By Jacob Comenetz

A debate about whether Communist East Germany was an “Unrechtsstaat” (”unjust state”) or merely not a “Rechtsstaat” (”state based on the rule of law”) has been dividing the German political class for months — and it now has spilled onto the front pages this week as the reunited country celebrates its 60th anniversary.

What might seem like a nuance of history has turned into a full-fledged battle that is splitting many eastern and western Germans once again along the fault lines of the long since dismantled Wall that separated them during the Cold War.

Many easterners are annoyed that some of their western brethren are labelling the Communist East German state an “Unrechtsstaat” – a term they see as denigrating not only the state, but also its people, as somehow morally inferior.

Few in the east, a region that is also far poorer than most of the prosperous west, would disagree that East Germany was not a “Rechtstaat”. The German Democratic Republic (GDR), as East Germany was officially known, had no independent judiciary, no free elections and a surveillance system run by the Stasi that used brutal methods to quash dissent for four decades.

But many easterners are rallying behind Gesine Schwan, a westerner who is running for president. Schwan has fuelled the debate by saying she would not label East Germany an “unjust state”, saying that was too “diffuse” a term.

“It implies that everything that happened in this state was unjust,” said Schwan, who is trying to defeat President Horst Koehler in a vote in the Reichstag by a special 1,224-seat Federal Assembly on Saturday. “I would not go this far in the case of the GDR.”

Schwan’s comments became a lightning rod in the run-up to the election against Koehler, who is backed by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and heavily favoured to win Saturday’s vote for a second five-year term. Her unwillingness to call the GDR an “Unrechtsstaat” may even cost her support from the Social Democrats who nominated her. Along with many westerners, some former dissidents in the east who were persecuted by the state say Schwan has it all wrong: the GDR was an unjust state through and through.

The debate was sparked in March by the state premier of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Erwin Sellering. The leader of the sparsely populated and poor eastern state on the Baltic Sea said that East Germany was not a “totally unjust state” as many westerners believe even though he agreed it was “certainly not a state based on the rule of law.”

Sellering said: “I reject the condemnation of the GDR as a totally unjust state in which there was nothing good at all about it.” He took a jab at westerners by repeating a popular eastern mantra whenever they felt attacked by west Germans: “The former West Germany also had its weaknesses just as East Germany had its strengths.”

Even Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, has entered into the debate — although with her typical caution avoided saying it was an unjust state: “It’s quite clear that East Germany was based on injustice. It was created by free and secret balloting. In order to survive, the system forced people to lie. It was a system based on fear and lies.”

Earlier this month, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo argued that Africa needs Western countries to cut long term aid that has brought dependency, distorted economies and fuelled bureaucracy and corruption. The comments on the blog posting suggested that many readers agreed. In a response, Savio Carvalho, Uganda country director for aid agency Oxfam GB, says that aid can help the continent escape poverty - if done in the right way:

In early January, I travelled to war-ravaged northern Uganda to a dusty village in Pobura and Kal parish in Kitgum District. We were there to see the completion of a 16km dirt road constructed by the community with support from Oxfam under an EU-funded programme.

The road is bringing benefits in the form of access to markets, education and health care. Some parents say their daughters feel safer walking to school on the road instead of through the bushes. Many families have used the wages earned from construction work to pay for school fees and medical treatment. This is the impact of aid.

Having lived and worked in east Africa, I have witnessed the positive effects of aid. But done badly, it can be very limiting and even has the potential to create more harm. To avoid this, it must be provided within an enabling environment in which it is used as a catalyst for change and not as an end in itself. Governments must show leadership through an accountable system.

For individuals, access to resources – including aid - is like an investment. Aid can build up poor people’s assets, support good governance and enhance skills and capacities to bring about transformation. But it can become a bane when it makes communities dependent, lazy and hopeless. Governments, aid agencies and the United Nations need to ensure the delivery of aid is well planned and coordinated, leading to higher self-reliance among poor communities.

Aid is also beneficial when trade is fair. There are several examples in Africa, like the case of coffee farmers in Uganda, where aid has been used effectively to improve the overall quality of the coffee seeds, thereby giving farmers better prices for their produce. When they have access to markets at home and abroad, they generate income which is ploughed back into increased output, better access to health and education, and overall improvement in the quality of their lives. To make this happen, developed countries need to stop procrastinating and put in place fair trade practices.

Aid works well if governments are accountable – in other words, when they are responsible and encourage active citizenship. On this continent, civil society is still weak and needs to be nourished. But stopping aid will not resolve frustrations about poor governance, which is partly a result of weak public scrutiny. Aid should be used to help fight corruption and promote accountability through active input from ordinary people.

As I have argued here, receiving aid is not just an act of charity. It should be understood as the right of poor communities to a life of dignity. As stated in international conventions, people have a right to good health, food, water and education. We all need to ensure the planet’s resources are equitably distributed. As Mahatma Gandhi said, you must be the change you want to see in the world.

So what do you think? Which argument is most convincing?

Guantanamo Bay prison

By Benet Koleka
Abu Bakkr Qassim, a Uighur from far western China, has seen a number of the world’s more remote corners for a middle aged fruit vendor who is now learning how to make pizzas for a living. He is one of four Uighurs living in Albania since 2006 because they could not stay in the United States nor go to China which sees them as terrorists.

Found innocent of terrorism after three and a half years in the U.S. jail in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, he feels vindicated by President Barack Obama’s decision to close down the notorious prison eventually. “I was happy. First of all, President Obama understood the mistake that happened to us in Guantanamo. We want him to repair the mistake although it is not easy,” said Qassim, 39.

Last month, Obama ordered that the Guantanamo military prison close within a year. It has become a symbol of the harsh U.S. treatment of terrorism suspects in a murky system of international prisons under ex-President George W. Bush. Qassim has not talked to 17 fellow Uighurs still at Guantanamo but said they tell their families they are living under much better conditions now. “They have a big garden and can open the doors themselves,” he told Reuters.

These other men are in limbo at Guantanamo although they have been cleared for release as no country, including Albania, is willing to take them. Although he said he was not tortured — in contrast to some who have been released from Guantanamo — Qassim described very difficult conditions during his time at Guantanamo.

“Even for an animal it is bad to be shut in a cage of two square metres. What I had thought about America, with all my admiration, was not the cage at Guantanamo,” he added. “I told the U.S. soldier: ‘You are not America’. The commander told him other things, but he threw the Koran in the toilet. No one can do that. It means going to extremes.”

A native of Ghulja, a city of one million in China’s Xinjiang province, Qassim spent seven months in jail in 1998 for what the Chinese termed religious propaganda. He said he was later found innocent, but was kept under watch. Many Muslim Uighurs, who are from far western China, seek greater autonomy for the region. Beijing has waged a campaign against what it calls their violent separatist activities.

Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang province

On December 31, 2000, Qassim left his wife and toddler son seeking opportunity abroad. He ended up with other Uighurs in an Afghan village where they were eventually captured and handed over to American forces. Qassim said they rejoiced to hear they were being handed over to the Americans because the U.S. had backed the Uighurs. “They told us not to worry because they had come for the Arabs and they would not hand us over to the Chinese,” he said. “After six months, were were flown to Guantanamo. For three and a half years there, they kept repeating they had made a mistake with us but we had to stay there.”

After his release, Albania agreed to take in five Uighurs, agreeing to pay their their rent and food through 2009. Qassin is learning how to make pizzas. One of his fellow former inmates is studying electronics, the others are learning Albanian; the fifth left for Sweden to join his sister.

Street in Tirana

When Bush visited Tirana in 2007 and was warmly welcomed, Albanian officials made it clear that the Uighur ex-inmates should attend a lunch in a city five hours away by car. “I have spent my life in jails. We stepped into a mistake. Even President Bush made a mistake. Now I want all this to pass,” Qassin said.

Russia has reversed its decision to station missiles in the Western outpost of Kaliningrad, next door to the European Union, according to Interfax.

The move would be the clearest signal so far of the start of a thaw in U.S.-Russia relations, which could be one of the major changes in U.S. President Barack Obama’s first year in office. We don’t know what commitment, if any, Obama may have given to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on the missile shield (the two spoke by telephone earlier this week).

Obama’s scepticism about the effectiveness and utility of missile defence was clearly stated during the campaign. But since the Russians unilaterally made the Kaliningrad threat on the day of his election, the suspension of the deployment plan is a clear goodwill gesture. It follows NATO’s announcement, slipped out without fanfare earlier this week, that political relations with Moscow, frozen after the Georgia war, would resume within a few weeks.

Expect Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to foam about appeasement.

The Obama administration has already made clear it will pursue bilateral and multilateral nuclear arms control treaties which Bush eschewed. At the very least, they will try to negotiate a new strategic arms reduction treaty to replace START 1, which expires at the end of this year. This is important because it treats Russia as a nuclear power on an equal footing with the United States, which the status-conscious Kremlin craves and the Bush administration always dismissed.

Obama realises he needs Russian cooperation for the two biggest foreign policy items on his agenda this year: trying to defang Iran’s nuclear ambitions and turn the tide in Afghanistan.

The Russians have made clear what some of the trade-offs could be: safe supply routes for U.S. and NATO forces to Afghanistan across Russia and its central Asian friends in exchange for a halt to NATO expansion along Russia’s southern border. There is no consensus in NATO to take in Ukraine and Georgia. Germany and France blocked giving them a roadmap to membership last year and the U.S. agreed reluctantly in December to put the issue on the back-burner for now.

The question is whether Obama will go further in reassuring Moscow that membership is off the table for the foreseeable future. Expect howls of betrayal from neo-cons, the Baltic states and Poland if he does. Another potential trade-off involves the U.S. postponing missile shield deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic as long as diplomatic efforts are under way to persuade Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment programme, in return for Russian agreement to tougher U.N. sanctions against Iran and postponement of delivery of high-grade S300 air defence missiles which Moscow has reportedly sold to Tehran, and which could make any U.S. air strike on Iran more difficult.

Both trade-offs would require the Obamistas to eat ideologically unpalatable craw and take flak in Washington, but that’s the prerogative of new administrations.

The implications for Europe of closer U.S. ties with Russia are mixed. The Obamistas have promised their first move in relations with Russia will be to consult European allies. But unless deftly handled diplomatically, a strategic opening to Russia could heighten fears of being bypassed in the Baltic and central European states, and cause frustration in Brussels at being out of the loop.

(Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev speaks during a show commemorating the 65th anniversary of the lifting of the Leningrad siege in World War Two in St.Petersburg, January 27, 2009. During the war, Leningrad suffered an 872-day siege by invading German armies where starvation killed 640,000 people and bombs killed 17,000. REUTERS/RIA Novosti/Kremlin/Vladimir Rodionov/Handout (RUSSIA). )

By Waleed Ibrahim
Before making a recent speech, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said the following: “I was given a specific time in which to talk, so I have to be brief. I was informed that there are other people speaking after me.”

I was shocked. Did I just hear an Iraqi leader sound and act as if he were
an ordinary citizen who had to make way for others? Maybe he was joking, but he looked serious. Could this really be an Iraqi leader who wasn’t going to pontificate on and on to his heart’s content?

During the reign of the former president Saddam Hussein, who was deposed by the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, no one even dared to look at their watch while he was speaking. Saddam’s speeches
lasted at least an hour. Sometimes he would speak for many.

In that speech he gave a short while ago, the prime minister of the post-invasion Iraq, Maliki, spoke about federalism and autonomy for the provinces. He said he believed authority should lie with the central government, not with local executives, but he told Iraqis it was up to them to decide. “I am stating my opinion as an Iraqi person, the decision is yours,” he said in the televised speech.

His opinion? Not a diktat? When Saddam was around, people used to say: “When Saddam has spoken, Iraq has spoken.”

Maliki’s apparent deference to the Iraqi people gives some Iraqis hope that a country still reeling from car and suicide bomb attacks may be on a path toward eventual, durable democracy. A history of authoritarianism in the Middle East and Iraq’s legacy of dictatorship suggest it won’t be easy.

Maliki’s increasing assertiveness as violence drops across the country and U.S. forces prepare to withdraw from cities by the middle of next year and the country as a whole by the end of
2011, has given some of his political opponents — and partners — cause to wonder about his ambitions. But many Iraqis are hopeful.

Ali al-Sai’di, a 75 year-old Iraqi professor living in Jordan, fled abroad during Saddam’s reign. He fled Iraq again after Saddam was toppled and Iraq descended into a frenzy of sectarian bloodshed.
“It is a golden opportunity that is in our hands now … If democracy succeeds in Iraq, all these sacrifices will have been worthwhile,” he said.

Millions of Iraqis, still struggling with little electricity and the threat of violence, are undoubtedly sceptical. But many, cheered by the drop in violence and the prime minister’s tone and demeanour, say they are willing to give hope a chance.

By Dan Williams

A Reuters investigation into how the Israeli domestic intelligence service Shin Bet is tackling threats from Jewish ultranationalists has raised intriguing parallels with Britain’s handling of the sectarian “troubles” in Northern Ireland.

Radical Jewish settlers who might turn to violence in a bid to wreck Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking are, increasingly, the quarry of the Shin Bet’s shadowy “Jewish Division”, whose operatives draw on a range of spying and interrogation tactics.

But a question remains over whether the Shin Bet, criticised internationally for its treatment of Palestinian suspects whose rights are limited under Israeli martial law, is less likely to get rough with Jews.

Such differential doctrines potentially recall Northern Ireland, where for decades British authorities had to tackle both Catholic republicans seeking a united Ireland and rival Protestants loyal to London.

A former top official with MI5, the British counterpart to Shin Bet, told me recently that when sectarian strife erupted in the province in the late 1960s, republicans were generally seen as the main threat to Britain, with the assumption that it was their violence that provoked loyalist counter-attacks.

Of further concern was the fact that the Provisional Irish Republican Army was targeting British targets abroad, while the loyalist paramilitaries were more localised.

“But when loyalists started, for example, buying weapons on the (British) mainland and abroad, we took that very seriously and certainly didn’t regard them as more ‘friendly’,” the MI5 veteran told me. “They were quite dreadful thugs.”

                                                      By Simon Cameron-Moore

Anyone who lives in Islamabad will recall the  moment they heard the explosion of a suicide truck bomb that killed 55 people at the Marriott Hotel on a Saturday night in September.

Sitting in their homes, watching television, having supper, putting their children to sleep, they were physically hit by  the shockwave.

The cause was unmistakable. The sight of flames leaping from the windows of a place where we had all dined, met contacts, and attended conferences was chilling.

A month later, I left a depressed Islamabad for a week’s leave. Many of the foreigners and their families had left the Pakistani capital for good. I just went to India for a break to
see colleagues and old friends I first met in the late 1990s during an earlier assignment.

Living in a city spooked by security scares and covering bomb blast after bomb blast inevitably results in a certain morbidity.

As I visited old haunts in Delhi and Mumbai, the
vulnerability of India’s beautiful hotels  was all too obvious.

I told my friends that I feared  it would only be a matter of time before the five star hotels were targeted.

The militants had hitherto mostly sought to create panic and mayhem by attacking the general population as they shopped at bazaars or travelled on public transport.

India’s luxury hotels are centres of excellence, they are masters of hospitality, full of grace and style. They are where elites and foreign businessmen and wealthy tourists go.

Security at the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai had tightened when I visited in early November.

The side and back entrances, which journalists often use, were closed, and the only way in was via the main front entrance.

I passed by the elegant, colonnaded swimming pool, and thought how easy it would be for someone to toss a grenade over the wall from the street behind. as they did at Islamabad’s
Luna Caprese restaurant in March.

A few years ago there was an explosion at a taxi rank opposite the Taj, where the road curls round by the Gateway of India. After that, I think taxis were barred from dropping passengers on the covered concourse apron at the foot of the steps to the lobby.

Since then the hotel management took a further step, introducing a security check at the entrance to the concourse from the road that visitors on foot would pass through.

It seemed rather thin protection for someone used to hotels in Pakistan. I walked past the Taj and the Oberoi on Nariman Point, and I thought of the truck bomb filled with explosives,
spiked with aluminium powder that created the inferno at the Marriott.

The results were devastating even though the truck never made it past the entrance from the road thanks to a retractable steel barrier that rises out of the ground to stop vehicles entering freely before being checked.

And then I thought how the security industy’s infrastructure would
change the landscape of India’s porous cities when their enemies shifted targets.

Reuters Editor, South Asia, Phil Smith is reporting from outside the landmark Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai, where Western hostages are being held.

"The scene at the famous gate of India is chaos, with dozens of army, police and fire trucks struggling to control a situation which began in the late evening on Wednesday. Searchlights illuminate the front of the Taj hotel, as up to five gunmen hold hundreds of hotel guests hostage. There have been several explosions from inside the hotel and earlier, grenades were thrown from windows and exploded in the street.

"At around 3 a.m., a large explosion set fire to the top part of the building, and fires are still burning on the upper floors.

"There have been rescue attempts by firefighters with hotel guests plucked from lower floor front windows by ladder and hydraulic lift. As they fled the scene, they told how they barricaded themselves in their rooms after hearing explosions and automatic fire in the hotel. There are similar scenes across the peninsula at the Trident hotel where another siege is going one.

"As dawn approaches, the fate of the remaining hostages is still unclear."

To listen to Phil's audio account click here.

                                 By Jack Kim
North and South Koreans have been divided for more than 50 years by one of the world’s most heavily fortified borders. When we come into contact, it is almost always in small and carefully arranged visits.

I was a part of a South Korean group that recently spent four days in the North. Over the course of countless hours of contact with the North Korean minders assigned to our group, conversation turned from heated discussion over international politics and inter-Korean troubles to nationalism and sports. 

We had been told by the officials from the group in the South that arranged the trip to avoid any discussion of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il because this highly sensitive subject would invariably lead to awkward discussions and raise tension.

But there was enough time to get a glimpse of the softer, human side of North Korean officials who were supposed to be tough, propaganda-conscious apparatchiks armed with skills to respond to any kind of challenge to the communist state’s leadership or its ideology.

The minders, usually mid-level cadres in the bureaucracy, would invariably break into warm smiles when we raised the subject of family, either ours or theirs, just to change the subject after a tense discussion on politics. They willingly talked about life at home.

“You have experience keeping a living?” a North Korean “guide” asked, using an expression that was not immediately clear in meaning, to ask whether I had a family. When I said I had a wife and a one-year-old daughter at home, he broke into a grin and said the girl would be “at an age when they are so adorable” and that I must sorely miss her.

He said he himself had a boy and a girl “all grown up,” meaning they were in primary school. Later on, as I prepared to head home, he said he had to meet another group of South Koreans who were arriving later in the day. He would be staying with them at their hotel. And that would make it eight straight days away from home, he said.