by Mark Weston | Feb 25, 2009 | Economics and development
The UN has just published an update to its Human Development Index (HDI), the league table that compares living standards in all the world’s countries.
At the top of the Index sits Iceland, which the UN believes has the world’s highest living standards but which most other observers think is basically bankrupt (public debt is running at over $30,000 per head). In 5th place is Ireland, also in dire straits as foreign investors – the mainstay of the recent boom – pull out and the government runs out of money to pay off its mountainous debts.
I don’t know about you, but if I was Norwegian, Canadian or Australian, and therefore enjoying the 2nd, 3rd and 4th highest living standards in the world, the curse of the HDI would be making me very uneasy indeed.
by David Steven | Feb 24, 2009 | Conflict and security
Disgraceful comments today from Con Couglin, the Daily Telegraph’s ‘executive foreign editor’, on the release of Binyam Mohammed.
Coughlin thinks Mohammed should be sent to Pakistan – the country where he was tortured – “so he can learn what the Taliban was really like” and bring himself “up to date on the Taliban’s latest governmental practices, such as stoning adulterers to death and cutting off the limbs of those accused of theft.”
This is red meat for the Telegraph’s commenters. “The further costs of keeping this scum alive and here far outweighs any other consideration,” one writes.
Coughlin has good sources in US intelligence, sources who have assured him that Mohamed was a highly placed Al Qaeda operative, one who confessed to his US interrogators that “he met Osama bin Laden on several occasions.” That this confession was extracted under torture doesn’t seemto bother Coughlin at all.
Most galling of all is the fact that Coughlin isn’t able even to get the details of Mohamed’s arrest right, claiming he was “he was arrested wandering around Afghanistan.” Perhaps he should read his own paper, which accurately reports that Mohamed was arrested in April 2002 in Karachi airport, as he tried to board a plane back to the UK.
(It would not surprise me at all if Mohamed is/was a low level Al Qaeda operative by the way. If he was, torture has made it impossible to prosecute him.)
by Richard Gowan | Feb 24, 2009 | Africa, Conflict and security, Global Dashboard
The new Annual Review of Global Peace Operations is out! This sturdy volume, which I helped set up in 2005-6, has chronicled the long decline of peacekeeping since then. This year’s excellent volume (now stewarded by my colleagues Sarjoh Bah and Ben Tortolani) opens on a particularly grim note:
2008 was the worst year for peacekeeping in over a decade. The largest and most visible peacekeeping operations faced serious military and political reversals. These endangered not only specific missions, but the entire global peacekeeping enterprise. No major peacekeeping provider was unaffected. The United Nations was tested in Congo and Sudan, NATO in Afghanistan, the EU in Kosovo, and the African Union in Somalia.
Today’s FT takes up the story:
United Nations military operations might have reached their limits, with the two largest peacekeeping operations stretched to breaking point in the past year, the organisation’s chief peacekeeper warns in a report to be published on Tuesday.
The warning from Alain Le Roy, under-secretary general for peacekeeping operations, appears in a foreword to the annual peacekeeping survey of the New York-based Center on International Co-operation. It comes a year after the centre’s last review criticised the security council for authorising big new peacekeeping missions round the world in spite of warnings that demands on troop contributors were overtaking their ability to deliver. [GOWAN INTERJECTS: I told you so!]
The UN is currently responsible for 18 peace missions worldwide that deploy 112,000 uniformed personnel at the cost of almost $8bn a year. “UN peacekeeping is now at an all-time high,” according to Mr Le Roy.
In the light of the near-collapse last October of the peacekeeping mission in Democratic Republic of the Congo, the UN’s largest, the security council has finally taken note. France and the UK have launched a review on how best to fix a system that one diplomat at the UN described as “breaking at the seams”.
We may yet save peacekeeping from strategic collapse. But can we save it from anonymous diplomats resorting to cliches?
by Richard Gowan | Feb 23, 2009 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development
At last, some good news from the Congo:
Negotiators for the Congolese government and a rebel group in the country’s east have reached a preliminary agreement, after talks in the eastern town of Goma. Neither side has released details of the discussion, which would only set the stage for future peace negotiations. Negotiations between the National Congress for the Defense of the People, an ethnic Tutsi rebel group operating in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Congolese government resumed last Wednesday. Following Sunday’s discussions, spokesmen for both sides indicated they had reached a preliminary agreement.
But such limited progress is rather dwarfed by this:
Western donors will begin releasing over $200m (€156m, £139m) of emergency loans to the Democratic Republic of Congo in the next three weeks to prevent the government seizing up as it runs out of dollars, according to an International Monetary Fund official. The funds are set to be released in spite of donor opposition to parts of a $9bn minerals-for-infrastructure deal that Congo has signed with China, which is holding up poverty reduction programmes financed by traditional western donors.
Congo has been hit harder and faster by the global financial crisis than other African countries owing to its heavy dependence on mining and oil, as well as the confluence of last year’s falls in commodity prices with a costly conflict in its eastern provinces.
The events have created a fiscal emergency as government revenues from tax and state joint ventures shrink, causing foreign currency reserves to plummet to just $32m by February 13 from an average of around $250m before the crisis last year, according to the central bank. In the real economy confidence has been shattered: the Congolese franc has weakened sharply against the dollar, inflation is rising, millions of people are being pushed deeper into poverty, and fears of social unrest are rising.
Brian Ames, the IMF’s country director for Congo, told the Financial Times he expected donors to begin dispersing funds at the end of this month or in early March so the government could pay for public sector imports and service its external debt. He said the IMF board would meet next month to consider a loan of up to $200m under the rapid access component of a facility designed to help countries manage the impact of “sudden and significant exogenous shocks”.
Late last year the IMF downgraded its 2009 economic growth forecast for Congo to 4.5 per cent from 11 per cent prior to the global financial crisis. The World Bank is considering providing a further $100m. An EU official said the European Union was considering a loan of €50m ($64m, £44m). “The sense of urgency is increasing by the minute,” said one western diplomat in Kinshasa.
Last year, I called the victims of the Congo crisis “victims of the first war of the financial crisis”. How many more (wars and victims) are to come?
by Richard Gowan | Feb 23, 2009 | Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Global system
From the Financial Times:
One of Germany’s most influential engineers has made an urgent plea to bring leading global industrialists, scientists and politicians together in an attempt to rapidly stabilise the financial system, highlighting the growing fear of tightening credit hitting supply chains. Franz Fehrenbach, chief executive of Bosch, the world’s largest car parts supplier, called for the creation of a global interdisciplinary think-tank to find ways to tackle the financial crisis. The head of Germany’s biggest privately owned engineering group warned that the risks of further bank crashes and a meltdown of credit supply to the broader economy remained unabated and urgent action was needed to prevent that.
“We have to bring the best people in the world together to find a sophisticated and interdisciplinary solution for the stabilisation of the world’s financial markets. The approach has to be enforceable on a global basis as too many plans have been torn apart by national governments,” Mr Fehrenbach told the Financial Times.
Wait a minute: did I just see the word enforceable applied to a think-tank’s out-put? This must be every wonk’s dream: an institution producing policy recommendations with the power of law. This concept needs to be extended: perhaps my wittering on the failure of peace operations should be backed up a crack brigade of Indian blue helmets? Or Alex’s musings on the food crisis reinforced by a guaranteed supply of free shrimp to anyone who puts them into practice?
