Global News Journal

from Raw Japan:

Watching the giants fall

Some elections count more than others, and never more than when a longstanding dominant party is sent packing. I've been lucky enough to witness turning points in four countries on two continents.

France, India, Italy, now Japan -- all have rejected one-party dominance for the rough and tumble of alternating majorities. In each case, I was fortunate to behold history.

Japan's election on Sunday marked the end of an era that started not long after World War Two and saw Japan rise from the ashes of defeat to a global economic power. Japan's revival took root in an iron triangle locking the Liberal Democratic Party, bureaucrats and Japanese industry.

Now the LDP is tasting the same bitter fruit as paramount parties in other countries whose voters decided a few decades in power for one party were enough. The circumstances in each country were different, but the democratic impulse was similar and the result much the same.

In 1981 Francois Mitterand became the first leftist president of France since the Fifth Republic was created in 1957. I watched as ecstatic French voters poured into the streets after Mitterrand's victory. France then trembled as this imperious socialist did the impossible by sharing power with his Gaullist rivals.

The Indian National Congress spearheaded that nation's independence movement and then became the dominant political party led by the Nehru-Gandhi family. Eventually corruption allegations caught up with Congress and it had to yield power first to Hindu nationalists, then to a coalition of upstart leftists and regional parties.

I remember the sight of chastened ex-Congress leader P.V. Narasimha Rao standing in the dock in a Delhi court accused of corruption charges, for which he was later acquitted.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Pakistani Taliban’s new chief:more ambitious, more ruthless?

The first big suicide bombing in Pakistan this week since the slaying of Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in a U.S.-missile strike had a particularly nasty edge to it.

The attack in Torkham, a post on the main route for moving supplies to NATO and American forces in Afghanistan, took place just before dusk, as a group of tribal police officers prepared to break the Ramadan fast on the lawn outside their barracks.

Because the attacker, who by most accounts appeared to be a teenager, offered food, he was welcomed to join the gathering, in accordance with local traditions during the fasting month, the New York Times reported, citing one of the police officers who was there at the time.

So the attacker walked in and detonated his explosives among the policemen, killing 22 people.

A militant group affiliated with the Taliban claimed responsibility for the bombing, which came two days after the Taliban confirmed Baitullah's death, after weeks of denials, and announced the appointment of one-time aide Hakimullah Mehsud, as his successor.

The question being asked is whether this is the face of a more ruthless and vicious Taliban under Hakimullah,  who, by all accounts, appears to be a young, battle-hardened ambitious leader.

German state elections: Live

10 p.m. - So it’s a black eye for Merkel and her conservative party four weeks before the federal election with the likely loss of power in two of three states that went to the polls on Sunday. But will it make a difference for the federal election on Sept. 27? Will Steinmeier’s SPD, now in the driver’s seat to win state offices from the CDU for the first time since 2001, be able to take advantage of the momentum? Will the CDU start to get nervous again after squandering big leads in last month of the 2002 and 2005 federal elections? September could be an exciting month in Germany.

9:50 p.m.  Bild newspaper’s Nikolaus Blome writes in a column for Monday’s early editions: “It was an earthquake kicking off the hot phase of the national campaign…The CDU has been spoiled by its past success but now has it in writing that the Sept. 27 election is far from decided.”

9:10 p.m. - Here is a video clip of Steinmeier savouring the SPD’s likely move into power in two of the three states that voted on Sunday. It’s been a l-o-n-g time since anyone in Germany has seen the SPD celebrating. Merkel kept a low profile on Sunday evening. No one saw or heard from her.

Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, the world’s most violent city?

By Julian CardonaCiudad Juarez, a Mexican town on the U.S. border where daylight murders and beheaded bodies have become the norm, could be the world’s most violent city.

With 130 murders for every 100,000 residents per year on average last year, the city of 1.6 million people is more violent than the Venezuelan capital Caracas, the U.S. city of New Orleans and Colombia’s Medellin. That is according to a study by the Mexican non-profit Citizen Council for Public Security and Justice, which presented its report to Mexico’s security minister at a conference this week.

The fight between rival drug cartels over Ciudad Juarez’s local drug market and smuggling routes into the United States broke out at the start of last year and continues to intensify.Reliable global crime statistics are hard to pin down and a study last year by Foreign Policy Magazine placed Caracas as the world’s top murder capital, also with 130 murders per 100,000 residents. (The Mexican study disputes that and puts the Caracas figure at 96).But Ciudad Juarez’s rising murder rate, currently at about 250 per month, appears to put it well ahead of other notorious world crime capitals such as South Africa’s Cape Town, Moscow, Baghdad, and Papua New Guinea’s capital Port Moresby, according to the Mexican and Foreign Policy studies.In fact, in Ciudad Juarez during the first day of the conference where the Mexican study was presented, eight people were murdered in the city’s streets, including a prosecutor, a lawyer, two policewomen, a clown performer and a gardener.Ciudad Juarez, a manufacturing city across from El Paso, Texas, already has a stained history with the unsolved murders of hundreds of young women in the 1990s.Perhaps most worryingly is not that 10,000 troops and elite police stationed there have failed to stop the drug violence, but that local officials say they have everything under control.Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz says the city’s fight against drug violence is “a successful process that the world can learn from.” Chihuahua state Governor Jose Reyes Baez, who has long bemoaned the media focus on drug violence in Ciudad Juarez, says that troops can gradually leave as newly-trained police take over. The army denies any scaling back in its deployment.

from The Great Debate UK:

Ghosts of Germany’s communist past return for election

- Erik Kirschbaum is a Reuters correspondent in Berlin. -

Will the party that traces its roots to Communist East Germany's SED party that built the Berlin Wall soon be in power in a west German state?

Or is the rise of the far-left "Linke" (Left party) in western Germany to the brink of its first role as a coalition partner in a state government with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) simply a political fact-of-life now so many years after the Wall fell and the two Germanys were reunited?

Will a "red" government in Saarland scare away investors and doom the state, as its conservative state premier Peter Mueller argues in a desperate fight to his job?

Or will the new leftist alliance in Saarland be able to better tackle state's woes, as the SPD state premier candidate Heiko Maas insists?

Depending on your Weltanschauung, that's what Sunday's election in three German states boils down to -- an emotional debate about whether the ex "Communists" in the form of the Left party should be allowed to be part of the next Saarland government or not.

It doesn't matter that the Left has already been in eastern state governments and will probably also be part of the next state government in the eastern state of Thuringia, which also elects a new state assembly on Sunday.

North Korea tries fast food. Juche Burgers for the masses?

There are no McDonald’s, Starbucks or KFC joints in reclusive North Korea, but there is the Samthaesong Soft Drink Restaurant, which is the North’s take on fast food complete with waffles on the menu. The communist state, which has its “juche” ideal of self-reliance as a guiding principal, said the restaurant offers the finest fast food in the land made from home-grown ingredients.

Even though the restaurant will serve the masses in Pyongyang, most North Koreans outside the capital struggle to find enough to eat in a country that battles chronic food shortages.

Here is the report on the new restaurant from the North’s KCNA news agency in an article it issued on Friday:

The Samthaesong Soft Drink Restaurant located in Moranbong District, Pyongyang is crowded with Korean and foreign customers.     It serves more than 20 kinds of dishes including burgers, waffles, French fries and crispy fried chicken along with soft drinks.      It was opened at the beginning of June last. Most of the tables are arranged by the semicircle windowed wall so that the customers can take food, looking out the street through windows.      It instantly cooks and serves dishes to the customers as they demand.  Manager Ko Jong Ok told KCNA that the restaurant will make world-famous foods with local raw materials to the taste of the Korean people.

{Picture: North Korea’s Samthaesong Soft Drink Restaurant in Pyongyang shown in an undated photo released by North Korea’s official KCNA news agency August 28, 2009.)

from Raw Japan:

Japan two-party system — long in arriving

Observers of Japanese politics who have long thought the country was ripe for a real two-party system are watching Sunday's election with a dual sense of incredulity -- surprise that it has taken so long to oust the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and surprise that it finally looks like happening.

Media surveys show the decade-old opposition Democratic Party is set to win the poll for parliament's powerful lower house -- and probably by a landslide, ushering in party leader Yukio Hatoyama at the head of a government pledged to spend more on consumers and workers than the companies that benefited most from LDP policies.

That would be only the second time the LDP has lost its grip on government since it was founded in 1955.

"Every one I talk to has that feeling -- they aren't sure it's really going to happen because they thought it would happen before," said Steven Reed, a political scientist at Chuo University who has been analysing Japanese politics for decades. "A lot of people predicted based on hope, and that's not a particularly good variable for predictions."

Those with long memories can't help but recall the only other time the LDP lost power, when heavyweight Ichiro Ozawa and dozens of other lawmakers bolted the party in 1993 and voted in favour of a no-confidence motion against then-premier Kiichi Miyazawa, triggering a political quake that led to the formation of a multiparty, anti-LDP coalition under the telegenic Morihiro Hosokawa.

Hosokawa entranced a public more accustomed to staid, dark-suited and often inarticulate leaders with his media-savvy ways -- striding before cameras at an international leaders' summit with a white scarf around his neck, using a teleprompter at news conferences -- and promising to cut the bureaucratic red-tape that critics said was strangling the world's second-biggest economy.

from Raw Japan:

No Obama moment in Japan

Opinion polls show the opposition Democratic Party of Japan is set for a runaway victory in Sunday's general election, but voters are showing none of the enthusiasm that swept Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency last year.

When I talked to more than a dozen voters in a small town near Hiroshima, western Japan,  they were interested in the election and had a lot to say about it. And most were looking for change -- but not with a great deal of fervour.

Perhaps that's because I was in Higashihiroshima, a conservative rural area surrounded by rice fields and known for its sake. The district has always voted for the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that has ruled Japan for all but 10 months during the past half century.

The voters were also well aware of the raft of challenges, such as growing social welfare costs, facing a new government, and seemed to have low expectations for the Democrats.

"We can go back to the old way if the Democratic party fails," 69-year-old Hiroaki Yamashita told me.

Still, they were pondering a once-unthinkable Democratic Party victory, not due to any wild enthusiam for the opposition Democrats but more so because they were fed up with the LDP.

from The Great Debate UK:

Brown must create Afghanistan war cabinet

- Col. Richard Kemp is a former commander of British Forces in Afghanistan and the author of Attack State Red, an account of British military operations in Afghanistan published by Penguin. The opinions expressed are his own. -

Disillusionment with the inability of the Kabul administration to govern fairly or to significantly reduce violence played a role in the reportedly low turnout at the polls in Helmand.

It is critical that this changes if we are to avoid another Vietnam. The South Vietnamese Army, well trained and equipped, lost heart once the U.S. withdrew, collapsing at the first push, partly because their corrupt and ineffective administration was not worth fighting for.

That an election was held at all in Afghanistan’s most violent province is an achievement. But despite a major operation to drive out the Taliban, the insurgents deterred large numbers of voters. This illustrates just how steep a mountain NATO has to climb. But it does not mean we cannot prevail against them in Helmand.

As President Obama says: "This isn’t a war of choice; it’s a war of necessity." Home grown British terrorists have only demonstrated an ability to kill our people when they have attended serious training and had face-to-face direction from war-hardened jihadists.

The Al Qaida leadership and their camps were driven into Pakistan in 2001. U.S. pursuit across the border using unmanned aerial vehicle strikes has been remarkably effective, resulting directly in the recent reduction of the UK terrorist threat level.

Al Qaida is not just a “global franchise” but also a solid organization that needs places to meet, to plan and to train terrorists. It cannot all be done on the internet.  Substantially unable to function now in Pakistan, the leadership is actively seeking a new base – perhaps in Yemen, Somalia or North Africa. In any of these they would be much more exposed. Their real desire is to return to Afghanistan. NATO forces are preventing that.

‘Dinnergate’ perks up German campaign

The German election campaign has so far lacked the riveting debates and explosive issues to which voters were treated in previous battles for power, perhaps because Chancellor Angela Merkel and her rival, Vice-Chancellor Frank-Walter Steinmeier, have worked together in the same “grand coalition” government for the past four years and neither party seems especially eager to rock the boat.

Filling the void have been several somewhat bizarre little scandals that each side has tried to use to tarnish the other, taking pot shots without resorting to full firepower. They are, after all, partners in power.

First there was Ulla Schmidt, the Social Democratic health minister whose questionable use of her official car on holiday in Spain came to light only after the car was stolen. Merkel’s Christian Democrats and opposition parties have done all they can to turn the “Dienstwagenaffaere” into a campaign issue — an example of a minister out of touch with voters for taking full advantage of government privileges — even though Schmidt insists she has done nothing wrong.

Now Merkel, the CDU chancellor, is facing criticism from the SPD and opposition parties for throwing a controversial dinner party at the chancellery (at the taxpayers’ expense) last year for Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann to mark his 60th birthday. “She told me at the time she would like to do something for me,” Ackermann told German TV in a profile of Merkel last week. “She said I should invite 30 or friends I’d like to spend an evening with to the chancellery.”

Merkel defended the meeting, saying she is always trying to bring different groups of people together at dinners.

And also in the spotlight is Economy Minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg, the rising young star of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, for using external advisers to draft complex financial legislation.

A parliamentary budget committee has started an investigation into whether any government rules were violated. Germany’s best-selling daily Bild has already reached its verdict: “It’s all nonsense,” wrote Einar Koch in a column on Wednesday. “The petty dispute about the dinner in the chancellery shows how devoid of content the 2009 election really is. If the chancellor of Europe’s leading economic power cannot invite 25 important industry and cultural leaders to a dinner in the chancellery, then it’s ‘good night’ for Germany”. His paper’s editor-in-chief Kai Diekmann and its publisher Mathias Doepfner were among those at the Ackermann party. So is it misuse of taxpayer money for the chancellor to throw a birthday party at her office for one of the most powerful bankers in the country? Or is it simply a smart thing to do, getting industry, political and cultural leaders together for some high-powered elbow rubbing?