “fact sheet” on the nuclear agreement in Lusanne as “for the most part wrong and distorted.” Accusing Americans of duplicity and a history of ‘backstabbing” Iran, the leader praised Iran’s foreign minister for publicly stating that he did not trust America.

In fact, parallel to the developments on the nuclear front, the U.S. and Iran are rapidly drifting apart over the crisis in Yemen, with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry going on record and directly accusing Iran of funneling arms to the Shiite rebels in Yemen, even though the Pentagon spokesperson has admitted that so far there is no evidence of either money or arms from Iran going to the Houthis who are under siege by a Saudi-led air campaign that has killed hundreds of civilians so far and threatens a humanitarian catastrophe.

Iran has begun to flex its naval muscle by dispatching two battleships to the Gulf of Eden while simultaneously accelerating the diplomatic efforts to end the bloodshed and find a political solution to the Yemen crisis, in light of foreign minister Zarif’s tour of the region. A potential formula along the lines of a new government of national reconciliation can be found if the Saudi bombs stop pulverizing the poor nation.

With respect to the details of nuclear negotiations, Ayatollah Khamenei reiterated the stated position of Iran’s military leaders that military sites will be off limit, in contrast to the position of U.S. president and his subordinates that the UN atomic agency will “have access to anywhere, any time.”

This is echoed in the U.S. “fact sheet” that claims that Iran has agreed to extensive transparency measures for a long time, whereby the IAEA would be allowed to inspect “suspicious sites” as part of its verification of Iran’s peaceful nuclear program, which has been set as the precondition for the “phasing out” sanctions on Iran.

Yet, Ayatollah Khamenei categorically rejected that demand and in no uncertain terms vowed that under no circumstance the country’s national security interests would be compromised. He also rejected the American interpretation that Iran will be placed in a “special inspection” category and distanced himself from the notion that Iran will agree to extra-NPT measures.

On the whole, Khamenei’s speech centered on the defense of Iran’s sovereignty and the refutation of the Western wishful thinking that somehow under their concerted efforts and pressures Iran will appease them to the extent of becoming another Iraq before the 2003 invasion, where the IAEA inspectors effectively acting as Western intelligence gained access to Iraq’s secrets as a prelude to the invasion under the false pretext of weapons of mass destruction.

Clearly, Iran will not be another Iraq and the “intelligence bonanza” from a one-sided deal hoped for by the Western powers simply will not materialize. Iran is too proud, its revolutionary history too assertive and independent, to entertain such a scenario, thus the sovereignty “red lines” set by the leadership that are mandatory on the negotiators.

The road ahead, then, is filled with snags that can hamper a final deal. Either the U.S. comes to terms with Iran’s legitimate sovereignty concerns and brackets the unrealistic expectation of turning Iran into another Iraq, albeit with clever maneuvers, or there will be no deal and Iran will resume its nuclear activities, which are presently curtailed under the interim agreement. A “win-win” approach is still possible, but it must be one that refrains from what the ayatollah has referred to as America’s “devilish designs.” This requires genuine respect for Iran and recognizing Iran’s legitimate NPT rights, instead of using coercive diplomacy to reduce Iran to a third class NPT member. The sooner the U.S. comes to this point, the more likely the possibility of a final agreement.

The post Iran’s Sovereignty Concerns And The Nuclear Deal – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Soccer threads itself as a red line through the 20th century history of the Middle East and North Africa as independence populated the region with nation-states. Soccer was important to the leaders struggling for independence as a means to stake claims, develop national identity and fuel anti-colonial sentiment. For its rulers soccer was a tool they could harness to shape their nations in their own mould; for its citizenry it was both a popular form of entertainment and a platform for opposition and resistance.

The sport offers a unique arena for social and political differentiation and the projection of transnational, national, ethnic, sectarian, local, generational and gender identities sparking a long list of literature that dates back more than a century.1 The sport also constitutes a carnivalesque event that lends itself to provocation of and confrontation with authority — local, national or colonial.2

Occupation and Conquest

Soccer is about occupation and conquest, the occupation of an opponent’s territory and the conquest of his goal.3 The sense of confrontation is heightened with fans often segregated from one another in different sections of the stadium. “The playing field thus becomes a metaphor for the competition between communities, cities and nations: football focuses group identities,” said Iranian soccer scholar Houchang E. Chehabi.4 French Iranian soccer scholar Christian Bromberger noted that every match between rival towns, regions and countries took the form of a ritualised war, complete with anthems, military fanfares and banners wielded by fans who make up the support divisions and who even call themselves “brigades”, “commandos”, “legions” and “assault troops”.5 Social scientist Janet Lever argued that in sports “nationalism is aroused by individual contestants but peaks over team sports… (It) peaks because many consider collective action a truer test of a country’s spirit than individual talent.”6

Little wonder that communities with contested identities and national leaders saw soccer, since its introduction to the Middle East and North Africa by colonial powers, as a key tool to shape their nations and promote modernity in a world in which according to political scientist Benedict Anderson “nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.”7 The sport was initially employed as what sports scholar Mahfoud Amara described as the post-colonial tool par excellence “for party-state regimes in their projects of mobilizing populations around nation-state building and integration into the international bi-polar world system.” It has since then helped autocratic leaders maintain power while managing the transition of their economies from state-run to market-oriented. It did so in part by exploiting the fact that nations emerge, in the words of Turkish sociologist Dogu Ergil, out of the tireless global competition that determines dominance, submission and the hierarchy of nations. Success in sports increases the confidence of nations. Failure does the opposite, Ergil argued.8

Amara and Ergil’s insights are relevant in the context of ethnographer Anthony D. Smith’s emphasis on “common myths and memories” and “mass, public culture” as crucial elements of national consciousness and the realisation that the relationship between nationalism and sports is to a large degree determined in the political context.9 That context in turn is defined by the multifaceted nature of nationalism. “There is a very real difference between the nationalism of a well-established world power and that of a submerged people… Inevitably there will also be a marked variation in the manner in which sport is used in such different contexts to promotes the nationalist cause,” noted sports scholar Alan Bairner.10

At the bottom line, sports and particularly soccer enabled post-colonial societies in the Middle East and North Africa to generate meaning and symbolism that gave imagined substance to an identity that differentiated the conceived nation from others and helped neutralise the threat posed by racial, ethnic, social, religious and regional identities they incorporated. At the same time, it allowed such sub-groups to differentiate themselves even though those sub-identities potentially would compete with the larger national identity.

As a result, sports in general and soccer in particular served historically in the Middle East and North Africa as a platform of opposition and resistance against colonial rulers and their local allies, and as a tool to project on the international stage a nation struggling to achieve independence. Given its strength in producing various forms of distinction,11 sports frequently helped post-colonial Middle Eastern and North African societies mould multiple, often rival identities into one that encompassed the nation as a whole. It was simultaneously designed to help construct national myths and advance post-colonial modernisation and foreign policy goals.

Constructing National Identity through Sports

Construction of a deeply rooted national identity was often hampered by the fact that a significant number of nations in the region lacked the perception of a long-standing common history on which countries like Egypt, Turkey and Iran pride themselves or the wrenching, unifying experience of a vicious struggle for independence as in the case of Algeria. This deficit was reinforced by the emergence of neo-patriarchic autocracies across that region that viewed the population as immature subjects rather than full-fledged citizens. As a result, sports — soccer in particular — underperformed as a tool in moulding nations and promoting feelings of national solidarity in line with historian Eric Hobsbawm’s definition of nations as imagined or constructed entities with invented traditions.12

Nevertheless, Middle Eastern and North African examples of the political employment of sports to create national myths are myriad. Egypt, a regional sports powerhouse, claimed to have fathered soccer long before the British who are largely credited with the emergence of the sport. Ousted President Hosni Mubarak’s State Information Service asserted that ancient Egyptians had recorded their knowledge of the game with inscriptions on the walls of temples that were discovered by the 5th century Greek historian Herodotus.13 In his memoire of a visit to Egypt titled “An Account of Egypt”,14 Herodotus made no mention of the inscriptions or of ancient Egyptians playing something akin to soccer. He also failed to refer to assertions that he saw young men kicking around a ball made of goatskin and straw.15

Zionists like the Shah of Iran and the Ottoman Empire’s reformist Young Turks saw sports as a way to mould their citizenry in a nationalist image. For the Zionists, the goal was the new, muscular Jew. Reza Shah Pahlavi, who captained his team at his Swiss boarding school and played for the squad of the Iranian military’s Officer School, saw soccer as a way “to create a modern Iranian man who understood the values of hygiene, manly competition, and cooperation.”16

To the Young Turks, soccer was a means of garnering support as they sought to convert the remnants of the Ottoman Empire into a modern state. Both recognised what the French Iranian soccer scholar Christian Bromberger identified as the westernising virtues of the sport: “Football values team work, solidarity, division of labour and collective planning — very much in the image of the industrial world that produced it.”17 German and Swedish athletics was to the Turks like Cooper’s Commonwealth competition was to the Zionists. It furthered what social anthropologist Paul Connerton described as the creation of collective memory and shared identity through ritualised physical activity.18 Soccer was uniquely designed for that purpose — as historian Eric Hobsbawm noted, “the imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.”19

For the Palestinians, in contrast to other national groupings in the Middle East and North Africa, forming a national identity initially constituted nation formation through differentiation of the Palestinian identity from a Syrian dominated pan-Arab identity, as stated by political scientist Paul James. Later nation building constituted the construction and/or structuring of a national identity within the framework of an own state as seen in post-Ottoman Turkey, Iran and Egypt.20 James defined nation formation as occurring “within a social formation constituted in the emerging dominance of relations of disembodied integration” in which there is no face-to-face encounter or agency extension.21

The differentiation of Palestinian identity in the absence of agency extension — the existence of a nation-state — was defined by asserting its distinctiveness from a Syrian Arab identity that was prevalent in Syria, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan and Zionist settlements at the time. Moreover, both in nation formation and nation building, imagined national communities need to give substance to their constructs by creating a consciousness of what it meant to be a nation. For Israeli Jews and Palestinians, sports served that purpose.22

Nonetheless, the effort of multi-ethnic, multi-confessional Middle Eastern and North African societies to employ soccer in the shaping of an overriding national identity was complicated by the communal aspirations of minority communities such as Kurds, Berbers and Israeli Palestinians, as well as conflict that resulted from their assertion. These communities felt discriminated against because the newly established states were preoccupied with creating one imaginary overall national identity that superseded diverse societal fabric rather than one that sought multicultural accommodation of the identities of its various constituent communities.23 Those communities often saw soccer as much as a way of expressing an identity of their own as they viewed it as tool to shape the new state’s national distinctiveness. Bairner and historian John Sugden noted that “wherever there are national or regional conflicts between societies which share a passion for sports, those conflicts will be in and carried on through respecting sport cultures.”24

Israeli sports historian Tamer Sorek argues that Palestinian citizens of Israel as opposed to Palestinians governed by Israeli occupation constituted at least for a significant period of post- independence Israeli history an exception to Sugden and Bairner’s notion. “Under certain conditions, sports may function in the opposite way. The particular case of Palestinian citizens of Israel is evidence that sports in general, and soccer in particular, may be used by the state as a tool to inhibit the nationalist consciousness of a national minority. The Palestinian citizens in turn tend to use soccer to smooth their tense relations with the Jewish majority rather than to emphasize the tension, and therefore they hide their Palestinian identity in the stadium,” Sorek reasoned.25

In effect, Sorek was highlighting the fact that post-1948 citizenship of the State of Israel did not amount to nationality for non-Jewish citizens i.e. the Palestinians. That dichotomy was reinforced by continued Israeli-Palestinian tensions, including military conflict in Gaza, Israeli-Palestinian frustration with lack of progress in peace talks, anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab bigotry on the soccer pitch. Nevertheless, Palestinian players contribute significantly to Israel’s national and top echelon teams despite their deep-seated sense of discrimination.26 This has meant that soccer serves Palestinians in Israel both as an integrative tool and a vehicle to assert their identity within the Jewish state.27

Rifaat ‘Jimmy’ Turk, Israel’s first Palestinian national team player, recalls coach Ze’ev Segal telling him when he joined Hapoel Tel Aviv: “There is one important rule. We live in a racist country. They will curse you, they will curse your mother and your sister. They will spit at you. They will try to undercut you, cut your legs from under you. You have to be smart about it and know how to deal with it. You can’t allow yourself to be provoked. You have to stay focused. If you are smart, you’ll survive. If you’re not smart, you can take everything I told you and throw it out the window.”28

Moulding Modern Citizens

For pre-Zionist Palestine, Iran and Turkey, sports was key to moulding of the “modern” citizen as well as the forging of relations with a colonial or Western power. This could help them in their endeavour irrespective of the fact that Jews and Palestinians were forming nations while Turkey and Iran were building nations as illustrated in this section. In doing so, they built on the experience of the first modern day international sports encounter — a cricket match in 1860 between the United States, a former British colony, and Canadian colonies that had yet to achieve independence.29

They also relied on the notion, first put forward in 1891 by Reverend J. Astley Cooper, of a British Commonwealth sporting competition that would involve literary and military events as a way of strengthening ties between Britain and its colonies.30

Zionism’s view of sports, much like that of the Shah of Iran as well as the Young Turks and their Kemalist successors, was partly anchored in the need to prepare young men for military service and defence of the nation. It was similarly rooted although not acknowledged in 19th century German approaches to athletics articulated by Theodore Herzl, physician and the father of political Zionism, and social critic Max Nordau’s concept of muscular Judaism. It also harked back to the principle in Deuteronomy 4:9 of shimrat ha-guf, guard the body.

“I must train the boys to become soldiers…. I shall educate one and all to be free, strong men, ready to serve as volunteers in the case of need,” Herzl wrote in his diaries.31 Speaking to the Second Zionist Congress in Basel, Nordau urged his audience to “let us continue our ancient tradition of being heroes with deep chests, nimble limbs and fearless looks.” Russian physician Max (Emmanuel) Mandelstamm made a similar appeal at the congress, where he concluded by repeating a line from Roman poet Juvenal’s Satire X:32 “Men sana in corpore sano (A sound mind in a sound body).”33

Nordau argued that Zionism would revitalise Judaism, liberate it from the distress it encountered in the diaspora, and create the new Jew “morally through the rejuvenation of the ideals of the people and bodily through the physical rearing of one’s offspring, in order to create a lost muscular Jewry… We want to restore to the flabby Jewish body its lost tone. Jews have to show to themselves, and to the world, how much vitality they still possess.”34 Literature scholar Marilyn Reizbaum described Nordau’s image of the new Jew as “derived from the image of manliness and restraint which together make the civilised man. This image is ironically modelled on the Aryan ideal…”35 Political scientist Haggai Harif went a step further in describing the emphasis on the “physical ability of the ‘New Jew’ who symbolized the ideal of national revival in the eyes of the fathers of Zionism” as a core element in “a revolution in the existential reality of the Jewish people in the Diaspora, in defining its collective identity and in its ways of life… Gymnastics and sport were among the offshoots of renewed life in the country and were an expression of the glorification of the physical heroism that was perceived as vital in the battle to conquer the Land” of Israel.36

Zionism’s embrace of the importance of sports was also rooted in moves by significant segments of 19th century Jewish diaspora to accommodate societal change, counter anti-Semitism, and by implication reject Orthodox Jewish repudiation of sports as a form of secularism. From the mid- nineteenth century, many Jews viewed joining the main gymnastic movements and, more importantly, sport and country clubs and the Olympic movement as part of their ‘emancipation’ from the old legal and social exclusions and from a “Jewish pathology”. Jews were described as intellectuals, cosmopolitans, and therefore artificially removed from nature.

Responding to the charge of physical inadequacy, participating in gymnastic and sports movements was just another facet of claiming equality and, simultaneously, manifesting patriotism.

Movements such as the Deutsche Turnerschaft, the Sokol, English Muscular Christianity, and of course the Olympic Games were as much a product of the 19th century as was the emancipation of Jews. In many societies, Jews considered the two as part and parcel — if Jews could join this fraternity of athletes, it would prove they were being accepted by the larger society. Zionist preoccupation with the body, exercise, and later the Jewish Olympic idea (Maccabiah Games) was a direct consequence of industrialisation, urbanisation and anti-Semitic pressures, wrote Sports historian George Eisen.37 Eisen was referring to the Maccabiah — a sporting event for Jews from across the globe — first organised in Palestine in the early 1930s and which today is recognised by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Historian David Biale argued that “like other nationalist movements of the nineteenth century, Zionism was preoccupied by the physical and emotional degeneration of the nation and by the threat of demographic decline.”38 As a result, Jewish immigrants imported soccer to Palestine under Ottoman rule. The game was institutionalised through public schools and clubs in 1917 under British colonial rule.

Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a xenophobic German nationalist, radical egalitarian and father of German gymnastics, inspired Zionist thinking despite his anti-Semitism that eventually prompted clubs associated with his movement to create Aryan sections. Historian Petr Roubal quotes Jahan as saying that “Poles, French, clerics, landlords and Jews are Germany’s misfortune!”39 Jahn’s combination of seemingly contradictory racist and revolutionary views posed a challenge to reactionary rule in Germany. As a result, Jahn was incarcerated in 1819 and his gymnastics movement was banned. Released in 1825, he resurrected his movement in the form of a more militaristic group that favoured unification of the various German states as the 1848 revolutions swept across Europe.

Jahn saw gymnastics and physical education at the time of the Napoleonic conquest of Prussia as a powerful tool to prepare for a liberation struggle. His German Gymnastics Movement (Deutsche Turnerschaft) established in 1811 expressed nationalist goals and emphasised strength, endurance, discipline, and movement in unison.40 He also saw his gymnastics, with its egalitarian lack of divisive class or regional characteristics, as a vehicle that would demonstrate what an ideal society would look like. Jahn believed that his gymnasts should be “chaste, pure, capable, fearless, truthful and ready to bear arms.”41

Jahn’s notion of a utopian society constituted fertile ground for representatives of all political stripes in the Middle East, including various trends within Zionism as well as Jews in Palestine and the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire, who saw militarisation of society as the way forward. In Zionist Palestine, Jahn’s thinking was to have its greatest impact on Beitar, the right-wing youth movement associated with revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s idea that evoked the Jews’ last stand against the Romans. Beitar was the Hebrew acronym for Joseph Trumpeldor Union, named after a one-armed Russian army officer who established the Zion Mule Corps that was defeated alongside the British and other Allied forces in 1916 by the Ottomans in the Battle of Gallipoli.

Beitar’s mission was to create the “New Jew” who would be able to build and defend the Jewish state. Beitar differed from other Zionist factions in its insistence that Jews had to rely on themselves rather than on the British. Its philosophy was rooted in the Biblical story of God advising Joshua on the eve of the Israelite’s return to the Promised Land, which stated “Every place that you have set foot I have given you”42 and “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”43 Jabotinsky summarised Beitar’s mission in songs he wrote, one of which said:

“From the pit of decay and dust
Through blood and sweat
A generation will arise to us
Proud, generous, and fierce.”44

Russian-born Yosef Yekutieli, an Ottoman conscript who became a physical educator in Palestine and a driving force in realising Herzl and Nordau’s vision, played a key role in the development of soccer and its emergence as a nationalist battle. Yekutieli defined his mission as “the development of Jewish culture — both physical and spiritual, and the presentation of that culture to the Jewish people and to the whole world; the development of Jewish sport in the world and the emphasis of the idea that Jewish sporting athletes were not just part of their home countries but were part of the Jewish diaspora. The emphasising of the fact that Eretz Yisrael is the centre of the Jewish world; and finally, the strengthening of the Maccabi movement.”45 A centrist Zionist youth movement whose concept of sports was influenced by Jahn served Yekutieli’s purpose of tightening bonds between the Zionists in Palestine and the Jewish Diaspora and projecting Jews as a nation and Palestine as their homeland.

Maccabi grew out of the Union of Jewish Gymnastic Clubs founded at the Fourth Zionist Congress in 1903. It was named after the Maccabean revolt in the second century CE that was sparked by the creation of gymnasium in Jerusalem by the High Priest Jason. The gymnasium in which Jews competed nude and participated in pagan rituals provoked the Maccabeans’ anger because it amounted to idol worshipping in their view. Ironically, one of the first things the Maccabeans did after recapturing Jerusalem was to destroy the gymnasium.46 Yekutieli, the founder of the Palestine Football Association and the Palestine Olympic Committee, first dreamt of the Maccabiah as a 15- year old. His inspiration was the 1912 Olympics. It took him 16 years to prepare a plan for the Jewish National Fund and another four to organise the first tournament.47

Following the Zionist Example

Palestinians, notwithstanding their hostility to Herzl, Nordau and Yekutieli effectively adopted their approach. “Obedience is one of the most important qualities a soldier on the battlefield must equip himself with. The war will not be fought without obedience. I urge everyone to obey whoever they are subordinate to, irrespective of whether you are players, spectators or referees, and to heed his every command, decision and restriction,” said the sports column of Filastin, a twice-weekly Christian-owned newspaper published in the first 67 years of the 20thcentury that pioneered Palestinian sports reporting, supported the Young Turks during Ottoman rule, opposed pre-Israel’s traditional Palestinian leadership, and was influential in promoting Palestinian nationalism. In a separate column, Mohammed Tahre Pasha, an Egyptian doctor, who went on to found the Mediterranean Games and head the Egyptian Olympic Committee, argued that sports was crucial for the East and the Arab’s regaining of past glory. “‘The East neglected sports for a long time. It is a main reason, if not the main reason, for its loss of superiority,” Pasha argued.48

The employment of sports by Zionist leaders also served as a way to mould relations between the Jewish national movement and the British mandate authorities in Palestine who established civilian clubs as well as ones associated with various branches of the government, military and law enforcement. “Here it is, we are given the opportunity now that tens of thousands of British soldiers from various countries and classes happened to come to the country; some of which will play important roles in the British policy and it is up to us to influence them and make them our friends through friendly sport meetings; it is our duty to do so properly and on a full state scale,” Maccabi said in a memo at the beginning of the Second World War.49

The strategy of forging ties to British colonial personnel proved to be a double-edged sword. It created situations of both bonding and friction. At times, encounters between Jewish and British players would end up in brawls with Jews alleging discrimination by British referees. Moreover, tensions would rise at times of unpopular British measures like the publication of the White Book in 1930 that restricted Jewish immigration to and settlement of Palestine. Sir John Robert Chancellor, the High Commissioner at the time of the publication, suspended matches between Zionist and British soccer teams to evade the risk of violent eruptions.50

The Zionist effort nonetheless constituted the flip side of Astley Cooper’s vision of Commonwealth sports. Jewish clubs sought to forge alliances with their British counterparts in a bid to build ties to Brits who one day may be influential in formulating British policy and could help cement Palestine’s identity as a Jewish entity. Ties to the mandate authority, the Zionists hoped, would also ensure Jews of British protection in times of violent Palestinian resistance to Jewish settlement of the land. As a result, Zionist exploitation of the sport turned soccer into a barometer of British-Jewish relations against the backdrop of the controversial settlement of Palestine in the 1930s.

Relations between British and Jewish players and fans warmed and cooled depending on political circumstances. In good times, they further served, according to Palestinian historians, as cover for illegal Jewish immigration. The historians charged that such incidences occurred in 1932 and 1935 during the Maccabiah, “This was not merely physical activity for the enjoyment of the individual: it was physical development in the service of the nation,” the Jewish Agency for Israel said.51 Sports historian Eisen argued that the Olympics had provided “a guiding example for the Maccabiah idea and (the) exerting powerful influences upon the inception and format of the Jewish Games.” 52 Nonetheless, the Palestinian Young Men Christian Association (YMCA) deprived Maccabiah of the ability to project itself as representative of the region’s diversity by withdrawing participation from the 1932 tournament.53 It also complicated the PFA’s effort to meet FIFA’s requirement that it represent both Jewish and Palestinian clubs.

Defence under Cover of Sports

Palestinian historian Issa al-Sifri warned in a book published in 1937 that “since 1924, the Zionists were trying to find new tricks for admitting more Jewish immigrants to the country; they have used smuggling and manipulation. They have pretended to submit to the restrictions of the immigration laws (while) transferring Jews to illegal resident status in Palestine by hiding them in the settlements. The Maccabiah was one of the ways of achieving these tasks,” Al-Sifri wrote.54 Hapoel, the sports association with the Zionist labour movement, pioneered naval operations that supported illegal immigration into Palestine as well as the smuggling of arms to Jewish paramilitary groups. The movement also helped establish Jewish settlements. Its members were often also part of the Haganah, the underground Jewish paramilitary force that after independence formed the core of the Israel Defence Force.55

All in all, the involvement of sports movements in what Zionists described as defensive measures traced their roots to the late years of Ottoman rule when sports groups volunteered to protect Jews against Palestinian protesters.“ From the early 1920s, members of the sports organizations participated in activities aimed at restraining Arab manifestations of violence. They also assisted with the absorption of immigrants and in broadening the settlement enterprise, were involved in protests against British policy which sought to limit the development of the national home, and continued its activities in the fields of education, culture, etc. Many of these activists volunteered to serve in the British army during the Second World War, and some were active in saving and rehabilitating Jewish Holocaust refugees from Europe,” Harif noted.56

Palestinian media as well as a Jewish scholar asserted that the Maccabi was using its 1935 tournament to obtain as many tourist visas as possible for Jews from abroad to visit the territory. Filastin said it had received a complaint from residents of the town of Tulkarem denouncing the games as a provocative military exercise.57 The paper reported the letter in an article headlined “Ten Thousand Jewish Athletes: By What Right are They Permitted to Come?”58 Ha’aretz reported that the Palestinian media had questioned whether British authorities were “taking sufficient precaution to ensure that the tourists entering the country would leave at the end of their stay under the visas granted, or whether it knew that many contemplated remaining permanently as residents.”59 In his 1979 dissertation, “The Maccabiah Games: A History of the Jewish Olympics”, Eisen acknowledged the Palestinian concern but asserted that the number of tourists cited by the media was “highly inflated by the hostile Arab news media even though their perception as to the real purpose of the Jewish influx was quite accurate.”60 The notion of using sports not only to project nationalism but also as a cover for developing military skills for the conquest of Palestine and defence of the rights of the Jewish people was particularly prevalent among those elements within Maccabi that traced their routes to Beitar.

Filastin and other Palestinian media demanded that the games be banned and asserted that their opening march was paramilitary in nature.61 The assertions prompted the British authorities to cancel the march a day before the opening of the Maccabiah.62 Earlier, the British had advised Beitar against wearing its brown-coloured shirts during the opening ceremony as it was reminiscent of fascist dress in Mussolini’s Italy. The ban prompted Beitar to pull out of the tournament and break away from Maccabi.63 Beitar, unlike Maccabi and Hapoel which saw itself first and foremost as sporting organisations with affinity to the Socialist International, defined itself primarily as a movement that also engaged in sports.

The Palestinian media nevertheless complained that the British gave the Zionists preferential treatment by imposing far less restrictions on them than on marches by Palestinian youth and sports groups. The complaint reflected British fears that Palestinian youth were adopting more militant nationalist attitudes. The British mandate authority warned in the public security section of its 1936 annual report that Palestinian youth had closely followed the Egyptian student movement that had “instigated disorders there in November, 1935.” It said Palestinian youth had “gradually achieved a certain degree of influence with the Arab leaders themselves and used this influence to press for the adoption of a more extreme Arab policy. These activities were voiced in the Press through the medium of ‘Al Difa`a’ newspaper, which was suspended for a month under the Press Ordinance for advocating the adoption in Palestine of the methods employed by the Egyptian students.”64

Palestinian media hinted at a growing divide between more militant youth and the Palestinian leadership in articles that criticised the lack of solidarity within Palestinian sports organisations,65 using the term Assabiyah — a phrase coined by Ibn Khaldun, the 14th century historiographer and founding father of modern sociology — that refers to the bonds of cohesion built in the formation of communities.66 Divisions among Palestinians were exacerbated by the decision of some Palestinian clubs to join the Zionist-dominated soccer federation during the popular revolt against Jewish settlement and British colonial administration in the late 1930s and the disappearance of a political edge in sports reporting during the Second World War as a result of British censorship.

Al-Sifri was not the first person to suspect Zionist use of sports. Palestine’s Ottoman rulers feared that sports was used as a means to further Jewish nationalism and provide paramilitary training. To counter the Zionists, Ottoman authorities pressured schools to bar sports clubs like Rishon Le Zion in Jaffa and Bar Giora in Jerusalem.

Schools often barred sports clubs for fear that authorities would confiscate their equipment or close them down. Ottoman and Palestinian fears were fuelled by the participation of Hashomer — a left-wing Jewish self-defence and settlement organisation — in the Rehovot Games, Zionism’s first major series of sports tournaments. Hashomer grew out of Bar Giora — a self-defence group established during the second wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine and named after Simon Bar Giora who was a leader of the Jewish Revolt against the Romans in 70 CE. Hashomer not only fielded athletes but had been contracted to guard the Rehovot settlement.67

Palestinian nationalists sought to stress the point that youth movements like Maccabi were paramilitary rather than sports groups. “The idea of the Maccabi goes back to first century B.C. when the Roman Empire saw for its own safety that the Jews have to (assimilate) so they could become Romans, but the Jews refused; they decided to maintain their national identity. The idea was in the beginning religiously ethical, so were their ways to achieve their goals. Later the concept was reduced from the realms of religion and ethics to the ground of nationalism and weaponry. The war was ongoing between the parties. The Romans were defeated more than once by the Maccabeans. The Jews remained nationally independent. We have no objection to see the Jews struggling for the sake of their unity and independence. The most we can prove here is that the Maccabi movement was a military struggle, but not an athletic movement as many Jews want to suggest to the world. What has been mentioned was proved by history,” said Filastin.

A Primary Source

Filastin, with its projection of Palestinian nationalism, has become a primary source of 20th century Palestinian history. Since Israel has captured significant Palestinian archives and Palestine’s sports history, historical sources has almost exclusively been written by non-Palestinian scholars and writers, with the exception of the work of Palestinian sports historian Issam Khalidi. Palestinian sports, despite its current political relevance, hardly ever emerges in Zionist or Palestinian collective memory.

The Jewish effort to solidify ties with the British as well as with other nations through soccer was boosted by Palestine’s admission in 1928 to world soccer body — FIFA. Within a decade of its founding, the PFA sought FIFA’s permission to play regional teams that were not members of the world body in a bid to strengthen Zionist ties with its non-Palestinian Arab neighbours as well as with British colonial teams in the Arab Middle East. In Khalidi’s words, “to obstruct Arab Palestinian teams, which it had alienated or excluded from the PFA, from competing with teams from other Arab counties.”68 To this end, the PFA in the mid-1930s used its authority as the national association to prevent Palestinian teams from playing neighbouring Arab squads on the grounds that they were not members of the PFA.

Josef Yekutieli, the founder of the PFA and initiator of the Maccabean games, described the PFA’s membership “as a direct result of the Maccabiah Games.”69 The PFA, despite having been established as an organisation that grouped teams regardless of religion and race, projected itself as one of the driving forces of Jewish sports in British-controlled Palestine. Palestine in its view was Jewish and British; Palestinians did not figure in its nationalist calculations. Its mother organisation, the Palestine Sports Federation, adopted Zionism’s blue and white colours while the PFA dropped Arabic as one of its languages within three years of its founding. The Zionist anthem “Ha-Tikva” was played alongside Britain’s “God Save the King” at the start of official matches. The Palestine Olympic Committee followed a similar pattern with its nine members, seven of which were Jewish. “By 1934, the dominance of Zionist officials meant that Arab clubs had no say in the running of the association, despite Arabs comprising over three-quarters of Palestine’s population,” Khalidi wrote.70 The quest for Zionist dominance was rooted in the effort to create under British rule the building blocks of a modern state based on the principle of “authority without sovereignty”.71

The PFA was established in 1924 after the Jewish Maccabi Athletic Organization was refused admission to the International Amateur Athletic Federation because its membership was predominantly Jewish and not representative of Palestine’s British and Arab population.72 Its Zionist domination sparked the initial creation of the Arab Palestinian Sports Federation (APSF) in 1931 with Palestinians unwilling to legitimise Zionist colonisation or serve as a fig leaf for a Zionist dominated institution. The APSF was founded at a time when the Palestinian national movement had to grapple with the fact that its traditional leadership was ineffective in the face of a refusal by the British mandatory administration to accord Palestinians the same degree of self-governance that it had granted other Arabs such as the Egyptians and the Iraqis. This reality was brought into sharp relief in 1930 with the death sentence for three Palestinian youths accused of organising the 1929 uprising against Jewish settlements and the British colonial administration. It persuaded younger nationalist leaders that they had to be more hard-line if Palestinians were to achieve their national ambitions.73

Divorce of Palestinians and Zionists was a key element of a more hard-line approach. As a result, the APSF vowed to boycott Zionist teams, athletes and referees. It’s opting for segregation paralleled efforts in other regions struggling with competing identities like South Africa and Ireland to assert identity through sports associations based on ethnicity or nationalism rather than the sport itself. The APSF’s policy however proved controversial. The Arab Sport Club in Jerusalem battled, for example, for months against a decision by the Orthodox Club in Jaffa to bar Jewish referees.74

The PFA’s intent was evident when it dubbed the squad it sent to Egypt for a friendly match, the Land of Israel. The team was made up of six Jewish and nine British players. No Palestinians were included.75 Neither were Palestinians part of the team which fielded in qualifiers for the 1934 and 1938 World Cup. When Palestinians revolted in 1936 against Jewish immigration, sports served to further bind Jews and Brits. “Efforts to dominate athletics, marginalize the Arabs, and cultivate cooperation with the British at any price were the main traits that characterized Zionist involvement in sports,” Khalidi wrote.76

A Well-oiled Machine

The Zionist effort to forge close relations with the British stumbled when ties with the colonial power frayed in the wake of the Second World War as Jews geared up for independence and extreme nationalist groups attacked British forces. Beitar, the right-wing nationalist group that encompassed Beitar Jerusalem, a storied club notorious until today for its anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim attitude, played an important role in the push for independence.

Beitar, which was the product of the 1935 split between the revisionists and the main Zionist movement, was particularly pronounced in the post- World War Two run up to independence.

The various Zionist youth movements intensified their focus on the concept of sports in the service of the nation and as a projection of nationhood. HaMashkif, the Beitar newspaper, argued in 1945 “that nations take part in international tournaments not only to display their sporting skills, but also to demonstrate their national traits and their national flag.” HaMashkif went on to note that sports teams serve “to glorify the name of their people in public.”77

Beitar adopted obedience as one its core principles so that it would operate as a well-oiled machine. Its members were obliged to become skilled in the use of weapons. Its philosophy was in line with the militaristic principles of legionism, the notion of collective revival based on an inherited defensive tradition; strict discipline; hadar or dignity; and mobilisation.78 The duty of a Beitar member was to be ready to defend the Jewish settlement of Palestine. In Beitar’s vision, its members were destined to join a military unit that would emerge from five volunteer battalions known as the Jewish Legion of the British military that fought the Ottomans in the First World War. Almost two decades later, Jabotinsky, to who sports was a utility rather than a passion negotiated through intermediaries the training of 134 Beitar members in Mussolini Italy’s Maritime School in Civitavecchia in the province of Rome. The Beitar members were trained by Il Duce’s Black Shirts — paramilitary squads established after the First World War — and were visited by Mussolini himself. In a letter to Leone Carpi, one of his intermediaries, Jabotinsky, aware of the rise of fascism under Mussolini, wrote that his movement preferred to have the training in Italy.79

Sociologist Shlomo Reznik noted that “in Jabotinsky’s words, Beitar was militaristic in the sense of knowing how and being ready to take up arms in the name of defending our rights. As an educational movement, the goal was to create a ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ citizen of the Jewish nation instead of the stereotypical ‘Diaspora Jew.’ The concept that captures the new Beitar type is Hadar (a Hebrew word that was used by Jabotinsky to denote outer beauty, pride, good manners, dignity, loyalty, and the like). Like its mother party, Beitar vowed to work for the establishment of a Hebrew state with a Hebrew-speaking Jewish majority, on both sides of the Jordan River, by means of mass settlement funded by national loans.”80

The Jerusalem branch of Beitar founded the Beitar Jerusalem sports club in 1936, the year of the second Palestinian uprising. The club has been supported throughout its history by right-wing Israeli leaders, including current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It initially drew many of its players and fans from Irgun, an extreme nationalist, para-military Jewish underground. Its players and fans were active in various right-wing Jewish underground groups that waged a violent campaign against the pre-state British mandate authorities. As a result, many of them were exiled to Eritrea in the 1940s. Beitar’s initial anthem reflected the club’s politics, glorifying a “guerrilla army racist and tough, an army that calls itself the supporters of Beitar.” The movement’s links to the underground ultimately prompted the British to ban it on the grounds that it was “recruitment source for (a) terrorist group.”81 Said an Israeli journalist: “This was a team with an ideal. Everybody was a member of (the Jewish underground movement Ha’Etzel) with the Menorah (Jewish candelabrum) emblem, which was something of a sacred symbol. The public was aware of the connection between Beitar and Ha’Etzel.”82

So were the Palestinians. Filastin translated an article by Jabotinsky originally published in Hebrew in HaMashkif newspaper under the title”Jabotinsky’s Program: Shooting”.83 Jabotinsky argued in the HaMashkif article that Beitar could serve as a venue for military training given British opposition to the creation of Jewish military units.84 The article constituted in Filastin’s view evidence that Beitar was a cover for Jewish paramilitary activity.

Despite the willingness of teams of neighbouring Arab countries to play Zionist squads prior to the establishment of the State of Israel, resistance to the Jewish national project spilled onto the soccer pitch, long before Israel’s expulsion from the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) in 1974. Filastin reported in 1929 at the time of the Palestinian uprising that Arab fans, provoked by Zionist flags and the singing of Jewish nationalist songs during a match in Damascus played by a Hapoel club, clashed with their Jewish counterparts.85 Elsewhere, fans fought over alleged bias of referees.86 The Muslim and Christian Association asked the British mandate authorities in 1925 whether the flying of Zionist flag alongside the British flag during soccer matches violated regulations governing public display of flags. The British governor of Jerusalem and Jaffa ruled that club flags did not violate the ordinance which was designed to curtail “any partisan demonstration.”87 The query followed a visit to Palestine by Hakoah Vienna, a team that was inspired by Nordau and widely viewed at the time as the best Jewish squad ever.

Ironically, Palestinians were not the only ones threatened by Zionist sports endeavours. Orthodox Jewry was vehemently opposed to defining Judaism as a national entity. To them Jewry was solely a religious community and would remain so until the Jews were redeemed from exile. The Orthodox leadership failed however to counter the attraction of youth movements with their emphasis on sports. Religious youth either joined Bnei Akiva, the largest religious Zionist movement, or often became members of Maccabi. The Orthodox Jewry nevertheless fought the fact that sports activities, particularly soccer, took place on Saturdays — the Jewish day of rest.

Police repeatedly clashed in the 1930s with Orthodox protesters who sought to prevent games from being played.88 It was a struggle that continued to be waged throughout the 20th century, with the Orthodox Jewry battling plans for the construction of a stadium in Jerusalem. Much like militant Islamic clerics, ultra-Orthodox rabbis feared that sports would distract students at yeshivas, Jewish religious schools, from their study of traditional texts. Similarly, they also opposed sports because it was performed in clothes that allowed athletes to exhibit parts of their body.89

Fuelling Nationalist Friction

The Zionist employment of sports in their struggle for Jewish statehood nonetheless sparked a Palestinian national response that sought to counter the challenge in the realm of sports. Palestinian national sentiment expressed itself post-World War I through the emergence of charitable societies, women’s groups, youth organisations and sports clubs, even though Palestinian media lamented that they lacked the resources, particularly in sports, available to their Zionist counterparts. British mandate officials recognised early on that the development of separate Jewish and Palestinian sports clubs was likely to fuel nationalist friction. At the inauguration of the Jerusalem Sports Club in 1921, Jerusalem Military Governor Ronald Stores called for clubs to be inclusive and admit members irrespective of their religion or beliefs.90

Khalidi documented the battle over rival Jewish and Palestinian claims to land and identity waged on the soccer pitch in the decades leading up to the founding of Israel. Muslim, Christian Orthodox and secular Palestinian sports clubs reinforced national identity and constituted a vehicle to strengthen ties among different Palestinian communities. Orthodox Christians, opposed to foreign domination of their parishes, took a lead in promoting sports with the first conference of Orthodox Christian clubs in 1923 that called for the establishment of clubs across Palestine. Its call was heeded with the emergence of Orthodox clubs established in Jaffa, Jerusalem, Lod, and Akko.91

The clubs, similar to the role of the Algerian national team as a promoter of the Algerian liberation struggle during the country’s war of independence, allowed Palestinians to forge relations with other Middle Eastern and North African nations. Filastin praised in nationalistic terms the performance of the Orthodox Club of Jaffa in its 1931 encounter with a visiting Egyptian team. “The team of the Egyptian University came to Palestine and played with the Jewish teams, no Arab team applied to compete with them, except the Orthodox Club. The result was better than the game with “Maccabi”. So it made us proud and made everyone understand that there are Arabic teams in Palestine who are skilful in this game and have the same level as the British and Jewish teams,” Filastin wrote.92

Sports clubs further created an institutional base for political organisation and served to prepare predominantly young men for social and political engagement. In an effort to forge useful relationships through soccer, Palestinians first created their own informal national team in 1910 that played primarily against missionary clubs. Encouraged by local media, the Arab Palestinian Sports Federation and a national team that played its first match against a squad from the American University of Beirut were born 21 years later as Palestinian counterparts of the PSA and the PFA. The team “will refute Jewish claims and Zionist propaganda that Palestinians are ignorant and have nothing to do with sports,” Filastin quipped.93

The Islamic movement, riding a wave of increasing popularity on the back of mounting public disillusion with the inability of Palestinian and Arab leaders to counter Zionist advances, convened a meeting of the Islamic Physical Training Club in 1928. The gathering attended by lawyers, journalists and politicians, including Ragheb Effendi Al-Imam, Hasan Sidqui al-Dajani, Mohammed Izzat Darwazeh and Sheikh Hassan Abu Saud, a close associate of Haj Mohammed Effendi Amin el- Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, called for the establishment of Young Men’s Muslim Associations (YMMA) across Palestine.94 A prominent newspaper editor described the activities of the YMMA’s Nablus branch as evidence that “native sons now have the knowledge that their public welfare, and consequently their private welfare, requires bonds of unity, virtuous discord, and love to exist.”95

Four years later, sports became a central tenant of the Arab Youth Congress headed by newspaper proprietor and politician Issa Basil Bandak. Convened in 1932, the congress was a reflection of the growing gap between Palestine’s traditional leadership and its youth.96 The divide was evident within clubs. In 1934, members of the long-standing Salesian Club in Haifa that was associated with the charitable Catholic Society of St. Francis de Sales, split off to form Shabab al-Arab because they felt that it was not nationalist enough. Shabab al-Arab was founded under the auspices of the congress which had its own annual tournament.97 “Athletic clubs were important in evoking the Palestinian national consciousness, sustaining connections between villages and cities, and developing ties with groups across the Middle East and parts of Africa. As such, this trend was contested by Zionist forces in Palestine in a struggle played out on the international stage after the re-establishment of the defunct APSF in 1944,” Khalidi wrote.98 To strengthen links with Arab neighbours, players and spectators held two minutes of silence in 1945 at the beginning of the final of the Palestinians’ first territory-wide soccer championship to commemorate the 400 protesters killed in the French bombardment of Damascus.99

The nationalist Palestinian uprising that erupted in 1936 nevertheless allowed the PFA to briefly revalidate its claim to represent both Jews and Arabs in Palestine. With the APSF in disarray and no institutional framework, several Palestinian clubs including Jerusalem’s Arab Sports Club and Al Rawda Club and Haifa’s Shabab al-Arab re-joined the PFA to ensure that they could continue playing.100 It was further strengthened by the creation of a short-lived league in 1942 that included Palestinian, Jewish, British and Greek teams.101 Shabab al-Arab, the nationalist club, was among the Palestinian clubs that participated.102 The APSF’s demise ironically ushered in a period of greater engagement between Zionist and Palestinian teams that in part was encouraged by perceptions in some segments of Palestinian society of sports being apolitical. It was a perception Zionists were eager to encourage. “Perhaps at first a small group of Arab sportsmen would be found, a group that would listen to our voice and claims that sport and politics should not be mixed and that the good and mutual relationship between sportsmen of both nations could bring about the improvement in the friendship in general,” wrote journalist Shimon Samet in 1937.103

A refusal seven years later by an Egyptian military soccer team to visit Palestine to play a predominantly Jewish squad prompted the Palestinians to again organise themselves on a regional and national basis. The newly reconstituted APSF insisted in its 1944 regulation that its membership “consists exclusively of Arab, non- Jewish institutions and clubs in Palestine… All clubs must include no Jewish members, not employ Jewish referees and not by funded by Jewish sources.”104 “The association is uncharted road in the confrontation with the Jewish Football Association,” a prominent Palestinian sports editor said.105

The regulation was more than an effort to challenge the Zionist claim of representation of Palestine, it was an attempt to project Arab Palestine as an organised sports entity in its own right, able to compete internationally and to engage the British in the waning years of their mandate. Opting for segregation in sports was in line with Filastin’s advocacy more than a decade earlier of parallel Jewish and Palestinian labour markets to counter British and Zionist policies that forced Palestinians into an increasingly untenable situation of insecure land tenure, heavy debt, and lack of investment.106 Filastin conveniently refrained from reporting that Palestinians and Jews played in an APSF team in violation of the group’s 1946 regulations to play against other squads in Palestine.107

The segregation strategy nevertheless persuaded Palestine’s Arab neighbours to play in Palestinian rather than Zionist clubs. However, Palestinian efforts to persuade FIFA to recognise the APSF alongside the PFA fell on deaf years. It took the Palestinians half a century to achieve FIFA acceptance when the Palestine Football Association, the APSF’s successor, won membership as FIFA’s only entity that was not a state.

Ironically, APSF had already warned two years before the establishment of the State of Israel that FIFA’s efforts to play peacemaker in the Middle East by having Jews and Palestinians represented by one organisation would fail. “Simply we could say that the members of your federation will not succeed in achieving what the British administration could not do,” the APSF said in a memo to FIFA.108 It would take the Palestinians 52 years to defeat Zionist insistence that the Palestinians did not constitute a people or a state. In achieving their goal, the Palestinians made history by becoming the first territory without a state to have a seat at the soccer world table.

The fact that it took the Palestinians half a century to become a FIFA member raises questions about soccer’s effectiveness as a tool to project nationhood. In the case of the Jewish national movement, Harif argued that the “political implications of the sports contacts with foreign countries must not give the impression that these sports meetings resulted in a substantial change in the international standing of the Yishuv,” the Jewish settlement of Palestine. Athletes, in the political scientist’s view, “first and foremost fulfilled a symbolic role as representatives of a political entity which lacked sovereignty and real power and strove to achieve independence.”109 While Haggai looked at the role of sports primarily in terms of Zionist Jewish identity, he unwittingly anticipated later concepts of the utility of sports as a soft power tool to project identity to a target audience beyond a nation’s immediate confines.

Projecting Nationhood

The Palestinian struggle to gain the right to represent themselves in soccer nonetheless gave birth to a strategy Palestinian soccer upholds until today: the projection of Palestinian nationhood through football. Palestinians “cannot avoid devising a way to publicise their ideas…and propagate their principles and views without being afraid of opposition or oppression. They can achieve their goal through sports as did Sweden, Czechoslovakia … and Hungary,” Filastin commented a day before the 1947 United Nations vote in favour of partitioning Palestine.110 APSF had rejected an invitation to Palestinian clubs issued by the PSA a year earlier in a bid to fend off a request by Arab soccer associations to grant the Palestinian group FIFA membership.111

The Palestinian efforts to join FIFA were thwarted not only by Zionist opposition but also by British concern about identity politics in sports given their experience in Egypt where Cairo’s storied Al Ahli club was a driver of the 1919 revolution and represented an anti-colonial bulwark. A 1935 official British report on youth movements in Palestine warned that Palestinian Scouts, sports and youth groups could challenge the region’s national leadership.112 A year later, in a forerunner of the role of soccer fans in the 21st century’s popular Arab revolts, members of sports clubs and the Scouts were in the forefront of anti-British demonstrations during the revolt in 1936. They patrolled beaches to prevent illegal Jewish immigration and arms smuggling, organised the distribution of food, and helped moving those wounded or killed in the uprising. They saw themselves as filling a void left by a failing Palestinian leadership.

Palestinian media stressed throughout this period the nationalist utility of sports in general and soccer in particular. Filastin, a twice-weekly Christian-owned newspaper published in the first 67 years of the 20th century that pioneered Palestinian sports reporting, supported the Young Turks during Ottoman rule and was influential in promoting Palestinian nationalism, “maintained a consistent critique: challenging the authorities’ neglect of Arab sport and its support of Jewish sport activities. About 80 per cent of the news in Filastin’s sport section was about soccer, the most popular game in Palestine,” wrote Khalidi.113

At the Jaffa Literary Club in 1922, the newspaper’s co-founder, poet and journalist Issa Daoud El-Issa, signalled public distrust of political leadership that came to haunt the Middle East and North Africa almost a century later. Addressing Arab rulers, El-Issa, a pioneer of criticism of 20th century Arab regimes, said: “Oh little kings of the Arabs, by the grace of God, enough feebleness and infighting. Once upon a time, our hopes were on you, but all our hopes were dashed.”

El-Issa’s comments primarily targeted the inability of the Hashemites, Jordan’s current rulers who at the time ruled Hejaz — a province of contemporary Saudi Arabia, to unite the Arabs in confronting British, French and Zionist advances in the region.114

They also targeted large landlords who sold Arab land to the Jewish National Fund which was a key element of Zionist colonisation effort; Palestinian merchants opposed to general strikes in protest against pro-Jewish British policies, and against Palestinian leaders who collaborated with the mandate authorities. The comments were all the more significant given that El-Issa had joined Hashemite Prince Faisal in his 1918 march on Damascus and served as the head of his court during his brief two-year reign in Syria. Similarly, El-Issa parted ways with El-Husseini, the grand mufti, whose supporters called for a boycott of Filastin, accused El-Issa of being a traitor, burnt his house to the ground and forced him into exile in Beirut from where he continued to publish the newspaper.115

Filastin, founded in 1911 in the booming port city of Jaffa, helped in the emergence of a Palestinian civil society and built an audience across all social and economic segments. El-Issa’s cousin and co- founder, Yousef El-Issa, defined the newspaper’s mission in Filastin’s first edition as advocating “every development that serves the constructive rather than the destructive building of a nation.”116 Six months later, he stressed the need to create a public opinion that would enable Palestinians to modernise tradition and custom within the framework of Islamic law.117 The notion of a need for public opinion and mobilisation was expanded three years later in the pages of Filastin and other media in a bid to galvanise opposition to Jewish immigration and land purchases. Within three weeks of writing an editorial asserting that “a very important movement is afoot among young men,”118 Filastin was closed down by the Ottomans for a period of six years that included the length of World War One, and Isa El-Issa was exiled to Anatolia. The paper’s fate was shared by other Palestinian publications.

Filastin, which unlike most Palestinian publications was not formally associated with a political party, was widely viewed as the most influential Palestinian newspaper in the first half of the 20th century. Once it started publishing again after the six-year closure, Filastin expanded its coverage to include sports. It used its football coverage to deepen national sentiments and helped, according to Khalidi, to “maintain the Palestinian national identity… Sports began to be viewed in the Palestinian community as an important element for raising social consciousness and as an essential component of national culture.”119 The paper did so in the context of a drive promoted by Isa El-Issa to carve out a Palestinian national identity that was separate from that of Syria, which traditionally was seen to incorporate Palestine. It was based on Isa’s notion that Palestinians needed to shape their identity before seeking independence — a proposition that positioned Filastin’s brand of Arab nationalism against Islam-based concepts of ummah, the community of the faithful.120 Filastin’s coverage tackled Zionist domination of sports and refuted assertions that the Palestinians lacked the cultural, social and athletic attributes needed for sports. The paper’s influence increased despite British censorship. Its sports coverage went in tandem with the revival of Palestinian sports federations in the 1940s.

Sports, a term in Arabic derived from a word that denotes domestication of animals, amounted in Filastin’s view to a national duty, according to Israeli sports historian Sorek who analysed Filastin’s sports reporting in the 1940s. Filastin propagated soccer’s emphasis on discipline and obedience. “Soccer teaches us to obey the team’s manager, and the referee teaches us to adhere to law and justice… Obedience is one of the most important qualities that the soldier in the battlefield must equip himself with. The war will not be fought without obedience,” the newspaper said.121 To bolster its campaign, Filastin enlisted medical personnel to propagate the individual and national health benefits of sports and provide guidance for taking care of one’s body — similar to concepts pushed by its Zionist counterparts.

In an appeal to the Supreme Muslim Council in 1946 to encourage sports, Filastin said it was “calling upon you as a soldier active on the sport field for many years … I would ask you to direct the attention of the preachers in the mosques, and the speech-givers in the houses of God, so that through their speeches they may point the nation to sport, to urge them to care for their bodies, to ensure its cleanliness and activeness, to strengthen its limbs and to behave according to the rules of health, and its health will advance with us…in the struggle….”122 In a similar appeal to school principals, it said: “Remember that history urges you to raise an army of well-educated and healthy people, which will defend this country against the demon of colonialism.”123 The newspaper’s campaign reflected the views of nationalist leaders at the time. “The youth is to the nation as the heart is to the body … I see sport as the best means of equipping the nation with the youth it longs for,” Gaza mayor Rushdi al- Shawa told the paper in 1945.124

Fast forward to 1998 when Palestine became the first non-state entity to become a member of FIFA and soccer re-emerged as a building block in the Palestinians attempt to create a state regardless of peace talks with Israel. Soccer, despite lack of funds and disruptive Israeli travel restrictions, flourished in Israeli-occupied Palestinian areas. Stadiums were built or refurbished across the West Bank and the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) hosted international tournaments. The Palestinian national team in 2014 qualified for the Asian Cup finals for the first time.

“Ours is more than just a game,” said PFA secretary general Abdel Majid Hijjeh. “It breaks the siege on Palestinian sports and the Palestinian people.”125 “When teams come to play on our land, it’s a way of recognizing the Palestinian state. That benefits the Palestinian cause, not just Palestinian sports,” added player Murad Ismael in an interview with the Associated Press.126 Palestine’s soccer effort fits into a Palestine Authority campaign spearheaded by President Mahmoud Abbas to ensure popular support at a time of popular revolt, upheaval and sectarian violence in the Arab world and to reduce Palestinian dependence on failed U.S. efforts to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

Leading Palestine’s charge on the soccer pitch was PFA President Jibril Rajoub, a 62-year old tough anti-Israeli activist, former security chief and member of the central committee of Abbas’ Al Fatah guerrilla group-turned political party. Rajoub, who served 17 years in Israeli jails for throwing a grenade at Israeli soldiers when he was 17 years old, worked hard to get Israeli consent to upgrade a soccer stadium in Al-Ram, a Jerusalem suburb a stone’s throw from the barrier that separates the West Bank from Israel, and to get FIFA funding for its refurbishment. He also convinced FIFA to allow Palestine to play its first ever match on home ground in 2008 rather than in a neighbouring Arab capital. The crowds in the Faisal al Husseini Stadium shouted “Football is nobler than war” as Palestine took the lead in its first international match in the stadium, a friendly match against Jordan.127

“We can achieve a lot for our cause through sports. The world is changing and we have to push the legitimacy of our national aspirations through sports. I hope sports will help Israel reach the right conclusion. We are 4.2 million people living under Israeli occupation; I hope that I can convince the Israelis that we should open a new page that recognizes the existence of Palestinian people,” Rajoub said.128

Conclusion

Filastin’s emphasis on national duty and its concept of sports as a tool for cultivation of traits needed on a battlefield was reflected in its reporting of the 1948 war that led to Israeli independence. Sportsmen who died in Zionist attacks or on the battlefield resisting Zionist advances were termed martyrs. One obituary was entitled, “The Martyrdom of a Youth on the Battle Field.”129

Nationalist fervour and the impending partition of Palestine in the late 1940s produced a galvanising figure, Hussein Husnu, in many ways the equivalent of early modern Turkey’s legendary author and athlete Selim Sirri Tarcan and Zionism’s Yosef Yekutieli. An Egyptian physical education teacher who became Filastin’s sports editor, Husnu was, in Khalidi’s words, a rarity who had a keen understanding of the importance of sports and education for the “health, ethical, national, cognitive, pedagogic and aesthetic benefits of sport at a time when many thought that sport was merely an amusement or recreational activity.”130 The emphasis of Filastin and Husnu on sports as a driver of modernity paralleled trends elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, including Zionist parts of Palestine as well as Iran, Ottoman and modern Turkey, and Egypt.131 Husnu emerged as a nationalist critic of Palestinian and British official neglect of Palestinian sports and physical education, and a major voice in countering conservative opposition. “The more the Palestinians will sacrifice for the sake of athletic progress, the faster they will reach a level of development and civilization. Every Palestinian must know that for every cent he pays for the growth of sport, he will achieve glory and honour for his country,” Husnu argued in his Filastin column.132

In doing so, Husnu and Filastin were aligned with more modernised segments of the Palestinian elite as opposed to conservatives like al-Husseini with whom Filastin editor Isa el-Issa had parted ways. Filastin found common ground with Ahmed Hilmi Pasha, an Ottoman general and finance minister in Faisal’s short-lived government in Damascus, director of Husseini’s religious endowment, and founder of a bank. Hilmi Pasha parted ways with Husseini with the establishment of the secularist Istiqlal Party in 1932 to which El-Issa was close. By the mid-1940s, Hilmi Pasha had emerged as a major patron of soccer which he hoped would help garner support for his bid for political office and mobilise a grassroots base. Hilmi Pasha was not alone in recognising the political value of soccer in Palestine at a time of increasing disunity and factionalism. Founders of the People’s Party, a breakaway group of younger members of the Husseini clan’s Palestine Arab Party (PAP), operated secretly through a network of sports clubs in Nablus and other cities.133 The moves by Hilmi Pasha and the PAP dissidents underscored the role soccer had already played in nationalist struggle and nation-formation in the Middle East and North Africa and was destined to play in the years to come.

So did the graduation of Jewish Israelis from nation formation to nation building with the 1947 United Nations partition resolution that established the State of Israel and could have established an Arab/Palestinian state had Arab states not rejected the notion of a territorial compromise. As a result, Palestinians post-1948 remained preoccupied with nation formation in the absence of an identity that was fully delineated from that of the broader Arab world and particularly concepts of Greater Syria.

That delineation took final shape with the takeover of the Palestine Liberation Organization, founded five years earlier by the Arab League, by Palestinian guerrilla groups in 1969. The creation of the Palestine National Authority in 1994 as a product of the Oslo Israeli-Palestinian peace process launched the Palestinians on their ongoing convoluted and messy nation building process. The Ottomans and Turkey as well as Iran were spared the convulsions of nation formation. Nevertheless like in Palestine, sports influenced by the notions of the German Turnbewegung played a key role in their nation building efforts.

About the author:
*James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture of the University of Würzburg in Germany, and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

Source:
This article was published by RSIS as Working Paper NO. 290

Notes:
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3. Tom Clark, . ‘Aspects of the Psychology of Games and Sports,’ British Journal of Psychology, 31-4 (1941), 279-293
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41. Ibid. Jahn and Eiselen, III-XLVIII
42. Joshua 1:3
43. Joshua 1:9
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45. Ibid. Jewish Agency for Palestine
46. Eizehu Gibor, “Living Jewish Values,” (Los Angeles: Torah Aura Productions, 2009), 19
47. Ibid. Gibor, 20
48. Mohammed Taher Basha. Filastin, March 11 1945
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mirror reflecting the relations between Jews and Britons,” Soccer & Society, 4:1 (2003), 41-56 / Aron Nethanel and Zelig Rosetzki, “A Memorandum to the Jewish Agency to the Land of Israel on Having Sport Ties with the British Army in the Country, March”21, 1940,, quoted by Issam Khalidi. مائة عام على كرة القدم في فلسطين in manuscript provided by the author
50. Harry Schneiderman, The Year in Review, Canadian Jewish Chronicle, September 11, 1931
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52. George Eisen, “Jewish History and the Ideology of Modern Sport: Approaches and Interpretations,” Journal of Sport History, 25:3(1998), 482-531
53. Filastin. مقاطعة دورة الالعاب مكابيه في تل أبيب: الإنتصارات القومية على مكائد الصهيونية, March 20, 1932
54. Iss Al-Sifri. Filastin bein al-Intidab wa al- Sahyoonia. (Jaffa, 1937), 184-187 quoted in Issam Khalidi, Body and Ideology, Early Athletics in Palestine (1900 – 1948), Jerusalem Quarterly, 27 (1937), 44-58
55. Yehoshua Alouf and Gilboa Shaked, Hapoel.” Encyclopaedia Judaica. Ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik. 2nd ed. Vol. 8. (Detroit: Macmillan, Reference USA, 2007). 338
56. Ibid. Harif, Israeli Sport
57. Issam Khalidi, Coverage of sports news in Filastin, 1911-1948, Soccer and Society, 13:5-6 (2012), 764-777 / FilastinJanuary 18, 1933
58. Filastin. عشرة آلاف الرياضيين اليهود: بأي حق هل هم المسموح القادمة؟, March 30, 1935
59. Haaretz, םי יופיע במכביע בשמ ארצ-ישראל, April 4, 1932
60. George Eisen, The Maccabiah Games: A History of the Jewish Olympics, (unpublished, 1979), 175
61. Davar”, הסתה סביב “תמכביע, April 3, 1935
62. Davar, ערב פתיחות המכביע, April 1, 1935,
63. Ibid. Jewish Agency for Israel
64. His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, “Report
by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of Palestine and Trans-Jordan for the year 1936,” December 31, 1936
65. Filastin. أل-إتحاد أريد وال-عصبية, July 18, 1935
66. Syed Farid Alatas, “A Khaldunian Exemplar for a Historical Sociology for the South,” Current Sociology 54:3 397-411,)2006(
67. Stephen E. C. Wendehorst, “Between Promised Land and Land of Promise: The Radical Socialist Zionism of Hashomer Hatzair,” Jewish Culture and History, 2:1 (1999), 44-57
68. Issam Khalidi, “Sports and Aspirations: Football in Palestine 1900 – 1948,” Jerusalem Quarterly. 58, (2014), 74-89
69. Josef Yekutieli, השתתפות ארצ-ישראל במשחק’מ האול’מפ”מ. Haaretz, March 29, 1935
70. Ibid. Khalidi, Sports and Aspirations
71. Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, “Trouble in Utopia: The Overburdened Polity of Israel,” (Albany: State University of New York Press 1989), 232
72. Haim Kaufman, “Jewish Sports in the Diaspora, Yishuv, and Israel: Between Nationalism and Politics,” Israel Studies, 10:2 (2005), 147-167
73. Mustafa Kabha, “The Palestinian press and the general strike, April–October 1936: Filastin as a case study,” Middle Eastern Studies, 39:3 (2003),169-189
74. Filastin. January 21, 1933
75. Ibid. Harif and Galily
76. Issam Khalidi, “The Zionist movement and sports in Palestine, The Electronic Intifada, April 27, 2009 (accessed Aprl 27, 2009)http://electronicintifada.net/content/zionist-movement-and-sports-palestine/8198
77. Ben Eliehu, הםשק’פ הספורט’ב’, HaMashkif, January 14, 1945
78. Ze’ev JabotinskyState Zionism, Hadassah Newsletter, October 1945, 9
79.Daniel Carpi, Attilio Milano and Alexander Rofé (eds, “Scritti in memoria di Leone Carpi: Saggi sull’ebraismo italiano a cura,” (Jerusalem/Milano: Mosad Shelomoh Meir, Makhon Le-Made Ha-Yahadut, 1967). 42
80. Shlomo Reznik, “Betar: Sports and Politics in a Segmented Society, Israel Affairs, 13:3 (2007), 617-641
81. David Niv, הםיארוח מארגונ הצבא’ הלאום’, (Tel Aviv: Klausner Institute, 1965), 277
82. Amir Ben-Porat, Oh Beitar Jerusalem: The Burning Bush Protest, International Journal of the History of Sport, 123-139 ,)2001( 18:4
83. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, , Hamashkif, April 3, 1939
84. Filastin.. برنامج جابوتنسكي: اطلاق النار, April 6, 1939
85. FilastinApril 16, 1929
86. Filastin, . اشتباك التي انتهت تقريبا مع الثورة. April 6, 1926
87. The Palestine Bulletin. March 24, 1925
88. Israeli Daily Picture. “The Tensions between Jerusalem’s Religious and Secular Jews Go Way Back, January 26, 2012 (accessed January 26, 2012), http://www.israeldailypicture.com/2012/01/tensions-between- jerusalems- religious.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IsraelsHistory- APictureADaybeta+%28Israel%27s+History+-+a+Picture+a+Day+%28Beta%29%29
89. For a detailed description of the history of the Teddy Kollek Stadium in Jerusalem see Gedalia Auerbach and Ira Sharkansky, “Politics and Planning in the Holy City, (Piscataway: Transaction Publishers, 2007), 87-96
90. The Palestine Weekly, Jerusalem Sporting Club, April 12, 1921
91. Issam Khalidi, The Coverage of Sports News in “Filastin” 1911-1948, Jerusalem Quarterly. 44 (2010), 45-69 92. Ibid. Khalidi, The Coverage
93. Filastin, March 28, 1931
94. Abdelaziz A. Ayyad, Arab Nationalism and the Palestinians 1850-1939, Jerusalem: Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs1989), 120
95. Bracey/Filastin. 1932. May 4
96. Ibid. Ayyad. p. 136
97. Ibid. Ayyad. p. 136
98. Issam Khalidi, “Body and Ideology Early Athletics in Palestine (1900 – 1948),” Jerusalem Quarterly, 27 (1983), 44-58 / Tamer Sorek, “Sports Column as a Site of Palestinian Nationalism in the 1940s,” Israel Affairs, 13:3 (2007),605-616
99. Ibid. Sorek, Palestinian nationalism
100. Ibid. Khalidi, Body and Ideolog
101. Filastin.. تشكيل رابطة الرياضة للموسم المقبل, January 27, 1942
102. Ibid. Khalidi, Sports and Aspirations / al-Difa‘, 12 April 1942
103. Shimon Samet, לםלו’ תפק’ד חשוב, Ha’aretz, April 17, 1936
104. Ibid. Khalidi, Body and Ideology
105. Hussein Husnu, Filastin, January 31, 1947
106. Ibid. Bracy, p. 101
107. Ibid. Al-Jibin, p. 442
108. Ibid. Khalidi, Sports and Aspirations
109. Ibid Harif, Israeli Sport
110. FilastinNovember 28, 1947
111. Ibid. Sorek, Palestinian nationalism
112.Ibid. Khalidi, The Coverage
113. Ibid. Khalidi, The Coverage
114. Yaqub Awdat. “Min ‘alam al-fikr wa al-adab fi Filastin,” (Jerusalem: Dar al-Isra, 1992), 478 quoted in. ‘Isa al- ‘Isa, Filastin, and the Textual Construction of National Identity 1911-1931, R. Michael Bracy. (Lanham: University of America Press, 2011), 1
115. Ibid. Bracey, p. 36
116. Yousef El-Issa, وجد ام لا وجد, Filastin, January 14, 1911
117. Youssef El. Issa, نفس السنة, Filastin, July 15, 1911
118. Ibid. Bracey, p. 59 / Issa El-Issa. 1914. Filastin August 8
119. Ibid. Khalidi, The Coverage
120. Bracy/Filastin. 1921. July 9
121. Ibid. Sorek, The Sports Column
122. Ibid. Sorek / Filastin. 1946. June 1
123. Ibid. Sorek / Filastin. 1945. October 25
124. Filastin. October 12, 1945
125. Interview with the author
126. Quoted in Palestine: Playing soccer for statehood, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, James M. Dorsey, June 18, 2011 (accessed June 18, 2011) http://mideastsoccer.blogspot.sg/2011/06/palestine-playing- soccer-for-statehood.html
127. Ibid. Dorsey
128. Interview with the author
129. Ibid. Khalidi, Sports and Aspirations
130. Ibid. Khalidi
131. Wilson C. Jacob, ‘Working out Egypt: Masculinity and Subject Formation between Colonial Modernity and Nationalism, 1870 – 1940’, (Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 2005)
132. Ibid. Khalidi
133. Issa Khalaf, Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration, 1939-1948, (Albany: State University of New York Press 1991), 95

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The JCPA between Iran and the P5+1 countries is being welcomed positively in Iran. President Rouhani was elected in 2013 on a platform to to improve Iran’s relations with the world and majority of Iranians wait anxiously for the improved socio-economic benefits that will follow.

In the last hours of the night of April 2, a historic primary agreement over Iran’s nuclear program, known as the framework for the Comprehensive Joint Plan of Action(JCPOA), was announced by Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini, the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the French, British and German foreign ministers as well as representatives from China and Russia, in front of hundreds of news-thirsty journalists in the conference room of the Rolex Learning Center at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne.

Iran and the group of five permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) plus Germany, known as the P5+1, have been negotiating intensely for 18 months to find a solution for the standoff that had marred Iran’s relations with the international community for about 10 years. It was the fulfillment of the main electoral promise of Hassan Rouhani who was elected President of Iran in June 2013, to constructively engage with the world powers and resolve the decade-long standoff over Iran’s nuclear program.

The framework for the comprehensive agreement, architected by Foreign Minister Zarif and his counterparts in the P5+1, gives the international community sufficient assurances that Iran’s nuclear activities, initiated in 1950s with the sponsorship of the U.S. government itself, will not deviate in a way which can result in the production of atomic weapons and will remain entirely peaceful.

The current agreement is a continuing plan for Iran, which after an interim agreement concluded on November 24, 2013, in Geneva, scaled back some of its sensitive nuclear ventures. In return, certain portions of the sanctions imposed against Iran — like the punitive measure to prevent it from expanding its atomic activities—were suspended. The new comprehensive deal, which Iran and the P5+1 now must finalize in three months, will result in the complete termination of all the nuclear-related sanctions — once Iran implements voluntary actions to limit and restrict its nuclear program.

The majority of Iranians favor a nuclear deal with the big powers, and are content that after three decades of animosity and enmity, Iran and the United States have put aside their stubbornness and come to the negotiation table to resolve their disagreements. The failed foreign policy of ex-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad exacerbated the nuclear tensions, resulting in severe, biting economic sanctions against Iran through six UNSC resolutions, the unilateral sanctions of the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea and India as well as the oil embargo of the European Union.

President Rouhani, seen as a moderate and pragmatist leader, reformed Iran’s combative foreign policy, abandoned the hawkish rhetoric of his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and revived Iran’s diplomatic apparatus. Especially intelligent was the nomination of Mohammad Javad Zarif as the foreign minister. Zarif, a prolific university professor educated in the United States, was the Permanent Representative of Iran to the United Nations from 2002 to 2007. He is the first foreign minister in the history of the Islamic Republic whose education and career background is relevant to international relations and foreign policy. He is popular with young Iranians because of his active presence on social media, his fluent and smooth English language skills and his neat appearance.

Upon his return to Tehran on April 2, Foreign Minister Zarif received a hero’s welcome. His Facebook and Twitter pages are full of compliments from enthusiastic Iranians who appreciate his diplomatic finesse and dexterity in bringing the nuclear controversy closer to an end. Masses poured into the streets of Tehran that night, cheering and rallying, waving the flag of Iran, sharing flowers and candies with fellow citizens as a sign of satisfaction.

Ordinary Iranians understand that to have better relations with the outside world, the nuclear controversy should be resolved first. They remember the eight-year term of Ahmadinejad, when Iran’s “rial” became one of the most worthless currencies in the world and inflation hit 45%. Canada and the U.K. closed down their embassies in Tehran following the escalation of disputes under Ahmadinejad. His fiery speeches at the UN General Assembly sessions turned into scenes for the disparagement of Iran and its leaders.

But Iranian youth, especially those not born when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, yearn for a more prosperous, peaceful and happy life and look for better opportunities for advancement and progress. They care less for the number of centrifuges spinning in Natanz and Fordow, and more for the chance to live free from the economic plight imposed on them as a result of the sanctions. They don’t always concur with the official narrative of the conservatives that nuclear energy is “an inalienable right.” They believe more in the right to safe roads and an aviation industry, inexpensive medicine and medical services, educational opportunities, employment, housing and a constructive relationship with the world. These are the rights that Iranians have nearly forgone simply to preserve nuclear energy as a power leverage.

Of course there are those unhappy with an Iran-U.S. rapprochement. These are mostly conservatives whose long-term interests are tied to economic monopolies, exclusive and unrivaled trade with China and continued hostility with the U.S., the time-tested enemy which can be held responsible for all the mismanagements and domestic failures.

A growing number of Iranians intend to travel abroad for education or work. On any given day, there are nearly 1,000 applicants across several official test centres in Iran, taking the IELTS (International English Language Testing System) exam, a qualification that better enables Iranians to pursue an education or career in Europe, North America or Australia. They understand that to get visas from the foreign embassies in Tehran easily and to afford travel and living expenses, their country needs a robust economy, empowered through partnerships with the international community.

They have seen the example of Mexico: at a conference in Calgary in 2009, former Mexican President Vicente Fox said of his country’s nuclear plans, “We relinquished the nuclear energy, and are now one of the world’s top 10 economies.” Perhaps Iran will follow the Mexican instance.

*Kourosh Ziabari is an award-winning Iranian journalist, media correspondent and peace activist. This feature was written for Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations.

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