Recently, there was a brief flurry of media interest in Guantánamo after the New York Times published an article by Charlie Savage entitled, “Obama’s Plan for Guantánamo Is Seen Faltering.”

Savage noted how the Obama administration’s “fitful effort” to shut down the prison at Guantánamo “is collapsing again,” pointing out how, in his first six months as defense secretary, Ashton Carter “has yet to make a decision on any newly proposed deals to transfer individual detainees,” and claiming that, according to unnamed officials, this delay, “which echoes a pattern last year by his predecessor, Chuck Hagel,” is “generating mounting concern in the White House and State Department.” The most recent transfers out of Guantánamo — of six Yemenis resettled in Oman —  were in June, but they were part of deal negotiated under Hagel, which saw four other Yemenis rehoused in Oman in January.

Savage wrote that, in mid-July, President Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, “convened a cabinet-level ‘principals committee’ meeting on how to close the prison before the president leaves office in 18 months.” At that meeting, Carter “was presented with an unsigned National Security Council memo stating that he would have 30 days to make decisions on newly proposed transfers,” according to several officials familiar with the discussions.

However, the meeting apparently “ended inconclusively.” Carter “did not commit to making a decision on pending transfer proposals by a particular date, including the repatriation of a Mauritanian and a Moroccan” — mentioned as pending releases in a Washington Post article in April, which I discussed here — and Savage added that it was unclear whether Carter “accepted the 30-day deadline.”

Carter already has the most significant role in approving releases, because he has to sign assurances, submitted to Congress 30 days before any transfer, stating that any risks in releasing prisoners “have been substantially mitigated.” As Charlie Savage put it, “The law effectively vests final power in the defense secretary and makes him personally accountable if something goes wrong.”

With this in mind, it is increasingly worrying that Carter has not yet approved anyone for transfer out of Guantánamo, even though 52 of the remaining 116 prisoners have been approved for release — 44 in 2009-10 by President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, and eight more by Periodic Review Boards in the last year and a half. 43 of these men are Yemenis, and as Charlie Savage noted, because Yemen “is in chaos, the American government is trying to resettle them, not repatriate them.”

Robert M. Chesney, a law professor at the University of Texas who worked on detainee policy for the Obama administration in 2009, told the Times, “The chances of getting it done on Obama’s watch are getting increasingly slim. Whatever hope there is depends on quick progress in transferring as many detainees as possible.” He added, however, that “there is still going to have to be a deal with Congress for the remainder for long-term custody in the United States.”

After noting that President Obama “has called closing Guantánamo a ‘national imperative,’ arguing that it fuels anti-American sentiment and wastes money,” Charlie Savage related how, in a written statement, Lisa Monaco, the president’s top counter-terrorism adviser, said that the president remained “steadfast in his commitment” to close Guantánamo.

Monaco wrote, “This is a goal that the entire national security team is working together to fulfill — from the White House to the Departments of Defense, State and Justice as well as the intelligence community.” She added, “The safety of Americans is our first priority, and each transfer decision involves careful vetting and negotiation of detailed security arrangements. These deliberations take time because these are important decisions.”

Officials told Savage that inter-agency tensions with Ashton Carter had “not reached the levels they did by last fall with Mr. Hagel, who eventually resigned under pressure.” He added that, towards the end of his time in the job, Hagel “cleared a backlog of proposed deals, leading to more than two dozen transfers between November and January,” including the ten Yemenis sent to Oman.

Lee Wolosky, the new State Department envoy for Guantánamo closure, said that the government “was talking with multiple countries about ‘the transfer of a large number of detainees’ from the list” of cleared prisoners awaiting release. He added, “This process will ramp up further in the coming weeks, as reducing the detainee population through foreign transfers is a critical component to our broader efforts to close the detention facility.”

However, Ashton Carter still has to approve any deals, as Charlie Savage pointed out. His deputy, Robert O. Work, said in a statement that the Pentagon would “continue to work with the national security team and the Congress to close the facility in an efficient and responsible manner.”

In his article, Savage also discussed the ongoing opposition to the closure of Guantánamo in Congress, noting how, in February, at Ashton Carter’s confirmation hearing, two Republican senators “asked him to commit that he would not succumb to pressure by the White House over Guantánamo transfers. Cater’s response? “I understand my responsibilities under that statute, and I’ll, as in everything else I do, I’ll play it absolutely straight,” he said.

Charlie Savage also noted how the House and Senate Armed Services Committees are currently “meeting to resolve differences between their versions of the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which includes the detainee transfer restrictions.” He explained that the House bill “would further tighten the standards, most likely shutting down any more transfers,” while the Senate version “would largely extend existing restrictions,” and he also noted that the White House “has threatened to veto both versions.” I discussed these discussions in an article in  June, ‘The Path to Closing Guantánamo,” in which I also discussed an additional issue included in the Senate version — “a process, proposed by Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee, for closing the prison: The administration would submit a plan to Congress, and if both chambers approve it, the ban on bringing the remaining detainees to domestic soil would be lifted.”

Charlie Savage noted how Ashton Carter and Lisa Monaco “have promised to give Mr. McCain a plan,” although he noted that it was expected to be similar to previous proposals — “to transfer all lower-level detainees, while bringing those deemed too dangerous for release to a military prison on domestic soil.” He added, “Of the latter group, some would be prosecuted while the rest would be held as wartime prisoners, with periodic parole-like reviews.”

Savage also noted that the plan “has previously failed to persuade skeptics of Mr. Obama’s Guantánamo policy, particularly in the House,” and a Republican congressional staff member told him that President Obama’s critics “also wanted to see, as part of the plan, discussion of how law-of-war detention would be used to hold and interrogate terrorism suspects captured in the future.” However, as Savage explained, “The administration has developed a model of first interrogating new captives for a period for intelligence purposes, often on a ship, and then transferring them to civilian courts for prosecution,” and “considers that model to be one of its policy achievements.”

The day after the New York Times article was published, the administration followed up. As Reuters put it, the White House said “it was in the final stage of drafting a plan for closing the Guantánamo prison.”

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the administration “hoped to ‘short circuit’ opposition from Republicans in Congress who have blocked Obama from closing the prison. At a press briefing, Earnest said that the administration was “in the final stages of drafting a plan to safely, responsibly, the prison at Guantánamo and to present that plan to Congress.”

Time also covered the story, speaking to Daphne Eviatar of Human Rights First, who said the fact that the White House is working [on a] plan could be a good first step, but questions still remain as to whether or not Congress will be able to approve any plan given many members’ opposition to closing the prison,” as Time described it. As Eviatar said, “It’s still within the Administration’s power to do a lot to close the prison. [The White House] can’t keep blaming Congress, but Congress also needs to do more. It shouldn’t be this political football anymore.”

Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel at the ACLU, also spoke to Time. He said that the plan being sent to Congress would “constitute no more than an ‘irrelevant checking of the box,’” and added that President Obama “already has the executive authority to make detainee transfers happen without Congress.”

As Anders put it, “It’s not much different than plans that have already been sent and it’s not going to convince Congress to change its mind. Obama should tell the Secretary of Defense to approve the transfer of cleared detainees.”

Anders added that the lack of prisoner releases was the “number one obstacle” facing the president and that the Pentagon was “digging in its heels” on closing the prison.

In conclusion, it is difficult to see quite what the flurry of media activity signified. It is certainly to be hoped that the administration, with Sen. McCain, can come up with a plan that might be used to persuade Congress to allow the president to fulfil his promise to close Guantánamo before he leaves office, but it is impossible to say with a straight face, and with any optimism, that this can or will happen.

However, what can and should happen is the release of as many as possible of the 52 men already approved for transfer, including Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and other men mentioned in April — the Mauritanian Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz and the Moroccan Younus Chekhouri.

Ashton Carter should approve these men’s transfer as soon as possible.

To encourage defense secretary Carter, please feel free to call the Pentagon on 703-571-3343 to leave him a message.

While students from minority groups are over-represented in Norwegian special needs education, practically no children from these groups are diagnosed with dyslexia. As a consequence many miss out on important help. Researchers at the Norwegian Reading Centre are studying whether a computer game can pick up dyslexia in pupils from minority groups.

The reading game GraphoGame is adapted for individual pupils so that they experience mastery of a task and an adequate number of challenges. GraphoGame is a motivational and engaging game that gets the player to learn letters and words. The researchers involved in the Norwegian On Track project, which looks at the prevention of reading and writing difficulties, are now investigating whether this game can help pick up dyslexia in children from minority groups.

“If you are a minority language pupil and have dyslexia, there is a strong possibility that this will not be picked up. Despite the fact that pupils from minority groups are over-represented in special needs education, dyslexic pupils from these groups rarely have their problems thoroughly addressed and can therefore miss out on appropriate help,” said Professor Per Henning Uppstad of the Reading Centre at the University of Stavanger and one of the On Track researchers.

It appears that traditional methods of diagnosing dyslexia have not been adequate in picking up dyslexia in pupils from Norwegian minority groups, compared to those who experience reading and writing difficulties for other reasons. According to Uppstad, GraphoGame may make it possible to approach the issue of dyslexia in pupils from minority groups in a new way and at an earlier stage than what is currently the case.

“This can also be done while the pupil is busy with meaningful learning activities, but not in a test situation,” he said.

“When playing GraphoGame, the player’s choices are recorded. When we analyse how students work with the computer game, we believe we can identify whether a pupil has dyslexia, or whether there are other reasons why they are struggling with reading or writing Norwegian. Simply put, dyslexic pupils will have a different type of player profile and progression than those who are not dyslexic.”

GraphoGame was developed in Finland and is available in a number of languages. The game has also been carefully tested, and the learning outcomes have been well-documented, according to the researchers.

”It is important that the game is motivating, as pupils who struggle with reading generally pull back from reading activities. The challenge is to get these pupils to do more—a lot more—of what they struggle with,” said Uppstad.

The Norwegian version of the game is currently being tested. About 200 six-year-olds involved in the On Track project tested the game during the 2014–2015 school year.

“What we have seen to date is both promising and exciting in terms of further work. In the last ten years, we have seen few new approaches to identifying dyslexia. Traditionally, ideas about phonology and awareness of sounds were central features in making a diagnosis, and it is here that problems with pupils from minority groups arise, as they have more than one language. Our approach looks at the pupil’s learning progress over time. This approach is generally referred to as “learning analytics”. This means that ideas about phonology continue to be important, but we are approaching it from a different angle. If we succeed, we may gain a new understanding of dyslexia, which could also enable us to discover new things,” said Uppstad.

He added that, as the game is adapted to the individual, it can be positive for all pupils. “The game’s learning algorithm quickly takes the pupil to a level with an adequate number of challenges: not too many, not too few and not the same for everyone”.

The results of laboratory experiments involving Vitamin B3 by a team of NASA researchers support a theory that the origin of life may have been assisted by a supply of ‘biologically important molecules produced in space and brought to Earth by comet and meteor impacts’.

The new work, published last month online in Chemical Communications, follows earlier research by the team which revealed that vitamin B3 was present on ‘carbon-rich meteorites at concentrations ranging from about 30 to 600 parts-per-billion’. In that work, the team performed experiments that showed vitamin B3, which is found in foods such as fish, peanuts and sunflower seeds, could be made from an organic molecule called pyridine in carbon dioxide ice under conditions that simulated the environment in space.

The new experiments went further by adding water ice to the mixture and using amounts closer to what is expected for interstellar ices and comets. NASA reports that the team found that even with the addition of water, the vitamin could be made under a wide variety of scenarios where the water ice abundance varied by up to ten times.

Study author, Karen Smith of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland noted, ‘This result suggests that these important organic compounds in meteorites may have originated from simple molecular ices in space. This type of chemistry may also be relevant for comets, which contain large amounts of water and carbon dioxide ices. These experiments show that vitamin B3 and other complex organic compounds could be made in space and it is plausible that meteorite and comet impacts could have added an extraterrestrial component to the supply of vitamin B3 on ancient Earth.’

According to iflscience, the results have implications for the origins of life on Earth, because many structures essential to metabolism rely on vitamin B3. The website notes, ‘It might be possible that vitamin B3 from space helped to fast-forward the formation of life on Earth, and this could have implications for how life may form on other planets.’ Indeed, Perry Gerakines of NASA Goddard says that the experiments, which are part of broad research programme in the field of Astrobiology at the organisation, demonstrate an important possible connection between the complex organic molecules formed in cold interstellar space and those we find in meteorites.

The authors are now looking closely to the information that the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta mission, currently in orbit around Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, is returning. Rosetta’s observations could help to further substantiate the team’s theory, as Smith noted, ‘Rosetta could help validate these experiments if it finds some of the same complex organic molecules in the gases released by the comet or in the comet’s nucleus.’

Source: CORDIS

By Abdelelah Alkhatib, Amr Moussa, Mohammad Al-Sabah and Turki Al Faisal*

Four years ago, the Syrian people burst into the streets in a courageous quest for a future without tyranny, corruption or repression. Sadly, their quest led them into an infernal existence. The civil war brought on them by Syrian regime has slaughtered over 300,000 people and displaced more than ten million, or half the population.

The result has been the disintegration of society, the destruction of cities and towns, and the collapse of the economy. A once peaceful land is now a breeding ground for terrorists of myriad affiliations. And the state of Syria is but a shadow of the once thriving society that survived in vibrant and diverse harmony for centuries.

This tragic situation would not have happened had the Syrian regime acted wisely, responsibly, and realistically. It did not. The misery and decimation could also have been avoided had the international community fulfilled its duty and obligations to safeguard international peace and security. It did not. The Arab League, the international powers, the Syrian government — all have failed in their efforts to salvage the national unity of Syria by replacing the bloodshed and devastation with peace and security.

Yet everyone realizes that the status quo is untenable. Unless the world deals courageously with Syria, the atrocity within its borders will continue. Further, we will never defeat Daesh the Nusra Front and their likes as long as there is fertile soil from which they can resurrect and mutate into far more lethal breeds. Solving Syria is not only a humanitarian issue; it is directly related to a victory over terror.

The only way to solve Syria is to allow the Syrian people to decide their future. They must be given a voice and a venue away from the regime that has ravaged them. They must be offered deliberative immunity from the terror groups that have hijacked their aspirations. They must also be allowed to chart their future free from regional and international interference.

Fortunately, the Syrian nation is deeply rooted in history, and it has long been a pioneering participant in world civilization. In fact, there is an invaluable example cherished by the Syrians as a shining landmark of their political experience: the Syrian National Congress of 1919-1920, held after the liberation of Syria during World War I. Despite the fact that French occupation kept their aspirations from materializing, this convention remains a model for building a promising future for Syria.

Inspired by this history and hopeful for tomorrow, the authors of this article propose the convening of a second Syrian National Congress. It will be open to representatives of all Syrian political and social forces. If we can bring civil society organizations together with representatives of cities, towns, villages and tribes — both those who fight for and against the regime — we will create a formidable vehicle for weaving a harmonious and solid accord on a political system and constitution that can help the Syrian people save their society and realize their quest.

This National Congress should be based on and abide by the following principles:

• Since supporters and opponents of the regime agree that the Syrian people have the right to self-determination, all parties should be morally and legally bound to entrust their national destiny to the Syrian people by granting them the freedom to choose their representatives to the National Congress.
• In consultation with the Arab League, the Secretary General of the United Nations should gather all representatives of the Syrian people and convene such a National Congress. This will also entail the Security Council of the United Nations imposing, under Chapter 7 of the Charter of the United Nations, a cease-fire between the regime and opposition forces for six months in order that the Syrian people may choose their representatives.
• An independent international commission should be established for drawing up all necessary procedures whereby this National Congress may fully represent the Syrian people.
• This National Congress should meet in a neutral location for three months and none but the representatives should administer, set the agenda for or intervene in the proceedings or resolutions.
• Those who serve in the National Congress, as well as the international community, should show their support for the Syrian people by abiding by its outcomes, by pledging to provide all required assistance for rebuilding Syria, and by doing whatever is in their power to help the Syrian people heal their wounds and resume their participation with the global community.
• The Security Council should invoke Chapter 7 of the United Nations’ Charter to impose the National Congress’s implementations through agreed-upon means of compliance and to penalize the parties that do not abide by the results.

The Syrian regime has claimed that it supports such a convention, but only after it has vanquished terrorism. Yet this is putting the cart before the horse. If the regime truly wishes to benefit the Syrian people, it must support the proposal of convening a Syrian National Congress to rescue the country and its people from further disaster. We must NOT allow Daesh, the Nusra Front and other terrorist organizations to hold the future of Syria hostage.

The ongoing slaughter in Syria, the destruction of a once great civilization, and the spilling of desperate refugees into neighboring nations are a stain of disgrace on the conscience of all humanity. Allowing this state of affairs to continue deeply threatens the Middle East region and the wider global environment. We therefore implore The United Nations and its envoy, Stefan di Mistura, to dedicate their efforts to the realization of a second Syrian National Congress. It is the only way to save Syria.

*Abdelelah Alkhatib (former foreign minister of Jordan), Amr Moussa (former secretary-general of the Arab League), Mohammad Al-Sabah (former deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs of Kuwait), and Turki Al Faisal (former general intelligence director of Saudi Arabia).

By Timur Toktonaliev*

Kyrgyzstan’s president has defended a decision to cancel tax exemptions for United States assistance and withdraw diplomatic immunity from aid programme staff. The move is direct retaliation for a US human rights prize awarded to jailed activist Azimjon Askarov.

The US government has expressed regret at the Kyrgyz decision, pointing out that the assistance agreement signed in 1993 has allowed two billion dollars in aid to boost areas including healthcare, education, farming, banking and border security.

On July 16, Askarov was given the Human Rights Defender Award by the US State Department. The prize was accepted by Askarov’s son, as he himself is serving a life sentence handed down in autumn 2010 for inciting the ethnic violence that ravaged southern Kyrgyzstan in June that year. Rights groups said that he suffered torture and beatings in custody, and that the real reason for his arrest was that he filmed and circulated footage apparently showing Kyrgyz security forces assisting rather than stopping attacks on ethnic Uzbeks.

Kyrgyzstan’s foreign ministry said on July 17 the US award was cause for “surprise and deep concern”, and accused Washington of “trying to stir up ethnic hatred” in the country. Four days later, Prime Minister Temir Sariev signed the order terminating the agreement, under which US assistance was not subject to taxation or financial audits, and gave diplomatic immunity to the American nationals implementing aid programmes.

President Almazbek Atambaev repeated the suggestion that US influence was destabilising in July 27 remarks to the press.

He said that while Washington was always preaching the importance of an independent judiciary, “I’ve been pressured to take a decision to change Askarov’s sentence throughout the three years of my presidency.”

He went further than that, implying that Washington was somehow behind Kyrgyzstan’s periodic bouts of political turbulence.

“These attempts to sow division, chaos and destabilisation – managed chaos – can only be cause for indignation,” he said. “We can see who truly wants a peaceful, prosperous, stable Kyrgyzstan, and who wants there always to be something on fire here, something going up in smoke.”

Specifically, Atambaev suggested that the award given to Askarov, who is Uzbek, was part of a plot to promote separatism in the south of the country. “The Uzbek community is being implanted with the idea that things are bad for it in Kyrgyzstan,” he said.

The US government expressed disappointment at the decision, and its embassy in Bishkek issued a statement listing the many areas of assistance that had directly benefited the Kyrgyz government as well as its people over many years.

Kyrgyzstan, it said “receives the highest level of development assistance in Central Asia precisely because it shares the United States’ democratic values, seeking to create economic opportunity for its citizens, and to ensure a healthy and well educated populace”.

The statement said Washington was studying the “technical impact of this decision, which could put assistance programs that benefit the Kyrgyzstani people in jeopardy, including programmes to address violent extremism, increase economic growth and job creation, improve the educational system, and support the continued democratic development of Kyrgyzstan.

“We will continue to engage with and support the people of Kyrgyzstan.”

The Kyrgyz foreign ministry, meanwhile, acknowledged that US aid could be “curtailed or even wound down”, but argued that since cancelling the aid agreement was just retaliation for the “unfriendly” US stance on the Askarov case, the country did not deserve to be the subject of further counter-measures itself.

Since 2010, the authorities in Bishkek have been accused of pandering to a resurgent Kyrgyz nationalism rather than addressing the root causes of the June bloodshed. Human rights groups point out that most of those killed were Uzbeks, yet this one ethnic group was blamed for inciting the violence. The majority of those arrested and jailed afterwards, like Askarov, were Uzbek. (See Unfinished Business in Kyrgyzstan on the limited success of efforts to heal the wounds and ethnic divisions.)

In 2011, the State Department gave its Women of Courage award to Kyrgyzstan’s interim president, Roza Otunbaeva, for the part she played in steering the country through a difficult period which included a revolution as well as ethnic conflict.

Askarov has been the recipient of other awards in the past, but the Kyrgyz government did not respond nearly as fiercely, simply re-stating that he had been tried and found guilty.

Erica Marat, a long-term expert on Central Asian affairs, sees the decision to denounce the agreement as “hasty, risky and short-sighted”.

“The United States is one of Kyrgyzstan’s principal partners on human development and security. Derailing cooperation with [the US] will above all jeopardise the health and welfare of the population,” she told IWPR.

Marat, who is assistant professor in the Department of Regional and Analytical Studies at the National Defence University’s College of International and Security Affairs in Washington, argues that the Kyrgyz “president and foreign ministry are themselves destabilising the ethnic situation by sowing panic that the US is somehow trying to influence domestic affairs in Kyrgyzstan. The question of releasing Askarov has been raised by the US and European countries many times, but Bishkek has now decided to use it for its own purposes.”

MAKING RUSSIA HAPPY?

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kyrgyzstan has been a major recipient of Western aid and grants as the only state to develop a democratic system, and the most fertile environment for non-government groups.

For some years, Kyrgyzstan has been gradually backing away from Western influences as Moscow reasserts its dominance in the economic, security and political spheres. In May, Kyrgyzstan joined the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union. Last year, Atambaev kept an earlier promise not to renew the US military’s lease of the Manas airbase, used to resupply Western forces in Afghanistan since 2001. He has also signed major defence and financial assistance agreements with President Vladimir Putin.

Marat is among those who suspect that the US aid agreement was annulled out of a desire to please Moscow.

“The Askarov award is just a pretext for Atambaev to win support from the Kremlin ahead of the upcoming election,” Marat said, referring to parliamentary polls scheduled for autumn 2015.

Moscow-based Central Asia watcher Andrei Grozin argues that Kyrgyzstan’s actions will play well in Russia.

“It’s clear this is going down really well in Beijing and Moscow, of course not at official level,” said Grozin, who is head of the Central Asia and Kazakstan Department at the Institute of CIS Countries. “They are all saying ‘you’re great, you’re an independent country and you can put the global hegemonist in its place.”

Furthermore, Grozin argues that the Kyrgyz government is also appealing to a domestic audience.

“What could be better than showing you are tough and independent in dealing with a global superpower ahead of a parliamentary election?” he asked. “The vast majority of the population, the Kyrgyz in particular, see this as an attempt to demonstrate their independence, their political maturity, and their ability to defend their national interests.”

Grozin believes that since the closure of the Manas airbase, the US-Kyrgyz relationship has diminished in importance for both sides, but despite that, neither will let it fall apart.

“Everyone is having their say now, but later on, everything will carry on as usual. Kyrgyzstan is a very small, poor country, but it is important to all the external players, and the US is not going to abandon its partnership with Kyrgyzstan, regardless of how disappointed it is. Because if it takes offence and leaves, its place will be taken by the Russians and Chinese, which we can see happening even now,” he said. “It wouldn’t make sense for Kyrgyzstan to break off ties with the US, because in addition to losing opportunities for dialogue with one of the world’s leading centres of power, it would have less space for political manoeuvring and accessing various kinds of resources….. The Western vector will remain no matter what agreements are concluded or denounced.”

Bishkek-based political analyst Medet Tiulegenov disagrees with this view, arguing that by binding itself to Moscow so tightly, Kyrgyzstan has lost credibility elsewhere.

“This is a signal to our partner [Russia] that we are with you,” he told IWPR. “This situation reflects the growing confrontation between the West and Russia. The decision-makers and some politicians believe think that by doing this, they are on the same track as their geopolitical partner.”

“Politicians are binding the republic to Russia alone in pursuit of their own immediate interests,” he continued. That’s a message to the world that Kyrgyzstan has a unipolar policy, and this makes it weak and dependent in the eyes of these external powers.”

*Timur Toktonaliev is IWPR’s Kyrgyzstan Editor. This article was published at IWPR’s RCA Issue 767

By Brig. Anil Gupta*

The recent terrorist attack in Gurdaspur has confirmed three things beyond doubt. Firstly, in Pakistan it is General Raheel Sharif who calls the shots and not Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif as far as India-Pakistan relations are concerned. Secondly, the script of India-Pakistan relations does not fall in the realm of foreign policy but defence policy, and hence is formulated in GHQ Rawalpindi and not Islamabad. Thirdly, Pakistan Army unashamedly continues to use terror as an instrument of policy against India, disregarding international opinion and UN pronouncements.

The terrorists have also conveyed an unambiguous message that they can strike at will where and whenever they want. They are not afraid of extending the arc of terror to anywhere in India. They follow the Clausewitzian strategy of “Flowing Water”, like the water continues to flow by changing its course when confronted by an obstacle so will the terrorists be pushed into India unmindful of the resistance on the Line of Control or International Border. So, finding the troops in IB sector in Jammu-Kathua belt alert and better prepared after two consecutive terror attacks in the recent past, the focus has now shifted to the other border states. One must be clear that it is not a policy shift but just a change of strategy. Contrary to the popular belief, annexation of Kashmir to complete the unfinished agenda of Partition is not the ultimate aim of the enemy, but it is to ensure total disintegration of India to justify the “Two Nation Theory”. It is not merely an animosity between the two neighbours but a conflict of ideologies. Is the Nation not aware of this threat?

The TV footage of the encounter site made one wonder of the seriousness with which we are prepared to meet the threat. The scenes of policemen, inadequately dressed, with large pot bellies and behaving as if a scene for a Bollywood film is being shot, did not portray the professionalism of a force ready to thwart any challenge from a determined enemy. I do not blame the Punjab Police personnel for that but the government and senior police hierarchy. It is their responsibility to equip and train the police force. Sheer physical courage does not substitute the lack of proper training. The unprofessional way in which the policemen were huddled together in a straight line and trying to shoot at the terrorists, as well as the way the grenades were being hurled clearly displayed lack of proper weapon training and field craft – two basic necessities while fighting the enemy, in this case the terrorists. It is not the case only with Punjab Police but with most of the police forces in our country.

With Pakistan not afraid of spreading the arc of terror it is necessary that all our state police forces, particularly of border states, are properly equipped and trained to fight the terrorists. In all such cases, police will always be the first line of response till such time the other reinforcements like police commandos, NSG and the army arrive. The state police forces therefore should revise their equipment and training manuals as well as formulate the tactics to counter the terrorist threat.

The statement of the Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal blaming the centre for poor border management does not augur well for national security. The menace of terror has to be fought jointly by the states and the central government. It is unpardonable that despite being victim of terror for more than three decades now we yet do not have a National Anti-Terror Policy. Petty electoral politics and lack of vision continues to override national interests. Lack of unanimity between the centre and the states continues to overshadow a joint approach to tackle the menace.

All forces operating in a state have to work jointly and not in water-tight compartments. Acts of terror cannot be tackled like routine law and order problems. Terrorism has blunted the very thin line between external and internal threat, particularly when terrorism is used by a hostile neighbor as a means to achieve the desired ends. In such a scenario the states and the centre have to be on the same page to ensure national security with state police forces playing a much larger role than merely maintenance of law and order.

Like a nation has no choice in choosing its neighbours, it has no choice as far as the terrain on the border. The nation has to find the ways and means to defend its borders irrespective of the terrain. If the border is riverine or porous it should not be an excuse to let the terrorists infiltrate at will. A proper analysis of the terrain would determine the means required to secure it. But problems occur when fixed templates or mathematical formulae are used to determine the same. BSF needs to do a serious introspection to analyse the causes for frequent border intrusions and means to solve them. If required methods employed by the army on the LOC should be studied as they have proved more effective. An analysis of the modus operandi of the terrorists can also be useful. A study of the previous attacks would suggest that proximity of NH1 and NH 15 to the IB permits the terrorists to attack targets in wee hours of the morning between 4.30 to 5 a.m.

Highest state of alert needs to be maintained at this time. Patrolling on the highways and villages around them needs to be strengthened after mid-night. There is a need to involve the locals as well. I remember that during the ‘65 and ‘71 wars there used to be a system of “Thikri Pehra” (roster based volunteer watch duties), wherein all able bodied males in the village used to perform rotational watch duties. A similar practice backed up with modern technology needs to be introduced in the settlements and villages around NHs.

The possibility of global terrorist outfits like ISIS (Islamic State) and Al Qaeda joining hands with the ISI for achievement of the ultimate aim of Gajwa-I-Hind (greater Pakistan) cannot be ruled out. The fact that the elephant is in the room can no longer be brushed under the carpet. In that case the threat is more deadly and brutal. Our response has to be more professional and swift. But are we really prepared?

Once again the onus of blunting the initial attack in form of first line of resistance would fall on the state police forces. Our intelligence agencies also have to gear up to meet the challenge. Time and again they have been found wanting. We need to invest heavily in TECHINT (technical intelligence) as well as HUMINT (human intelligence). There is no substitute to that. A reorganization of the Home Ministry is also needed. We also need to create a separate dedicated ministry for homeland security as was done by the USA after the 9/11 attack. Modernisation, equipping and training of the police should be the foremost priority. The British Raj ethos of use of police to run the writ of the state needs to end. The primary job of police should be crime prevention and to ensure safety and security of its citizens. The centre has to accept the responsibility of capacity building.

It is popularly believed that the Narendra Modi government’s Pakistan policy is ambiguous and jerky. All initiatives taken so far have met with stiff resistance from the Pakistan Army, which has been successful in preventing resumption of bilateral dialogue. I am confident that Modi government has a well-defined strategy to deal with Pakistan and the terrorist threat emanating from there. India is committed to regional peace and as a responsible nation is conscious of her role in ensuring stability in the region and global peace. India can no longer be treated as a soft state. Appropriate lesson will be taught to the perpetrators of terror if they do not mend their ways.

*Brig Anil Gupta is a Jammu-based political commentator, security and strategic analyst. He can be contacted at anil5457@gmail.com

By Preety Sahu*

It is a happy beginning to the process of ending an old nightmare. Finally an end to the disputed Enclaves between India and Bangladesh, called the ‘Chitmahal’ that have kept thousands of its residents to live a life of hell for last many decades. Historically, the enclaves have been the result of a series of chess games between two kings of the area in the eighteenth century where villages were simply gambled away. After Independence, boundaries were drawn but the fate of these enclaves was never sorted. The Land Border Agreement (LBA) was signed by India and Bangladesh way back in 1974. While Bangladesh government ratified the deal in 1974, the agreement was not ratified by Indian parliament as it involved cession of territory which required constitution amendment before ratification. Hence they lived in the “no-man’s land” as ill-fated children of Asia’s border- problems in the post-colonial backdrop.

Identity is the most important aspect of our dignity as human beings and no one could have understood it better than the people living in the Indo-Bangladesh border enclaves. In absence of an identity of nationality, there remained a grave lack of access to even the most basic facilities, like sanitation, electricity, water or education. There are numerous untold stories of human suffering in the region. However the lives of approximately 60,000 people living in these 162 enclaves, who were anxiously waiting for the implementation of the deal, has changed. Across the border too, there are Indian enclaves within Bangladesh, where people were as miserable and desperate as those on this side of the border. Ray of hope came to them finally although a tad bit too late!

At the stroke of midnight on 31st of July 2015 – the residents of these enclaves gained a homeland after a ‘stateless’ existence of 68 years. Excited at this momentous development, the enclave dwellers swung into a celebratory mood. The LBA between India and Bangladesh during Prime Minister Modi’s visit has made it happen. As per the provisions of the Bill, India has exchanged 111 enclaves, measuring 17,158.2 acres, with Bangladesh and received 51 enclaves, covering 7,110 acres. There have been strong protests in some of the bordering Indian states opposing the agreement. Approximately 52,000 people have got Indian citizenship now amidst numerous speculations.

These newly-made citizens of India are very excited about their future under the Republic of India. They are hopeful of experiencing many positive and progressive economic, social and political changes in their lives. They hope ‘merger’ with India will also help fill vital infrastructure gaps. They expect their villages to get electricity connections and would no longer have to ‘trespass’ into India to charge their mobile phones. They would also get someone to address their grievances. These people are happy that they would not need fake certificates any longer to study in Indian schools, and that the villagers would finally be entitled to all the schemes of the Indian government. However this transformation from “identity-lessness” to Indian hood of the enclave people is not going to be easy. The uneasiness remains on the issue of Bangladeshi criminals and illegal migrants attempt to enter India, which is perceived as an obvious threat. Apprehensions are there that criminals from Bangladesh will sneak into India, taking advantage of the enclave and population exchange. On the other hand some Indian officials have received several complaints that people who wanted to relocate to India are being intimidated by local goons. Allegations are there that Bangladesh is trying to manipulate the list of people who intend to cross over to India for an Indian citizenship. Besides, there is strong possibility of socio-cultural clashes of the new citizens with their neighbors. Here the question of cultural tolerance and acceptability is likely to arise.

India is a land of diversities, frequent clashes amongst different groups in India is common, despite being under one national umbrella. Therefore, the question of acceptability towards the people of Chitmahal is going to be a crucial issue in near future. News of the clashes among groups from Chitmahal area and their immediate Indian neighbors has been received in the past. However, the current process can fulfill aspirations and take a true path only if the compensation packages offered become commensurate to the requirements of the beneficiaries. After getting independence, everything about the lives of the enclave people will change. So they rightfully deserve adequate compensation. Otherwise, things will be like ‘from fire to frying pan’. Also the legal status quo of these people has been changed through the EPIC cards provided by the Election Commission of India.

Central government has also assured full rehabilitation of the people. For those who will come to India from Bangladesh, the resettlement programme is going to take some time to materialize. While this process will only be resolved with time, the process of relocation is to end by June 20, 2016.

Amidst all kinds of speculations, now it is to be seen in what manner the new citizens of India will be received and how they will adapt themselves to the Indian environment.

*Preety Sahu is a Research Scholar at the School of International Relations, JNU, New Delhi. She can be reached at: preetysahu92@gmail.com

By Leonard Brecken

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”  — Benjamin Franklin, Silence Dogood, The Busy-Body, and Early Writings

I start with that quote because once the media, as well as politicians for that matter, have no accountability for actions or words then liberty will dissolve. Over the last few weeks I have witnessed another litany of lies that the media insists on putting forth. They come in the form of statements presented as facts to sway opinion while others are opinions quoted by others. Either way, the bias in talking down oil prices, reinforcing the “glut” that is fueled in part by misleading EIA and IEA data, is readily apparent.

Earlier in the year I documented half a dozen media reports which turned out to be 100 percent false. Now I expose another half dozen in just the past few weeks. Prices remain unchanged as a result of the largest drop in production in a year, as well as a large inventory draw this week via the EIA. The very fact that prices haven’t responded demonstrates my points. This comes despite the dollar index (UUP) over the last month remaining essentially flat while USO has fallen over 15 percent (so much for that relationship, except when the dollar rises right?)…

Even at the time of this article the dollar index is down 1 percent yet oil is down as well.

Here is a list of the latest lies:

1. Iran Agreement to flood market. FALSE. OPEC has even stated that the natural 1.0 to 1.5 million barrels per day (MB/D) rise in demand in 2016 will more than offset any production rises in Iran which, contrary to earlier reports, won’t come on line until early 2016. In addition, China will open up refining to third party, non-state-owned refineries which will reportedly add another 600,000 B/D in demand in 2016.

2. Iran floating storage will flood market. FALSE. As initially reported in the media, it was Iranian oil floating in storage but it now turns out to be low grade condensate as stated by PIRA on Bloomberg a few weeks back and then supported by tankers attempting to move inventory to Asia. Later media reports corrected earlier ones that the storage is in fact condensate while failing to report on its grade.

3. U.S. production resilient. FALSE. The latest EIA data refutes this as does data via EPS calls at Whiting Petroleum (WLL) & Hess Corporation (HES). Yes, some are increasing production such as Concho resources (CXO), but in the Bakken both companies confirm that 2H15 production will decline due to lower rigs and depletion. HES raised production for the year as a result of 1H15 production being higher than expected by some 5 percent. All in all, next week should see further production drops.

4. U.S. Inventory resilient. FALSE. EIA data would have fallen last week by some 4MB as it did this week ex import surges and continues to be overstated by “adjustments” made to production that amount to millions of barrels in daily production.

5. Cushing inventory fears revived. FALSE…see above.

6. OPEC supply will continue. The Saudis, as OPEC’s largest producer and largest contributor to growth in 2015, have already stated that they will reduce output by 200,000-300,000 by summers end. Yes true, OPEC as an entity won’t formally announce a cut but isn’t it misleading to report this?

I should note that WLL also refuted Goldman Sachs’ call that, at $60, U.S. production and rig count increases would resume. Before the most recent fall in oil, that call admittedly looked true as rigs did rise and Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD) was reportedly going to add 2 rigs a month until early 2016.

WLL, however, finally drew a line in the sand as they stated on their EPS call that they would not add a rig until 4-6 months after oil remained at $60 or better. PXD, if they are smart, will follow suit and, I suspect, the oil industry has finally come to realize that the “Trillion Dollar Swindle” in oil is very real and normal supply and demand dynamics no longer apply. The law of diminishing returns in more supply is real thanks to media hype.

Lastly, I wish to emphasize that freedom of speech not only comes as the freedom to express yourself, as I am doing here now, as others have done freely in the media, presenting both bullish and bearish cases. However, the number of statements that have been proven false and not retracted, as well as the obvious bias should raise serious questions about the role of media in the current oil bust. Which industry will be under attack next?

Meanwhile, an industry which by simple math cannot generate free cash flow (FCF) on $100 oil is disintegrating before our eyes, with millions affected by the fallout. Targeting individuals has become a regular theme in the media but now it appears to have moved to certain industries.

Below demonstrates that even on $100 oil shale isn’t self-sustainable on a FCF basis, never mind $50 oil.

Image URL: http://cdn.oilprice.com/images/tinymce/Breck1.jpg

Below is the estimated CF deficits for 2016 according to Jefferies with hedges:
Image URL: http://cdn.oilprice.com/images/tinymce/Breck2.jpg

How one on the sell side or media can argue for even lower oil to balance the market demonstrates the lack of detailed research and understanding of shale economics.

Source: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/Top-6-Myths-Driving-Oil-Prices-Down.html

Clashes broke out between Palestinian worshipers and and Israeli police at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Tuesday after an Israeli extremist attempted to raise the Israeli flag over the holy site, witnesses said.

Witnesses said that Palestinian worshipers asked Israeli police to stop the extremist but they were ignored.

Palestinian worshipers and compound security guards then stopped the extremist themselves and tore up the flag, witnesses said.

They added that the Israeli extremist assaulted the worshipers with a sharp implement, injuring two Palestinians identified as Muammad Badran and Suliman abu-Mayyala.

During subsequent clashes, Israeli police reportedly assaulted worshipers near the Chain Gate and detained Radwan Amr, Fadi Bakir, Raed Zughaier, Husam Sedir, and Majdi Abbasi.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque compound has seen rising tensions in recent days, with Jewish organizations seeking to celebrate unconfirmed reports that Israel is negotiating the reopening of the compound to non-Muslim worship.

At the end of June, International Crisis Group reported discussions between Israel and the Islamic Endowment that controls the mosque compound on allowing non-Muslim worship at the site, although the move has not yet been confirmed.

On Sunday, right-wing Jewish organizations were reported to have called for a “return to the Temple Mount,” urging participants to wear their Israeli army uniforms as they stormed the holy site.

Violent clashes the week before saw Israeli forces enter the mosque itself, causing the UN to issue a warning against “religious provocations” at the site.

Following Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, Israel has maintained an agreement with the Islamic Endowment not to allow non-Muslim prayer in the area.

Jewish prayer is allowed at the neighboring Western Wall, which is the last remnant of the Second Temple.

However, Israeli forces regularly escort Jewish visitors to Al-Aqsa, leading to anger among Muslim worshipers.

The situation is pressing. Turkey, having always expressed an ambivalent position on how to deal with the threat of Islamic State, has gone on the offensive against their mortal enemy, the Kurds. This is problematic, not least because the Kurds have also provided considerable fight in the battle against Islamic State and its assortment of forces.

The US-led coalition created to fight IS has attempted, with varying degrees of success, to assist the Kurdish YPG militia in northern Syria by way of airstrikes. Much of this is symbolic push rather than tangible gain, but the Kurds have taken it in their stride to make gains. But while this particular action was taking place, Ankara’s view towards its own Kurdish minority is one of wariness, ever watchful about the actions of the PKK. The creation of a Kurdish state is the last thing on the policy making books, especially if it is to be created along Syria’s northern border with Turkey.

The successes of the YPG have been striking. In recent months, they have managed to force Islamic State fighters from 2,000 square miles of territory in northern Syria. Administrative autonomy has been established in the three Kurdish cantons, something aided by the YPG victory at Tal Abyad last summer. Even as this is happening, Ankara has gotten busy bombing PKK positions in northern Iraq. This is the artificial difference between the ideological Kurd and the pragmatic one; the Kurd that will do business with Ankara; and one willing to fight it.

Effectively, Ankara finds itself at war with several groups, with a promise that it will also target the YPG if it gets too zealous and stroppy in victory. On July 23, Turkish forces, after breathing heavily on the border, finally joined the battle against the Islamic State with air and artillery strikes in Syria. Simultaneous access to the United States was also granted at the Incirlik and Diyarbakir airbases.

Turkey is now in the process of establishing a safe border zone in the northwest of Syria which will act as a buffer against Kurdish nationalist aspirations, though whether this receives full approval from the United States is still not clear. (The messages at this point suggest the affirmative.) Certainly, the message from Turkish officials is that Washington ought to abide by it, ostensible to protect other ethnicities that would, it is argued, suffer under a Kurdish dominated administration.

“That’s the red line,” claimed a Turkish official in the Wall Street Journal. “There are almost no Kurds in the area that would be the ISIL-free zone. Forcing the issue would trigger a new wave of ethnic cleansing, which is unacceptable to us.” When Turkish officials refer to the book of ethnic cleansing, history is truly out of joint.

Domestically, the police state is abuzz with arrests of ISIS sympathisers and suspected PKK members. The Erdogan government has managed to steal US support to effectively right its own domestic ills, notably the electoral advances made by the Kurdish People’s Democratic Party. Having failed to secure the mandate that would have given him near despotic powers, Erdogan has had to find other schemes to trample on democratic sentiment.

Targeting the PKK nad dealing with ISIS are not seen as mutually exclusive, and the boutique of paranoid ideologies is being frequented by such individuals as the presidential foreign advisor Ibrahim Kalin. “Although acting with different motivations, ISIS and the PKK both employ similar tactics and goals to maintain their presence in the region, carrying out terrorist attacks.” Like Siamese headed monsters, ISIS and the PKK sought to manipulate the political process for military gain. “No democracy can allow that. Terrorism must be opposed in all its forms whether it is ISIS or PKK terrorism.”

The PKK is treated as a radical, anti-democratic body that would perish under transparency. But this is always Kalin’s point: Turkey cannot abide by such an organisation. Then comes the domestic sting: that the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) is doing little to actually condemn the activities of the PKK. “They condemn the deaths without making any reference to the PKK despite the fact that the PKK has claimed responsibility for them.”

The interventions by Ankara, now cloaked by Washington’s backing, are richly cynical in calculation. The targeting of ISIS positions is being undertaken in a way that may weaken the body without actually benefiting the Kurds. In joining the broader fight, the goal here is to keep the lid on the Syrian Rojava canton, stomping on any prospects that a sovereign Kurdish state might develop.

The true beef Turkey has here is not with the caliphate designs of Islamic State, but its deeply visceral dislike and suspicion of Kurdish ambitions. In this, it has relied on Washington’s meddlesome desire to rally in a manner that is undermining the very fighters that have proven to be most effective. “In effect,” argued Stephan Richter of The Globalist, “the Americans have managed to sell out the Kurds, perhaps Syria’s only true ‘freedom fighters’, as they proved to be in the defence of Kobane.”

While the fine print of the latest multilateral agreement on the Iranian nuclear question has been projected by US President Barack Obama in quite modest terms of stopping Tehran in its tracks of making the atom bomb, the author envisions a possible regional scenario of economic benefits for Iran as well as Pakistan, Afghanistan and India.

By Shahid Javed Burki*

In reporting on the agreement between Iran and six leading powers on 14 July 2015, The New York Times found a parallel between what the United States President Barack Obama had achieved in 2015 and what President Richard Nixon was able to do 40 years earlier. For both, their actions represented giant leaps of faith. Nixon’s travel to Beijing and his meeting with Chairman Mao Zedong brought China out of the closed wall it had erected around itself. Mao died a few years after the Nixon visit and was later succeeded by the reformist Deng Xiaoping, who succeeded in initiating economic growth at an unprecedented pace in human history. In about four decades, the Chinese economy has increased 35-fold. By late-2014, according to International Monetary Fund, China had overtaken the United States and become the world’s largest economy. President Nixon could not have imagined that his one action would bring about such a revolution in the structure of the global economy.

If the initiative taken by President Obama is Nixonian in scope and impact, what would be its result? The first thing that will undoubtedly happen is that it would end Iran’s forced isolation. In that respect there is a parallel between “Nixon in China” and “Obama with Iran”. The initial phase of isolation of Iran was self-imposed. The Muslim clerics who founded the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 believed that, to protect their revolution, they had to keep their country and society away from the rest of the world. This isolation was reinforced when the Western powers imposed stiff sanctions on Iran to force it to abandon its perceived plans to acquire nuclear weapons. The sanctions worked.

The Deal

The heavy toll they took on the Iranian economy and the sufferings the citizenry has had to bear persuaded the Islamic regime to sign this agreement with the United States and its negotiating partners. Tehran has accepted conditions which will make it impossible for it to develop nuclear bombs for the next ten years – the period during which time it will not be able to purify uranium to the weapons-grade level. Nor will it be able to use plutonium for making nuclear bombs. The agreement has ensured that what is called the “break-out” period – the time taken to make a bomb once the decision is made to go that route – is at least one-year long. That will be the case if Iran decides to walk out of the agreement.

What is the content of the deal? The number of centrifuges Iran has installed and has been operating round the clock to refine uranium will now be reduced by two-thirds to 5,060; the uranium stockpile will be almost totally eliminated; enrichment levels are to be capped at 3.7 percent, very far from bomb-grade; the potential route to weapons-grade plutonium at Arak will be disabled; international inspection will be doubled, and in President Obama’s words, will be extended “where necessary,” “when necessary”. In return for all this, Iran gets a phased elimination of most sanctions, the large inflow of its capital that has been frozen in foreign bank accounts, and the end to its pariah status.

The Reaction

In the months to come, especially after the deal has worked its way through the US Congress, there will be debate – some informed, some emotional – about the longer-term consequences of the historic argument with Iran. As expected Israel – in particular Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s Prime Minister – came out hitting hard even before the ink was dry after the parties had signed the long document. It had taken the group P5+1, meaning the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (Britain, China, France, Russia and United States) and Germany, 20 months to negotiate the deal. Netanyahu called it a “stunning historical mistake”. A minister in the Netanyahu cabinet went further and called the day of the deal “one of the darkest days in world history”. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who until 2005 was the Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador in Washington, said the deal would wreak havoc in the Middle East, and he accused President Obama of knowingly making a bad agreement. Even the Republican candidates for the US presidency invoked memories of British leader Chamberlain in Munich and the Second World War; Jeb Bush called this Iran deal an appeasement.

That Israel was worried about the impact of the Iran deal was conceded by President Obama at a news conference at the White House on 16 July 16,two days after the Vienna agreement was reached. “You have [in Iran] a large country with a significant military, that has proclaimed that Israel shouldn’t exist, that has denied the Holocaust, that has financed Hezbollah”, he acknowledged. “There are very good reasons why Israelis are nervous about Iran’s position in the world generally”. But the president insisted that “those threats are compounded if Iran gets nuclear bombs”. He chastised the Israeli leadership for ignoring the facts of the deal and for failing to offer alternatives. He should also have mentioned – something I do at the end of this piece – that the deal will unleash a new dynamic that will alter the Middle Eastern and Asian landscape.

In fact, alternatives were offered, some of them implicit in the statements made by the critics. Israel, under Netanyahu, had all along favoured the military option. At one point it threatened that it could go alone even if the Americans were not prepared to lend it support. Then there were those who argued that harsh sanctions had brought Iran to the negotiating table; making the sanctions harsher would have elicited more favourable responses. These critics – several of them in the Sunni part of the Arab world – agreed with the Obama administration that a well-thought-out regime of inspections was the only way to prevent Iran from going nuclear. In their view, the inspection protocol now agreed upon is not rigorous enough. In that context, Obama’s civil exchange with King Salman of Saudi Arabia provides some insights into what the United States and Saudi Arabia have in mind about the deal.

The statement issued by the White House after Obama’s conversation with the Saudi monarch on 16 July said that the president shared “details of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) regarding Iran’s nuclear program agreed with the P5+1, the European Union and Iran…The president affirmed that it will verifiably prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon by cutting off all the potential pathways to a bomb while ensuring the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear [programme] going forward. The president underscored that the United States is committed as ever to working with our Gulf partners to counter Iran’s destabilizing activities in the region and promote stability as well a resolution of the region’s crises. Consistent with the productive discussion the president conducted with the Gulf cooperation Council (GCC) members at Camp David in May, he reiterated the U.S. support in building the capabilities of our regional partners”. The Camp David meeting with the GCC members was called by Obama, anticipating an Iran deal, but some of the more important heads of state, including the Saudi king, had chosen not to attend. Those who were absent did not want to be talked into accepting the gamble that the American president seemed bent on making.

The Saudi embassy in Washington issued its own statement after the Obama-Salman conversation. “The Kingdom has always been in favor of an agreement between P5+1 group and Iran that would prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. The agreement must include a specific, strict and sustainable inspection regime of all Iranian sites, including military sites, as well as mechanism to swiftly re-impose effective sanctions in the event that Iran violates the agreement…[S]ince Iran is a neighboring country, the Kingdom is looking forward to build the best of relations in all fields on the principle of good neighborliness and non-interference in the affairs of others”.

From the scores of commentaries that appeared soon after the 14 July agreement was signed, two provide good indication of the diversity of opinion about President Obama’s initiative. According to Daniel Twinning who served in the US Secretary of State’s policy planning staff under President George W Bush and was foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain, “Obama and his team believe that a nuclear deal with Iran will allow the U.S. to focus its diplomatic and strategic energies on Asia, a region that will do more to determine the history of this century than the morass in the Middle East. But if the deal liberates Iran to cause more regional mayhem, the U.S. will have less time and energy, not more, to manage its intensifying strategic competition with China in Asia. Japan, India, and other regional states will take note, and will make their own arrangements – just as America’s allies in the Middle East are now doing. The results may produce exactly the proliferation, proxy wars and great power conflicts that the Iran deal is designed to prevent”.2

But Roger Cohen, a columnist of The New York Times, expressed an entirely different point of view. “If implemented, the agreement constitutes the most remarkable American diplomatic achievement since the Dayton Accords put an end to the Bosnian war two decades ago. It increases the distance between Iran and a bomb as it reduces the distance between Iran and the world. It makes the Middle East less dangerous by forestalling proliferation. In a cacophonous age of short termism, it offers a lesson of stubborn leadership in pursuit of a long-term goal”.3

Iran and Shiite World

The full impact of the deal with Iran cannot be understood unless we bring into the discussion the place and role of the Shiite community in Asia and the Middle East. Estimates vary, but it would be safe to say that the world has 225 million people who follow the Shiite faith of Islam. This is about 14 percent of the global Muslim population. What makes this group different from mainstream Islam is its geographic concentration. Iran is the hub of the sect; it has almost 37 percent of world’s Shiite people. Including its neighbours, Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan and Azerbaijan – the share of the Shiite population in Iran and its immediate neighbourhood is almost 70 percent of the total. Also, the remaining large Shiite communities are not very distant from Iran. In other words, the Sunni-Shiite conflict is in essence a Middle East and West Asia problem. (See the Table below.)

The policies adopted by the Iranian regime led by the clerics who have administered Iran since the 1979 revolution have exacerbated the Shiite-Sunni divide, but Tehran is not entirely responsible for the confrontation between the two largest sects of Islam. Saudi Arabia has also been deeply involved. This conflict has been around from the days of the founding of Islam as a religion. However, its present form can be traced back to the emergence of the Wahabi Islam in Saudi Arabia. It has promoted an extremely conservative version of the religion; indeed treating the Shiite sect as heretics. After the riches that arrived in the Kingdom following the several-fold increase in the price of oil, the Saudis began to use their wealth to promote Wahabism in other parts of the Muslim world. They targeted in particular the countries around Iran. The war against the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan in 1979, and the strategy crafted by the United States to push Moscow out, provided Saudi Arabia with an opportunity to flex its religious muscle. It used the Afghan conflict as a way of extending its influence in the world around Iran. Pakistan was ripe for the success of such an effort. It was then governed by President Ziaul Haq, a military ruler and a devout Sunni Muslim. He had already begun to Islamise Pakistan, and the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan offered him an opportunity to further his cause. Pakistan helped create half a dozen groups of mujahideen (Islamic fighters) who, after a decade-long hard work, succeeded in pushing the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. They also established extremist Islam as the preferred faith in several parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Especially affected were the tribal belts on both sides of the border. In both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Shiite communities came under attack by the forces of Sunni extremism.

The mix of politics and economics is almost always the reason behind most deep conflicts. At this time, in the western part of Muslim world – the parts that include the Arab world and West-, Central- and South-Asia – two sets of youth are alienated from the systems in which they live. One group is troubled by the authoritarian regimes in many areas in this part of the Muslim world. They were behind the Arab Spring of 2011 that toppled four long-enduring regimes – in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen. They also launched the revolt against the repressive and authoritarian regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. It was the entry of Iran into the conflict that brought the Sunni-Shiite conflict into play, but that did not mark the beginning of the entry of religion into the politics of conflict or induce the Sunni youth to revolt. This second process of radicalisation of the Arab youth started with the recent American invasion of Iraq, when the “viceroy” Washington put in place in Baghdad took a number of actions that eventually led to the emergence of the Islamic State (IS) as a potent political force. The Sunni-dominated Baath Party was banned, and the Sunni-dominated military was disbanded. The final nail in the Sunni political coffin was driven by the American-encouraged rise of a committed Shiite political leader, Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki. He used the power of the state to curb the Sunnis in his country. The stage was thus set for the arrival of the Islamic Caliphate in Iraq and Syria which openly and effectively recruited the young alienated by Iraq’s Shiite regime.

The Outcome

Most analysts agree that it will take 10 to 15 years before the impact of the 14 July deal with Iran becomes fully apparent. The sceptics paint a dark picture. They are of the view that once the period of vigilant and intrusive inspection is over, Iran will go quickly nuclear, acquire several weapons and the systems to deliver them, and begin brandishing the new weaponry to have its way in the region. It would thus become a dominant player in the region, but its rise will be challenged by the Sunni governments. Not only that. Israel, perhaps supported by the Sunni monarchies, could opt for a military approach to contain Iran.

Militarisation of the area, already underway, will pick up pace. The July agreement could, therefore, lose the ‘bite’ to influence Tehran. A bit more tightening of the sanctions-screw could have yielded more rewards – the objective should have been to eliminate altogether any probability of Iran going nuclear, not just postponing it. So runs this argument.

It is interesting that, in the long interview President Obama gave to the journalist Thomas L Freidman to explain why he had used so much of his political capital to sign the deal with Iran, he focused entirely on the impact it would have on curtailing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. He brushed aside the belief that the deal would have consequences beyond the nuclear field. He limited the scope of the impact, in order to focus on the criticism that he had not negotiated an airtight agreement. “Don’t judge me on whether this deal transforms Iran, ends Iran’s aggressive behavior toward some of its Arab neighbors or leads to detente between and Shiites and Sunnis. Judge me on one thing: Does this deal prevent Iran from breaking out with a nuclear weapon for the next 10 years and is a better outcome for America, Israel, and our Arab allies than any other alternative on the table?” 4

Iran is a complex country located right in the middle of a highly complex world. It is the world’s largest Shiite nation surrounded by a number of Sunni states, some of them openly hostile to it. It has reacted to the sanctions imposed on it by the West and the United Nations by supporting a number of militias, including the Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Mehdi Army in Iraq. It is also a strong supporter of the beleaguered regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. While the Sunni monarchies of the Gulf, in particular Saudi Arabia, were openly suspicious of Iran’s intentions in the region, they found themselves on the same side as Tehran in dealing with the rise of the extremist Islamic Caliphate, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

On its eastern and southern borders are Afghanistan and Pakistan; the former highly unstable, the latter on the verge of becoming one. Both have large Shiite populations. Pakistan, after Iran, is the second largest Shiite nation. Afghanistan has sizeable Shiite minorities, living in the areas bordering Iran and Central Asia. In both these countries, the Shiite sect had co-existed with the majority Sunni community before the Saudis found a way of supporting Sunni extremism in both cases.

Islamabad came under considerable pressure from these states to join their campaign against the rebels in Yemen. Pakistan’s response was clever and well thought-through. The matter was put before the National Assembly that turned down the request. This drew an angry response from the leaders of the Gulf States; one of them – a minister from the United Arab Emirates – threatened to take unspecified action against Pakistan. His statement drew an angry response from the authorities in Pakistan.

How will the Arab monarchies react to the agreement? They may decide to aid the forces of Sunni extremism in some of the countries in which they have influence. Pakistan is one such country. There are numerous madrassahs in Pakistan that receive funds from the Arab states. Several of these are involved in sponsoring extremist activities in Pakistan. That this was happening was recognised by the Pakistani authorities when they drafted the National Action Plan to counter terrorism. However, because of stiff opposition from some of those in the Islamic community who were benefitting from the flow of money from the Arab world, the government was slow to act; it did not take the promised action.

But the positive impact of the deal on Pakistan will far outweigh some of the negative consequences. With the deal in place, Pakistan should be able to move forward with the construction of Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline. Iran has in place a pipeline up to its border with Pakistan. However, Islamabad was reluctant to move on its side of the border because of the fear of American retaliation. Now that Tehran has been promised the easing of sanctions, that fear is gone. In fact, it is possible that India may also join the project. It too is desperate to receive a regular and reliable flow of gas.

With Iran gradually re-joining the international economic system, Pakistan can once again begin to think of creating a regional association that would include the non-Arab Muslim states such as Afghanistan, Turkey and the Central Asian nations. The Chinese will be receptive to the idea; they have already committed large sums of money to Pakistan to construct the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. A system of roads linking this region to the CPEC should become not only possible but economically attractive. In short, the Iran deal may prove to be a game-changer for the Middle East and Central Asia and South Asia, too.

I visualise an outcome of the deal that is more far-reaching than the one suggested by President Obama in his Friedman interview. Let us speculate what could result from the deal 15 years hence, by the year 2030. That will be the time by when the restrictions imposed by the deal on Iran would have run their course, and the country will be required to abide only by the framework which it had agreed to when it signed the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT). By that time, Iran would have fully established itself as a responsible and political regional power. The economy would have revived; it would not only have overcome the slack resulting from years of sanctions, but also begun to make full use of its enormous energy resources and human resource potential. Growing at an average of 10 percent a year – up from the depressed growth rate of only 3.0 per cent at this time – its economy would have quadrupled in size, reaching total output of US$ 1.75 trillion at today’s prices. It would have added another 22 million to its population, reaching over 100 million. Per capita income would have reached US$ 17,500. By 2015, the rate of unemployment had reached the worrying level of 20 percent, affecting especially women (20.3 per cent unemployed) and youth (24 per cent unemployed). Economic growth and restructuring of the economy will bring down the unemployment rate to 5 percent. It was the high rate of unemployment that no doubt persuaded the regime to agree to the terms of 2015 deal with P5+1.

Although Iran has the second largest reserves of natural gas and the fourth largest oil reserves, it would have diversified its exports away from energy products to manufacturing and modern services. Nonetheless, it will become the central hub of intra-continental gas and oil pipelines, linking not only its own energy fields but also with those of Central Asia, China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, now confined to the cold-storage, would have been revived and linked with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Four non-Arab Muslim states – Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan – will probably establish a sub-regional economic and trading arrangement.

In all likelihood, the power of the Iranian clerics would have declined, with the youth becoming politically and economically more assertive. Religion will no longer be the basis of foreign relations; in fact, Tehran and Ankara would probably work together to overcome the Islamic extremists in the Levant. Iran by then could become a close partner with the United States; Tehran and Washington could work to lead the present-day restive Middle East, Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan towards relative stability.

In 2030, historians will look back and credit Barack Obama for being bold and politically astute to have used negotiations rather than persistent warfare to stabilise an area that had not known peace or sustained economic development for more than a century. Over the first six years of his presidency he had given a number of public statements which, taken together, could be interpreted as spelling out the Obama doctrine. Having succeeded a president who was quick to throw his country’s forces in harm’s way to solve difficult problems, Obama had a strong a preference for negotiations. He and his administration negotiated hard to bring Tehran to the negotiating table and then work out a deal to delay by at least a decade the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran. With Iran inducted back into the global system, there may be little reason for it to go nuclear. The deal, in other words, will have many consequences, most of them overwhelmingly positive. The reason President Obama was not willing to make the prediction that his deal with Iran could lead to a host of positive outcomes was calculated to win support for a game-changing agreement with a power that that, for decades, had come to be treated with a great deal of suspicion. He is perhaps of the view that history should be the final judge of his bold move; to make such a claim himself would serve little purpose.

About the author:
*1.Mr Shahid Javed Burki is Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), an autonomous research institute at the National University of Singapore. He can be contacted at sjburki@gmail.com. The author, not the ISAS, is responsible for the facts cited and opinions expressed in this paper. During a professional career spanning over half a century, Mr Burki has held a number of senior positions in Pakistan and at the World Bank. He was the Director of China Operations at the World Bank from 1987 to 1994, and the Vice President of Latin America and the Caribbean Region at the World Bank from 1994 to 1999. On leave of absence from the Bank, he was Pakistan’s Finance Minister, 1996-1997.

Source:
This article was published by ISAS as ISAS Special Report Number 27 (PDF)

Notes:
2. Daniel Twinning, “Iran deal could undercut US pivot to Asia,” Nikkei Asian Review, July 16, 2015. 3. Roger Cohen, “The door to Iran opens,” The New York Times, July 16, 2015.
4. Thomas L. Friedman, “Obama makes his case on Iran Nuclear deal”, The New York Times, July 14, 2015.

On 1 August 2015, the Helsinki Final Act, the birth certificate of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) turned 40. Today, however, it is not clear that the current leaders of the 57 governments of the OSCE have the wisdom or skills to lead to a renewal of the Security Community. Very likely, as in the period between the events of 1968 and the start of government negotiations in 1972, there will need to be non-governmental voices setting out new ideas and creating bridges between people.

By Rene Wadlow*

On 1 August 2015, the Helsinki Final Act, the birth certificate of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) turned 40.  The Final Act signed in Helsinki’s Finlandia Hall was the result of three years of nearly continuous negotiations among government representatives meeting for the most part in Geneva, Switzerland as well as years of promotion of better East-West relations by non-governmental peace builders.

Basically one can date the planting of the seeds that grew into the OSCE as 1968 in two cities:  in Paris and Prague.  The student-led demonstrations in Paris which sent shock waves to other university centers from California to Berlin, showed that under a cover of calm, there was a river of demands and desires for a new life, a more cooperative and creative way of life.

In Prague, the Prague Spring of internal reforms and demands for a freer European society was met by the tanks of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in August. Yet some far-sighted individuals saw that 1968 was a turning point in European history and that there could be no return to the 1945 divisions of two Europes with the Berlin Wall as the symbol of that division.  Thus, in small circles, there were those who started asking “Where do we go from here?”

A security community – a halfway house

In 1957, Karl W. Deutsch (1912-1992) published an important study Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Princeton University Press). Karl Deutsch was born into a German-speaking family in Prague in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  His family was active in socialist party politics and became strongly anti-Nazi. Seeing what might happen, Deutsch and his wife left Prague in 1939 for the USA where he became a leading political science-international relations professor.  I knew Karl Deutsch in the mid-1950s when I was a university student at Princeton, and he was associated with a Center on International Organization at Princeton. It was there that he was developing his ideas on types of integration among peoples and States and that he coined the term “security community” to mean a group of people “believing that they had come to agreement on at least one point that common social problems must and can be resolved by processes of peaceful change.”  For Deutsch, the concept of a security community could be applied to people coming together to form a State: his approach was much used in the 1960s in the study of “nation building” especially of post-colonial African States. A “security community” could also be a stage in relations among States as the term has become common in OSCE thinking.  For Deutsch, a security community was a necessary halfway house before the creation of a State or a multi-State federation. Deutsch stressed the need for certain core values which created a sense of mutual identity and loyalty leading to self-restraint and good-faith negotiations to settle disputes.

Core values established and quickly disappeared

During the negotiations leading to the Helsinki Final Act, a set of 10 core values or commitments were set out, sometimes called the OSCE Decalogue after the “Ten Commandments”.  “Sovereign equality, respect for the rights inherent in sovereignty and non-intervention in internal affairs” set the framework as well as the limitations of any efforts toward a supranational institution. The two other related core values were “the territorial integrity of States and the inviolability of frontiers.”

The core values were not so much “values” as a reflection of the status quo of the Cold War years.  By the time that the Charter of Paris for a New Europe  was signed in November 1990, marking the formal end of the Cold War, “territorial integrity and the inviolability of frontiers” as values had disappeared.

The 1990s saw the breakup of two major European federations − that of Yugoslavia and the USSR.  Most of the work of the OSCE has been devoted to the consequences of these two breakups.  Yugoslavia broke into nearly all the pieces that it could with a few exceptions.  I had been asked to help support the independence of Sandzak, a largely Muslim area in Serbia and part of Montenegro. I declined, having thought at the time that with a few modifications the Yugoslav federation could be kept together. I was wrong, and the OSCE is still confronted by tensions in Kosovo, renewed tensions in Macedonia, an unlikely form of government in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as social issues of trafficking in persons, arms, drugs and uncontrolled migration.

The breakup of the Soviet Union has led to a full agenda of OSCE activities.  The republics of the Soviet Union had been designed by Joseph Stalin, then Commissar for Nationalities so that each republic could not become an independent State but would have to look to the central government for security and socio-economic development.  Each Soviet republic had minority populations though each was given the name of the majority or dominant ethnic group called a “nationality”.

With the breakup of the Soviet Union, there have been recurrent issues involving the degree of autonomy of geographic space and the role of minorities.  The conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh had already started before the breakup, but continues to this day with its load of refugees, displaced persons and the calmer but unlikely twin, the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic.  Moldova and Transdniestria remain a “frozen conflict” with a 1992 ceasefire agreement. The armed conflicts in Chechnya  and violence in Dagestan highlighted conflicts within the Russian Federation.  The 2008 “Guns of August” conflict over South Ossetia between Russia and Georgia showed that autonomy issues could slip out of control and have Europe-wide consequences.

A cloudy cristal ball

Predictions, especially about the future, are always difficult.  In 2013, the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, the then Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, Leonid Kazhara, said “ We wish to contribute to the establishment of the Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian security community free of dividing lines, conflicts, spheres of influence and zones with different levels of security…There is a pressing need to, first of all, change our mindsets from confrontational thinking to a co-operative approach.  I am confident that Ukraine, with its rich history, huge cultural heritage and clear European aspirations is well placed for carrying out this mission.”

Today, Ukraine’s rich history has a new chapter, recreating old dividing lines and spheres of influence.  The shift in “ownership” of Crimea indicates that “territorial integrity of States” is a relative commitment.  The large number of persons going to Russia as refugees and to west Ukraine as internally-displaced persons recalls the bad days of displacement of the Second World War. NATO has dangerously over-reacted to events in Ukraine.

It is not clear that the current leaders of the 57 governments of the OSCE have the wisdom or skills to lead to a renewal of the Security Community.  Yet when one looks at the photos of the government leaders who did sign the Helsinki Final Act 40 years ago, there are few faces indicating wisdom or diplomatic skills so perhaps all is not lost today.  Very likely, as in the period between the events of 1968 and the start of government negotiations in 1972, there will need to be non-governmental voices setting out new ideas and creating bridges between people.

Rene Wadlow is President and a Representative to the United Nations, Geneva of the Association of World Citizens.

The recent launch of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a Chinese initiative, showcases Beijing’s rise as an economic powerhouse in the context of the perceived failure of the US-sponsored World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to meet the aspirations of the developing countries. Yet, the AIIB’s success will depend on the equation between the bank’s leading stakeholders, China and India, who are otherwise competitors.

By Sajjad Ashraf*

The formal launch of China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in Beijing on 29 June 2015 may be looked upon as the beginning of the Chinese century. Four out of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council have joined; eighteen out of the 34 members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are in; all ASEAN countries have entered. Five out of the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are in, and six out of the eight South Asian states have joined.2 In co-opting major European economies despite the dissuasion from the United States, China has dealt a blow to America’s dominant status in the world; this increases China’s clout in the international economic arena.

Significantly, China, India, Russia and Germany are the four biggest contributors to the AIIB which has an initial capitalisation of US$ 50 billion, which will be raised to US$ 100 billion later.3 With 26.06 percentage of voting rights, China will be able to exercise considerable control over the Bank’s operations. But the diverse group of countries that have signed up will keep China in check. India reportedly gets the second spot in leadership.

With the agreement on International Monetary Fund reforms stalled in the US Congress since 2010, China is frustrated at the inability of the existing financial order to accommodate its ability and ambitions.

By 2050 Asia will have eleven countries amongst the top twenty-five in the world in GDP (Purchasing Power Parity) terms.4 Asia is thirsty for infrastructure funding. The Asian Development Bank (ADB), in a 2010 report, estimated that Asia would need US$ 8.22 trillion for infrastructure development in the coming decade.5 The World Bank (WB) and the ADB have neither the capacity nor the will to meet this demand. China’s US$ 3.45 trillion6 worth of foreign exchange reserves and its political will can come in handy for Asia.

After the unsuccessful US’ opposition, reflected in its chiding of its allies upon their joining the AIIB, the US and Japan will find their ability to influence Asia further curtailed. China’s success in getting more countries on board than the pundits had predicted an erosion of US leadership in the international financial system. When Australia, which US Secretary of State John Kerry personally pleaded with to stay out, became the first country to sign the Articles of Agreement, the “United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system” said Larry Summers, former US Treasury Secretary. With a US$ 700 million stake, Australia is the fifth largest contributor to the AIIB’s capital structure.7

In one-way, the AIIB is a part-fulfilment of China’s dream of national rejuvenation. The Washington-led organisations like the WB and the IMF are no longer reflective of the true economic balance of power in the world. China now has the capacity and willingness to contribute. And yet, it had been frustrated by the gridlock in the US political process.

Asia’s infrastructure needs are of the order of US$ 8 trillion during this decade to maintain current levels of economic growth.8 Asia, home to the bulk of global population and with the fastest-growing economies, needs substantial amounts of money to invest in communications, power, transport and other infrastructure networks to prevent stagnation. By 2025, 60 per cent of world’s infrastructure funding demands will come from Asia according to Price Waterhouse Coopers, one of the leading finance and management firms in the world.9 In 2014, the ADB could only allocate a total of US$ 21 billion for all development projects.10

Japan has stayed away from the AIIB for purely geopolitical reasons, and its knee-jerk announcement of US$ 110 billion for infrastructure projects was too little, too late.11 With its growing capacity China is steadily able to increase its aid commitments, while the Japanese aid figures have fallen for 16 years in succession.12 With top economies already on board in the AIIB, the United States, too, will soon want to be a part of it. In fact, Western countries like Canada, which opted to stay out, are now facing public calls for joining the bank.13 Asia’s infrastructure needs, the inability of the Bretton Woods institutions to meet Asia’s expectations and China’s growing capacity and ambition point to a promising future for the bank.

The new bank, seen as the competitor to the WB and the ADB, is the first big Chinese attempt to shoulder more responsibilities amongst the developing world, even though there are sceptics who question China’s benign declarations. China assures that the AIIB will be managed through best practices, and dismisses apprehensions about the largest number of votes it possesses. “AIIB is a bank, not a political organization or political alliance,” said Jin Liqun,14 the man widely tipped to be the first head of the bank.

Like China, India too believes that the Bretton woods arrangement is unfair. No wonder that India was amongst the first countries to embrace the AIIB idea. But sceptics question if India actually wants Washington’s domination replaced by Beijing’s, especially when both neighbours have border disputes to settle and are jockeying for influence in the Indian Ocean. It is how China and India relate that will determine the effectiveness of the new bank.

With India joining the AIIB, the new institution has gained credibility; this more than adequately compensates for the damage, if any, from the US being absent. Taking note of the fact that 57 countries showed up for the launch, and factoring in Chinese financial backing, many fence-sitters will join the bank over time. India’s influence in the bank’s decision-making will be protected by the number of shares it holds and its second spot in the administration.

India’s dilapidated infrastructure is the biggest impediment to its economic growth. Modi’s ‘Make in India’ is heavily dependent upon rolling out China-style roads, ports, airports and power. To meet these costs, India needs to rely on institutions like the AIIB, regardless of the underlying political power-play.
With the 5th largest coal reserves,15 India’s ambitious plans to set up coal-fired electricity generation plants have gone awry since 2013, when the US and the WB severely restricted investments in coal-fired power generation.16 India needs help from outside to fill its gap in infrastructure financing, and its joining the AIIB comes in at an appropriate time.

Working with India on infrastructure financing presents China with an excellent opportunity for strengthening and deepening relations between the two. It demonstrates that India and China are prepared to work together for the betterment of the Asian continent. India may have its reservations over China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) strategy, but when the AIIB approves projects with India’s acquiescence, India becomes a partner.

While it is reassuring that India is teaming up with China on the economic front, ideas like the US-India Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean Region, signed during President Obama’s India visit in January 2015, cast doubts on India’s real priorities in the geopolitics of the region.17 Similarly, the Chinese pursuit of possible naval presence in the Indian Ocean, through port constructions in Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, makes Indian strategic planners wary of Chinese intentions.

It is a challenge to both China and India, and they owe it to Asia that they will not force a choice on the continental states. Their interests coincide, and there is enough space for the two to pursue them. It may even mean giving space to the other at times. After all, the cost of military preparedness or escalation is bound to be heavier than any concession either one makes.

About the author:
* 1. Mr Sajjad Ashraf is a Consultant at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), an autonomous research institute at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and an Adjunct Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the NUS. He was Pakistan’s High Commissioner to Singapore from 2004 to 2008. He can be contacted at sashraf1947@gmail.com. The author, not ISAS, is responsible for the facts cited and opinions expressed in this paper.

Source:
This article was published by ISAS as ISAS Brief Number 383 (PDF)

Notes:
2. Trends in Southeast Asia -The Politics of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Tang Sew Mun, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), Singapore 2015, p. 8
3. http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2015-06/30/content_21140163.htm
4. ISEAS, p 2.
5. Ibid p 3
6. https://www.imf.org/external/np/sta/ir/IRProcessWeb/data/hkg/eng/curhkg.htm#I
7. http://www.thestar.com.my/Business/Business-News/2015/06/25/Australia-to-contribute-to- AIIB/?style=biz
8. http://www.pwc.com/sg/en/capital-projects-infrastructure/assets/cpi-develop-infrastructure-in-ap- 201405.pdf
9. ibid
10. http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/25/is-aiib-the-answer-to-asias-infrastructure-needs.html
11. ibid
12. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/03/10/commentary/japan-commentary/abes-new-policy- on-foreign-aid-risks-playing-with-fire/#.Va38W3jN7dl
13. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-commentary/new-asian-development- bank-needs-a-canadian-presence/article22296905/
14. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-04/11/c_134142959.htm
15. http://www.mining-technology.com/features/feature-the-worlds-biggest-coal-reserves-by-country/
16. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/16/us-worldbank-climate-coal-idUSBRE96F19U20130716
17. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/01/25/us-india-joint-strategic-vision-asia- pacific-and-indian-ocean-region

In 2012, just a year after President Obama decided that “Assad must go,” then-State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland condemned the Syrian military’s use of unguided explosives in its fight against the US-sponsored insurgency. These weapons, deemed “barrel bombs,” were, according to Nuland, “vicious things indiscriminately launched … at targets without any concern about civilians.”

Claims that “barrel bombs” were a form of terror deployed uniquely by the Syrian government primarily against citizens soon dominated media and western government coverage of the conflict. President Assad was a special kind of madman who, when given the opportunity, would particularly target his own citizens with “barrel bombs.” Just as Gaddafi was about to commit genocide against his own citizens in Benghazi, Assad was barrel-bombing his own people and must be stopped, we were told.

The media and US government adoption of the term “barrel bomb” was in reality convenient war propaganda. Do the civilian victims of any military attack — be they victims of Assad’s bombs or US drones — really care whether they are incinerated by a bomb with a Raytheon logo instead of a more crudely manufactured device? Are they any less or more dead?

Besides, history teaches us that not that long ago the US was quite fond of dropping what it calls “barrel bombs” from helicopters onto Vietnamese civilians. And, more recently, the US has sent Saudi Arabia thousands of cluster bombs — also an indiscriminate, civilian-killing device — where they have been used lately against Yemeni civilians.

Ultimately, the issue is the number of innocent civilians killed. And on that score, a new report shows that US attacks on Syria are killing hundreds of innocent civilians. According to a study by the investigative group Airwars, the estimated US-led 5,700 airstrikes on Iraq and Syria have killed more than 450 civilian non-combatants, 100 of them children.

In the ever-evolving war propaganda produced by the compliant mainstream media, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that initially this US bombing exercise was designed to save a small religious minority trapped on a hilltop in northern Iraq. When these Yazidis were “saved” by US airstrikes (many of them were not trapped after all, and preferred to say put), the US did not declare “mission accomplished” and go home, but rather began concocting story after story of why we must rapidly escalate our military presence in the region. Anyone remember the fake “Khorasan Group”?

So now one year later hundreds of civilians have been slaughtered by US bombs where they had no business being dropped. Smart bombs or dumb bombs, Boeing bombs or “barrel bombs,” the victims are just as dead. And four years after US intervention to “save” Syria from Assad, ISIS and al-Qaeda are set to take the country over.

The US government solution to a foreign policy disaster? Declare war on Assad!

This article was published by the RonPaul Institute.

Arsenic, which can be present in ground water, modifies an enzyme that alters the secretion of insulin in the pancreas.

Physicians, usually, show type II diabetes as a consequence of an exaggerated food intake and lack of exercise; however, there are about 50 genes that cause changes in the DNA, known as polymorphisms, that when combined with harsh environmental factors are at increased risk of developing the disease, mentioned PhD Marta Ostrosky Wegman, director of the Institute for Biomedical Research the National University of Mexico (UNAM).

“This does not mean that everyone who is exposed to pollution will have diabetes, only those who are susceptible will develop polymorphisms” said the specialist in pharmacology.

She added that there are substances known as obesogenic and diabetogenic, like pesticides, cadmium, the chemical bisphenol A, among others, which may alter the genes.

The best known is arsenic, which comes from groundwater and contaminates the tab water of northern Mexican states like Coahuila, Sonora, Chihuahua and Hidalgo. In Mexico, mining and overexploitation of underground aquifers are the main factor that allow this metalloid to affect the vital liquid.

The researcher at the UNAM, who for 20 years has conducted several scientific studies, found that people who drink this water are more susceptible to developing diabetes, because arsenic modifies the enzyme calpain 10, which alters insulin secretion by the pancreas.

In this regard, she noted that in vitro research in the area of ​​the Laguna Region (comprised of three cities in the states of Coahuila and Durango) has found that people who drink large amounts of water contaminated with arsenic have polymorphisms in genes of calpain 10, which alters cells and prevents the body from taking advantage of the glucose, thereby showing susceptibility to diabetes.

Therefore, the Laguna region implements measures to combat pollution of water by arsenic; one is to mix the contaminated liquid with the clean water and promote the intake of bottled water in areas where it is possible to acquire it.

Wegman Ostrosky detailed that arsenic besides being a diabetogenic factor also influences in the development of skin and bladder cancer. “We can not be so drastic and say that only eating carbs and not exercising is causing diabetes. There are other parameters that are related with genes and their interaction with the environment. We must know what toxic substances accumulate in the environment and avoid exposure to them.”

By Jai Kumar Verma*

After lapse of about eight years of peace the sinister Inter Services Intelligence (ISI)-backed terrorists’ barged into Dinanagar Police Station in Gurdaspur district, on the morning of July 27. The heavily armed terrorists of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) wearing army uniform and equipped with automatic weapons and grenades killed seven persons, including a Superintendent of Police.

The LeT terrorists were carrying US-manufactured night vision devices, which the US army supplied to Afghanistan. ISI procured these devices from Afghanistan and supplied them to the suicide squad.

The valiant commandos of the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) made efforts to capture at least one terrorist alive. However, the terrorists who were equipped with sophisticated weapons and large quantity of ammunition could not be captured alive and were killed after the gun battle of about 11 hours.

SWAT, which was commissioned about four years back in Punjab Police, has been trained by the Israeli anti-terrorist force. SWAT commandos in their first operation killed all three LeT terrorists without suffering any loss of life. Nonetheless the photographs clearly indicate that these daring commandos, although equipped with latest weapons, were not wearing any bullet proof or protective dress.

The ISI selected Gurdaspur as it is near the Pakistani border and the terrorists infiltrated through the ravines of river Ravi. The malevolent ISI sent these terrorists alongwith drug smugglers and experienced guides who have full idea of the topography and clandestine routes in the area.

The terrorists who wanted to inflict maximum causalities planted five bombs at a major railway track but the bombs were defused well in time.

Pakistan intelligence agency which is not getting desired success in Jammu and Kashmir wanted to demonstrate that the Khalistan movement is not dead, and Khalistani terrorists are active and carrying out the terrorist acts. Any separatist movement, including Khalistani or Kashmiri, strengthens the Pakistani propaganda that minorities are ill treated in India. Secondly, opening of a second front would divide the strength of the security forces.

The analysts also say that due to the Amarnath pilgrimage the security was very tight in J&K, hence the ISI selected Gurdaspur. It was also timed before the hanging of Yaqub Memon.

Some analysts quote a few minor incidents to prove that Khalistan movement is again gaining momentum. They mention that voices are being raised in Punjab in support of Janrail Singh Bhindranwale who was an ardent supporter of Khalistan. Demonstrations were also held in favour of Balwant Singh Rajoana, an assassin of Beant Singh, former chief minister of Punjab. One or two incidents of hoisting of Khalistani flags and shouting of pro-Khalistani slogans were also reported in the province.

The possibility, that these inconsequential episodes were carried out by agents of sleeper cells of ISI, which is bent upon creating law and order problems in Punjab, cannot be ruled out. The intelligence sources mention that terrorist infrastructure, including sleeper cells of ISI, is present at many places in India and they use them when required.

ISI with the help of Khalistani leaders settled abroad including Canada, USA and UK, make efforts to revive the Khalistan movement. However, there is very remote chance of success because inhabitants of Punjab know the futility of Khalistan movement.

The modus operandi of the attackers of Dinanagar Police Station is akin to the tactics of ISI trained suicide terrorists of LeT.

The ISI infiltrated the suicide squad with full preparation and they were carrying no evidence that they were Pakistanis. However, their GPS sets revealed that these LeT men started their operation from Shakargarh, Pakistan.

Pakistani army, which enjoys several perks including hefty pay packets, will never allow cordial relations with India as it survives on the assumed threat from India. It is the reason that whenever some negotiations happen between the leaders of India and Pakistan the incidents of sporadic cross- border firing increases and the ISI manages some terrorist incidents in India.

The attack on Dinanagar Police Station carried out, after the meeting of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif in Ufa and issuance of a joint statement, reaffirms that the Pakistani Army is averse to the idea of friendly relations with India.

The information given by Indian Intelligence organizations about the terror attacks was a general warning which lacked the date, time and place of the assault.

Although the fearless SWAT commandoes have conducted a successful operation, the security agencies must consider the weaknesses of the security apparatus. Why did intelligence ogranisations fail to provide pinpointed and actionable intelligence? Why did the total operation take 11 hours to kill three terrorists? Why did SWAT commandoes go for the operation without wearing full defensive kit, including bulletproof jackets?

India should not expect any assistance from the Pakistani government in curbing terrorism, as according to analysts the Pakistani government is a terrorist government and no one punishes himself.

Pakistan which survives on anti-India rhetoric will not stop sending terrorists to India, hence Indian policy makers must formulate a fool-proof national security policy which would emanate from the beat constable, and include the Director General of Police, multifarious intelligence ogranisations, Ministry of External Affairs, all the security agencies and top of it the political leadership, including the opposition.

India should adopt multi-pronged strategy. On the one hand, India must continue negotiations with Pakistani authorities; highlight the terrorist activities of Pakistan through diplomatic channels in the world; and improve the security system, including intelligence network.

India must strengthen its forces at the border. Sealing of the border is a very difficult and tedious job; although fencing of the border has curbed the menace of infiltration to a great extent, there are several gaps from where the infiltration can be done. ISI is using these gaps for sending the terrorists through trained guides.

If Pakistan does not understand the language of peace there is no harm in giving them a stern warning that India has the capability of instigating various nationalities in Pakistan who are agitating against Punjabi domination. India being a peaceful nation will not interfere in the internal matters of any country, but Pakistan should also avoid sending terrorists in India. Political leaders and bureaucrats should also avoid issuing empty threats. Instead they should retaliate with foolproof planning, determination and caution if the situation does not improve.

*Jai Kumar Verma is a Delhi-based strategic analyst. He can be contacted at editor@spsindia.in

The fluctuations of the oil prices, the Fed’s policy rate and the U.S. dollar are intertwined. In fall 2015/spring 2016, the Fed’s impending rate hikes will cause substantial turbulence in emerging markets.

Until recently, oil prices were recovering. However, after rallying earlier in the year, oil plunged nearly 20 percent in July (and briefly fell below $47 per barrel). In the past, that has often heralded the coming of a bear market.

Since oil is a dollar-denominated commodity, the timing of the impending interest rate hike by the U.S. Federal Reserve has a significant impact on the U.S. dollar and thus on oil prices. Monetary hawks would like to see the Fed raise short-term interest rates by September, whereas doves argue that the international environment is far too fragile and such a move could have an adverse impact on the lingering U.S. recovery and world markets overall.

Still others warn about the adverse consequences of premature rate hikes. This is why the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in early June, warned the Fed to delay the rate hike until 2016; until there are sure signs of a pickup in wages and inflation.

In the past few years, Japan, the EU, and Sweden have all experienced these situations, which typically led to a quick reversal of policy. The case of the United States, however, is different, due to the large scale of its economy and significant contribution to global growth prospects.

Any premature rate hike would not only have potential to undermine recent economic progress; the repercussions would be global.

Diminished prospects, strengthening dollar

In the U.S., the recovery, though stronger in relative terms than in other advanced economies, has been a slow crawl. In Europe, there are weak signs of recovery, but overall the continent is amid a lost decade. And as the Greek crisis has demonstrated, disruptive turns remain fully possible, despite the current deal between Athens and its creditors.

In East Asia, the situation reflects similar vulnerabilities. In Japan, Prime Minister Abe’s monetary gamble has failed to re-ignite economic growth and while contraction has been avoided, stagnation is now the new normal.
In China, the deceleration of growth has been accompanied by high market volatility, local debt deleveraging, and overcapacity across sectors (although real estate appears to be bottoming out).

These trends are reflected in the U.S. Dollar Index, which measures the strength of the greenback relative to other world currencies. As the Fed stopped the asset purchases and began to taper down QE policies, and Europe’s challenges caused the dramatic plunge of the euro, U.S. dollar soared from 75 in mid-2014 to 90 last January. That’s when oil prices took a heavy hit across the world.

U.S. dollar and oil have an inverse relationship. When dollar goes up, oil tends to come down. Conversely, when dollar falls, oil tends to go up. Today, the Index is around 92. Currently, markets are keeping their breadth.

The Fed’s impending rate hike will prove challenging to all emerging markets, particularly to those economies in which growth or trade rely on oil revenues. The skeptics like to argue that historically stronger U.S. growth tends to reinforce growth in emerging markets as well. The problem is that U.S. dollar appreciation is likely to mitigate the impact on real GDP growth in emerging markets.

What next?

While U.S. dollar plays a central role in oil prices, it is certainly not the only driver. Initially, oversupply fears emerged amid high U.S. production, which is a reflection of the U.S. shale revolution.

Another major factor is the case of Iran. While Secretary of State John Kerry is pushing the Iran nuclear deal in the Congress, U.S. and Iran could soon go head to head on the world oil markets. For all practical purposes, that could contribute to further fall in global oil prices, even if U.S. prices might rise slightly.

In turn, Iran may increase oil exports even when its oil revenues remain locked in escrow accounts. It will seek to sustain market share, avoid damage caused by shutdowns, boost employment and economic activity from increased production.

The Fed’s impending rate hikes will also materialize in a new international currency environment. China and the IMF are working to make the renminbi a reserve currency, possibly by October this year when the IMF will hold its vote about the issue. That decision could trigger a transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars into Chinese assets in few years, which, to a degree, is predicated on the sales of US Treasuries.

In 2014, naira fell more than 15 percent against the dollar. In spring, Nigeria’s senate voted to cut its benchmark expectation for oil prices in 2015 to $52 a barrel. At the same time, the value of the naira was pegged to the U.S. dollar at 190. Today, naira is about 200, while oil prices remain close to $50.

Recently, emerging market currencies slumped to 15-year lows, as falling commodity prices and China’s equity volatility reverberated through the global economy. However, turbulence will increase once the Fed will begin to hike interest rates. That’s when the real rollercoaster ride will begin.

This article appeared at Business Today and is reprinted with permission

Protests, China’s tightening grip, uncertainty put Hong Kong’s status as global financial center at risk.

By Michael C. Davis*

As the world looks on in horror at China locking up hundreds of human rights lawyers, tightening censorship over its internet, and scolding academics for use of Western materials, Hong Kong lingers in a struggle with Beijing over democratic development. The Chinese Communist Party’s passion for repressive control and interference has clearly intruded into Hong Kong, along with the rest of the country. With the CCP increasingly paranoid over its power there appears little hope of resolution. Can Hong Kong find a way to relax Beijing’s tightening grip?

Beijing’s decisions over the past year reflect a profound change in the “one country, two systems” model upon which Hong Kong and its international investors have long relied. The extreme liberty Beijing has taken in interpreting the human-rights and democratic commitments in the Hong Kong Basic Law have signaled a profound attitudinal change. Hong Kong may not survive as one of the world’s leading financial centers in the tightening restrictions of one of the world’s most hardline regimes.

Much more than elections is at stake in Hong Kong’s battle over democracy. The protesters’ calls for democracy have aimed to relax Beijing’s controls. Democracy has been seen as crucial to defending the autonomy and rule of law so instrumental to the integrity of the Hong Kong system.

Relations were not always so tense. In the can-do spirit of the early reform era Deng Xiaoping had called for Hong Kong investors in 1979 to “put their hearts at ease.” To ensure such confidence, the Sino-British treaty promised Hong Kong a “high degree of autonomy,” Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong under democratic principles, liberal human-rights protections, and independence and finality of the courts to maintain Hong Kong’s existing rule of law. Commitment to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was included, and all such commitments were stipulated for inclusion in a basic law. The 1990 Hong Kong Basic Law generally fulfilled such promises. For selecting Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, it expressed an “ultimate aim” of “universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures.” The same liberal list of human rights was guaranteed. While the independence and finality of the local courts were put at risk by providing the ultimate power of interpretation with China’s National People’s Congress Standing Committee, the committee early on showed restraint and rarely exercised such power.

These documents were taken to the capitals of the world to gain international support for treating Hong Kong distinctly from the mainland for purposes of trade and investment and a variety of social and cultural relations.

This restraint began to break down in the middle of the last decade. Beijing began to tighten its grip, as Hong Kong protestors increasingly demanded compliance with Beijing’s promises. Beijing’s foot-dragging over democratic reforms, demands for national security laws and efforts to institute patriotic education met with massive protests. That the local Hong Kong government has shown no inclination to defend Hong Kong’s autonomy and is often seen to represent Beijing’s interest over Hong Kong concerns has ratcheted up the calls for democracy.

In this distrustful atmosphere, as the debate over going forward on the promised universal suffrage took shape in 2014, Hong Kong activists launched a civil disobedience campaign. The Occupy Central campaign, now called the umbrella movement after protestors used umbrellas to deflect tear gas, only hardened Beijing’s resolve to block genuine democratic reform.

The June 2014 Beijing White Paper on “One Country, Two Systems” revealed Beijing passion for control. Accusing Hong Kongers of a “confused and lopsided view,” Beijing attacked core Hong Kong values and institutions. Portraying Beijing’s NPC Standing Committee as the guardian of the rule of law, Hong Kong judges were characterized as administrators and told of their responsibility to guard national security. A “high degree of autonomy” was “not full autonomy.” The Sino-British treaty was effectively abandoned.

In the wake of the white paper, a June civil referendum organized by the Occupy Central founders overshot the expected 100,000 voters to attract 800,000 voters for an electoral model involving civil nominations as a device to bypass Beijing’s control. Voters were angered both by the white paper and a Hong Kong government consultation report that appeared to misrepresent Hong Kong views as effectively supporting Beijing’s pronouncements.

Claiming universal suffrage only meant everyone could vote, Beijing then issued its August 31, 2014, decision allowing for “universal suffrage.” The voters would be allowed to vote for up to three candidates selected by a pro-Beijing nominating committee.

The Hong Kong government in lockstep followed Beijing’s directives. Proposals of compromise by either the pan-democratic camp or the pro-Beijing camp were uniformly rejected. With such official indifference, the pan-democrats choice to veto the proposal in the June 2015 legislative vote was a forgone conclusion.

A battle for Hong Kong has emerged. Consistent with increasing repression on the mainland, Beijing’s tightening restrictions have replaced promises of Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong with only limited mainland interference. The complete lack of voice by an allegedly autonomous government has left Hong Kong with a political battle between the street and Beijing.

This battle certainly diminishes confidence in China’s promises and offers little stability for Hong Kong. Even some business people are transferring some investments overseas. Both the democratic camp and the governments in Hong Kong and Beijing find themselves at impasse with little clarity on the road ahead.

Most efforts at breaking the impasse seem doomed. An optimal way would be for Beijing to appreciate that a completely submissive Hong Kong government is not in the national interest. A vital Hong Kong, able to perform its role as China’s international financial center, requires a government willing to represent Hong Kong and guard its core human rights and rule-of-law values. Deng’s democratic promises aimed to achieve this. The 2014 white paper and August 31 democratic reform decision appear to withdraw that promise.

Weakened autonomy and rule of law not only pose danger to the local way of life, but will also undermine foreign justification for treating Hong Kong differently than other Chinese city. Foreigners will be deprived of a valued rule-of-law-base in China. China will be deprived of the many advantages of the “one country, two systems” model.

The Hong Kong street also faces a dilemma. Surrendering to Beijing’s demands would destroy Hong Kong as we know it. Carrying on an unlimited protest may also endanger Hong Kong. The public was already showing signs of protest fatigue when the occupy movement wound down late last year. Protest leaders cannot be sure that calls for renewed demonstrations would gain popular support.

Clearly, Hong Kong democrats need to do a better job of communicating such stakes with Beijing supporters, especially the business elite. It’s not in the interest of local Hong Kong people or global investors for Beijing to increase its grip on Hong Kong. The Hong Kong government and foreign friends in the capitals of the world need to find their voice to facilitate this dialogue process.

The repressive turn on the mainland may have to run its course before this effort can gain traction. The deep contradictions between Chinese promises of the rule of law and policies of extreme repression weigh heavily on both the mainland and Hong Kong.

*Michael C. Davis, a professor in the Law Faculty at the University of Hong Kong, has published widely on human rights and development in Asia. As a public intellectual, Professor Davis has contributed to the debate over constitutional reform and human rights in Hong Kong for more than two decades.

Saudi Arabia’s four-month old bombing campaign against Houthi rebel forces in Yemen has had mixed results beyond devastation in the region’s poorest country. The insertion of Saudi-trained Yemeni ground forces that support exiled president Abd Rabbah Mansour Hadi led last month to the capture of the port city of Aden from the rebels.

The Yemen war and the prominent role of Saudi Arabia’s powerful defence minister, Mohammed Bin Salman, have nevertheless, sparked unease among some members of the Saudi ruling family. Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen has also brought to the fore cracks within the kingdom’s ruling family at a time that fissures are also becoming public among rulers of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Internal Saudi repercussions

Critics of the Yemen civil war within the Saudi royal family worry that even if the Houthis can be driven back to their northern redoubt of Saada, they will be embittered and likely to pose a continued threat to Saudi border towns populated by non-Wahhabi Muslim communities and tribes. Indeed a number of Saudi princes are said to have questioned the wisdom of the bombing campaign launched by King Salman’s son, Defence Minister Mohamed.

There is moreover unease at the King’s reliance on his 34-year-old son, who is Deputy Crown Prince and serves as Second Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the Council for Economic and Development Affairs besides being Chief of the Royal Court. Among the dissenters are royal family members affiliated to the late King Abdullah, such as his sons Mitaib, Minister and Head of the National Guard; Turki, who was removed as Governor of Riyadh; Mishaal, removed as Governor of Mecca, and Abdul Aziz, Deputy Foreign Minister.

Also eased out last February was Khaled bin Bandar, Deputy Defence Minister and Head of Intelligence, while earlier, Crown Prince Muqrin bin Abdul Aziz retired, making way for Prince Mohamed bin Nayef, Minister of Interior to become Crown Prince and First Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the Political and Security Affairs Council.

The ascent of King Salman, along with Mohamed bin Nayef and Mohamed bin Salman as Crown Princes, affirm the return of the Sudairi branch of the family of Ibn Saud (King Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman Ibn Saud), the founder of the Saudi kingdom, following the decade-long reign of King Abdullah. He had succeeded King Fahd, the first of the Sudairi Seven, while two other brothers, Sultan and Nayef, died as Crown Princes. Salman is the second Sudairi to be king.

Three other Sudairis, Turki, Ahmad and another, are not in the running. Turki was in exile for being “liberal”, while Ahmad retired as a Deputy Minister of the Interior. Intriguingly Turki’s son, Sultan, has recently emerged to lodge a complaint in a Swiss court against Abdul Aziz bin Fahd, a son of the late King Fahd and Religious Affairs Minister Saleh Al Sheikh, for his abduction and forced repatriation to the kingdom from Switzerland in 2003. He claims to have been kidnapped and sedated from a Saudi villa in Geneva, after he announced plans to expose widespread corruption in the Saudi defence and interior ministries.

While the incident may have occurred over a decade ago the timing of the legal suit has significance. Though he is from the same Sudairi lineage as the king and his two crown princes, as well as King Fahd’s son, Sultan bin Turki could represent a group of dissenting members of the ruling family who resent the concentration of power in the Salman and Nayef clans.

Fissures in the Emirates

The Saudi prince’s complaint came as reports surfaced that a senior prince in the UAE, with the backing of several younger members of the ruling Al Nahyan family, had allegedly plotted in 2010 to overthrow the country’s leaders and transform the autocratic Gulf state into a constitutional monarchy. The UAE is ruled by the eldest son of the founder, Sheikh Khalifa bin Shekih Zayed Al Nahyan, and his 10 brothers and half-brothers with Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed as the strongman.

According to Middle East Eye (MEE), a respected UK-based online publication, Sheikh Hamdan, the fourth brother, had considered abdicating and fleeing the country. MEE said the plot had been revealed by people close to Hamdan, including one who has since seen his prospects diminish as a result of business disputes. Hamdan, a former minister of state for foreign affairs and deputy prime minister, has reportedly been exiled to a desert oasis and banned from travel.

While the inscrutability of the Gulf rulers makes independent assessment of the power balance between different factions difficult, rumblings of policy difference have been observed by various foreign governments that interact frequently with their Gulf counterparts. The policy debates are significant as they reflect sensitivity on the part of some younger members of ruling families of UAE and Saudi Arabia to the restiveness among the region’s young population, following the Arab Uprisings and the subsequent civil wars and insurgencies in the Middle East and North Africa the past four years.

The emergence of fissures in secretive ruling families takes on added significance at a time that they are seeking to repress dissent. Saudi Arabia last month arrested hundreds of alleged supporters of Islamic State (IS) while the UAE this week announced that they were putting on trial 41 people charged with seeking to overthrow the government.

Pundits and scholars have long argued that the Arab monarchies constituted bedrocks of stability in a region embroiled in a lengthy transition that is messy and bloody. In that vision, uprisings by the Shia minority in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province and the brutally suppressed popular revolt in Bahrain in 2011 were merely small blips on the radar.

IS and threat to Gulf solidity

The rise of IS with its bloody attacks on Shia mosques in the Saudi kingdom and Kuwait has brought the threat closer to home. Gulf rulers frame the threat as a terrorism problem that the international community should confront kinetically and ideologically.

Western officials from President Barack Obama to scholars and pundits have acknowledged that IS and other jihadist groups will only really be defeated once the root causes that power their rise are addressed. They have however done little to match words with deeds.

The recent cracks in the Saudi ruling family as well as earlier dissent by Prince Sultan and the UAE’s Sheikh Hamdan suggest that the autocratic rule of Gulf families is being challenged, and has been for a longer period of time, by a minority that so far has successfully been outmanoeuvred. Nonetheless, it raises questions about the solidity of Gulf rule as the oil-rich states of the region confront multiple political and security challenges.

This article was published by RSIS

As the name implies, innovation means doing something new, novel if you will, that goes beyond what is known so far and allows, in practice, to improve the production processes especially in corporations through the use, for example, new technologies. I consider useful to reiterate in a brief summary what innovation is, a term that already became very common everywhere, from academia to government and other social organizations.

But this subject matter has its origins a long time ago. Let’s say that it is almost inherent to human nature and, above all, has been key to the survival of man throughout history, the foundation of ongoing progress. Wasn’t fire a great innovation? Or the development of weapons for hunting animals, tools to cultivate the fertile soil and even kitchen items necessary to store and prepare food? And what about modern machines a characteristic of the industrial age? Or what about today’s sophisticated technologies with the embodiment of an extraordinary revolutionary age in information?

Yes! Innovation has always been present, but it is more so now, in the recent decades, from the scientific advances that have enabled us to achieve unprecedented progress, stunning, and further improving the living conditions of men worldwide.

A question of life and death

In fact, there are some who qualify this factor, connected -we insist- and linked with today’s sophisticated technologies, as the main determinant of economic growth, even more so especially when the factors of production (labor and capital, for example) still manage to multiply their productivity and thus raising their competitiveness, something indispensable, vital, in today’s business, whatever they may be doing.

With more innovation there are new technologies that enable a greater economic growth and even a greater social development in items of healthcare, education, nutrition and food sciences, etc.

From above it is easy to conclude the enormous importance of innovation in enterprises. Those who do not innovate, will run out of business or are doomed to make no profit. This applies even at the administrative level of the companies, as confirmed by the use of appropriate techniques in the financial sector, personnel management, whose superiors in charge have to adopt the theories that are trendy, from reengineering to Corporate Social Responsibility as an appropriate management tool.

In general, such advances with their trendy technologies are the result of greater scientific knowledge (even in social sciences such as economics and politics, history and sociology), there is made possible a phenomena such as mass production processes, quality and economies of scale, among many others that express higher effectiveness and generate greater demand for various goods and services.

But, the wonderful situation described has also negative aspects: the gap between efficient companies and inefficient companies, the same as countries that have the best technologies and countries that depend on those that possess them. Here is a breakdown.

More wealthy and poor

Indeed, the major economies are advancing rapidly, while small countries are crawling and are increasingly far-away from reaching the development of the first group of countries. “The rich are richer and the poor get poorer” is repeated everywhere while specialists in this field, such as Thomas Piketty, have cautioned about the high levels of inequality that seem to accompany capitalism to the detriment of millions of human beings.

Such dramatic circumstances, which are obvious, undoubtedly originate on the fact that innovations, with the current corresponding development of technologies, are the fruit of scientific research, the same that usually requires large investments, which are usually assumed only in rich countries, with funding from both government and private sector and represented by powerful multinational firms, whose brands are well known.

Let’s think only in the field of telecommunications and in the pharmaceutical industry, which are just two examples. In poor countries, to make matters worse, is taken the easy path forward of a so-called transfer of technology (no innovation, for reasons I just mentioned) and while they are applauded by improving the production after replacing other equipment that are considered obsolete, it is also a sign of dependence and, ultimately, lack of creativity and initiative, these are essential parts of the development.

In fact, our companies, with a few exceptions, do not invest in research, and thus do not reach new forms of production due to the lack of innovation. They are dedicated simply to import the latest technologies from the international markets, as if that was the sole solution to the backwardness and poverty.

A Call upon Universities

And our universities, what? What role do they play in regards to this issue? Do they generate the necessary scientific knowledge in order to create new technologies that urge companies in an effort to be more efficient in a highly competitive external market and on the proper domestic market, where globalization provides the doors wide open to large multinational companies?

Without going into Honduras, it is suffice to say that there are still glaring flaws in the educational process (from simple memorization, in a passive attitude, repeating “like parrots” the words of Professor José Consuegra Higgins), which in principle hinder innovation and thus preventing their transcendence beyond the frontiers of knowledge that we made reference above.

There is also missing the innumerable and considerable resources not only public but private and from the universities themselves, which, to make matters worse, continue to be isolated, regardless of the instrumental social problems that they should help resolve in a significant team work manner, while maintaining a kind of divorce with corporations, unfavorably viewed for being engaged only in their own business.

In short, it is a requirement to establish an ironclad alliance between universities and enterprises, with the support of the state, under the model of new innovations where each sector – according to what we discussed in the Basic Course of Social Corporate Responsibility – would be fulfilling its mission: the university, with the production of scientific knowledge; corporations, with the development of technologies, and the government with the regulations and strengthening of this partnership.

Here is a key element to development that we should take a look at!

* The author is the Director, Revista “Desarrollo Indoamericano”,  la Universidad Simón Bolívar de Barranquilla, Colombia

Translation from Spanish Language: Peter M. Tase