The practice of “growing and harvesting rainwater to face declining soil moisture and recharge rate of headwater aquifers,” promoted by the Bartolomé Aripaylla Association (ABA) and the rural community of Quispillaccta, in the southern Andean department of Ayacucho, has been awarded first place in the Contest for Best Practices in Facing Climate Change in rural areas, under the 2014 National Environmental Award of the Ministry of the Environment.

The award ceremony was held on Dec. 2 in the Platinum Garden Auditorium as part of the Voices for Climate Meeting — a space for exposition and exchange promoted by the government to raise public awareness of the importance of climate change — where the Quispillaccta community received from the hands of the Minister of the Environment Manuel Pulgar Vidal this recognition for their important work. The Voices for Climate Meeting was held in parallel to the 20th Conference of the Parties (COP20) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was held in Lima from Dec. 1 to 12.

20 years ago, the Quispillaccta peasant community, located in the Chuschi district of Ayacucho between 2.800 to 4.600 meters above sea level, began using community work to “breed” lakes and promote the practice of cultivating and harvesting rainwater.

With this practice, the Quispillaccta community members seek to respond to the problem of water shortages in communities adjacent to the basins of the Pampas and Cachi-Mantaro rivers. These shortages are caused by, among other factors, low water recharge rates and the rapid melting of the snow that feeds their primary sources, which in turn are effects of climate change, which causes other negative consequences such as increased hail damage and frost severity.

Among the other factors that caused the overall dryness of the community grasslands with loss of vegetation covering the hills, and the decreased flow of rivers and near disappearance of water springs, it should be highlighted the armed political violence that began in the Chuschi district in 1980 and ravaged the country until 2000, causing destruction of protected water springs and farm abandonment due to peasant murders, disappearances and forced migration; other factors include the loss of “affection” and respect for the water of a sector of the population that has neglected festivities and rituals, and academia and government institutions’ undervaluing of local knowledge and worldview for growing water and of natural landscapes.

That is why ABA — created in 1991 by agronomic engineers Magdalena and Marcela Machaca —, which provides technical advice and financial support for the water recovery process in the Quispillaccta community, promotes a development approach with a focus on Good Living (Sumaq Kawsay) of the entire living community (human, nature and deities) that qualify as “harmonious life and dignity” in their own way of living life centered on agriculture. This approach involves recognizing the economic and social value of Andean peasant agriculture, that is, the shift towards agroecology and food sovereignty as well as the development of agricultural festivals and rituals and an education based on the dialogue of knowledge.

The cultivation and harvesting of rainwater (growing water) is performed by adapting natural hollows to store runoff water until the accumulation forms “artificial lakes” and then building dikes with stones, clay and ashes. The community also plants native flora to increase the flow of water springs to forever preserve these water springs and wetlands, which they call “mothers of water”. They also build natural fences and wire around the springs and wetlands to prevent animals from overusing them and so these water sources can regain their water levels. This is all done with the active participation of community members and community authorities of Quispillaccta.

“It is making water where there is no water, with the mother plant that calls water and harvesting rainwater in natural vessels. Thus far we have 71 stable lakes and additional 10 are forming, a total of 81 lakes,” says Magdalena Machaca, executive director of ABA.

Since 2000, ABA expanded its activities to neighboring communities and started using heavy machinery with community participation to improve the dams of rainwater lakes or for the construction of new ones. Its goal is to create up to 200 artificial lakes.

But ABA not only harvests water, it also harvests public recognition for its work. Asked about what this award means to her, Magdalena Machaca said: “It´s a nice experience because it is about the recognition of this ancient knowledge that still guides our communities … Many times our communities have been called backward … they call them archaic communities, but this is not true. Instead, we [use] that wisdom to address the problem of climate change. That is why this feels great and [feels] that our wisdom, such as in cultivating and harvesting rainwater, is worth a lot.”

The post Peru: ‘Cultivation’ Of Lakes Project Recognized appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Relations between Cuba and the United States have been tumultuous since Castro took control in January 1959 from the dictator Fulgencio Batista.

Fidel Castro and Fidelistas won a revolution and were determined to keep it at all costs. While the United States government was determined to do whatever was necessary – invasion, espionage, assassination attempts on high-ranking Cubans including Castro, subversion, embargos (except open immigration for refugees) and even pressing other nations not to trade with or invest in Cuba.

Foreign policy observers know that the U.S. has propped up dozens of brutal dictatorships in three continents at the same time the U.S. was trying to undermine Cuba. The U.S. opened diplomatic relations with China who fought us in the Korean War. We even have full relations with Vietnam despite our major bloody war with them. The ongoing animosity from the U.S. to achieve “regime change” in Cuba can be seen as bizarre, even given the anti-Cuban immigrant enclave in South Florida, when compared to the aforementioned foreign policies throughout the past half-century with China, Vietnam and other countries and regimes.

Last week, when President Obama, with the support of two-thirds of the American people, announced opening the door to diplomatic relations with Cuba (Congress will still have to authorize an embassy and an ambassador), this included loosening trade restrictions, easier access for tourist visas, and cooperating on health matters, climate disasters, and drug trafficking. Now, the prediction game has erupted in all directions in both countries as to what can, will and should happen regarding Cuba in the coming weeks, months and years.

Well, what we do know is that a Republican Congress will give President Obama very little slack, other than to help U.S. tractor manufacturers and U.S. agricultural exporters trade with Cuba. Annual trade with Cuba will soon go to $1 billion from under $400 million of mostly food exports last year. Trade with Vietnam, a much larger country, reached $30 billion last year!

In the future when relations have progressed to include all tourism and the Cuban infrastructure can support it, Cuba will become an attractive destination for millions of American tourists. Some U.S. hotels will get management contracts with the Cuban government, as some European and South American companies have already. Cubans will be able to receive more remittances from their relatives in the U.S. through credit cards.

The real questions about change, however, are from the Cuban side. What will be the reaction of the Castro brothers to U.S. politicians discussing the changes they believe will be best for Cuban politics, economics and culture? Will human rights and civil liberties expand?

The Castros are realists and futurists who are conscious of their ages and want to preserve the Cuban socialist revolution. The state currently controls 80% of the economy. Raul Castro has permitted a variety of small businesses (450,000 of them so far) and small private agricultural plots.

Still, the economy is in bad shape, notwithstanding universal free public education through the university level, universal health care, religious freedom and the ingenuity of Cubans in gaming the system with small-time black markets to get what they need.

Cubans have grown to rely on their remarkable ability to repair given their lack of imports due to embargos. The 1958 Chevrolet taxis I saw in Havana when David F. Binder and I joined a foreign press delegation to interview Castro in April 1959 are still on the streets of Havana today. Nonetheless, Cuba needs to significantly improve its infrastructure and expand the manufacturing of household goods.

It is not likely that Cubans can hold true to their principles in the face of an unimpeded flood of U.S. junk food, credit gouging, deceptive TV advertising, one-sided fine-print contracts, over promotion of drugs, commercialization of childhood with incessant and often violent programming and other forms of harmful corporate marketing.

Few societies can absorb the sensual seduction of Western corporate/commercial culture’s onslaught and not succumb to becoming a mimicking society. If it can happen to China – the Middle Kingdom – it can happen to any country.

President Obama promised last week to assist civil society in Cuba which made me wonder why he hasn’t assisted civil society – dominated by a two party tyranny and corporatism – in the U.S. Furthermore, given the history it may not be in the best interest of all Cubans for the “American imperialists” to assist their civil society.

The Castro brothers may be looking at Vietnam as a model. There the Communist Party is still strictly in charge, but there is a burgeoning “capitalist” economy expanding quite rapidly. In addition, Vietnam has seen the expansion of public corruption, pollution, profiteering, inequality, a painful generation gap and upheaval of cultural traditions.

One thing you can say about Castro’s Cuba, compared to Venezuela and many other South American regimes, is that there is not much big-time corruption. In fact, a corruption-ridden Venezuela that ships 100,000 barrels of oil a day to Cuba and is falling into deeper disarray is a reason why the Castros want more trade, tourism, and technical investment from the U.S and other countries.

Cuba exports physicians to many countries, often as a form of foreign aid. On the other hand, the U.S. imports physicians. Fidel Castro told us in 2002 that he was willing to collaborate with the U.S. in other countries to confront tropical diseases and epidemics using each country’s strengths. The U.S. government had no interest in his offer.

Now, with Cuban physicians going to West Africa in far greater numbers than our medical corps to deal with Ebola, the thawing of relations may produce more joint efforts in fighting or preventing such deadly epidemics.

Stay tuned to forthcoming events. Waging peace is a novel experience for hawkish U.S. foreign policy operatives and their provocative private consulting think tanks in Washington, D.C.

The post Ralph Nader: Political Rumbas Start In Cuba – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

When four networks go down in a country where hardly anyone has internet access, does it make any sense to say that North Korea had an internet outage?

Every single day there are outages on a much larger scale all over the world and apart from for the technicians whose task it is to fix them, they largely go unnoticed.

Two weeks ago there was an outage of 148 networks in the U.S. It didn’t merit media coverage — just a tweet.

A 9 hour 31 minute outage that prompted headlines suggesting the U.S. government might have launched a cyberattack in response to the Sony hack, drew this more measured observation from Mashable:

While nobody knows who blocked access for the four networks and 1,024 IP addresses in the country, the consensus is clear: it wouldn’t have taken much. The attack appears to have been a relatively simple distributed denial of service, or DDoS — the kind of thing just about any experienced hacker could launch.

Meanwhile, North Korea, never known to exercise restraint when it comes to launching fusillades of wild rhetoric, on Sunday threatened to destroy America, which is to say, they are ready to “blow up” every city in this country. The Policy Department of the National Defence Commission of the DPRK said:

The army and people of the DPRK who aspire after justice and truth and value conscience have hundreds of millions of supporters and sympathizers, known or unknown, who have turned out in the sacred war against terrorism and the U.S. imperialists, the chieftain of aggression, to accomplish the just cause.

Obama personally declared in public the “symmetric counteraction”, a disgraceful behavior.

There is no need to guess what kind of thing the “symmetric counteraction” is like but the army and people of the DPRK will never be browbeaten by such a thing.

The DPRK has already launched the toughest counteraction. Nothing is more serious miscalculation than guessing that just a single movie production company is the target of this counteraction. Our target is all the citadels of the U.S. imperialists who earned the bitterest grudge of all Koreans.

The army and people of the DPRK are fully ready to stand in confrontation with the U.S. in all war spaces including cyber warfare space to blow up those citadels.

Funny how a nuclear-armed government can threaten to destroy this country and no one takes it seriously and yet when unknown hackers ominously evoke memories of 9/11, Sony executives panic.

The post Putting North Korea’s ‘Widespread’ Internet Outage In Perspective – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Conn Hallinan*

The pieces for a political resolution of the Syrian civil war are finally coming together.

But the situation is extremely fragile, which is not good news in a region where sabotaging agreements and derailing initiatives comes easier than sober compromise. While many of the key players have already begun backing away from their previous “red lines,” there remains one major obstacle: Turkey.

Back in August, Abbas Habib, coordinator of the Council of Syrian Tribes, met with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov to explore the possibility of a “preliminary conference” of the antagonists — first in Moscow, then in Syria. In November, the Russians also met with Qadri Jamil, a leader of the Popular Front for Change and Liberation, an in-house opposition party that functions inside Syria. The outcome of the November talks was an agreement to “promote the launch of an inclusive intra-Syrian negotiation process on the basis of the Geneva communiqué of June 30, 2012.”

The 2012 Geneva agreement called for “the establishment of a transitional governing body, which would include members of the present government and the opposition, an inclusive National Dialogue process, and a review of the constitutional order and the legal system.” Implementation dissolved in the face of intransigence on all sides, and stepped up support for the armed opposition by Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf monarchies, plus the United States, Turkey, and France.

But two more years of brutal warfare has accomplished very little except generating millions of refugees, close to 200,000 deaths, and widening instability in neighboring countries. The Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad now admits there is no military solution to the war, and the U.S. government has backed away from its “Assad must go” demand. According to David Harland of the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, most of the rebels and their backers have also concluded that “Assad’s departure cannot be a precondition for talks.”

In essence, most of the players fear the Islamic State (or ISIS) more than they do the repressive Assad regime. As Harland puts it, “Better to have a regime and a state than not have a state.”

Regime Change Dead Enders

But that approach runs counter to Turkey’s strategy, which has as its centerpiece the ouster of Assad. Indeed, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan argues that defeating the Islamic State is secondary to overthrowing the Damascus government, and that once Assad is gone, the Islamic extremists will disappear.

That analysis — shared by virtually no on else in the region — is why the Turks have locked horns with the United States by refusing to support the Kurds fighting the Islamic State to hold the Syrian border town of Kobani. Most of the Kurds involved in that battle are members of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), an offshoot of Turkey’s long-time nemesis, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). As Erdogan told reporters, “The PKK and ISIS are the same for Turkey. It is wrong to view them differently. We need to deal with them jointly.”

But aside from the Syrian Army, the PYD is the only serious military force resisting the Islamic State, a fact that even the U.S. government has come around to recognizing. Initially reluctant to support a group tied to the PKK — officially designated a “terrorist organization” by the U.S. and the European Union — the Americans have done a 180-degree turn, supplying the PYD with arms, ammunition, and food.

Under pressure from the United States, France, and Britain, Turkey allowed a modest number of Kurdish peshmerga forces from Iraq to cross the border and fight in Kobani, and agreed to train insurgents, including Kurds, to fight in Syria. But whom those soldiers will fight is hardly clear.

Erdogan’s Demands

So far, the Erdogan government has refused to allow the United States to use its huge Incirlik air base to bomb Islamic State forces in Syria and Iraq unless Washington agrees to support Ankara’s four demands: a no-fly zone over Syria, a “safe zone” on the Turkish-Syrian border, training of rebels, and equal targeting of the Islamic State and the Assad regime.

The Americans are already instructing rebel forces in Jordan and Qatar, preparing to do so in Saudi Arabia, and appear willing to pick up the bill if Turkey opens up training camps. Washington, however, is less enthusiastic about a “safe zone,” which U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called “premature.”

What a “safe zone” would actually involve is still unclear, although Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu says it should include the five northern cities of Idib, Latakia, Hasakah, Jarablus, and Kobani — a hefty slice of Syrian territory. And for the United States to establish it by force would certainly violate international law unless it had UN sanction, and Russia is unlikely to permit that. It would also put the Obama administration at odds with its Kurdish allies in Kobani, who see the “safe zone” as just an attempt by Ankara to meddle in Kurdish affairs.

The “no-fly zone” would require the United States to smash up Syria’s air defense system and ground its air force. That would not be terribly difficult — though it has risks — but it would mean that the U.S. would essentially be at war with Syria. “No-fly” zones also don’t have a particularly good track record in the region. The United States imposed no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq for over a decade, but it took the U.S. Army to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

As for equally targeting the Islamic State and Assad, not even the Turkish public supports that. A recent poll found that 66 percent supported military action against the Islamic State, but not Ankara’s goal of regime change in Syria. Only a slight majority thought Turkey itself should take part in military actions against the Islamic State.

Part of this hesitation is the fear that the war will spill over into Turkey, something that has already happened to a certain degree. There have been several car bombings on the Turkish-Syrian border, and last year car bombs in the Turkish town of Reyhanli killed 43 people and wounded dozens more. While Ankara blames Syria, the locals blame the Syrian rebels.

In October, Turkish authorities in Gaziantep, a city 40 miles north of the Syrian border, seized dozens of suicide vests, hundreds of pounds of powerful C-4 explosives, grenades, and Kalashnikov rifles. Local authorities say that the Islamic State is active in the area and has cautioned Westerners they might be potential kidnap victims.

Small-Scale Diplomacy

There are also proposals for local ceasefires that might lay the foundation for a general peace agreement. The UN’s special envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, is trying to work out an armistice in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. Russia supports the proposal and de Mistura said the Damascus government expressed “constructive interest” in such an agreement.

In early December, De Mistura met with Hadi al-Bahra of the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition and the following day with various rebel groups in Gaziantep.

According to Al-Monitor, the plan would “focus on the real threat of terrorism as defined by the resolutions of the Security Council,” reduce violence, and move toward a “political solution.” Under the terms of the ceasefire, all groups would keep their arms. This latter point is an important one, because an earlier ceasefire in Homs required disarmament, an action that many of the opposition groups interpreted as surrender.

But the Erdogan government is not happy with a focus on “terrorism” that doesn’t include the Assad government, a posture that has isolated Turkey regionally and internationally. At the 60-nation meeting in Brussels on December 3, Turkey’s argument equating the Islamic State and the PKK received zero support. “Erdogan’s fixation with regime change in Syria has blinded his practical decision-making,” Suat Kiniklioglu, a former member of parliament for the president’s Justice and Development Party, told the Financial Times.

Ankara’s obstinacy around Kobani touched off riots that killed more than 30 people in Kurdish towns and villages all over Turkey. And it threatens to derail one of the Erdogan’s more successful initiatives: peace talks with the Kurds.

Ankara is certainly in a position to cause trouble. It has already permitted rebel groups, including the Islamic State, to ferry fighters and supplies through its long border with Syria. So it’s hard to imagine a lasting peace without a buy-in from Turkey.

Putting the Pieces Together

The Erdogan government is not the only player in the Middle East that would like to see the Syrian civil war continue. Israel has been aiding rebel forces in southern Syria and has bombed suspected government weapons depots on several occasions.

Getting all the rebel groups on board will be no picnic either. The Islamic State is not interested in talking with anyone, and the Free Syrian Army has little support inside the country. The Kurds are willing to talk, but about what? Autonomy? The very thing that Ankara fears the most?

In Washington, will the newly resurgent Republicans in Congress — along with some Democrats and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton — balk at anything that keeps Assad in power, even if only temporarily? And, by the same token, will the Syrian government be deluded into thinking it can win a military victory?

Nonetheless, writing in Foreign Policy, journalist James Traub holds out hope that the latest proposed talks could lead to “an end to the war, a comprehensive reform of the constitution, and internationally supervised elections.”

There are myriad ways that a peaceful resolution of the Syrian civil war can be derailed, but the pieces for an agreement are on the table. Failure to put them together will accelerate the destabilizing effects of the war in neighboring countries and deepen the misery of the Syrian people.

* Foreign Policy In Focus columnist Conn Hallinan can be read at www.dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com and www.middleempireseries.wordpress.com

The post Is Turkey Holding Up A Resolution In Syria? – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By P.K. Abdul Ghafour

Saudi scholars and lawyers have called for effective steps to stop the phenomenon of people convening big tribal gatherings to demand exorbitant amounts in diya (blood money) from relatives of murder convicts, saying it does not conform to Islamic teachings and social values.

“Islam teaches its followers to forgive when they are able to do that and show tolerance,” said Sheikh Khalaf Al-Mutlaq, supervisor of Dar Al-Ifta in the Eastern Province. However, he stressed that demanding blood money from the killer is the right of the victim’s kin.

Al-Mutlaq said when Islam introduced the punishment of qisas or beheading the murderer, it was instrumental in reducing such crimes in society. The Shariah has given the relatives of a murder victim three options — forgive without taking diya, forgive in lieu of diya or demand execution.

He said reconciliation between the families of the murderer and his/her victim would reduce tension and promote peace in society.

“Most people agree to forgive the killer seeking the reward hereafter. It is much better for a family to forgive the killer of their loved one without taking money seeking the reward from God. If they accept half of the amount, instead of demanding full it will reduce the financial burden of the other family.”

Hamoud Al-Khaledi, a lawyer, said the Shariah came to protect the rights and interests of people. “The Shariah calls for execution of the killer and at the same time encourages people to forgive the killer,” he said adding that the Qur’an has clearly stated that those who forgive the killer would be rewarded by the Almighty.

He said demanding blood money has become a kind of trade as people negotiate to get the highest amount, exploiting the situation of the defendant’s family. He urged academics, prayer leaders and media persons to enlighten the public on the need to accept reasonable amounts in blood money.

Sheikh Mohammed Al-Safi, director of the committee for taking care of prisoners, said people should stop holding big tribal gatherings to demand high amounts in blood money.

“They should instead encourage families to forgive the killer, inspired by the teachings of the Qur’an and Hadith,” he said.

The post Saudi Scholars: ‘Blood Money’ Demands Must Also Reflect Forgiveness appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Shahid Javed Burki*

On December 16, 2014, the Taliban attacked an army school in Peshawar and killed 132 children. In all 145 persons died. Seven terrorists – among them three Arabs, two Afghans and one Chechen – dressed in military uniform penetrated the well-guarded perimeter of the school and opened fire on the students and school personnel.

By assembling an international force, the Taliban sent a powerful signal that their campaign against the Pakistani state and the country’s military had wide support. According to a statement issued to the press by Muhammad Khorasani, the Taliban spokesman, the attackers were ordered to kill only those children who were from army families. “Our shura decided to target these enemies of Islam right in their homes so they can feel the pain of losing their children.”

Pakistan

The authorities in Pakistan identified Omar Mansoor, the Taliban commander from Peshawar and Darra Adam Khel, a nearby tribal district known for its gunsmiths as the person who sent the terrorist to attack the school. While the Peshawar school battle was still underway, the Pakistani military launched a series of air strikes on terrorist hideouts in the Thira Valley on the border with Afghanistan. Military intelligence had concluded that the planning was done by a group operating in that area.

The attacks continued and by 21 December, five days after the massacre, 150 terrorists had been killed by the Pakistani military. Sartaj Aziz, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s National Security Advisor, told the press that Afghanistan and Pakistan had agreed to carry out joint operations against the terrorist groups in the border areas. This was the first time the two countries had begun to work together in their campaigns against terrorism.

The Peshawar attack may prove to be a turning point for Pakistan. It appears that after the assault on Pakistan’s military, the nation’s most respected and powerful institution, the country may finally be ready to resolutely move against all extremist groups.

One immediate consequence was the change in the official position in Pakistan that had drawn a distinction between “good” and “bad” Taliban. The former were those who did Pakistan’s bidding in its Afghan and India policies. This was one reason two successive governments had not taken any action against the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba for having mounted the November 2008 attack on Mumbai India. The Peshawar attack also forced Imran Khan the cricketer-turned-politician to terminate his four-month-old campaign aimed at unseating Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Pakistan’s Waziristan

The Taliban had come under pressure from the Pakistan army when in June 2014 it decided to launch Zarb-e-Azab, a full-scale operation aimed at eliminating the terrorist hideouts in North Waziristan, one of the tribal areas on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.

The border called the “Durand Line” that runs between the two countries was drawn by a British diplomat in 1893 and was imposed on Kabul by India’s colonial rulers. To this day, Afghanistan has not recognized the line as the formal border with Pakistan. In fact, Kabul was the only capital that opposed the entry of Pakistan into the United Nations after the latter gained independence from British rule in 1947. This was one of the several reasons why Afghan-Pakistan relations remained strained for almost seven decades. The Peshawar tragedy may finally bring closer the two long-feuding countries.

The Durand Line (in red, above) forms the border between the two countries

The Durand Line cuts across a number of Pashtun tribes living in the borderland between the two countries.

Among those that got divided were the Mehsuds and the Haqqanis. The former have supplied the leadership and foot-soldiers to the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the latter operated, often with devastating effect, against the government in Kabul and the American and NATO troops fighting in that country. Both groups aimed to undermine the established governing orders in the two countries, replacing them with what they call the “Islamic caliphate”, a system of governance that would follow what they interpreted as the tenets of Islam. The personnel belonging to the two groups freely crossed the poorly patrolled Durand Line. The governments in Islamabad and Kabul did little to remove the sanctuaries established by the two groups on either side of the border.

Three recent developments have altered the environment in which the Islamic extremists have been operating in the two countries. In November 2013, a new officer, Gen. Raheel Sharif, was placed in charge of the army in Pakistan. In a conversation with me in Washington during his almost 2-week long visit to the United States in November 2014 the general was of the view that of the three problems his country faced – Islamic extremism, a poorly performing economy and a political system that was still evolving – the first was by far the most important. He identified Islamic extremism to be his country’s most difficult problem – an existential threat that needed to be faced. He was convinced that Pakistan had the strength – and now also the political will – to move decisively against terrorism that had taken heavy human and economic tolls on the country. He saw the Zarb-e-Azb as a beginning of the effort that will take a while to produce the desired results. “There will be difficulties on the way, and three of them have already occurred”, he said. He referred to the summer 2014 attacks on Karachi’s international airport, on a naval base in the city, and on the crowd that had gathered at Wagah, a town on the India-Pakistan border to witness a well-choreographed and popular display of force by the guards from the two countries, as the types of hiccups the country must be ready to face. Gen. Sharif will no doubt add the Peshawar episode to this lengthening list.

Afghanistan’s Mohammad Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai. Photo by S.K. Vemmer (U.S. Department of State).

The second development is the result of the prolonged presidential contest in Afghanistan that finally resulted in the start of the Ashraf Ghani presidency, succeeding that of Hamid Karzai. Ghani, a former member of the World Bank staff, was interested in not only finding a durable solution to the problem of Islamic extremism but in setting his country on the path of sustainable economic progress. He was persuaded that he needed Pakistan’s help in both endeavors. Pakistan was the third country he visited after taking office. The first two calls were made to China and Saudi Arabia.

One of the first actions taken by the Pakistani authorities after the Peshawar incident was to approach Kabul and ensure that the escape routes of those involved in planning and executing the attacks were blocked by the Afghan authorities.

Gen. Sharif visited President Ghani in Kabul a few hours after the terrorists struck the school in Peshawar. He was accompanied by Lt. Gen. Rizwan Akhtar, the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence. According to one newspaper report, “during a lengthy meeting at the Afghan presidential palace, the Pakistani officials shared intelligence with President Ashraf Ghani and the top American military commander Gen. John F. Campbell.

Mr. Ghani condemned the attack on the school and likened it to recent assaults in Afghanistan, including a bombing in the country’s southeast that killed 61 people, and a suicide attack at a French-funded school in Kabul. A statement from the palace said the two countries had agreed on increased mutual cooperation in fighting extremism, offering a glimmer of hope that some positive step would be taken.”1

The third development of great importance for the world’s Muslim countries is the sudden rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (IS). The IS is not so much an expression of religious belief as that of the tribal traditions that have, over the centuries, been informed by their interpretations of Islam. Much of the trouble in Afghanistan and Pakistan is in the tribal belt. Mainstreaming tribal system and its mores will have to be an important part of the effort the people of Pakistan and its government will need to make. Some conservative elements in Pakistan and across the border in Afghanistan may be attracted to the IS type of ideology.

That said the more liberal segments in the population are now alerted to the danger these movements pose for the country. “The situation has never been clearer. It is time to dispense with the delusions of threats from “foreign forces”, and the idea that our problems are elaborate conspiracies hatched by others. Our government does not need to “talk” with the Taliban. It needs to prosecute them,” wrote two Lahore based female journalists in an article published by The New York Times.2

About the author:
*Mr Shahid Javed Burki is Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), an autonomous research institute at the National University of Singapore. He can be contacted at sjburki@gmail.com. Opinions expressed in this paper, based on research by the author, do not necessarily reflect the views of ISAS. During a professional career spanning over half a century, Mr Burki has held a number of senior positions in Pakistan and at the World Bank. He was the Director of China Operations at the World Bank from 1987 to 1994 and the Vice President of Latin America and the Caribbean Region at the World Bank from 1994 to 1999. On leave of absence from the Bank, he was Pakistan’s Finance Minister, 1996-97.

Source:
This article was published by ISAS as ISAS Brief No. 355 – 23 December 2014 (PDF).

Notes:
1. Ismail Khan and Azam Ahmed, “Pakistan urges Afghans to help find Taliban leaders behind massacre,” The New York Times, 18 December, 2014, p. A22.
2. Mira Sethi and Sherbano Taseer, “Avenging the children of Peshawar” The New York Times, 18 December 2014, p. A33.

The post Pakistan: Terrorism’s Most Devastating Blow – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Col. R. Hariharan

Any narrative on Sri Lanka would be incomplete if India’s overwhelming influence in Sri Lanka is not considered. It comes from India’s huge geographic size, economic strength and global political influence from times immemorial.

After the British colonial power exited from South Asia, independent India’s dominance gave rise to anxiety among sections of Sri Lankans, particularly among the Sinhala Buddhist majority who saw their country as Theravada Buddhism’s last sanctuary.

The sense of anxiety gave way to a feeling of insecurity across Sri Lanka particularly after India’s massive political and military intervention from 1987 to 90 to ensure the state redressed the grievances of Tamil minority population.

Though the Tamil minority question is still unresolved, Indian intervention had a positive, but cathartic effect to impart balance and realism to the largely unequal relationship between the two countries. During the last two decades both the countries have assiduously built a multi-faceted relationship.

Its hallmark is probably the close strategic coordination that exists today between them to address and repair their mutual concerns on national security issues.

Both of your questions on China have to be answered in this as the backdrop. The questions relate to the impact of China’s increasing presence and influence on Sri Lanka’s Jan 2015 Presidential election and upon India’s close strategic security relations with Sri Lanka and the region.

China factor

Q: A Sri Lankan ambassador to Cuba once called Sri Lanka a “natural aircraft carrier” for the Chinese. How likely is that scenario? If China were to establish a permanent naval presence in Sri Lanka, how would that impact regional politics?

Sri Lanka is the strategic gateway to India from

Indian Ocean just as India is the guarantor of Sri Lanka’s freedom from external threat and invasion. At the same time their close geostrategic umbilical relationship makes both of them highly vulnerable to any external threat to either of them. The reality is if China’s increasing presence in Sri Lanka affects India’s strategic security, its fall out will be upon Sri Lanka as well.

So establishment of a permanent Chinese naval presence in Sri Lanka would dislocate the strategic balance in this region for two reasons. Naval power has become a key to China’s power projection in Asia-Pacific region, particularly after PLA Navy modernisation has made rapid progress.

China is entering the South  and Central Asia in a big way investing huge amounts in building the land and maritime infrastructure to the resurrect the Silk Route to external world including Central and South Asia and what it calls the Maritime Silk road. Sri Lanka has an unrivalled pivotal position in the maritime route because it is midway on the sea lanes of communication from Europe to East Asia and Pacific.

Any Chinese strategic intrusion in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) has to reckon with the naval power of India – “the largest and most capable Indian Ocean littoral” as retired Indian Vice Admiral AC Das puts it. In his words this gives India “serious interests in the Western Pacific [as well] through which half of its overseas trade moves.”

While assessing Chinese naval threat, the twin weaknesses of PLA-N have to be considered. PLAN is yet to demonstrate its mastery of fleet operations particularly employing carrier borne forces. Despite its increasing number of ships and modernisation of command and control systems, can the present PLA-N match Indian navy’s five decades of fleet and aircraft operational experience to dominate the Indian Ocean? This remains the moot question. Under such limitations, it would be reasonable to expect the PLA -N to do so around the last quarter of the coming decade. And India is in no mood to accept it lying.

All these are in the realm of speculation if it is considered in the emerging Asia-Pacific strategic logjam where Russia, China, India, Japan and the U.S. are locked in a complex game of power assertion. It involves not merely their military power, but also the economic and global relationship clout as well.

So it would be realistic to conclude that China with its desire to expand its economic and strategic influence this region would rather have India as an ally, if not a partner, than as a foe. Both China and Sri Lanka have repeatedly averred that China’s port infrastructure constructions in Sri Lanka relate to merchant marine facilities and not for naval operations.

At the same time, it would be prudent to remember they would tremendously increase opportunities for the Chinese intelligence to improve their snooping and electronic eaves dropping on India. They would also provide legitimate opportunities for Chinese war ships to operate in India’s close proximity.

Q: What are Sri Lanka’s best long-term options given all the financing and infrastructure that China has brought to the economy? Should it place its bets by aligning itself more closely with Beijing? Can it continue to play China and India off against each other?

The best option for Sri Lanka is to cultivate India to make productive use of the infrastructure built with expensive Chinese loans and project expertise. India has the power and potential to do so in Sri Lanka because its aid comes at one third the cost of Chinese loans. It can be encouraged to create joint enterprises with China so that they generate a lot of employment and make Sri Lanka a commercial capital in Asia.

Sri Lanka has adequate wisdom not to align itself totally with China which has a tendency to gobble up local joint ventures and create closed facilities outside the control of local government.

All nations play their diplomatic cards to get the maximum out of other countries; Sri Lanka has neither the size nor the strength to play off India and China against each other. Their agenda is much larger and Sri Lanka forms only one part of it; so I do not subscribe to the ‘street smartness’ of Sri Lanka playing any cards in the power game of giant Asian nations.

Q: Given regional concerns about China’s growing assertiveness, are outsiders/ third-parties watching these Sri Lankan elections more than usual? (Or should they be?)

Of course, outsiders and third-parties are watching the Sri Lanka elections more than usual not merely because of their concerns about China which will have only peripheral impact. Under the leadership of President Rajapaksa Sri Lanka is rapidly slipping into authoritarian mode with Rajapaksa family gaining control of the reins of power.  That is their concern.

Mahinda Rajapaksa gained unmatched national popularity after he masterminded the total destruction of Prabhakaran-led Tamil Tiger separatists who held the nation to ransom for three decades. This helped him gain a huge majority in parliament.

But he has used his national popularity after the war not to resolve the vexing Tamil issue but to strengthen his power base. In the process fundamental freedoms have been curtailed, dissent suppressed, critical media hounded and pillars of democratic governance like the judiciary have been subverted. Lawlessness has become all pervading.

While the President enjoys unfettered power, his brothers exercise control over the finances and the bloated armed forces. Last but not least, Tamil minority’s unattended grievances have the seeds to germinate Tamil separatism all over again out of the ashes of the Tamil Tigers.

So the Western world – particularly the EU and the U.S. are concerned because Rajapaksa has used xenophobia to ward off even the UN demand for greater accountability for gross human rights violations and alleged war crimes committed under his watch. He has nurtured latent anti-American feelings among the right wing fringe for his political benefit.

Added to these concerns, India’s worries have increased over Rajapaksa’s studied indifference to implement his own promises to India to kick start the political process with Tamils.

Politically it reflects India’s weakening ability to influence Sri Lanka. This should be of concern to Prime Minister Modi though he has managed to free the Indian government from the retrograde influence of Tamil Nadu politics which hobbled India’s policy making for the last two decades. So, Sri Lanka   Parliamentary election is of special interest to the international community. This is more so after Rajapaksa’s own long term political aide Maithripala Sirisena walked out to emerge as the common opposition candidate to deny a third term for Rajapaksa.

(Col R Hariharan is a retired MI officer who served as the head of intelligence with the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka from 1987 to 90. He is associated with the Chennai Centre for China Studies and the South Asia Analysis Group. E-mail: haridirect@gmail.com Blog: http://col.hariharan.info)

[Answers to questions raised by an international news agency on the subject in an e-mail interview on Dec 23rd.]

The post China’ Factor In Sri Lanka Election And Strategic Security – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Manoj Joshi*

The US Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture by the CIA, published earlier this month, was reported faithfully by the Indian media. But unlike the West, where the issue has rocked the system and is being debated and discussed in great detail, the story in India has quickly moved on.

The reason is not too difficult to see. Torture is routine in India. From the thana policeman investigating petty theft, to the intelligence officer interrogating a suspected terrorist, no one thinks twice about it. India has signed the UN Convention on Torture in 1997, but has yet to ratify it. But it is party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which prohibits torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and it has also ratified the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, whose Common Article 3 applies to internal conflict and prohibits murder, torture and ill-treatment of non-combatants by both the government and the militant forces. But all this matters little.

One of the more embarrassing revelations from the Wikileaks cables was an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report based on authorised visits to detention centres and jails in India which spoke of widespread torture, including electrocution, beatings and sexual humiliation, of prisoners in Jammu & Kashmir by the security forces.

As per an MOU with the government of India in 1995, the ICRC was permitted to visit prisoners in J&K, but it was to communicate its findings to the Government of India. But frustrated by GOI’s inability to check the torture, which the ICRC had been reporting since the mid 1990s, the outfit briefed American diplomats on the issue in the mid-2000s. The ICRC’s report was the outcome of as many as 177 visits to detention centres, between 2002-2004 and meetings with nearly 1,500 detainees.

The cable in which the diplomats reported to headquarters formed part of the massive trove of documents that were leaked by a whistleblower to Julian Assange and the Wikileaks organisation.

In the Wikileaks report, the ICRC was reported as saying in its assessment, that the Government of India “condones” torture.

But what happens in Kashmir is only the tip of the iceberg. As it is, as per the ICRC, most of those tortured were not militants – only their supporters and civilians – the excuse often given for this disgraceful activity is that the forces are fighting militants and terrorists.

However, the reality is that torture is used across the country in various forms for even the most routine crimes in the place of professional police investigation. It is, of course, used against all militants, be they the Maoists or the insurgents in the North-east.

The reason why this happens is that there is a near total absence of any professional interrogation skills among the security forces and the absence of forensic inquiry. Investigation is based on interrogation and confession, which, fortunately, is not admissible in court as evidence. However, unfortunately, victims put through torture end up spending years in prison suffering permanent physical and psychological damage.

The sad fact, and this is not reported in any detail in the country, is that torture rarely achieves its ends. The CIA report has examined the issue in great detail and it concludes that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” produced no intelligence or they “fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence.”

They looked at several cases, but in particular that of the two top Al Qaeda figures Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who, the Bush Administration claimed, had yielded information after being subjected to water-boarded or simulated drowning, that had led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. But, the Senate report cites Ali Soufan, an FBI interrogator who said that all useful intelligence had come through traditional non-violent questioning; torture had yielded nothing new.

The most striking testimony to the uses of traditional and non-violent interrogation comes from the experience of Britain in World War II. The official history of the MI-5, the country’s internal security organisation, published a few years ago, and based on documents declassified in the 1970s and 1980s, reported that in no instance was violence used in dealing with German spies. Mind you, this includes the period in which Britain was with its back to the wall and threatened with a German invasion which would have led to tens of thousands killed and devastation of the island nation. There was one instance of an officer who violently pulled the hand of a suspect; the officer was taken off the interrogation detail and transferred to another department.

Even more interesting were the memoirs of Lt Col Oreste Pinto, a Dutch military intelligence officer working for the British. His specialisation was the interrogation of refugees coming to UK and in Spycatcher published in 1952, he detailed the manner in which he was able to break the stories of spies through systematic interrogation. His work resulted in the exposure of eight spies.

Torture is morally degrading, and a detailed report by the US Senate committee has told us once again that it doesn’t work. India claims to be a democracy with a civilisation going back millennia. It should also aspire to become a civilised democracy by putting an immediate legislative ban on torture. Only if such a ban is put in place will our police and security organisations have the incentive to develop the interrogation and forensic skills, which are far more efficacious in countering terrorism.

* (The writer is a Distinguished Fellow at Observer Research Foundation, Delhi)

Courtesy: Mid-Day

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The international energy community, politicians and experts continue the debate over the reasons and possible consequences of the decision to shut down the South Stream gas pipeline. The project cancelled by the President of Russia Vladimir Putin was to supply up to 63 billion cubic meters of gas to Southern and Central Europe through a Black Sea route with the aim to diversify export routes and eliminate transit risks.

In his speech after talks with his Turkish colleague Recep Tayyip Erdogan on December 1, the Russian President made it clear that if Europe does not want South Stream to be built, it will not be built.

“We will redirect the flow of our energy resources to other regions of the world, including by advanced and fast realization of liquefied natural gas projects. We will advance to the other markets,” Vladimir Putin described, adding that special emphasis will be placed on expanding gas supply to Turkey at more favorable prices.

Meanwhile, Alexey Miller, head of “Gazprom,” noted that the decision to cancel South Stream marked the beginning of drastic changes in originally buyer-oriented supply policy to European countries. According to him, in the future Europe will be able to buy Russian gas through a transit hub on Turkish-Greek border.

The speech given by the Russian President was a very unexpected hit for several European countries that planned to profit from South Stream, Bulgaria and Serbia first and foremost. Western politicians voiced an opinion the decision to stop the South Stream construction was an attempt to coerce Europe into submission, and a sign that sanctions proved to be effective. Several political figures believe this step to be a bluff, and the project possible to restart.

The event caused mixed reaction in foreign media. Several European sources, such as BBC, German “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” and Italian “La Repubblica,” called the South Stream halt a “defeat for Putin” and said it was caused by altered energy market.

However, some sources mention great losses for Southern and Eastern European countries. According to OilPrice.com, the decision to cancel the pipeline puts those states at great disadvantage in comparison to their bigger and stronger neighbors.

“Countries like Bulgaria and Serbia remember well the winter of 2009, when achingly cold temperatures coincided with Russia’s punitive shutoff of gas to Ukraine. Germany used the lesson to press forward with the Nord Stream pipeline, guaranteeing a direct gas supply. But the EU has repeatedly blocked its southern counterpart, citing antimonopoly policies but possibly fearing even greater Russian influence within the bloc. The South Stream countries not only lose energy guarantees, they lose lucrative transit fees, new jobs, and the potential for better trade with Russia,” they stress, pointing out that discontent caused by this decision may further contribute to political instability inside the EU.

“Reuters” says Europe has not too many possibilities to diversify their gas suppliers: among potential alternatives are resuming construction of the Nabucco pipeline through the Caspian Sea, building a liquefied natural gas terminal in Croatia, and increasing import from Azerbaijan.

At the same time, several analysts claim that Vladimir Putin’s decision to cancel South Stream is an attempt to show the West he will not submit, even in tough economic, trade and political circumstances.

“By abandoning this project, Putin has sent a message that he has had enough of Europe’s continued complaints and critiques about its role in Ukraine. […] With these actions, Putin is attempting to stay ahead of his adversaries, though his country is increasingly being backed into a tough corner,” suggests Tim Boersma of Brookings Institution.

International experts had mixed opinions over the role of Bulgaria in the South Stream issue. One of them, Kiril Avramov, faculty member of the Center for Social Practices at the New Bulgarian University, said the decisions made by authorities as

“You should understand that it is not ill will of the European countries to severe ties with Russia. It was only the requirement for Russia to comply with international law,” he added.

According to him, the issue was further exacerbated by the fact that talks between Sofia and Moscow were not sufficiently transparent.

The expert also highlighted the fact that several high-ranking officials do not always agree to the course taken Boyko Borisov. In particular, according to him, Kristian Vigenin, the foreign minister of Bulgaria, expressed his disagreement with the former’s decisions.

“He was giving an official lecture at our university. Part of the questions that were given to him were precisely about South Stream,” Kiril Avramov explained.

At the same time, the analyst struggled to evaluate possible losses from the decision because of lack of transparency during the talks and difficult economic situation in Russia. However, he expressed his belief that both parties see the situation as unacceptable and inconvenient.

In his turn, Mark Harrison, Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick, England, call the decision to stop South Stream an unusual decision for Kremlin, because it might have been made on economic grounds.

“For several years the Russian administration has given political objectives priority over financial considerations in the energy market,” he explained.

In the expert’s opinion, the EU obstructed the pipeline construction mainly due to demands from Brussels to follow its competition laws.

“The European objections arose because European competition rules do not allow the same corporation to control both the gas and the pipeline,” Mark Harrison said.

From his point of view, several Bulgarian politicians were trapped because of the stance taken by Brussels and the decision to abandon the project made by Moscow.

“They tried to satisfy Russia’s aims for South Stream and then found themselves isolated by the Russian withdrawal,” stressed the Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick.

According to Andras Deak, senior fellow at the Institute of World Economies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the current situation made it impossible for affected countries to influence the decision on their own.

“Bulgaria and all the transit states became the hostages of an ex lex situation between the EC and Russia,” the expert explained.

He pointed out that Europe anticipated much less severe measures, such as postponement and stalemate, but not the decision to cancel the project.

“The EC set its final position in December 2013, and Gazprom did not react in this manner [back then],” Andras Deak said.

Now, in his opinion, repercussions of this decision will affect all involved parties.

“Russia gets stuck in Ukraine or increases its Turkish exposure – another big transit story starts. Europe gets a lot of transit headache, esp. in Ukraine. It is the EU-Russia energy relations that suffer the most,” he stressed.

However, the expert mentioned that both parties may possibly return to the project idea in middle-term perspective if Russia and the EU are left without any alternatives in gas transit issue.

At the same time, Jonathan Stern, chairman of the Natural Gas Research Program at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, called the decision to abandon the South Stream project so late exceptionally surprising and impossible to anticipate.

“If it was going to be stopped, I thought it would have been stopped two years ago, not once the pipes have been delivered in the barge that’s ready to lay,” he said.

According to the expert, Sofia became a highly convenient scapegoat, because construction would be impossible without the Bulgarian section: however, the real reasons for the stalemate are the Third Energy Package requirements. He also suggested that the European Commission might have been influenced by the overall EU tendency to look for new suppliers, and decreasing gas demand.

“This was not all Bulgaria’s fault. But the Bulgarians did not move quickly enough after the EU presented them with the statement of objections. The Bulgarians should have done a lot more since June to do something about resolving this situation if indeed they wanted to resolve it,” Jonathan Stern speculated.

From his opinion, the future situation will highly depend on Russian-Turkish cooperation.

“The Turks [and the Russians] need to agree on the new [South Stream] landfill very quickly – probably in the next six months. If it takes longer than that, than that’s going to delay the project quite significantly,” the expert pointed out, adding that negotiating the sea section of the pipeline would be the most important task.

Meanwhile, Pepe Escobar, Brazillian roving correspondent for several news agencies, speculated that the European Union might lose more than Russia.

“I’ve been listening to people carping in Brussels about the EU being ‘hostage’ to Gazprom at least since 2002. And yet they mess up in all negotiations, don’t have a united energy policy, don’t even know how to approach other nations for securing gas deals. It’s a mess. The only thing they do well is to shoot themselves in their feet,” he said.

In his opinion, several members of the European Union, such as Britain, Poland and the Baltic countries, are only aggravating both parties. Because of this and the circumstances, he says, it was only a matter of time before South Stream would be abandoned.

“The decision was foreseeable taking into account the enormous pressure by the US on weak link Bulgaria, and frankly the ‘ideological’ stupidity that reigns supreme at the EC in Brussels,” Pepe Escobar stressed.

Still, he expressed his hope that top politicians in Europe and in Germany in particular would soon change their stance towards Moscow.

“Meanwhile, Russia is absolutely right in pursuing more energy deals with East Asia,” the journalist concluded.

At the same time, Stefan Meister, head of the program on Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia at the Robert Bosch center of the German Council on Foreign Affairs, recalled that South Steam was one of the key Moscow projects and dwelled on its political and economic importance.

According to him, the decision to stop the pipeline was expected due to current difficult situation.

“With the sanctions from the EU side, all the discussion about energy supply, with increasing critic on South Stream and the Bulgarian government which less and less supported the project, I think the Russian side had to make its decision,” the political analyst explained, adding that financial troubles of “Gazprom” might have also been one of the reasons behind this step.

He highlighted the fact that Russian side tried to persuade Bulgaria via political and economic means to sign a bilateral agreement, bypassing the EU.

“The European Union had a discussion that Russian side – Gazprom and the government – informally try to influence this project and push Bulgaria against the EU legacy. This is seen more as an intrigue from the Russian side than it is from the European Union side,” Stefan Meister pointed out.

In his opinion, in the end it was the stance taken by the EU that put a end to South Stream.

“I think because of this increasing pressure on the government in Bulgaria [from Brussels], in the end they decided against it. The discussion was very transparent, very public, so I don’t see any intrigue: I just see the European Commission being very tough in terms of their own legacy, of their own policy, and, surprisingly, they succeeded to some extent, from their perspective,” said the political analyst.

However, he struggled to calculate the damages caused by this decision to Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary and other involved countries, and stressed the fact there will be no compensation for a cancelled business project.

The expert also speculated that Russia-Europe energy ties will weaken over the next few years.

“Russia has an interest to develop its energy relations with Asia. European market might be less important for the Russian energy companies, and the European Union is developing more energy efficiency, renewable energy, and is looking for other energy sources,” Stefan Meister explained.

He also said the relations were and will be affected by current international crises, such as the Ukrainian conflict.

At the same time, the German analyst highlighted the potential of Moscow, Ankara and Baku to cooperate in gas supply area.

“I’m most skeptical about this, but I think there could be links with Azerbaijan and Turkey, especially in the Southern energy corridor. There are possibilities for cooperation,”

The South Stream pipeline project was planned to go from the Anapa region of Russia to Varnu, Bulgaria, through an underwater pipeline in the Black Sea, with two branches connecting the Balkan Peninsula with Italy and Austria. However, no definitive plans on pipeline routes were maid.

Construction works began on December 7, 2012, and the pipeline was to be competed in 2015.

South Stream, with a total planned cost of €16 billion would supply up to 63 billion cubic meters of gas a year. The project aimed to diversify the European supply routes for Russian gas and reduce dependency on transit states for suppliers and customers.

This article was published by Penza News.

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Attacks in the restive north-east Indian state of Assam by separatists of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) left at least 56 dead and dozens injured, reports MISNA.

According to witnesses, the separatists stormed villages forcing residents from their homes and killing them in cold blood. The head of the local government, Tarun Gogoi, indicated that there were many children among the victims.

“This is one of the most barbaric attacks in recent times with the militants not even sparing infants”, Gogoi stated. The violence was attributed to the NDFB, an outlawed movement demanding independence fort decades.

A curfew was declared today in Assam along the border with Bhutan and Bangladesh, an area with a long history of often violent land disputes between the indigenous Bodo people, Muslim settlers from Bangladesh and the Adivasi community.

At the start of the year, the fighting left over 45 dead and displaced 10,000, while in 2012 some 100 dead and 400,000 displaced.

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The former Navy SEAL who says he killed Al-Qaeda mastermind, Osama Bin Laden, is now under investigation for possibly releasing classified information of the operation, the Navy said.

US Navy spokesman Ryan Perry said Robert O’Neill is under investigation for potentially breaking a code of silence that SEAL members are sworn to uphold regarding their missions, including the 2011 operation that killed international terrorist Osama Bin Laden.

“The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) is in receipt of an allegation that Mr O’Neill may have revealed classified information to persons not authorized to receive such information,” Perry told AFP.

“In response, NCIS has initiated an investigation to determine the merit of the allegations.”

O’Neill, 38, who has given many interviews regarding his participation in the operation, triggered controversy in the ranks last month when he took responsibility for firing the fatal shot that killed Bin Laden at his secret bunker in Abbottabad, Pakistan, just across the border from Afghanistan, three years ago.

O’Neill’s account appeared at odds with that of another former SEAL, Matt Bissonnette, who published his version of events in the book, “No Easy Day” in 2012.

“Two different people telling two different stories for two different reasons,” Bissonnette told AFP. “Whatever he says, he says. I don’t want to touch that.”

Meanwhile, Pentagon officials maintain they are uncertain as to whose shots actually killed Bin Laden, the New York Times reported.

O’Neill told the Washington Post that he decided to go public with his information after meeting with relatives of victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

“The families told me it helped bring them some closure,” O’Neill told the Post.

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Russian authorities have failed to investigate strong evidence that at least 12 of the defendants convicted on December 23, 2014, on mass terrorism charges had been tortured and their coerced confessions used as evidence, Human Rights Watch said Wednesday. A court in Nalchik sentenced most of the 12 to lengthy prison terms, including Rasul Kudaev, a former Guantanamo detainee, to life in prison, and Batyr Pshybiev to 18 years.

“Solid forensic evidence has shown these 12 men were tortured,” said Rachel Denber, deputy Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The authorities need to finally conduct effective and impartial investigations into the torture, hold those responsible to account, and immediately withdraw as evidence any coerced statements by the defendants.”

Fifty-seven men have been on trial since 2008 for leading an armed uprising on October 13, 2005, in Kabardino-Balkaria, in Russia’s unstable Northern Caucasus region. The uprising resulted in more than 140 deaths, reportedly including 35 law enforcement officers, 15 civilians, and at least 92 of those involved in the uprising.

The prosecutor’s office had performed perfunctory inquiries into torture complaints filed by the defendants and found no wrongdoing, even though forensic medial evidence showed that many were severely injured during and after their arrest. Injuries included concussions and severe bruising, in some cases, covering their entire bodies.

Defendants told their lawyers they were beaten until they signed alleged confessions.

Russia is a party to the European Convention on Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Under all three treaties Russia has obligations to prohibit all forms of torture and inhuman and degrading treatment, to punish those who resort to such actions, and to ensure that no evidence obtained in violation of the prohibition can be used in courts.

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Eurozone deflation is likely to become reality when the annual inflation figure for 2014 is announced in January. This column argues that the ECB should develop a strategy that works in the Eurozone’s unique financial setting, instead of following the Fed’s lead. The author proposes that the ECB should pursue ‘quantitative easing for the people’, such as sending each adult citizen a €500 check.

By John Muellbauer*

The US was the first to try quantitative easing (QE), which success depended on special features of the US financial setting. The Fed initially provided liquidity support for the banking system and bought government bonds to drive down yields and put cash into the financial system. It also rapidly brought down the policy interest rate to close to zero. There were spill-over effects on corporate bond yields, equity prices, and mortgage rates, closely linked to treasury yields.

In later rounds of QE, the Fed bought large volumes of mortgage-linked agency debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This directly lowered mortgage rates and added to credit flows available for financing mortgages. Very likely, the QE also lowered the dollar exchange rate, pressuring central banks around the world to ease policy to prevent excessive appreciation of their currencies against the dollar.

US mortgages and QE effectiveness

A crucial part of the US transmission mechanism operates via mortgages, the housing market, and the household sector – where the subprime crisis had triggered massive contractionary forces (Duca et al. 2011). The collapse of residential investment alone reduced GDP by around 4%. The fall in house prices had a direct negative effect on consumer spending by reducing the collateral backing for borrowing. The ratcheting up of foreclosures and payment defaults radically reduced the asset base of the banking system. Therefore, together with far higher risk spreads on non-bank loans, credit availability for households fell sharply, particularly in the mortgage market. This was a double whammy for consumer spending.  Reversing these trends and repairing this part of monetary transmission was a central and successful aim of Fed policy. The housing market began to recover in 2012, household deleveraging came to an end, and building activity gradually began to pick up.

In our research, we can track the impact of lower house prices on consumer spending, on the contraction of availability of mortgages and consumer credit, and on the subsequent recovery (Duca and Muellbauer 2013). We can also measure the effect of higher equity prices on consumer spending and the effect of lower interest rates on spending. The direct effect of the latter was substantial in the US, in addition to the indirect effects via housing and equities. The reason is that total US household debt is large relative to total liquid assets. Indeed, between 2001 and 2008, debt actually exceeded liquid assets, as was also the case in the UK. Lower interest rates benefit borrowers and hurt savers. Another important element in monetary transmission in the US, despite mainly fixed rate mortgages, is the ability to refinance at a typical cost of only about 1% when mortgage rates fall. The combination of low interest rate and QE worked in the US, even though at first the headwinds from the subprime crisis were so massive that some concluded that the policy wasn’t effective.

Reasons why US-style QE is less effective in the Eurozone

• In Germany, and to a lesser extent in France, the total liquid asset holdings of households are far larger than total household debt, so much so that lower policy rates translate into lower deposit rates, and reduce total household spending – the opposite of what occurs in the US and the UK.

Moreover, households in the Eurozone hold far less in equities relative to income than do US households, so the undisputed uplift on consumer spending from higher stock market valuations is small compared to that in the US.

• The housing collateral channel does not work in the core Eurozone, and the down-payment constraint for mortgages is far tighter than in the US.

As our research confirms, higher house prices in France and Germany reduce total consumer spending.¹ In Germany, France, and Italy, higher house prices spur non-owners to save more for the mortgage down payment and inspire caution among tenants, who expect future rent hikes. And the housing wealth of existing owners does not translate into significantly higher spending, given the lack of access to home-equity loans and cheap mortgage refinancing.² The ECB, therefore, deserves praise for excluding mortgage lending from its targeted long-run refinancing operation (TLTRO), its version of the Bank of England Funding for Lending Scheme, which aim was to offset some of the credit crunch due to the contraction of bank credit.

• When it comes to credit provision, capital markets do far less of the heavy lifting in the Eurozone (where banks matter more) than in the US.

As a result, bringing down yields on government, corporate, and asset-backed bonds has less impact. That is an important reason why ECB intervention to provide liquidity support for the banking system, for which it was the global leader as early as August 2007, accounted for a much larger share of its balance sheet expansion compared to the US.

• The final factor impeding QE’s impact in the EZ is the fact that low bond yields, by increasing measured pension-fund deficits, make some companies reluctant to invest and thus more likely to raise contribution rates and limit pension benefits.

In the US, more generous assumptions regarding discount rates are used to calculate pension-fund liabilities (see Bank of England 2014).

At the same time, one should question whether the euro exchange rate – the one mechanism whereby current policies could still make an important difference – can be pushed down much further. It could meet strong international resistance, given the EZ’s giant trade surplus.

Two generic problems with QE

• One current generic problem with QE in the form of large-scale bond purchases when yields are already at record lows is that risks of significant losses for the central bank increase, e.g. should it need to reverse QE in the future.
• The second problem is that if bond yields are driven lower, this tends to have adverse distributional implications because it channels more money toward the wealthy who own the assets whose prices are boosted by QE.

They have a lower propensity to spend, with little trickle-down to the poorer people who would use it to consume more.³ In the Eurozone, the distribution issue is also one between countries since institutional differences between countries can give the impression of discrimination among them. For example, purchases of corporate debt would favour countries with large corporate debts such as France.

€500 per citizen

Clearly, the ECB must develop a strategy that works in the Eurozone’s unique system, instead of attempting to follow the Fed’s lead. Such a strategy should be based on Friedman’s assertion that ‘helicopter drops’ – printing large sums of money and distributing it to the public – can always stimulate the economy and combat deflation. But, in order to maximise the impact of such an operation, the ECB would also have to find a way to ensure fair distribution.

One simple solution would be to distribute the funds to governments, which could then decide how best to spend them in their countries. But the EZ’s rule against using the ECB to finance government spending bars this approach.

A more reasonable option would be to provide all workers and pensioners with social-security numbers (or the local equivalent) with a payment from the ECB, which governments would merely aid in distributing. Another alternative would be to use the electoral register, a public database that the ECB could use independently of governments. Of the roughly 275 million adults in the Eurozone, some 90% are on the electoral register. Nothing in EZ law forbids the ECB from undertaking such an independent action.⁴

There is an important difference between the ECB implementing a €500 per-adult-citizen hand-out as part of monetary policy and governments doing this as traditional fiscal policy. Economists have long worried about myopic politicians over-spending, for example, just before an election in order to influence the voters and thus creating a ‘political’ business cycle, or simply perpetually spending too much, and as a result running too high government deficits. That is an important reason why the ECB is not allowed to directly finance government spending. But it is quite a different matter for an independent central bank, subject to its governing council and the representation of different countries on that council, to directly hand out cash to households as part of its method of meeting its inflation mandate. That is why I would classify this as monetary policy and not just a devious way of by-passing Eurozone rules.

Would it work? Evidence on the spending impact

In 2001 and 2008 there were tax rebates in the US, carefully studied by economists. A study of the 2001 rebate by Johnson et al. (2006) suggests between 20 and 40 % was spent in the quarter in which the cash was received – and about another third in the quarter afterwards – and the authors looked only at non-durable spending. The study of the 2008 rebate concluded that “Households spent 12-30% (depending on specification) of their payments on nondurable goods during the three-month period of payment receipt, and a significant amount more on durable goods, primarily vehicles, bringing the total response to 50-90% of the payments”, see Parker et al. (2013). In an Australian study of the 2009 tax rebate, called a ‘bonus’, Leigh (2012) suggests around 40% was spent in the quarter of receipt.

Such evidence contradicts simple textbook versions of the permanent income hypothesis of consumption. In our Kendrick Prize winning paper (Aron et al. 2012), we find time series evidence for Japan, the US, and the UK that the marginal propensity to spend out of permanent income is between about 40 and 60%, and not 100%. This is confirmed for Germany by Geiger et al. (2014) and for France by Chauvin and Muellbauer (2013). The implication is that between 40 and 60% of a surprise transfer of €500 would be spent fairly quickly.⁵ The US studies find evidence of heterogeneity between households, with poorer households and those with mortgage debt having higher spending propensities.

This would suggest that in Germany, where many households already have a lot in their saving accounts, the spending impact could be less than in the US but that, in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, where many households are cash-poor, the effects would be as large or larger as those in the US. I would, therefore, expect between 1.1% to 2% of GDP effects in Spain, Portugal, and Greece but probably as low as 0.5% in Germany.⁶

Beyond lifting the Eurozone economy out of deflation, such an initiative would have massive political benefits, as it would reduce resentment toward European institutions, especially in struggling countries like Spain, Portugal, and Greece, where an extra €500 would have a particularly strong impact on spending. In this way, the ECB could prove to disgruntled citizens as well as investors that it is serious about meeting its inflation target, and help to stem the rise of nationalist parties.

The arguments against

• Like other types of helicopter money this proposal would be costly from the point of view of a public sector balance sheet combining the ECB with governments. Since households can see this clearly, they will increase their private savings to offset this cost and neutralise the addition to base money.

The first point to make is that the overwhelming evidence cited above against the simple form of the permanent income hypothesis implies that, even if the basic accounting proposition were true, we can reject the hypothesis that households ‘can see this clearly’.⁷ Secondly, as Buiter (2014) shows, the objection is highly implausible even with full visibility. As long as money yields services such as transactions utility or liquidity services, and as long as households regard the addition as irreversible, household expenditure will increase. Such a helicopter drop relaxes the government budget constraint – unless an irrationally hair-shirted government insists on tightening fiscal policy to offset the helicopter drop.⁸ Indeed, the additional tax revenue from the initial round of spending increases and from the multiplier effects of the additional employment, income, and spending it generates will actually improve the government budget constraint.⁹

• A second argument against is the possibility that the proposal could be subject to moral hazard of two types. First, the over-leveraged private sector would back off its efforts to de-leverage on the expectation that money printing would always rescue it from the consequences of its imprudence, which would increase future risks. Secondly, highly indebted EZ governments would step back from unpopular fiscal reforms.

The best way to de-leverage is to improve growth and the immediate effect of the policy is to improve both private and public sector balance sheets. Within the context of a highly disciplined inflation targeting policy it is unlikely that private sector expectations would be shifted in this direction any further than monetary policies pursued to date might already have done so. Structural reforms of labour and product markets should have priority over fiscal austerity since they address problems of competitiveness and growth. In principle, the ECB could make the €500 per adult conditional on credible reform commitments.

• It will undermine ‘faith in the currency’.

This can only mean that the proposal will somehow lead to high future inflation. On the cusp of deflation and with the EZ in deep stagnation, this makes little sense.  Maintaining the credibility of its inflation target is a sure-fire way for the ECB to prevent such risks.

• It will undermine the incentive to work.

High unemployment in the Eurozone is not the result of people simply being work shy or not wanting to work, much more a result of the jobs not being there.

• Handouts to poor people who ‘don’t deserve it’ are unethical.

This argument neglects that conventional monetary policy and QE involves raising the prices of assets, which benefits the people who own the wealth. Some members of elites see this as a ‘natural’ benefit, but resist offering the same benefit to the poor. The rise of populist anti-euro parties is part of the popular response to this distorted point of view.

Concluding remark

After years of austerity, infighting, and unemployment, it is time to implement a QE programme that delivers what Europe needs.

About the author:
* John Muellbauer
Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield College; Professor of Economics, Oxford University; and Fellow, Institute for New Economic Thinking, Oxford Martin Schoo

References
Aron, J, J Duca, J Muellbauer, K Murata and A Murphy (2012)  “Credit, housing collateral and consumption in the UK, U.S., and Japan”,  Review of Income and Wealth 58 (3): 397–423.

Bank of England and Procyclicality Working Group (2014), “Procyclicality and structural trends in investment allocation by insurance companies and pension funds”, Discussion Paper 310714

Bernanke, B (2003), “Some Thoughts on Monetary Policy in Japan”, speech, Tokyo, May.

Boone, L and N Girouard (2002), “The Stock Market, the Housing Market and Consumer Behaviour”, OECD Economic Studies No. 35, 2002/2, 175-200.

Buiter, W H (2014), “The Simple Analytics of Helicopter Money: Why It Works – Always“m in Economics, The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal, 8 (2014-28): 1-51.

Chauvin, V and J Muellbauer (2013), “Consumption, household portfolios and the housing market: a flow of funds approach for France”, presented at Banque de France, Dec.

Duca, J, J Muellbauer and A Murphy (2011) “Housing Markets and the Financial Crisis of 2007-2009: Lessons for the Future”, Journal of Financial Stability,6(4), 203-217, 2010.

Duca, J and J Muellbauer (2012), “Tobin LIVES:  Integrating evolving credit market architecture into flow of funds based macro-models”, in A flow-of-funds perspective on the financial crisis, vol. 2, Palgrave-Macmillan, Ed.: Bernhard Winkler, Ad van Riet and Peter Bull, Palgrave-Macmillan. Also www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp1581.pdf

Geiger, F, J Muellbauer and M Rupprecht (2014) “The Housing Market, Household Portfolios and the German Consumer”, Presented at the Bundesbank, DFG and IMF conference ‘Housing markets and the macroeconomy: challenges for monetary policy and financial stability’, Eltville, June 5-6.

Johnson, D S, J A Parker, and N S Souleles (2006), “Household Expenditure and the Income Tax Rebates of 2001”, American Economic Review 96: 1589-1610.

Jordà, Ò and A M Taylor (2013), “The Time for Austerity: Estimating the Average Treatment Effect of Fiscal Policy,” NBER Working Papers 19414.

Leigh, A (2012), “How Much Did the 2009 Australian Fiscal Stimulus Boost Demand? Evidence from Household-Reported Spending Effects”, B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics 12(1).

Muellbauer, J (2008) “Time for unorthodox monetary policy”, VoxEU.org, 27 November.

Muellbauer, J and K Murata (2011) “Mistaken monetary policy lessons from Japan”, VoxEU.org, 21 August.

Parker, J A, N S Souleles, D S Johnson, R McClelland (2011), “Consumer Spending and the Economic Stimulus Payments of 2008”, NBER Working Paper 16684, January.

Reichlin, L, A Turner and M Woodford (2013), “Helicopter money as a policy option”, VoxEU.org, 20 May 2013.

Turner, A (2013), “Debt, Money and Mephistopheles”, speech at Cass Business School, 6 February.

Wren-Lewis, S (2014), “Helicopter money”, mainlymacro.blogspot.co.uk, 22 October.

Footnotes
[1] Chauvin and Muellbauer (2013) for France and Geiger et al. (2014) for Germany. Earlier research by Boone and Girouard (2004) had pointed to the negative effect of higher house prices on aggregate consumer spending in Italy. Aron et al. (2012) confirm a similar effect in Japan. Japanese households are world champions in the ratio of bank and saving deposits held relative to income and to debt. As a result, lower real interest rates reduce total household spending, given income and equity prices. Applying US-style thinking to Japanese monetary policy led to erroneous lessons from Japan for the US, see Muellbauer and Murata (2011), and explains the failure of Abenomics so far to raise growth in Japan.

[2]  In the UK, where variable rate mortgages dominate, monetary policy was even more potent than in the US since cash flows of mortgage borrowers immediately improved.

[3] In November 2008, I was an early enthusiast for QE (Muellbauer 2008). In circumstances of market meltdown, mounting solvency, liquidity problems, as well as heavy disruption of credit flows, QE made complete sense. Indeed, as I argued would be the case, its use proved highly profitable for central banks. There is, therefore, no contradiction between my views then and now.

[4] Friedman, great communicator as he was, almost certainly had multiple reasons for the helicopter image. One was for dramatic effect of the visualisation. Second, for a central bank to resort to helicopters emphasises its independence from governments and the fact that this is not standard fiscal policy.

[5] This simplifies the argument slightly. The models imply that not all the impact is felt in the same quarter, so the full effect takes several quarters to come through. However, once the initial surprise impact is over, the unspent amounts are added to liquid assets, whose marginal propensity to spend we estimate at about 10%, which implies a longer lasting and slightly larger overall impact.

[6] The calculation is based on the following assumptions. Suppose in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, 60% of the €500 is spent in the first year. With annual GDP per adult of around €28,000, €20,000 and €15,000 respectively in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, this would imply a 1.1% of GDP boost in Spain, 1.5% in Portugal, and 2% in Greece. Assuming 40% is spent in Germany in the first year, and GDP per adult of around €42,000, the boost in Germany would be around 0.5% of GDP.

[7] Behind this are credit constraints, myopia of some households and fundamental uncertainty.

[8] Also see Bernanke (2003), the 2013 voxeu debate on helicopter money between Turner and Woodford, chaired by Reichlin, Turner (2013) and Wren-Lewis(2014).

[9] One might ask: why resort to the printing press when conventional fiscal expansion would work? see Jorda and Taylor (2013) for literature discussion and innovative new evidence on fiscal policy effectiveness.  However, ‘fiscal space’ is currently poor given the high government debt to GDP ratios of many EZ countries and political pressures for austerity are strong.

The post Combatting Eurozone Deflation: QE For The People – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Jordanian Royal Air Force pilot was captured by the Islamic State (IS) Wednesday after his warplane went down in northeastern Syria, the Jordan Armed Forces – Arab Army (JAF) said in a statement.

Images of the arrest of Lieutenant Muath Kasasbeh, 27, from Karak Governorate, appeared on social media after his capture by the IS terrorists as the government pledged to continue war on terrorism in defending Islam.

In the statement, JAF said the fighter went down during a mission against IS in Raqqa northeast Syria Wednesday morning and the pilot was taken as a “hostage”.

Jordan holds the terrorist group of Islamic State, better known with its Arabic acronym “Daesh”, accountable for the safety of the pilot, adding that the terror organisation “does not hide its terrorist plots, as it has carried out numerous criminal acts and destruction targeting Muslims and non-Muslims in Syria and Iraq”.

Muath, who has three brothers and four sisters is a graduate from King Hussein Air College, according to his relatives.

“I call on those who arrested him and on all those who have powers and authorities to intervene to secure the release of my son Muath,” Safi Kasasbeh, his father, told The Jordan Times Wednesday.

“Muath is a very modest and religious person. He memorises the Koran and he was never harmful to anyone,” the father added.

Hassan Kasasbeh, a cousin of the pilot, told The Jordan Times over the phone, that “The Morale Guidance Department at the Jordan Armed Forces informed us around 9:00am today [Wednesday] that Muath’s plane went down and he is in the hands of Daesh fighters in Syria.”

Marwan Kasasbeh, another cousin of Muath, confirmed the news of his arrest, saying Muath informed him a few days ago that it was his second mission in the campaign against IS after Jordan joined the US-led international coalition to fight the IS in September.

“We call for exerting all efforts possible to secure his release. His entire family is deeply saddened by the news,” said Marwan over the phone.

Commenting on the capture, Minister of State for Media Affairs Mohammad Momani voiced solidarity with the pilot’s family, describing Kasasbeh as a hero.

The minister added that all Jordanians stand behind the Jordanian army in its pursuit to protect the homeland and defend the nation.

“The war on terrorism is ongoing and our battle against it is to defend the moderate faith of Islam,” the minister said in remarks to The Jordan Times.

The capture of the Jordanian pilot triggered angry reactions on social media with Jordanians expressing their sorrow for this incident.

Original article

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As many as a dozen workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are being assessed for possible exposure to the Ebola virus. The incident occurred as a sample of the pathogen was transferred between labs.

CDC officials said Wednesday that one scientist may have been exposed to the Ebola virus, and as many as a dozen others are being assessed for potential exposure at the HQ in Atlanta. Officials said two experienced technicians made mistakes at the high-security lab, known as Biosafety level-4 lab (BSL-4), when material from an Ebola virus experiment was securely transported from the BSL-4 lab to a BSL-2.

That material may have contained a live sample of the virus. If so, that sample should have remained in BSL-4 and should have been stored in a freezer.

The second mistake came when a BSL-2 lab technician should have recognized, via the color coding on the test tubes, that this material should have stayed at Level 4. That second technician is the person who could have been exposed and is now in the 21-day monitoring period, agency spokeswoman Barbara Reynolds said.

The movement between the two labs is significant. In Biosafety level-4 labs, technicians wear one-piece, positive pressure supplied air suits because they are handling dangerous and exotic agents that pose a high level of risk. In Biosafety level-2 labs, in which material is considered moderately hazardous to persons and the environment, technicians wear lab coats, goggles and gloves.

“I am troubled by this incident in our Ebola research laboratory in Atlanta,” said CDC director Tom Frieden in a statement. “We are monitoring the health of one technician who could possibly have been exposed and I have directed that there be a full review of every aspect of the incident and that CDC take all necessary measures.”

“Thousands of laboratory scientists in more than 150 labs throughout CDC have taken extraordinary steps in recent months to improve safety. No risk to staff is acceptable, and our efforts to improve lab safety are essential — the safety of our employees is our highest priority.”

The potential exposure took place Monday and was discovered by scientists on Tuesday, when workers looked in the freezer and saw material that was supposed to be sent down the hall for a genetic analysis. They realized the samples had been switched.

The technician currently has no symptoms of illness and is being monitored for 21 days. Agency officials said others who entered the lab have been contacted, and based on assessments, it’s likely no one else was exposed. They said the number of people who entered the lab could be as many as a dozen, but was likely far fewer.

Nonetheless, this is the latest in a serious of failures at the CDC. In August, a scientist declined to tell superiors that a worker mixed a lethal strain of bird flu with a more benign one which was shipped out to another laboratory. The dangerous bird flu cocktail was administrated to chickens as part of a US Department of Agriculture study, in which all of the chickens ended up dying.

When USDA officials took another look at the sample, they discovered the lethal strain. No people fell ill due to the bird flu strain, the Associated Press reported, but it apparently remained in circulation for months.

In July, a Maryland facility reported that more than 300 vials containing influenza, dengue, and other pathogens were discovered in an unused storage room. And in June, 80 CDC employees were exposed to live anthrax during the transportation of samples from one lab to another. That revelation led to a House Oversight Committee hearing over the CDC’s adherence to safety protocol measures.

The post CDC Workers Possibly Exposed To Ebola In Atlanta appeared first on Eurasia Review.

The Sri Lankan Tamils have a tendency to boycott important elections. And yet, every time they have boycotted an election, they have lost. Still, some of them do not seem to be learning lessons from their follies and are tempted to repeat their mistakes again and again. A major portion of the blame should go to their political leadership.

This time around also, in view of the forthcoming presidential election (on January 8, 2015), there are calls to boycott. The Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF), an ultra-national political party headed by one of the former members of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) has officially urged the Tamil people to boycott the election. The Tamil Civil Society Forum (TCSF), a collective of the concerned Tamil civil society activists in the North-East of the island, has recently argued that the “Tamil people do not have to take a collective stance at the forthcoming elections” and it wanted to leave the decision to “individual conclusions” of the people. The TCSF does not urge the people to exercise their right to vote and has declared that it has no confidence in either candidate. The TNA, the leading Tamil political party is yet to make known its position vis-à-vis the election. The party obviously is in a quandary and finds it difficult to make a decision and announce it, all of which leads to confusion and mixed signals.

What is clear, however, is that the Tamil people in the country do not have the luxury to ignore the election or boycott it. The election is far too important to be left to the decisions of the political leadership. Maximum participation in the election offers an opportunity to shape their political future, which is intrinsically linked to the politics of the South.

The fear or concern of a boycott emerges from Tamil political history. Two major examples can be cited.

The Tamils boycotted the election to the State Council in 1931 conducted under the colonial rule. Demanding independence to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) rather than constitutional concessions the British were willing to grant, the Jaffna Youth Congress (JYC) called for a nationwide boycott of the 1931 election. The JYC was the most prominent political entity in the North during this period. Since, there was no support in the South for the boycott call, the election was conducted and the Council was formed successfully. The Tamils in the North, however, lost representation in the State Council, which had a lasting impact on the political fate of the country and the community. Realizing their folly after the election, the JYC had to plead the colonial administration for another election to be held.

In 2005, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) decided to impose a total Tamil boycott of the presidential election in that year. Hardly any Tamil in the North voted due to fear of violent reprisal. The results were devastating and the Tamils could not make any political gains since 2005.

The Tamils seems to be using boycotts as a simple solution when they are faced with difficult political choices and realities. The January 2015 election is no less complicated. Naturally, a majority of the Tamils should vote for the opposition candidate Maithripala Sirisena. Sirisena however has not made any concessions in his campaign or manifesto to the Tamil people. The opposition alliance seems to be soliciting the Tamil support in return for nothing. The alliance does not want to be seen by the Sinhala voters as yielding to the Tamil demands.

In Sri Lanka, however, presidential elections are about bargaining and horse-trading. Every single group in the present opposition alliance has negotiated deals and agreed on something. The United National Party (UNP), Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), the Democratic Party (DP), and all other major partners of the opposition coalition, have got some assurances (and promise of positions) in return for their support for the opposition candidate.

The TNA, however, seems to be lacking the bargaining power in its negotiations with the opposition alliance and which is causing a lack of concessions. This may be one reason why the TNA decision is delayed so far. Practically, the TNA cannot openly endorse Sirisena and ask the Tamil people to vote for him without any meaningful promises. This would generate condemnation. It is not clear if the opposition alliance is sensitive to this dimension. It is also not clear whether the TNA is concerned about criticism within the community. If it is sensitive to internal criticism, statements of the TNPF and TCSF have the potential to add to the pressure on the TNA.

The only way to deal with this dilemma, as I have pointed out in a previous article, is to focus on the democratic issues faced by the Tamil people. The opposition alliance and the TNA could agree to solve the day-to-day and democratic issues of the Tamil people, which will allow the TNA to go before the community and ask for their votes in favor of the opposition candidate. They could leave the contentious and ethnic issues for future dialogues. Such a concession could be a symbolic recognition of minority concerns as well.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake for the Tamil people to rely too much on their political leadership on this issue. Their political leadership seems to be leading from behind. Hence the silence from their main political party on this issue. It is already too late to make a decision and announce it. What the Tamil people need to understand is that boycotting is not an option — regardless of who is advocating it. If the election could create a fresh democratic space, that in itself should be a reason to go to the polling booth and vote. For the moment, the Tamil people should focus more on democratic deficiencies in the country and in their region, rather than ethnic demands. A new democratic environment will allow the Tamil people to engage in constructive politics and get out of the present quandaries.

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President Joko Widodo of Indonesia should create a joint fact-finding team to ensure a credible, impartial investigation into the December 8, 2014 deadly shootings in the remote town of Enarotali in Papua, Human Rights Watch said. The team should include the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) and the military, as well as the police, to investigate the incident, in which at least five peaceful protesters died of gunshot wounds.

Currently, there are three separate official investigations into the shootings: by the police, by the national human rights commission, and by an informal military-and-police effort. The military has not cooperated with the Komnas Human Rights Commission inquiry, and Indonesia’s 1997 Law on Military Courts blocks civilian investigators from access to military personnel at the scene of crimes. A joint investigation is necessary to ensure that police and rights agency investigators can question military personnel who were present during the incident.

“The Papua inquiry has been stymied because civilian investigators can’t interview the soldiers who were at the scene,” said Phelim Kine, deputy Asia director. “A joint probe with police, military, and human rights investigators is crucial to ensure that all information is collected and that the findings will be taken seriously.”

The 1997 Law on Military Courts provides that only military investigators, prosecutors, and judges have jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute crimes by Indonesian military personnel. The system lacks transparency, independence, and impartiality, and has long failed to properly investigate and prosecute alleged serious human rights abuses by members of the military. In a number of cases over the past decade, the military justice system has dispensed extremely lenient sentences to soldiers convicted of serious human rights abuses against civilians.

The Indonesian government should also deploy the official Witness and Victim Protection Agency to Enarotali to protect witnesses, victims, and victims’ families from possible security force reprisals for cooperating with investigators. Papuan journalists and rights defenders told Human Rights Watch that numerous witnesses are afraid to discuss the December 8, 2014 incident. A December 22 Komnas Human Rights Commission preliminary report about the incident found that witnesses were “unwilling to testify” due to apparent concerns about reprisals.

Witnesses have told Human Rights Watch that security forces in Enarotali shot dead five protesters on December 8. A sixth protester died of gunshot wounds on December 10, the media reported. At least 17 other protesters were wounded and required hospitalization. Witnesses said that the shooting occurred during a peaceful protest by about 800 Papuan young men, women, and primary school children on Enarotali’s Karel Gobay football field in front of the local police station (Polsek) and Koramil office. Komnas HAM reported that the protesters had been demanding an explanation for the beating of several children by some soldiers the previous evening.

The police ordered the protesters to disperse and then struck them with batons and sticks when they refused, witnesses said. A witness told Human Rights Watch that he saw six or seven Indonesian officers chasing protesters, who ran to a nearby airfield. Between 9:30 and 9:40 a.m., the witnesses heard gunshots and saw security force personnel, including police Mobile Brigade (Brimob) officers, bearing rifles. It is unclear if the police fired any warning shots before firing into the crowd.

The December 8 shootings are emblematic of the routine human rights abuses that security forces carry out with impunity in Papua, in the extreme eastern of the Indonesian archipelago. Over the last 15 years, Human Rights Watch has documented hundreds of cases in which police, military, intelligence officers, and prison guards have used unnecessary or excessive force when dealing with Papuans taking part in protests. While a handful of military tribunals have been held in Papua for security force personnel implicated in abuses, the charges have been inadequate and soldiers who committed abuses continue to serve.

The Indonesian government has deployed military forces in Papua since 1963 to counter a long-simmering independence movement and restricts access to international media, diplomats, and nongovernmental groups by requiring special access permits, which are rarely granted. Tensions heightened in Papua following the February 21, 2013 attack on Indonesian military forces by suspected elements of the armed separatist Free Papua Movement. The attack resulted in the deaths of eight soldiers, the highest death toll for Indonesian military forces in the province in more than 15 years.

“The climate of fear in Papua inhibits local people from publicly discussing security force abuses,” Kine said. “The Witness and Victim Protection Agency can help Enarotali residents who wish to give their account to do so with greater safety.”

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By Wilson John*

Much has been written about Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is accused of the savage attack on the Peshawar school children on December 16, 2014. But only a few of the writings have attempted to examine a critical question — Why does TTP target the Pakistani state and its army? A coherent answer to this question would call for an objective assessment of the nature and character of this group.

Such an assessment has become all the more important in view of the Peshawar attack. The TTP does pose a serious threat to the state of Pakistan, in ways not appreciated fully even after the Peshawar attack. A failure to assess the nature of the threat posed by TTP to Pakistan could have serious consequences for India and the region as a whole.

A starting point could be the genesis of TTP. Three events in essence shaped the group’s ideology, character and formation in December 2007. First and foremost was the Afghan Jihad where many of the tribal leaders and men were recruited as ‘mujahideen’, funded and armed by the Saudi-US combine and trained by Pakistan Army. The Afghan battlefield also brought the tribal leaders close to foreign fighters, notably the Arabs, many of whom later became part of al Qaeda. Second was the events following the al Qaeda attack on the US in September 2001. In the US counter-offensive launched in Afghanistan, a large number of al Qaeda and Taliban men and leaders fled to Pakistan and many of them found easy refuge in the tribal areas, thanks to their close relations with the Haqqani Network, various tribal leaders and Pakistan Army.

The third, perhaps the most relevant in the present context, was the series of military offensives launched by Pakistan Army in the tribal areas since 2002 and the launching of Drone attacks by the US in 2004.

Both the military offensives carried out by Pakistan Army and the US Drone attacks have killed several thousand in the tribal areas dominated by Pashtun communities. There is no record of the deaths in any of these offensives. Some estimates suggest that over 3000 people have died in the US Drone attacks with only a small percentage identified as terrorists. A large number of the dead, and injured, remain anonymous and a significant percentage of this anonymous figure were civilians—men, women and children.

There is no figure to match the Pakistan Army military actions in the area since 2002. What is known is the intensity of these offensives—the military used gunships, combat jets and field artillery to kill, to destroy and raze villages after villages in the area. The quantum of destruction could be gauged from the number of people displaced due to these operations. In 2008, the UN reported close to eight million displaced persons—men, women and children forced to flee their homes and take refuge in tents put up by distant places. The latest military operation, Operation Zarb-e-Azb, which began in June 2014, has already displaced close to one million people.

It would be amiss not to mention the Lal Masjid episode of July 2007 when the army launched a short but a bloody attack on the mosque in Islamabad to neutralise a group of students and clerics who were demanding an imposition of sharia in the country and had taken to the streets. A few hundred students and others had died in the offensive (the army estimated a little over a hundred while the other estimates put the figure at over 300), many of them were from the erstwhile North West Frontier Province and the tribal areas.

It is against this backdrop that several tribal groups, till then fighting against the foreign forces in Afghanistan, decided to come together under an umbrella group called Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). It was not a splinter group of Afghan Taliban nor was directly associated with al Qaeda. It had no connection with the Haqqani Network either. But the evolution of violent armed groups in the region post-2001 has been so complex and opaque it would be deceptive to believe that TTP has had no association with any of these groups.

This complex nature of violence is reflected in TTP’s survival against compelling odds and Pakistan’s struggles to contain the group. TTP is not a big group with its cadre strength between 5000 and 30000 (different estimates), a large number of them have been killed in Pak military offensives and Drone attacks since 2002; much of its top leadership has been killed in Drone attacks and it gets no support from any state agency, be it in Pakistan or outside. The group not only faces the might of Pakistan Army and the state but also several terrorist groups, patronised by Pakistan Army, like Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT), which have been used to counter them. The group, despite these challenges, managed to attack the Karachi airport early this year and carry out a suicide bombing at Wagah in November this year.

Pakistan Army’s struggles to contain the group could be gauged from the series of military offensives it had launched in the past to destroy TTP but with little success. Apart from occasional ceasefires, TTP has consistently attacked military assets in different provinces, including Punjab. TTP had also kidnapped soldiers from the army as well as the paramilitary force, Frontier Corps, and beheaded a few of them.

One of the key reasons for TTP’s survival has been Pakistan’s policy of using terrorist groups as instruments of state policy. In this context, Pakistan Army’s protection of the Haqqani Network and the Afghan Taliban as ‘ strategic assets’ has helped TTP to retain its sanctuary and its attack capabilities. The areas dominated by the Haqqani Network and the Afghan Taliban have provided TTP with ‘strategic depth’. Whenever the Pakistan military stepped up its offensive in the tribal areas, TTP found it convenient to move into the Taliban-controlled areas. There is substantial evidence that the Haqqani Network has also helped TTP to survive the military onslaught which, in any case, has been selective and hence ineffective. For instance, before launching the current operation, the Haqqanis were alerted and moved to safer locations.

Another important reason for TTP’s survival has been its vast network of supporters in other parts of Pakistan, particularly Karachi which is considered to be the city with the largest number of Pashtuns. TTP has drawn its cadres and much of its financial resources from Karachi where it has a stake in the booming business of kidnapping for ransom. Likewise, TTP also has a working relationship with extremist groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LJ) which are also active in the criminal world in Karachi and other major cities of Pakistan. The LJ, based in Punjab, incidentally openly campaigned for Nawaz Sharif during the 2013 general elections.

It is fairly apparent that TTP benefits in many other ways from its association with al Qaeda and the Taliban. This becomes apparent from Pakistan’s noticeable failure to persuade the Haqqani Network and the Afghan Taliban to keep TTP in check or help the army to destroy the group. This failure could also indicate the limited leverage the army has on its ‘proxy’ groups, which are emboldened by the impending departure of the foreign forces from Afghanistan. Both Haqqanis and Afghan Taliban, like TTP, are Pashtun groups.

What Pakistan today faces in TTP is a hybrid group, a mixture of virulent insurgency and terrorism, fuelled by its association with al Qaeda. The Peshawar attack has added another dimension—the brutality of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

* (The writer is a Senior Fellow at Observer Research Foundation, Delhi)

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Greek warplanes have harassed Turkish F-16 war jets over the Aegean Sea, said the Turkish General Staff in a written statement on Tuesday evening.

Six Turkish F-16 war jets were performing training flights over the Aegean Sea, while two Greek F-16 war jets put radar locks for three and half minutes on two Turkish aircrafts, the statement said, noting that the Turkish planes responded in kind due to engagement rules.

Turkish and Greek warplanes have previously engaged in dogfights over the Aegean Sea many times, as two countries are at odds over the boundaries of their airspace over the area due to a long-running territorial dispute.

Turkey and Greece have been in talks to resolve their disagreements on the continental shelf over the Aegean Sea, and accordingly mutual harassments by warplanes have relatively declined in recent years.

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By P.K. Abdul Ghafour

Saudi Arabia unveiled Thursday the largest budget in history for 2015, projecting spending at record SR860 billion, despite a sharp fall in oil prices. The budget projected revenue at SR715 billion showing a huge deficit of SR145 billion for the first time since 2011.

Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah expressed optimism that the Kingdom would continue its economic growth, driven by private sector activity, integration of public and private sectors and improvement of private sector performance.

Crown Prince Salman, deputy premier and minister of defense, chaired the Cabinet’s special budget session to approve the budget on behalf of King Abdullah.

In his address to the nation on the occasion, King Abdullah said the expansionary budget was aimed at enhancing the citizens’ progress and prosperity and creating more job opportunities for them.

In his keynote speech, which was delivered by the Cabinet’s Secretary-General Abdul Rahman Al-Sadhan, King Abdullah said the budget was aimed at boosting comprehensive and balanced development. “My brothers, you are well aware that the global economy is showing weakness in growth, in addition to what the global oil market is going through, which contributed to a significant drop in oil prices,” the king told citizens.

“We have issued our directives to officials that the next year’s budget shall take into consideration these developments and rationalize expenditures, taking care of everything that serves citizens, improves services provided to them, implements strictly and efficiently the budget’s programs and projects.”

King Abdullah said the Kingdom was seeking sustainability of strong public finances status, and giving priority in the next fiscal year for completing the implementation of projects approved in previous budgets, which are huge projects.

King Abdullah said the government would continue to focus on education, address labor market imbalance to create more job opportunities for citizens and ensure optimal use of resources. The 2015 budget has allocated funds for three new universities.

King Abdullah also urged citizens to preserve the country’s security and stability. He urged all ministers and officials to exert maximum efforts to implement the budget’s programs and projects efficiently and with quality to achieve its goals.

Finance Minister Ibrahim Al-Assaf said the 2015 deficit would be covered by the country’s huge reserves from previous surpluses. Speaking to Saudi Television after presenting the budget, he said the government would continue spending actively on economic development projects “over the medium term.”

Asked whether he meant three to five years, the minister replied: “Yes, over three to five years…The (economic) depth we have, God willing, will be enough until prices get better.”

Al-Assaf said everybody expected prices to rise eventually but there was a difference over when; some people said the second half of next year while others said 2016.

“We have the ability to endure low oil prices over the medium term,” he said. The Kingdom’s total cash reserves stood at SR1.492 trillion in October 2014 while its total reserves in assets amounted to SR2.78 trillion, enough to cover deficits of the size projected in 2015 for several years.

The stock market reacted positively as the Tadawul All-Share Index rose 49.56 points or 0.57% to close at 8,749.34 points.

The value of traded shares reached SR11.32 billion. Petrochemical industries index dropped 0.14% while industrial investment index rose 4.18% and hotel and tourism index was up 2.8%.

Financial markets had feared the Kingdom might cut spending sharply, but the plan suggests Saudi authorities are confident of their ability to ride out a period of low oil prices and see no need for major austerity.

Al-Assaf said the Kingdom would continue spending actively on economic development projects, social welfare and security despite the oil price slide and challenging conditions in the global economy.

He said the Kingdom’s GDP was to reach SR2,821.7 ($752.5) billion by the end of 2014 with a growth rate of 1.09 percent compared to 2013. The nonoil GDP is estimated to grow 8.21 percent, whereas the nonoil public and private sectors 6.06 percent and 9.11 percent, respectively, and the oil sector to decline by 7.17 percent.

Labor Minister Adel Fakeih said the new budget would accelerate growth and enhance welfare of citizens. “It also reflects the strength of Saudi economy and its ability to withstand challenges…It also gives the message that citizens are the real asset of the Kingdom and the driving force for growth.”

Higher Education Minister Khaled Al-Sabti said the budget has allocated more than SR80 billion for higher education projects.

“During the past 10 years there was 86 percent growth in number of universities, which has reached 28,” he said, adding that they accommodate over 1.5 million students.

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