By Andrew England in Abu Dhabi
Published: December 30 2008
As Arab states scramble to find a unified response to Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, Turkey appears to be taking the initiative to bridge divisions that have undermined Arab efforts to influence Palestinians.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, is scheduled to begin a tour of Arab nations on Wednesday, as Arab League foreign ministers hold an emergency meeting in Cairo to find a common stand on the Gaza crisis.
The attacks have so far only helped illuminate the divisions that exist in the Middle East from the level of the street to the region’s governments – differences that have hampered Arab efforts to rein in Hamas, the Islamist movement, and reconcile bitterly divided Palestinian factions.
Turkey, which is not a member of the Arab League, has been close to Israel but took a strong stance against the attacks on Gaza and suspended its role as mediator of indirect talks between the Jewish state and Syria.
Mr Erdogan will visit Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan for consultations on ways to “restore peace”.
The three are Washington’s key allies in the Middle East and share concerns about the rise of political Islam, as well as the influence of Iran.
Mr Erdogan will also stop off in Syria, which is regarded as a maverick and often finds itself in the opposing corner to the region’s US allies.
The regional struggle for influence between Washington’s allies on the one side and Syria and Iran on the other, has played out in Iraq and Lebanon, as well as in the Palestinian territories.
Damascus supports Hamas, while other Arab states, particularly Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza, consider the Islamist group a barrier to Palestinian unity and the broader Arab-Israeli peace process.
Hesham Youssef, a senior official at the Arab League, acknowledged that it was difficult to reach an Arab consensus but said the key was finding an end to the violence.
“The situation is very sensitive and there are divisions, so it will not be easy,” he said. “But there are agreements on fundamentals – everybody wants this military attack to cease right now.”
The massive demonstrations that have taken place across the Middle East have piled the pressure on Arab states to be seen to be taking a more active stand against the Jewish state.
In what seemed to be a reaction to the criticism, Mr Mubarak, the Egyptian president, on Tuesday gave his strongest condemnation yet of the attacks, accusing Israeli leaders of “savage aggression against the Palestinians”.
But he also insisted that Egypt’s border with Gaza would not be fully reopened until the Palestinian Authority was in control of border posts.
Some of the fiercest statements against Israel had previously come from Iran and Hizbollah, the Lebanese militant movement which is backed by Iran and Syria, which seem more adept at tapping into the public mood.
A similar scenario developed during the Israeli war in Lebanon in 2006, when Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia initially condemned Hizbollah, only to see the movement emerge as a champion for many Arabs as it withstood the Israeli onslaught.
The result is autocratic, western-backed governments looking ever more out of touch with the mood on the street.
The reality is that there is little more Arab states can do – other than appealing to Washington, which has tacitly backed Israel’s actions, to call for a ceasefire, while hoping to exert some influence on the Palestinian factions.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
South Ossetia Becomes Thorn in Russia's Side
South Ossetia has been a de facto Russian protectorate since Moscow's victory in the five-day war in Georgia. But the breakaway republic is becoming an embarrassment for the Kremlin, with a corrupt president, disappearing aid money and brewing social unrest.
Thick clouds hang over the roofs of Tskhinvali, as if fog had enveloped the houses there. But they are clouds of smoke coming from the wood-burning ovens in the homes of the city's 27,000 inhabitants. There is no central gas supply in the South Ossetian capital, where gas pipes are not expected to be installed until next year.
Snow and cold temperatures have descended on this small town in the Caucasus, forcing Valentina Tadtayeva and her family to move once again. "It's already the third time since the war," says Tadtayeva, a thin, gray-haired woman.
In the night before Aug. 8, when Georgian forces launched a surprise attack on South Ossetia, a breakaway province northwest of the capital Tbilisi, three artillery shells tore off the roof and one wall of her house. Valentina, 59, and her husband Pavel, 62, had fled to the basement, together with their two sons Alan, 27, and Oleg, 26, as well as their daughter-in-law Asa, 21. "We feared for our lives," says Valentina.
The war lasted three days for the Tadtayevs. When the Russians liberated Tskhinvali, the family moved to the apartment of the youngest son's mother-in-law, where 14 people lived in two small rooms. Four weeks later, the soldiers set up an army-green tent in the courtyard, and the city administration promised to repair the damaged house within a few weeks. "Nothing has happened yet," Valentina complains. Instead, the family is now forced to move in with relatives once again. "They forgot about us," says Valentina. "Now the peace is becoming a burden."
It has been four months since Russia and Georgia went to war over the tiny state, only slightly larger than Luxembourg and with about 70,000 inhabitants, triggering a geopolitical earthquake. Moscow came to the aid of the South Ossetians. With their concentrated military might, the Russians repelled the Georgian troops from Tskhinvali and made it clear to the world that Georgia is part of their sphere of influence. What had seemed like a struggle between Georgia and Russia had turned into a conflict between Russia and the West.
But what did this victory do for South Ossetia, a mountainous strip of land that declared its independence after the hostilities ended? The state whose fate was allegedly the Kremlin's greatest concern at the time? And for which Moscow continues to collect donations through its embassies abroad -- funds intended for the "victims of the humanitarian disaster in South Ossetia?"
Besides Russia, so far only Nicaragua has recognized the separatist republic. Foreign journalists are only permitted to travel in the tiny country when accompanied by officials from the foreign ministry in Moscow. Even the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the European Union, which brokered the cease-fire between Russia and Georgia, are being denied entry by the South Ossetians and their protective power, Russia. For this reason, very little reliable information makes it out of the region.
Russian Criticism Mounting
This makes what recently appeared in Russian newspapers all the more surprising: that the republic is on the brink of social unrest, just as winter is beginning, because the government has allegedly embezzled Russian reconstruction aid funds, as the former South Ossetian defense minister and head of the security council, a Russian lieutenant general, explained; or that South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity fled spinelessly during the war; and that millions of rubles deposited in the safes at the national bank in Tskhinvali had gone missing and that Russian businesspeople are refusing to invest in South Ossetia while its brawny separatist leader remains in power.
Kokoity, a former freestyle wrestler who now sits in the "Office of the President," a six-story concrete building from the Soviet era, calls the criticism in Russian newspapers "arranged." Certain pro-Georgian forces in Russia, he says, are attempting to "discredit South Ossetia and its leadership in the eyes of the Russians." Yes, says Kokoity, it is cold now in Tskhinvali, but "we are occasionally warmed by the joy of victory and independence," he tells his freezing fellow South Ossetians -- while his own office has thermopane windows from Turkey, installed after the war.
In the city, 10 schools, kindergartens and the hospital have been rebuilt. But in many houses there are now plastic tarps and blankets where windows used to be. "We brought enough glass to Tskhinvali to provide it with three times as many windows as it needs," Russian Disaster Protection Minister Sergei Shoigu said angrily.
No one knows exactly what happened to all the glass and other building materials. The same appears to apply to much of the €350 million ($490 million) in Russian reconstruction aid. To be on the safe side, Moscow did send two of its own people to Tskhinvali to serve as prime minister and finance minister. But President Kokoity has declared the budget, filled almost exclusively with Russian funds after the war, a state secret. A former security advisor accuses Kokoity of having surrounded himself with confidants from the Russian regions of Samara and Ulyanovsk and of conducting money-laundering operations with dubious companies.
Yuri Morosov, the former prime minister who resigned after the war -- supposedly of his own free will -- voices similar complaints. According to Morosov, 100 million rubles or about €2.7 million ($3.8 million) in salary payments for public servants were embezzled shortly before the conflict. Most of the money was intended for South Ossetia's armed militias.
It's a difficult situation for Russia. While war refugees in the rest of Georgia will receive new houses, thanks to €3.4 billion ($4.8 billion) in aid money, mainly from the EU and the United States, the reconstruction of South Ossetia could prove to be an embarrassment for Moscow. If so, Russia's efforts to present itself as an protective power to the people of the Caucasus and the world will suffer.
Potential Embarrassment for Moscow
There is at least one location in Tskhinvali that looks how Moscow wants it to look. At Stalin Street 27, across from the seat of Kokoity's government, Russian mobile phone provider Yevrozet has opened a shop. Fashionably dressed saleswomen use computers as cash registers -- as long as there is no power outage. It is warm in the shop, where Nokia mobile phones and Canon cameras glitter in glass cases. The shop is an island of modernity in a city in which the scars of the war are in full view on every street corner.
The shop sees about 1,000 visitors a day, which would even be considered a success for a retail business in downtown Moscow. The trouble is, hardly anyone is buying mobile phones and cameras. "People come here because they want to see normal life," says Irma Alborova, a saleswoman.
Normal life? South Ossetia, which the Russians seem so keen on controlling, has had a bad reputation since the early 1990s. Today it is considered a hub of crime and smuggling. It rebelled against the Georgian central government in a bloody war in the early 1990s, and after the war South Ossetia became impoverished and isolated. Many residents earned a living dealing in vodka on the black market.
Kokoity made a name for himself as the region's "trade representative" in Moscow, and then, with Kremlin support, he managed to catapult himself to the presidency of the rebel republic. But now there are growing doubts, even in Moscow, over whether Kokoity is the right man for the job.
Russian Control of Caucasus at Stake
If South Ossetia plunges in chaos, Russia could lose control over the entire unstable and majority Muslim Caucasus region. In the Russian autonomous republics of Dagestan and Inguchetia, government forces wage battles with underground fighters almost daily. Even in Christian North Ossetia, a pillar of Russian imperialism until now, religious warriors are now trying to stir up resistance within the Muslim minority against the "Russian occupiers."
Kokoity governs his territory like a mafia boss. Critics are threatened with deportation by his security staff, while family members are awarded positions in the administration. Kokoity made his brother Robert, a feared gangster in Tskhinvali, ambassador in sunny Abkhazia on the Black Sea.
The Ossetians certainly have Russia to thank for stopping the invasion of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in August, thereby preventing reintegration of the province into Georgia. But they are increasingly skeptical about Kokoity's regime.
The Ossetian leader, who publicly drained a tankard containing three liters of wine to celebrate the Russian victory, now intends to give his regime a civilized makeover and curry favor in Moscow. Stalin Street, the only street with this name in a state capital, is to be renamed Medvedev Street.
But even Russian President Dmitry Medvedev knows that "by far not everything is going well" in South Ossetia, as he admitted in public recently.
But to avoid completely isolating itself internationally, Russia has stopped short of formally annexing the captured mountain province. This has its downsides. For example, the Kremlin cannot simply dismiss Kokoity like any other governor. Instead, it must court him as if he were a foreign head of state -- even though Kokoity's militias were apparently involved in gun battles with Russian troops recently. Many in Moscow are realizing that Russia went to war over a region that is not only insignificant, but also has a leadership every bit as unpredictable as Saakashvili.
In Tskhinvali, Valentina Tadtayeva and her sons packed together their few remaining belongings: blankets, a tea kettle, silverware and family photos. They will also take a basket of apples along to their relatives. The apples are from Kechvi, one of the Georgian villages on South Ossetian soil that were "flattened," as Kokoity says, and burned to the ground in the war. "We picked the apples after the war, otherwise we wouldn't have much," Valentina explains.
She remembers the days when Georgians sold their fruit at the market in Tskhinvali. "Somehow it seems long ago now," she says. "Even the market is now bombed out."
Thick clouds hang over the roofs of Tskhinvali, as if fog had enveloped the houses there. But they are clouds of smoke coming from the wood-burning ovens in the homes of the city's 27,000 inhabitants. There is no central gas supply in the South Ossetian capital, where gas pipes are not expected to be installed until next year.
Snow and cold temperatures have descended on this small town in the Caucasus, forcing Valentina Tadtayeva and her family to move once again. "It's already the third time since the war," says Tadtayeva, a thin, gray-haired woman.
In the night before Aug. 8, when Georgian forces launched a surprise attack on South Ossetia, a breakaway province northwest of the capital Tbilisi, three artillery shells tore off the roof and one wall of her house. Valentina, 59, and her husband Pavel, 62, had fled to the basement, together with their two sons Alan, 27, and Oleg, 26, as well as their daughter-in-law Asa, 21. "We feared for our lives," says Valentina.
The war lasted three days for the Tadtayevs. When the Russians liberated Tskhinvali, the family moved to the apartment of the youngest son's mother-in-law, where 14 people lived in two small rooms. Four weeks later, the soldiers set up an army-green tent in the courtyard, and the city administration promised to repair the damaged house within a few weeks. "Nothing has happened yet," Valentina complains. Instead, the family is now forced to move in with relatives once again. "They forgot about us," says Valentina. "Now the peace is becoming a burden."
It has been four months since Russia and Georgia went to war over the tiny state, only slightly larger than Luxembourg and with about 70,000 inhabitants, triggering a geopolitical earthquake. Moscow came to the aid of the South Ossetians. With their concentrated military might, the Russians repelled the Georgian troops from Tskhinvali and made it clear to the world that Georgia is part of their sphere of influence. What had seemed like a struggle between Georgia and Russia had turned into a conflict between Russia and the West.
But what did this victory do for South Ossetia, a mountainous strip of land that declared its independence after the hostilities ended? The state whose fate was allegedly the Kremlin's greatest concern at the time? And for which Moscow continues to collect donations through its embassies abroad -- funds intended for the "victims of the humanitarian disaster in South Ossetia?"
Besides Russia, so far only Nicaragua has recognized the separatist republic. Foreign journalists are only permitted to travel in the tiny country when accompanied by officials from the foreign ministry in Moscow. Even the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the European Union, which brokered the cease-fire between Russia and Georgia, are being denied entry by the South Ossetians and their protective power, Russia. For this reason, very little reliable information makes it out of the region.
Russian Criticism Mounting
This makes what recently appeared in Russian newspapers all the more surprising: that the republic is on the brink of social unrest, just as winter is beginning, because the government has allegedly embezzled Russian reconstruction aid funds, as the former South Ossetian defense minister and head of the security council, a Russian lieutenant general, explained; or that South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity fled spinelessly during the war; and that millions of rubles deposited in the safes at the national bank in Tskhinvali had gone missing and that Russian businesspeople are refusing to invest in South Ossetia while its brawny separatist leader remains in power.
Kokoity, a former freestyle wrestler who now sits in the "Office of the President," a six-story concrete building from the Soviet era, calls the criticism in Russian newspapers "arranged." Certain pro-Georgian forces in Russia, he says, are attempting to "discredit South Ossetia and its leadership in the eyes of the Russians." Yes, says Kokoity, it is cold now in Tskhinvali, but "we are occasionally warmed by the joy of victory and independence," he tells his freezing fellow South Ossetians -- while his own office has thermopane windows from Turkey, installed after the war.
In the city, 10 schools, kindergartens and the hospital have been rebuilt. But in many houses there are now plastic tarps and blankets where windows used to be. "We brought enough glass to Tskhinvali to provide it with three times as many windows as it needs," Russian Disaster Protection Minister Sergei Shoigu said angrily.
No one knows exactly what happened to all the glass and other building materials. The same appears to apply to much of the €350 million ($490 million) in Russian reconstruction aid. To be on the safe side, Moscow did send two of its own people to Tskhinvali to serve as prime minister and finance minister. But President Kokoity has declared the budget, filled almost exclusively with Russian funds after the war, a state secret. A former security advisor accuses Kokoity of having surrounded himself with confidants from the Russian regions of Samara and Ulyanovsk and of conducting money-laundering operations with dubious companies.
Yuri Morosov, the former prime minister who resigned after the war -- supposedly of his own free will -- voices similar complaints. According to Morosov, 100 million rubles or about €2.7 million ($3.8 million) in salary payments for public servants were embezzled shortly before the conflict. Most of the money was intended for South Ossetia's armed militias.
It's a difficult situation for Russia. While war refugees in the rest of Georgia will receive new houses, thanks to €3.4 billion ($4.8 billion) in aid money, mainly from the EU and the United States, the reconstruction of South Ossetia could prove to be an embarrassment for Moscow. If so, Russia's efforts to present itself as an protective power to the people of the Caucasus and the world will suffer.
Potential Embarrassment for Moscow
There is at least one location in Tskhinvali that looks how Moscow wants it to look. At Stalin Street 27, across from the seat of Kokoity's government, Russian mobile phone provider Yevrozet has opened a shop. Fashionably dressed saleswomen use computers as cash registers -- as long as there is no power outage. It is warm in the shop, where Nokia mobile phones and Canon cameras glitter in glass cases. The shop is an island of modernity in a city in which the scars of the war are in full view on every street corner.
The shop sees about 1,000 visitors a day, which would even be considered a success for a retail business in downtown Moscow. The trouble is, hardly anyone is buying mobile phones and cameras. "People come here because they want to see normal life," says Irma Alborova, a saleswoman.
Normal life? South Ossetia, which the Russians seem so keen on controlling, has had a bad reputation since the early 1990s. Today it is considered a hub of crime and smuggling. It rebelled against the Georgian central government in a bloody war in the early 1990s, and after the war South Ossetia became impoverished and isolated. Many residents earned a living dealing in vodka on the black market.
Kokoity made a name for himself as the region's "trade representative" in Moscow, and then, with Kremlin support, he managed to catapult himself to the presidency of the rebel republic. But now there are growing doubts, even in Moscow, over whether Kokoity is the right man for the job.
Russian Control of Caucasus at Stake
If South Ossetia plunges in chaos, Russia could lose control over the entire unstable and majority Muslim Caucasus region. In the Russian autonomous republics of Dagestan and Inguchetia, government forces wage battles with underground fighters almost daily. Even in Christian North Ossetia, a pillar of Russian imperialism until now, religious warriors are now trying to stir up resistance within the Muslim minority against the "Russian occupiers."
Kokoity governs his territory like a mafia boss. Critics are threatened with deportation by his security staff, while family members are awarded positions in the administration. Kokoity made his brother Robert, a feared gangster in Tskhinvali, ambassador in sunny Abkhazia on the Black Sea.
The Ossetians certainly have Russia to thank for stopping the invasion of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in August, thereby preventing reintegration of the province into Georgia. But they are increasingly skeptical about Kokoity's regime.
The Ossetian leader, who publicly drained a tankard containing three liters of wine to celebrate the Russian victory, now intends to give his regime a civilized makeover and curry favor in Moscow. Stalin Street, the only street with this name in a state capital, is to be renamed Medvedev Street.
But even Russian President Dmitry Medvedev knows that "by far not everything is going well" in South Ossetia, as he admitted in public recently.
But to avoid completely isolating itself internationally, Russia has stopped short of formally annexing the captured mountain province. This has its downsides. For example, the Kremlin cannot simply dismiss Kokoity like any other governor. Instead, it must court him as if he were a foreign head of state -- even though Kokoity's militias were apparently involved in gun battles with Russian troops recently. Many in Moscow are realizing that Russia went to war over a region that is not only insignificant, but also has a leadership every bit as unpredictable as Saakashvili.
In Tskhinvali, Valentina Tadtayeva and her sons packed together their few remaining belongings: blankets, a tea kettle, silverware and family photos. They will also take a basket of apples along to their relatives. The apples are from Kechvi, one of the Georgian villages on South Ossetian soil that were "flattened," as Kokoity says, and burned to the ground in the war. "We picked the apples after the war, otherwise we wouldn't have much," Valentina explains.
She remembers the days when Georgians sold their fruit at the market in Tskhinvali. "Somehow it seems long ago now," she says. "Even the market is now bombed out."
Eurosceptic becomes EU President
When you are head of state of the country about to hold the EU presidency, you might normally be looking forward to a taste of the international limelight, and a busier, more prestigious schedule than usual.
But Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, may be relishing his country's assumption of EU leadership in January for very different reasons - as an opportunity to publicise views which other EU leaders will not enjoy hearing.
For Mr Klaus, a steely, bespectacled economist who came to sudden prominence after the Czechoslovak revolution against communism, is a vehement Eurosceptic. He believes the EU has echoes of the old Soviet bloc he used to live under.
And he is also an enthusiastic challenger of European and international policy on everything from climate change to relations with Russia.
Constant dissidence
Mr Klaus gave a foretaste of what the EU can expect on an official visit to Ireland in November. Upsetting his Irish hosts, he ostentatiously visited Declan Ganley, leader of the successful Irish No campaign against ratification of the EU's Lisbon reform treaty.
Klaus compared Ganley and his supporters to dissidents in the old communist bloc - which angered many former Czech dissidents who suffered persecution and imprisonment for their views.
But Mr Klaus likes to think of his life as a kind of constant dissidence against what he sees as the erroneous views of the majority.
He was born in Prague in 1941 during the wartime Nazi occupation.
As an economics student in post-war communist Czechoslovakia, he was allowed to study in Italy and the United States during the political thaw of the mid-to-late 1960s.
But the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 ended all hope of wider international opportunities for bright young Czechs.
Klaus, who refused to join the Communist Party, could not aspire to a senior academic or business job. But he was allowed to earn his living in the 1970s and 80s in a post at the Czechoslovak National Bank.
He did not join the more open campaign of opposition to the communist regime led, among others, by the playwright Vaclav Havel. But as political restraints eased again in the late 1980s Klaus did organise seminars to discuss free-market economics.
Self-assured 'genius'
He was always supremely self-confident or, as his critics put it, arrogant. According to files published last year in the Czech press, a communist secret policeman sent to monitor Klaus's seminars concluded that "he feels like an unappreciated genius".
But then, in late 1989, the chance to be appreciated dramatically appeared as Communist rule collapsed. Klaus turned up at the Magic Lantern theatre, headquarters of the Civic Forum opposition, led by Havel.
His economic expertise, good command of English and ability to handle the international media won him rapid advancement.
But he remained very different from Havel and those closest to him.
While the latter dressed informally, and liked to discuss politics philosophically over beer and cigarettes, Klaus wore blazers and ties, consumed raw vegetables and mineral water and lectured all and sundry on economic theory.
Thatcher fan
He built his political career in the early 1990s as a finance minister promoting rapid free-market reforms, founding and leading a conservative Civic Democratic party modelled partly on the British Tories.
Pictures of Margaret Thatcher featured prominently in his publicity material.
In 1992, after their parties did well in federal elections, Klaus and the Slovak leader Vladimir Meciar controversially negotiated the splitting of Czechoslovakia into two independent states, without a referendum. Klaus became prime minister of the Czech Republic.
But he became an increasingly frustrated figure as Czech politics became bogged down in stalemate, with parties of the Left remaining much more influential than Klaus had hoped.
There were also corruption allegations surrounding the privatisation programmes he had introduced and the financing of his political party.
Comecon
Klaus resigned as prime minister in 1997, but managed to secure election as Czech president in 2003, in succession to Vaclav Havel.
Their feuding was constant. Klaus called Havel elitist - "I am a normal person, he is not," he said. Havel has said of Klaus that he only has two ways of behaving: "Either he's afraid of someone. Or he's out to humiliate him."
As president, Klaus has had less executive power, but has felt freer to air his opinions, especially towards the EU. "Whenever I look at the Berlaymont building (European Commission HQ) in Brussels," he once told the British politician Norman Lamont, "I seem to see the word Comecon" - a reference to the old Soviet-dominated communist trading organisation.
While some Czechs applaud this kind of view, opinion polls suggest a majority remain much more positive about the EU.
The list of Klaus's running battles with international orthodoxy grows ever longer.
He recently refused to join Western condemnation of Russian policy over Georgia and he challenges international environmental policy.
His book disputing that man-made climate change is happening is entitled Blue Planet in Green Chains.
So during the coming months he will brood in his residence in the castle high above Prague, refusing to fly the EU flag, while, his critics hope, the Czech government is left to enjoy its time of European prominence in the city below.
But Vaclav Klaus is unlikely to let the opportunity pass to snipe at what he once called "business class Eurocrats" lording it over "economy class Slavs", as this most combative of Czechs condemns the error of Europe's ways.
But Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, may be relishing his country's assumption of EU leadership in January for very different reasons - as an opportunity to publicise views which other EU leaders will not enjoy hearing.
For Mr Klaus, a steely, bespectacled economist who came to sudden prominence after the Czechoslovak revolution against communism, is a vehement Eurosceptic. He believes the EU has echoes of the old Soviet bloc he used to live under.
And he is also an enthusiastic challenger of European and international policy on everything from climate change to relations with Russia.
Constant dissidence
Mr Klaus gave a foretaste of what the EU can expect on an official visit to Ireland in November. Upsetting his Irish hosts, he ostentatiously visited Declan Ganley, leader of the successful Irish No campaign against ratification of the EU's Lisbon reform treaty.
Klaus compared Ganley and his supporters to dissidents in the old communist bloc - which angered many former Czech dissidents who suffered persecution and imprisonment for their views.
But Mr Klaus likes to think of his life as a kind of constant dissidence against what he sees as the erroneous views of the majority.
He was born in Prague in 1941 during the wartime Nazi occupation.
As an economics student in post-war communist Czechoslovakia, he was allowed to study in Italy and the United States during the political thaw of the mid-to-late 1960s.
But the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 ended all hope of wider international opportunities for bright young Czechs.
Klaus, who refused to join the Communist Party, could not aspire to a senior academic or business job. But he was allowed to earn his living in the 1970s and 80s in a post at the Czechoslovak National Bank.
He did not join the more open campaign of opposition to the communist regime led, among others, by the playwright Vaclav Havel. But as political restraints eased again in the late 1980s Klaus did organise seminars to discuss free-market economics.
Self-assured 'genius'
He was always supremely self-confident or, as his critics put it, arrogant. According to files published last year in the Czech press, a communist secret policeman sent to monitor Klaus's seminars concluded that "he feels like an unappreciated genius".
But then, in late 1989, the chance to be appreciated dramatically appeared as Communist rule collapsed. Klaus turned up at the Magic Lantern theatre, headquarters of the Civic Forum opposition, led by Havel.
His economic expertise, good command of English and ability to handle the international media won him rapid advancement.
But he remained very different from Havel and those closest to him.
While the latter dressed informally, and liked to discuss politics philosophically over beer and cigarettes, Klaus wore blazers and ties, consumed raw vegetables and mineral water and lectured all and sundry on economic theory.
Thatcher fan
He built his political career in the early 1990s as a finance minister promoting rapid free-market reforms, founding and leading a conservative Civic Democratic party modelled partly on the British Tories.
Pictures of Margaret Thatcher featured prominently in his publicity material.
In 1992, after their parties did well in federal elections, Klaus and the Slovak leader Vladimir Meciar controversially negotiated the splitting of Czechoslovakia into two independent states, without a referendum. Klaus became prime minister of the Czech Republic.
But he became an increasingly frustrated figure as Czech politics became bogged down in stalemate, with parties of the Left remaining much more influential than Klaus had hoped.
There were also corruption allegations surrounding the privatisation programmes he had introduced and the financing of his political party.
Comecon
Klaus resigned as prime minister in 1997, but managed to secure election as Czech president in 2003, in succession to Vaclav Havel.
Their feuding was constant. Klaus called Havel elitist - "I am a normal person, he is not," he said. Havel has said of Klaus that he only has two ways of behaving: "Either he's afraid of someone. Or he's out to humiliate him."
As president, Klaus has had less executive power, but has felt freer to air his opinions, especially towards the EU. "Whenever I look at the Berlaymont building (European Commission HQ) in Brussels," he once told the British politician Norman Lamont, "I seem to see the word Comecon" - a reference to the old Soviet-dominated communist trading organisation.
While some Czechs applaud this kind of view, opinion polls suggest a majority remain much more positive about the EU.
The list of Klaus's running battles with international orthodoxy grows ever longer.
He recently refused to join Western condemnation of Russian policy over Georgia and he challenges international environmental policy.
His book disputing that man-made climate change is happening is entitled Blue Planet in Green Chains.
So during the coming months he will brood in his residence in the castle high above Prague, refusing to fly the EU flag, while, his critics hope, the Czech government is left to enjoy its time of European prominence in the city below.
But Vaclav Klaus is unlikely to let the opportunity pass to snipe at what he once called "business class Eurocrats" lording it over "economy class Slavs", as this most combative of Czechs condemns the error of Europe's ways.
For Hamas, logic led to cease-fire's end
By Stephen Farrell
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
RAMALLAH, West Bank: On the wall of the Israeli government press office in Jerusalem on Monday was a stack of yellow Post-it notes pasted one on top of the next, with the number 10,048 scrawled on the top one. That was the number of Palestinian rockets and mortar shells fired into Israel from Gaza since 2001.
It was quickly out of date, and other Post-its will soon be stacked on top.
For Israel, the tally has prompted internal debate about how to counter the threat from Hamas's homemade rockets and those of other armed Palestinian factions.
For Hamas, the very existence of that number in an Israeli office is an achievement. As plumes of smoke rise from Gaza, it is Hamas that dominates the television news and newspaper headlines.
It is not only the publicity, but also the status conveyed on Hamas as the Palestinians' principal resistance. Its secular rival, Fatah, sits on the sidelines, marginal to the violence unfolding in Gaza, from which Hamas effectively expelled it at gunpoint in the summer of 2007.
The questions remain: Why did Hamas end its six-month cease-fire on Dec. 19? Will it — can it — unleash suicide bombers into Israel in retaliation? And will the devastation in Gaza make Palestinians fall into line behind Hamas, as they reliably have in the past, or will Hamas lose their support as Gazans count the escalating cost in blood and destruction?
Even knowing that retaliation was certain, Hamas seemed to end the cease-fire in part because of its longstanding discipline and consistency. For years it has preached to Palestinians the rejectionist credo that Fatah negotiated with Israel and got nowhere; Hamas's way of armed force, it argued year in and year out, was the only way.
And so it appears that Hamas turned its logic against its own cease-fire: Hamas's supreme leader, Khaled Meshal, said on Saturday that the truce had yielded few results. If there were no specific benefits — like freed prisoners or an end to Israeli blockages on Gaza — then the option, again, was a return to violence. It may also have calculated that the rockets into Israel — 60 in one day — would restore its status among Palestinians as the champion of "resistance" against the Zionist enemy, whose soldiers and settlers are no longer in Gaza within reach of Hamas's military wing.
A major question remains whether Hamas expected the shock-and-awe Israeli offensive that has left Gaza reeling.
The outcome, for the moment, is far from clear because neither side has yet deployed the full arsenal available to it.
Some in Gaza believe Hamas wants Israeli soldiers to enter the Gaza Strip, because it has had 18 months to smuggle weapons in through tunnels from the Sinai since it seized control of the territory from Fatah. For the last several years, after Israel's pullout from Gaza in 2005 and its erection of a barrier around the West Bank, it has been harder to strike at Israelis.
Israel, though, is aware of the risks and will not reflexively mount a large-scale military return to Gaza.
As Israeli tanks rumbled on the outskirts of Gaza and explosions and machine-gun fire echoed through the night late on Monday, it is too early to gauge the effect the renewed violence is having on Palestinian opinion. The key issue is whether Palestinians will blame Israel for raining fire down upon them, as Hamas hopes. Or blame Hamas for provoking it, as Fatah, Israel and its Western allies hope.
Right now Palestinians are blaming Israel, loudly.
This weekend, the Palestinian newspaper Al Hayat al Jadida printed a black front page with a headline blaring: "1,000 Martyrs and Wounded in Saturday Slaughter."
More important is whether once away from television cameras and foreign journalists, Palestinians will vote for Hamas in presidential and parliamentary elections, both scheduled roughly within a year.
At the Shuafat refugee camp on the northern outskirts of Jerusalem on Sunday, masked Palestinian youths burned tires and used slingshots to hurl stones at Israeli soldiers.
Mohammed, 13, predicted bloody Hamas reprisals. "Hamas will be the one that will bomb green Egged buses, and we will go back to the way it was," he said, referring to the Israeli bus carrier that is often a target of suicide bombers.
Others were more doubtful. Ahmad, 14, said he supported "neither one nor the other," complaining that Hamas and Fatah spent too much time fighting each other instead of working for Palestinian unity.
A few miles north in Ramallah anti-Israeli and American sentiment was high among a small crowd of protesters gathered, incongruously, beneath a Stars and Bucks Cafe. Even here, in Fatah's heartland, people said they admired Hamas for its willingness to take on a regional superpower.
Challenged on the point that firing highly inaccurate rockets from Gaza into Israel carried a huge cost in retaliation, one 30-year-old Palestinian who refused to give his name compared the attacks to the impotent yet defiant gesture of the Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi, who has become a folk hero across the Arab world for throwing his shoes at President George W. Bush.
Mustafa Saleh, 37, said: "I am originally Fatah and my voice will always be Fatah. But Hamas is resisting and we are a nation under occupation. I support the resistance, even here in the West Bank."
Hamas hopes such sentiments will bring it new supporters.
But as he watched the protesters go by, Mohanad Salah, 42, said that emotions would calm down. Palestinians were quite capable of wanting Hamas-style "resistance" with their hearts but peace talks with their heads, he said.
"The more military operations by Israel either here or in Gaza, the more it will make people go away from wanting agreements," he said.
"But you should know that even after Israel carried out this operation yesterday, if today it says 'We want a political solution, let's reach an agreement,' it would be completely accepted by the majority of the Palestinian people," Salah added.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesman, Mark Regev, on Monday accused Hamas of inflicting suffering upon its fellow Palestinians. In a conference call with journalists he said the group was "holding hostage" ordinary Palestinians in Gaza just as it was a quarter of a million citizens in southern Israel.
But Hamas has in the past proved adept at deflecting such barbs. "Israel and America say no to Hamas. What do you say?" read one Hamas 2006 election banner. The Palestinians gave one answer then. Whether they give the same answer in 2009 or 2010 may depend on how the next few weeks play out.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
RAMALLAH, West Bank: On the wall of the Israeli government press office in Jerusalem on Monday was a stack of yellow Post-it notes pasted one on top of the next, with the number 10,048 scrawled on the top one. That was the number of Palestinian rockets and mortar shells fired into Israel from Gaza since 2001.
It was quickly out of date, and other Post-its will soon be stacked on top.
For Israel, the tally has prompted internal debate about how to counter the threat from Hamas's homemade rockets and those of other armed Palestinian factions.
For Hamas, the very existence of that number in an Israeli office is an achievement. As plumes of smoke rise from Gaza, it is Hamas that dominates the television news and newspaper headlines.
It is not only the publicity, but also the status conveyed on Hamas as the Palestinians' principal resistance. Its secular rival, Fatah, sits on the sidelines, marginal to the violence unfolding in Gaza, from which Hamas effectively expelled it at gunpoint in the summer of 2007.
The questions remain: Why did Hamas end its six-month cease-fire on Dec. 19? Will it — can it — unleash suicide bombers into Israel in retaliation? And will the devastation in Gaza make Palestinians fall into line behind Hamas, as they reliably have in the past, or will Hamas lose their support as Gazans count the escalating cost in blood and destruction?
Even knowing that retaliation was certain, Hamas seemed to end the cease-fire in part because of its longstanding discipline and consistency. For years it has preached to Palestinians the rejectionist credo that Fatah negotiated with Israel and got nowhere; Hamas's way of armed force, it argued year in and year out, was the only way.
And so it appears that Hamas turned its logic against its own cease-fire: Hamas's supreme leader, Khaled Meshal, said on Saturday that the truce had yielded few results. If there were no specific benefits — like freed prisoners or an end to Israeli blockages on Gaza — then the option, again, was a return to violence. It may also have calculated that the rockets into Israel — 60 in one day — would restore its status among Palestinians as the champion of "resistance" against the Zionist enemy, whose soldiers and settlers are no longer in Gaza within reach of Hamas's military wing.
A major question remains whether Hamas expected the shock-and-awe Israeli offensive that has left Gaza reeling.
The outcome, for the moment, is far from clear because neither side has yet deployed the full arsenal available to it.
Some in Gaza believe Hamas wants Israeli soldiers to enter the Gaza Strip, because it has had 18 months to smuggle weapons in through tunnels from the Sinai since it seized control of the territory from Fatah. For the last several years, after Israel's pullout from Gaza in 2005 and its erection of a barrier around the West Bank, it has been harder to strike at Israelis.
Israel, though, is aware of the risks and will not reflexively mount a large-scale military return to Gaza.
As Israeli tanks rumbled on the outskirts of Gaza and explosions and machine-gun fire echoed through the night late on Monday, it is too early to gauge the effect the renewed violence is having on Palestinian opinion. The key issue is whether Palestinians will blame Israel for raining fire down upon them, as Hamas hopes. Or blame Hamas for provoking it, as Fatah, Israel and its Western allies hope.
Right now Palestinians are blaming Israel, loudly.
This weekend, the Palestinian newspaper Al Hayat al Jadida printed a black front page with a headline blaring: "1,000 Martyrs and Wounded in Saturday Slaughter."
More important is whether once away from television cameras and foreign journalists, Palestinians will vote for Hamas in presidential and parliamentary elections, both scheduled roughly within a year.
At the Shuafat refugee camp on the northern outskirts of Jerusalem on Sunday, masked Palestinian youths burned tires and used slingshots to hurl stones at Israeli soldiers.
Mohammed, 13, predicted bloody Hamas reprisals. "Hamas will be the one that will bomb green Egged buses, and we will go back to the way it was," he said, referring to the Israeli bus carrier that is often a target of suicide bombers.
Others were more doubtful. Ahmad, 14, said he supported "neither one nor the other," complaining that Hamas and Fatah spent too much time fighting each other instead of working for Palestinian unity.
A few miles north in Ramallah anti-Israeli and American sentiment was high among a small crowd of protesters gathered, incongruously, beneath a Stars and Bucks Cafe. Even here, in Fatah's heartland, people said they admired Hamas for its willingness to take on a regional superpower.
Challenged on the point that firing highly inaccurate rockets from Gaza into Israel carried a huge cost in retaliation, one 30-year-old Palestinian who refused to give his name compared the attacks to the impotent yet defiant gesture of the Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi, who has become a folk hero across the Arab world for throwing his shoes at President George W. Bush.
Mustafa Saleh, 37, said: "I am originally Fatah and my voice will always be Fatah. But Hamas is resisting and we are a nation under occupation. I support the resistance, even here in the West Bank."
Hamas hopes such sentiments will bring it new supporters.
But as he watched the protesters go by, Mohanad Salah, 42, said that emotions would calm down. Palestinians were quite capable of wanting Hamas-style "resistance" with their hearts but peace talks with their heads, he said.
"The more military operations by Israel either here or in Gaza, the more it will make people go away from wanting agreements," he said.
"But you should know that even after Israel carried out this operation yesterday, if today it says 'We want a political solution, let's reach an agreement,' it would be completely accepted by the majority of the Palestinian people," Salah added.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesman, Mark Regev, on Monday accused Hamas of inflicting suffering upon its fellow Palestinians. In a conference call with journalists he said the group was "holding hostage" ordinary Palestinians in Gaza just as it was a quarter of a million citizens in southern Israel.
But Hamas has in the past proved adept at deflecting such barbs. "Israel and America say no to Hamas. What do you say?" read one Hamas 2006 election banner. The Palestinians gave one answer then. Whether they give the same answer in 2009 or 2010 may depend on how the next few weeks play out.
For Hamas, logic led to cease-fire's end
By Stephen Farrell
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
RAMALLAH, West Bank: On the wall of the Israeli government press office in Jerusalem on Monday was a stack of yellow Post-it notes pasted one on top of the next, with the number 10,048 scrawled on the top one. That was the number of Palestinian rockets and mortar shells fired into Israel from Gaza since 2001.
It was quickly out of date, and other Post-its will soon be stacked on top.
For Israel, the tally has prompted internal debate about how to counter the threat from Hamas's homemade rockets and those of other armed Palestinian factions.
For Hamas, the very existence of that number in an Israeli office is an achievement. As plumes of smoke rise from Gaza, it is Hamas that dominates the television news and newspaper headlines.
It is not only the publicity, but also the status conveyed on Hamas as the Palestinians' principal resistance. Its secular rival, Fatah, sits on the sidelines, marginal to the violence unfolding in Gaza, from which Hamas effectively expelled it at gunpoint in the summer of 2007.
The questions remain: Why did Hamas end its six-month cease-fire on Dec. 19? Will it — can it — unleash suicide bombers into Israel in retaliation? And will the devastation in Gaza make Palestinians fall into line behind Hamas, as they reliably have in the past, or will Hamas lose their support as Gazans count the escalating cost in blood and destruction?
Even knowing that retaliation was certain, Hamas seemed to end the cease-fire in part because of its longstanding discipline and consistency. For years it has preached to Palestinians the rejectionist credo that Fatah negotiated with Israel and got nowhere; Hamas's way of armed force, it argued year in and year out, was the only way.
And so it appears that Hamas turned its logic against its own cease-fire: Hamas's supreme leader, Khaled Meshal, said on Saturday that the truce had yielded few results. If there were no specific benefits — like freed prisoners or an end to Israeli blockages on Gaza — then the option, again, was a return to violence. It may also have calculated that the rockets into Israel — 60 in one day — would restore its status among Palestinians as the champion of "resistance" against the Zionist enemy, whose soldiers and settlers are no longer in Gaza within reach of Hamas's military wing.
A major question remains whether Hamas expected the shock-and-awe Israeli offensive that has left Gaza reeling.
The outcome, for the moment, is far from clear because neither side has yet deployed the full arsenal available to it.
Some in Gaza believe Hamas wants Israeli soldiers to enter the Gaza Strip, because it has had 18 months to smuggle weapons in through tunnels from the Sinai since it seized control of the territory from Fatah. For the last several years, after Israel's pullout from Gaza in 2005 and its erection of a barrier around the West Bank, it has been harder to strike at Israelis.
Israel, though, is aware of the risks and will not reflexively mount a large-scale military return to Gaza.
As Israeli tanks rumbled on the outskirts of Gaza and explosions and machine-gun fire echoed through the night late on Monday, it is too early to gauge the effect the renewed violence is having on Palestinian opinion. The key issue is whether Palestinians will blame Israel for raining fire down upon them, as Hamas hopes. Or blame Hamas for provoking it, as Fatah, Israel and its Western allies hope.
Right now Palestinians are blaming Israel, loudly.
This weekend, the Palestinian newspaper Al Hayat al Jadida printed a black front page with a headline blaring: "1,000 Martyrs and Wounded in Saturday Slaughter."
More important is whether once away from television cameras and foreign journalists, Palestinians will vote for Hamas in presidential and parliamentary elections, both scheduled roughly within a year.
At the Shuafat refugee camp on the northern outskirts of Jerusalem on Sunday, masked Palestinian youths burned tires and used slingshots to hurl stones at Israeli soldiers.
Mohammed, 13, predicted bloody Hamas reprisals. "Hamas will be the one that will bomb green Egged buses, and we will go back to the way it was," he said, referring to the Israeli bus carrier that is often a target of suicide bombers.
Others were more doubtful. Ahmad, 14, said he supported "neither one nor the other," complaining that Hamas and Fatah spent too much time fighting each other instead of working for Palestinian unity.
A few miles north in Ramallah anti-Israeli and American sentiment was high among a small crowd of protesters gathered, incongruously, beneath a Stars and Bucks Cafe. Even here, in Fatah's heartland, people said they admired Hamas for its willingness to take on a regional superpower.
Challenged on the point that firing highly inaccurate rockets from Gaza into Israel carried a huge cost in retaliation, one 30-year-old Palestinian who refused to give his name compared the attacks to the impotent yet defiant gesture of the Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi, who has become a folk hero across the Arab world for throwing his shoes at President George W. Bush.
Mustafa Saleh, 37, said: "I am originally Fatah and my voice will always be Fatah. But Hamas is resisting and we are a nation under occupation. I support the resistance, even here in the West Bank."
Hamas hopes such sentiments will bring it new supporters.
But as he watched the protesters go by, Mohanad Salah, 42, said that emotions would calm down. Palestinians were quite capable of wanting Hamas-style "resistance" with their hearts but peace talks with their heads, he said.
"The more military operations by Israel either here or in Gaza, the more it will make people go away from wanting agreements," he said.
"But you should know that even after Israel carried out this operation yesterday, if today it says 'We want a political solution, let's reach an agreement,' it would be completely accepted by the majority of the Palestinian people," Salah added.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesman, Mark Regev, on Monday accused Hamas of inflicting suffering upon its fellow Palestinians. In a conference call with journalists he said the group was "holding hostage" ordinary Palestinians in Gaza just as it was a quarter of a million citizens in southern Israel.
But Hamas has in the past proved adept at deflecting such barbs. "Israel and America say no to Hamas. What do you say?" read one Hamas 2006 election banner. The Palestinians gave one answer then. Whether they give the same answer in 2009 or 2010 may depend on how the next few weeks play out.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
RAMALLAH, West Bank: On the wall of the Israeli government press office in Jerusalem on Monday was a stack of yellow Post-it notes pasted one on top of the next, with the number 10,048 scrawled on the top one. That was the number of Palestinian rockets and mortar shells fired into Israel from Gaza since 2001.
It was quickly out of date, and other Post-its will soon be stacked on top.
For Israel, the tally has prompted internal debate about how to counter the threat from Hamas's homemade rockets and those of other armed Palestinian factions.
For Hamas, the very existence of that number in an Israeli office is an achievement. As plumes of smoke rise from Gaza, it is Hamas that dominates the television news and newspaper headlines.
It is not only the publicity, but also the status conveyed on Hamas as the Palestinians' principal resistance. Its secular rival, Fatah, sits on the sidelines, marginal to the violence unfolding in Gaza, from which Hamas effectively expelled it at gunpoint in the summer of 2007.
The questions remain: Why did Hamas end its six-month cease-fire on Dec. 19? Will it — can it — unleash suicide bombers into Israel in retaliation? And will the devastation in Gaza make Palestinians fall into line behind Hamas, as they reliably have in the past, or will Hamas lose their support as Gazans count the escalating cost in blood and destruction?
Even knowing that retaliation was certain, Hamas seemed to end the cease-fire in part because of its longstanding discipline and consistency. For years it has preached to Palestinians the rejectionist credo that Fatah negotiated with Israel and got nowhere; Hamas's way of armed force, it argued year in and year out, was the only way.
And so it appears that Hamas turned its logic against its own cease-fire: Hamas's supreme leader, Khaled Meshal, said on Saturday that the truce had yielded few results. If there were no specific benefits — like freed prisoners or an end to Israeli blockages on Gaza — then the option, again, was a return to violence. It may also have calculated that the rockets into Israel — 60 in one day — would restore its status among Palestinians as the champion of "resistance" against the Zionist enemy, whose soldiers and settlers are no longer in Gaza within reach of Hamas's military wing.
A major question remains whether Hamas expected the shock-and-awe Israeli offensive that has left Gaza reeling.
The outcome, for the moment, is far from clear because neither side has yet deployed the full arsenal available to it.
Some in Gaza believe Hamas wants Israeli soldiers to enter the Gaza Strip, because it has had 18 months to smuggle weapons in through tunnels from the Sinai since it seized control of the territory from Fatah. For the last several years, after Israel's pullout from Gaza in 2005 and its erection of a barrier around the West Bank, it has been harder to strike at Israelis.
Israel, though, is aware of the risks and will not reflexively mount a large-scale military return to Gaza.
As Israeli tanks rumbled on the outskirts of Gaza and explosions and machine-gun fire echoed through the night late on Monday, it is too early to gauge the effect the renewed violence is having on Palestinian opinion. The key issue is whether Palestinians will blame Israel for raining fire down upon them, as Hamas hopes. Or blame Hamas for provoking it, as Fatah, Israel and its Western allies hope.
Right now Palestinians are blaming Israel, loudly.
This weekend, the Palestinian newspaper Al Hayat al Jadida printed a black front page with a headline blaring: "1,000 Martyrs and Wounded in Saturday Slaughter."
More important is whether once away from television cameras and foreign journalists, Palestinians will vote for Hamas in presidential and parliamentary elections, both scheduled roughly within a year.
At the Shuafat refugee camp on the northern outskirts of Jerusalem on Sunday, masked Palestinian youths burned tires and used slingshots to hurl stones at Israeli soldiers.
Mohammed, 13, predicted bloody Hamas reprisals. "Hamas will be the one that will bomb green Egged buses, and we will go back to the way it was," he said, referring to the Israeli bus carrier that is often a target of suicide bombers.
Others were more doubtful. Ahmad, 14, said he supported "neither one nor the other," complaining that Hamas and Fatah spent too much time fighting each other instead of working for Palestinian unity.
A few miles north in Ramallah anti-Israeli and American sentiment was high among a small crowd of protesters gathered, incongruously, beneath a Stars and Bucks Cafe. Even here, in Fatah's heartland, people said they admired Hamas for its willingness to take on a regional superpower.
Challenged on the point that firing highly inaccurate rockets from Gaza into Israel carried a huge cost in retaliation, one 30-year-old Palestinian who refused to give his name compared the attacks to the impotent yet defiant gesture of the Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi, who has become a folk hero across the Arab world for throwing his shoes at President George W. Bush.
Mustafa Saleh, 37, said: "I am originally Fatah and my voice will always be Fatah. But Hamas is resisting and we are a nation under occupation. I support the resistance, even here in the West Bank."
Hamas hopes such sentiments will bring it new supporters.
But as he watched the protesters go by, Mohanad Salah, 42, said that emotions would calm down. Palestinians were quite capable of wanting Hamas-style "resistance" with their hearts but peace talks with their heads, he said.
"The more military operations by Israel either here or in Gaza, the more it will make people go away from wanting agreements," he said.
"But you should know that even after Israel carried out this operation yesterday, if today it says 'We want a political solution, let's reach an agreement,' it would be completely accepted by the majority of the Palestinian people," Salah added.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesman, Mark Regev, on Monday accused Hamas of inflicting suffering upon its fellow Palestinians. In a conference call with journalists he said the group was "holding hostage" ordinary Palestinians in Gaza just as it was a quarter of a million citizens in southern Israel.
But Hamas has in the past proved adept at deflecting such barbs. "Israel and America say no to Hamas. What do you say?" read one Hamas 2006 election banner. The Palestinians gave one answer then. Whether they give the same answer in 2009 or 2010 may depend on how the next few weeks play out.
Gazprom, once mighty, is reeling
By Andrew E. Kramer
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
MOSCOW: A year ago, Gazprom, the Russian natural gas monopoly, aspired to be the largest corporation in the world. Buoyed by high oil prices and political backing from the Kremlin, it had already achieved third place judging by market capitalization, behind Exxon Mobil and General Electric.
Today, Gazprom is deep in debt and negotiating a government bailout. Its market cap, the total value of all the company's shares, has fallen 76 percent since the beginning of the year. Instead of becoming the world's largest company, it has tumbled to 35th place. And while bailouts are increasingly common, none of Gazprom's big private sector competitors in the West is looking for one.
That Russia's largest state-run energy company needs a bailout so soon after oil hit record highs last summer is a telling postscript to a turbulent period. Once the emblem of the pride and the menace of a resurgent Russia, Gazprom has become a symbol of this oil state's rapid economic decline.
During the boom times, Gazprom and the other Russian state energy company, Rosneft, became vehicles for carrying out creeping renationalization.
As oil prices rose, so did their stocks. But rather than investing sufficiently in drilling and exploration, Russia's president at the time, Vladimir Putin, used them to pursue his agenda of regaining public control over the oil fields, and much of private industry beyond.
As a result, by the time the downturn came, they entered the credit crisis deeply in debt and with a backlog of capital investment needs. (Under Putin, now the prime minister, Gazprom and Rosneft are so tightly controlled by the Kremlin that the companies are not run by mere government appointees, but directly by government ministers who sit on their boards.)
"They were as inebriated with their success as much as some of their investors were," James Fenkner, the chief strategist at Red Star, a Russian-dedicated hedge fund, said of Gazprom's ambition to become the world's largest company. "It's not like they're going to produce a better mousetrap," he said. "Their mousetrap is whatever the price of oil is. You can't improve that."
Investors are now fleeing Gazprom stock, once such a favorite that it alone accounted for 2 percent of the Morgan Stanley index of global emerging market companies. Gazprom is far from becoming the world's largest company; its share prices have fallen more quickly than those of private sector competitors. The company's debt, amassed while consolidating national control over the industry, is one reason.
After five years of record prices for natural gas, Gazprom is $49.5 billion in debt. By comparison, the entire combined public and private sector debt coming due for India, China and Brazil in 2009 totals $56 billion, according to an estimate by Commerzbank.
Putin used Gazprom to acquire private property. Among its big-ticket acquisitions, in 2005 it bought the Sibneft oil company from Roman Abramovich, the tycoon and owner of the Chelsea soccer club in London, for $13 billion. In 2006 it bought half of Shell's Sakhalin II oil and gas development for $7 billion. And in 2007, it spent more billions to acquire parts of Yukos, the private oil company bankrupted in a politically tinged fraud and tax evasion case.
Rosneft is deeply in debt, too. It owes $18.1 billion after spending billions acquiring assets from Yukos. And in addition to negotiating for a government bailout, Rosneft is negotiating a $15 billion loan from the China National Petroleum Corporation, secured by future exports to China.
Under Putin, more than a third of the Russian oil industry was effectively renationalized in such deals. But unlike Hugo Chávez of Venezuela or Evo Morales of Bolivia, who sent troops to seize a natural gas field in that country, the Kremlin used more sophisticated tactics.
Regulatory pressure was brought to bear on private owners to encourage them to sell to state companies or private companies loyal to the Kremlin. The assets were typically bought at prices below market rates, yet the state companies still paid out billions of dollars, much of it borrowed from Western banks that called in the credit lines in the financial crisis.
Rosneft, which was also held up as a model of resurgent Russian pride and defiance of the West as it was cobbled together from Yukos assets once partly owned by foreign investors, was compelled to meet a margin call on Western bank debt in October.
Critics predicted Russia's policy of nationalization would foster inefficiency, or at the very least disruption as huge companies were bought and sold, divided up and repackaged as state property. At stake were assets worth vast sums: Russia is the world's largest natural gas producer and became the world's largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia reduced output this summer to support prices.
A deputy chief executive of Gazprom, Aleksandr Medvedev, predicted the company would achieve a market capitalization of $1 trillion by 2014. Instead, its share price has fallen 76 percent since the beginning of the year and its market cap is now about $85 billion.
By comparison, Exxon's share price Monday of $78.02 is down 18 percent since January. The company's market capitalization is $393 billion. And the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index stocks is down more than 40 percent for the year
Medvedev, the Gazprom executive, defended Gazprom's performance and attributed the steep drop in its share price relative to other energy companies to the company's listing on the Russian stock exchange, which is volatile and lacks investors who put their money into companies for the long term.
Medvedev said share price "does not reflect the company's value" and blamed the financial crisis that began on Wall Street for the company's woes.
It is true that Gazprom is far from broke. The company made a profit of 360 billon rubles, or $14 billion, from revenue of 1,774 billion rubles, or $70 billion, in 2007, the most recent audited results released by the company.
Valery A. Nesterov, an oil and gas analyst at Troika Dialog bank in Moscow, said Gazprom's ratio of debt to revenue — before interest payments, taxes and amortization — was 1 to 5 in 2007, high by oil industry standards but not so excessive as to jeopardize the company's investment grade debt rating.
The company, meanwhile, says it will go ahead with capital spending to develop new fields in the Arctic, and continues to pour money into subsidiaries in often losing sectors like agriculture and media. It is also assuming, through its banking arm, a new role in the financial crisis of bailing out struggling Russian banks and brokerages.
Investors say an unwillingness to cut costs in a downturn is a common problem for nationalized industries, and another reason they have fled the stock. When oil sold for less than $50 a barrel in 2004, Gazprom's capital outlay that year was $6.6 billion; for 2009, the company has budgeted more than $32 billion.
Gazprom executives say they are reviewing spending but will not cut major developments, including two undersea pipelines intended to reduce the company's reliance on Ukraine as a transit country for about 80 percent of exports to Europe. Gazprom and Ukraine are again locked in a dispute over pricing that Gazprom officials say could prompt them to cut supplies to Ukraine by Thursday.
"All our major projects in our core business — upstream, midstream and downstream — will continue with very simple efforts to meet demand both in Russia and in our export markets," Medvedev said.
But revenue is projected to fall steeply next year. Gazprom received an average of $420 per 1,000 cubic meters for gas sold in Western Europe this year; that is projected to fall to $260 to $300 in 2009.
"For them, like everybody else, sober realism has intruded," Jonathan Stern, the author of "The Future of Russian Gas and Gazprom" and a natural gas expert at Oxford Energy, said in a telephone interview.
A significant portion of the country's corporate bailout fund — about $9 billion out of a total of $50 billion — was set aside for the oil and gas companies. Gazprom alone is seeking $5.5 billion.
For a time, Gazprom, a company that evolved from the former Soviet ministry of gas, had been embraced by investors as the model for energy investing at a time of resource nationalism, when governments in oil-rich regions were shutting out the Western majors. In theory, minority shareholders in government-run companies would not face the risk their assets would be nationalized.
But with 436,000 employees, extensive subsidiaries in everything from farming to hotels, higher-than-average salaries and company-sponsored housing and resorts on the Black Sea, critics say Gazprom perpetuated the Soviet paternalistic economy well into the capitalist era.
"I can describe the Russian economy as water in a sieve," Yulia Latynina, a commentator on Echo of Moscow radio, said of the chronic waste in Russian industry.
"Everybody was thinking Russia had succeeded, and they were wondering, how do you keep water in a sieve?" Latynina said. "When the input of water is greater than the output, the sieve is full. Everybody was thinking it was a miracle. The sieve is full! But when there is a drop in the water supply, the sieve is again empty very quickly."
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
MOSCOW: A year ago, Gazprom, the Russian natural gas monopoly, aspired to be the largest corporation in the world. Buoyed by high oil prices and political backing from the Kremlin, it had already achieved third place judging by market capitalization, behind Exxon Mobil and General Electric.
Today, Gazprom is deep in debt and negotiating a government bailout. Its market cap, the total value of all the company's shares, has fallen 76 percent since the beginning of the year. Instead of becoming the world's largest company, it has tumbled to 35th place. And while bailouts are increasingly common, none of Gazprom's big private sector competitors in the West is looking for one.
That Russia's largest state-run energy company needs a bailout so soon after oil hit record highs last summer is a telling postscript to a turbulent period. Once the emblem of the pride and the menace of a resurgent Russia, Gazprom has become a symbol of this oil state's rapid economic decline.
During the boom times, Gazprom and the other Russian state energy company, Rosneft, became vehicles for carrying out creeping renationalization.
As oil prices rose, so did their stocks. But rather than investing sufficiently in drilling and exploration, Russia's president at the time, Vladimir Putin, used them to pursue his agenda of regaining public control over the oil fields, and much of private industry beyond.
As a result, by the time the downturn came, they entered the credit crisis deeply in debt and with a backlog of capital investment needs. (Under Putin, now the prime minister, Gazprom and Rosneft are so tightly controlled by the Kremlin that the companies are not run by mere government appointees, but directly by government ministers who sit on their boards.)
"They were as inebriated with their success as much as some of their investors were," James Fenkner, the chief strategist at Red Star, a Russian-dedicated hedge fund, said of Gazprom's ambition to become the world's largest company. "It's not like they're going to produce a better mousetrap," he said. "Their mousetrap is whatever the price of oil is. You can't improve that."
Investors are now fleeing Gazprom stock, once such a favorite that it alone accounted for 2 percent of the Morgan Stanley index of global emerging market companies. Gazprom is far from becoming the world's largest company; its share prices have fallen more quickly than those of private sector competitors. The company's debt, amassed while consolidating national control over the industry, is one reason.
After five years of record prices for natural gas, Gazprom is $49.5 billion in debt. By comparison, the entire combined public and private sector debt coming due for India, China and Brazil in 2009 totals $56 billion, according to an estimate by Commerzbank.
Putin used Gazprom to acquire private property. Among its big-ticket acquisitions, in 2005 it bought the Sibneft oil company from Roman Abramovich, the tycoon and owner of the Chelsea soccer club in London, for $13 billion. In 2006 it bought half of Shell's Sakhalin II oil and gas development for $7 billion. And in 2007, it spent more billions to acquire parts of Yukos, the private oil company bankrupted in a politically tinged fraud and tax evasion case.
Rosneft is deeply in debt, too. It owes $18.1 billion after spending billions acquiring assets from Yukos. And in addition to negotiating for a government bailout, Rosneft is negotiating a $15 billion loan from the China National Petroleum Corporation, secured by future exports to China.
Under Putin, more than a third of the Russian oil industry was effectively renationalized in such deals. But unlike Hugo Chávez of Venezuela or Evo Morales of Bolivia, who sent troops to seize a natural gas field in that country, the Kremlin used more sophisticated tactics.
Regulatory pressure was brought to bear on private owners to encourage them to sell to state companies or private companies loyal to the Kremlin. The assets were typically bought at prices below market rates, yet the state companies still paid out billions of dollars, much of it borrowed from Western banks that called in the credit lines in the financial crisis.
Rosneft, which was also held up as a model of resurgent Russian pride and defiance of the West as it was cobbled together from Yukos assets once partly owned by foreign investors, was compelled to meet a margin call on Western bank debt in October.
Critics predicted Russia's policy of nationalization would foster inefficiency, or at the very least disruption as huge companies were bought and sold, divided up and repackaged as state property. At stake were assets worth vast sums: Russia is the world's largest natural gas producer and became the world's largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia reduced output this summer to support prices.
A deputy chief executive of Gazprom, Aleksandr Medvedev, predicted the company would achieve a market capitalization of $1 trillion by 2014. Instead, its share price has fallen 76 percent since the beginning of the year and its market cap is now about $85 billion.
By comparison, Exxon's share price Monday of $78.02 is down 18 percent since January. The company's market capitalization is $393 billion. And the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index stocks is down more than 40 percent for the year
Medvedev, the Gazprom executive, defended Gazprom's performance and attributed the steep drop in its share price relative to other energy companies to the company's listing on the Russian stock exchange, which is volatile and lacks investors who put their money into companies for the long term.
Medvedev said share price "does not reflect the company's value" and blamed the financial crisis that began on Wall Street for the company's woes.
It is true that Gazprom is far from broke. The company made a profit of 360 billon rubles, or $14 billion, from revenue of 1,774 billion rubles, or $70 billion, in 2007, the most recent audited results released by the company.
Valery A. Nesterov, an oil and gas analyst at Troika Dialog bank in Moscow, said Gazprom's ratio of debt to revenue — before interest payments, taxes and amortization — was 1 to 5 in 2007, high by oil industry standards but not so excessive as to jeopardize the company's investment grade debt rating.
The company, meanwhile, says it will go ahead with capital spending to develop new fields in the Arctic, and continues to pour money into subsidiaries in often losing sectors like agriculture and media. It is also assuming, through its banking arm, a new role in the financial crisis of bailing out struggling Russian banks and brokerages.
Investors say an unwillingness to cut costs in a downturn is a common problem for nationalized industries, and another reason they have fled the stock. When oil sold for less than $50 a barrel in 2004, Gazprom's capital outlay that year was $6.6 billion; for 2009, the company has budgeted more than $32 billion.
Gazprom executives say they are reviewing spending but will not cut major developments, including two undersea pipelines intended to reduce the company's reliance on Ukraine as a transit country for about 80 percent of exports to Europe. Gazprom and Ukraine are again locked in a dispute over pricing that Gazprom officials say could prompt them to cut supplies to Ukraine by Thursday.
"All our major projects in our core business — upstream, midstream and downstream — will continue with very simple efforts to meet demand both in Russia and in our export markets," Medvedev said.
But revenue is projected to fall steeply next year. Gazprom received an average of $420 per 1,000 cubic meters for gas sold in Western Europe this year; that is projected to fall to $260 to $300 in 2009.
"For them, like everybody else, sober realism has intruded," Jonathan Stern, the author of "The Future of Russian Gas and Gazprom" and a natural gas expert at Oxford Energy, said in a telephone interview.
A significant portion of the country's corporate bailout fund — about $9 billion out of a total of $50 billion — was set aside for the oil and gas companies. Gazprom alone is seeking $5.5 billion.
For a time, Gazprom, a company that evolved from the former Soviet ministry of gas, had been embraced by investors as the model for energy investing at a time of resource nationalism, when governments in oil-rich regions were shutting out the Western majors. In theory, minority shareholders in government-run companies would not face the risk their assets would be nationalized.
But with 436,000 employees, extensive subsidiaries in everything from farming to hotels, higher-than-average salaries and company-sponsored housing and resorts on the Black Sea, critics say Gazprom perpetuated the Soviet paternalistic economy well into the capitalist era.
"I can describe the Russian economy as water in a sieve," Yulia Latynina, a commentator on Echo of Moscow radio, said of the chronic waste in Russian industry.
"Everybody was thinking Russia had succeeded, and they were wondering, how do you keep water in a sieve?" Latynina said. "When the input of water is greater than the output, the sieve is full. Everybody was thinking it was a miracle. The sieve is full! But when there is a drop in the water supply, the sieve is again empty very quickly."
Monday, December 29, 2008
Israel in 'all-out war' with Hamas
Israel's military is in an "all-out war" with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Ehud Barak, the defence minister, says.
More than 300 Palestinians have been killed in three consecutive days of aerial bombardment in the heavily-populated territory.
"We have nothing against Gaza residents, but we are engaged in an all-out war against Hamas and its proxies," Barak said on Monday.
There were also growing fears that a ground offensive was being planned after a "closed military zone" was declared around the Gaza Strip.
The announcement created a buffer zone along the border which Israeli officials say will help protect it from rocket attacks.
Civilians, including journalists, could be banned from an area between 2km and 4km deep under the policy. On previous occasions, such a move has sometimes been followed by military operations.
"This operation will expand and deepen as much as needed," Barak said. "We went to war to deal a heavy blow to Hamas, to change the situation in the south."
Military build-up
Tanks and troops have been massed in the area since Operation Cast Lead was launched on Saturday.
Al Jazeera's Ayman Mohyeldin, reporting from Gaza City, said that there was little the residents of Gaza could do to prepare for any possible ground assault.
"In a city that is so densely-populated a ground offensive would mean urban warfare, street-to-street fighting ... leaving many Palestinians in the cross-fire," he said.
"Unlike other conflict zones where there is the possibility to flee the war zone, Gaza itself has become the war zone. There is nowhere for the population to go, they are in the middle of all these attacks."
Israel said it began pounding the Gaza Strip with missiles fired from warplanes and helicopter gunships in order to halt the rocket and mortar attacks by Palestinian fighters.
"Military officials said yesterday that this operation will go on until Hamas stops firing missiles into southern Israel,"Al Jazeera's Hoda Abdel Hamid, reporting from southern Israel, said.
"They are also very much aware that they wouldn't really be able to stop that, but at least they will try to degrade the capability of Hamas."
Scores of rockets have hit southern Israel since the offensive got under way.
On Monday, an Israeli Arab was killed and eight others wounded when one of the missiles hit a construction site in the city of Ashkelon.
"Israel is being attacked from Gaza and that has been the situation for the last eight years, and we did everything we could to avoid escalation," Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister and governing Kadima party leader, told parliament.
"We need to fight those who are trying to prevent us from living in peace."
Civilian casualties
The UN relief and works agency said on Monday that at least 51 Palestinian civilians, including women and children, were confirmed to be among among those killed in the Gaza Strip.
Four young girls from the same family in the northern town of Jabaliya and two young boy from Rafah were among those killed in the latest raids, Palestinian medics said.
Al Jazeera's Sherine Tadros said the situation at the Shifa hospital in Gaza City was chaotic as the territory's health system struggled to cope with the more than 1,400 people injured.
"Hundreds of people are just waiting outside ... a lot of those people, the problems is that there simply arent enough beds to cope with the number of injured,' she said.
"Medical sources here are telling us they are running out of everything, from gauzes to saline solutions, and critically now they are running out of almost every type of blood."
A six-month truce between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip ended on December 19.
More than 300 Palestinians have been killed in three consecutive days of aerial bombardment in the heavily-populated territory.
"We have nothing against Gaza residents, but we are engaged in an all-out war against Hamas and its proxies," Barak said on Monday.
There were also growing fears that a ground offensive was being planned after a "closed military zone" was declared around the Gaza Strip.
The announcement created a buffer zone along the border which Israeli officials say will help protect it from rocket attacks.
Civilians, including journalists, could be banned from an area between 2km and 4km deep under the policy. On previous occasions, such a move has sometimes been followed by military operations.
"This operation will expand and deepen as much as needed," Barak said. "We went to war to deal a heavy blow to Hamas, to change the situation in the south."
Military build-up
Tanks and troops have been massed in the area since Operation Cast Lead was launched on Saturday.
Al Jazeera's Ayman Mohyeldin, reporting from Gaza City, said that there was little the residents of Gaza could do to prepare for any possible ground assault.
"In a city that is so densely-populated a ground offensive would mean urban warfare, street-to-street fighting ... leaving many Palestinians in the cross-fire," he said.
"Unlike other conflict zones where there is the possibility to flee the war zone, Gaza itself has become the war zone. There is nowhere for the population to go, they are in the middle of all these attacks."
Israel said it began pounding the Gaza Strip with missiles fired from warplanes and helicopter gunships in order to halt the rocket and mortar attacks by Palestinian fighters.
"Military officials said yesterday that this operation will go on until Hamas stops firing missiles into southern Israel,"Al Jazeera's Hoda Abdel Hamid, reporting from southern Israel, said.
"They are also very much aware that they wouldn't really be able to stop that, but at least they will try to degrade the capability of Hamas."
Scores of rockets have hit southern Israel since the offensive got under way.
On Monday, an Israeli Arab was killed and eight others wounded when one of the missiles hit a construction site in the city of Ashkelon.
"Israel is being attacked from Gaza and that has been the situation for the last eight years, and we did everything we could to avoid escalation," Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister and governing Kadima party leader, told parliament.
"We need to fight those who are trying to prevent us from living in peace."
Civilian casualties
The UN relief and works agency said on Monday that at least 51 Palestinian civilians, including women and children, were confirmed to be among among those killed in the Gaza Strip.
Four young girls from the same family in the northern town of Jabaliya and two young boy from Rafah were among those killed in the latest raids, Palestinian medics said.
Al Jazeera's Sherine Tadros said the situation at the Shifa hospital in Gaza City was chaotic as the territory's health system struggled to cope with the more than 1,400 people injured.
"Hundreds of people are just waiting outside ... a lot of those people, the problems is that there simply arent enough beds to cope with the number of injured,' she said.
"Medical sources here are telling us they are running out of everything, from gauzes to saline solutions, and critically now they are running out of almost every type of blood."
A six-month truce between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip ended on December 19.
Grief and fear in Gaza
BBC journalist and Gaza resident Hamada Abu Qammar describes the impact of the current wave of Israeli airstrikes against Hamas targets.
The streets of Gaza are deserted, apart from a few cars taking urgent cases to hospital and families screaming and shouting as they take bodies to the cemetery to be buried.
This morning I visited Shifa Hospital, the main one in Gaza.
I spoke to one man, a civilian, and also a 14-year-old boy who were injured in an airstrike on a police station in the east of Gaza City this morning.
The man said he had been going to work in a clinic when he heard the sound of planes and turned back. But after that he cannot remember what happened - he just woke up injured, with wounds in his hand, leg and stomach.
The teenage boy had blood on his head and was in a lot of pain. He could not even remember his own name. "I don't even know where I am," he said to me.
I saw a body too, in the emergency room, with a stick of wood stuck through the chest.
Yesterday I also went into the hospital; the morgue was full and bodies were left in the streets. Parents were scouring the hospital for their children.
I followed one woman who was screaming "my son, my son" as she searched the building.
Eventually they located him, a young man was in his twenties. The staff would not let her see the body, but I saw it. It didn't have a head and there was no stomach. She fainted on top of the remains of her son, which were covered with a white sheet.
The relatives in the hospital scream and scream. They don't have words to express their feelings, they just say "God help us", over and over.
'Sitting and waiting'
I have seen several Israeli airstrikes this morning - one on a Hamas police post on the coastal road, another on a house about 200m from the BBC office. Smoke pours into the sky. The largest so far today was on the Hamas security headquarters, which is also near to our office, a few hundred metres away.
I was watching it from the window. There were three very loud bangs and a power cut. I could hear women screaming in their houses, and gunshots from Hamas men surrounding the area to keep people way.
The compound was in a big residential area, with lots of high buildings and apartments. Some of the homes are only about 5m from the site - and of course those buildings were damaged, with windows shattered and falling to the ground.
Electricity comes and goes as usual. Most shops are closed. There is a lack of everything - the UN relief agency UNRWA has not been able to deliver food aid for about 750,000 people.
There are shortages of anaesthetic gas, medical supplies, flour and milk - but many of the people I have spoken to say they don't feel like eating while this is going on.
Families are just sitting in their homes. I spoke to one of my neighbours, Iman, a 14-year-old-girl. She was so scared she could barely speak.
"I don't know where to go. I don't know where is a safe place to stay. We don't know when they will strike again," she said.
Israel is not currently permitting international journalists to cross into Gaza
The streets of Gaza are deserted, apart from a few cars taking urgent cases to hospital and families screaming and shouting as they take bodies to the cemetery to be buried.
This morning I visited Shifa Hospital, the main one in Gaza.
I spoke to one man, a civilian, and also a 14-year-old boy who were injured in an airstrike on a police station in the east of Gaza City this morning.
The man said he had been going to work in a clinic when he heard the sound of planes and turned back. But after that he cannot remember what happened - he just woke up injured, with wounds in his hand, leg and stomach.
The teenage boy had blood on his head and was in a lot of pain. He could not even remember his own name. "I don't even know where I am," he said to me.
I saw a body too, in the emergency room, with a stick of wood stuck through the chest.
Yesterday I also went into the hospital; the morgue was full and bodies were left in the streets. Parents were scouring the hospital for their children.
I followed one woman who was screaming "my son, my son" as she searched the building.
Eventually they located him, a young man was in his twenties. The staff would not let her see the body, but I saw it. It didn't have a head and there was no stomach. She fainted on top of the remains of her son, which were covered with a white sheet.
The relatives in the hospital scream and scream. They don't have words to express their feelings, they just say "God help us", over and over.
'Sitting and waiting'
I have seen several Israeli airstrikes this morning - one on a Hamas police post on the coastal road, another on a house about 200m from the BBC office. Smoke pours into the sky. The largest so far today was on the Hamas security headquarters, which is also near to our office, a few hundred metres away.
I was watching it from the window. There were three very loud bangs and a power cut. I could hear women screaming in their houses, and gunshots from Hamas men surrounding the area to keep people way.
The compound was in a big residential area, with lots of high buildings and apartments. Some of the homes are only about 5m from the site - and of course those buildings were damaged, with windows shattered and falling to the ground.
Electricity comes and goes as usual. Most shops are closed. There is a lack of everything - the UN relief agency UNRWA has not been able to deliver food aid for about 750,000 people.
There are shortages of anaesthetic gas, medical supplies, flour and milk - but many of the people I have spoken to say they don't feel like eating while this is going on.
Families are just sitting in their homes. I spoke to one of my neighbours, Iman, a 14-year-old-girl. She was so scared she could barely speak.
"I don't know where to go. I don't know where is a safe place to stay. We don't know when they will strike again," she said.
Israel is not currently permitting international journalists to cross into Gaza
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Serbia arrests 'ex-KLA fighters'
Police in south Serbia have arrested 10 suspected former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters for war crimes against non-Albanians, including murder and rape.
Serbian Interior Minister Ivica Dacic said the suspects had been arrested in the Serbian town of Presevo, near the border with Kosovo.
The 10 are suspected of being former KLA fighters who killed more than 50 Serbs in Kosovo.
The alleged crimes date back to after the end of the conflict there in 1999.
'New Year's visit'
The Serbian war crimes prosecutor's office said the group had sought to get rid of Serbs and other non-Albanians from Gnjilane (Gjilan in Albanian), 47km (30 miles) south-east of the Kosovan capital, Pristina.
"From June 1999 until October 1999, they were involved in at least 51 murders and 159 abductions in the town," said Bruno Vekaric, a spokesman for Serbia's war crimes prosecutor, Vladimir Vukcevic.
He added that some of those arrested had entered Presevo, a region of Serbia with a large ethnic Albanian community, to celebrate the New Year with relatives.
The Serbian prosecutor's office said the arrests had been made in raids on 17 homes in Presevo after months of preparation because of the "extremely high risk as almost all the suspects were armed".
Nine suspects were transferred to custody in Belgrade while one remained under investigation in southern Serbia, according to a statement from the office reported by the Associated Press.
Belgrade still regards Kosovo, which declared formal independence this year nearly a decade after breaking away from Serbia, as its territory.
Ethnic Albanian militants in Presevo waged an insurgency against Belgrade in 2001 which was ended with the help of Nato and EU diplomacy.
Riza Halimi, an ethnic Albanian political leader from Presevo, accused Serbian police of using excessive force in making the arrests on Friday.
"It certainly does not contribute to the stability in the region," the leader told Serbia's Beta news agency.
Published: 2008/12/26 16:49:53 GMT
Serbian Interior Minister Ivica Dacic said the suspects had been arrested in the Serbian town of Presevo, near the border with Kosovo.
The 10 are suspected of being former KLA fighters who killed more than 50 Serbs in Kosovo.
The alleged crimes date back to after the end of the conflict there in 1999.
'New Year's visit'
The Serbian war crimes prosecutor's office said the group had sought to get rid of Serbs and other non-Albanians from Gnjilane (Gjilan in Albanian), 47km (30 miles) south-east of the Kosovan capital, Pristina.
"From June 1999 until October 1999, they were involved in at least 51 murders and 159 abductions in the town," said Bruno Vekaric, a spokesman for Serbia's war crimes prosecutor, Vladimir Vukcevic.
He added that some of those arrested had entered Presevo, a region of Serbia with a large ethnic Albanian community, to celebrate the New Year with relatives.
The Serbian prosecutor's office said the arrests had been made in raids on 17 homes in Presevo after months of preparation because of the "extremely high risk as almost all the suspects were armed".
Nine suspects were transferred to custody in Belgrade while one remained under investigation in southern Serbia, according to a statement from the office reported by the Associated Press.
Belgrade still regards Kosovo, which declared formal independence this year nearly a decade after breaking away from Serbia, as its territory.
Ethnic Albanian militants in Presevo waged an insurgency against Belgrade in 2001 which was ended with the help of Nato and EU diplomacy.
Riza Halimi, an ethnic Albanian political leader from Presevo, accused Serbian police of using excessive force in making the arrests on Friday.
"It certainly does not contribute to the stability in the region," the leader told Serbia's Beta news agency.
Published: 2008/12/26 16:49:53 GMT
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Gazprom to control Serbia's oil
Russia and Serbia have signed a controversial energy deal that will hand Russian gas giant Gazprom control of NIS, Serbia's oil monopoly.
Under the deal, Gazprom is to build a gas pipeline through Serbia and an underground gas storage facility there.
Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev and his Serbian counterpart Boris Tadic signed the agreement in Moscow.
The plan is for Serbia to host part of a new pipeline called South Stream, to deliver Russian gas to southern Europe.
Gazprom is taking a 51% stake in NIS for 400m euros (£380m; $560m), officials say.
Diplomatic tensions
Both countries signed an energy co-operation agreement in January, but the details have only just been finalised. Belgrade had delayed signing because a small party in Serbia's ruling coalition had argued that the terms on offer to Gazprom were too generous.
Critics say Russia's pledges to build South Stream by 2015 are not firm enough, given the current economic downturn.
South Stream is designed to take Russian gas under the Black Sea to Bulgaria and then to Serbia for transit towards the lucrative markets of southern Europe.
Washington and the European Union are backing a rival pipeline project called Nabucco, to bring gas from Central Asia, which would bypass Russia.
Correspondents say the planned pipeline could undermine the European efforts, which aim to reduce European dependency on Russian gas.
Serbia's energy diplomacy is complicated by the fact that Nabucco has EU backing - yet Serbia wants to join the EU.
Political tensions over Kosovo are also a complicating factor, with the EU supporting Kosovo's independence, while Belgrade and Moscow insist the territory remains part of Serbia.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7799396.stm
Published: 2008/12/24 18:24:07 GMT
Under the deal, Gazprom is to build a gas pipeline through Serbia and an underground gas storage facility there.
Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev and his Serbian counterpart Boris Tadic signed the agreement in Moscow.
The plan is for Serbia to host part of a new pipeline called South Stream, to deliver Russian gas to southern Europe.
Gazprom is taking a 51% stake in NIS for 400m euros (£380m; $560m), officials say.
Diplomatic tensions
Both countries signed an energy co-operation agreement in January, but the details have only just been finalised. Belgrade had delayed signing because a small party in Serbia's ruling coalition had argued that the terms on offer to Gazprom were too generous.
Critics say Russia's pledges to build South Stream by 2015 are not firm enough, given the current economic downturn.
South Stream is designed to take Russian gas under the Black Sea to Bulgaria and then to Serbia for transit towards the lucrative markets of southern Europe.
Washington and the European Union are backing a rival pipeline project called Nabucco, to bring gas from Central Asia, which would bypass Russia.
Correspondents say the planned pipeline could undermine the European efforts, which aim to reduce European dependency on Russian gas.
Serbia's energy diplomacy is complicated by the fact that Nabucco has EU backing - yet Serbia wants to join the EU.
Political tensions over Kosovo are also a complicating factor, with the EU supporting Kosovo's independence, while Belgrade and Moscow insist the territory remains part of Serbia.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7799396.stm
Published: 2008/12/24 18:24:07 GMT
Russia may cut off Ukraine's gas
Russian gas giant Gazprom has renewed its threat to cut off gas supplies to Ukraine on 1 January, saying a contract dispute has reached a "critical" stage.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Ukraine faced Russian "sanctions and demands" if it did not pay off its gas debt "to the last rouble".
Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov stressed that the dispute would not disrupt gas deliveries to Europe.
Ukraine owes $1.67bn (£1.1bn) for gas and $450m in fines, Gazprom says.
Gazprom denied that any agreement had been reached with Kiev on postponing the repayment, contradicting an announcement by Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko
On Tuesday, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned that the era of cheap gas was coming to an end.
Earlier, Gazprom said it had warned European customers about possible disruption linked to the Ukraine dispute.
The EU gets 42% of its gas imports from Russia, mostly via pipelines across Ukraine. A similar row in 2006 led to gas shortages in several EU countries.
'Pay up'
"If a contract for 2009 is not signed [with Ukraine] then we are not going to deliver gas without a contract," Mr Kupriyanov told reporters in Kiev.
"When there is no contract we cannot realise deliveries. The situation is not simple. It is even critical."
But Gazprom, he added, would "deliver the full volume of gas destined for transit and... fulfil all [its] obligations towards European consumers".
Speaking to Russian TV channels in Moscow, President Medvedev said the non-payment situation could not be allowed to continue.
"They should pay the money to the last rouble if they don't want their economy eventually running up against sanctions and demands from the Russian Federation," he said.
"It is impossible to go on like this. Let them pay the money."
Economic woes
Ukraine's President Yushchenko said earlier on Wednesday that an agreement had been reached with Gazprom to reschedule repayment.
"A portion of the debt will be restructured" over several months, he said, adding that Kiev might return some gas held in storage to Gazprom as reimbursement.
"The question has not been solved as was announced in Kiev," Gazprom's Sergei Kupriyanov said in response, in televised comments.
Analysts say Kiev will struggle to find the money to pay for the gas.
Shaken by the global financial crisis, Ukraine is relying on a $16.4bn emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund to see it through a halving of exports and a sharp devaluation of the national currency.
On Tuesday, Vladimir Putin told a meeting of major gas-exporting countries in Moscow that because of extraction costs, "the era... of cheap gas... [was] coming to an end".
The Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) meeting in Moscow agreed a charter and plans for a permanent base.
Some observers say the GECF may develop into an Opec-style producers' cartel.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7799321.stm
Published: 2008/12/24 17:37:09 GMT
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Ukraine faced Russian "sanctions and demands" if it did not pay off its gas debt "to the last rouble".
Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov stressed that the dispute would not disrupt gas deliveries to Europe.
Ukraine owes $1.67bn (£1.1bn) for gas and $450m in fines, Gazprom says.
Gazprom denied that any agreement had been reached with Kiev on postponing the repayment, contradicting an announcement by Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko
On Tuesday, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned that the era of cheap gas was coming to an end.
Earlier, Gazprom said it had warned European customers about possible disruption linked to the Ukraine dispute.
The EU gets 42% of its gas imports from Russia, mostly via pipelines across Ukraine. A similar row in 2006 led to gas shortages in several EU countries.
'Pay up'
"If a contract for 2009 is not signed [with Ukraine] then we are not going to deliver gas without a contract," Mr Kupriyanov told reporters in Kiev.
"When there is no contract we cannot realise deliveries. The situation is not simple. It is even critical."
But Gazprom, he added, would "deliver the full volume of gas destined for transit and... fulfil all [its] obligations towards European consumers".
Speaking to Russian TV channels in Moscow, President Medvedev said the non-payment situation could not be allowed to continue.
"They should pay the money to the last rouble if they don't want their economy eventually running up against sanctions and demands from the Russian Federation," he said.
"It is impossible to go on like this. Let them pay the money."
Economic woes
Ukraine's President Yushchenko said earlier on Wednesday that an agreement had been reached with Gazprom to reschedule repayment.
"A portion of the debt will be restructured" over several months, he said, adding that Kiev might return some gas held in storage to Gazprom as reimbursement.
"The question has not been solved as was announced in Kiev," Gazprom's Sergei Kupriyanov said in response, in televised comments.
Analysts say Kiev will struggle to find the money to pay for the gas.
Shaken by the global financial crisis, Ukraine is relying on a $16.4bn emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund to see it through a halving of exports and a sharp devaluation of the national currency.
On Tuesday, Vladimir Putin told a meeting of major gas-exporting countries in Moscow that because of extraction costs, "the era... of cheap gas... [was] coming to an end".
The Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) meeting in Moscow agreed a charter and plans for a permanent base.
Some observers say the GECF may develop into an Opec-style producers' cartel.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7799321.stm
Published: 2008/12/24 17:37:09 GMT
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
The Revolt of a Disappointed Generation
By Manfred Ertel and Daniel Steinvorth
The violent unrest that followed the shooting of a 15-year-old boy has driven Greece to the brink of a political crisis. The rioting marks an explosion of rage by the country's young people who have few prospects of carving out a place in a society where all initiative is stifled.
The mood in the jam-packed auditorium was reminiscent of the student protest movements of 1968. Hundreds of young people thronged their way into the dark room, sat on the steps or stood on tables. They shouted "murderers" and "pigs" -- and thunderously applauded calls for revenge. Cigarette smoke and the smell of sweat hung heavily in the air.
Jorgos Barutas, 29, had to struggle to make himself heard. The computer engineer, sporting a five-day beard and steel-rimmed glasses, stood at the foot of the steep rows of seats and shouted up to the audience with a throaty voice. "We have to hold out until the government steps down." Applause. "We have to transform the protests into a political movement." Applause. "We have to formulate political objectives." Followed again by thunderous applause. Barutas stepped down from the stage, feeling satisfied, and the students poured out of the hall.
Outside on the campus of the Athens Polytechnic University such lofty political statements are quickly forgotten. Fires blaze and the smoldering remains of hastily erected barricades block the paths between lecture halls. Figures dressed in black and wearing ski masks use threatening gestures or engage in pushing matches to keep strangers from entering.
Dumpsters are burning in front of the entrance to the university, and in the side streets young people are building roadblocks between burned-out cars and kiosks or piling up stones that are just the right size for throwing.
It is day five of the intense rioting by young people in Athens. The protests began in the district of Exarchia -- a traditional haunt of artists, anarchists and left-wing intellectuals -- and rapidly spread throughout the entire country. They have also sparked violent unrest in the large cities of Thessaloniki, Patras and Heraklion -- and in 20 other Greek towns.
Following the police shooting of a 15-year-old boy, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a week ago Saturday, there have even been protests on Greek islands like Lesbos, where police used teargas against demonstrators. In Athens alone hundreds of stores have been destroyed and looted, schools have called off classes and universities have canceled lectures. Just a few days before Christmas, "the city has come to a grinding halt," says government spokesman Evangelos Antonaros.
Over the past week, the wave of protests has even spread to Europe's major cities. Sympathizers occupied the Greek consulates in Berlin and London, anarchists rioted out of solidarity in Barcelona, Rome and Copenhagen, and the sense of outrage has even reached New York.
Athens Polytechnic, in the heart of Exarchia, is the focal point of the protests and a place steeped in symbolism for Greek leftists. This is where students barricaded themselves inside university buildings in 1973 to protest against the military junta. When tanks crushed the gates on Nov. 17 and put and end to the leftist uprising, at least 34 young people died and some 800 were injured.
Today's sizeable Black Bloc anarchist movement in the Greek capital strongly identifies with the tradition of those young 1970s rebels. For years, they have been setting fire to police stations, banks and state institutions. "From a statistical perspective, there are attacks like this every day," says a security expert.
A Growing Prosperity Gap Between Young and Old
The schoolboy's death has given the Black Bloc anarchists widespread support among the population for the first time -- and has driven the country to the brink of a political crisis. "A young man killed by a police bullet is the worst thing that could happen," admits Antonaros. But he adds that "it has nothing to do with social unrest."
Sure enough, the riots, which continued until the weekend, and particularly the obvious sympathy for the young protesters, are an expression of the Greek people's overwhelming disappointment with their government and political system. The country's political class has been losing credibility for years due to graft, kickbacks and "widespread corruption," says an EU diplomat. Over the past few months, a series of ministers have had to step down in the wake of corruption allegations, most recently the predecessor of government spokesman Antonaros and the mercantile marine minister, both of whom are close associates of conservative Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis.
To make matters worse, Greece faces a shaky economic situation. Although growth has averaged 4.3 percent since 2000, Greece has one of the highest inflation rates in the euro zone, at 4.5 percent. The unemployment rate of 7.5 percent remains within European norms, but the prosperity gap between the older generation -- senior workers and civil servants -- and young people who are fresh out of school continues to grow. Nearly a quarter of all adults under the age of 29 are unemployed.
The current crisis has not only hit the traditional losers of modernization, such as individuals from educationally disadvantaged social strata or immigrants. This time around university-educated young people from well-off middle-class families also have to work odd jobs to keep their heads above water. Due to a lack of income, many young Greeks live with their parents until well into their thirties. The system is "tailored to the needs of established and older individuals," says sociologist Stratos Georgoulas from the Aegean University on Lesbos, "and young people are suffering from this."
Dashed Hopes and Opportunities
Economic experts have begun to refer to the €700 generation ($935 generation), and student leader Barutas is a prime example: He studied electrical engineering for five years at the Athens Polytechnic and graduated with excellent grades. Now he's working as a teacher at a high school for €8 net an hour, 12 hours a week, which is all that is allowed. Such jobs are often limited to four- or five-month contracts. "How am I supposed to survive or establish a family on that?" asks the engineer.
Roughly 21 percent of the population has a university degree, "so not every language and literature expert can immediately become a teacher," says the government. "Today's generation of young people has had great dreams," retorts architecture professor Stavros Stavrides, "and now all their hopes and opportunities have been dashed."
Stavrides has joined many of his colleagues in support of the protests. "We have tens of thousands of young people who are rebelling and the government doesn't know how to respond to the situation," says Nikos Belavilas, an urban planning professor. "The political system has failed to integrate young people," adds sociologist Georgoulas, "and that's why things are exploding."
The general sense of frustration and powerlessness among the protesters is also shared by the police, who are poorly trained and constantly have to defend their reputation against widespread allegations of rightist infiltration and xenophobia. Professor Belavilas speaks of a "Balkans brutality" that riot police unleash on young demonstrators. There has been an increasing number of deaths over the past few years, and the fatal shooting in Exarchia is just one of many examples.
The ensuing escalation of violence reminds many older Greeks of the civil war period between 1946 and 1949. And it actually looks like civil war: Young people form mobs on streets and squares, or under the protection of mass demonstrations, and they throw stones, bottles and pieces of wood at advancing police. Small groups of marauding hooligans, including children, march through the busy shopping districts. Armed with hammers and steel pipes, they smash shop fronts and car windows, and set vehicles and barricades on fire. The darker the night, the more violent the rioting.
'We Are all Responsible'
Shocked by the furious reaction to the deadly shooting by one of their colleagues, the police have shown restraint this time or responded with teargas. And when the special units with helmets and shields advance on the protesters, the demonstrators quickly retreat through dark side streets, usually to the campus of the Polytechnic.
The atmosphere on campus resembles an open-air festival. Behind the barricaded entrances and banners with slogans, huge bonfires burn brightly and hard rock booms throughout the mild nights. There is plenty of beer, and afterwards the bottles rain down on police who venture too close to the university. The rioters are virtually unassailable there. After the deadly experience with the military in 1973, the university is off limits for the police -- an anarchistic paradise. And a surprisingly large number of Greeks see this as a good thing.
Petros Markaris is sitting in his armchair and he is outraged -- but not because of the destruction. The 71-year-old author, whose novels describe the underlying reasons why young people are rioting in Greece, says he could see these protests coming. "We are all responsible for this outbreak of violence," he says, "because we cultivated it ourselves."
Then he vents his anger, a deep-seated resentment that his country produces an endless series of scandals, and that "corrupt cliques" in politics, the church, associations and trade unions are free to skim off the top as they see fit. He says that no one from the two dominant political camps -- neither the center-right conservatives nor the socialists, both of whom are dominated by family clans -- will allow young people to take their place in society. Today's Greece stifles all initiative.
"German tourists love us for the Acropolis and our history," says the writer, "but the days when Greece was an advanced civilization are long gone."
The violent unrest that followed the shooting of a 15-year-old boy has driven Greece to the brink of a political crisis. The rioting marks an explosion of rage by the country's young people who have few prospects of carving out a place in a society where all initiative is stifled.
The mood in the jam-packed auditorium was reminiscent of the student protest movements of 1968. Hundreds of young people thronged their way into the dark room, sat on the steps or stood on tables. They shouted "murderers" and "pigs" -- and thunderously applauded calls for revenge. Cigarette smoke and the smell of sweat hung heavily in the air.
Jorgos Barutas, 29, had to struggle to make himself heard. The computer engineer, sporting a five-day beard and steel-rimmed glasses, stood at the foot of the steep rows of seats and shouted up to the audience with a throaty voice. "We have to hold out until the government steps down." Applause. "We have to transform the protests into a political movement." Applause. "We have to formulate political objectives." Followed again by thunderous applause. Barutas stepped down from the stage, feeling satisfied, and the students poured out of the hall.
Outside on the campus of the Athens Polytechnic University such lofty political statements are quickly forgotten. Fires blaze and the smoldering remains of hastily erected barricades block the paths between lecture halls. Figures dressed in black and wearing ski masks use threatening gestures or engage in pushing matches to keep strangers from entering.
Dumpsters are burning in front of the entrance to the university, and in the side streets young people are building roadblocks between burned-out cars and kiosks or piling up stones that are just the right size for throwing.
It is day five of the intense rioting by young people in Athens. The protests began in the district of Exarchia -- a traditional haunt of artists, anarchists and left-wing intellectuals -- and rapidly spread throughout the entire country. They have also sparked violent unrest in the large cities of Thessaloniki, Patras and Heraklion -- and in 20 other Greek towns.
Following the police shooting of a 15-year-old boy, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a week ago Saturday, there have even been protests on Greek islands like Lesbos, where police used teargas against demonstrators. In Athens alone hundreds of stores have been destroyed and looted, schools have called off classes and universities have canceled lectures. Just a few days before Christmas, "the city has come to a grinding halt," says government spokesman Evangelos Antonaros.
Over the past week, the wave of protests has even spread to Europe's major cities. Sympathizers occupied the Greek consulates in Berlin and London, anarchists rioted out of solidarity in Barcelona, Rome and Copenhagen, and the sense of outrage has even reached New York.
Athens Polytechnic, in the heart of Exarchia, is the focal point of the protests and a place steeped in symbolism for Greek leftists. This is where students barricaded themselves inside university buildings in 1973 to protest against the military junta. When tanks crushed the gates on Nov. 17 and put and end to the leftist uprising, at least 34 young people died and some 800 were injured.
Today's sizeable Black Bloc anarchist movement in the Greek capital strongly identifies with the tradition of those young 1970s rebels. For years, they have been setting fire to police stations, banks and state institutions. "From a statistical perspective, there are attacks like this every day," says a security expert.
A Growing Prosperity Gap Between Young and Old
The schoolboy's death has given the Black Bloc anarchists widespread support among the population for the first time -- and has driven the country to the brink of a political crisis. "A young man killed by a police bullet is the worst thing that could happen," admits Antonaros. But he adds that "it has nothing to do with social unrest."
Sure enough, the riots, which continued until the weekend, and particularly the obvious sympathy for the young protesters, are an expression of the Greek people's overwhelming disappointment with their government and political system. The country's political class has been losing credibility for years due to graft, kickbacks and "widespread corruption," says an EU diplomat. Over the past few months, a series of ministers have had to step down in the wake of corruption allegations, most recently the predecessor of government spokesman Antonaros and the mercantile marine minister, both of whom are close associates of conservative Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis.
To make matters worse, Greece faces a shaky economic situation. Although growth has averaged 4.3 percent since 2000, Greece has one of the highest inflation rates in the euro zone, at 4.5 percent. The unemployment rate of 7.5 percent remains within European norms, but the prosperity gap between the older generation -- senior workers and civil servants -- and young people who are fresh out of school continues to grow. Nearly a quarter of all adults under the age of 29 are unemployed.
The current crisis has not only hit the traditional losers of modernization, such as individuals from educationally disadvantaged social strata or immigrants. This time around university-educated young people from well-off middle-class families also have to work odd jobs to keep their heads above water. Due to a lack of income, many young Greeks live with their parents until well into their thirties. The system is "tailored to the needs of established and older individuals," says sociologist Stratos Georgoulas from the Aegean University on Lesbos, "and young people are suffering from this."
Dashed Hopes and Opportunities
Economic experts have begun to refer to the €700 generation ($935 generation), and student leader Barutas is a prime example: He studied electrical engineering for five years at the Athens Polytechnic and graduated with excellent grades. Now he's working as a teacher at a high school for €8 net an hour, 12 hours a week, which is all that is allowed. Such jobs are often limited to four- or five-month contracts. "How am I supposed to survive or establish a family on that?" asks the engineer.
Roughly 21 percent of the population has a university degree, "so not every language and literature expert can immediately become a teacher," says the government. "Today's generation of young people has had great dreams," retorts architecture professor Stavros Stavrides, "and now all their hopes and opportunities have been dashed."
Stavrides has joined many of his colleagues in support of the protests. "We have tens of thousands of young people who are rebelling and the government doesn't know how to respond to the situation," says Nikos Belavilas, an urban planning professor. "The political system has failed to integrate young people," adds sociologist Georgoulas, "and that's why things are exploding."
The general sense of frustration and powerlessness among the protesters is also shared by the police, who are poorly trained and constantly have to defend their reputation against widespread allegations of rightist infiltration and xenophobia. Professor Belavilas speaks of a "Balkans brutality" that riot police unleash on young demonstrators. There has been an increasing number of deaths over the past few years, and the fatal shooting in Exarchia is just one of many examples.
The ensuing escalation of violence reminds many older Greeks of the civil war period between 1946 and 1949. And it actually looks like civil war: Young people form mobs on streets and squares, or under the protection of mass demonstrations, and they throw stones, bottles and pieces of wood at advancing police. Small groups of marauding hooligans, including children, march through the busy shopping districts. Armed with hammers and steel pipes, they smash shop fronts and car windows, and set vehicles and barricades on fire. The darker the night, the more violent the rioting.
'We Are all Responsible'
Shocked by the furious reaction to the deadly shooting by one of their colleagues, the police have shown restraint this time or responded with teargas. And when the special units with helmets and shields advance on the protesters, the demonstrators quickly retreat through dark side streets, usually to the campus of the Polytechnic.
The atmosphere on campus resembles an open-air festival. Behind the barricaded entrances and banners with slogans, huge bonfires burn brightly and hard rock booms throughout the mild nights. There is plenty of beer, and afterwards the bottles rain down on police who venture too close to the university. The rioters are virtually unassailable there. After the deadly experience with the military in 1973, the university is off limits for the police -- an anarchistic paradise. And a surprisingly large number of Greeks see this as a good thing.
Petros Markaris is sitting in his armchair and he is outraged -- but not because of the destruction. The 71-year-old author, whose novels describe the underlying reasons why young people are rioting in Greece, says he could see these protests coming. "We are all responsible for this outbreak of violence," he says, "because we cultivated it ourselves."
Then he vents his anger, a deep-seated resentment that his country produces an endless series of scandals, and that "corrupt cliques" in politics, the church, associations and trade unions are free to skim off the top as they see fit. He says that no one from the two dominant political camps -- neither the center-right conservatives nor the socialists, both of whom are dominated by family clans -- will allow young people to take their place in society. Today's Greece stifles all initiative.
"German tourists love us for the Acropolis and our history," says the writer, "but the days when Greece was an advanced civilization are long gone."
'Germany is Failing as a Leading Power in Europe'
SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH EX-FOREIGN MINISTER JOSCHKA FISCHER
Germany's former Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, 60, speaks with SPIEGEL about the global financial crisis, the lack of German leadership in Europe and what Barack Obama is doing right.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Fischer, France and the UK held the last EU summit without the German chancellor, and many European countries are mocking the Germans' hesitant economic policies. Is Germany headed toward isolation?
Fischer: Things have not gotten that bad. But Germany is staring at its own navel, too much so for my taste. I have made quite a few trips these past few weeks -- to Paris, Lisbon and Copenhagen. Everywhere the first question was: Can you explain why the chancellor, in this crisis, where everyone is looking to Berlin, is leaving Europe in the lurch? Why doesn't Germany see tackling the crisis as a joint project? Why does Germany always say no, instead of assuming a leadership role?
SPIEGEL: What reasons do you see for this?
Fischer: I have noticed a disastrous shift in focus in Germany's foreign and European policy. Until now Europe itself has been the key project in German foreign policy -- what was good for Europe was also good for Germany, and vice versa. The country's current leaders, however, increasingly see Europe as a tool to push through Germany's own political agenda. This entails a significant risk for Europe, but also primarily for Germany.
SPIEGEL: What signs do you see of this shift?
Fischer: First and foremost, how the crisis is being addressed. Apparently the German government at first underestimated the gravity of the situation. It failed to recognize how great the risk is that we could slide into a worldwide depression. The fact that the German government did not energetically take action back in November caused a great deal of consternation and confusion in Europe.
SPIEGEL: Can you explain Berlin's hesitation?
Fischer: (German Chancellor) Angela Merkel is still struggling with the political blisters on her hands that she received from the radical reform pledges that she made at the Christian Democratic Union party conference in Leipzig and her support for the war in Iraq. As a result of this experience, she is more reserved and no longer rushes into things. Until now, if opinion polls are anything to judge by, this approach has served her well. She always takes positions that allow her to maintain a majority. However, in this global crisis, that is simply the wrong attitude. What is needed now is strategic, large-scale planning -- in the European spirit.
SPIEGEL: That would be the moment of calling for the self-declared great strategist, Joschka Fischer?
Fischer: This is not about me. But I do see a German government that is groping its way forward. Why aren't we presenting our own German proposals? Germany is failing as a leading power in Europe.
SPIEGEL: Does Germany have to pay more in order to lead Europe? Would an economic stimulus program also be a political investment in Germany's role?
Fischer: We do not have to pay in the sense that we have to pay off a debt. Generally, we expect the strong to do more than the weak, no doubt about it. Of course, we have to take great pains to ensure that budget problems, which other countries have brought upon themselves, are not simply dumped at our doorstep. But that is no reason to throw up our hands and say 'no' whenever our neighbors start talking about a European economic stimulus program. This requires a political approach.
SPIEGEL: But that would mean reassuming our old role as Europe's bankroller.
Fischer: That is precisely the national logic that alienates our neighbors. On top of that, it doesn't make economic sense. We are not the world's leading exporter because of our trade with China, but because we supply so many products to the EU internal market. Hardly any other country depends as much on Europe as Germany, and earns as much from Europe as we do, at all levels. The entire internal market is our market -- no longer just the German part.
SPIEGEL: Germans these days tend to perceive their neighbors as cheeky and greedy.
Fischer: There is a real danger here that the European project will run out of steam, that people will say: Okay, Europe is important, but now we've had enough. The German government promotes this type of thinking with its wait-and-see approach. At least the government now wants to introduce a second stimulus package. But why are they waiting so long?
SPIEGEL: The German chancellor says she's waiting because she first needs to know what US President-elect Barack Obama will do.
Fischer: We have known for a long time what he will do. Ever since the Democratic National Convention in Denver, we have known what is at the core of his intentions. I don't know who the German government sent there. I was there. Since then it has been clear to me. Obama is going to start off with a big bang. The week before last, if the figure was $500 billion -- today it will be over a trillion! The details, how much they will spend on education and how much on infrastructure, won't help us anyway because we, thank God, don't have their infrastructural problems. I suspect that the chancellor would simply like to act simultaneously with that shining light, Obama -- but is this tactical victory worth the price of going through three months of strife with Paris and London?
SPIEGEL: You have a reputation for seeing the gloomier side of things. Could it be that these inner-European problems will all be forgotten in three weeks?
Fischer: That would be nice, but I don't believe it. This brings us back to the issue of Germany's new orientation in Europe. Reaching a consensus within the EU appears to be too arduous for Berlin, in other words: Things are too complicated in Brussels, so let's go it alone.
SPIEGEL: Isn't that understandable? Europe's integration isn't moving forward.
Fischer: Of course it's arduous. But the alternative to a Europe with 27 members cannot be that Germany goes solo. I could very well imagine an avant-garde consisting of a number of countries that lead the way, but France absolutely needs to be one of them, whether we like it or not. Of course other countries have to take part, but working without or against France -- forget it.
SPIEGEL: Nevertheless, the indefatigable, vain Nicolas Sarkozy is undeniably a rather difficult partner.
Fischer: It has always been like that with French presidents. The relationship between Schröder and Chirac was horrendous for many years. The relationship Kohl/Chirac was also anything but good and harmonious. You don't have to love each other, you just have to achieve something together.
SPIEGEL: And if you don't like each other?
Fischer: Personal aggressions have no place in diplomacy. They are far too dangerous. You sometimes meet people who truly get on your nerves, and in extreme cases, if you are dealing with bloody dictatorships, they can even be revolting. In such cases, as the chancellor or foreign minister, you can't find enough soap to wash your hands after a handshake. That comes with the territory. But aggression is out of the question. It doesn't help when you read in German newspapers that the chancellor watches Louis-de-Funès films to understand Sarkozy better. What's the point?
SPIEGEL: Do German politicians have to be subservient to the French in order to lead Europe?
Fischer: Helmut Kohl said: "The German chancellor is best advised to bow twice before the French flag." I don't see it quite like that, but we are well advised to endeavor to understand a country which has become such an important partner. That is often difficult. But we are also certainly not an easy partner for the French. We have a totally different mentality. We tend to have diverging political cultures. This also engenders something positive and constructive, if you embrace it. That is something that Schmidt/Giscard d'Estaing and Kohl/Mitterrand succeeded in doing.
SPIEGEL: Germany is also at loggerheads with the British. The Financial Times compared Merkel's approach to Heinrich Brüning's belt-tightening policies during the economic crisis of the 1930s.
Fischer: We don't have to take every criticism literally. There are definitely exaggerations. But our government is acting like a bull in a china shop. Take for example Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück's tirade against Gordon Brown in Newsweek.
SPIEGEL: He accused him of "crass Keynesianism" and questioned the benefits of lowering their value-added tax.
Fischer: It reminds me of the Daily Telegraph interview, which led to an extremely inglorious affair.
SPIEGEL: In 1908 the newspaper published an interview with Kaiser Wilhelm II, where he read the riot act to the British. This sparked a crisis in German-British relations.
Fischer: Of course Steinbrück is not Wilhelm II. But it is exactly the same kind of brash "now I'm going to tell them what's what" -- a condescending tone.
SPIEGEL: A return to Wilhelmism?
Fischer: Oh no, those days are definitely over. But such interview attacks are bad foreign policy and don't fit with our role.
SPIEGEL: Steinbrück of course loves provocations.
Fischer: The finance minister has apparently not understood that one country is speaking to another here, one government to another. If you offend someone, not as a person, but rather in their political function, it has consequences.
SPIEGEL: Particularly as Steinbrück has made mistakes himself during this crisis.
Fischer: He stood before the German parliament and said: The financial crisis is a purely American problem. His coattails were on fire and he didn't even notice. He has pulled a couple of stunts during this crisis. There is absolutely no reason for him to stick his nose in the air.
SPIEGEL: What was his biggest mistake?
Fischer: Take Germany's bank rescue package -- truly a carefully crafted, top-notch product. In contrast to other countries, we have made the banks' participation voluntary -- and thrown in thumbscrews and hot irons for good measure. The banks of course have recoiled in horror because even on their boards of directors they are not particularly inclined toward masochism. I would have made the law mandatory.
SPIEGEL: Are Steinbrück's actions an indication that the Germans are focusing increasingly on their own national agenda?
Fischer: Yes, but not in the sense of something negative, something nationalistic. More like the French and the British.
SPIEGEL: A new normality?
Fischer: If you will. But there is a big difference. France and the UK are integrated into an extremely old foreign policy tradition. We are not. Take for example the Middle East. When you think of France, clear coordinates immediately spring to mind: Northern Africa, Lebanon and the Mediterranean region. It's a similar story with the British. However, if you want to define Germany's political role in the Middle East, aside from our special relationship with Israel, you are left only with foreign trade policy, or a big question mark.
SPIEGEL: In other words, we are weaker when it comes to foreign policy, so we are best advised to focus on Europe?
Fischer: German foreign policy only becomes stable and reliable if it is defined through the European prism. We had a break in our traditions with National Socialism and the Holocaust. So we cannot build on long historical experience. Things immediately lose clarity when we think that we can again define foreign policy more in line with our national agenda. We simply lack a firm foundation. Only defining Germany's identity within a European context has made it stable.
SPIEGEL: We cannot expect any help from the chancellor. She hasn't given any great speeches during the crisis, and hasn't shown direction. Do you see a lack of leadership here?
Fischer: This would actually be a golden opportunity for Merkel -- like the fall of the Berlin Wall for Helmut Kohl. He was an extremely ungifted speaker. But in a similar crisis he reacted with a 10-point plan for German unity. I have yet to see Merkel produce such a plan.
SPIEGEL: Why is that?
Fischer: Perhaps there is not enough pressure on the government to make every effort. That is my impression. This is an extremely negative aspect of the grand coalition.
SPIEGEL: Because there is no opposition?
Fischer: When Schröder and I were in power, when we went to sleep there was no way to know that we would still have a majority in the morning. It was constantly like that. You need an opposition, you need to feel their hot breath down your back. It makes you work. Merkel and Steinbrück are lacking this drive.
SPIEGEL: Europe is faltering due to a lack of German leadership. What consequences does this have for Europe?
Fischer: America will turn away from the Atlantic and toward the Pacific. China, Japan and South Korea are the main creditors of the US. If we are interested in having lively transatlantic relations, then we have to invest more. This requires a strong Europe which can serve as a partner to the US on the world stage. But if Europe ceases to be an effective power, the Americans will downgrade their relations with us.
SPIEGEL: At the same time, there are so many Germans who hope that Obama can save their world.
Fischer: This crisis will restructure the age of globalization in the 21st century. America will redetermine its role. Obama is bringing America together. America is reinventing itself in its worst crisis and growing together, while Europe is flying apart. Berlin is currently pursuing a course that will only weaken us.
SPIEGEL: What would Merkel have to do to become more European?
Fischer: It is important to coordinate your new stimulus program with the key partners in Europe and truly assume the responsibilities of leadership. This would be a second attempt, in any case. But it will come too late for 2009. That could be disastrous. From a political standpoint, though, I find it absolutely necessary that Germany once again assumes a leadership role.
SPIEGEL: Thank you for this interview, Mr. Fischer.
Germany's former Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, 60, speaks with SPIEGEL about the global financial crisis, the lack of German leadership in Europe and what Barack Obama is doing right.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Fischer, France and the UK held the last EU summit without the German chancellor, and many European countries are mocking the Germans' hesitant economic policies. Is Germany headed toward isolation?
Fischer: Things have not gotten that bad. But Germany is staring at its own navel, too much so for my taste. I have made quite a few trips these past few weeks -- to Paris, Lisbon and Copenhagen. Everywhere the first question was: Can you explain why the chancellor, in this crisis, where everyone is looking to Berlin, is leaving Europe in the lurch? Why doesn't Germany see tackling the crisis as a joint project? Why does Germany always say no, instead of assuming a leadership role?
SPIEGEL: What reasons do you see for this?
Fischer: I have noticed a disastrous shift in focus in Germany's foreign and European policy. Until now Europe itself has been the key project in German foreign policy -- what was good for Europe was also good for Germany, and vice versa. The country's current leaders, however, increasingly see Europe as a tool to push through Germany's own political agenda. This entails a significant risk for Europe, but also primarily for Germany.
SPIEGEL: What signs do you see of this shift?
Fischer: First and foremost, how the crisis is being addressed. Apparently the German government at first underestimated the gravity of the situation. It failed to recognize how great the risk is that we could slide into a worldwide depression. The fact that the German government did not energetically take action back in November caused a great deal of consternation and confusion in Europe.
SPIEGEL: Can you explain Berlin's hesitation?
Fischer: (German Chancellor) Angela Merkel is still struggling with the political blisters on her hands that she received from the radical reform pledges that she made at the Christian Democratic Union party conference in Leipzig and her support for the war in Iraq. As a result of this experience, she is more reserved and no longer rushes into things. Until now, if opinion polls are anything to judge by, this approach has served her well. She always takes positions that allow her to maintain a majority. However, in this global crisis, that is simply the wrong attitude. What is needed now is strategic, large-scale planning -- in the European spirit.
SPIEGEL: That would be the moment of calling for the self-declared great strategist, Joschka Fischer?
Fischer: This is not about me. But I do see a German government that is groping its way forward. Why aren't we presenting our own German proposals? Germany is failing as a leading power in Europe.
SPIEGEL: Does Germany have to pay more in order to lead Europe? Would an economic stimulus program also be a political investment in Germany's role?
Fischer: We do not have to pay in the sense that we have to pay off a debt. Generally, we expect the strong to do more than the weak, no doubt about it. Of course, we have to take great pains to ensure that budget problems, which other countries have brought upon themselves, are not simply dumped at our doorstep. But that is no reason to throw up our hands and say 'no' whenever our neighbors start talking about a European economic stimulus program. This requires a political approach.
SPIEGEL: But that would mean reassuming our old role as Europe's bankroller.
Fischer: That is precisely the national logic that alienates our neighbors. On top of that, it doesn't make economic sense. We are not the world's leading exporter because of our trade with China, but because we supply so many products to the EU internal market. Hardly any other country depends as much on Europe as Germany, and earns as much from Europe as we do, at all levels. The entire internal market is our market -- no longer just the German part.
SPIEGEL: Germans these days tend to perceive their neighbors as cheeky and greedy.
Fischer: There is a real danger here that the European project will run out of steam, that people will say: Okay, Europe is important, but now we've had enough. The German government promotes this type of thinking with its wait-and-see approach. At least the government now wants to introduce a second stimulus package. But why are they waiting so long?
SPIEGEL: The German chancellor says she's waiting because she first needs to know what US President-elect Barack Obama will do.
Fischer: We have known for a long time what he will do. Ever since the Democratic National Convention in Denver, we have known what is at the core of his intentions. I don't know who the German government sent there. I was there. Since then it has been clear to me. Obama is going to start off with a big bang. The week before last, if the figure was $500 billion -- today it will be over a trillion! The details, how much they will spend on education and how much on infrastructure, won't help us anyway because we, thank God, don't have their infrastructural problems. I suspect that the chancellor would simply like to act simultaneously with that shining light, Obama -- but is this tactical victory worth the price of going through three months of strife with Paris and London?
SPIEGEL: You have a reputation for seeing the gloomier side of things. Could it be that these inner-European problems will all be forgotten in three weeks?
Fischer: That would be nice, but I don't believe it. This brings us back to the issue of Germany's new orientation in Europe. Reaching a consensus within the EU appears to be too arduous for Berlin, in other words: Things are too complicated in Brussels, so let's go it alone.
SPIEGEL: Isn't that understandable? Europe's integration isn't moving forward.
Fischer: Of course it's arduous. But the alternative to a Europe with 27 members cannot be that Germany goes solo. I could very well imagine an avant-garde consisting of a number of countries that lead the way, but France absolutely needs to be one of them, whether we like it or not. Of course other countries have to take part, but working without or against France -- forget it.
SPIEGEL: Nevertheless, the indefatigable, vain Nicolas Sarkozy is undeniably a rather difficult partner.
Fischer: It has always been like that with French presidents. The relationship between Schröder and Chirac was horrendous for many years. The relationship Kohl/Chirac was also anything but good and harmonious. You don't have to love each other, you just have to achieve something together.
SPIEGEL: And if you don't like each other?
Fischer: Personal aggressions have no place in diplomacy. They are far too dangerous. You sometimes meet people who truly get on your nerves, and in extreme cases, if you are dealing with bloody dictatorships, they can even be revolting. In such cases, as the chancellor or foreign minister, you can't find enough soap to wash your hands after a handshake. That comes with the territory. But aggression is out of the question. It doesn't help when you read in German newspapers that the chancellor watches Louis-de-Funès films to understand Sarkozy better. What's the point?
SPIEGEL: Do German politicians have to be subservient to the French in order to lead Europe?
Fischer: Helmut Kohl said: "The German chancellor is best advised to bow twice before the French flag." I don't see it quite like that, but we are well advised to endeavor to understand a country which has become such an important partner. That is often difficult. But we are also certainly not an easy partner for the French. We have a totally different mentality. We tend to have diverging political cultures. This also engenders something positive and constructive, if you embrace it. That is something that Schmidt/Giscard d'Estaing and Kohl/Mitterrand succeeded in doing.
SPIEGEL: Germany is also at loggerheads with the British. The Financial Times compared Merkel's approach to Heinrich Brüning's belt-tightening policies during the economic crisis of the 1930s.
Fischer: We don't have to take every criticism literally. There are definitely exaggerations. But our government is acting like a bull in a china shop. Take for example Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück's tirade against Gordon Brown in Newsweek.
SPIEGEL: He accused him of "crass Keynesianism" and questioned the benefits of lowering their value-added tax.
Fischer: It reminds me of the Daily Telegraph interview, which led to an extremely inglorious affair.
SPIEGEL: In 1908 the newspaper published an interview with Kaiser Wilhelm II, where he read the riot act to the British. This sparked a crisis in German-British relations.
Fischer: Of course Steinbrück is not Wilhelm II. But it is exactly the same kind of brash "now I'm going to tell them what's what" -- a condescending tone.
SPIEGEL: A return to Wilhelmism?
Fischer: Oh no, those days are definitely over. But such interview attacks are bad foreign policy and don't fit with our role.
SPIEGEL: Steinbrück of course loves provocations.
Fischer: The finance minister has apparently not understood that one country is speaking to another here, one government to another. If you offend someone, not as a person, but rather in their political function, it has consequences.
SPIEGEL: Particularly as Steinbrück has made mistakes himself during this crisis.
Fischer: He stood before the German parliament and said: The financial crisis is a purely American problem. His coattails were on fire and he didn't even notice. He has pulled a couple of stunts during this crisis. There is absolutely no reason for him to stick his nose in the air.
SPIEGEL: What was his biggest mistake?
Fischer: Take Germany's bank rescue package -- truly a carefully crafted, top-notch product. In contrast to other countries, we have made the banks' participation voluntary -- and thrown in thumbscrews and hot irons for good measure. The banks of course have recoiled in horror because even on their boards of directors they are not particularly inclined toward masochism. I would have made the law mandatory.
SPIEGEL: Are Steinbrück's actions an indication that the Germans are focusing increasingly on their own national agenda?
Fischer: Yes, but not in the sense of something negative, something nationalistic. More like the French and the British.
SPIEGEL: A new normality?
Fischer: If you will. But there is a big difference. France and the UK are integrated into an extremely old foreign policy tradition. We are not. Take for example the Middle East. When you think of France, clear coordinates immediately spring to mind: Northern Africa, Lebanon and the Mediterranean region. It's a similar story with the British. However, if you want to define Germany's political role in the Middle East, aside from our special relationship with Israel, you are left only with foreign trade policy, or a big question mark.
SPIEGEL: In other words, we are weaker when it comes to foreign policy, so we are best advised to focus on Europe?
Fischer: German foreign policy only becomes stable and reliable if it is defined through the European prism. We had a break in our traditions with National Socialism and the Holocaust. So we cannot build on long historical experience. Things immediately lose clarity when we think that we can again define foreign policy more in line with our national agenda. We simply lack a firm foundation. Only defining Germany's identity within a European context has made it stable.
SPIEGEL: We cannot expect any help from the chancellor. She hasn't given any great speeches during the crisis, and hasn't shown direction. Do you see a lack of leadership here?
Fischer: This would actually be a golden opportunity for Merkel -- like the fall of the Berlin Wall for Helmut Kohl. He was an extremely ungifted speaker. But in a similar crisis he reacted with a 10-point plan for German unity. I have yet to see Merkel produce such a plan.
SPIEGEL: Why is that?
Fischer: Perhaps there is not enough pressure on the government to make every effort. That is my impression. This is an extremely negative aspect of the grand coalition.
SPIEGEL: Because there is no opposition?
Fischer: When Schröder and I were in power, when we went to sleep there was no way to know that we would still have a majority in the morning. It was constantly like that. You need an opposition, you need to feel their hot breath down your back. It makes you work. Merkel and Steinbrück are lacking this drive.
SPIEGEL: Europe is faltering due to a lack of German leadership. What consequences does this have for Europe?
Fischer: America will turn away from the Atlantic and toward the Pacific. China, Japan and South Korea are the main creditors of the US. If we are interested in having lively transatlantic relations, then we have to invest more. This requires a strong Europe which can serve as a partner to the US on the world stage. But if Europe ceases to be an effective power, the Americans will downgrade their relations with us.
SPIEGEL: At the same time, there are so many Germans who hope that Obama can save their world.
Fischer: This crisis will restructure the age of globalization in the 21st century. America will redetermine its role. Obama is bringing America together. America is reinventing itself in its worst crisis and growing together, while Europe is flying apart. Berlin is currently pursuing a course that will only weaken us.
SPIEGEL: What would Merkel have to do to become more European?
Fischer: It is important to coordinate your new stimulus program with the key partners in Europe and truly assume the responsibilities of leadership. This would be a second attempt, in any case. But it will come too late for 2009. That could be disastrous. From a political standpoint, though, I find it absolutely necessary that Germany once again assumes a leadership role.
SPIEGEL: Thank you for this interview, Mr. Fischer.
No faith in ourselves
So why do Greek institutions not function? And, to the extent that they do, why is there such public distrust in them? Greece has, after all, been an independent state since 1831. After nearly two centuries of freedom it is a bit sad to keep going back to the 400-year Ottoman occupation to explain the inefficiency and corruption of our public administration – and the individual selfishness that makes collective effort the exception rather than the rule. Admittedly, the past 200 years have not been easy, as they have included several wars of varying magnitude and consequence, foreign occupation, civil war, famine, mass emigration and mass immigration. Greece, like every other country, is in a constant state of flux. Yet, unlike many others, it seems unable to escape the burdens of its past.
When we talk about institutions we mean the government and political parties, the Church, the judiciary, the police (and military), the education system and other parts of the bureaucracy and state organizations that are supposed to serve the citizen. The news media and businesses follow, to a lesser extent. In all these sectors, we have been conditioned to expect the worst in all our dealings with those who wield any power. We know that the system of political favors and clientelism is just as prevalent now as it was since the establishment of modern Greece. Those with connections can exploit the power of the state to their own benefit; those without connections get their only revenge by voting for populist parties, following populist media and serving as a lynch mob when this suits others who are in power. The few benefit, the many muddle along and are kept in line mostly by their inordinate fascination with the lives of the richer and more famous.
We do not expect our institutions to work for us, irrespective of who we are. We have to fend for ourselves, against the modern equivalent of antiquity’s brutal and arbitrary gods. In our moral universe we combine ingrained fear and superstition with the need to benefit our friends and harm our enemies. In this, we never graduated to seeing the whole nation as our friend and the national interest as our own. Even Greece’s greatest moments – such as its heroic national effort in World War II – were an interlude, a break from endless internecine strife.
The period after the 1967-74 military dictatorship has been the most peaceful, the most prosperous the nation has known – thanks mostly to Greece’s membership in the EU and, earlier, NATO. Being a member of something bigger than Greece, though, created a sense that all good and all ill come from abroad. In other words, Greece does not need to get its house in order and create a modern, functioning economy and society – because it is not really on its own. Now that every country is struggling to face the challenges of a disoriented world, the Greeks are realizing how unprepared they are to fend for themselves as a nation on its own.
Aside from citizens complaining about the state of their institutions, those employed by these bodies are unhappy because they feel they are not paid enough nor appreciated sufficiently. So, like everyone else, they too have a negative attitude toward the work they do – in this case dealing with the public. This leads to rudeness, indifference and, sooner or later, to exploitation of the system for personal gain and, of course, to strikes and protests that serve only to worsen the lot of those who depend on them. Thus the vicious circle goes on. Everyone complains and no one dares fix anything.
In some cases – in the education, health and immigration systems, for example – one might argue that neglect is intentional: Let them suffer and they will seek their solutions elsewhere. In some cases (in immigration, for instance), this malevolence certainly applies. But in the rest? In whose interest is it for Greeks to be badly educated, rude, unhappy, selfish, reckless and, when not exploding in collective anger, desperately lonely? If Greece belongs to the Greeks, as it does, then it is time to realize that our institutions will only work when everyone – those within the system and those outside it – wants them to work and makes them work.
When we talk about institutions we mean the government and political parties, the Church, the judiciary, the police (and military), the education system and other parts of the bureaucracy and state organizations that are supposed to serve the citizen. The news media and businesses follow, to a lesser extent. In all these sectors, we have been conditioned to expect the worst in all our dealings with those who wield any power. We know that the system of political favors and clientelism is just as prevalent now as it was since the establishment of modern Greece. Those with connections can exploit the power of the state to their own benefit; those without connections get their only revenge by voting for populist parties, following populist media and serving as a lynch mob when this suits others who are in power. The few benefit, the many muddle along and are kept in line mostly by their inordinate fascination with the lives of the richer and more famous.
We do not expect our institutions to work for us, irrespective of who we are. We have to fend for ourselves, against the modern equivalent of antiquity’s brutal and arbitrary gods. In our moral universe we combine ingrained fear and superstition with the need to benefit our friends and harm our enemies. In this, we never graduated to seeing the whole nation as our friend and the national interest as our own. Even Greece’s greatest moments – such as its heroic national effort in World War II – were an interlude, a break from endless internecine strife.
The period after the 1967-74 military dictatorship has been the most peaceful, the most prosperous the nation has known – thanks mostly to Greece’s membership in the EU and, earlier, NATO. Being a member of something bigger than Greece, though, created a sense that all good and all ill come from abroad. In other words, Greece does not need to get its house in order and create a modern, functioning economy and society – because it is not really on its own. Now that every country is struggling to face the challenges of a disoriented world, the Greeks are realizing how unprepared they are to fend for themselves as a nation on its own.
Aside from citizens complaining about the state of their institutions, those employed by these bodies are unhappy because they feel they are not paid enough nor appreciated sufficiently. So, like everyone else, they too have a negative attitude toward the work they do – in this case dealing with the public. This leads to rudeness, indifference and, sooner or later, to exploitation of the system for personal gain and, of course, to strikes and protests that serve only to worsen the lot of those who depend on them. Thus the vicious circle goes on. Everyone complains and no one dares fix anything.
In some cases – in the education, health and immigration systems, for example – one might argue that neglect is intentional: Let them suffer and they will seek their solutions elsewhere. In some cases (in immigration, for instance), this malevolence certainly applies. But in the rest? In whose interest is it for Greeks to be badly educated, rude, unhappy, selfish, reckless and, when not exploding in collective anger, desperately lonely? If Greece belongs to the Greeks, as it does, then it is time to realize that our institutions will only work when everyone – those within the system and those outside it – wants them to work and makes them work.
Russia hosts gas exporters summit
Ministers from the world's major gas-exporting countries have gathered in Moscow to discuss closer co-operation.
Countries represented include Iran and Libya, as well as Russia - all members of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum.
The gathering has led to suggestions that they want to set up an organisation similar to the oil producers' cartel, Opec.
It will be closely watched by consumer nations who fear such a move could push up energy prices.
Fears over energy security mean a formal organisation of gas exporting countries would be deeply unpopular in Europe and the US.
It is feared that such an organisation could hold a monopoly on world supply and set prices to suit its own needs.
The meeting also comes amid growing concern that a long-running row between Russia and Ukraine could disrupt supplies to Europe this winter.
'Protecting producers'
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will attend the forum, while President Dmitry Medvedev will host a dinner for delegates at the Kremlin.
Russian officials said delegates would agree on a charter that would make the GECF a more formal organisation headquartered in St Petersburg.
Issues including possible future cuts in gas production and the effect of lower oil prices are also likely to be on the agenda, says the BBC's James Rodgers, in Moscow.
There are concerns among gas-importing nations that the GECF could eventually set quotas for gas in the same way as Opec does for oil.
But industry analysts say technical differences between the oil and gas markets make that unlikely for now.
At the weekend, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin said the forum was "not about any collusion".
"We are talking about protecting the interests of (gas) producing countries, about co-ordinating their work," he said.
Ukraine row
At the moment Russia remains locked in a dispute with Ukraine over non-payment of debts.
The Russian gas company, Gazprom, says Ukraine owes it $2bn (£1.4bn) and has warned it may cut off gas supplies next month if the dispute remains unresolved.
Russia supplies about a quarter of Europe's gas needs, and about 80% of Russian gas exports to Europe flow through Ukraine.
On Monday, Gazprom said it had warned European customers about possible disruption linked to the Ukraine dispute.
"It is not ruled out that the current position of the Ukrainian side and some of its actions could lead to disruptions in the stability of gas supplies to Europe," Gazprom Chairman and First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov said in a statement.
A similar dispute three years ago saw Russia briefly cutting gas deliveries to its neighbour, action that also affected supplies to several western European countries.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7796806.stm
Published: 2008/12/23 09:19:42 GMT
Countries represented include Iran and Libya, as well as Russia - all members of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum.
The gathering has led to suggestions that they want to set up an organisation similar to the oil producers' cartel, Opec.
It will be closely watched by consumer nations who fear such a move could push up energy prices.
Fears over energy security mean a formal organisation of gas exporting countries would be deeply unpopular in Europe and the US.
It is feared that such an organisation could hold a monopoly on world supply and set prices to suit its own needs.
The meeting also comes amid growing concern that a long-running row between Russia and Ukraine could disrupt supplies to Europe this winter.
'Protecting producers'
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will attend the forum, while President Dmitry Medvedev will host a dinner for delegates at the Kremlin.
Russian officials said delegates would agree on a charter that would make the GECF a more formal organisation headquartered in St Petersburg.
Issues including possible future cuts in gas production and the effect of lower oil prices are also likely to be on the agenda, says the BBC's James Rodgers, in Moscow.
There are concerns among gas-importing nations that the GECF could eventually set quotas for gas in the same way as Opec does for oil.
But industry analysts say technical differences between the oil and gas markets make that unlikely for now.
At the weekend, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin said the forum was "not about any collusion".
"We are talking about protecting the interests of (gas) producing countries, about co-ordinating their work," he said.
Ukraine row
At the moment Russia remains locked in a dispute with Ukraine over non-payment of debts.
The Russian gas company, Gazprom, says Ukraine owes it $2bn (£1.4bn) and has warned it may cut off gas supplies next month if the dispute remains unresolved.
Russia supplies about a quarter of Europe's gas needs, and about 80% of Russian gas exports to Europe flow through Ukraine.
On Monday, Gazprom said it had warned European customers about possible disruption linked to the Ukraine dispute.
"It is not ruled out that the current position of the Ukrainian side and some of its actions could lead to disruptions in the stability of gas supplies to Europe," Gazprom Chairman and First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov said in a statement.
A similar dispute three years ago saw Russia briefly cutting gas deliveries to its neighbour, action that also affected supplies to several western European countries.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7796806.stm
Published: 2008/12/23 09:19:42 GMT
Friday, December 19, 2008
Turkey and Europe: The Decisive Year Ahead
Europe Report N°197
15 December 2008
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Turkey is entering a critical year, in which its prospects for European Union (EU) membership are at make or break stage. Domestic crises over the past two years have slowed national reform, betrayed the promise of a new constitution and undermined the political will needed to pursue accession negotiations. Its leaders show scant sign of changing course, at least before the March 2009 local elections, and EU states are applying little pressure to reinvigorate reform. Both sides need to recall how much they have to gain from each other and move quickly on several fronts to break out of this downward spiral before one or the other breaks off the negotiations, which could then well prove impossible to start again.
The dangers to Turkey of this loss of EU-bound momentum are already evident: weak reform performance, new tensions between Turks and Kurds, polarisation in politics and the potential loss of the principal anchor of this decade’s economic miracle. For Europe, the cost would be longer term: less easy access to one of the biggest and fastest-growing nearby markets, likely new tensions over Cyprus and loss of leverage that real partnership with Turkey offers in helping to stabilise the Middle East, strengthen EU energy security and reach out to the Muslim world.
Paradoxically, the reform program went off course in 2005 concurrently with the launch of EU membership negotiations. A first reason was bitterness that the Republic of Cyprus was allowed to enter in 2004, even though it was Turkish Cypriots, with Ankara’s support, who voted for the reunification deal (the Annan Plan) backed by the UN, the U.S. and the EU itself, while the Greek Cypriots voted it down. Then the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – Justice and Development Party) government lost motivation as France and Germany worked to block Turkey’s EU ambitions. It was disappointed by the failure of the European Court of Human Rights to overturn the Constitutional Court’s rejection of a hard-fought amendment to allow women university students to wear headscarves. It was also distracted by need to concentrate on other Constitutional Court cases brought by the secularist establishment that narrowly failed to block the AKP’s choice of president and to ban the party but deepened the polarisation of domestic politics and institutions. Simultaneously an upsurge in attacks by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) focused attention increasingly on security issues.
Turkey now pledges to relaunch reforms with a new National Program for Adopting the EU Body of Law (the acquis communautaire). The draft text focuses on anti-corruption measures through regulation of state tenders and state incentives, judicial reform and more democratic laws governing political parties and elections. In particular, AKP officials mention lowering the 10 per cent national electoral threshold for a party to enter parliament; allowing 100 of that body’s 550 seats to be determined by nationwide proportional voting; and lengthening the short daily broadcasts in Kurdish and liberalising their content.
However, such plans are years late and fall short of EU expectations expressed in a 2007 Accession Partnership document and the European Commission’s annual progress reports. While the EU seeks many changes within a one- or two-year timeframe, Turkey envisages longer horizons. Instead of showing determined political commitment to the EU process, some top Turkish leaders have preferred to adopt an injured tone of complaint about Brussels’ demands and criticism. Above all, implementation has lagged: despite brave talk that it would replace the Copenhagen Criteria the EU has used since the early 1990s to assess a candidate’s status with its own “Ankara Criteria”, Turkey has passed only one sixth of a self-developed list of 119 legal reform measures announced in April 2007. Most disappointingly, the AKP has also dropped its prime promise in that year’s election campaign of a new, truly democratic constitution.
This slowdown comes just as Turkey’s initiatives to encourage openness and calm tensions in the region are showing how much it can do to advance EU foreign policy goals. Ankara has helped de-escalate crises over Iran’s nuclear policy and Lebanon; mediated proximity talks between Syria and Israel; and opened a new process of contacts with Armenia and cooperation with Iraqi Kurds. It is also supporting promising new talks on the reunification of Cyprus, where a settlement could provide a critical breakthrough for its relationship with the EU over the next year. Such initiatives helped win Turkey a two-year seat on the UN Security Council from January 2009. Conversely, however, a failure to live up to the commitment made in 2005 to open seaports and airports to Greek Cypriot traffic in 2009 would risk anti-membership EU states seeking to suspend Turkey’s accession negotiations.
EU member states should seize the chance to fix past mistakes over Cyprus by prioritising success in the new negotiations on the island and do more to encourage Turkey to revitalise its reform effort. EU politicians must stop pushing the qualifying bar ever higher for Turkey and restate that they stand by their promise of full membership once all criteria are fulfilled. For its part, Turkey should be less sensitive to slights and stop treating the EU as a monolithic bloc. It should take care to avoid the trap of self-exclusion, keep its foot in the still open door and, like the UK and Spain before it, refuse to take “no” for an answer.
RECOMMENDATIONS
To the Government of Turkey:
1. Recommit to EU-compliant reforms at the highest executive level; immediately approve and begin implementation of the draft National Program for Adopting the EU Body of Law; and re-establish trust between parliamentary parties and cooperation on the EU membership goal.
2. Sustain full support for the current round of talks on a Cyprus settlement and avoid navy intervention against oil exploration in waters claimed by Greece or the Republic of Cyprus.
3. Broaden the policy of inclusion towards the Turkish Kurds by both sustaining economic development plans in Kurdish-majority areas and developing wider cultural and language rights.
4. Extend freedoms and equal rights for members of all faiths in choice of religious instruction at school, access to seminaries and status of places of worship.
5. Sponsor and encourage an inclusive process of national discussion leading to the adoption of a new, less authoritarian civilian constitution and reform political party and electoral legislation to increase transparency and representation.
To the EU and Governments of EU Member States:
6. Reassert firmly and often that Turkey can achieve full membership of the EU when it has fulfilled all criteria; lift unofficial blocks on the screening and opening of negotiating chapters; and familiarise Turkish companies with the requirements, benefits and costs of complying with the EU body of law.
7. Take a greater, even-handed interest in Cyprus settlement talks; send senior officials to visit both community leaders in their offices on the island; underline willingness to give financial support for a solution; and consider delaying oil exploration in contested territorial waters while talks are under way.
8. Support and coordinate with recent Turkish foreign policy initiatives to de-escalate crises in the Caucasus and the Middle East.
9. Crack down more firmly on financing from Europe of the Kurdish militant group the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party); ensure that requests in relation to the arrest and extradition of suspects accused of terrorist attacks in Turkey are fairly dealt with.
10. Encourage Turkey to ensure that steps in support of more freedom of religion are taken not just for non-Muslim minorities but also involve a commitment to the rights of Muslims, including non-mainstream faiths like the Alevis.
Istanbul/Brussels, 15 December 2008
15 December 2008
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Turkey is entering a critical year, in which its prospects for European Union (EU) membership are at make or break stage. Domestic crises over the past two years have slowed national reform, betrayed the promise of a new constitution and undermined the political will needed to pursue accession negotiations. Its leaders show scant sign of changing course, at least before the March 2009 local elections, and EU states are applying little pressure to reinvigorate reform. Both sides need to recall how much they have to gain from each other and move quickly on several fronts to break out of this downward spiral before one or the other breaks off the negotiations, which could then well prove impossible to start again.
The dangers to Turkey of this loss of EU-bound momentum are already evident: weak reform performance, new tensions between Turks and Kurds, polarisation in politics and the potential loss of the principal anchor of this decade’s economic miracle. For Europe, the cost would be longer term: less easy access to one of the biggest and fastest-growing nearby markets, likely new tensions over Cyprus and loss of leverage that real partnership with Turkey offers in helping to stabilise the Middle East, strengthen EU energy security and reach out to the Muslim world.
Paradoxically, the reform program went off course in 2005 concurrently with the launch of EU membership negotiations. A first reason was bitterness that the Republic of Cyprus was allowed to enter in 2004, even though it was Turkish Cypriots, with Ankara’s support, who voted for the reunification deal (the Annan Plan) backed by the UN, the U.S. and the EU itself, while the Greek Cypriots voted it down. Then the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – Justice and Development Party) government lost motivation as France and Germany worked to block Turkey’s EU ambitions. It was disappointed by the failure of the European Court of Human Rights to overturn the Constitutional Court’s rejection of a hard-fought amendment to allow women university students to wear headscarves. It was also distracted by need to concentrate on other Constitutional Court cases brought by the secularist establishment that narrowly failed to block the AKP’s choice of president and to ban the party but deepened the polarisation of domestic politics and institutions. Simultaneously an upsurge in attacks by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) focused attention increasingly on security issues.
Turkey now pledges to relaunch reforms with a new National Program for Adopting the EU Body of Law (the acquis communautaire). The draft text focuses on anti-corruption measures through regulation of state tenders and state incentives, judicial reform and more democratic laws governing political parties and elections. In particular, AKP officials mention lowering the 10 per cent national electoral threshold for a party to enter parliament; allowing 100 of that body’s 550 seats to be determined by nationwide proportional voting; and lengthening the short daily broadcasts in Kurdish and liberalising their content.
However, such plans are years late and fall short of EU expectations expressed in a 2007 Accession Partnership document and the European Commission’s annual progress reports. While the EU seeks many changes within a one- or two-year timeframe, Turkey envisages longer horizons. Instead of showing determined political commitment to the EU process, some top Turkish leaders have preferred to adopt an injured tone of complaint about Brussels’ demands and criticism. Above all, implementation has lagged: despite brave talk that it would replace the Copenhagen Criteria the EU has used since the early 1990s to assess a candidate’s status with its own “Ankara Criteria”, Turkey has passed only one sixth of a self-developed list of 119 legal reform measures announced in April 2007. Most disappointingly, the AKP has also dropped its prime promise in that year’s election campaign of a new, truly democratic constitution.
This slowdown comes just as Turkey’s initiatives to encourage openness and calm tensions in the region are showing how much it can do to advance EU foreign policy goals. Ankara has helped de-escalate crises over Iran’s nuclear policy and Lebanon; mediated proximity talks between Syria and Israel; and opened a new process of contacts with Armenia and cooperation with Iraqi Kurds. It is also supporting promising new talks on the reunification of Cyprus, where a settlement could provide a critical breakthrough for its relationship with the EU over the next year. Such initiatives helped win Turkey a two-year seat on the UN Security Council from January 2009. Conversely, however, a failure to live up to the commitment made in 2005 to open seaports and airports to Greek Cypriot traffic in 2009 would risk anti-membership EU states seeking to suspend Turkey’s accession negotiations.
EU member states should seize the chance to fix past mistakes over Cyprus by prioritising success in the new negotiations on the island and do more to encourage Turkey to revitalise its reform effort. EU politicians must stop pushing the qualifying bar ever higher for Turkey and restate that they stand by their promise of full membership once all criteria are fulfilled. For its part, Turkey should be less sensitive to slights and stop treating the EU as a monolithic bloc. It should take care to avoid the trap of self-exclusion, keep its foot in the still open door and, like the UK and Spain before it, refuse to take “no” for an answer.
RECOMMENDATIONS
To the Government of Turkey:
1. Recommit to EU-compliant reforms at the highest executive level; immediately approve and begin implementation of the draft National Program for Adopting the EU Body of Law; and re-establish trust between parliamentary parties and cooperation on the EU membership goal.
2. Sustain full support for the current round of talks on a Cyprus settlement and avoid navy intervention against oil exploration in waters claimed by Greece or the Republic of Cyprus.
3. Broaden the policy of inclusion towards the Turkish Kurds by both sustaining economic development plans in Kurdish-majority areas and developing wider cultural and language rights.
4. Extend freedoms and equal rights for members of all faiths in choice of religious instruction at school, access to seminaries and status of places of worship.
5. Sponsor and encourage an inclusive process of national discussion leading to the adoption of a new, less authoritarian civilian constitution and reform political party and electoral legislation to increase transparency and representation.
To the EU and Governments of EU Member States:
6. Reassert firmly and often that Turkey can achieve full membership of the EU when it has fulfilled all criteria; lift unofficial blocks on the screening and opening of negotiating chapters; and familiarise Turkish companies with the requirements, benefits and costs of complying with the EU body of law.
7. Take a greater, even-handed interest in Cyprus settlement talks; send senior officials to visit both community leaders in their offices on the island; underline willingness to give financial support for a solution; and consider delaying oil exploration in contested territorial waters while talks are under way.
8. Support and coordinate with recent Turkish foreign policy initiatives to de-escalate crises in the Caucasus and the Middle East.
9. Crack down more firmly on financing from Europe of the Kurdish militant group the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party); ensure that requests in relation to the arrest and extradition of suspects accused of terrorist attacks in Turkey are fairly dealt with.
10. Encourage Turkey to ensure that steps in support of more freedom of religion are taken not just for non-Muslim minorities but also involve a commitment to the rights of Muslims, including non-mainstream faiths like the Alevis.
Istanbul/Brussels, 15 December 2008
Turkey hit by grim growth data
By Delphine Strauss in Ankara
Published: December 15 2008 20:55 | Last updated: December 15 2008 20:55
Turkey aims to close a financing deal with the International Monetary Fund at the start of January, the government confirmed on Monday, as the weakest quarterly growth in six years prompted analysts to forecast a technical recession.
Gross domestic product in the third quarter of 2008 grew just 0.5 per cent from the same quarter of 2007, official data showed, down from 2.3 per cent in the second quarter. That took year-on-year growth for the first nine months of 2008 to 3 per cent – less than half the previous five-year average.
Separate data showed unemployment hit double-digit figures in September, reaching 10.3 per cent compared with 9.3 per cent in the same month of 2007.
The figures belie ministers’ repeated assertion that Turkey will suffer only mild effects from the global crisis and underline the urgency of sealing an agreement with the IMF on a financing package. Investors are hoping Turkey will secure $20bn (€14bn, £13bn) of funding to help plug its financing gap.
“Today’s grim data will remind the authorities just how exposed the country is to the global credit crunch,” said Neil Shearing, at Capital Economics in London.
Since Turkey completed its $10bn, three-year IMF programme in May, the ruling Justice & Development party (AKP) has been reluctant to enter a scheme that would constrain spending before local elections in the spring.
But after weeks of wrangling, the government has accepted it will have to revisit budget plans based on a forecast of 4 per cent annual GDP growth and on revenue assumptions the IMF considers to be wildly optimistic.
The Treasury said on Monday that it had invited an IMF mission to visit Ankara in January. An IMF statement confirmed there had been “considerable progress” in technical discussions that could lead to a programme.
The negotiations in January will determine how much funding Turkey can access and how it balances the budget – although the IMF will stress that productive investments should be postponed rather than cancelled.
There is no agreement yet on the growth assumption that will underpin the programme. But analysts noted on Monday that quarter-on-quarter growth was negative and several predicted the economy would shrink at least until the second quarter of 2009 – meeting one definition of a technical recession.
“A sharp economic downturn and a further currency correction now look almost inevitable,” said Ahmet Akarli, economist at Goldman Sachs, noting that political problems could resurface as recession would hit the AKP’s core supporters among the urban poor and small businesses.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Published: December 15 2008 20:55 | Last updated: December 15 2008 20:55
Turkey aims to close a financing deal with the International Monetary Fund at the start of January, the government confirmed on Monday, as the weakest quarterly growth in six years prompted analysts to forecast a technical recession.
Gross domestic product in the third quarter of 2008 grew just 0.5 per cent from the same quarter of 2007, official data showed, down from 2.3 per cent in the second quarter. That took year-on-year growth for the first nine months of 2008 to 3 per cent – less than half the previous five-year average.
Separate data showed unemployment hit double-digit figures in September, reaching 10.3 per cent compared with 9.3 per cent in the same month of 2007.
The figures belie ministers’ repeated assertion that Turkey will suffer only mild effects from the global crisis and underline the urgency of sealing an agreement with the IMF on a financing package. Investors are hoping Turkey will secure $20bn (€14bn, £13bn) of funding to help plug its financing gap.
“Today’s grim data will remind the authorities just how exposed the country is to the global credit crunch,” said Neil Shearing, at Capital Economics in London.
Since Turkey completed its $10bn, three-year IMF programme in May, the ruling Justice & Development party (AKP) has been reluctant to enter a scheme that would constrain spending before local elections in the spring.
But after weeks of wrangling, the government has accepted it will have to revisit budget plans based on a forecast of 4 per cent annual GDP growth and on revenue assumptions the IMF considers to be wildly optimistic.
The Treasury said on Monday that it had invited an IMF mission to visit Ankara in January. An IMF statement confirmed there had been “considerable progress” in technical discussions that could lead to a programme.
The negotiations in January will determine how much funding Turkey can access and how it balances the budget – although the IMF will stress that productive investments should be postponed rather than cancelled.
There is no agreement yet on the growth assumption that will underpin the programme. But analysts noted on Monday that quarter-on-quarter growth was negative and several predicted the economy would shrink at least until the second quarter of 2009 – meeting one definition of a technical recession.
“A sharp economic downturn and a further currency correction now look almost inevitable,” said Ahmet Akarli, economist at Goldman Sachs, noting that political problems could resurface as recession would hit the AKP’s core supporters among the urban poor and small businesses.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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