David L. Stern covers the former Soviet Union and the Black Sea region for GlobalPost, where this article originally ran.

KIEV, Ukraine  — Was Kyrgyzstan’s decision last week not to evict American forces from a strategic air base the result of the “Obama Effect” — President Barack Obama’s reputed benign influence on how other nations now view the United States — or evidence of the new president’s hardball negotiating tactics?

The answer holds implications for the American leader’s first meeting with Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, when he is in Moscow July 6 to 8. Depending on whether the Kyrgyz reversal was made with or without the Kremlin’s blessing, the base issue could be a sign of how U.S.-Russian relations will develop over the next four years.

Bishkek announced that an arrangement was reached last week to allow U.S. forces to remain at Manas air base, where they staff a major re-fueling and transport hub for operations in nearby Afghanistan. Parliament, in which all but a few seats are occupied by President Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s ruling party, quickly ratified the new agreement.

Rumors of a deal had been swirling around Washington and Bishkek for more than a month, but U.S. and Kyrgyz officials maintained a strict silence that allowed no official confirmation of the back-channel negotiations. Only three weeks ago, Foreign Minister Kadyrbek Sarbayev said that the decision to eject the Americans by August still stood.

Under the new agreement, Washington’s annual rent for using Manas will be upped from $17.5 million to $60 million. In addition, the U.S. will pay some $36 million to renovate Manas International Airport, where the base is located, just outside the capital, and tens of millions more to combat drug trafficking and terrorism, and to promote economic growth. Some news reports placed the total amount of the new package at about $180 million per year. When the U.S. first opened Manas in 2001, its rent was just $2 million.

It is still unclear, however, if the base’s core functions will in any way change. A Russian foreign ministry statement indicated that cargo through Kyrgyzstan would be limited to “non-lethal” goods. Kyrgyz and U.S. officials made no mention of this, however.

Last year more than 6,300 flights took off from the base, while some 189,000 troops passed through and more than 200 million pounds of fuel were used.

But a question remains: Namely, were the Russians aware of the negotiations, or were they kept out of the loop?

The Kremlin appeared to have a vested interest in Bishkek’s original action. President Bakiev made his announcement that he was evicting the Americans just after talks in Moscow where the Russians had promised the Kyrgyz some $2 billion in aid. Many observers believed Russia, which runs an air base of its own in Kyrgyzstan, used financial enticements to achieve its long-stated goal of closing Manas, though both sides denied this.

Moscow immediately put a positive spin on the U-turn. President Medvedev said that he welcomed the decision, while the Russian foreign ministry said Kyrgyzstan was acting in its rights as a “sovereign nation.”

Not everybody was so sanguine, however. An unnamed senior Russian diplomat told Russia’s Kommersant newspaper that the Kyrgyz had played a “dirty trick” and Moscow would carry out an “adequate response.”

Konstantin Zatulin, a Duma deputy with close ties to the Kremlin and foreign policy establishment, nevertheless believes that Moscow did give its blessing to the negotiations. “Obama’s arrival played a substantive, important role <in the Kremlin’s position>. He created the ground for a new Russian-American relationship.”

Others do not doubt that some Russian officials are dissatisfied, but in the end their opinions matter little. “We have only two ‘senior diplomats’ — Putin and Medvedev,” said Aleksei Malashenko, a Eurasia expert at the Carnegie Center in Moscow, referring to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

If the Russians were on board, some experts wonder if they received anything for their acquiescence — an American concession to abandon an anti-missile defense shield in Eastern Europe, for example. This, however, would be a risky move, as it could be interpreted as a betrayal of the two countries that pushed for the shield, Poland and the Czech Republic.

But others say that the Russians were in fact not informed until the last minute. This raises the question of what measures they will take next. Just prior to the decision to kick the Americans out, Kyrgyzstan experienced a debilitating cyber-attack which some experts subscribed to the Kremlin.

On the other hand, the Americans may have simply handed the Russians a fait accompli, which Moscow, on the eve of its first summit with the new president, will have to accept.

“My sense is that they are as mad as hell,” said Stephen Blank, a professor of national securities studies at the U.S. Army War College. “They thought they had it locked up and we beat them.”

For full article on GlobalPost, click here.

-Tim Cocks is a Reuters correspondent based in Baghdad.-

For the U.S. military, it's the million dollar question -- or rather the $687 billion question, according to a recent estimate of the Iraq war's total cost. Is Iraq now stable enough for them to take a permanent back seat?

The short answer is no one knows. The only way they were ever going to find out was to leave Iraq's own forces to it and hope the whole thing doesn't come tumbling down. They started doing that on Tuesday when they pulled out of Iraqi cities.

It's been an encouraging start. A big bomb in Kirkuk cast a shadow over Iraq's celebrations of its new-found sovereignty, but since then things have been relatively quiet. Militants might try to take advantage by stepping up attacks, but for the moment they seem content with celebrating a "victory" over the occupation -- and setting off the odd bomb, of course.

The United States' coalition partners have for the most part long since departed. British forces handed over southern Iraq to the Americans in April, but since 2007 their 4,000 odd troops left had been largely confined to Basra airport anyway.

And one thing the crystal ball gazers have learned about Iraq's hugely complicated, many-sided conflict is that the past is rarely a reliable guide to the future.

When optimists thought Iraq was poised to enjoy democracy after the fall of Saddam, it spiralled into years of bloody insurgency and sectarian killing. Later, just when it seemed all hope was lost and Iraq would have to be partitioned, things starting getting dramatically better.

The idea that Iraqi forces aren't ready to take on the country's security usually centre on claims that they are untested, not well trained or infiltrated with militiamen.

But few deny they look more professional and integrated now than anyone would have thought possible two years ago. They might still be full of militiamen, but those militiamen are no longer kidnapping or killing political rivals, as in the past.

And there are clearly some things the Iraqis do better. For one thing, they know the language and understand the culture.

When I was on a U.S. patrol in Iraq's troubled Diyala province, a U.S. unit nearby accidentallly shot and wounded a civilian in Jalawla town, forcing them to vacate it because a public outcry would put other soldiers at risk of attack.

What they had done is fire a warning shot at a vehicle after the driver failed to heed a command -- in English -- to stay back. But few Iraqis in rural areas speak basic English.

The real test will be when U.S. pulls all combat forces out, under President Barack Obama's orders, by September next year.

Many Iraqis I've spoken too seem convinced the insurgents are just biding their time, sharpening their knives and stockpiling explosives waiting to reignite the conflict.

But whether or not Iraq can look after itself, at some point the Americans have to say: Look, we've done our best to get the lid back on Pandora's Box. Now it's over to you.

“One swan, two swans, three swans…”

Queen Elizabeth is having her swans counted. The annual Swan Upping, a tradition dating to the 12th century involving a census of swans on the River Thames, is conducted by the queen’s official Swan Marker. The process involves the Swan Marker rowing up the Thames for five days with the Swan Warden in traditional skiffs while wearing special scarlet uniforms and counting, weighing and measuring swans and cygnets.

Climate change shrinks Scotland’s wild sheep

Wild sheep on a remote Scottish island are shrinking, and scientists say global warming is to blame. The Soay sheep should be getting bigger, according to classical evolutionary theory, but they are 5 percent smaller than 25 years ago.

Weary Bulgarians hope ex-bodyguard can clear graft

Ever since communism collapsed 20 years ago, Bulgarians have been waiting for a savior to rid the country of its plagues: corruption, nepotism and impunity for the powerful of the day. Days before the parliamentary election, hopes were pinned on a bodyguard-turned-politician with cropped hair, a karate black belt and the epaulettes of a general.

Moon-lovers remember Apollo with radio chats

Radio hams and amateur astronomers around the world spent the weekend bouncing radio conversations off the Moon in commemoration of the Apollo 11 landings 40 years ago. They had some clear and extensive conversations, but they had to be patient — it takes around 2.5 seconds for a radio signal to reach the Moon and bounce back to another part of the Earth, so it took about five seconds to get a reply.

Venice gets its first woman gondolier

Nine centuries of male monopoly on the canals of Venice ended when the first woman passed the grueling test to become a trainee gondolier. Giorgia Boscolo, the 23-year-old daughter of a gondolier, got the lowest points for one of the 22 places available, and she is now authorized to take passengers on her gondola while completing training.

Soviet nuclear tests still haunt Kazakhs

A flash of blinding light on the horizon, a deafening roar across the steppe and a nuclear mushroom cloud in the sky. The image still haunts Zheyembek Abishev, who was a child when the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear bomb near his village in Kazakhstan where generations of his ancestors grazed horses. “All the kids had to lie face down in the ditches during those explosions to keep safe. But I watched anyway,” he recalls.

Borneo projet aims to yield lessons on saving forests

Within a vast deforested area on Borneo island, Australia and Indonesia hope to turn an ecological disaster into a lesson on how to help save tropical forests and fight climate change. Half the area has been cleared and half is still forested but under threat unless alternative livelihoods are found for the 20,000 people living in and around the area.

Stoned wallabies make Australian crop circles

The mystery of crop circles in poppy fields in Australia’s southern island state of Tasmania has been solved — stoned wallabies are eating the poppy heads and hopping around in circles. Poppy producer Tasmanian Alkaloids said livestock that ate the poppies were known to “act weird” — including deer and sheep in the state’s highlands.

Pressured by sex workers, Taiwan OKs prostitution

Taiwan began a process of legalizing prostitution, and in six months, it will stop punishing sex workers after prostitutes successfully campaigned to be given the same protection as their clients. Certain locations in Taiwan will be approved for prostitution. “It’s like fishing,” a government spokesman said. “The activity may be legal, but in some places you can’t do it.”

Cuba is “rolling museum” of vintage U.S. cars

The cars predate communist Cuba’s 1959 revolution. They hark back to a time when Detroit’s Big Three automakers were the envy of the world and a symbol of American economic power. Iron-clad chassis, scooped body and once lavishly appointed interior often seem to be the only original parts of the cars built during the heyday of General Motors Corp, Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler, that are seen lumbering down Cuba’s roads today.

Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was seized by the military, bundled onto a plane in his pajamas and flown out of the country. The people who took over the country last Sunday say it was not a coup.

The interim government, led by Congress speaker Roberto Micheletti, argue that Zelaya’s ouster was legal as it was ordered by the Supreme Court after the president had tried to extend his four-year term in office illegally. 
 
They say he was acting unconstitutionally and had to be removed. 
 
The rest of the world seems to disagree. From U.S. President Barack Obama to arch-U.S. rival Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, world leaders have condemned Zelaya’s removal and used the term “coup.”
 
In the days before the coup, opposition leaders said they planned to impeach Zelaya over his plan to hold an unofficial public survey to gauge support for letting presidents run for re-election beyond the current one four-year term. They said a congressional committee set up to investigate Zelaya found he had violated the Central American nation’s laws and would ask Congress to declare him unfit to rule. 
 
Does one unconstitutional act justify another? In a democracy, is it ever justified for soldiers to seize a president and spirit him out of the country? Does the fact that Congress quickly elected a successor, who will serve only until presidential elections in November, make any difference?

 
Defining the nature of the “coup” has been troubling lawyers at the U.S. State Department.
 
By law, no U.S. aid — other than for the promotion of democracy — may be given to a nation “whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree.” 
 
Two U.S. officials said the legal determination of this was complex despite the fact that Zelaya was grabbed by the military and put on a plane to Costa Rica in his pajamas. 
 
“The military moved against the president. They removed him from his home and they expelled him from the country. So the military participated in a coup,” said a senior U.S. official. 
     
“However, the transfer of leadership was not a military action. The transfer of leadership was done by the Honduran Congress and therefore the coup, while it had a military component … is a larger event,” he added. 
 
Zelaya was unpopular with many in Honduras, particularly the country’s wealthier conservative elite, for his alliance with Chavez. His popularity was down to 30 percent. 
 
Many Hondurans struggle to understand why foreign leaders, from Obama to most of Latin America’s presidents, have backed Zelaya. 
 
“They have only listened to (Zelaya) abroad, they haven’t listened to the population. But that doesn’t matter. We will continue alone,” said Adela Guevara, a hotel worker.  
 
Tell us what you think. When is a coup not a coup?

(Pictures in Honduras by REUTERS/Edgard Garrido. Pictures show: Soldiers crawling through a hole in the fence to enter the presidential residency; members of Congress praying before Roberto Micheletti is sworn in as interim president; Zelaya (L) being welcomed by Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez (R) and Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega (C) after his arrival in Nicaragua June 29, 2009. )

Foreign Policy magazine has just released its 2009 list of failing states or those at risk of failure and South Asia makes for sobering reading.

All of India's neighbours, except for tiny Bhutan, figure in the list of top 25 states that are faltering, although their rankings have improved marginally over the previous year.

So Afghanistan remains at number 7 in the table of failing states topped by Somalia. Pakistan is ranked 10th, just marginally better than its 9th position in last year's table which perhaps reflects the belief that the state has begun to fight back the militants who threaten its existence.

(The higher you are on this list, based on 12 indicators measuring state cohesion and performance, the closer you are to failure)

You can see the full report of The Failed States Index 2009 here.

But just to distil it, here are the rankings for South Asian nations as they changed over the past year. Myanmar is ranked 13th which is what it was in 2008.

Bangladesh has moved down to 19th position from 12th the previous year, reflecting perhaps the return of an elected civilian government there.  But it remains at risk and as a Reuters analysis here points out there is a tendency to neglect the militant threat in Bangladesh, with all the attention focused on the violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Sri Lanka takes the 22nd spot and Nepal 25rd, both slightly less at risk this year than in 2008 but still very much in the world's top 25 states.

And India? Foreign Policy puts it at 87th position, a healthy score for a country that some thought wouldn't survive especially during the Sikh revolt of the 1980s, and other insurgencies in that period.

Giant neighbour China, according to the editors of the magazine, is more at risk with a score of 57.

[Photo of a U.S. Marine in southern Afghanistan]

By Jacob Comenetz

Less than three months before Germany’s election, Chancellor Angela Merkel has become the unlikely subject of a new comic book.

Journalist Miriam Hollstein teamed up with political cartoonist Heiko Sakurai to tell the story, with pictures and speech bubbles, of  ”How Angie became our chancellor”, as the 64-page book is subtitled.

The authors say it is the first comic book devoted to the German chancellor in a country that lacks a tradition of comics and has a reputation for seriousness.

“Germans are ready for this kind of book,” said artist Sakurai, pointing out that the book is not only about entertainment. “Our comic is serious too.”

It tells the story of Merkel’s rapid rise to the top position in German politics despite what critics say is her lack of charisma. Along the way, she outfoxes numerous male opponents who attempt to stunt her progress.

A key turning point portrayed in the book came in January 2002 when Merkel made a secret deal with her conservative rival Edmund Stoiber, then the premier of the southern state of Bavaria who became the conservative candidate for chancellor that year. She promised to support his candidacy in exchange for his supporting her bid to become the head of the party’s parliamentary group.

“It was a daredevil move,” said Hollstein, adding it allowed her to get the upper hand in her party after Stoiber lost the federal election.

A scene from Merkel’s childhood reveals much about her cautious leadership style. She stands on a high diving board as two boys look on. “She’s been there for 45 minutes,” says one.

“Coward, she’ll never jump,” says the other as they turn to walk away.

At that moment, she jumps. And the caption reads, “Even back then one shouldn’t have underestimated her.” 

Sakurai, who has drawn Merkel hundreds of times for German newspapers, said while many aspects of her appearance had changed over time, he had always drawn her eyes in the same way. “This dull look, with the lids half shut, means we can’t look into her soul,” he said. “What does this woman actually want? Where is she going? We don’t really know.”

In the final scene, as her formal rivals Stoiber and former Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder drink themselves into a stupor while watching the returns come in on election night 2009, Merkel gets the final word.

“Cheers! Here’s to the old bird losing!” says Schroeder. Merkel then appears: “You boys only belong to the past, I, however, have gone down in HISTORY!”

But the book leaves open who will win in September’s election.

 The Egyptian authorities were taking no chances. There were at least as many vehicles stuffed full of Egyptian police and security parked near the downtown Cairo square as there were individuals gathered to demonstrate.

 There were more than a dozen big trucks and pick-up vans lined along roads leading off Talaat Harb square.

 The handful of demonstrators were so heavily outnumbered by baton-wielding security that the gathering to mark the death of Neda, a woman killed during demonstrations over a disputed presidential election in Iran and now a symbol of that protest, never really began.

 One member of liberal opposition Ghad party, which had called for the show of support, was bundled into a security truck when she started chanting slogans backing Ayman Nour, who ran for Ghad and lost against President Hosni Mubarak in 2005.

 Three more suffered the same fate, party members said. All were released a few hours later.

 ”The people of Iran were silent before (the election on) June 12 … The street had no voice,” said Nour, addressing a group of his supporters later in his office above the square from which signs were draped with “Ghad: Farewell Neda.”

  “(I say) to the regime in Egypt, don’t be fooled by the appearance of calm,” he said, comparing the streets of Cairo, capital of the Arab world’s most populous country, with Tehran.

 But is there really a comparison to be made?

 Egypt, like Iran, boasts of having a revolution that toppled its monarchy. But Egypt’s 1952 overthrow was led by a group of military officers with Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser in their rank. Most Egyptians heard about the revolution from the radio.

 In Iran, the 1979 revolution followed months of demonstrations that brought thousands of Iranians onto the streets as the cycle of protester deaths and mourning marches against the shah gathered momentum. Many Iranians were inspired by the words of the exiled cleric, soon to become founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. But many others were leftists and communists with a different agenda for change.

 Iran’s top authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who inherited Khomeini’s mantle, has the powers of any autocrat in the Middle East or elsewhere. But beneath him are a multiplicity of political forces, all vying to sway political debate albeit, usually, within boundaries set by Iran’s system
of clerical rule.

 In quieter times in Tehran, analysts would point out that Khamenei sought a consensus, part of a political balancing act, even if he tended to side with more conservative factions. Divisions have now emerged in the Iranian political establishment and Khamenei has openly taken sides. But there were ready-made sides to take inside the fractured polity of the Islamic Republic.

 In Egypt, political debate is little more than a monologue. Mubarak contested his first multi-candidate election in 2005, and Nour came a very distant second. The ruling National Democratic Party has a crushing majority in parliament. Other political parties are weak and fragile. The biggest opposition bloc — the Muslim Brotherhood — with a fifth of parliament’s seats is officially banned, regularly has activists detained and only won seats in the lower house by fielding candidates as
independents.

 Nour, jailed until last year on what he says were politically motivated charges, alluded to the differences by mentioning the internal debate in Iran between reform-minded politicians and conservatives, even before ordinary Iranians took to the streets. He also pointed to the presidency.

 ”What happened in Iran does not mean it is the worst. In the past 30 years, Iran has had (several) presidents,” Nour said, without needing to explain to his listeners that Egypt has had just one for the past three decades.

 Around 2005, a pro-democracy movement in Egypt gathered some modest momentum. But even at its height, it rarely managed to draw more than several hundred protesters onto the street.

 Again, the security forces were always out in droves.

 If anything brought Egyptians out in protest in recent decades, it was bread not politics. In 1977, bread riots rattled the then government of President Anwar Sadat, later assassinated by Islamists. Surging prices and shortages of subsidised bread in 2008 also sparked protests that sometimes turned violent. The government responded by hiking some state wages but a fifth of Egypt’s 77 million people still live in dire poverty.

 So the silence now on Egypt’s streets may well be a very different calm to the one that preceded the storm that was unleashed after Iran’s presidential vote. Nour’s comparison may find supporters but it presents plenty of questions.

Has German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck finally said what many world leaders think but are afraid to say? That the British government won’t sign up to meaningful reform of financial markets because it is too worried about what it would mean for the country’s most famous cash cow, the City of London.

The City, which accounts for around 35 percent of global foreign exchange turnover, has been a popular target for critics of capitalism for years. But it has rarely been singled out so bluntly as a problem by one of Britain’s close allies.

Even for a man not known for holding his tongue, Steinbrueck’s remark on Wednesday that Downing Street was impeding reform because it had “practically aligned” its interests with the City, was unusually undiplomatic. Just days before global leaders meet at a Group of Eight summit in Italy, Steinbrueck suggested the British government was plotting a “restoration” of the pre-crisis order to protect its own interests. The United States, by contrast, was now open to reform, he said.

Rather than attempting to smooth ruffled feathers when she addressed parliament on Thursday, Chancellor Angela Merkel picked up the thread, saying she would not tolerate efforts to stall reform at the G8 summit, though she did not name Britain.

Steinbrueck’s comments generated a strong response on German websites. Though he belongs to the centre-left Social Democrats, many readers of conservative daily Die Welt wrote in to praise him. “Finally the truth”, “genius” and “backbone” were some of the remarks his stance provoked. Across the channel, the most popular reader’s comment posted online in an article by Eurosceptic British newspaper the Daily Mail also backed the 62-year-old. “I’m with the German finance minister,” it begins.

Whether one agrees with his approach or not, Steinbrueck knows he is not talking into a vacuum. Large swathes of the commentariat believe not enough has been done to stabilise financial markets over the long term. Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, wrote on Wednesday that without radical changes, another banking crisis is inevitable.

PHOTO: German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck addresses a news conference in Berlin, May 13, 2009. Steinbrueck said on Wednesday Germany’s interbank lending sector was still suffering from weak confidence. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

A lush green residential area in the south of Stockholm embodies Sweden’s determination to lead from the front in its efforts to combat climate change during its presidency of the European Union.

A decade ago, Hammarby Sjostad was a run-down industrial area with pollution problems. Today it is an environmentally friendly suburb which exemplifies the battle against climate change – one of Sweden’s priorities in its six-month presidency which began on Wednesday.

By 2018, Hammarby Sjostad will have almost 11,000 residential homes. Many are already built and 15,000 people already live in the tree-lined area next to a lake.

Most of the building materials are environmentally friendly, many have solar panels to heat water, and 50 percent of electricity and heat consumption comes from recycled organic and combustible waste. Waste water is also used in the heating system.

“Everything is recycled. All waste is regarded as useful material in one way or another,” architect Bjorn Cederquist said during a visit to Hammarby Sjostad.  

An innovative waste disposal system uses vacuum suction to send rubbish at high speed through underground pipes to a disposal unit on the edge of the town. This drastically reduces pollution because the garbage trucks that eventually take the rubbish away spend little time in the town itself and cover far less ground.

Biogas, an environmentally friendly fuel, is extracted from the digestion of sewage sludge from a waste treatment plant and used in buses, cars and cookers.

Hammary Sjostad is at the forefront of efforts to clean up the environment and Stockholm, where  people can be seen fishing in the city centre, plans to be free of fossil fuel by 2030.

“This is the achievement of a struggle for decades. When I was a kid, you could not swim in the centre of Stockholm,” said Gunnar Soderholm, director of Stockholm’s environment and health administration.

Sweden will need such determination in its efforts to find a common EU position for global climate change talks in Copenhagen in December which are intended to secure an agreement on a new global deal to limit harmful emissions.

 “The main challenge of our generation is climate change and we will do everything in our power to achieve a climate change agreement in December,” Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt told a news conference on taking over the EU presidency from the Czech Republic on Wednesday. 

He said Sweden had cut emissions by 10 percent since 1990 but still managed to increase economic growth by about 50 percent in that time, helped by a carbon tax for industry which puts about 20 euro cents on the price of a litre of petrol.

The problem will be getting others to follow suit. The EU has led the way but developing countries want financial assistance from wealthy countries to help them combat climate change and cut emissions. Some of the poorer EU member states are wary of an agreement to share the burden of helping poor countries.

The EU has no power to impose CO2 taxes on member states and Sweden acknowledges it faces a hard task winning others over.

Reinfeldt said he was encouraged by recent signs that the United States is more ready to tackle climate change under President Barack Obama and hopes to win China’s backing for a deal to limit rises in global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius. But Japan, he said, needed to do more to battle climate change.

Reinfeldt said he would address climate changes issues in the summits he will take part in over the six months with countries including the United States, Russia, China, Ukraine, China, Brazil, India and South Africa.

“We need global answers to a global problem,” he said. 

    Hasankeyf’s villagers say the beauty of their home is most  striking at first-light or at sundown, when the historic stone  ruins are reflected crisply in the waters of the river Tigris.

     This is a remote, sparsely populated and, for most of the  year, scorchingly hot corner of southeast Anatolia, where people  live in poverty and seclusion. Over the years, their anger at  the construction of a huge dam which will see Hasankeyf subsumed  by flood waters has turned into sad resignation and quiet  despair.

     Labelled “doomed” in tourist guidebooks, Hasankeyf manages  to attract a certain number of earnest-minded visitors, eager to  see the traces of successive ancient civilizations. Locals sell  them what they can, while they can — beautiful goat-wool rugs or hand-carved wooden implements — for a pitifully small sum.

      The Ilisu dam’s foreign backers look to have developed cold  feet, stating the dam has failed to meet environmental and  cultural safeguards and have ordered suspension of work while  matters are investigated. But any withdrawal of their support is  unlikely to prevent energy-hungry Turkey from constructing the  dam and a power plant — part of its sweeping development plan  for the laggard south-east.

     Turkey vowed on Wednesday work would resume next week.

     Opposition to the dam stretches far beyond Anatolia.  Environmentalists argue colossal dam projects such as Ilisu are  a relic of the 1970s and have never proven their worth, causing  catastrophic damage to the natural environment and harming the  ecosystems of downstream states.

     Others question the economic principles of the project —  creating enormous power capacity in an area where there is  little or no industry and to where firms may be reluctant to  relocate.

     The government has pledged to reconstruct the scattered  villages which must make way for the water, and to transport  historical Hasankeyf, once used by the Romans to ward off the  Persians, to another suitable spot.

     In a country dotted with spectacular ancient sites and where  so many civilizations have left their mark, the fight to save  historical ruins in-situ can often be a fruitless one.

     Archaeologists raced against the clock to excavate the  historical mosaics of Zeugma, also in eastern Turkey, in 2000  before it disappeared under flood waters.

     Gazing at the tall stone supports of Hasankeyf’s once-mighty  bridge, the fragile stone minaret of its medieval mosque and the  intricate warren of tombs and caves which clings to the cliffs above the river, it is difficult to imagine how this could be recreated anywhere else.