by Mark Weston | Nov 29, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa
Just as I was wondering whether Turkey’s Kurds still had reasons to be grumpy, up pops the country’s Supreme Court to ban the leading Kurdish political party, the DTP, and expel its elected MPs from Parliament. This has happened many times before – a DTP deputy describes Turkey as a “cemetery of banned political parties” – but not usually when the eyes of the world are watching how the nation responds to Kurdish unrest.
Unfortunately the government doesn’t have the power to override Supreme Court decisions – if it did, the pragmatic Prime Minister Tayyip Erdo?an would quickly throw the case out. Banning the DTP, which the Supreme Court claims is “based on blood and takes orders from the terrorist organisation of the PKK,” would be self-defeating. The party has been weakened by the rise of Tayyip’s AKP, which swept the board among Kurds in the 2007 general election, relegating the DTP to a bit part even in its traditional strongholds of Diyarbakir and Bingol. Silencing it now, Erdo?an knows, can only fan Kurdish resentment:
“Everyone should be able to freely express themselves through constitutional and legitimate means in a democratic environment,” he argued this week. “The climate of freedoms is an enemy of violence and terrorism…So let’s maintain pluralistic democracy and strengthen the climate of freedoms in order to secure the ultimate result in the struggle against terrorism…All experience shows there is no other way out.”
The latter is a reference to Turkey’s failure to snuff out earlier Kurdish rebellions using force. OK, the arrest of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999 calmed things down for a while, but most of the underlying causes of his people’s frustration remained. It was only a matter of time before some of them regrouped, and the recent troubles show the battle for hearts and minds, as the Prime Minister acknowledges, is far from won. “Let’s look together,” he urges, “for ways of winning over the people instead of alienating them.” Sadly, his plea is likely to fall on deaf ears.
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 Richard Gowan | Nov 15, 2007 | Conflict and security
There seems to be a small revolt in progress at the UN over the ever-growing demand for its peacekeepers. There are currently more than 100,000 of them around the world, a record, and UN-watchers have been muttering darkly about “overstretch” for a while. But now there’s a new mood of frankness among senior officials too. Last week, Ban Ki-moon declared that sending a UN force into Somalia is not “a realistic and viable option” right now. That will have irritated Washington, which badly wants to the UN to go in to take some pressure off its Ethiopian allies, bogged down in Mogadishu.
This week, it’s been the turn of Ban’s Under-Secretary for Peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno to tell it like it is. Reviewing the lack of hi-tech assets like helicopters available for the UN force in Darfur, he told the press that the mission there “may become a failure.” Guehenno has been blunt about such issues in the past. But these two statements, coming so close together, may foreshadow a growing fight over high-risk missions like Darfur and Somalia between a cautious UN Secretariat and those governments (most obviously the US and UK) that strongly favor these deployments.
So it’s worth noting the disconnect between these short-term warnings from the UN and some of the big picture thinking on peacekeeping that Gordon Brown laid out in his Mansion House speech on Monday. As Alex Evans pointed out in his review of the speech on this blog, Brown had much to say about the need for a “a new framework” to handle fragile states and peace operations. And much of it was absolutely right in theory: “Security Council peacekeeping resolutions and UN Envoys should make stablisation, reconstruction and development an equal priority”, for example. The problem is that you can’t make the theory work (or get onto reconstruction or development) if you don’t have the troops and helicopters you need to do stabilization.
In fairness, they know this in London. In a lecture on the EU as “Model Power Not Superpower” today, David Miliband had all the details on rotary wing aircraft:
EU countries have around 1,200 transport helicopters, yet only about 35 are deployed in Afghanistan. And EU member states haven’t provided any helicopters in Darfur despite the desperate need there.
Miliband went on to say that “increasing our capacity to put peacekeepers into the field – whether on UN, EU or NATO missions – is a crucial part of cooperation.” Again, this is absolutely right in principle. But even if the Europeans did have much greater capacity, would they be prepared to risk their assets and personnel in Somalia?
Er, no. Fewer than 2% of UN forces in Africa come from Europe. Give credit where it is due: the Norwegians and Swedes do want to send engineers to Darfur, and the EU is deploying (mainly French) soldiers to Chad alongside UN police. The UN will continue to have to bear the burden of new missions with troops from Africa and Asia. As that becomes ever more difficult and dangerous, the Secretariat may start to do what Bill Clinton told the UN to do after the last Somalia debacle in the 1990s: learn to say no.
by Alex Evans | Nov 7, 2007 | Conflict and security
From BloggingStocks.com, the news that Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa is considering a Congressional investigation into an intriguing tax break: “whether it’s right that they avoid paying any taxes while their ministries contribute immensely to their personal wealth”.
The site quotes the Wall Street Journal that: “Mr. Grassley said his investigation was prompted by complaints from watchdog groups and others that the ministers live in multimillion-dollar homes, travel on private jets and engage in profit-making ventures from their ministries. He said the complaints raised suspicions, “but I would not make a final judgment until I get the story from the ministries.”
Among those Grassley is apparently likely to assess is Benny Hinn, who has made gazillions from donations and tasteful retail items such as this Lord My Rock Desk Sculpture (“A good conversation piece, it is a rugged reminder of the safety and protection God’s provides His children” – yours for $20). BloggingStocks has helpfully provided the following excerpt from a 1991 interview with Hinn in Florida Magazine in 1991, which provides some useful additional context:
He looks like a Ralph Lauren advertisement, a true gentleman of leisure. As always, his hair is sprayed solidly in place. “I don’t know if you’ll ever [again] see a reverend without socks,” he says proudly. [He’s wearing no socks.] “That’s the way I am. I’m more down to earth than most people.”
This comes from a man who just turned in his Mercedes for a Jaguar and recently moved from the exclusive Heathrow development to the even more exclusive Alaqua, where he now lives in a $685,000 home. His suits are tailored, his shoes are Italian leather, and his wrists and finger glitter with gold and diamonds … what he considers a modest lifestyle, as if everyone lives like this.
He wears his diamond Rolex, diamond rings, gold bracelet and custom suits for all to see. …”What’s the big deal, for goodness sake?” he says. “What am I supposed to do, drive a Honda? …That’s not in the Bible. … I’m sick and tired about hearing about streets of gold [in heaven]. I don’t need gold in heaven. I got to have it now!”
by Alex Evans | Oct 23, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, North America
Here’s a story that seems to have gone virtually unremarked outside the US. Atlanta is running out of water: not in some long term “by 2050” kind of way, but in about 75 days’ time. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution put it in an article on 11 October,
That’s three months before there’s not enough water for more than 3 million metro Atlantans to take showers, flush their toilets and cook. Three months before there’s not enough water in parts of the Chattahoochee River for power plants to make the steam necessary to generate electricity. Three months before part of the river runs dry. “We’ve never experienced this situation before,” state Environmental Protection Division Director Carol Couch said of the record-breaking drought and fast-falling lake.
As the New York Times observed over the weekend, “the response to the worst drought on record in the Southeast has unfolded in ultra-slow motion”. The drought afflicting Georgia has been underway for more than a year. Yet:
All summer … fountains sprayed and football fields were watered, prisoners got two showers a day and Coca-Cola’s bottling plants chugged along at full strength. On an 81-degree day this month, an outdoor theme park began to manufacture what was intended to be a 1.2-million-gallon mountain of snow.
Atlanta’s waking up to to the juggernaut bearing down on it, as the lakes on which it depends – Lake Lanier and Allatoona Lake – sink lower and lower, has been sudden. On September 28, Couch ordered an immediate ban on all outdoor water use, the most severe step laid out in state drought plans – but warned as she did so that, “my calculation is it may be inadequate”. She would be “reaching out”, she went on, to the US Army Corps of Engineers, to lobby for more water to be released from corps-run lakes (of which Lake Lanier is one).
By October 11, the full extent of the problem – including the fact that only three months’ worth of water remained, in the face of a forecast for another dry, warm winter – was becoming clear. Couch and her officials began drawing up a more demanding crisis plan to figure out where the pain should land. Couch commented at the time, “there has to be a balance between determining how much water we can conserve against how much lost jobs and lost economy there is. You don’t do that lightly.”
Then, on Friday last week – with drinking water down to 80 days – Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue staked out his position: it’s not our fault. Carol Couch’s attempts to “reach out” to the Corps of Engineers had been met by a blunt refusal, based on federally mandated protection for mussels and sturgeon downstream in the Sunshine State. The governor’s office claimed bitterly that “the amount of water the corps sends downstream is about double what Mother Nature would provide to federally protected mussels living in Florida’s Apalachicola River”, and promptly sued the Corps. (Even the local paper conceded on its editorial page, “Let’s be honest: It’s not about the mussels. The struggle for control of water flowing down the drought-stricken Chattahoochee River is about money and politics and human frailties such as jealousy, greed, laziness and procrastination.”) On Saturday, as the story went national, the Governor declared a state of emergency for more than half the state, and requested federal assistance.
Yet as the New York Times observed, “these last-minute measures belie a history of inaction in Georgia and across the South when it comes to managing and conserving water, even in the face of rapid growth”. As Mark Crisp, a water expert in the Atlanta office of engineering firm CH Guernsey commented, “we have made it clear to the planners and executive management of this state for years that we may very well be on the verge of a systemwide emergency”.
True and necessary as such statements of tough love may be, they are of scant consolation to the people of Georgia – who, as Katie Couric’s flagship news program on CBS reported yesterday, are feeling “rising panic”:
Across North Georgia, thousands of people are digging private wells, nervous that their regular water’s about to run dry. “The phone is just ringing off the hook,” said Bob Askew, the owner of a well-drilling company. “It’s like working at a telethon or something.”
So here comes another test of urban resilience – and one that emphatically illustrates the importance of futures and horizon scanning (as well as the fact that in the US, when you need a scapegoat for your incompetent water management, you can always blame the Corps of Engineers). And as a thoughtful feature in the NYT magazine on Sunday suggests, that what’s happening in Atlanta may well be a preview of coming attractions:
A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California.
An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”
