Once a year, North Korea’s often vitriolic rhetoric machine fires up with special intensity to attack those who attack its human rights record. The exchanges usually come toward the end of the year when the U.N. General Assembly approves what has become an annual measure criticising North Korea for having one of the worst rights records in the world.

Reclusive North Korea is a member of only a few international organisations so the annual rebuke at the United Nations stings particularly hard for the state that bills itself as a workers’ paradise, or as it said in a state media report on Tuesday: “the best socialist state in the world as it is centred on the popular masses”.

North Korea comes under special scrutiny this year because it will be subject to official international questioning of its human rights record at the United Nations in December, which could provide even more embarrassment for the North’s thinned-skinned leaders as the prickly state is put on the defensive.
North Korea has prepared for this event by changing its Constitution earlier this year and adding clauses about human rights protections.

But many of the rights of North Korean citizens spelled out in the document are not carried out. For example, it guarantees freedom of assembly, but Pyongyang can send to political prison anyone who gathers without permission of authorities. The regime guarantees freedom of religion, but jails those who try to exercise the right. Privacy is a right, but the government’s large internal spy network keeps tabs on almost all citizens.

According to human rights groups, the United States and other leading democracies, North Korea maintains a vast political prison system to stamp out dissent. It intimidates the masses through public executions and by guilt by association where it can jail family members of those it accuses of crimes.

North Korea’s official media usually unleashes some of its harshest rhetoric during this human rights season, saying this is all part of a plot by a hostile United States to topple its leaders. Already this week, the North slammed “the ceaseless mean ‘human rights rackets’ kicked up by the U.S. and its followers.”

“This is nothing but a despicable plot to attain their sinister purposes by putting political pressure upon the DPRK (North Korea),” its KCNA news agency said.

The points to watch this year when North Korea is raked over the coals for its record are whether Pyongyang will use the criticism as a means to back away from international nuclear disarmament talks – as it has done previously – or if it will finally grant the request of Vitit Muntarbhorn, the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in North Korea, to see for himself what is going on in one of the world’s most isolated states.

Want to know how it feels to be George Mitchell, President Obama's special envoy to the Middle East? Try getting from Jerusalem to Ramallah on a typical weekday at the rush hour. And experience stalemate, frustration, competitive selfishness, blind fury and an absence of movement that even the most stubborn and blinkered of West Bank bus drivers might see as a metaphor for the peace process that is going nowhere fast right now.

It took me 2 full hours to drive the 100 metres (yards) or so from the Israeli military checkpoint in the West Bank barrier around Jerusalem to reach the relatively open main street through Qalandiya refugee camp, the gateway to Ramallah. The reason? Well, at its simplest it's traffic chaos caused by anarchy, a vacuum of law and order. Look further, as with much else in the Middle East, and you get a conflicting and contrasting range of explanations.

Traffic coming through the Israeli checkpoint must merge with that arriving on a main road that follows the West Bank barrier on the Palestinian side. Just beyond the checkpoint, where these two flows merge, they must also cross with traffic going in the opposite direction, from Ramallah, either into the checkpoint or along the barrier. The snag? No traffic lights, no traffic police, no nothing (barely smooth tarmac and certainly no painted junction lines) at the crossroads. The result? Check out the picture above.

Why does it happen? For many Palestinians, the cause as in so many other respects is Israel. Take away the checkpoint and the Jewish settlements protected by further military posts and traffic would circulate much more easily. For Israelis, the checkpoints, barrier and so on are the result of Palestinian violence during the Intifada of the first part of this decade. Bad traffic is the price ordinary Palestinians are paying. Dig further, and each side will come up with a long line of causes and counter-causes going back many decades, if not millennia. Stuck in a jam at Qalandiya checkpoint, you have time to muse on all of them, believe me.

There are a few nuances. Palestinians point out that the violence of the Intifada has died away. But Israelis note that a security guard was wounded in a stabbing at Qalandiya only on Sunday.  As I sat imprisoned in a car on Monday, boys aged 14 or less took advantage of the inability of Israeli jeeps to drive out and grab them to lob stones into the checkpoint.  Palestinians complain that Israeli troops have authority over the roads around the checkpoint under the Olso accords of the 1990s, but in fact show little or no interest in managing traffic beyond the confines of the checkpoints search bays. Palestinians argue that they manage traffic pretty well in Ramallah itself. A minor economic upswing in the past few months in the West Bank, grudgingly attributed at least in part to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's policy of easing security roadblocks, seems to have contributed to bringing more cars onto the roads. Traffic lights and traffic cops keep reasonable order in the Palestinian cities. But out in the no man's land close to the Israeli barrier, they are not allowed to operate.

What else can you learn sitting tight for a couple of hours breathing other people's exhaust fumes? 1. Yasser Arafat is still popular, as attested to by some nifty graffiti art on the wall itself. 2. It's an ill wind that blows no good in the Middle East - enterprising young men were hawking gum, cigarettes and sunglasses with rather more success than usual to the stranded motorists. 3. Brutally selfish pig-headedness seems to pay, after a fashion, in these parts. The guys with the baddest attitude and least regard for their fellow man or woman, seem to get to the front of the queue, and no one seems able to stop them.

That's a pretty sad lesson to take away, but one that Mr Mitchell may be becoming familiar with as he struggles to coax anything looking like compromise from any of his interlocutors. However, if one can find any positives, perhaps it is this. I did eventually get across the crossroads, even if it did take a big chunk of my afternoon. And I did so quicker than I might have done if total anarchy had prevailed. For, in time, at least, in this small, ugly, scarred spot of the Middle East, ordinary people did come to the rescue. Groups of men from the refugee camp, with no obvious authority but the odd chequered headscarf, leather jacket or a don't-mess-with-me moustache, started directing the traffic, blocking everything from cheeky Suzukis to belching 16-wheelers with their bodies and forcing apart the gridlocked mess to start the process of clearing the backlog. A few thousand years after Moses and the Red Sea, another miracle in the Middle East. Mr Mitchell may have to hope for one. But at least the good folk of Qalandiya camp showed that, just maybe, such things really can happen around here.

I wouldn't bet on it. But thanks anyway, guys.

One of the arguments frequently put forward for sending more western troops to Afghanistan is that western failure there will destabilise Pakistan.

Very roughly summarised, this 21st century version of the domino theory suggests that a victory for Islamist militants in Afghanistan would so embolden them that they might then overrun Pakistan - a far more dangerous proposition given its nuclear weapons.

A slightly different but related argument is that the United States needs to show resolve in Afghanistan to convince Pakistan of its commitment to the region and encourage the Pakistan Army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency to turn against Islamist militants it once cultivated as "strategic assets" to be used against its much bigger neighbour India.

"Many in Pakistan have always believed the Americans are not really serious about Afghanistan. They recall that the U.S. supported Pakistan and the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s only to abandon both once the Soviets left," writes Bruce Riedel at Brookings in a follow-up to this weekend's attack on the Pakistan Army headquarters.

If President Barack Obama "shows resolve in Afghanistan, Pakistanis won’t love us, but they will believe we are serious and determined to stay until a stable Afghanistan and Pakistan emerges," he writes. "If it appears the United States cannot make up its mind about what to do, then Pakistanis will say I told you so and make their own accommodations."

Yet the assault on army headquarters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi raises several questions both about the domino theory and argument about the United States needing to show resolve in Afghanistan.

First, does the Pakistan Army still need to be convinced of the dangers from Islamist militants after its commandos, as the Daily Telegraph put it, "were forced to storm their own headquarters" to release hostages seized in an attack on the most powerful institution in the country?

Second, the attack - which in turn raised jitters about the safety of Pakistan's nuclear weapons - appeared to have nothing to do with the main Afghan Taliban group fighting western forces in Afghanistan - the so-called Quetta shura led by Mullah Omar, which according to Washington is based in  Pakistan's Baluchistan province.   

As discussed in this post and in this analysis, the gunmen involved in the Rawalpindi raid came from a nexus of militant groups linking up the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), based in South Waziristan in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, and organisations which have taken deep root in the country's heartland Punjab province - including sectarian groups and those originally set up to fight India in Kashmir.

The Guardian quotes Pakistan Army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas as saying that five of the attackers came from Punjab while the other five were from South Waziristan. The ringleader, he said, was a Punjabi, while the operation was ordered from South Waziristan. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, but said it was carried out by its Punjab unit.

So if the threat to Pakistan comes not from the Afghan Taliban but from the Pakistani Taliban and the many militant organisations based in Punjab, can you still cite the need to stabilise Pakistan as a justification for sending more troops to Afghanistan?

There may be other arguments for sending more troops to Afghanistan, among them to prevent it again becoming a base for al Qaeda. As Reuters correspondent William Maclean writes here, analysts are still divided on whether the Afghan Taliban can be prised away from al Qaeda.

Pakistan's former ambassador to Kabul argues in this interview with India's Business Standard that they can. "First of all, we have to understand that the Taliban and the al Qaeda have totally different targets; and also that the Afghan Taliban are different from the Pakistan Taliban and there is evidence of this," he says. "We can do business with the Taliban and in order to bring back some normalcy in Afghanistan, the Taliban and the U.S. will have to do business. But we need to have some benchmarks for the conduct of the Taliban government before we do that."

And in this article in the Washington Post, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former director of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service, suggests looking anew at the Afghan Taliban.

"Change the media theme from attacking the Taliban and calling them the terrorists to concentrating on al Qaeda and 'foreign terrorists'," he writes. "By removing the stigma of terrorism from the Taliban, you can pursue meaningful negotiations with them. Mohammad Omar has never enjoyed the full support of Pashtuns. He is a lowly figure in tribal terms, and he is blamed by many of them for the calamity that has befallen Afghanistan. Reaching out to tribal leaders is what will move negotiations."

Those are big questions about Afghanistan, but are they the same questions as those now being asked about Pakistan? Or is it time to start looking at the two countries separately again, albeit within a broad regional context that acknowledges the very complex links between different Islamist militant groups?

The "AfPak" label has never been popular in the region itself. Is it time to ditch it?

(Reuters file photos: Nuristan in Afghanistan; U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, and Pakistani soldiers in the border areas)

By Robin Emmott

Securing the United States’s border from illegal immigrants, terrorists and weapons of mass destruction “continues to be a major challenge,” says the United States Government Accountability Office in a new report. It is also proving to be expensive in both lives and money.

In dollar terms, the outlay is substantial. Every time someone breaks a hole in the U.S.-Mexico border wall, it costs about $1,300 to repair. The estimated cost of maintaining the 661-mile (1,058 km) double-layered fence along part of its 2,000-mile (3,000 km) border with Mexico over the next 20 years is $6.5 billion, the GAO report says. 

That is on top of the $3.7 billion allocated to the Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Border Initiative since 2005 to build a system of fencing, lighting, sensors, cameras and radars to keep out job-hungry immigrants, terrorists and smugglers.

While border agents say the wall is a tool that helps them protect the United States, the GAO report found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection cannot accurately determine the fence’s impact on improving border security, suggesting the money might not be well spent.

“What a waste in resources and creativity ,” said Jorge Mario Cabrera Valladares of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA). “Our tax dollars are being wasted on an ineffective, old strategy instead of urgently working on serious, long term, workable immigration reform,” he said.

Since the attacks on New York and Washington of Sept. 11, 2001, political pressure for tighter border controls has grown sharply and supporters of the border wall argue it is effective in keeping unwanted foreigners out.

But some border experts say the wall does not stop those trying to get into the United States and only makes it more dangerous, greatly raising the fees charged by people smugglers who charge up to $2 billion every year in Arizona alone. 

Some 5,600 people have died trying to cross into the United States since the U.S. government under President Bill Clinton dramatically increased border security in 1994 with Operation Gatekeeper and the first stretch of fence between San Diego and Tijuana.

That is according to a study by the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties and Mexico’s National Commission on Human Rights (CNDH), based on Mexico’s foreign ministry and media reports, who say the death of migrants is an international humanitarian crisis.

Before the stepped-up enforcement operations, experts say most deaths were due to traffic accidents as migrants dashed across freeways in border areas. Today, most die from hypothermia in the desert or by drowning in the Rio Grande and irrigation canals.

The U.S. Border Patrol’s body count for border crossers this year points to the continued dangers. While the U.S. recession has caused a sharp drop in arrests on the borderline,  Customs and Border Protection has reported 416 deaths so far in 2009. That compares with 390 last year and 398 in 2007.

U.S. President Barack Obama has pledged to push comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, but the issue has little lawmaker support as Americans lose jobs in the recession.

(Additional reporting by Tim Gaynor)

President Obama and the leaders of France and Britain have deliberately raised the stakes in the confrontation over Iran's nuclear programme by dramatising the disclosure that it is building a second uranium enrichment plant. Their shoulder-to-shoulder statements of resolve, less than a week before Iran opens talks with six major powers in Geneva, raised more questions than they answer.

It turns out that the United States has known for a long time (how long?) that Iran had been building the still incomplete plant near Qom. Did it share that intelligence with the U.N. nuclear watchdog, and if not, why not? Why did it wait until now, in the middle of a G20 summit in Pittsburgh, to make the announcement -- after Iran had notified the International Atomic Energy Authority of the plant's existence on Monday, after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had delivered a defiant speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday and after the Security Council had adopted a unanimous resolution calling for an end to the spread of nuclear weapons on Thursday?

Is this all part of Obama's choreography to  build international pressure on Iran by getting Russia, in return for the dropping of plans to put a U.S. missile shield in Poland the Czech Republic, to threaten more sanctions against Tehran? A U.S. official says Obama shared the intelligence with Russian President Dimitry Medvedev at the United Nations this week and China had only just been informed. Did Obama try and fail to get Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao -- both in Pittsburgh -- to join the three Western leaders on the podium? Or was his hand forced on timing by the fact that the New York Times had got wind of the Iranian nuclear plant and was set to publish the news on Friday?

The division of labour between Obama, Sarkozy and Brown was striking. The U.S. president sounded stern but his tone was measured. He stressed his commitment to dialogue and negotiation with Iran and to Tehran's right to peaceful nuclear energy. He did not mention sanctions, let alone the possibility of military action. It fell to the Europeans to inject a tone of menace.

Sarkozy accused Iran of defying the international community and taking the world on a dangerous path, and said that unless Tehran changed course by December, there would be tougher sanctions. Brown charged the Islamic Republic with deception and said the international community had no choice but "to draw a line in the sand", and that he did not rule out anything although sanctions were the preferred route. 

Will the latest disclosure on what Iran insists is a peaceful nuclear programme persuade Russia to renounce the sale of advanced S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Tehran? Will it persuade China, which reaffirmed its scepticism about more sanctions this week and has begun supplying gasoline to Iran, to change its mind? The West sees Iran's dependency on imported fuel as a key vulnerability.

Friday's dramatic announcement was a clear effort to appeal to the world court of public opinion and maximise pressure on Tehran before the Oct. 1 talks, but there is no sign that the Islamic Republic's leaders are even considering yielding on their nuclear ambitions. On the contrary, they seem convinced that the nuclear standoff will enable them to patch over deep internal divisions over the disputed June presidential election by playing the patriotic card.

By Tim Gaynor

The foreign born population in the United States dipped slightly last year for the first time in more than a generation, as this nation of immigrants weathered its worst recession in decades, figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau this week indicated.

The Bureau’s American Community Survey showed the total foreign-born population dipped by around 99,000 people to 37.9 million in 2008, as the U.S. sank into its most extended recession since the Great Depression. It was the first recorded decline since 1970.

The Census Bureau cautioned that the dip in the foreign born, to 12.5 percent of the population in 2008 from 12.6 percent in 2007, was well within the margin of error, although analysts found it nevertheless suggestive.

“It’s a modest decline when you’re looking at the overall size of the foreign born population of about 38 million ….  but that said, it is the first time that there has been one,” said Michelle Mittelstadt, of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

“We believe it’s very much tied to economic conditions in the United States and the fact particularly that immigrant flows to the United States have declined significantly during the downturn, and … illegal immigration flows in particular,” added Mittelstadt, who is the co-author of a report on global migration flows and the recession published this month.

The U.S. foreign born population includes naturalized Americans, refugees and both legal and illegal immigrants, of whom there are some 12 million illegal immigrants living and working in the shadows.

One sign that immigrants have been hurt by the recession are falling remittances to Mexico, which began a decline last year for the first time on record. Cash sent back to Mexico fell 16.2 percent in the year to July to $1.83 billion, down from $2.19 billion a year earlier, according to figures released by Mexico’s Central Bank earlier this month.

Whether or not migrants, legal or otherwise, were returning home in the downturn remained moot.
Mittelstadt said evidence suggested that the foreign born population was not being replenished by fresh immigration, rather than significant numbers of people leaving the United States — although other analysts disagreed.

“Fewer people are coming, and significantly more people are going home,” Steven Camarota of the pro-enforcement Center for Immigration Studies think tank in Washington.

“For these numbers to look as they do, it strongly implies that it’s illegal immigrants who are coming in lower numbers and going home in higher numbers,” he added.

Whatever the cause, the tentative decline in the foreign born population is more likely temporary than structural - with immigration likely to trend upward with the economic recovery, Mittelstadt said.

“We believe … this is cyclical and tied to the economy. Within the next two to five years as you see the economy take off again, you will see immigration increase,” she said.

“If this ends up being a jobless recovery … and if Americans decide to consume less and cutback on spending … this could in turn affect migration patterns.”

After just six weeks as NATO secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen has his first crisis. The alliance may be slowly bleeding in an intractable war in Afghanistan, but the immediate cause is the U.S. administration's decision to shelve a planned missile shield due to have been built in Poland and the Czech Republic.

The shield, energetically promoted by former President George W. Bush, was designed to intercept a small number of missiles fired by Iran or some other "rogue state". But Russia saw it as a threat to its own nuclear deterrent and NATO's new east European members saw it as a useful deterrent against Russian bullying, by putting U.S. strategic assets on their soil.

President Barack Obama's decision to drop plans to install it on Polish and Czech territory leaves those former Soviet satellites feeling betrayed -- because they expended political capital to win parliamentary support -- and more exposed to a resurgent Russia, especially after its use of force against Georgia last year.

Obama's move is clearly part of a warming of U.S. relations with Moscow from which Washington hopes to gain help in return on supply routes to Afghanistan, pressure on Iran to rein in its nuclear programme, and an agreement on radical cuts in nuclear arsenals. But this "reset" of U.S.-Russian relations has only exacerbated the rift within NATO over Russia.

The three Baltic states and Poland were particularly critical of NATO's low-key response to Moscow's military action in Georgia. Some said the refusal of west European allies led by Germany and France to agree at a NATO summit last year to putting Georgia and Ukraine on a path to NATO membership emboldened the Kremlin to act. President Dimitry Medvedev's harsh attack on Ukraine's leader in an open letter last month fanned their fears of Russian bullying of its neighbours.

East European officials cite Moscow's playing with the gas taps and trade disputes, and its apparent determination to keep its Black Sea fleet in the Crimean port of Odessa Sevastopol beyond a 2017 deadline agreed with Ukraine as part of a strategy of tension intended to reverse the "colour revolutions" in Kiev and Tbilisi, and bring other former Soviet republics to heel.

All that makes it a particularly awkward moment for Rasmussen to deliver his inaugural keynote speech on NATO-Russia relations on Friday in Brussels. The former Danish prime minister has put a few noses out of joint in his first weeks by making clear he intends to run NATO in a more results-oriented way, leaving less room and time for ambassadors in the North Atlantic Council to debate any idea to a standstill. He has set strict time-limits on council meetings, streamlined flabby agendas and outsourced the drafting of a new Strategic Concept to a group of 12 experts led by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, on which not all allies are represented.

His personal management style and high media profile (monthly news conferences, a blog and Twitter chatter) has sharpened the traditional Kabuki dance in which a new boss and the old board flex their muscles at each other in mutual suspicion, insiders say. It is the first time a former prime minister, used to running a government and to talking to fellow national leaders, has been picked for the job. Previous secretaries-general were former defence or foreign ministers, more accustomed to being servants of the member nations.

Both camps within NATO (which privately brand each other the "Friends of Russia", and the "Cold Warriors") will be watching every word of Rasmussen's Russia speech to ensure he does not depart from alliance policy. The fact is that NATO has been unable to agree on an overall policy towards Russia since the 1990s, when it declared that Moscow was no longer an adversary.

Rasmussen hopes to launch NATO's own modest "reset" of ties with Russia, offering closer cooperation on Afghanistan, a joint threat assessment and work on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. NATO officials have received assurances that Moscow will respond positively and breathe new life into the NATO-Russia Council.

None of that will assuage NATO's east European members, who are likely to press harder now for practical steps to give credibility to the alliance's Article V mutual defence commitment. That could involve drafting military plans to reinforce the Baltic republics and Poland, and holding joint military exercises on those countries' territory. The French and Germans have resisted such ideas in the past as unnecessarily provocative to Moscow. If NATO cannot agree to such moves, the United States may have to do more on its own to compensate its jilted friends.

(note: corrects Odessa to Sevastopol in 6th paragraph)

At his penultimate meeting with governors of the U.N. nuclear watchdog before he steps down in November, Mohamed ElBaradei gave diplomats a reminder of the colourful prose and no-nonsense authority they may soon miss.

   A veteran of the long-running dispute between the West and Iran over its contentious nuclear programme,  the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency  urged the 35-nation governing body to “put (your) heads together to break the logjam,” on the same day that Tehran submitted a package of proposals to foreign powers.

   He criticised countries – he did not name them but was clearly referring to Israel and France — who have suggested he hid evidence from his latest written report on Iran, pointing undeniably to illicit Iranian research into the making of atomic bombs.

   “Talking about formalities, whether the work plan has been implemented or not,  whether people telling us how to suck eggs, how to write our reports, whether there is a (secret) annex  (on Iran)  — these are not the issues,” he said in a swipe at both sides of the debate.

   “If anybody…has any information we have not shared, that has passed muster, been assessed critically in accordance with our practices, please step forward today. Otherwise, as a preacher would say, you should forever hold your peace,” ElBaradei told delegates.

   “We have, in our reports, always tried not to understate the facts or overstate the facts. We have serious concerns, but we are not in a state of panic. Because we have not seen diversion of nuclear material, we have not seen components of nuclear weapons. We do not have any information to that effect.”

   ElBaradei’s Aug. 28 report lent credence to a Western the intelligence dossier implying military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear activity.  But ElBaradei said caveats were still in order.

   “It’s alleged (studies), the whole question is about accuracy, whether this is real — that is the $64,000 question. That is where we are stuck, we have a limited ability to authenticate,” ElBaradei said. “People talk about assessments. I’m not a rocket scientist,” the 67-year-old lawyer and diplomat said.

   But the agency is losing patience with Iran, he said, for stonewalling IAEA efforts to verify that its nuclear programme is peaceful.

   “I know you have been reacting to others,” ElBaradei told Iranian ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh, referring to Tehran’s 2006 decision to stop wider-ranging agency inspections because of U.N. sanctions. “But you are not penalizing others, you are penalizing yourself.”

   Further, ElBaradei prodded Iran to stop evading a U.S.-led big power offer of negotiations that would provide it major trade benefits if it reined in its nuclear activity and made it transparent to non-proliferation inspectors.

   “I’ve told (Iran) I don’t see where the problem is. The U.S. is making an offer without preconditions on that base of mutual respect. Soltanieh has said they are ready to have a comprehensive dialogue. I say the offer by the US can not be refused because it has no conditions attached to it and is based on mutual respect.”

   He also warned  Iran’s strongest Western critics against hyping the Iranian threat by talking about supposed IAEA cover-ups.  “(You are) trying to undermine the agency, (but) in the end (you are) undermining your own credibility. We went through this during the time of Iraq.”

   An outspoken ElBaradei clashed with the former U.S. administration over what he saw as its confrontational policy towards Iraq and Iran. He has said that anyone considering military force against the Islamic Republic would be “bonkers”.

   ElBaradei’s more soft-spoken, reserved successor, Yukiya Amano of Japan, takes over in December.

Germany’s “cash-for-clunkers” scheme expired on Wednesday with a last-minute surge in demand a full three weeks before the Sept. 27 election and much faster than anyone thought possible.

It was among the 81-billion euro basket of stimulus measures the government put together to soften the impact of the recession and was later copied in many other countries, including the United States.It started out as a 1.5-billion euro scheme but that had to be quickly topped up in the spring as a frenzy swept the country.

It gave the economy an important glimmer of hope as gross domestic product contracted by a post-war record 3.5 percent in the first quarter. The government’s heavy-handed intervention did, however, disrupt the free markets — hitting the market for used cars and causing problems for retailers as we pointed out in this story in April.  

My colleague Paul Carrel pointed out in an analysis today that the “cash-for-clunkers” scheme helped private consumption in Europe’s biggest economy grow by 0.1 percent in the first half and without the scheme it would have declined 1.0 pecent compared to the first half of 2008.    

 

The Social Democrats led by Vice Chancellor Frank-Walter Steinmeier — pictured here on the left inspecting a new car as it rolls along on the assembly line — have claimed credit for the Abwrackpraemie, saying it was their idea that helped the car industry in Germany and elsewhere with the generous subsidies for new cars for those to junk their older vehicles. That may be the case but voters don’t seem to care: the SPD still trails Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives by about 12 points in opinion polls. 

The pressing question now is: What will happen to the car market now? Will demand for cars collapse? Did the “cash-for-clunkers” scheme simply encourage would-be car buyers to pull forward their purchases? Will the market be sucked dry? Or did it help stimulate genuinely new demand from people who otherwise would have held onto their ageing vehicles? Will it prove to be a “Strohfeuer“, a flash in the pan?

 

 

 

PHOTOS: Top: Junk cars piled up at a scrap yard in Offenbach near Frankfurt,  REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach (GERMANY)

Lower: Steinmeier (2ndL) talks to an employee about the A3 production line during a visit to the German car manufacturer Audi in Ingolstadt. REUTERS/Michaela Rehle

 

 

 

Ban Ki-moon isn’t having a good year for public relations. Halfway through a five-year term as U.N. secretary-general, he’s been hit with a wave of negative assessments by the Financial Times, The Economist, London Times, Foreign Policy and other media organizations. In a March 2009 editorial entitled “Whereabouts Unknown,” the Times said Ban was “virtually inaudible” on pressing issues of international security and “ineffectual” on climate change, the one issue that Ban claims he has made the biggest difference on. The Economist gave him a mixed report card, assigning him two out of 10 points for his management skills while praising him on climate change (eight out of 10 points).
    
This week, Norway’s Aftenposten newspaper made an unpleasant situation much worse. It published a confidential memo assessing Ban’s 2-1/2 years in office from Oslo’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Mona Juul, to the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. Juul’s report is scathing — and it comes from a representative of one of the world’s body’s top financial contributors. She says the former South Korean foreign minister suffers from a “lack of charisma” and has “constant temper tantrums” in his offices on the 38th floor of the United Nations building in midtown Manhattan.
    
She describes Ban as a “powerless observer” during the fighting in Sri Lanka earlier this year when thousands of civilians were killed as government forces ended a 25-year civil war against Tamil Tiger rebels, trapping them on a narrow strip of coast in the country’s northeast. In Darfur, Somalia, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Congo, she wrote, Ban’s “passive and not very committed appeals seem to fall on deaf ears.” She says that his recent trip to Myanmar was a failure and that some people in Washington refer to Ban as a “one-term” secretary-general.
    
Juul’s letter could hardly have come at a more inopportune time. Ban is planning to visit Norway in the coming weeks, where he intends to meet with government officials and visit the Arctic circle to see for himself the effects of global warming and the melting polar ice. Now U.N. officials fear reporters will be more interested in what he says about Juul’s memo than climate change.

So far Ban has not reacted to the letter. However, a Norwegian diplomat told Reuters that Ban’s press office had been instructed to hold off on confirming his visit to Norway shortly after the news of Juul’s memo began to spread.
    
Ban’s PR difficulties didn’t start this year. In March 2008, his chief of staff Vijay Nambiar sent a memo to U.N. employees explaining how to say his boss’s name. “Many world leaders, some of whom are well acquainted with the Secretary-General, still use his first name mistakenly as his surname and address him wrongly as Mr. Ki-moon or Mr. Moon,” Nambiar complained.
 
Then came Ban’s own speech to senior U.N. officials in Turin, Italy last year, in which he described how difficult it was to improve the working culture inside the United Nations. The secretary-general seemed to acknowledge that his internal management style had failed. “I tried to lead by example,” Ban said. “Nobody followed.”
    
Ban’s aides vehemently defend him, saying he’s being treated unfairly by the press. One senior U.N. official suggested privately that Ban could very well turn out to be “the greatest secretary-general ever.” They complain that people continue to compare him to his predecessor Kofi Annan, who was a very different U.N. chief and relied less on “quiet diplomacy” than Ban. Annan became a hero to many people around the world for standing up to the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush over the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Annan called the March 2003 invasion illegal. U.N. officials also complain bitterly about the indefatigable blogger Matthew Lee, whose website Inner City Press regularly accuses Ban and other U.N. officials of hypocrisy and failing to keep their promises to reform the United Nations and root out corruption. (Some U.N. officials accuse Lee of not always getting his facts right, but his blog has become unofficial required reading for U.N. staffers around the world.)
    
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, diplomats in New York say, is among those supporting a campaign against a second term for Ban. Juul’s memo said Helen Clark, New Zealand’s former prime minister and current head of the U.N. Development Program, “could quickly become a competitor for Ban’s second term.” But diplomats say they expect the United States, Britain and other major powers to reluctantly back a second term for Ban, if only because there appears to be no viable alternative whom Russia and China would support.
    
A recent article in the Times of London said the best U.N. chief in the organization’s 64-year history was not Swedish Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dag Hammarskjold but the Peruvian diplomat Javier Perez de Cuellar, who held the top U.N. post for 10 years until 1992. Nicknamed “mumbles” because he was so difficult to understand, Perez de Cuellar kept a low profile and, like Ban, preferred backroom diplomacy, not Annan’s bully pulpit. Among the Peruvian diplomat’s successes were managing the end of the Cold War, leading a long-delayed revival of U.N. peacekeeping and encouraging member states to back a U.S.-led military operation to drive Iraq’s invading forces out of Kuwait in 1991.
    
Will Ban’s preference for quiet diplomacy make him as good or better than Perez de Cuellar? That remains to be seen.