Global News Journal

British royalty steps into Central Asia energy diplomacy

Britain’s Prince Andrew stepped into Central Asia energy diplomacy this week, touring the vast former Soviet region and holding top-level talks on gas supplies in remote Turkmenistan.

Western envoys have flocked to Central Asia over past years, hoping to grab a share of its abundant energy reserves – a worrisome trend for Russia which sees the mainly Muslim region as part of its traditional sphere of interest.

Turkmenistan, a long-isolated Caspian nation, has been of particular interest since its new president came to power in 2006 promising to open its doors to foreign investors.

Prince Andrew – who doubles as Britain’s special representative for international trade and investment – sat down for talks with President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov to discuss expanding energy supplies to Europe.

Although little came out of the closed-door meeting, his visit symbolised growing Western interest in forging closer energy relations with Central Asia’s biggest gas exporter.

“The president expressed readiness to look into any proposals with this regard (expanding gas shipments) and noted that the energy potential of the country can allow for virtually any volumes of gas shipments,” the state news agency Turkmen Khabarlary reported.

But Turkmenistan’s ambitions to diversify shipments away from Russia remain under question as Moscow still controls, as in Soviet times, its gas export network. Turkmenistan says its reserves exceed 20 trillion cubic metres — way above the 2.9 tcm estimated by BP.

Euphoria at Saddam’s fall becomes a sigh

I still remember what my father-in-law told me that fateful day in 2003, as we sat riveted by the sight of American soldiers on television pulling down the iconic statue of Saddam Hussein from its pedestal in a Baghdad square.

My father-in-law, whose brother had fled Iraq after being jailed for a few days after Baathists took the power in 1969 and who was never a Saddam supporter, was reflective.

“The only thing I fear is that a day will come in which we will regret Saddam’s fall,” he said.

During a visit a couple of months ago to Jordan, where my children, my wife and her parents have lived in self-exile for almost two years, I asked my father-in-law whether he had come to regret the end of that era.

“Unfortunately, yes,” he said, his voice filled with disappointment. Since then, I haven’t been able to drive his response from my mind.

For five years, I have been asking myself the same question: how did it come to be that Iraqis like my father-in-law, driven to live as an illegal immigrant outside Iraq, rue Saddam’s fall?

I can say without hesitation that many Iraqis share my father-in-law’s feelings. Not because they supported Saddam, although there are many who still do, but because the hopes of a better life that were born in April 2003 have been crushed.

Bailing out Russian oligarchs

Posted by Guy Faulconbridge

Not all of Russia’s rich businessmen are queuing up for a loan under a government rescue package offering billions of dollars in state funds to bail out oligarchs who have been badly hit by the global financial crisis.

Russian billionaires Oleg Deripaska and Mikhail Fridman this week got a total of $6.5 billion in loans from a state-owned bank to help them cover foreign debts secured against stakes in major Russian companies, according to industry sources.

But Alexander Lebedev says there is no reason state money should be used to save oligarchs, the name given to a small group of well connected businessmen who made fortunes in the chaos following the fall of the Soviet Union.

“Why is profit private but the losses put on everyone else? I don’t understand that at all. Why should the rich government save rich citizens. It is not right,” Lebedev told Reuters on the sidelines of an investor conference in Moscow.

“The task of the government is affordable housing, to subsidise mortgages, health and so on but not handing out billions of dollars to certain people,” said Lebedev, a former spy who made a fortune through banking deals in the 1990s.

Lebedev was ranked by Forbes in May as Russia’s 39th richest man with a fortune of $3.1 billion. He  said he had not asked for any help from the government.

Russia talks to foreign investors – in private

Posted by Gleb Bryanski

Foreign investors who filed into a Moscow hotel on Wednesday anxious to hear what Russia’s anti-crisis tsar First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov had to say about the future of the market were disappointed to find he had not shown up.

They had many questions: the stock market is down around 70 percent since May peak, gold and forex reserves are have fallen below $500 billion for the first time in eight months as Russia props up the rouble and the economic outlook is uncertain.

Investors were left to listen to economists from UBS, whose conferences in better times used to attract the cream of Russia’s business and political elite. Other official speakers later took the floor.

“I am not going to answer your questions for now because there are journalists in the hall and I will have to give you very stupid answers,” said Stanislav Voskresensky, a 32-year-old deputy economy minister who is tipped as a rising star.

“Let’s talk more informally in the bar this evening, I will be able to give you more honest answers,” he added, before being ushered out of the hall by UBS-hired security guards, with reporters kept at a safe distance.

“Deja vu all over again” in struggling Hungary?

Hungary has negotiated a $25 billion economic rescue package with the IMF, the EU and the World Bank. What else is new? As that non-Hungarian philosopher of gamesmanship Yogi Berra put it, it’s ”like déjà vu all over again”.  

Consider the words of historian Paul Lendvai who wrote: ”Its economy in tatters, Hungary accepts a loan of 250 million gold crowns.” “Fiscal stability was restored, a currency reform was introduced…and after a modest upswing the value of industrial production stood 12 percent higher…”

The date? The 1920s. The lender: The League of Nations. Only the details have changed.

Hungary seems never to have encountered a global financial crisis it didn’t jump into head first.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Will the U.S. have to turn to Iran for help on Afghanistan?

Will the United States have to turn to its old nemesis Iran for help in Afghanistan? A couple of articles out this month suggest it will.

In this article published by the MIT Center for International Studies, the authors argue that the hostility between Washington and Tehran has been bad for the United States, Iran and Afghanistan, and played into the hands of the Pakistan military, the Taliban and al Qaeda.

After 9/11, Iran cooperated with the United States to hep defeat the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan. (Shi'ite Iran has traditionally been opposed to the hardline brand of Sunni Islam espoused by the Taliban and al Qaeda.) So from Tehran's point of view, the country felt badly betrayed when in return for its help, President George W. Bush labelled Iran as part of the "axis of evil" along with Iraq and North Korea.

This was not helped, according to the article's authors Barnett Rubin and Sara Batmanglich, by U.S. suggestions in 2007 that the United States might consider attacking Iran over its nuclear programme. This, they say, may have actually driven Tehran to support the Taliban to neutralise the threat of a U.S. attack from neighbouring Afghanistan. “Afghanistan is our friend,” it quotes an Iranian diplomat as saying. “But when your life is at stake you may have to sacrifice even your friends.”

They argue that to stabilise Afghanistan, Washington should recognise it shares a common interest with Iran in combating Sunni Islamist militancy there, while recalibrating its relationship with Pakistan.

Pakistan - which unlike Iran already has unclear weapons - traditionally supported the Taliban in Afghanistan as a way of giving it "strategic depth" against its eastern neighbour, India. "Since the Iranian revolution, the U.S. has overreacted to the Iranian threat and engaged in systematic appeasement of Pakistan..." they say.  

"Using Afghanistan as a base for anti-Iran policies handicaps the U.S. in pressing for Pakistani cooperation, thus undermining one of the country’s most important strategic objectives. Of course, such recalibration will also require shifts in Iranian policy away from the path it has taken. Clearly abandoning any U.S. agenda of forcible regime change in Iran will make such a shift much more likely."

What really happened in the U.S. raid on Syria?

   So much of what passes for news in the Middle East is enveloped in shadow, with even seasoned observers reduced to weighing claim and counter-claim with little hard evidence to go on. Yet another example is the U.S. raid across the Syrian border on Sunday.    Syria says the attack by U.S. forces inside Syria was a “terrorist aggression” which targeted a farm and killed eight civilians.     A U.S. official said the raid by U.S. forces is believed to have killed a major al Qaeda operative, known as Abu Ghadiya, who helped smuggle foreign fighters into Iraq.     But do we really know what happened?     We do know that following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of  Iraq, Syria, which feared it was next on Washington’s list of rogue states for regime change, permitted the transit of Jihadi volunteers for the Iraqi insurgency fighting the U.S. occupation of Iraq.     We also know that there have been similar attacks by U.S. forces near the Iraqi border, and also in Afghanistan and across the Afghan-Pakistan border. In at least two instances these operations have mistakenly hit a wedding party and civilian houses despite claims they were al Qaeda hideouts.     We also know that the U.S. military has at least twice in the past carried out attacks across the Syrian border but this was the first time the obsessively secretive Syrian regime has gone public with it and allowed camera crews to reach the area and film the aftermath.     Damascus is resentful because, as part of its attempt to improve its image internationally, it has clamped down on al Qaeda-inspired Islamist militants. It feels its efforts are not being recognised by Washington and that the Jihadis  are seeking reprisals.    “I can tell you and explain that the terrorist explosion in Damacus in September happened because we tightened our border with Iraq. They (Jihadis) wanted revenge for what we are doing. Unfortunately they are not the only revenging party. Of course the Americans tried to ‘reward’ us by carrying out this (attack) ,” said Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem.     Given the credibility of all parties  in this affair it is going to be difficult to get to the the bottom of what happened.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

IMF bailout: the coming medicine for Pakistan?

Is the International Monetary Fund going to force Pakistan to swallow its classic bitter pill – which to some is worse than the disease – as a price of rescuing it from economic meltdown?

IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn has said loans to countries hit by the global financial turmoil would be faster, and with fewer conditions, than in the past. Conditions for lending should be defined by what is needed for the programme and should not be an “attempt to fix the world”, the IMF Survey magazine quotes him as telling staff.

Pakistan’s The News, citing an internal document, sets out what it said were extremely tough conditions

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

India, Japan in security pact; a new architecture for Asia?

While much of the media attention during Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Japan this week was focused on a free trade deal the two sides failed to agree on, another pact that could have even greater consequences for the region was quietly pushed through.

This was a security cooperation agreement under which India and  Japan, once on opposite sides of the Cold War, will hold military exercises, police the Indian Ocean and conduct military-to-military exchanges on fighting terrorism.

It doesn’t sound very grand, but its significance lies in the fact that pacifist Japan has such a security pact with only two other countries - the United States and Australia.

And it comes in the same month that India and the United States closed a nuclear cooperation deal that won New Delhi a place on the world’s nuclear high table, ending three decades of isolation following its first nuclear tests in 1974.

And finally if you remember that India, the United States, Japan , Australia and Singapore held naval exercises last year off the Arabian Sea, you begin to see the outlines of a new security architecture  for Asia, which according to some has the containment of China written all over it.

Call it what you will - a league of democracies perhaps - but the idea of some of the most powerful navies in Asian seas exercising together points to a dramatic shift of  alliances, one that would have raised an eyebrow not just in Beijing and Islamabad, but other regional capitals such as Jakarta and Bangkok.

Was rightist Haider gay? Austria doesn’t care

 Now that Austrian far-right leader Joerg Haider is dead, the German, British and U.S. press are eagerly spilling the beans on his “secret double life”, saying that he had a male lover.

 Just when you thought his story couldn’t get more dramatic — he died on Oct. 11 in a high-speed car crash while drunk — we now learn that Haider, who was married with two daughters, was not only a populist who polarised the public with remarks about Nazism and immigrants, but might have been gay too.

 But wait a minute. Speculation about Haider’s sexuality is not at all new, at least not in Austria. Here, his death has not really led to breathless speculation about his private life as it has elsewhere.

 Why not?

 Questions about Haider’s sexuality had been asked in Austria since the 1990s, when the charismatic, folksy leader surrounded himself with a group of young and successful male followers, earning his entourage the nickname “The Boys Posse”.

 Far-right parties have never been especially women-friendly anyway.  Haider never said he was gay, nor denied it and Austrians’ reaction to this is interesting. They don’t really care. Whether true or not, this speculation was largely politely ignored or deemed not newsworthy.

 Overall the Austrian press abides by the unwritten rule that private lives should only be written about when made an issue by the politician themselves, or has an effect on public policy.