by Richard Gowan | Aug 13, 2008 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia
The idea that EU personnel should help keep the peace in Georgia – noted here yesterday but in the air since last week – is gaining traction. Today, the European Council said that the EU would boost OSCE observers there, but that just means more Euros under the OSCE’s flag. But the Council left open the possibility of a mission under its own banner, and that’s reportedly being discussed in private.
Russia has indicated that it is open to a greater “international aspect”. One potential problem: the Russians may also insist that EU monitors operate within the framework of, or in very close coordination with, the existing (Russian-led) CIS “peacekeeping force” in South Ossetia. That could mean EU-badged troops taking orders from Russian officers, or at least having to defer to them.
That may be the price to pay to avoid more bloodshed (the European Council says it’ll support “every effort” and while it stipulates the UN and OSCE, that could mean the CIS too). And the EU would demand that the force in South Ossetia come under a UN mandate – previously, it’s relied on an agreement between Georgia and Moscow that the Georgians have voided by quitting the CIS.
But a Russian-EU hook-up will not impress those Georgians who had hoped that the EU might come to their aid during the war – experience in Kosovo and elsewhere indicates that it won’t be long before an angry war vet decides to take personal revenge. And it will be greeted with hoots from the Washington neocons: is this the marvellous European Security and Defence Policy? Are some EU members more comfortable with Russian command than with the U.S. in Afghanistan?
How can the EU limit the damage to its image? In operational terms, the answer must be to maximize the autonomy of its contingent as much as possible (in recent days, I’ve kicked ideas to and fro with Nicu Popescu of ECFR on this, and he’s reproduced part of the exchange on his blog). But the key is to ensure that the EU is also seen to be delivering humanitarian and reconstruction aid, and boosting Georgian democracy every way it knows. But the U.S. is ahead in that game – and this is Korski’s turf, so I challenge him to put forward a plan…
by Jules Evans | Aug 13, 2008 | Conflict and security
Ten years ago last week, a bomb went off in a parked Vauxhall car on Market Street in Omagh, a market town with a population of 22,000 in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. It killed 29 people, as well as two unborn babies, and injured many others.
In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, the Sperrin Lakeland Trust, which has a hospital on Market Street in Omagh, asked the Maudsley Hospital in London, which is one of the leading centres in the world for treating post-traumatic stress disorder, to send help. It did, flying in a team of psychologists headed by perhaps the leading psychologist in the UK, professor David Clark.
Over the next few weeks, Clark and his team treated hundreds of the traumatised citizens of Omagh using cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), a form of therapy developed in the US in the 1950s and 60s.
One shop worker said he needed months of counselling after helping a woman in the street. Richard Walker, quoted by the BBC, said: “There was a woman lying with her clothes nearly half blown off her with her leg broken and her knees all broken. It was a terrible sight. I went for over two months of counselling once a week and it really helped. They got me to make a tape of what happened and play it over and over to get it out of your system.”
Not everyone responded to treatment. Some, ten years later, are still in treatment. But Clark says a significant proportion of those treated did respond well, and their mental suffering decreased and stayed diminished over time.
The UK government was understandably impressed by the evidence Clark amassed. He told me, at a CBT conference at the Maudsley Hospital last year, ‘It was our work, and the evidence from it, in Omagh that really impressed the government that CBT worked’.
As a result, the government started to listen seriously to Lord Layard’s calls for a national mental health service, mainly staffed by CBT therapists, to treat the one in six British citizens who will suffer from depression or chronic anxiety at some point in their lives. In 2006, the government approved the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme, according to which the government will spend £173mn a year by 2010 on training new therapists, mainly in CBT.
The government hasn’t spent that money yet, and maybe it won’t be around long enough to do so. I sincerely hope the next government will continue with this plan, which seems to me one of the most important government initiatives of the last few years.
Omagh, meanwhile, is now home to one of the most advanced centres in the world for the treatment of PSTD and for helping communities cope with catastrophe – the Northern Ireland Centre for Trauma and Transformation.
by Alex Evans | Aug 13, 2008 | East Asia and Pacific, Global system, Influence and networks
As regular readers will know, we’re always on the lookout for lessons from China on how [not] to do public diplomacy. So we’re happy to be able to pass on that faced with a Free Tibet protest in Beijing today, the Chinese authorities decided that as well as arresting all eight protestors, it might be as well to err on the side of caution by roughing up and then detaining ITN’s China correspondent too.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doz4zjg9Bx8]
ITN: “John Ray is a fully accredited China correspondent who was doing his legitimate job as a journalist. We intend to protest in the strongest possible terms to the Chinese authorities and seek assurances that the treatment meted out to Mr Ray will not be repeated.”
International Olympic Committee: “The IOC has learned through media reports that a British journalist was allegedly assaulted today while covering a demonstration near an Olympic venue in Beijing. The IOC’s position is clear: the media must be free to report on the Olympic Games. We are endeavouring to discover the full facts of this incident and, if necessary, will raise our concerns with the appropriate authority.”
Reporter: “the level of force was unbelievable”.
This small victory for brand China follows yesterday’s news that the cute 9 year old girl who sang at the Opening Ceremony was in fact lip-synching:
According to the ceremony’s musical director, Chen Qigang, Miss Lin actually lip-synched “Ode to the Motherland” to the voice of another girl after the politburo decided her own singing was not good enough. The replacement singer, however, was deemed not attractive enough to grace the world’s television screens.
“I think all China’s viewers and listeners should understand that was a matter of national interest,” Mr Chen said in an interview with Radio Beijing.
Absolutely. After all, there’s a reputation to uphold.
by Richard Gowan | Aug 12, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia
So the war in Georgia is over for now (or as Finnish FM Alex Stubb nicely puts it “traditionally, we will see a few skirmishes, but frontal attacks and positioning will end”). Stand by for laborious talks on peacekeeping options. In Moscow, Nicolas Sarkozy offered EU personnel, but with Russian “peacekeepers” and OSCE and UN observers already in Georgia, how will all the players fit together?
At some point in the negotiations, a weary diplomat may stop to wonder why there was ever such a complex peacekeeping structure in Georgia in the first place. Why, for example, did you have OSCE military observers in South Ossetia but UN guys in Abkhazia? I don’t know the full history, but there’s a curious tale behind the UN Observer Mission in Georgia, as my boss Bruce Jones explains in a recent book chapter on how the UN stumbled into its Rwandan debacle:
At the Security Council [in 1993] both the US and Russia initially objected to yet another peacekeeping operation, this time for a small country with a small civil war that barely registered on the radar screen. Of the actors involved in the Security Council deliberations, only France had any significant interests in Rwanda. France eventually brokered a compromise wherein the US and Russia would support the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda if France agreed to support missions in Haiti and Georgia for which the US and Russia were lobbying respectively.
This was not the most successful deal in the Council’s history.
by Daniel Korski | Aug 12, 2008 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks
There you are, spotty-faced and filled with anti-Western rage. An Ed Hussein, pre-conversion, in search of a community of co-believers who, like you, want to revenge U.S attacks on Muslims. You despise the West and dream of a new Caliphate.
You write in chat-rooms, read Salafist blogs and participate in on-line discussions. Like a Scientologist, you move from one chat-room to the next, all the time becoming more extreme, angrier, until you are deeply-embedded in the web-based Jihad, where Salafist meet Shia extremists, where bomb-making skills are swapped like recipes and where you, from your Oldham bedroom or your Cairo bed-sit, do your bit to aid the worldwide struggle
Allah hu aqbar! Allah hu aqbar!
But can you be sure that your net-brother – Mohammed007 – is who he says he is? Is he really a Salafist preacher, once a fatherless 18 year-old car-thief, but now radicalised by a six-month stint in Wormwood Scrubs and ready to preach anti-Western Jihad? He might be.
But he might also be a 25-year old Arab-speaking intelligence analyst, working for Israel’s Terrogence, a private company founded by ex-spies to take Jihadists on in cyberspace. Its experts, most of them ex-members of Israeli intelligence, have created radical Muslim identities to talk their way into hundreds of closely guarded global jihad websites and forums.
Remember when Tony Blair had to cancel a trip to Gaza? That was because of a tip from Terrogence, who picked up chatter, and passed the information on. What about the thwarted attack on the Vatican’s computer system. Terrogence discovered a plot to attack the Holy See’s network and helped the authorities take evasive action. When a Jihadi activist watched a National Geographic documentary and got the idea of blasting the wall between the Paris sewage system and the Metro, Terrogence analysts were on hand to pick up his idea and prevent the Paris underground from being flooded.
Like polling companies who specialise in one type of polling – say those who use the internet – Terrogence’s output needs to be seen together with other analytical products. But if they provide only a fragment of the Jihadi struggle, it is an illuminating one that many intelligence services are willing to pay large sums to see. Clients are said to include Western spy agencies, but also newspapers and private companies.
The work is not without its dilemmas, moral and legal. To gain respect among the hardest of fanatics, you too – much like in inner-city gangs – have to suggest ways to strike at the Kafir, to kill and maim. But how to do so without crossing the line? More, if it works to take on personalities in chat-rooms, then why not set-up whole forums and lure unsuspecting Jihadists to your website?
Having visited Terrogence, I’m left with a different question, though – just as Jihadists can be tracked, ideas followed, people found and methods stopped, can the company’s work be used in the other side of counter-terrorism, that is, for counter-radicalisation?
If the largest part of the Jihadi struggle takes place on-line, then surely that’s where the government’s counter-radicalisation work needs to be? Terrogence web-based aliases could be used to coax Jihadists away from violence, complementing the real-world work of the Quilliam Foundation and others. But is it? Terrogence say they are open to the idea, but have not yet been approached by any governments….
