by Richard Gowan | Nov 17, 2007 | Conflict and security
It continues to be Brutal Honesty Month from the UN. Since I noted here that Ban Ki-moon and his team had started to tell harsh truths about the dangers of peacekeeping in Somalia and Darfur, the Secretary-General has been to Lebanon to warn that the country could reach “the brink of the abyss” if political parties fail to elect a new president by the first week of December.
The possibility that political deadlock could lead to violence – even a new civil war – has been making UN officials nervous for a while, not least because they have over 13,000 peacekeepers in south Lebanon who might very well find themselves in the line of fire. Unlike the unfortunate troops bound for Darfur, the forces in Lebanon are primarily European and have artillery to shoot back with. But precisely because they’re European, there are widespread doubts about whether they’re ready to take significant casualties. It’s not hard to imagine them choosing to retreat to the sea.
And if that wouldn’t be damaging enough for the UN and Europeans, Ban is all too aware that December could bring another peacekeeping crisis in Kosovo. If talks on the UN-run province’s future – set to end on 10 December – end without a deal, there’s a real chance of things turning ugly there too (as some thug reminds the BBC here).
Happily, many serious Kosovo-watchers think that this can be avoided, or at least delayed. In-depth polling for UNDP earlier in the year shows that the time isn’t really ripe for revolution in the province: only 3% of respondents would take up arms for independence. In public, senior UN figures are balancing their “faith” in the current negotiation process with calls for “clarity” on what comes next. But on the ground, international officials admit that the situation is basically unpredictable: a few well-targeted provocations could spark major violence, even if the majority don’t want it.
And that, as I was grumbling elsewhere at the start of this year, could combine with trouble in Lebanon to create a “multi-center crisis” that would leave the UN in disarray (even without its African problems). Ban wants the focus this December to be on the UN climate change negotiations in Bali, and his biggest success as Secretary-General to date has been building momentum towards those talks. But he and his team may end up spending the month in full-scale crisis mode. I’m not sure how many shopping days there are until Christmas, but let’s hope UN staffers decided to get their presents early this year…
by David Steven | Nov 17, 2007 | Off topic, South Asia
In 1978, Cambodian artist, Vann Nath was locked up by the Khmer Rouge in the S-21 prison. “We were all in one room,” he recalls. “We lay naked down on the floor, packed next to each other in handcuffs, and we tried to sleep.”
The soldiers wore black uniforms. They were young. Some of them were only about 13 or 14 years old, but they had no mercy. Their accusation of “khmang”—enemy—was so powerful. It separated fathers, mothers, children, and siblings from each other.
Every four days, they gave us a bath. They brought hoses up from downstairs and sprayed everyone from the doorway. Each day they would take some prisoners out of my room to be interrogated. Some prisoners came back with wounds or with blood on their bodies; others disappeared. Prisoners started dying in the room, one by one. If a prisoner died in the morning, the guards would not take him out until night. If I needed to defecate I asked the guards to bring the bucket over.
I was lucky. They found out I can draw. They used me a lot to do drawings. All the time they wanted me to draw Pol Pot. They gave me his picture and I would draw. I drew him from different angles and in all different environments. But I never met Pol Pot. He never knew I was the artist that did his pictures.
Of the 14,000 people who entered that prison, Nath was one of only seven to leave. Comrade Duch – the prison commandant – had scrawled ‘keep the painter’ on the list of people to be executed.
After he left prison, Nath painted pictures for Cambodia’s Museum of Genocide. Here is his picture of his cell:
And here’s his picture of waterboarding – hung above the table on which the torture was performed:
Nath remembers the torture:
I could hear screams of pain from every corner of the prison. I felt a twinge of pain in my body at each scream… I could hear the guards demanding the truth, the acts of betrayal, the names of collaborators.
Nath is now seriously ill, with kidney failure and TB that has corroded his spine. He depends on donations and sales of his paintings to stay alive (the Cambodian government has apparently refused to help with his medical costs).
Until 1999, meanwhile, Nath’s ex-captor, Comrade Duch was hiding out, a smiley old man who had converted to Christianity and worked for a development charity. He was then tracked down in 1999 by the photo-journalist, Nic Dunlop confessed his guilt in an interview, and was arrested.
Duch is now held by the UN-backed Cambodia tribunal and was charged in July this year with crimes against humanity. He, too, is ill, with prostate problems, but is receiving medical treatment while in prison. His trial has just started and he will probably be sentenced early next year. He has admitted his guilt and expresses contrition for his actions:
I have done very bad things in my life. Now is the time to bear the consequences of my actions… Then I thought God was very bad. I did not serve God, I served communism. I feel sorry about the killings and the past.
Dunlop believes he may implicate more senior leaders at his trial:
When he spoke in 1999, he accepted his own role in the killings and began to establish a chain of command of how orders were given and carried out and by who. His testimony should be a pivotal moment if he does speak the truth on the stand and so it could be very damaging.
Duch’s trial began with evidence from Nhem En, the photographer whose job it was to take pictures of people just before they were executed:
It’s hard to say if they knew they would die or not. I realised that many times they arrested people who had done nothing. People from my village confessed to being in the CIA. In the end, everyone confessed to something. Most people went on to name every person they could think of as an accomplice before they were killed with an iron bar.
En led a team of six photographers and was careful to minimise contact with the prisoners:
‘Look straight ahead. Don’t lean your head to the left or the right.’ That’s all I said. I had to say that so the picture would turn out well. Then they were taken to the interrogation center. The duty of the photographer was just to take the picture.”
Here are some of his pictures of people waiting to die:
En joined the Khmer Rouge in 1961, when he was ten. He did not leave the party until the mid-90s, when there was an amnesty. In January this year, he made a public apology at a meeting organised by the American ambassador to Vietnam.
En says that he feels both ‘pride and regret’ at the pictures he took. Regret because the photos were sad ones; pride, it seems, because of the international attention they have bought him. He regards his pictures as important historical and artistic artefacts, and uses pictures of his meeting with the Ambassador to raise money for a museum to display his work.
Now a member of the governing party, he is deputy governor for his district. As an important man, he expects to be treated with respect. When summoned to Comrade Duch’s trial, he complained bitterly that he was only given $5 expenses in return for testifying:
I’m living history. They should give me more. The court only offered me $5 and I don’t need that money. I’m a deputy governor! I did my job and I have my pride. Why do they offer me $5? It’s not enough for my breakfast!”
Vann Nath will testify too, but is not interested in stipends. Instead, he waits for justice finally to be done:
What I want to see in my life is for the leaders to face the court and for the trial to determine who is responsible for killing our people. I don’t want to see any leaders killed because I don’t want to see people killed again. I don’t want to see them in prison. I don’t want that.
I just want them to acknowledge that they committed these crimes and explain. That is the most important lesson for our young generation to learn.
by Mark Weston | Nov 16, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa
The humble headscarf has become a key symbol in the simmering debate over Turkey’s secular future. In August this year it nearly brought down the government when the army opposed Abdullah Gul’s presidential bid because of his scarf-toting wife. The liberal middle classes of Istanbul and Izmir cite the AK Party’s apparent support for the garb, which although seen on every street in the country is banned in public buildings, as evidence of its Muslim fundamentalist intentions.
I spoke to a number of these critics when the AK Party first came to power in 2002. They predicted that it would try to turn Turkey into an Islamic theocracy. Even though the party’s manifesto promised to uphold secularism, its murky past persuaded the urban elites that it was lying. The party’s leader Tayyip Erdo?an, for example, was once locked up for inciting religious hatred in a poem he read at a public meeting. The offending verse? “The minarets are our bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks.” Nothing too vindictive in there, you might think, but he deliberately omitted a verse praising the army (who are a sensitive bunch) and his final stanza, “our journey is our destiny, the end is martyrdom,” is admittedly a bit scary.
Turkey looks no more Islamic today than it did five years ago, however. The headscarf is still banned in schools, universities, the courts and government offices (Tayyip doesn’t even take his bescarved wife to official functions). The country has taken steps to get into the EU (despite the latter looking increasingly like an exclusively Christian club). And the generals – the staunch defenders of Ataturk’s secular legacy – remain powerful. (more…)
by Alex Evans | Nov 16, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks, UK
Lots of gossip in Whitehall about Sue Cameron’s piece in the FT the day before yesterday:
Oh dear! No one in Whitehall expected Gordon Brown to revert to type so quickly. He has been in Number 10 less than six months but, to the horror of civil servants, he has already hunkered down and cut most communication with the rest of government. Insiders say that no papers, no ideas and no decisions are getting through the barbed wire – only announcements from the leader that have been discussed with no one outside Mr Brown’s inner circle.
As a result, the corridors of power have become the corridors of impotence. Whitehall teems with unhappy cabinet ministers who have not been consulted or even informed about proposals that concern them – little details such as the date of the Budget, troop withdrawals in Iraq or the cancelling of the general election.
Equally significant yet unnoticed by outsiders is the impact on officials who find they are as much out of the loop as ever they were in the days of Tony Blair. With their ministers sidelined, their own expertise – and sometimes months of work on new proposals – is being ignored.
Their mood has shifted markedly from the welcome they gave Mr Brown in the summer. They feel he has reneged on his promises of a return to a more open, listening government. Criticism among the permanent secretaries, Whitehall’s college of cardinals, is swelling.
This is a story that Brown can’t afford to allow to run…
by Alex Evans | Nov 16, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system
I was about to pull together some of the main threads in the IEA’s 2007 World Energy Outlook (executive summary here), but Martin Wolf beat me to it in yesterday’s FT, so here are a few of his highlights from the new report:
If governments stick with current policies (which the IEA calls the “reference scenario”), the world’s energy needs will be more than 50 per cent higher in 2030 than today, with developing countries accounting for 74 per cent, and China and India alone for 45 per cent, of the growth in demand.
Fossil fuels are forecast to account for 84 per cent of the increase in global energy consumption between 2005 and 2030.
Some $22,000bn (a little under half of 2006 world gross product) will need to be invested in supply infrastructure, to meet demand over the next quarter century.
In the IEA’s own words, “a supply-side crunch in the period to 2015, involving an abrupt escalation in oil prices cannot be ruled out”.
Sitting straight yet?
For me, two big themes stand out in this year’s outlook. The first is the oil markets, which remain extremely tight. The overall figures for global production are not keeping pace with the increase in demand; Lester Brown at the Earth Policy Institute argues that they show “a pronounced loss of momentum in the growth of oil production” over the last few years. In 2004, the total was 82.90 million barrels of oil a day (mb/d). This rose to 84.15 mb/d in 2005, and then 84.80 mb/d in in 2006. In the first ten months of this year, output has fallen back slightly to 84.62 mb/d.
Naturally, none of this has been lost on analysts who support the peak oil argument – an increasing number of whom now claim that the peak was passed some time between late 2005 and early 2007. Their attention has in particular focused on a report from the Energy Watch Group, commissioned by the German government, which concluded that:
world oil production … peaked in 2006. Production will start to decline at a rate of several percent per year. By 2020, and even more by 2030, global oil supply will be dramatically lower. This will create a supply gap which can hardly be closed by growing contributions from other fossil, nuclear or alternative energy sources in this time frame.
Not being a geologist, I won’t attempt to pass judgement on that claim. Many in the oil industry vehemently deny that a peak is anywhere close, and since peak oilers themselves tend to argue that the production peak will only be definitively discernable in retrospect, a few more years of falling production would presumably be needed before a peak could be called for sure.
But what the IEA’s new energy outlook really tells us is that you don’t have to be a peak oiler to be worried about the energy outlook. Although some investment in new supply is happening, it’s a long way short of the astronomical levels called for by the IEA. Take, for instance, Javier Blas’s excellent FT analysis piece today, which quotes the Secretary General of OPEC – which according to the IEA will account for a rapidly increasing proportion of global oil supply – as saying that its members have committed close to $120 billion in supply expansion projects.
$120 billion? Well, great. Only another $21,880 billion to go, then.
The second stand-out part of the report for me is the climate change part of the piece. Among the highlights that Martin Wolf picks out from the report:
Under the reference scenario, emissions of carbon dioxide will jump by 57 per cent between 2005 and 2030. The US, China, Russia and India alone contribute two-thirds of this increase. China becomes the world’s biggest emitter this year and India the third largest by 2015.
Even under the IEA’s more radical “alternative policy scenario” CO2 emissions stabilise only by 2025 and remain almost 30 per cent above 2005 levels.
Look at these figures in the light of the IPCC figures on emissions levels and stabilisation scenarios (here‘s the relevant section of the latest assessment report – you want table 3.5 on page 198). According to the IPCC, the ‘alternative scenario’ – with emissions peaking in 2025 – puts the world on course for a stabilisation level of around 590 parts per million carbon dioxide equivalent, and warming of around 4 degrees Celsius (though caveat recent data in Science about the risks of predicting temperature increase from concentration data). And that’s assuming a rapid decline in emissions after they peak in 2025. It doesn’t look good.
Wolf is refreshingly blunt – and right on the mark – when he says that on global warming, “despite the blather, nothing effective has been done or yet seems likely to be done”. And this is perhaps the most challenging element of the world’s energy outlook – not just the need to meet exploding demand for energy while slashing carbon dioxide emissions, but the fact that in order to pull off this extraordinary feat, the real heavy lifting is on the demand rather than the supply side of the equation. According to the IEA’s own projections, it’s energy efficiency, more than renewables, nuclear, clean coal and so on, that make the difference between the reference scenario and the alternative policy scenario.
The problem is, tackling the demand side is the hard part of climate mitigation – and domestic energy efficiency and road transport (as opposed to business energy use) are the really hard part. Changes of this kind are all about influencing the behaviour, values, assumptions and narratives of a very large number of people; technical policy fixes don’t go that far here. David and I will be publishing a paper next month, commissioned by the London Accord, on public perceptions of climate change, which has a lot to say on this area. There’s a lot of work to do…
