Excluding “boots on the ground” and leaving combat missions to local and regional “partners,” President Barak Obama and his administration say the United States keeps “all options on the table” to respond militarily to the terrorists’ threat to “American interests” in Iraq, which are now in “danger.”

Similarly, former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, on TV screens and in print has recently urged western governments to “put aside the differences of the past and act now” and to intervene militarily in Iraq “to save the future” because “we do have interests in this.”

Both men refrained from indicating what are exactly the “American” and “western” interests in Iraq that need military intervention to defend, but the major prize of their invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the country’s hydrocarbon assets. There lies their “interests.

On June 13 however, Obama hinted to a possible major “disruption” in Iraqi oil output and urged “other producers in the Gulf” to be “able to pick up the slack.”

The United States has already moved the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush, escorted by the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea and the guided-missile destroyer USS Truxtun, from the northern Arabian Sea into the Arabian Gulf (Persian according to Iran) “to protect American lives, citizens and interests in Iraq,” according to Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, on June 14. Media is reporting that U.S. intelligence units and air reconnaissance are already operating in Iraq.

The unfolding collapse of the U.S. proxy government in Baghdad has cut short a process of legalizing the de-nationalization of the hydrocarbon industry in Iraq, which became within reach with the latest electoral victory of the Iraqi prime minister since 2006, Noori al-Maliki.

Anti-American armed resistance to the U.S. proxy ruling regime in Baghdad, especially the Baath-led backbone, is on record as seeking to return to the status quo ante with regard to the country’s strategic hydrocarbon assets, i.e. nationalization.

De-nationalization and privatization of the Iraqi oil and gas industry began with the U.S.-led invasion of the country in 2003. Al-Maliki for eight years could not pass a hydrocarbons law through the parliament. Popular opposition and a political system based on sectarian distribution of power and “federal” distribution of oil revenues blocked its adoption. Ruling by political majority instead by sectarian consensus was al-Maliki’s declared hope to enact the law.

Al-Maliki’s plans towards this end together with his political ambitions for a third term were cut short by the fall to armed opposition on this June 10 of Mosul, the capital of the northern Ninawa governorate and second only to Baghdad as Iraq’s largest metropolitan area.

Three days on, with the fighting moving on to the gates of Baghdad, “the most important priority for Baghdad right now is to secure its capital and oil infrastructure,” a Stratfor analysis on June 11 concluded.

The raging war in Iraq now will determine whether Iraqi hydrocarbons are a national asset or multinational loot. Any U.S. military support to the regime it installed in Baghdad should be viewed within this context. Meanwhile this national wealth is still being pillaged as spoils of war.

Al-Maliki is not now preoccupied even with maintaining Iraq as OPEC’s No. 2 oil producer, but with maintaining a level of oil output sufficient to bring in enough revenues to finance a defensive war that left his capital besieged and his government with southern Iraq only to rule, may be not for too long.

Even this modest goal is in doubt. Al-Maliki is left with oil exports from the south only, the disruption of which is highly possible any time now.

Worries that fighting would spread to the southern city of Basra or Baghdad have already sent oil prices to nine-month high on Thursday.

Legalizing the de-nationalization of Iraqi hydrocarbon industry has thus become more elusive than it has ever been since 2003.

On June 1 forty two years ago the process of the nationalization of the hydrocarbon industry kicked off in Iraq. Now Iraq is an open field for looting its only strategic asset.

On April 15 last year the CNN, reviewing “The Iraq war, 10 years on,” reported: “Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with winners: Big Oil.”

“Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq’s domestic oil industry was fully nationalized and closed to Western oil companies. A decade of war later, it is largely privatized and utterly dominated by foreign firms,” the CNN report concluded, indicating that, “From ExxonMobil and Chevron to BP and Shell, the West’s largest oil companies have set up shop in Iraq. So have a slew of American oil service companies, including Halliburton, the Texas-based firm Dick Cheney ran before becoming George W. Bush’s running mate in 2000.

The international rush for the Iraqi “black gold” by trans-national oil and gas corporations is at its height with no national law or competent central authority to regulate it.

Iraq’s “oil industry” now “operates, gold rush–style, in an almost complete absence of oversight or regulation,” Greg Muttitt wrote in The Nation on August 23, 2012.

Nothing changed since except that the “rush” was accelerating and the de-nationalization process was taking roots, squandering the bloody sacrifices of the Iraqis over eighty two years to uproot the foreign hold on their major strategic asset. The ongoing fighting is threatening to cut this process short.

Tip of iceberg

Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq has been awarding hydrocarbon contracts to foreign firms independently without reference to the central government in Baghdad.

Since early 2014, it has been pumping crude to Turkey via its own independent pipeline built last December. On this June 4, Turkey and the KRG announced the signing of a 50-year deal to export Iraqi oil from Kurdistan via Turkey.

Hussein al-Shahristani, Iraq’s deputy prime minister, threatened legal action against firms that purchased “smuggled oil” via the Turkish-KRG arrangements; he accused Turkey of “greed” and trying “to lay (its) hands on cheap Iraqi oil.

Baghdadfiled for arbitration against Turkey’s state-owned pipeline operator BOTAS with the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris.

Baghdad says those Turkish-KRG arrangements are illegal and unconstitutional, but its own contract awarding is also unlawful. Should a change of guard occur in Baghdad, al-Maliki and his government would be held accountable and probably prosecuted.

The dispute between Baghdad on the one hand and Turkey and the KRG on the other is only the surfacing tip of the iceberg of the “gold rush–style” looting of Iraq’s national wealth.

One of the main priorities of al-Maliki all along has been to legalize the de-nationalization and privatization process.

Muttitt, author of Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq, wrote a few months before al-Maliki assumed his first premiership that American and British governments made sure the candidates for prime minister knew what their first priority had to be: To pass a law legalizing the return of the foreign multinationals. This would be the vital biggest prize of the U.S. 2003 invasion.

Al-Maliki is the right man to secure a pro-privatization government in Baghdad. Thomas L. Friedman described him in the New York Times on this June 4 as “our guy,” “an American-installed autocrat” and a “big gift” the U.S. occupation “left behind in Iraq.”

Various drafts of hydrocarbon privatization laws failed to gain consensus among the proxy sectarian parties to the U.S.-engineered “political process” and the “federal” entities of Iraq’s U.S.-drafted constitution.

Al-Maliki’s government endorsed the first draft of a privatization law in February 2007 and on August 28, 2011 endorsed an amended draft which the parliament has yet to adopt.

Iraqi trade unions, amid popular protests, opposed and fought the privatization draft laws. Their offices were raided, computers confiscated, equipment smashed and their leaders arrested and prosecuted. Nonetheless, the parliament could not pass the law.

Al-Maliki government began awarding contracts to international oil and gas giants without a law in place. They are illegal contracts, but valid as long as there is a pro-privatization government in Baghdad.

U.S. Executive Order 13303

Former British and U.S. leaders of the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair and George Bush junior, were on record to deny that the invasion had anything to do with oil, but the U.S. President Barak Obama has just refuted their claim.

On last May 16, Obama signed an Executive Order to extend the national emergency with respect to Iraq for one year. His predecessor Bush signed this “order” for the first time on May 22, 2003 “to deal with the … threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by obstacles to the continued reconstruction of Iraq.”

Details of Bush’s Executive Order (EO) No. 13303 are still kept out of media spotlight. It declared that future legal claims on Iraq’s oil wealth constitute “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

Section 1(b) eliminates all judicial process for “all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein, and proceeds, obligations or any financial instruments of any nature whatsoever arising from or related to the sale or marketing thereof, and interests therein, in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons.”

EO 13303 was rubber-stamped by the UN Security Council Resolution No. 1483, which protected the U.S.-controlled governmental institutions in Iraq.

Muttitt wrote in August 2012: “In 2011, after nearly nine years of war and occupation, U.S. troops finally left Iraq. In their place, Big Oil is now present in force.”

“Big Oil” is now the only guarantor of the survival of the U.S. proxy government in Baghdad, but the survival of “Big Oil” itself is now threatened by the escalating and rapidly expanding armed opposition.

Obama said the “threats” and “obstacles” to U.S, interests in Iraq have not changed eleven years after the invasion; Iraq has not enacted yet a hydrocarbon law to legalize the privatization of its oil and gas industry.

The developments of the last week in Iraq vindicate Obama’s renewal of EO 13303. The U.S. war on Iraq is not over and it is not won yet. Hence Obama’s recent extension of the national emergency with respect to Iraq for one year.

Since Great Britain granted Iraq its restricted independence in 1932, the nationalization of Iraqi oil wealth was the national and popular battle cry for complete sovereignty. It is now the battle cry of the armed opposition.

Iraq has been targeted by western powers since the “republic” under the late Abd al-Karim Qasim enacted law No. 80 of 1961, which deprived foreign companies of the right to explore in 99.5% of the Iraqi territory, but mainly since the Baath regime led by the late Saddam Hussein decided to nationalize the hydrocarbon industry on June 1, 1972.

The post Iraqi Hydrocarbon Prize Of US Invasion In Danger – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Tensions are rising as the deteriorating humanitarian situation and limited access to livelihoods for Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar’s largely Buddhist Rakhine State lead to accusations that some are smuggling drugs across the border into neighbouring Bangladesh.

“We have rounded up many Rohingyas with ‘yaba’ in their possession, which means they are being used as yaba carriers,” Major General Aziz Ahmed, director general of Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) told IRIN. “Recently we have opened six new camps along the border to prevent illegal entry of Rohingya and drugs.”

“Yaba” is a drug that contains morphine and amphetamine, and creates intense hallucinogenic effects. Users can remain awake for days at a time. The Bangladesh government’s Department of Narcotics Control has reported a surge in yaba seizures in recent years – from approximately 4,000 tablets in 2009 to more than 150,000 in 2013. The 2014 Global Synthetic Drugs Assessment by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reports that the yaba seized in Bangladesh originates in Myanmar.

The approximately 800,000 Rohingyas have long faced persecution and discrimination, including being stateless in the eyes of Burmese law. Myanmar’s government claims that historically they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and labels them ‘Bengalis’. The Bangladesh government would like the Rohingya refugees in its territory to be repatriated.

According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), there are 200,000 to 500,000 Rohingyas in Bangladesh, of whom only 30,000 are documented and living in two government camps assisted by the agency, both within 2km of Myanmar. Most live in informal settlements or towns and cities in whatMédecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has described as “deplorable conditions”.

Communal violence in Rakhine state in 2012 displaced more than 140,000 Rohingya, and forced many to cross into Bangladesh. Conditions are far from ripe for their return.

In March international aid workers were forced to flee western Myanmar after being targeted by Buddhist mobs that threw rocks at homes and offices in Sittwe, over perceived humanitarian bias towards Rohingyas. Agencies have been maneuvering to re-enter western Myanmar at full scale since then.

During a 13 June visit to IDP camps in Rakhine State, the Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator, Kyung-wha Kang, called the situation “appalling, with wholly inadequate access to basic services including health, education, water and sanitation.” More than 140,000 Rohingya live in IDP camps.

Officials and experts say the lack of humanitarian access, intense security on both sides of the border, and the ongoing misery in Rakhine, coupled with the humanitarian reticence across the border in Bangladesh, is exposing Rohingyas to increasing exploitation and risk.

In a 2013 security survey in the area, 60 percent of respondents identified drug trafficking with the “most economically insecure and marginalized people to smuggle drugs” as a major cross-border activity.

“While we do not have any confirmation that Rohingya have been involved in moving drugs across the Myanmar-Bangladesh border, exploiting extremely vulnerable people in low-level and dangerous labour… is common around the world,” said Jeremy Douglas, Southeast Asia and Pacific regional representative for UNODC in Bangkok, Thailand.

“It’s not about placing blame on the Rohingya for their involvement, but understanding that this happens because of their vulnerability and lack of other options for income.”

Rejecting the Rohingyas

“[The Rohingya are] creating enormous pressure on the otherwise vulnerable socio-economic, environmental and security situation in Cox’s Bazar and its surrounding areas,” said Khaleda Begum, senior information officer at Bangladesh’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA).

The Rohingya as well as indigenous hill tribes are concentrated in Bangladesh’s southeastern coastal district of Cox’s Bazar. The area has among the country’s highest levels of illiteracy and poverty. Along the coast, deforestation has intensified the impact of periodic flooding.

“Bangladesh has made it absolutely clear that due to the aggravating security, law and order, socio-economic, demographic and environmental situation in our coastal areas, it is not possible for us to accommodate any further influx from Myanmar,” Begum said.

MoFA said the process of verifying and repatriating the 30,000 registered Rohingya refugees Bangladesh was underway until violence in Rakhine stalled the process in June 2012.

“It is absolutely critical to resume and complete the repatriation of refugees, so that both countries can also initiate necessary consular processes for the return of the millions of undocumented Myanmar Muslims from Rakhine State who are now residing in Bangladesh,” said Begum.

“The continued denial of citizenship rights to the Muslims in Rakhine State and systematic restriction on most of their fundamental rights and freedoms,” was a major impediment in the repatriation process, she noted.

Bangladesh’s humanitarian record regarding the Rohingya has in some ways mirrored Myanmar’s. In August 2012 Bangladeshi authorities ordered three NGOs – MSF, Action Against Hunger and Muslim Aid UK – to stop the formal delivery of humanitarian services to undocumented Rohingya refugees.

Later that year, Bangladeshi authorities used allegations that Rohingya were responsible for a violent attack on Buddhist temples and homes in the Cox’s Bazar area to justify sweeping arrests.

Muktar Hossain, chief of police in Teknaf, a city in southern Bangladesh near the two registered camps, said, “Rounding up the Rohingya Muslims who cross, or try to cross, into Bangladesh is our routine work. We arrest from one to five Rohingyas … from Bangladesh almost daily.”

The typical protocol is to file an illegal immigration case in court, but he admitted, “We also hand them over to BGB for push back.”

No choice but to “mule”

“I would not deny the allegation of Rohingyas being used as yaba mules [drug carriers], but they are very few in numbers,” said Mohammad Islam, a Rohingya refugee living in Bangladesh, previously chairman of the Noyapara Rohingya Camp in Cox’s Bazar. “Some Rohingyas get involved in drug peddling out of poverty, to earn some money. Rohingyas in Burma are in trouble. They are dying out there due to lack of food and basic services.”

Rafiqul Islam, police chief in Naikkhangchhari, a Bangladeshi border town, told IRIN police there have arrested people crossing the border with anywhere between 2,000 to 20,000 yaba tablets in their possession.

“During interrogations, they mention varied amounts of money — from 500 to 10,000 taka ($US6.50 to $130) — that they get paid for carrying yaba each time,” he said.

Chowdhury Abrar, a professor of international relations and coordinator of the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit at the University of Dhaka, cautioned that accusations of Rohingyas as drug runners must be seen in a political context.

“The claim that Rohingyas are being used as yaba mules is one-sided, made by the Bangladeshi government. But if in some cases Rohingyas are in fact being used as yaba mules – if those people, who have no shelter on either side of the border, are doing the drug peddling to earn some money – then they are in further danger,” he said.

UNODC’s Douglas pointed out that “Drug trafficking networks are well-organized and well-funded, and they use people who don’t have much to lose to operate in dangerous border areas – this is what appears to be happening between Bangladesh and Myanmar.”

The post Bangladesh-Myanmar Border Tensions Pinch Desperate Rohingya – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

On June 16 Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, announced that diplomatic relations between the UK and Iran are to be restored. The British embassy in Tehran and the Iranian embassy in London are to be re-opened, initially on something less than ambassadorial level.

It was in November 2011 that the Majlis, Iran’s parliament, voted amid cries of “Death to England”, to sever ties with London. Afterwards, hundreds of protesters stormed the British embassy compound and looted the residence. The UK ambassador, Dominick Chilcott, and his family were evacuated at some speed.

This pattern of events is nothing new. Ever since the Islamic revolution in 1979, the UK and Iran have been in an on-off diplomatic relationship. Immediately after the overthrow of the Shah, Britain suspended all relations with Iran, and it was not until 1988 that the British embassy was reopened. Only one year later, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomenei issued a fatwa ordering Muslims across the world to kill British author Salman Rushdie. Diplomatic ties with London were broken off again, only to be resumed at a chargé d’affaires level in 1990.

They remained uneasy until the election in June 2013 which resulted in the elevation to the presidency of the apparently “moderate” Hassan Rohani – the man who had held the UN and the West at bay with soft words for month after month, while allowing Iran’s uranium enrichment programme to forge ahead.

Nevertheless much international opinion, the US, the EU and the UK among them, seized on Rohani’s election as on a gift from heaven – a chance to avoid grasping the nettle of Iran’s unacceptable nuclear and political ambitions and to by-pass outright confrontation. Hence the talks about Iran’s nuclear program – an initiative enthusiastically entered into in November 2013 by the six countries known as the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council: China, France, Russia, the UK and the US, plus Germany). The talks – which have of course got nowhere – were heavily supported by Russia, since this was a sure way to avert the one-time threat of a military strike, by either the US or Israel, against their ally’s nuclear facilities.

Meanwhile, events within Syria and the wider Middle East have given the geo-political kaleidoscope a thorough shake-up – and a new pattern has emerged.

The Syrian conflict, which began as an internal protest against the regime of Bashar Assad, quickly morphed into a free-for-all where jihadists of many persuasions joined the conflict to fight each other with ferocity. Assad and his regime were part of the wider Shia axis, master-minded by Iran’s ayatollahs, and including their heavily-armed instrument, Hezbollah in Lebanon. They were initlally opposed by a grouping of Syrians opposed to Assad – a grouping half-heartedly supported by the US and the West, though not to the extent of providing direct military assistance. When al-Qaeda, representing Sunni Islam, joined the fight against Assad, any hope of direct Western support for the opposition vanished.

Then a Sunni military force, far more extreme, more bloodthirsty, more ruthless than al-Qaeda began to make its presence felt in Syria. With the ambition of creating a caliphate across the Middle East, subject to the strictest application of Sharia law, the new body became known by the acronym ISIS, standing for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (or the Levant). The first stage of the plan was to take over all of northern Syria and turn it into an Islamic state.

However Assad, supported by Russia, Iran and a substantial Hezbollah force, appears to have turned the tide. So ISIS, forced to flee parts of Syria, has spilled over into Iraq where, confronting the demoralised Iraqi army, it has made substantial gains and could soon be threatening Baghdad itself.

But the prospect of this formidable force controlling large areas of Iraq is a genuine threat to the West. Among a number of other undesirable consequences, it puts oil supplies in jeopardy. So although in next-door Syria the West is opposing Assad and his Shia Iranian ally, in Iraq the West is making overtures to Iran, in the hope that it will act as proxy for them in beating back the fanatical Sunni ISIS. This is what is behind the UK’s diplomatic overtures to Iran, and Washington’s recent statement that the US is “open to engaging the Iranians” over the crisis in Iraq.

What a mistake! In a twinkling of an eye Iran has been transformed from a sponsor of terror around the world, supporting the Assad regime’s mass slaughter in Syria, developing nuclear weapons to further its war against the West and its declared aim of exterminating Israel. Suddenly it has become America’s ally and the West’s new best friend.

Both President Obama and Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, have ruled out any prospect of taking direct military action to tackle ISIS. They are looking to Iran to take the steps necessary to halt the Sunni extremists in their tracks – and indeed Iran has already sent the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force to supervise the defence of Baghdad.

The Quds Force has, of course, undertaken a similar – and highly successful – role in neighbouring Syria, where its efforts have helped to revive the fortunes of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. And herein lies the fundamental paradox that both US and British policymakers must now contend with. In Syria they oppose the Iranian-back Assad regime, in Iraq it is the Iranian-backed Shia forces they support. Indeed, desperate for help to enable Iraq’s government prevail against the Islamist militants, they are increasingly relying on the experienced Shia fighting forces flooding in from Syria.

When you sup with the devil, runs the old saying, be sure you use a long spoon. Deep confusion about the challenges posed by the Middle East seems to hold sway in both in the White House and in Whitehall. But assuredly there will be a price to pay for the West’s determination not to engage directly with ISIS on the ground. Look to the on-going negotiations aimed at curbing Iran’s ambition to become a nuclear power. Iran suddenly finds itself with a dominant – if not winning – hand. What quid pro quo will it exact for its continued involvement against ISIS forces in Iraq, and what price will the West have to pay for it further down the line? Time will tell.

The post The West And Iran: A Muddle And A Mistake – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

IF THERE is a God, he surely has a sense of humor. The career of Shimon Peres, who is about to finish his term as President of Israel, is clear evidence.

Here is a life-long politician, who has never won an election. Here is the world-renowned Man of Peace, who has started several wars and never done anything for peace. Here is the most popular political figure in Israel who for most of his life was hated and despised.

Once, several decades ago, I wrote an article about him with the title “Mr. Sisyphus”. Sisyphus, it will be remembered, was condemned for all eternity to roll a heavy rock to the top of a hill, and each time when he was nearing his goal the stone slipped from his hands and rolled down again.

That has been the story of Peres’ life – until now. God, or whoever, has obviously decided: enough is enough.

IT STARTED when he was a boy in a small Polish town. Many times he complained to his mother that the other pupils in the (Jewish) school were beating him up for no reason. His younger brother, Gigi, had to defend him.

He arrived in Palestine in 1934, a year after me, as a boy of 11 (he is five weeks older than I). His father sent him to the agricultural school in Ben Shemen, a children’s village that was a Zionist indoctrination center. There the Polish Persky became the Hebrew Peres and joined the Noar Oved (“working youth”) , the main youth organization of the ruling Mapai party. As was usual then, he was sent to a kibbutz.

That’s where his political career started. Mapai split into two, and so did its youth movement. The young and active joined “Faction 2″, the left-wing section. Peres, by now an instructor, was among the few who wisely remained with Mapai, and thus attracted the attention of the party leaders.

The reward came soon. The 1948 war broke out. Everybody in our age group hastened to join the fighting forces in what appeared to be literally a fight for life or death. Peres was sent abroad by Ben-Gurion to buy arms. An important task, no doubt, but one that could have been done by a 70- year old.

The fact that Peres did not serve in the army at this fateful juncture was not forgotten and earned him the contempt of our generation for decades.

I MET him for the first time when we were 30 – he was already the Director General of the Ministry of Defense and the darling of Ben-Gurion, I was the editor in chief of a popular opposition magazine. It was not a case of love at first sight.

In his powerful position, young Peres was a determined war- monger. During the early 50s, his ministry ordered an unending chain of “retaliation actions” whose aim was to keep the country on a war footing. Arab refugees who returned at night to their villages were killed, Jews were killed in return, and unofficial units of the army crossed the armistice lines to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to kill civilians and soldiers in turn.

When the atmosphere was ripe, Ben Gurion and Peres started the 1956 Suez war. The Algerian people rose up against their French colonial masters. Unable to admit that they were facing a genuine war of liberation, the French blamed the young Egyptian leader, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser. In collusion with another declining colonial power, Great Britain, the French conspired with Israel to attack Nasser. It ended in a mess, but Peres and Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan were celebrated in Israel as heroes, the men of the future.

The French showed their gratitude. For his services, Peres received a military atomic reactor in Dimona. Peres still boasts of being the father of Israel’s nuclear armament.

HIS CAREER was clearly heading for the top. Ben-Gurion appointed him Deputy Minister, and he was destined to become Minister of Defense, the second most powerful position in Israel, when disaster struck. The querulous Old Man quarreled with his party and was thrown out. Peres followed. The rock rolled down to the bottom.

Ben-Gurion insisted on founding a new party, and dragged an unwilling Peres after him. With indefatigable energy, Peres “plowed” the country, went from village to village and from town to town, and the “Rafi” party took shape. Yet with all its array of celebrities, it won only ten Knesset seats. (The peace party I founded at the same time got a seventh of their number of votes.)

As a member of a small opposition party, Peres was vegetating. The future seemed dark, when Nasser came to the rescue. He sent his army into Sinai, war fever reached a frenzied pitch and the public decided that Ben-Gurion’s successor, Levy Eshkol, must give up his position as Minister of Defense. Several names were mentioned. High on the list was Peres.

And then it happened again. Moshe Dayan snatched the prize and became the Defense Minister, victor of the 1967 war and a world-wide hero. Peres remained a gray politician, a minor minister. The rock was down again.

For six glorious years, Dayan was the captain of the Ship of Fools, until the disaster of the Yom Kippur war. He and Golda Meir were wiped from the table and the country needed a new Prime Minister. Peres was the obvious candidate. But at the very last moment, practically out of nowhere, Yitzhak Rabin appeared and walked off with the prize. Peres had to satisfy himself with the Ministry of Defense.

He didn’t. For the next three years, he devoted days and nights to an unceasing effort to undermine Rabin. The fight became notorious, and Rabin invented a title which stuck to Peres for many years: “tireless intriguer”.

However, the effort bore fruit. Near the end of his term, Rabin faced a scandal: it appeared that after leaving office as ambassador to the USA, he had left open a bank account in Washington DC, contrary to Israeli law. He resigned in the middle of the 1977 election campaign, Peres took over. At long last, the way was open.

And then the incredible happened. After 44 consecutive years in power, before and after the founding of Israel, the Labor Party lost the election. Menachem Begin came to power. Responsibility fell on the party leader, Shimon Peres. Nobody blamed Rabin.

ON THE eve of the 1982 Lebanon war, Peres and Rabin went to see Prime Minister Begin and urged him to attack. This did not prevent Peres, two months later, appearing as the main speaker at the giant protest demonstration after the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Begin abdicated and Yitzhak Shamir took his place. In the following election Peres at least achieved a draw. Shamir became prime minister again for two years, to be followed by Peres. During his two years as Prime Minister, he did nothing for peace. His main act was to persuade President Chaim Herzog to amnesty the chief of the Security Service and a group of his men who admitted to having murdered with their bare hands two young Arab prisoners who had hijacked a bus.

In 1992 it was Rabin again who led their party to power. He appointed Peres to the Foreign Ministry, presumably because he could not harm him there. However, things took another direction.

Yasser Arafat, with whom I had been in contact since 1974 and whom I met in besieged Beirut in 1982, decided to make peace with Israel. Behind the scenes, contact was established in Oslo. The result was the historic Oslo agreement.

Between Peres, his assistant Yossi Beilin and Rabin a competition for the credit started. Peres tried to appropriate all of it for himself. Beilin angrily resisted. But it was, of course, Rabin who took the fateful decision and paid the price.

First there was the Battle for the Nobel. The Oslo committee decided of course to bestow it on Arafat and Rabin (as it had done before to Sadat and Begin). Peres furiously demanded a share and mobilized half the political world. But if Peres got it, why not Mahmoud Abbas, who had signed together with him, and who had worked for years for Palestinian-Israeli peace?

Nothing doing. The price can go only to three people at most. Peres got it, Abbas did not.

THE OSLO agreement opened a new road for Israel. Peres started to talk (endlessly) about the New Middle East, and adopted it as his personal trade mark. He and Rabin had patched things up between them. And then disaster struck again.

A few minutes after standing next to Peres and singing a peace song at a mass demonstration in Tel Aviv, Rabin was assassinated. Peres himself had passed the murderer with his cocked pistol, who would not flatter him with a bullet.

That was the dramatic high point of Peres, and of Israel. The entire country was seething with anger. If Peres, the sole successor, had proclaimed immediate elections, he would have won by a landslide. The future of Israel would have been different.

But Peres did not want to win as the heir to Rabin. He desired to win on his own merits. So he postponed the elections, started another war in Lebanon which ended in disaster, caused another deadly terror campaign by ordering the assassination of a beloved Hamas leader – and lost the elections.

In a variation of Murphy’s law: “If an election can be lost, Peres will lose it. If an election cannot be lost, Peres will lose it anyhow.”

On a memorable occasion, Peres addressed a party meeting and loudly posed the rhetorical question: “Am I a looser?” The entire audience roared in return: “Yes!”

THAT SHOULD have been the end of Sisyphus’ troubles. New people took over the Labor Party. Peres was pushed aside. Or so it seemed.

Ariel Sharon, the extreme right-wing Likud leader, came to power. Throughout the world he was considered a war criminal, the author of several atrocities, blamed by an Israeli commission as “indirectly responsible” for the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the man behind the fateful settlement project. He needed someone to make him acceptable. And who did? Shimon Peres, the internationally renowned Man of Peace. Later, he did the same for Netanyahu.

But his rock rolled down a final time. The Knesset had to elect a President of Israel. Peres was the obvious candidate, opposed only by a political nobody, Moshe Katzav. Yet the impossible happened: Peres lost, although he had undergone an operation that changed his lifelong hangdog expression into something more likeable.

Even people who didn’t like Peres agreed that this was just too much. Katzav was accused of rape and sent to prison. Peres finally, finally, won an election.

SINCE THEN, tragedy has turned into farce. The man who had been abused all his life suddenly became the most popular person in Israel. As President he could talk every day, letting loose with an endless stream of utter banalities. The public just lapped it up.

Throughout the world, Peres became one of the Grand Old Men, one of the Wise Elders, the Man of Peace, the symbol of all that is fine and good in Israel.

His successor has already been elected. A very nice person of the very extreme Right.

In a few weeks, Peres will finally step down.

Finally? Why, he is only 90!

The post Sisyphus Redeemed – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Hanno Brankamp

‘[…] it appears impossible to believe, judging from the physical appearance of the Wahuma [Batutsi], that they can be of any other race than the semi− Shem−Hamitic of Ethiopia.’ John Hanning Speke, (The Discovery of the Source of the Nile, 1863, Chapter IX.) [1]

‘[…] I am telling you that your [Batutsi] home is in Ethiopia, that we will send you by the Nyabarongo so you can get there quickly’. Léon Mugesera (22 November, 1992, in Kabaya, Rwanda)[2]

Formulating scientific hypotheses about colonial subjects was a concomitant objective of the European conquest of Africa (Van den Bersselaar 2006). After visiting the Kingdom of Rwanda on his journey to the source of the Nile, explorer John Hanning Speke developed a hypothesis claiming that a ‘higher’ nomadic people had migrated into the interior of the continent and had subdued its ‘primitive’ inhabitants. In 1992, some 130 years later, Léon Mugesera, a staunch supporter of Rwandan President Habyarimana, revitalised this claim, inciting the country’s Bahutu to commit genocide against the Batutsi who he deemed an embodiment of those nomadic invaders.

Although this semi-scientific hypothesis has long been refuted, its racist assumptions linger and play into the dynamics of contemporary conflicts. This essay aims at assessing to what extent this ‘political myth’ has nurtured genocide ideology and prepared the ground for the systematic murder of Rwanda’s Batutsi and moderate Bahutu between April and July 1994. Most accounts treat historical misrepresentations and racist ideology as a ‘given’ in producing the genocide (Gourevitch 2000; Newbury 1998; Hintjens 2001; Des Forges 1999; Prunier 2010). Although the present paper concurs with these views, it seeks to challenge the ‘conventional wisdom’ on three accounts. First, explaining current political realities through colonial-era myths, without considering ruptures or diverging developments, is bound to deliver biased results. Second, reiterating ideology as the socio-psychological force behind the genocide trivialises the legal and ethical responsibilities of individual perpetrators.

Third, treating the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ as a unique Rwandan phenomenon runs the risk of ignoring comparative case studies which can foster a more thorough understanding of the country’s particular path to violence. To advance these arguments, the essay will proceed in the following manner. First, it will discuss theories on the social construction of antagonistic identities and trace back the origins of the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’, while outlining some of its contradictory historical developments and claims. In a second step, these insights will benefit the discussion on the hypothesis as a recurrent propagandistic tool that shapes public opinion through the media and eventually influences the actions of perpetrators. Here, some alternative views on the impact of the myth will be discussed. Last, the author will make some concluding remarks about the significance of the myth in preparing genocidal violence.

‘HAMITIC HYPOTHESIS’ AND IDENTITIES: FORMULATIONS, HISTORIES AND DEBATES

While the Nazi’s ‘final solution’ (Endlösung) became conceivable through the deep-rooted anti-Semitism in European societies (Brustein & King 2004), Rwanda’s genocidal violence could arguably thrive on an ideology known as the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’. The hypothesis attributes any technological or cultural achievement in Africa to the influence of a superior ‘northern’ race, most likely from ancient Egypt or Ethiopia, as ‘Africans’ were categorically deemed void of civilisation (Prunier 2010, 7). Europeans regarded Rwanda’s Batutsi as the descendants of those nomadic invaders who supposedly subdued their more ‘primitive’ African neighbours (i.e. the Bahutu) (Mamdani 2001, 82). Right from its inception, the hypothesis was more than a theoretical construct, but rather an ‘ideological statement, a myth motivating actions’ (Rekdal 1998, 17). Its underlying assumption – the dependency of African cultures on a more advanced deus ex machina – put Europeans in a good position to justify their mission civilisatrice and the colonial project at large. To properly capture this ideological genesis, a brief historical account is necessary.

Early expeditions to Africa were inspired by modernist and empiricist exploratory zeal, whereas indigenous people were categorised according to scientific racism (Uvin 1997, 95; see e.g. Seligman 1930). Expecting a continent of ‘savages’, German explorer Count von Götzen was bewildered when he discovered sophisticated socio-political structures and a monarchic-hierarchical ‘state’ on his arrival in Rwanda in 1894 (Von Götzen 1895, 156; Schmuhl 2000, 311). His travelogue, though exemplary for contemporary racist beliefs, conveys the zeitgeist which reaffirmed the conviction that ‘everything of value ever found in Africa was brought there by the Hamites’, a supposedly lost branch of the Caucasian ‘race’ (Sanders 1969, 521). A contemporary of von Götzen, German geographer and anthropologist Friedrich Ratzel, subsequently formulated his ‘Hirtenkriegertheorie’ (herding-warriors-hypothesis) in which he tried to prove the cultural superiority of the Batutsi (among others) on the basis of their nomadic way of life (Spöttel 1998, 131).

This interpretation of the ‘Hamitic Myth’ deviated substantially from earlier biblically-inspired versions that had classified ‘Hamites’ as ‘black savages’, ‘natural slaves’, ‘Negroes’, and as the progeny of Noah’s cursed son Ham (Sanders 1969, 532; Rottmann 1996, 54). Sanders explains these seemingly contradictory ontological claims with the growing influence of the European Enlightenment, the declining profitability of slavery in the early 1800s, and Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt which disclosed an ancient African civilisation that challenged simplistic notions of the continent’s ‘savagery’ (1969, 524-528). While previous accounts had legitimised the enslavement of black Africans on the grounds of their supposed racial inferiority (Spöttel 1998, 133), the colonial enterprise greatly gained from a race-theoretical turn that distinguished between ordinary Africans (‘Bantus’) and higher-ranking ‘Hamites’, the latter epitomising the notion of an alleged Kulturvolk[3] (a cultured people) with European ancestry.

Belgian colonialists and missionaries in Rwanda granted official status to this concept by institutionalising racial distinctions between 1927 and 1936. The introduction of identity cards, and the favourable treatment of Batutsi in education, politics and the economy, effectively cultivated social injustices (Mamdani 2001a, 87f.). Pre-colonial Bahutu and Batutsi identities, that were mostly based on status, occupation or wealth, were replaced by racialised categories and enshrined in a colonial ‘master narrative’ that was internalised by both colonisers and colonised (Jefremovas 1997, 96f.; Pels 1997, 174). Hintjens notes that prior to colonialism, ‘cross-cutting allegiances served to prevent the crystallization of anything akin to ‘ethnic’ identities’ (2001, 28). Making race the master-signifier of belonging annulled those allegiances. Indigenous identities began to compete with an externally-imposed racial categorisation.

The ‘Hamitic Myth’ gained currency not only as an ideology for keeping Bahutu ‘in their place’, as Des Forges (1995, 44) suggests, but also for rallying opposition against a perceived Tutsi domination. Mamdani’s (1996; 2001a; 2001b) approach to colonial identity emphasises political and socio-legal elements, such as histories of discrimination and the creation of bifurcated colonial citizenship, whereas Appadurai (2006) champions a socio-psychological understanding of mutual ‘Othering’ that relies on the social invocation of myths. Both explanatory models are inseparably intertwined, and shed light on different development phases of the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’. By stressing the functionality of ideology and ‘fear’ during various genocides, Appadurai (2006) makes his theory generally applicable. In contrast, Mamdani (2001a) traces back the specific roots of Batutsi-Bahutu relations and puts the genesis of the above narrative into a local historical perspective. Appadurai’s thesis lacks this insight and therefore fails to adequately grasp the Rwandan conundrum. Other than in Nazi Germany, where Jews were neither historically privileged (on the contrary), nor posed an objective threat to state order at any point in time, the Batutsi had a history of dominating Rwanda’s socio-political life, although this was mediated by colonial law and practice (Newbury 1995). However, both functional and comprehending approaches are causally connected, especially where the colonial imagery of a ‘master race’ was translated into actual legal facts. In the process of ethno-racial polarisation, that characterised the post-colonial period until the 1994 genocide, fact and fiction indistinguishably coalesced.

Decades of racist colonial policies had left their imprints on Rwanda society. In 1957, Grégoire Kayibanda pursued the transformation of socio-political structures in favour of the Bahutu majority (Prunier 2010, 48). His popular movement Parti du Mouvement de l’Emancipation Hutu (Parmehutu) sought to rid the country of “double colonialism”, both from Belgian and Tutsi rule. Both demands were formulated in the so-called ‘Bahutu Manifesto’ of 1957 (Newbury 1998, 11). It stipulated that Batutsi-Bahutu cleavages are the result of a ‘political monopoly held by one race, the Mututsi, […] [which] has become an economic and social monopoly’ (Niyonzima et al 1957, 3, emphasis added). The ‘Hamitic Myth’ became the ideological basis for the 1959 ‘Hutu Revolution’ that abolished the monarchy and turned Rwanda into a republic (Mayersen 2011, 171). As a result of the uprising, thousands of Batutsi were victimised and killed, being publicly vilified as ‘henchmen’ of colonialism and proponents of ‘Hamitic-feudalist’ rule (Mamdani 1996, 12).

Here, the hypothesis fulfilled two purposes. First, as Prunier argues, the establishment of the republic merely equalled an ‘ethnic transfer of power’, rather than an attempt in nation-building (2010, 50). Others go even further and suggest that ethno-cultural Hutu-nationalist propaganda aimed at the systematic social exclusion or outright elimination of the Batutsi in order to create a pure Hutu nation (see Appadurai 2006, 53; Mamdani 1996, 14; Hintjens 2001, 41; Gourevitch 2000, 95). Distinguishing between the two objectives is a matter of degree. While the first theory emphasises socio-economic balancing and a shift in power politics, the second adds an element of racial exclusivism which produces a Hutu “anxiety of incompleteness” (Appadurai 2006, 52) that requires the extermination of the Batutsi group.

On achieving independence in 1962, Rwanda’s internal cleavages further deepened (Prunier 2010, 55). Belgiums’ strategic shift in favour of the Bahutu opposition left the Batutsi isolated and vulnerable to extremist violence. During Kayibanda’s presidential years, structural discrimination and indoctrination against the Batutsi remained common practice (Newbury 1998, 13). ‘Tutsification’ of neighbouring Burundi, after a successful military coup in 1965, further exacerbated anti-Tutsi sentiments and quickly revived the parlance of a ‘Hamitic plot’ (Lemarchand 1995, 60). Also the formation of the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in their Ugandan exile nurtured resentments against a returning ‘master race’ trying to reverse the 1959 Hutu revolution and re-imposing its supposedly ‘age-old’ domination over Rwanda (Van der Meeren 1996, 259). The spectre of the ‘evil Hamite’ was haunting the region again, but this time fiction merged with actual fact, and whether it was the ‘killing fields’ of 1972 (Lemarchand 1989) in neighbouring Burundi, or the approaching ‘Tutsi army’ of the RPF in 1990, reality seemed to evidence whatever ‘secret plot’ the Batutsi were said to have made.

MYTH AND IDEOLOGY IN THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE

Due to the brevity of this essay, and a thematic focus on the ideology of the genocide, other factors that have contributed to its unfolding, such as the RPF invasion, the economic downturn, regional security, the environment, and foreign state complicity, are deliberately omitted, but have been discussed in-depth elsewhere (see Kamola 2007; Cameron 2012; Newbury 1998; Reed 1996, Kuperman 2004; Magnarella 2005; Uvin 1997). As in other genocide cases, the invocation of a ‘higher cause’ also attached a specific ‘meaning’ to the 1994 Rwandan killings. In Nazi Germany, Jews were dehumanised as a “cancer” or “disease” to humanity, and thus their millionfold death in gas chambers was portrayed as a “salvation” for mankind (Pine 2010, 58). A similar rhetoric was employed by Serbs to justify the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Bosniaks during the 1990s (HRW 1992, 249). In Rwanda, the physical destruction of Batutsi was euphemised as ‘chopping trees’, and victims were pejoratively referred to as ‘cockroaches’ (inyenzi) (Des Forges 1999, 62). As outlined before, genocidal ideology necessarily rests upon a process of dichotomisation and dehumanisation to justify the destruction of another group (Moshman 2007). Considering the above examples of racial propaganda from other sites of mass murder, this point seems valid and coincides neatly with Vansina’s apt description of ethno-racial myths as the “handmaidens of war propaganda” (1998, 38). However, myths and ideology are rarely the causes of conflict, they merely perpetuate its deadly logic by reconciling fact with fiction, grievances with ‘higher cause’. Bearing these theoretical discussions in mind, the question is which impact the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ had on social and criminal interactions during the Rwandan genocide. A discussion of the media is therefore a useful focus for analysis.

While most killings were conducted by the interahamwe (Bahutu militias) and units of the army (FAR), an ever-growing propaganda machinery provided ideological guidance through radio broadcasts, newspapers and public speeches. Although the RPF was responsible for spreading counter-propaganda, a detailed discussion thereof is precluded here by spacial constraints. In their broadcasts, the state-backed Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) and other stations continuously harped on the ‘foreign’ descent of Batutsi, denouncing them as ‘invaders’, a trope which proved particularly effective in the light of the RPF offensive (Yanagizawa-Drott 2012, 8; Baisley 2014, 51). Kimani concludes that racist radio propaganda “created an environment in which the ‘Tutsis of the past’ and the ‘Tutsis of the present’ became the same” (2007, 112). By invoking the ‘Hamitic’ origin of their enemies, propagandists could historicise contemporary animosities. To what extent this ideology directly spurred violence is debatable. Yanagizawa-Drott claims that over 51,000 victims can be attributed to radio propaganda alone (2012, 5). Based on qualitative interviews with génocidaires, Scott Straus criticises this view, stating that over half of the respondents declared the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ was utterly unknown to them (2007, 627). Considering the strong case most authors make to establish a direct connection between racist myth-creation and the perpetration of crimes (see Prunier 2010; Gourevitch 2000; Hintjens 2001; Des Forges 1999), this result seems surprising at first, but supports the view that other structural factors were pivotal.

Print media was similarly ambiguous. Distributing propagandistic newspapers, such as Kangura, proved difficult due to a relatively small readership concentrated in Kigali (Chalk 1999). Kangura instigated anti-Tutsi hatred in various ways, featuring treatise that interpreted politics through a racial lens. In 1990, the newspaper published a notorious pamphlet called the ‘Ten Commandments of the Bahutu’ which, although not explicitly mentioning a ‘Hamitic plot’, used language to celebrate Hutu-ness and to evoke solidarity among ‘Bantu brothers’ (Kangura 1990). Another contribution from 1991 explains that “the Bantu people […] are fighting a legitimate battle to free themselves from the tutsi [sic] hegemony;” (emphasis added, cited in Kabanda 2007, 67). Again, the struggle of “Bantu people” is an allusion to the imaginary ‘Hamito-Semitic’ origins of Batutsi. Making these connections does not per se demonstrate the hypothesis’ efficacy in encouraging violence, yet it documents its persistency throughout the 1990s.

The same is true for public speeches. Léon Mugesera achieved considerable ‘fame’ with his 1992 appearance in Kabaya where he threatened to send Batutsi (corpses) ‘back’ to their fictive Ethiopian home land via the Nyabarongo river – a macabre vision that became reality barely two years later (MoCI 2003, 23). Hate speeches of this calibre, fuelling the fear of ‘alien’ domination, were commonly used to spread genocidal ideas (Des Forges 1999, 68). Measuring the precise effect of such rhetoric, and its translation into violence action, seems analytically desirable, though unrealistic. Attempts by Straus (2007) and Yanagizawa-Drott (2012) in this regard are ambitious and promising, yet more work needs to be done.

The above examples arguably reflect the ideological tendencies prevalent in Rwandan public opinion during the genocide. The ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ re-surfaced continuously throughout Rwanda’s colonial and post-colonial past and cast a long shadow on Batutsi-Bahutu relations. By socially normalising contempt towards another group, and lowering the inhibition threshold for denouncements, dehumanisation, and eventually murder, the ideology played a crucial role in enabling genocide (Vollhardt et al 2006; Moshman 2007). A key witness in the ICTR trial against the publishers of Kangura remarked that genocidal ideologies spread like ‘petrol throughout the country little by little, so that one day [they] would be able to set fire[…]’ (cited in Benesch 2004, 62). With media propaganda as a case in point, the ‘Hamitic Myth’ seems to have provided a superstructure that rationalised mass murder. However, the following three aspects put this ‘conventional wisdom’ into a more critical perspective.

First, the concept’s adaptability to historical circumstances is particularly noteworthy as it defies the simplistic claim of a timeless European-inspired racist ideology. On the contrary, its content was subject to substantial change and modification, depending on the social climate or the political objectives of its proponents (Sanders 1969). The RPF’s advances during the genocide, or the anti-Bahutu atrocities of Burundi’s oppressive Batutsi regime have been pointed out as catalysts for reinforcing prejudice and myth-making in this context. Drawing simple comparisons between the colonial construction of the ‘Hamitic Myth’ and its crystallisation during the genocide seems methodologically flawed. Frederick Cooper polemically criticises this historically negligent technique as ‘leapfrogging legacies’ (2005, 17).

Second, the insistence on establishing an immediate causal link between racist ideology and violent deed not only runs the risk of eclipsing the bulk of alternative factors that have contributed rendered genocide possible (see Magnarella 2005), but also trivialises the individual responsibility for participation in such crimes, an issue addressed in more detail by Straus (2004) and Franck (2007). Last, assuming the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ was symptomatic only for the 1994 tragedy overlooks the fact that Rwanda is not a singular case in colonial-era social engineering. Rekdal points to the Iraqw people of Tanzania who were first branded as descendants of Middle Eastern migrants and were later declared as being representatives of a culturally superior ‘Hamitic’ race (1998, 17). He holds that although the Iraqw’s self-perception and sense of belonging is inspired by the hypothesis, a notion of vicious racial antagonism, as in the Rwandan case, is practically unheard of in Iraqw historiography. Likewise, during colonialism the nomadic Maasai were constructed in a similar way, but the post-colonial Tanzanian state tried to eradicate such racist legacy at the root, sometimes even by force (Mamdani 2001a, 47f.; Rekdal 1998, 29). The impact of racial politics on those groups was rather different than on the Rwandan Batutsi, which shows that the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ is neither a one-way-road to genocide, nor a self-sufficient explanation for ethno-racial conflict. Once again, an in-depth analysis of local histories, cultures and social settings is inevitable for comprehending myth, reality and what lies in between.

CONCLUSION

John H. Speke’s contemporaries were convinced that Rwanda’s Batutsi were racially and culturally superior to their Bahutu counterparts. Colonial policies translated this scientific myth into laws and practices, thus establishing an order of racial favouritism that privileged the Batutsi minority in socio-political life. Independence saw a reversal of those roles, victimising the former protégés of the colonial state and declaring them second-class citizens in a Hutu republic. The ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ proved a versatile tool for justifying discrimination, defamation and violence, but also a powerful social force in rallying nationalists around a notion of exclusivist Hutu-ism, fostering the emergence of a “predatory identity” (Appadurai 2006, 51) against the Batutsi. Seemingly irrefutable, the hypothesis and its inflammatory ideological assumptions survived in the catacombs of Rwandan politics, based on fragmentary evidence and ambiguous historiography. Since its inception in the colonial era, its ideas have strongly defined Rwanda’s social relations by fusing fiction and political fact, thus lastingly poisoning the country’s social climate. During the 1994 killings, the ideological perseverance of this ‘political myth’ became evident as its rhetoric resurfaced in media and the public space. Before this background, the Batutsi-led RPF rebel army and the oppressive minority regime in Burundi served as catalysts for a further polarisation and escalation of violence. Other than in Nazi Germany, where the Jews were never privileged nor posed an objective threat to state power, Rwanda’s past was an ambiguous space imbued with contested memories of oppression and the fear of a collective ‘Other’. Genocide propaganda thrived on the interstices of these both real and imaginary grievances and rationalised thousandfold murder.

END NOTES

[1] The e-document is available online, http://tinyurl.com/lpk8bl8
[2] A transcript of Mugesera’s speech is available in Canadian legal documents prepared by the Ministry of Immigration and Citizenship, http://tinyurl.com/ltlwz6j
[3] The term ‘Kulturvolk‘ (a cultured people) was first mentioned by German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder who used it as an antonym to the category of ‘Naturvolk’ (a primitive people).

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Hanno Brankamp is currently completing his postgraduate studies in International Security at the University of St Andrews, UK. He also holds a B.A. degree in Area Studies Asia/Africa from Humboldt University in Berlin with a specific focus on conflicts and security in Eastern Africa, including the Great Lakes and the Horn. He also publishes on Think Africa Press.’

THE VIEWS OF THE ABOVE ARTICLE ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR/S AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE PAMBAZUKA NEWS EDITORIAL TEAM

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Iranian MP Ali Motahari says the censorship of Persian-language networks is not right and should be avoided.

IRNA reports that Motahari said: “We cannot restrict society’s access to news because of security reasons.” He added, however, that immoral websites should be blocked.

A committee comprised of officials from several Iranian government bodies determines which websites should be blocked for access in Iran.

Internet users in Iran use proxies to access many popular website that are blocked by the government.

The post Iran: MP Slams Censorship Of Persian-Language News appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Fatih Karimov

Afghanistan may be turned into a rival for Iran in saffron production.

Farhad Saharkhiz, member of the board of directors of the saffron export development fund of Iran, said considering that Afghanistan is similar to Iran in climate, it is likely to become a rival for the country in the future, Iran’s IRIB reported on June 18.

To maintain the saffron market, we should produce organic saffron and export under national brands, he added.

The value of Iran’s saffron exports fell by 52 percent during the last Iranian calendar year (ended on March 20) compared to the preceding year.

The country exported some 136.6 tonnes of saffron, worth $200.2 million in the mentioned period, Iran’s ISNA news agency reported on April 25.

Iran’s saffron exports stood at 139.2 tonnes during the calendar year of 1391(ended on March 21, 2013).

While the volume of the exported saffron last year was only 1.8 percent less than the preceding year’s export, the sharp fall of Iran’s saffron’s price lead to a decrease of 52 percent in value.

The value of Iran’s exported saffron accounted for $418.8 million during the calendar year of 1391.

Iran currently exports 75 percent of its total saffron output to over 30 countries including Russia, Germany, Switzerland, England, France, Spain, Canada, Turkey, Belgium, Scotland, Sweden, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Estonia, Bahrain, Philippines, Malaysia, Brazil, South Africa, Qatar, Japan, Kuwait, India, China, and Saudi Arabia.

The Iranian administration has developed a plan for raising the annual saffron output to 500 tonnes by 2021. The plan has envisaged boosting exports to over $1 billion by 2021.

The post Afghanistan Threatens Iran’s Saffron Market appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Shahin Abbasov

Russia is putting the moves on Azerbaijan, as the South Caucasus country’s two neighbors, Georgia and Armenia, prepare to formalize partnerships with rival unions. But ever the pragmatic belle, Baku is resisting Russia’s advances.

While Azerbaijan’s neighbors, Georgia and Armenia, already are committed to deepening ties with the European Union (on June 27) and the Eurasian Economic Union (by July 1), respectively, Azerbaijan, the largest and richest country in the South Caucasus, remains up for grabs.

Suitors from the Kremlin have lined up to woo Baku. The first visit occurred in early June when Russian Economic Minister Alexei Ulyukayev arrived in the Azerbaijani capital to chat about economic cooperation and invited Azerbaijan to join the Eurasian Economic Union. Then, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dropped in on June 18-19 for a continuation of what he described as “a most active dialogue.” A triple whammy of visits will take place late this month, with trips by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees military-industrial matters, Development Minister Irog Slyunayev and State Duma Speaker Sergei Narishkin.

Meanwhile, during a visit to Baku earlier this month, José Manuel Barroso, president of the EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, announced plans for a “partnership on the strategic modernization” of Azerbaijan. The scope of this EU offer was not immediately clear.

But some things already are clear to the Kremlin. The EU accounts for 42 percent of Azerbaijan’s overall trade volume, and can serve as a major market for Azerbaijani gas exports. Moscow, therefore, is keen to prevent Baku and the EU from developing closer ties. Russia also does not want to see Azerbaijan expanding relations with Ukraine’s new government, or with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which has begun to assert itself in Ukraine’s neighborhood.

Azerbaijan showing support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity in the United Nations or the Council of Europe is one thing, but Moscow “wants to prevent real support from Baku for the new Ukrainian president, [Petro] Poroshenko, in the form of investments, loans and so on,” commented political analyst Elhan Shahinoglu, head of the non-governmental Atlas research center.

The Russian government, which is grappling with a large-scale capital flight out of Russia, likes the look of energy-rich Azerbaijan’s cash. “Russia is jealous that Azerbaijan is planning to invest $18 billion into the Turkish economy by 2019, which includes big projects in oil refining … and wants Baku to be also active in the Russian market,” said Shahinoglu.

With an eye on boosting Azerbaijani investment in Russia, a Russian-Azerbaijani economic forum, featuring the participation of more than 200 Russian entrepreneurs, is due to be held on June 23-24 in the city of Gabala. Local businesses and state-owned companies are unlikely to invest heavily in Russia amid Western sanctions and projected Russian growth of 0.5 percent. Even so, the Gabala forum indicates that Baku itself will initiate things, said Shahinoglu.

Azerbaijani commentators emphasize that any search for investment opportunities does not signal that Azerbaijan is going to enter a Russia-led economic union. “Russian ministers could offer anything, but one should consider the realities,” said Rasim Musabekov, a non-partisan member of parliament’s International Relations Committee. “Baku will not benefit from membership in these unions simply because Azerbaijan’s trade turnover with the countries of the Eurasian Union [Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia] amounts to less than 10 percent of the country’s foreign trade.”

Lavrov told a June-18 news conference in Baku that “no formal or official invitations” to join the Eurasian Union had been extended to Azerbaijan, but that “we would react positively if Azerbaijan, or any other country would decide to [join].”

In diplo-speak, that likely means that the Kremlin has accepted Baku’s position of non-alignment, noted Shahinoglu.

Moscow has limited levers with which to exert political or economic pressure on Baku. Unlike other former Soviet republics, Azerbaijan contains no large ethnic Russian minority, hosts no Russian military bases and has no Russian-controlled economic assets that could give Moscow political influence.

An earlier measure at extending Russia’s influence in the former Soviet Union – the offer of Russian passports to former Soviet citizens who can pass a Russian-language exam – does not appear to have generated much interest in Azerbaijan. The Russian Embassy in Baku declined to comment, but migration expert Azer Allahveranov, head of the non-governmental organization Hayat, observed that those Azerbaijanis who wanted Russian passports – primarily, the tens of thousands of labor migrants in Russia – had already obtained them.

The Azerbaijani parliament has taken steps to discourage Azerbaijani nationals from obtaining Russian passports. Amendments to Azerbaijan’s citizenship law stipulate that those who acquire other citizenships will automatically lose their Azerbaijani citizenship. Those who do not inform the government within a month’s time of any new passport risk criminal prosecution.

The post Azerbaijan Avoids Moscow’s Embrace appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Laith Hammoudi

After Islamic militants captured Tal Afar to the west of Mosul on June 16, the Iraqi military regrouped and rearmed and has since taken back about a quarter of this Shia-majority city, a security officer told IWPR.

Insurgents of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) moved on Tal Afar, 50 kilometres west of Mosul, after capturing the latter city last week and pushing south and east towards the capital Baghdad.

IWPR’s source, who did not want to be named, said troops commanded by General Mohammed al-Quraishi, who is also known as Abu al-Walid, held out and gathered his forces for a counterattack.

“Abu al-Walid and his troops kept fighting the ISIS insurgents from their base in the military airport, but they were suffering from a lack of support and ammunition,” the officer said

He described police units and allied tribal militias pulling out of Tal Afar as arms and supplies ran short. The insurgents then shelled the city with artillery and mortar shells, and captured most of it in a morning assault.

The remaining defending troops put up a fight, and the attack cost ISIS dear, according to a Tal Afar resident who spoke to IWPR by phone.

“On Monday morning, 25 vehicles full of ISIS fighters were torched when they first tried to enter in the city,” he said.

He added that the police and tribal forces who had left Tal Afar went to the town of Sinjar to wait for resupplies. Sinjar, like Tal Afar and Mosul, is in Nineveh governorate but is currently controlled by Kurdish forces.

Tal Afar residents, who are overwhelmingly Shia, fled in large numbers in fear of what the Sunni extremists might do. ISIS proceeded to destroy Shia mosques and a shrine.

ISIS’s grip on the city began to loosen by the end of the day. General Quraishi’s troops were resupplied by air, and many of the police and tribal units came back to join the fight on the evening of June 16.

“The security forces have regained control of 25 per cent of Tal Afar and captured some ISIS insurgents, including fighters of [non-Iraqi] Arab nationality,” the officer said, speaking on June 17. He added that some Saudis were among the detainees.

The insurgents remain in control of other parts of Nineveh province, above all Mosul itself.

Reports coming out of Mosul speak of fighting among insurgent factions after ISIS executed members of other groups including the Naqshbandi militia led by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a vice-president under the late Saddam Hussein.

In Anbar province, the Iraqi security forces and allied tribal units are battling insurgents in the town of Ramadi.

Fallujah is fully under the control of insurgents, although a local resident who gave his first name as Ali said they belonged to the Islamic State of Iraq, a faction he said was “a branch of al-Qaeda and unrelated to ISIS”.

Ali said 80 per cent of Fallujah’s residents had fled because of shelling by Iraqi government troops.

“Frankly, people hate the army more and more because of its random bombardment of the town, which has caused civilian casualties,” he said.

Laith Hammoudi is IWPR’s editor in Iraq. This article was published at IWPR’s ICR Issue 405.

The post Iraqi Military Pushes Back Into Tal Afar appeared first on Eurasia Review.

The Syrian government launched an air attack on an eastern Syria town controlled by the jihadist linked ISIS, according to the Associated Press Saturday.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that the government launched six airstrikes on the town of Muhassan Saturday in the oil-rich, eastern province of Deir Ezzor. The town located on the Euphrates River has been in the control of the the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a jihadist opposition group operating in both Syria and Iraq.

At least 16 people were killed in the strikes, including three civilians, according to the Observatory.

In related news, ISIS also allegedly killed three officers from the Free Syrian Army rebel group, according to another Agence France Presse report Saturday.

The bodies of the officers from the Western-backed opposition faction were found Friday in the eastern Deir Ezzor province where they were kidnapped two days earlier by ISIS militants.

The Free Syrian Army has been fighting ISIS since earlier this year in the eastern province, but lack of funding has hurt the rebel groups’ strength against the jihadists. In mid-June, nine FSA soldiers resigned in protest of funding shortages and lack of necessary military aid and supplies from donor countries.

At least 6,000 people have been killed in the fighting between the rebel and jihadist factions since the start of the year, according to Al Arabiya News report.

Original article

The post Damascus Attacks ISIS Stronghold, Militants Kill Syrian Rebel Officers appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Foreign companies are much more optimistic about Spain than they were in 2012. Nine out of every 10 companies surveyed expect to increase or at least maintain their revenues from Spain in the year ahead. This marks a notable increase compared to two years ago, when just over one in three (37 percent) were expecting revenues to fall.

Forecasts are also positive with regard to investment and employment in Spain: 88 percent of foreign firms believe they will increase or hold steady their level of investment and 87 percent expect their staff to grow or remain stable this year. In both cases the 2014 figures are 17 percent higher than those seen in 2012.

Meanwhile, Spain’s current business climate is rated 2.7 out of 5 overall, halting a downward trend seen in recent years, as the economic crisis took its toll.

These are some of the findings of the Barometer of the Business Climate in Spain, a survey of more than 230 foreign firms prepared by IESE’s International Center for Competitiveness run by Prof. Antoni Subirà in conjunction with ICEX, the Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade.

The Strengths of the Spanish Market

The features of Spain that are most praised by foreign investors are its infrastructure, human capital, quality of life and the size of its market. Meanwhile, Spain is approaching a passing grade in six other areas analyzed by the survey — with slight improvements seen in perceptions of its labor market, costs and financing, compared to previous years.

Spain’s high-speed railways and airports are singled out for praise, boosting the score for infrastructure. Foreign companies are also bullish on Spain’s human capital, the quality of its business schools, and its leisure and cultural offerings.

Despite high marks for human capital overall — an area deemed very important to those surveyed — the results indicate that foreign companies would like Spaniards to improve their language and oral/written expression skills, as well as their willingness to assume responsibilities and goals, their learning abilities and the availability of skilled (vs. unskilled) labor.

Quality of life is rated highly. The ease with which expats blend into Spanish society and the availability of international schools are praised in the study, although the cost of living is considered relatively high.

Room for Improvement

Negatives for Spain include the high cost of electricity and difficulties with financing and regulatory issues. Financing is the area with the lowest scores on the barometer, although some improvement is seen in the cost of financing from commercial banks, compared to 2012.

As for Spain’s regulatory issues, foreign investors seek greater stability. They also want to see less bureaucratic red tape and speedier and more efficient commercial courts.

Foreign companies also complain about the high cost of complying with regional and local legislation. A total of 65 percent agree that the business community would benefit if the rules set by Spain’s different levels of government were made uniform.

Regarding taxation, foreign companies feel Spain can make progress on corporate taxes, value-added tax (VAT) and employers’ contributions to the Social Security system for their workers.

In three other areas — namely, the labor market, costs and the size of the market — Spain has made progress since 2012 but there continues to be room to improve.

As for the labor market, the main drawbacks have to do with legislation. On the bright side for companies, nearly 70 percent of the firms polled feel that recent labor market reforms make the market more flexible, and 60 percent give the thumbs up to changes in the way collective bargaining agreements are reached.

The Importance of Foreign Investment

Foreign companies’ views on investing in Spain are very important to Spain’s economy. In 2013, foreign investment totaled 15.8 billion euros, an increase of 9 percent compared to 2012.

Those numbers put Spain in 13th place in the world in terms of foreign investment flows, ahead of Germany, France and Italy.

The post Foreign Companies Bullish On Spain appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Michele Penna

How do you measure your newly-acquired global player status? In many ways. One of them is how much debt you have and how threatening that could turn out to be for other countries.

So far, the world’s chief debtors were mostly located in the West. The US total debt is gigantic, and Europe’s recent crisis has been all about how much countries have to pay and what reform might make them sustainable.

But there is a new kid on the block: China. According to a new report by Standard & Poor’s, the People’s Republic has now joined the club.

The fresh analysis points out that “China is poised to overtake the U.S. as the country with the world’s largest corporate debt wall in 2014 (if debt grows at 1.2x nominal GDP growth) or 2015 (assuming 1.0x nominal GDP growth).” That means that Chinese companies are expected to borrow gigantic amounts of money in the next couple of years: “in the former scenario, China’s nonfinancial corporations would owe $13.8 trillion in 2014, versus U.S. corporations’ $13.7 trillion–and, in the latter scenario, $14.7 trillion in 2015 versus $14.1 trillion.”

The research also suggests that the debt of the Asia-Pacific region could soon be bigger that of the West: “in a similar vein, but over a longer-term horizon, Asia-Pacific could have more corporate debt than North America, the eurozone, and the U.K. combined by 2017, regardless of whether debt grows at 1.2x the nominal GDP growth of each country or 1.0x nominal GDP.”

Chinese debt started took an upswing after the financial crisis when the government in Beijing allowed the economy to be flooded with credit in an effort to fight economic headwinds. It worked. Chinese growth rates soon bounced back to over 10 percent and even now, in spite of a consistent slowdown, GDP increases at over 7 percent a year.

According to S&P’s, China’s corporate debt is poised to continue increasing even beyond the immediate future. In its report, the agency argues that Chinese debt has grown as a result of the country’s large investments in manufacturing, infrastructure and real estate, which are underpinned by credit. Besides, Chinese banks have not been impacted by the crisis in the way that European and American ones have been: thus, they have kept on lending and they could well keep on doing so. “Absent a more substantial rebalancing of the economy toward consumption, away from investment,” reads the paper, “China’s corporate debt growth is likely to continue at a fast pace for the foreseeable future.”

The rise of corporate debt is surely an indicator how far East Asia has come in the past few decades, but it also carries some negative implications. First, it is not clear whether the trend can be safely sustained over the coming years. “China has had a remarkable three-decade run without suffering a year of recession,” reads the report. However,  “while it is tempting to say that China’s economy can grow at such a level for another 20 years, we suggest that the risk of a correction may continue to be building.”

According to many, investments made during the post-crisis period were not all that productive and pressure may increase in the near future. There is much talk about a housing bubble ready to pop. Furthermore, a particularly troublesome aspect of China’s credit binge is that a significant part of it is financed through the so called ‘shadow banking sector’ – essentially, non-banking institutions loaning money to companies. According to S&P’s, the shadow banking sector finances somewhere between one third and one quarter of China’s corporate debt. That, given China’s bulging economic size, means that up to 10 per cent of global corporate debt is exposed to Chinese shadow banking: a crack in the system that affects everyone.

The post China Corporate Debt ‘Poised To Overtake US’ – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By James Stafford

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe isn’t a get-rich-quick scenario for the impatient investor: It’s a long, strategic play for the sophisticated investor who can handle no small amount of politics and geopolitics along the way. When it comes to Europe, Russia’s strategy to divide and conquer has worked so far, but Gazprom is a fragile giant that will eventually feel the pressure of LNG.

Robert Bensh is an LNG and energy security expert who has over 13 years of experience with leading oil and gas companies in Ukraine. He has been involved in various roles in finance, capital markets, mergers and acquisitions and government for the past 25 years. Mr. Bensh is the Managing Director and partner with Pelicourt LLC, a private equity firm focused on energy and natural resources in Ukraine.

In an exclusive interview with Oilprice.com, Bensh tells us:

• Why the smart LNG play is a long-term one
• How LNG fits into the European energy picture
• Why LNG will eventually pressure Russia in Europe
• Why Gazprom is but a fragile giant
• How Russia combines gas and political influence in Eastern Europe
• How the European Union is easy to divide and conquer
• Why the Ukraine crisis has brought attention to the South Stream pipeline
• Why Bulgaria is the new front line
• How Lithuania succeeded in negotiating down Gazprom
• What Moscow’s Crimea annexation really achieved
• Why it’s game over for Gazprom prices when Turkey steps in

James Stafford: Where does LNG fit into the overall European energy picture?

Robert Bensh: A better question might be, “When does LNG fit into the European energy picture?” When the price is right, it fits into the picture across the European Union, with new import terminals under construction, plenty of transmission lines to deliver it to land-locked countries and the prospect of deliveries from rising energy hub Turkey. And while it may not be a reality at this very moment, it is the prospect of cheaper LNG and the pace of LNG infrastructure development that has Gazprom worried about maintaining its monopoly.

James Stafford: So from an investor’s perspective, what do we need to know here?

Robert Bensh: Listen, the LNG economics are marginal. LNG is about long-term, steady supply. It’s a low-margin, long-term supply of gas to Europe. This is not a play for impatient investors who are looking to get rich quickly. This is a play for investors with longer-term vision, patience and strategic capabilities on a regional
level. Those are the people who are going to make money off of this and, along the way, help reshape the balance in Europe away from Russia.

James Stafford: Who are the buyers in this scenario?

Robert Bensh: The countries that primarily take LNG are the Eastern European countries that are paying the highest gas prices and feeling the most significant strategic energy crunch from Russia. They can purchase large amounts of LNG on five 10-year contracts.

James Stafford: And what will Gazprom’s response to more LNG for Europe be? What are its options?

Robert Bensh: Gazprom will either see its supply reduced, or it will be forced to reduce prices to limit economic impact. But once we can start getting LNG through the Turkish-controlled Bosphorus Strait, it is game over for Gazprom in terms of pricing. You’ll still have LNG coming into Europe simply because demand will always exceed supply with long-term contracts in place. That’s when you’ll start to see significant amounts of Canadian and American LNG entering the European and Asian markets, which will affect gas prices in Europe.

James Stafford: Has Russia’s, or Gazprom’s, energy strategy in Europe really been as sinisterly brilliant as is often suggested?

Robert Bensh: In many ways, yes; but it has its limitations. Financially, Russian gas monopoly Gazprom is a fragile giant.

Russia’s European energy policy is to approach different EU states on an individual basis in order to discriminate with price and get the maximum price possible from each. Beyond that, Russia also attempts to lock in supply by consolidating control over strategic energy infrastructure throughout Europe, as well as Eurasia.

In 2002, for example, Russia attempted to buy major energy infrastructure holdings in the Baltic states of Lithuania and Latvia. When both countries refused to cede control, Moscow sharply cut oil deliveries to both states. The final piece of Moscow’s strategy is to maintain control of energy corridors, thus denying Europe any alternative energy routes.

Russia gets away with this because its divide-and-conquer energy strategy is made easy by the fact that the European Union is anything but unified.

James Stafford: How does Gazprom’s controversial South Stream pipeline play into the crisis in Ukraine?

Robert Bensh: The South Stream pipeline is now coming into much clearer focus against the backdrop of the Ukraine crisis. This pipeline, which would run from the Black Sea to Austria and bypass Ukraine, is both a frightening and exciting proposition for Central and Eastern Europe. The specter of this pipeline makes the fractures in Europe highly visible.

The annexation of Crimea was significant on numerous fronts. The Ukraine crisis provided Russia with the opportunity to achieve important the economic and geopolitical goals of promoting alternative energy supplies that bypass Ukraine. And the results have been quick: Already, some EU countries have indicated that they are willing to drop their objections to the South Stream pipeline in order to increase the percentage of gas shipped directly from Russia.

James Stafford: What about Bulgaria’s recent back-and-forth over South Stream? What can we read into this?

Robert Bensh: For the South Stream pipeline, which is largely a macrocosm of the Ukraine crisis, the front line is Bulgaria, where Russian influence is now at its strongest, and where there is already talk of the country becoming the next Ukraine.

The wider EU is trying to block the South Stream project, while Central and Eastern Europe are very torn. Bulgaria is where this pipeline will enter the EU, and accusations persist that Gazprom has had a hand in framing Bulgarian legislation that would circumvent EU competition directives. All of Europe wants this pipeline, but Brussels doesn’t want it to be majority-Russian owned — they want to enable other suppliers to bring gas through it.

The Bulgarian story is getting very interesting. Last week, the Bulgarian government said it was suspending working on South Stream, under pressure from the EU over the project and U.S. sanctions against Russian firms working on the project. Bulgaria is
caught in a very bad place here—between Russia and the EU. On the one hand it is suspending work—for now, as it consults with the EU.

On the other hand, it is making sure everyone knows it still intends to go ahead with South Stream.

James Stafford: How much of a threat to Russia is the European Commission’s pending investigation into Gazprom’s monopolistic activities?

Robert Bensh: Europe has argued that Gazprom manipulates prices for political gain and the European Commission is set to release the results of a two-year investigation this month, which is expected to demonstrate substantial evidence that Gazprom is breaking European laws. After that report is released, the EC could take action relatively quickly with up to10 billion euros in fines, which Gazprom cannot afford. Again, the Bulgaria question will figure prominently in his debate.

James Stafford: How does Russia take advantage of the divisions within the EU?

Robert Bensh: The problem within the EU is that Western European countries have more supply opportunities, while Central and Eastern Europe are stuck with Russia. There is no common policy among the EU countries, so there can be no unified front to take
on Russia in the energy sphere. Russia takes full advantage of this bifurcation.

While talking of interdependence and dialogue, Russia has insisted on providing demand guarantees for the producers and sharing responsibilities and risks among energy supplier’s consumers and transit states. Russia’s actions have not backed up its visions for a new global energy security due to the state policy of not budging
from monopolizing gas production or oil and gas pipeline transportation. Europeans are wholly energy dependent on Russia.

Russia conducts geo-economic warfare on Europe. Russia’s vast oil and gas resources and strategic geographic positioning has translated into increased influence in global energy markets and political clout in its relations with the numerous states that remain more or less dependent on Russian energy. Lawsuits and rulings from the European Commission will prove to be well intended, yet ultimately failed efforts to control Russia’s policy aims driven by control of energy supply and transportation.

Here is where efforts to reduce dependence by one client state will have a concomitant benefit for other client state consumers. The European Union lacks a coherent, unified energy strategy and policy towards Russia. Russia thus wisely triangulates client states and the EU to achieve their policy goals either through cheaper supply or infrastructural development.

James Stafford: Will other countries in the region follow the example of Lithuania and Poland—both of which are aggressively pursuing alternatives to Russian piped gas?

Robert Bensh: Some, yes, out of necessity. The wisest ones, of course, will develop what they can internally of their own resources in an effort to reduce or possibly even remove the need for Russian oil and gas.

James Stafford: Where in Europe is there the potential to actually develop domestic resources to reduce Russian dependence?

Robert Bensh: Ukraine has the potential to do so. Poland, potentially, as well.

Other countries, the Baltics in particular, will have a much harder time reducing dependence through internal resource development. For this reason, the development of LNG and additional transportation routes to the region are vital strategically to reduce the dependence on Russian energy.

James Stafford: How should we perceive Lithuania’s recent success in negotiating down gas prices with Gazprom?

Robert Bensh: The country has very earnestly pursued LNG and is close to signing a supply deal with Norway’s Statoil. This, in turn, has forced Russia into price concessions for fear of losing market share. But for now, it’s a luxury that the poorer members of the EU in Central and Eastern Europe cannot afford, economically or politically.

Unfortunately, most countries will not play ball. Either they have enough of an internally generated resource base to help reduce dependence on Russian energy, or they have multi-integrated economic ties to Russia. Or both.

The crisis in Ukraine has taught us a devastating lesson: The failure to reduce dependence on Russia, in combination with a multi-integrated economic union with Russia, exposes a client state to geo-economic warfare. In Ukraine, this situation eventually led to President Viktor Yanukovych refusing to sign an Association
Agreement with the European Union, which in ignited the Maidan protests that led to the president’s overthrow and Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

James Stafford: Where will politics and geopolitics head this off? What is Russia’s weak point, it’s Achilles’ heel?

Robert Bensh: Russia has done a good job of tactically focusing on each client state, recognizing their weaknesses and exacerbating them to suit their needs. The only countries that can head this off are those with independent economies and diversified energy supplies. Russia can only provide oil and gas supplies and energy
infrastructure development. It cannot provide expertise in oil and gas drilling or service, which really comes from the United States.

And Gazprom’s Achilles’ heel—that which makes it a fragile giant—is the prospect of losing the European market to LNG. And it eventually will, at least in part, though it won’t be tomorrow.

James Stafford: What does the LNG pricing look like right now?

Robert Bensh: LNG is always about $1 less than Gazprom. The U.S. wants to sell their LNG, period. Asian prices are higher, anywhere from $3-$4 higher. But long, steady supply will always get sold.

Unless Gazprom comes down in its prices, to make LNG uneconomic, there will always be an LNG marketplace in Europe. There will always be enough supply to meet demand in Europe. All Gazprom has to do is drop its prices down $1 and LNG will be uneconomic. But you have some countries in Europe who are willing to pay a premium to reduce their dependence on Russian gas. LNG supply and the development of internal resources is a strategic decision being made by each country.

There won’t really be U.S. LNG hitting Europe until 2017-2018. There isn’t enough LNG coming from the U.S. to supply both Asia and Europe. Until there are more export terminals built in the U.S., there will always be significantly more demand than supply, from a U.S. standpoint. For now, U.S. LNG does not impact Europe—we’re not transporting enough in the next five years.

James Stafford: Last month, amid the crisis in Ukraine, Russia and China inked what is viewed as a highly significant gas deal. What are the implications of this deal for Europe?

Robert Bensh: Let’s put this into perspective a bit: This Russia-China deal might not be squeezing out potential supply to Europe, but making up for the likely disappearance of the market for gas from Ukraine. A decade ago, Ukraine was buying 52 billion cubic meters of gas annually from Russia, and last year, this was down to 28bcm. The take-or-pay agreement signed in 2009 was for 42 bcm, which is more than the annual supply as per the China deal. It is not unreasonable to think of Ukraine being totally self-sufficient in gas over the next decade as rational energy pricing reduces very inefficient consumption, while Ukraine has lot of opportunities to hike production — assuming it remains unified.

This is part one of a three-part series of interviews examining the prospects for Black Sea LNG.

Source:
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/LNG-The-Long-Strategic-Play-for-Europe-Interview-with-Robert-Bensh.html

The post LNG: The Long, Strategic Play For Europe: Interview With Robert Bensh appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Miroslav Klose equaled Brazilian legend Ronaldo’s record of 15 World Cup goals with the equalizer for Germany in their 2-2 Group G draw with Ghana in Fortaleza on Saturday.

Mario Goetze had given Germany the lead before goals from Andre Ayew and Asamoah Gyan turned the game on its head and threatened to cause a major upset for the Black Stars.

But Klose had the last laugh with a poacher’s goal a yard out 19 minutes from time.

The post World Cup: Germany Draw 2-2 With Ghana appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Kerri Lenartowick

In his homily at the Saturday evening anticipated Mass during his day trip to Italy’s Calabria region, Pope Francis denounced the dishonesty and violence perpetrated by members of the local mafia.

“When adoration of the Lord is substituted by adoration of money, the road to sin opens to personal interest … When one does not adore the Lord, one becomes an adorer of evil, like those who live by dishonesty and violence,” Pope Francis said June 21 at the outdoor Mass in Sibari, Italy.

“Your land, which so beautiful, knows the signs of the consequences of this sin. The ‘Ndrangheta (Calabrian mafia) is this: adoration of evil and contempt of the common good. This evil must be fought, must be expelled. It must be told no,” he urged.

Those who have chosen the “evil road, such as the mobsters” are “not in communion with God. They are ‘excommunicated’,” he said.

His homily, preached for the feast of the Corpus Christi focused on the importance of adoring God alone.

“And, for this faith, we renounce Satan and all of his temptations; we renounce the idols of money, vanity, pride and power. We, Christians, do not want to adore anything or anyone in this world except Jesus Christ, who is present in the Holy Eucharist,” he emphasized.

Christians adore God “who is love” and who “in Jesus Christ has given himself for us, who has offered himself on the cross for the expiation of our sins and by the power of this love is risen and lives in the Church.”

A Christian’s adoration of Jesus present in the Eucharist will also bear fruit in fraternal charity, noted Pope Francis. “The people that adores God in the Eucharist is the people that walks in charity.”

The Holy Father urged the congregation to “witness to concrete fraternal solidarity” in families, parishes, and ecclesial movements.

“The Lord Jesus does not cease to raise up gestures of charity in his people who are journeying!” he exclaimed.

Furthermore, it is the Eucharist that unites the followers of Jesus, making them “one family, the People of God gathered around Jesus, the bread of life.”

“If you adore Christ and walk behind him and with him, your diocesan Church and your parishes will grow in faith and in charity, in the joy of evangelization,” he encouraged.

“You will be a Church in which fathers, mothers, priests, religious, catechists, children, the elderly, (and) young people walk together, one alongside the other, supporting one another, helping one another, loving one another as brothers, especially in moments of difficulty.”

The pontiff also repeated his much-used encouragement to young people. “I have said it before and I say it again now: do not let your hope be stolen!” he exclaimed. “Adoring Jesus in your hears and remaining united to him you will know how to oppose evil, injustice, violence with the force of good, truth and beauty.”

Pope Francis concluded his homily by invoking Mary, the “woman of the Eucharist,” who will “help you remain united, also by means of your witness, so that the Lord will continue to give life to the world.”

The post Pope Slams Mafia As ‘Adorers Of Evil’ appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Muslims closed their shops and restaurants on Friday in towns across Sri Lanka, in protest against a recent spate of attacks on them by extremist Buddhists.

Businesses in Colombo, Beruwala, Aluthgama and other parts of the country were locked and shuttered, after what has been described as the worst outbreak of Sinhala-Muslim violence in years. Several businesses had been closed since the previous day.

On the advice of the Muslim Council of Sri Lanka, Friday noon prayer services – normally the busiest gathering of the week – were also cut short, with attendees urged to disperse and go home promptly and quietly afterwards.

Muslim businessmen said that their intention was not to provoke another clash but to prevent further incidents and highlight their plight to the government.

Silvan Hettiarachchi, a Muslim resident of the coastal resort town of Beruwala where violence erupted on June 15, was among those who closed his business for the day.

“This incident has caused disharmony among the religious communities who were living in peace with their neighbors,” he said. “Massive security including police trucks, armored cars and hundreds of army solders are now patrolling with weapons in every corner.”

He added that in his estimation, “more than 6,000 people have been displaced and are now staying in camps or mosques.”

Mohammad Sonsuthi, owner of a three-story textile shop which was set ablaze in the June 15 riot, said that he, his wife and children were left with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. He said that “the children’s school uniforms, books and birth certificates” are all lost.

He added that it had taken him three days to overcome his fear and return to the gutted premises as he was still haunted by the memory of a shop he owned formerly, which was burnt to the ground during a similar clash in 2006.

“Now business people and their staff are all in the same displacement camps,” he said, tearfully.

At Beruwala’s Al-Humaisara displacement camp, Pathima Pazna told the harrowing tale of her ordeal when violence broke out on June 15.

“Last Sunday night the curfew was in operation when intruders forced my front door open. My next door neighbor was with them.”

She and her children were forced to flee into the jungle where they hid until the next morning. She added that 75 pregnant women and 156 infants were staying in the camp among a total of around 1,250 people.

“How are we going to survive?” she said. “The government is not supporting us.”

It is thought that the prime mover behind the attacks on the Muslims – who account for around 10 percent of the country’s population – is a hardline Buddhist group known as the BBS, or Buddhist Force.

However, BBS chairman Ven. Kerama Vimalajothi Thero has strongly condemned the violence, suggesting that there may be breakaway factions within the group. “Some groups are trying to disrupt the religious unity existing in the country. Where should the Muslims go? Every citizen has the right to enjoy freedom. “This issue can be settled peacefully without engaging in any violence.”

Meanwhile a prominent Buddhist monk who is also critical of extremism was found naked, beaten and unconscious on Thursday in Panadura, 30 kms south of Colombo.

“I was assaulted, cut and had my robes stripped off by an unknown gang,” said Ven. Vijitha Thero who is now recovering in hospital.

The post Sri Lanka Muslim Businesses Close In Protest Over Attacks appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Phyllis Bennis

This is how wars begin.

Barack Obama says we’re not going back to Iraq. “American forces will not be returning to combat in Iraq,” he said on June 19^th, “but we will help Iraqis as they take the fight to terrorists who threaten the Iraqi people, the region, and American interests as well.”

The White House says it’s “only” sending 275 soldiers to protect the embassy, it’s only sending 300 Special Forces, they’re only “advisers.” There’s only one aircraft carrier in the region, they say, and a few other warships. They’re considering missile strikes but they’re not going to send ground troops.

Iraq isn’t a start-up war for the United States—we’ve been there before. And these actions increase the danger we could be heading there again. We thought we had a president who learned the lesson, at least about Iraq—he even repeats it every chance he gets: “There is no military solution.”

This is a very dangerous move. President Obama’s words are right: there is no military solution.But his actions are wrong. When there is no military solution, airstrikes, Special Forces, arms deals, and aircraft carriers will only make it worse.

We need to stop it now. Before the first Special Forces guy gets captured and suddenly there are boots on the ground to find him. Before the first surveillance plane gets shot down and suddenly there are helicopter crews and more boots on the ground to rescue the pilot. Before the first missile hits a wedding party that some faulty intel guy thought looked like a truckload of terrorists—we seem to be good at that. And before we’re fully back at war.

Iraq is on the verge of full-scale civil war along the fault lines set in place when U.S. troops invaded and occupied the country more than a decade ago. We need to demand that our government do five things right away:

First, do no harm. There is no military solution in Iraq—so end the threats of airstrikes, bring home the evac troops and Special Forces, and turn the aircraft carrier around.

Second, call for and support an immediate arms embargo on all sides. That means pressuring U.S. regional allies to stop providing weapons and money to various militias.

Third, engage immediately with Iran to bring pressure to bear on the Iraqi government to end its sectarian discrimination, its violence against civilians, and its violations of human rights.

Fourth, engage with Russia and other powers to get the United Nations to take the lead in organizing international negotiations for a political solution to the crisis now enveloping Iraq as well as Syria. Those talks must include all sides, including non-violent Syrian and Iraqi activists, civil society organizations, women, and representatives of refugees and displaced people forced from their homes. All relevant outside parties, including Iran, must be included. Building on the success of the ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran, Washington should continue to broaden its engagement with Tehran with the goal of helping to bring the Syrian and Iraqi wars to an immediate end.

Fifth, get help to the people who need it. The Iraq war is creating an enormous new refugee and humanitarian crisis, escalating the crisis of the Syrian war, and spreading across the entire region. The United States has pledged one of the largest grants of humanitarian aid for refugees from Syria, but it is still too small, and much of it has not been paid out. Simultaneously with the announcement of an immediate arms embargo, Washington should announce a major increase in humanitarian assistance for all refugees in the region to be made immediately available to UN agencies, and call on other countries to do the same.

This is how wars can be stopped.

Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

The post Five Steps US Can Take In Iraq Without Going Back To War – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Hani Hazaimeh

After reading countless articles, op-eds and analyzes on the swift takeover of the northern parts of Iraq by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), only very few made sense. While the vast media coverage remained lopsided and contained no in-depth analysis of what has happened and still happening in the war-torn Iraq, less than five pointed out some facts as to what has deteriorated the situation.

While writing this article, only one thought kept hovering my mind that the failure to pay attention to people’s legitimate rights gives rise to extremist tendencies. Let us just pause for a moment and discuss the fast-paced events pushing the region, particularly Syria and Iraq, to an ugly sectarian conflict. Ever since the US ground troops left Iraq, the security situation there never improved. The number of suicide bombings — targeting government installations and popular gatherings — has been a daily routine. The number of people killed in those attacks has been in hundreds.

For many, it is very clear that violence in Iraq is rooted in religion, and basically it is between the Shiite government led for the third time by Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki and the Sunni rebels, whether they are affiliated with the Al-Qaeda, the ISIL or the banned Baath party, led by Izzat Ibrahim Al-Douri, who is allegedly spearheading the Iraqi Sunni opposition since the invasion of Iraq and the ousting of Saddam regime in 2003.

There is no doubt that ISIL is an Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group and targets the unity, stability and security of Iraq and aims to establish an Islamic state in the Levant region at any cost. However, it is in Al-Maliki’s interest to eliminate any form of opposition to his rule and what can be a better way to gain international community’s support than portraying the popular uprising to his unjust and divisive policies as terrorism.

This is the best way for him to get rid of his Sunni opponents once and for all. Just before the situation escalated, there was very little mention of the ISIL as sane elements in Iraq were calling on Al-Maliki to end the military action in Anbar and resort to negotiations with the locals and engage them in a reconciliation process by ensuring social justice to all components and sects of the Iraqi society.

What I still find puzzling and impossible to understand is that how could a few thousand inexperienced, badly equipped fighters beat a well-armed and well-trained army? I strongly disagree with President Obama when he attributed the Iraqi Army’s unwillingness to fight the ISIL fighters to lack of morale and commitment. From my own experience, as an Arab citizen who has lived his whole life in the region, I can say that Iraqis are one of the most stubborn people in the Arab world and when they want to do something they do it by any possible mean. And I know that Iraqis are willing to sacrifice their lives to defend their own country.

So how come hundreds of thousands of Iraqi military personnel chose to drop their weapons and took off their uniforms and fled the battleground in face of a group of fighters who have failed to win the years-long battle in Syria.

Several opinion writers and columnists appear to have fallen for what Al-Maliki aimed to achieve through that dirty game he is playing. They based their analyzes on the theory that ISIL is a terrorist organization and is the only force behind the current mess in Iraq.

By this, what has been written so far in fact is doing Al-Maliki’s sectarian agenda a big favor. Al-Maliki, according to this scenario, will employ the artificial collapse of the Iraqi Army in order to impose a state of emergency, according to the provisions of the emergency law enacted in 2010 to be able to restore security and then have the strongest profile in Iraq.

In an exclusive interview with Al-Arabia TV, Anbar tribal leader Sheikh Ali Hatem underlined that since the first day of the “Iraqi revolution,” the aim of the movement is to fight injustice and to restore the rights of governorates that Al-Maliki has baffled since day one by describing the Iraqi revolution as being messy and non-Iraqi or foreign.

Hatem asserted that the Iraqi revolution had nothing against the regional countries and the world and had nothing to do with terrorism, vowing to keep track of the goal of the revolution and not to harm the interests of regional countries in Iraq. He explicitly made it clear that the revolutionary forces did not want to impose yet another war on the country as Al-Maliki claimed.

The way Al-Maliki has portrayed the Sunni revolution against his brutal sectarian agenda should bring to our minds the brutality of the Bashar Assad’s regime and the atrocities it is committing against its own people for the past few years.

Finally, the international community should be aware of Al- Maliki’s dirty policies and find ways to verify what is happening on the ground in Iraq and to ascertain the plight of the people who have been trying to win their freedom from years of Shiite oppression. Short of that, Iraq would just be another link in the Shiite loop headed by the Iranian regime to further spread Shiite influence and to impose itself as a superpower in the region. By then, it would be too late to take any action to check Iran’s expansionist designs.

On the other hand, if any regional power considers the ISIL the savior of the Sunni populations in pre-dominantly Shiite countries, they should think twice. Forces like the ISIL and its likes can never be trusted for any constructive goal.

The post Demonizing Sunni Uprising In Iraq – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

About two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Obama’s immigration policies. The polling reveals extreme partisanship: 60% of Democrats and 8% of Republicans approve of the president’s approach.

And yet, there is nothing particularly remarkable about the current administration’s policies. In response to the increasing flow of children and women immigrants seeking asylum, Obama is escalating deportations and authorizing more detention facilities. This is completely consistent with the president’s tendencies over the last several years.

Many news articles have reported record deportations under Obama, while his anti-immigration critics have argued that a sensitivity to novelties in classification expose a president lax on border enforcement. Adjusting for all this, it appears that the truth is somewhere in the middle: Overall, the Obama administration has conducted deportation policies qualitatively similar to the last administration’s. Whether one concludes a slight decline or increase, the more important fact is that there has been no radical shift since he took office, and certainly not one toward liberalization. Obama’s proposal for reform last year was in fact quite reminiscent of Bush’s plan. Although conservatives tended to find Bush too liberal on immigration, a June 2007 poll showed that 45 percent of Republicans favored their president on these policies, down from 61 percent just a few months before.

How is it that two presidents can behave in a fairly similar manner and yet garner such very different reactions among voters who identify with the two parties? Surely this phenomenon is not unique to immigration. Although the figures have moderated quite a bit, in the immediate aftermath of the first NSA revelations last year, Democrats overwhelmingly supported the agency’s surveillance programs, while Republicans were about equally divided; back in 2006, Democrats opposed NSA wiretapping 61 percent to 37 percent, while Republicans approved it 75 percent to 23 percent.

It would appear that the biggest changes in American politics that arrive when one party displaces the other in power do not concern what the government actually does as much as what the populace thinks about what it does. The voters flip-flop more than the leaders, who all tend, on most issues anyway, to gravitate toward governing from the center. The implication for those with principled stances on the issues is troubling and somewhat counterintuitive. Because in the long-term the government’s activities tend to respond to and be constrained by public opinion, rule by one party rather than the other tends toward a paradoxical dynamic: A Democrat in power will be defended by partisans and condemned by opponents no matter how hawkish the policies in war and civil liberties. Similarly, a Republican in power will be defended by partisans and condemned by opponents no matter how spendthrift the economic agenda. This helps explain why Bush was able to get away with so much deficit spending and domestic government expansion, and yet be celebrated and tarred as a free marketer, while Obama can deport, bomb, and indefinitely detain while being celebrated and tarred as a bleeding heart dove.

On the other hand, of course, both parties also do have their own pet projects. The Democrats have greater ambitions of domestic entitlement aggrandizement and the Republicans do appear more ideologically committed to wars abroad. These differences, taken with the countervailing effects of political opposition, mean that we can’t make any sort of solid predictions other than a fairly confident assumption that the vast majority of government activity and its trajectory of growth will continue, with only somewhat minor differences in specific areas, regardless of the party in charge, at least so long as mainstream American political ideology continues fundamentally to embrace government in its most modern incarnation, tempered only by partisan hypocrisy as seen in these kinds of polling results.

So for the pundits wondering what all of this means for the 2014 and 2016 election cycles, to which they seem obsessed in relating every news item, all I can say is that mass deportations, the destruction of families, inhumane mass detentions, invasive border searches, and an overall horrific immigration policy will probably be safe no matter who wins or loses at the ballot box. For those who find this projection unsatisfying, I urge you to try to convince your neighbors of your political principles, and to stick to fundamentals. Nothing short of a widespread change in attitude will secure substantive reforms anyway.

The post Immigration And Mindless Partisanship – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

In the nearly 25 years since the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers and the public alike have enjoyed ground-breaking views of the cosmos and the suite of scientific discoveries that followed. The successor to HST, the James Webb Telescope should launch in 2018 but will have a comparatively short lifetime.

Now Prof Martin Barstow of the University of Leicester is looking to the future. In his talk at the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2014) in Portsmouth on Tuesday 24 June, he calls for governments and space agencies around the world to back the Advanced Technologies Large Aperture Space Telescope (ATLAST), an instrument that would give scientists a good chance of detecting hints of life on planets around other stars.

ATLAST is currently a concept under development in the USA and Europe. Scientists and engineers envisage a telescope with a mirror as large as 20 m across that like HST would detect visible light and also operate from the far-ultraviolet to the infrared parts of the spectrum. It would be capable of analysing the light from planets the size of the Earth in orbit around other nearby stars, searching for features in their spectra such as molecular oxygen, ozone, water and methane that could suggest the presence of life. It might also be able to see how the surfaces of planets change with the seasons.

Within the vision “Cosmic birth to living Earths”, ATLAST would study star and galaxy formation in high definition, constructing the history of star birth in detail and establishing how intergalactic matter was and is assembled into galaxies over billions of years.

If it goes ahead, ATLAST could be launched around 2030. Before this can happen, there are technical challenges to overcome such as enhancing the sensitivities of detectors and increasing the efficiencies of the coatings on the mirror segments. Such a large structure may also need to be assembled in space before deployment rather than launching on a single rocket. All of this means that a decision to construct the telescope needs to happen soon for it to go ahead.

Prof Barstow is the President of the Royal Astronomical Society, but is speaking in a personal capacity. He sees ATLAST as an ambitious but extraordinary project. He commented:

“Since antiquity human beings have wondered whether we really are alone in the universe or whether there are other oases of life. This question is one of the fundamental goals of modern science and ATLAST could finally allow us to answer it.

‘The time is right for scientific and space agencies around the world, including those in the UK, to take a bold step forward and to commit to this project.”

The post Time To Think Big: A Call For A Giant Space Telescope appeared first on Eurasia Review.