Majalla 1554

Issue 1554 • July 2010

Beyond Oil and Security As many regional variables begin to play into the future definition of Saudi-US ties, the formula that was once used to characterize their rapport no longer applies writes Caryle Murphy

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9 771319 087105 The Majalla

The Art of War

Somali piracy has opened the doors to great power competition, and The Gulf of Aden is the first place where a new geopolitical game is being played out

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Candid Coversations

US Ambassador to Riyadh James B. Smith speaks about what is one of the most important bilateral relations for the United States of America

Issue 1554

On Politics

Saudi Liberals claim to speak for a “silent majority,” but these activists continue to represent an elite group with no strong connections to society

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• EDITORIAL

Established in 1987 by Prince Ahmad Bin Salman Bin Abdel Aziz Al-Majalla Established by Hisham and Ali Hafez Editor-in-Chief Adel Al Toraifi Editors Paula Mejia Wessam Sherif Jacqueline Shoen Editorial Secretary Jan Singfield New Media Development Officer Markus Milligan Submissions To submit articles or opinion, please email: editorial@majalla.com Note: all articles should not exceed 800 words Subscriptions To subscribe to the digital edition, please contact: subscriptions@majalla.com To subscribe for kindle edition: kindle@majalla.com Disclaimer The views expressed in this magazine are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or views of The Majalla and its editorial team.

Al Majalla © 2009 HH Saudi Research and Marketing (UK) Limited.

All rights reserved. Niether this publication nor any part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of HH Saudi Research and Marketing (UK) Limited. For digital subscription inquiries please visit www.majalla.com/subscriptions

London Office Address HH Saudi Research & Marketing (UK) Limited Arab Press House 182-184 High Holborn, LONDON WC1V 7AP DDI: +44 (0)20 7539 2335/2337, Tel.: +44 (0)20 7821 8181, Fax: +(0)20 7831 2310 E-Mail: editorial@majalla.com Advertising For advertisement, sponsorship and digital edition, please contact: Mr. Wael Al Fayez w.alfayez@alkhaleejiah.com Tel.: 0096614411444 F.: 0096614400996 P.O.BOX 22304 Riyadh 11495, Saudi Arabia Cover image © iStockphoto

Editorial This issue of The Majalla brings to you an anlysis of the evolution of the Saudi-US bilateral relationship. In this month's feature, Beyond Oil and Security, Pulitzer prize winner Caryle Murphy notes that after some tensions during the 1990s, the Saudi-US bilateral relationship suffered an almost fatal blow with 9/11 and its aftermath. Yet, this relationship survived, changed and diversified, and today the formula “oil and security” that was used to characterize the Saudi-US rapport no longer does it justice. Many regional variables, she argues, will play into the future definition of Saudi-US ties, among them the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire and Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

In an interesting evaluation of the dynamics of geopolitics, Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, looks at how relations between US, China, Israel and Japan demonstrate the leverage their respective leaders have and the pressure they can exert over one another. In Jan Ken Pon: Obama Takes Down (Wrong) Prime Minister, Clemons explains how Netanyahu and Hu Jintao have played their hands best, while Obama has been beaten, constrained, but still has global leverage, and finally why Yukio Hatoyama was constantly on the losing end.

We invite you to read these articles and much more on our website at Majalla.com/en. As always, we welcome and value our readers’ feedback and we invite you to take the opportunity to leave your comments or contact us if you are interested in writing for our publication.

Adel Al Toraifi, Editor-in-Chief

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Contributors Caryle Murphy Caryle Murphy is an independent journalist based in Saudi Arabia. A longtime reporter for the Washington Post, Ms Murphy was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting (1991) and the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting (1990) for her coverage of Iraqi-occupied Kuwait and subsequent 1990-91 Gulf War. She is the author of Passion for Islam, which explores Islam’s contemporary revival and the roots of religious extremism in the Middle East.

Published by Scribner, the book examines Islam’s resurgence through the prism of Egypt, where Murphy lived for five years.

Steve Clemons Steve Clemons is a Senior Fellow and Director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation which aims to promote a new American internationalism, that combines a tough-minded realism about America's interests in the world, with a pragmatic idealism about the kind of world order best suited to America's democratic way of life. Publisher of the popular political blog The Washington Note, Mr Clemons is a longterm policy practitioner and entrepreneur in Washington, DC.

Stéphane Lacroix Stéphane Lacroix is an assistant professor of political science at Sciences Po in Paris. His work has focused on Islam and politics in the contemporary Middle East, particularly the Gulf region. He has published articles on Saudi Arabia in academic journals such as the Middle East Journal and the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

He is the author of the 2008 book Awakening Islam: A History of Islamism in Saudi Arabia. Lacroix is also a former consultant on Saudi Arabia for the International Crisis Group.

Julian Gardner Julian Gardner is a Director of the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Corporate Employee & Executive Services (‘RBC cees’) based in Geneva. Julian joined RBC in 1995 and in 2000, took up a client management and business development position within RBC cees. Julian moved to Geneva in 2006 to establish a European base for RBC cees, where he is involved in developing RBC cees globally. He sits on the Standards Board for EMXco. The board consists of leading fund managers and investors who are standardizing the development of electronic trading of funds.

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• CONTENTS

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Contents Quotes of the Month The Art of War

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On Politics

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Beyond Oil and Security

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The Wealth of Nations

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The Human Condition

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A Thousand Words

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Candid Conversations

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Country Brief

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The Critics

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The Final Word

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• Blind Spots to Peace: America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan • Fighting Piracy: The Gulf of Aden and the Quest for Great Power Status • What’s New in Al-Qaeda’s Suicide Bombings?

• Saudi Liberals: Elitist ambitions and the reality of Saudi society • A Law Unto Himself: Ramzan Kadyrov – President of Chechnya • Jan Ken Pon: Obama Takes Down (Wrong) Prime Minister

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As many regional variables begin to play into the future definition of Saudi-US ties, the formula that was once used to characterize their rapport no longer applies

• Return of the King? The state of gold markets • The Crumbling of Global Solidarity • The Quest for Talent • Save Money as you Save the Planet: Mitigating climate change • News Behind the Graph

• A Home Away From Home?

The UK’s detrimental asylum policy • PIn the Lead: Kuwait’s Development Fund

• US Ambassador James B. Smith • Jeremy Ben-Ami

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• QUOTES OF THE MONTH

Quotes of the Month Images © Getty Images

“Nuclear states do not allow others to even peacefully use nuclear energy … They want to monopolize science and technology for themselves to protect their material interests.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaking at an Iranian cultural event at the Shanghai Expo, where he labeled Iran sanctions “worthless”.

“The European economy is in the midst of its deepest and most widespread recession in the postwar era.”

Joaquín Almunia, EU commission

“For some countries, aid is a vital safety net that saves lives every day.

UK money should be spent helping the poorest people in the poorest countries, with every penny making a real difference by giving families the chance of a better future.”

Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell explains the UK’s decision to terminate development aid to Russia and China

“Our goal is not to punish Iran; our goal is not to sanction Iran; our goal is to end any doubts or questions about the purpose of Iran’s nuclear program, and to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.”

Hilary Clinton discusses US policy towards Iran in light of the recent sanctions resolution

“My task is to rebuild this nation. What I want to tell voters in the upper house election is that our reforms are becoming more concrete,” he said this evening. “The hopes voters had for the Democratic Party will not end up as a mere dream. They will be realized.

That is what I want people to know.”

Newly appointed Japanese PM Naoto Kan

“The government decision will make it clear to the world that Israel is acting legally, responsibly, and with complete transparency,” Israeli PM Netanyahu on the decision to launch an inquiry into the Gaza convoy raid

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• THE ART OF WAR

Blind Spots to Peace

America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan It is no coincidence that Afghanistan’s first major peace conference did not go well. The central players involved are geared for more war, and all the incentives point that way. Even the withdrawal of foreign troops, publicly pointed out by Karzai as a preliminary and essential condition for peace, is not going to happen by 2011. The Afghan president more than anyone else needs the NATO and US troops to stay.

Michael Hastings

Image © Getty Images

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ast week, Afghanistan held its first major peace conference. It didn’t start out well. The Taliban fired a couple of rockets at the venue in Kabul during President Hamid Karzai’s opening speech, and a Taliban suicide bomber blew himself up nearby. Afghan security forces killed two other suicide bombers; one of Karzai’s guards was severely injured in the attack. The security breach forced two Afghan government officials out of office: in the wake of the attack, Karzai accepted the resignations of the interior minister (not coincidentally, a political rival) and the director of national security. In the end, the three day conference produced around 200 recommendations to put Afghanistan on a path towards peace.

Don’t get your hopes up. The country has been in a nearly continuous state of war for three decades, and the smart money is on years more of the same. Sadly, in the aftermath of the peace conference, these feelings are just confirmed. Despite its perhaps noble intentions, critics viewed the conference as a way for the Karzai government to suck yet more aid money out of the international community. Abdullah Abdullah, the former presidential candidate and reformer called the whole thing a “PR exercise.” The conference ended up exposing all the reasons why a lasting peace appears to be an impossibility, at least for now. Mainly: the major players don’t really want it.

The incentives are all towards more war.

Karzai’s claims of peace appear particularly dubious. Most at the conference agreed that as long as there are foreign troops in Afghanistan, peace will be elusive. Yet Karzai relies on the NATO forces for both his survival, and his cash. He wants them there, despite his regular criticisms of them for killing civilians, which allows him to score political points at home. One of the 200 recommendations to emerge was to put a timeline on foreign troops in Afghanistan, which Karzai appeared to endorse. Yet Karzai really doesn’t want a timeline. The Obama administration’s attempt at putting even a wishy-washy dead-

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line on American involvement—Obama said he would start withdrawing combat troops in July 2011, which he has since backed away from —sent Karzai’s government into a panic.

Last month, Karzai went to Washington to make sure Obama wasn’t really serious about leaving in 2011. Karzai was publicly assured that the troops would be there well past 2011—perhaps even to the earliest date that Karzai has said he’ll need foreign troops to stick around, 2024. And though Karzai would like to see his enemies lay down their arms, US officials privately say that he’s not keen on giving them any real political power that could threaten his own.

For America, peace doesn’t appear to be a priority either.

Obama’s strategy—now about one year old—has ensured at least two or three more years of bloody fighting, with the tripling of Western forces in Afghanistan to almost 150,000. And while it’s a favorite talking point of American and Afghan officials to say that there’s no “military solution” to Afghanistan, only a “political solution,” the vast majority of our resources are spent on making-war there. The US State Department tripled the number of civilians it had in Afghanistan as well—to a paltry 1,000, utterly dwarfed by the US military’s troops and private contractors. The US is going to spend about $120 billion in Afghanistan this coming year— only a fraction of that will be for diplomacy and aid.

Furthermore, while there’s a single military commander of US and NATO forces—making it easier to command the effort, and giving his singular voice credibility—there are at least five US and British diplomatic roles. The latter often seem to be fighting amongst themselves, trying to figure out who’s in the lead. That makes each diplomatic voice less credible. Our diplomatic effort, writes counterinsurgency expert Andrew Exum, has been on an “ad-hoc” basis. “Politics is the blind spot in America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan,” he wrote in a paper released last month. If we're blind in politics, then we’re also blind to peace.

Then are the folks the Americans and the Afghan government are fighting: the Taliban, in reality an assortment of home-grown fighters and militant factions, with the occasional connection to international terrorist networks across the border in Pakistan. The Taliban’s appetite for peace appears sketchy at best, especially since almost all the factions have said there won’t be peace until America leaves. Many have made fighting their business; other younger fighters take pride in their role as mujahedeen, and they don’t see any actual incentives for laying down their arms. Even if the Taliban wanted to quit fighting, the reception they’ve gotten in the past from Kabul has been extremely hostile. In 2007, two Western diplomats were expelled by Karzai’s government for just talking to the Taliban.

Another recommendation that came out of the peace process was to take Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s name off the US and UN blacklist—which is something the Americans would never go for. And since Omar would have to adopt the Afghan constitution, embrace a Western view on human rights, and renounce violence, it appears unlikely that he’d bite either.

Which leads us to where we are now, and where we're headed: Afghanistan as a battlefield, where the fighters are gearing up for more war, not peace.

Michael Hastings – regular contributor to GQ magazine. He recently returned from a trip to Afghanistan.

This article was first published in The Majalla 22 June 2010 Issue 1554 • July 2010

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• THE ART OF WAR

Fighting Piracy The Gulf of Aden and the Quest for Great Power Status Somali piracy has opened the doors to great power competition off the Horn of Africa. Military clashes between the navies present in the waters in and around the Gulf of Aden are almost unthinkable. In fact, coordination among them has been remarkably smooth. Operating independently, they are obtaining valuable war-like experience far away from their waters. Maritime power is one of the essential elements for any country harboring great power ambitions. The Gulf of Aden is the first scenario where a new geopolitical game is being played out.

Ramon Pacheco Pardo

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A look at the piracy map provided by the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Centre reveals the scope of the problem.

Around two thirds of all actual and attempted attacks on ships have occurred off the coast of Somalia

Image © Getty Images

iracy off the coast of Somalia has become a major issue. Over 250 attacks on bulk carriers, oil tankers, fishing vessels and other ships have taken place since a spike in piracy began in 2007. At least 60 of these attacks have resulted in successful seizures. Tens of millions of dollars have been paid in ransom to pirate groups. The dangers associated to crossing the Gulf of Aden, nicknamed “Pirate Alley,” have increased premium costs for ship owners. The gulf is one of the major trade routes in the world, meaning that expenses related to dealing with this problem translate into greater costs for the world economy.

A look at the piracy map provided by the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Centre reveals the scope of the problem. Around two thirds of all actual and attempted attacks on ships have occurred off the coast of Somalia. Therefore, it is not surprising that all major powers answered a call from the UN in October 2008 to work jointly to deter piracy, by force if necessary. The US, China, the EU, Russia, Japan, South Korea and Australia are using their fleets to fend off the threat from Somali pirates. In the absence of a proper central government in Mogadishu, countries around the world have mobilized to protect their commercial interests.

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• THE ART OF WAR

Somali piracy has therefore produced a welcomed effect in the form of cooperation between the navies of powers that never before had cooperated. However, cooperation between these countries to defend one of the busiest transport routes in the world is only one reason why all of them were quick to heed the call from the UN. Equally important has been the interplay of interests that make the Gulf of Aden a playing field for competing great powers seeking to test their influence. For the US, Somali piracy serves to reinforce its commitment to maintain an active presence in the region, as well as to underline its position as the hegemonic maritime power. For China and the EU, their respective missions to fight piracy represent a new development in their military strategy. For Russia, it signifies a return to the heyday of the Soviet days when only the US had a stronger navy. The waters around the Gulf of Aden have therefore become one of the first centers in which the battle for influence between existing, rising and willing great powers is being played. Beyond economic considerations, the US, China, the EU and Russia also see their presence in Pirate Alley in terms of power and prestige.

The Fifth Fleet of the US has been sailing the waters from the Persian Gulf to the East African coast since 1995. No other navy can match the overwhelming power of the most technologically advanced and materially endowed fleet in the region. Hence, the Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet has been heading the multinational Combined Task Force (CTF) 151 anti-piracy force since January 2009. A total of 24 partners, including several Arab and Southeast Asian countries, are working together and making use of the Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Manama.

CTF-151 could be perceived as an exercise mixing soft and hard power from the US. On the one hand, Washington allows third parties to make use of their resources in the region. On the other hand, it is a demonstration of American naval superiority. No other country can compete with its well-equipped vessels, surveillance know-how or coordination experience.

Russia’s Pacific Fleet has remained a constant presence off the Horn of Africa throughout the years The presence of the Chinese fleet in the Gulf of Aden is a historic event. It marks the first time since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 that the country has dispatched its navy in a combat mission overseas. Moreover, in January 2010 China gained approval to co-head Shared Awareness and Deconfliction, or SHADE, the mechanism to provide coordination to anti-piracy efforts. Chinese warships are also in charge of permanently patrolling one of the most dangerous sectors in the Gulf of Aden. Therefore, in less than two years the Chinese navy has gone from having no recent experience of deployment overseas to sharing the responsibility for coordinating what essentially is a war mission. As expected, some Western policy-makers and analysts have expressed uneasiness at the new role being played by the Chinese army. For Beijing, its mission off the Horn of Africa is an expression of its increasing power.

As deputy chief of staff of the navy force of the People's Liberation Army, Xiao Xinnian, puts it, the mission “shows the positive role of the PLA in maintaining world stability and peace as well

Pirate Attacks in 2009

as the PLA navy's confidence and capability of handling multiple security threats and fulfilling diverse military tasks.”

Yet, it is the EU’s new-found readiness to engage in a war mission that could prove of most interest. It is not surprising that the US has sought to display its military power, nor that China harbors the ambition to transform its economic rise into a greater say in international affairs. However, the EU had hitherto emphasized its civilian power, distancing itself from the alleged bruteness of American displays of military power.

Not in this case. Launched in December 2008 to fight piracy off the coast of Somalia, EUNAVFOR is the first-ever EUmanaged non-peacekeeping operation, as well as the EU’s firstever naval mission. EUNAVFOR operates independently from CTF-151, thus showing the willingness of European leaders to conduct military operations without relying on the US. In fact, the EU is one of the co-heads of SHADE. David Miliband, when he was UK foreign secretary, called for the EU to speak with a common European voice to become as influential as the US and China. EUNAVFOR is a step in this direction.

Russia is the other power using its presence in the Gulf of Aden to announce its renewed military power. Albeit smaller than during the Soviet era, Russia’s Pacific Fleet has remained a constant presence off the Horn of Africa throughout the years.

Operating independently from all other navies, the Pacific Fleet has been one of the most effective in deterring pirate attacks and freeing seized ships. Following the approval of China’s candidature to co-head SHADE, Moscow now seeks to emulate Beijing and participate in running an international military operation for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Somali piracy has opened the doors to great power competition off the Horn of Africa. Military clashes between the navies present in the waters in and around the Gulf of Aden are almost unthinkable. In fact, coordination among them has been remarkably smooth. Somali pirates might have even helped to increase confidence between military officials of the US, China, the EU and Russia. However, the last three are benefitting from their presence off the coast of Somalia to an extent they could have never imagined. Operating independently, they are obtaining valuable war-like experience far away from their waters.

Maritime power is one of the essential elements for any country harboring great power ambitions. The Gulf of Aden is the first scenario where a new geopolitical game is being played out.

Ramon Pacheco Pardo – Researcher in counter-proliferation and East Asian politics.

This article was first published in The Majalla 27 June 2010

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• THE ART OF WAR

What’s New in Al-Qaeda’s Suicide Bombings?

Exploring Al-Qaeda’s unique terror tactics

Suicide bombings as a tactic can be traced back to the early 1980s. If one takes into consideration suicidal actions in combat that are very similar in nature to suicide bombings, then they can be traced back to the Second World War, and even to the eighteenth century. However there seems to be something exclusively characteristic of the suicide bombings carried out by Al-Qaeda and affiliated groups.

Manuel Almeida

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Most experts on the subject seem to agree that the unique nature of Al-Qaeda lies in the highly publicized battle of ideas that the organization and its suicide bombings are part of

Image © Getty Images

ast month in Kabul, a suicide bomber drove a van full of explosives into a NATO convoy, killing five US troops, one Canadian soldier, plus 12 civilians. Dissipating doubts about whether Al-Qaeda or the Taliban were behind the attack, the latter claimed responsibility, even stating in a declaration the quantity of explosives carried inside the van—750kg.

The use of suicide bombings by the Afghan Taliban is relatively recent. It derives from the close ideological views and personal ties, especially at the leadership level, between the Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaeda, reflected in an increasingly similar modus operandi after 9/11. Although suicide bombings in Afghanistan during the 1990s were rare or non-existent, AlQaeda used them elsewhere during that decade, namely; the attacks against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Albeit the most notorious suicide bombings are those of AlQaeda, who seek such notoriety, they are not an exclusive feature of Al-Qaeda and associated groups, nor were they invented by Al-Qaeda. Among others, Mahdi Hassan from New Statesman remembers how this tactic can be traced back in time to Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers in the 1980s, and prior to that to the Japanese kamikaze pilots during World War Two. Other famous examples are the suicide bombings carried out during the Lebanese civil war against US, French and Israeli forces; an issue of debate as to whether Hezbollah were involved in these attacks. Yet another case is the Iran-Iraq war, to which the TV documentary The Cult of the Suicide Bomber attributes the origin of suicide bombings.

Suicidal actions in combat have been traced further back in time. At the end of the eighteenth century, John Paul Jones, a US naval officer known as the “Father of the American navy,” was hired by Catherine II of Russia to take part in the naval campaign in the Black Sea against the Turks. In his chronicles, Jones wrote about how Ottoman captains would set their ships on fire and sail them towards the Russian ships. With the wooden ships loaded with gunpowder for the canons, this meant certain death for the Ottoman crews.

What then differentiates Al-Qaeda’s suicide bombings from all the other cases? At first sight, all the examples stated above, including the Taliban in Afghanistan, took place in a war context, whereas Al-Qaeda is not a state actor and thus its terrorist activities can hardly be framed as war. However, the face of war has changed, and while the number of inter-state wars has declined substantially, the rise in number and profile of unconventional and intra16

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state wars is one of the most important features of the post-Cold War world. The Al-Qaeda leadership certainly believes that it is at war with the US, plus a few other governments in the West and in the Middle East. What is more, the whole US reaction to 9/11 was framed—wrongly—around the expression “The War on Terror”, and the enemy combatants, i.e. suspect Al-Qaeda members, that were captured were treated under the laws of war.

Another possible claim to differentiate Al-Qaeda’s suicide bombings could be that it does not fight for a particular territory, whereas all the examples named above, including the Afghan Taliban case, directly or indirectly involve the struggle for a specific territory. Again, this does not stand. The World Islamic Front Statement (1998), probably the most symbolic statement by Al-Qaeda and affiliated groups to date, clearly states that striking the West is motivated by grievances caused by the aggressive presence of foreigners in the Arabian Peninsula, in Iraq, and in Jerusalem. This claim is one of Al-Qaeda’s most important rhetorical weapons.

While the magnitude of the destruction and the number of civilian victims of Al-Qaeda’s suicide bombings is surely unprecedented, the indiscriminate targeting of civilians is also not an exclusive feature of Al-Qaeda and affiliated groups. The Tamil Tigers carried out numerous such attacks in Sri Lanka that targeted civilians exclusively, and with high casualty rates.

An indication to what is truly exclusive of Al-Qaeda is given by its own leaders. In 2005, Ayman al-Zawahiri stated that “We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place

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in the battlefield of the media…[and we] are in a media battle for the hearts and minds of our umma.” According to Faisal Devji, author of Landscapes of the Jihad, contemporary martyrdom “only achieves meaning by being witnessed by the media.” Most experts on the subject seem to agree that the unique nature of Al-Qaeda lies in the highly publicized battle of ideas that the organization and its suicide bombings are part of.

As Peter Bergen from the New America Foundation wrote in The New York Times, Al Qaeda today “lives on as an organization as much virtual as it is real, releasing videotapes and audiotapes while its members communicate with one another from untraceable Internet cafes. Truly Al-Qaeda 2.0.” As nihilistic or barbarian Al-Qaeda’s suicide bombings might be, they are a product of our times.

This article was first published in The Majalla 18 June 2010

Dying to Win In Robert Pape's book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, the author undertakes an analysis of suicide terrorism form a strategic, social and pshycological perspective. Based on a databased he compiled at the University of Chicago, the book bases its conclusions on suicide bombings around the world from 1980-2003, comprising over 400 attacks.

In this critically acclaimed analyisis, Pape argues that various misrepresentations about suicide terrorists harm our ability in creating effective counterinsurgency programs. For one he argues that at the root of suicide terrorism is nationalism and not religion, and instead explains that it is an extreme form of national liberation. “The data show that there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic Fundamentalism, or r any one of the world’s religions. ... Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland” (4).

Pape analyzes specifically multiple campaings to demonstrate that sucide terrorism and religion do not have a causal relationship. His looks into instances in Lebanon, Sri Lanka and the Sikhs in Punhap, as well as the PKK Kurdish party in Turkey, to examine the role of religion. He notes that “Religion plays a role in suicide terrorism, but mainly in the context of national resistance” and not Islam per se but “the dynamics of religious difference” are what matter (166-67).

Unlike his critics, Pape believes that Islamic terrorists are not fundamentally against modernity and the West. Pape on the other hand demonstrates that it is the West's actions that determine the mobilization of suicide attacks, and the implications of his finding could prove extremely effective in undermining the capacity and willingness of terrorist organizations to resort to such measures.

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• ON POLITICS

Saudi Liberals Elitist ambitions and the reality of Saudi society

Saudi Liberals, one of the two competing factions in Saudi society, remain an understudied group.

The term liberal is relatively new in Saudi parlance, although there had been earlier occurrences of secular activism in Saudi Arabia. The liberal movement was born in opposition to the Sahwa movement and, for years, it had no clear project of its own. In the early 2000s, a split occurred between what can be referred to as social liberals and political liberals. Today, although claiming to speak for a “silent majority,” these activists continue to represent an elite group with no strong connections to society.

Stéphane Lacroix

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ontemporary Saudi society is usually described as torn between two competing factions—the Islamists and the Liberals. Yet, while the first group has been the subject of numerous studies, the second group remains paradoxically much more mysterious, in terms of who those Saudi “liberal” voices are, what their background is and what they want.

The term liberal is relatively new in Saudi social parlance. By all accounts, it wasn’t used before the 1990s. This doesn’t mean, however, that there was no secular activism in Saudi Arabia before that period. In the wake of World War II, some Saudi students who had traveled to Egypt, Lebanon or Iraq for their studies came back to the Kingdom under the influence of the leftist and Arab nationalist ideologies that were so popular in the region. Unintentionally, ARAMCO also played a major role in this movement of secular politicization, because it hosted Arabs from all neighboring countries, many of whom were under the influence of those same ideologies. As a consequence, Marxist, leftist, Nasserite and Arab nationalist clandestine groups appeared in Saudi Arabia. It is true that they were confined to the elite, and never represented a mass movement—and yet, they were seen as a threat, especially after some of their members attempted a series of coups against the authorities.

The government reacted strongly against those activists who had crossed the line, while limiting their potential social base by offering graduates from abroad high-profile jobs in an ever-expanding administration. They were soon found at key positions in the ministries—to the extent that some of them later, and obviously after having demonstrated their loyalty, became ministers—and in some media institutions. As a consequence, from the mid-1970s, most secular activists maintained a distance from politics. A few of them, however, became active in a new field, which was developing quickly at the time: the literary scene. There, they started calling for the modernization of Saudi literature—a modernization that 18

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would not only involve form, but also content. Simultaneously, the critique was directed, implicitly, at Saudi social norms, which they aimed to liberalize. They were soon joined by a number of novelists, poets and literary critics, the most prominent of whom were Abdallah Al-Ghadhdhami and Sa‘id Al-Surayhi. An intellectual trend was born, known as modernism.

Again, this was a development that mainly had to do with a certain intellectual elite and remained at the surface of society.

At the same time, however, a much deeper-reaching evolution was taking place in the Kingdom. From the 1960s, the Sahwa (from Al-Sahwa Al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Awakening), a grassroots Islamist movement, had been growing as a result, among other things, of the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood activists who had found shelter in Saudi Arabia. The Sahwa’s base was the educational system, through which it had access to all layers of society. More importantly, in a conservative society, the Sahwa’s discourse was well-understood—and well-received.

By the mid-1980s, the Sahwa had reached a critical mass, and it started seeing the modernists’ monopoly over certain media outlets, especially the literary supplements of the major Saudi newspapers, as a provocation. A wide-ranging campaign against the modernists was organized, and many of them were soon dismissed from their positions. The Sahwa, apparently, had won.

In August 1990, the threat of a potential invasion of Saudi Arabia by the Iraqi army, right after the latter had invaded Kuwait, convinced the Saudi rulers to request the assistance of Western troops. This prompted a wave of unprecedented debates in the Kingdom—with demands coming from all sectors of society. The first individuals to take action were a group of women’s rights advocates, who organized a spectacular event: In November 1990, 49 women drove cars in the streets of Riyadh, explicitly challenging the ban imposed on women’s driving. From early 1991, however, the Sahwa members—who had been outraged by the women’s demonstration—became the most salient voice in Saudi society. Through a series of petitions and sermons, they called for the implementation of their social and political project, which aimed, among other things, at increasing the control of the religious establishment over Saudi society, and at giving religious figures a more prominent role in the political system.

However, both the authorities and the liberals saw the momentum gained by the Sahwa as a threat. The authorities reacted by silencing the most prominent figures of the Sahwist opposition, while secular activists of all backgrounds—leftists, communists, modernists, advocates of women’s rights, etc.—started to coalesce in a group, which, soon after, informally took the name liberals (libaraliyyun). These liberals had a very simple program: countering the Sahwa’s project and worldview. This would remain the main weakness of the Saudi liberal trend for the years to come: It was born in opposition to the Sahwa, and had no real—and, even less so, coherent—project of its own. It is true that, in the 1990s, some brilliant thinkers such as Turki Al-Hamad attempted to inject intellectual flesh into the liberal project. But Al-Hamad’s effort was relatively isolated, and many of those claiming the liberal label didn’t even identify with it.

The weakening of the Sahwa, however, gave the liberal trend a first impulse: Liberals soon reclaimed the positions that some of them had earlier occupied in the media, and they re-established their influence at the elite level. The emergence of salafi-jihadi terrorism, and the events of September 11th gave liberals a second impulse: The fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi and Issue 1554 • July 2010

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the media campaign against the Kingdom in the West opened a phase of self-introspection in Saudi Arabia. Presenting themselves as an alternative to the Islamists—while explicitly assimilating Sahwis and jihadists—the liberals undoubtedly took advantage of the situation. Another factor played in favor of the liberals; the emergence of a group of mutahawwilun (literally “those who have changed”), former Islamists who had become extremely critical of the Sahwa and other forms of Islamic activism. For the liberals, these mutahawwilun were a key asset, first because they spoke out of personal experience, and second because they had a mastery of the language of Islam that was sorely lacking among the liberals.

While the first group has been the subject of numerous studies, the second group remains paradoxically much more mysterious This is an important point: in the 1990s, most of the liberals had no discourse on Islam. They claimed to represent universal values, and acted as if it were obvious that those values were compatible with Islam. In the wake of 9/11, and with the help of some of the mutahawwilun such as Mansur Al-Nuqaidan or Muhammad AlMahmud, the liberals would increasingly attempt to justify their positions through Islam. This intrusion in a sphere considered alien to them reinforced the Sahwa’s hostility towards the liberals.

This was especially so when, for instance, Al-Nuqaidan went so far as to call for a revival of irja’, a medieval group known for its tolerance of all religious opinions but considered deviant by the Sahwis, who had spent considerable efforts refuting their ideas.

This gave the liberals an increasing visibility, especially on the Internet where they established a significant presence. Liberal forums were created: first, Tuwaa, until 2004, then Dar Al-Nadwa, until 2006, and finally, and since then, Minbar Al-Ibda’ walHiwar and Muntadayatuna Al-Shabaka Al-Libaraliyya. This is a remarkable development: for the first time, the term liberal is used here in a formal way, marking the increasing assertiveness of its proponents. This development coincided with the increasing use of the same term by the liberals’ foes, as in the 2009 book published by the Sahwis of Al-Bayan magazine under the name Naqd Al-Libaraliyya (“critique of liberalism”).

However, the increasing visibility of the liberals also exposed their contradictions. The liberal trend grew out of its opposition to the Sahwa, but lacked a coherence of its own. Liberals wanted reform, but they disagreed on what should be reformed, and how. This produced an important split in the early 2000s, which led to the emergence of two groups, representing two radically distinct options— those who may be referred to as social liberals and those that I would refer to as political liberals. For the first group, the main problem in Saudi Arabia is social and cultural, and what is needed primarily, then, is social and cultural reform. Many of those liberals even oppose the idea of democratization, because, according to them, any opening in this direction while society isn’t ready would only benefit their Islamist foes. They are very loyal to the regime, which they see as an ally and protector against the influence of the Sahwa.

The political liberals, on the contrary, believe that no change can be achieved without an all-encompassing effort at political reform. For them, social and cultural reform is also deeply needed, but it will not happen if the political issue is not addressed first. To make this

happen, some of those “political liberals” have proven ready to collaborate with any other social group, including Islamists, as long as they agree on common goals.

The resulting Islamo-liberal alliance prompted heated debates between the different groups of liberals: While the political liberals insisted on the fruitfulness of their approach, others, especially the social liberals, reproached them for becoming tools in the hands of the Islamists. As Turki Al-Hamad, who may be considered as part of the social liberal group, once put it in an interview he gave me, “Those ‘liberals’ are being fooled by the Islamists the same way Iranian liberals were fooled by Khomeini. The Islamists claim to be democrats, but if they get to power, they’ll establish a regime of the kind of what is found in Iran.”

The debate between the different groups of liberals about what liberalism truly means continues today—as does the debate between Islamists and liberals on what social and political project to implement. The latter, however, remains an uneven debate: Despite the visibility that the media boom and the post-9/11 context have provided to the liberals, these activists continue to represent an elite group, with no strong connections to society. They do claim to represent the “silent majority”; but, even if this were true, the main characteristic of the silent majority is precisely that it remains… silent. In contrast, the Islamists control thousands of institutions and associations, and are found in every sphere of Saudi society. In the debate, they are—and will without a doubt continue to be in the years to come—the strong side.

Stéphane Lacroix - Assistant professor of political science at Sciences Po in Paris. His work focuses on Islam and politics in the contemporary Middle East, with a particular focus on the Gulf region.

This article was first published in The Majalla 2 June 2010

Women in Saudi Arabia During the past few years, reform efforts in Saudi Arabia have made significant strides in the field of women's rights. Recent studies show that 40% of articles in printed and electronic media have tackled women empowerment through different angles.

King Abdullah has adopted a reformist approach in supporting the role of women through the implementation of several intiative. Speaking to this accomplishment, was the appointment of a woman, Norah al-Faiz, as deputy minister of education.

Saudi business women have also achieved significant improvements in the social and religious barriers that limited the business environment. In response to these efforts, the governor of Mecca, Prince Khalid Al-Faisal, has modified the article in the Labor Law which used to prohibit the interaction of men and women in a business environment.In addition, feminist activism has risen significantly led by the “Where are my rights” campaign that aims at educating women about their rights and promotes gender equality.

Despite the influence of conservative religious sheikhs in the Kingdom, growing activism influenced by the King’s reforms, has created an important and growing debate within Saudi society.

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A Law Unto Himself

Ramzan Kadyrov –President of Chechnya Over the past three years Putin’s man in Grozny has consolidated his power, ruling Chechnya with an iron fist, and Russian roubles. Between rebuilding the country and terrorizing human rights workers Ramzan Kadyrov has been making overtures to the country’s Sufi leaders and brandishing his own credentials as a devout Muslim and former mujahedeen.

Filipe Avilez

A Century of War 1858 Chechnya is conquered by Russia following the defeat of Imam Shamil's resistance, who had aimed to establish an Islamic state.

1922 Chechen autonomous region is established.

1944 Stalin deports the entire Chechen and Ingush populations to Siberia and Central Asia, citing alleged collaboration with Nazi Germany. Many thousands die in the process.

1957 Khruschev restores the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

1991 Following the collapse of the Soviet Union Dudayev wins a presidential poll and proclaims Chechnya independent of Russia.

1994 Russian troops enter Chechnya to defeat the independence movement.

1995 Chechen rebels seize a hospital in Budennovsk, southern Russia.

1996 Dudayev is killed in a Russian missile attack.

1996 May - Russian President Boris Yeltsin signs a short-lived peace agreement with Chechnya.

1996 Chechen rebels attack on Grozny.

1997 Yeltsin and Maskhadov of Chechnya sign a formal peace treaty, but the issue of Chechen independence is not resolved. Violence and hostage-taking continues.

1999 Maskhadov imposes Sharia law in Chechnya.

Chechen fighters then stage armed incursions into Dagestan in an attempt to create an Islamic state.

2000 Russian troops capture Grozny, and President Putin declares direct rule from Moscow. Putin then appoints former Chechen cleric Akhmat Kadyrov as head of its administration in Chechnya.

I

n 2005, Ramzan Kadyrov, the then prime minister of Chechnya famously declared that the republic was “the most peaceful place in Russia”, and would soon be “the wealthiest and most peaceful place” in the world.

Most Chechens would beg to differ, although they might do so discreetly so as not to invite the same reaction that Kadyrov’s men allegedly handed down to Zarema Sadulayeva and her husband. Their bullet riddled bodies were found in the trunk of a car. Sadulayeva’s crime, it seems, was to run an NGO called Save the Generation, an organization aimed at helping the children who had been maimed and traumatized during the two savage wars which raised, and then brutally dashed, Chechen hopes for independence.

Kadyrov evidently denies any link to this or other murders, but international watchdog organizations such as Human Rights Watch and the Memorial Society have produced long lists of damning reports. One of Memorial’s main figures in Chechnya, Natalia Estimarova, was murdered just weeks before the Sudulayeva killing.

Former allies have been equally critical. Movladi Baisarov, a fighter who was a close ally of Kadyrov’s father, described Ramzan as a “medieval tyrant” and ominously claimed that: “If someone tells the truth about what is going on, it's like signing one's own death warrant. Ramzan is a law unto himself.”

Baisarov was shot dead in Moscow by Chechen police forces loyal to Kadyrov, shortly after suggesting he had information linking Kadyrov to the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who had uncovered many cases of government sanctioned brutality in Chechnya.

The current president of Chechnya seems in two minds as to what he would have you believe about him, his past and his involvement. His hasty dismissals of any misconduct smack of arrogance and sarcasm; he openly mocks such institutions as democracy and shows no qualms in threatening his, or even Russia’s perceived enemies, such as Ukraine and Georgia.

So who exactly is Kadyrov, and how did he get where he is? The easiest answer is that he is Putin’s man. Putin personally placed him in charge of Chechnya and makes sure he stays there. Kadyrov admits as much. The man who famously travelled to Moscow to receive his “Hero of Russia” medal wearing a light blue tracksuit, also describes himself in the following terms: “I am not anyone’s president; I am not a man of the Russian security services. I am Putin’s man... Putin is God’s gift, he gave us freedom.”

As long as Putin is in power, therefore, Kadyrov appears to be safe. Within Chechnya he has little opposition left. Pockets

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“Sufi leaders will have to be careful not to appear to be too close to him, otherwise they will compromise their spiritual authority. If they are intelligent they will cultivate a relationship discretely,” says Professor Heck. Ramzan’s self-made image of a pious leader might help bring in cash from Muslim countries, but it has little to do with the truth.

The tendency to add colourful details to one’s biography is common among dictators, but with Kadyrov it might not end with religion. Jagielski claims that the Chechen leader’s warrior past might not be all that it seems either: “Ramzan was never a fighter; he never fought the Russians, although now he’s telling naive Western journalists what a brave mujahid he was.”

This article was first published in the Majalla 14 June 2010 2001 Following 9/11 attacks, Putin urges rebels to "halt all contacts with international terrorists".

2002 Chechen rebels seize a Moscow theatre and hold about 800 people hostage. Most of the rebels and hostages are killed when Russian forces storm the building.

2003 Chechen referendum votes in favour of a new constitution stipulating that the republic is part of the Russian Federation.

2003 Akhmad Kadyrov elected president. He is killed a year later following a bomb blast in Grozny.

2004 A school in Beslan, North Ossetia, is seized by rebels resulting in the death of hundreds of civilians, mostly children.

2005 Separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov calls ceasefire and urges the Russian authorities to agree to peace talks. The official Chechen leadership dismisses his overtures and says he should give himself up. He is killed later that year and his successor, Abdul-Khalim Saydullayev, ends peace talks with Moscow.

2006 Ramzan Kadyrov becomes prime minister after Sergey Abramov resigns.

2006 Separatist leader Abdul-Khalim Saydullayev killed by government forces. He is succeeded by Dokka Umarov.

2006 Warlord Shamil Basayev is killed in Ingushetia.

2006 Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of the Kremlin's actions in Chechnya, is killed in Moscow.

Image © Getty Images

of rebels continue to fight for independence, but according to Wojciech Jagielski, a Polish journalist who is an expert on the region and author of “Towers of Stone – The Battle of Wills in Chechnya”, the president’s main threat comes from other Moscow loyalists who try to manoeuvre influences in the Kremlin to weaken his hold on Grozny. “It is even possible that somebody in Moscow, trying to fight Putin, might overthrow Ramzan Kadyrov just in order to weaken Putin’s power”, adds Jagielski, who has travelled covertly to the region several times over the years and has since been blacklisted in all CIS countries.

The fate of these two men is therefore closely intertwined.

As long as Kadyrov maintains peace in Chechnya, Putin can boast of having put an end to a bloody and exhausting war. In exchange he seems to be more than willing to funnel in cash and keep federal interference to a minimum.

Exactly where the money goes is anyone’s guess, but the country has steadily been rebuilt. This has done more to endear Kadyrov to his countrymen than any personal charm or charisma: “I do not think they admire him. But I am 100% sure they are afraid of him. However, they also appreciate he rebuilt the country with Russian money. The Chechens always liked and somehow respected leaders who succeeded in seducing and cheating Russia. Nobody can deny that Grozny and Chechnya were rebuilt, and normal life restored under Ramzan. But the price was accepting the real tyranny of Ramzan and his men”, explains Jagielski.

With reconstruction comes propaganda. Giant posters of Kadyrov cover many of the largest buildings in Grozny, and the city now boasts one of the world’s largest mosques.

Kadyrov’s relationship with Islam is characteristic of his overall personality. The son of a mufti, who was president of Chechnya until being blown up in 2004, Ramzan plays the part of a devout Muslim. One of his first acts as president was to order Chechen women to wear headscarves, and many nonIslamic activities have been banned, such as gambling. Ramzan himself, however, has been filmed cavorting with prostitutes and owns racehorses.

More than an act of personal piety, it seems that Ramzan is intent on promoting the indigenous Sufi strands of Sunni Islam, in order to weaken the Salafi influence which was brought into the country by foreign mujahedeen: “Of course, these militants were not interested simply in restoring Chechen national integrity but wanted to "use" Chechnya as battleground for a global conflict against infidel forces,” explains Paul L. Heck, professor at Georgetown University and editor of “Sufism and Politics”. “For this reason,” according to Heck, “in the second Chechen war, the traditional (Sufi) religious leaders turned against the militant groups (now including Chechen elements), realizing that it was in fact better to side with Russia than with Jihadism”.

All over the Muslim world, Sufism and Salafism are engaged in what this professor terms a low intensity conflict and power struggle. Being more prone to the idea of a nation-state and strong government, Sufism, in its many different forms, tends to be promoted by states over and against Salafism.

2007 President Alu Alkhanov is moved to a post in the Russian government by Russian President Vladimir Putin who names Ramzan Kadyrov as his successor.

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Jan Ken Pon

Obama Takes Down (Wrong) Prime Minister How is geopolitical power expressed at a global scale? Relations between US, China, Israel and Japan demonstrate the leverage their respective leaders have and the pressure they can exert over one another. Netanyahu and Hu Jintao have played their hands best. Obama has been beaten, constrained, but still has global leverage, and Yukio Hatoyama was constantly on the losing end.

Image © iStockphoto

U

nwilling to yield international real estate under the control of the Pentagon, President Barack Obama has just crushed the political life of Japan Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, who this week resigned from Japan’s top government job. This is all the more important because Hatoyama and the spectacular success of his Democratic Party of Japan over the long-ruling LDP had an Obama-like “yes we can” momentum that was giving Japan a “Democracy 2.0” opportunity.

On the other hand, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been provoking, rebuffing and constraining Obama. The recent US-Israel collision over expansion of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the provocative Israeli Defense Force raid that killed 9 and injured scores more on a politically motivated flotilla of Turkish ships carrying humanitarian supplies to the blockaded Gaza are also tests of American power and Obama’s resolve. So far, Netanyahu is clearly winning.

Then on the US-China front, Obama and China’s Hu Jintao seem to be stalemated, playing jan ken pon over and over and over again.

“Defining challenges” for leaders and nations are those that represent the highest stakes wins and most consequential losses. The United States, for example, invested enormous blood and treasure in triggering change in Iraq and the region and thus the Middle East today is a self-chosen defining challenge for the country. For Barack Obama, there were other defining

Steve Clemons

challenges that he promised to stand by – including closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, “stopping” climate change, ending the war in Iraq, achieving Israel-Palestine peace and delivering the opportunity of universal health care coverage to American citizens.

Yukio Hatoyama also articulated his own defining challenges – including ending bureaucratic control of government and restoring genuine political leadership, opening up Japan’s official records of secret deals done with the U.S., enhancing

There is general stalemate – jan ken pon, jan ken pon – as they sort out the realities of emerging Chinese power in an international system over which the US is not willing to forfeit control the quality of life for average Japanese citizens, closing the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station in Okinawa, improving Japan’s position and sovereignty within the US-Japan Security Relationship and building stronger relations with China among other challenges.

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For Netanyahu, the defining challenge has been to simultaneously protect Israel’s security interests and expansion in the Occupied Territories while rallying support to thwart Iran’s nuclear pretensions.

For Hu Jintao, it has been to incrementally increase China’s global economic and geostrategic position while maintaining high economic growth and not destabilizing the country or creating new costly burdensome international responsibilities for China.

The interactions between these leaders show how power is deployed and measured, created and destroyed. Netanyahu and Hu Jintao have played their hands best. Obama has been beaten, constrained, but still has global leverage, and Yukio Hatoyama — despite his promise — was constantly on the losing end of jan ken pon.

While the United States and China have been testing each other from the earliest days of the Obama White House, with the relationship moving from global economic crisis-focused harmony to tensions recently over the Dalai Lama, Taiwan arms sales, and how to deal with Iran, fundamentally the US and China have moved into a de facto G2 arrangement that doesn’t necessarily mean that the US and China run the world but does mean that nearly every major global challenge requires consultation and policy coordination between these two global behemoths. China can veto America’s global efforts and the US can veto China’s. So far, there is general stalemate – jan ken pon, jan ken pon – as they sort out the realities of emerging Chinese power in an international system over which the US is not willing to forfeit control.

Obama and Hu Jintao are for the moment tied, which historically speaking, represents a substantial moving up in the ranks for China and diminished power for the U.S. When it comes to US-Israel relations, Barack Obama started out strong, appointed distinguished former US Senator and Northern Ireland peacemaker George Mitchell to go to work on achieving the same between Israelis and Palestinians, and indicated that Arab states would kick in some normalization-tilting gestures with Israel if Israel would cease all settlement expansion.

Obama’s equation for moving Middle East peace forward was just too quaint and simple. Even though Israel is completely dependent on American security guarantees and aid and is genuinely a client state of the United States, the pugnacious prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, flamboyantly rebuffed

Obama’s call to stop settlements. Obama, with some twisting and modification of his position, has essentially forfeited the match to Netanyahu.

During the early part of the John F. Kennedy administration, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev beat Kennedy in similar challenges and began to doubt Kennedy’s resolve and strategic temperament – leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Today, Netanyahu has become the Khrushchev of the Obama administration – and one wonders if a crisis lies ahead in which Obama will have to reassert his primacy lest the world think that Israel runs the United States and the Obama presidency.

The Gaza flotilla strategy is yet another tilt in the direction towards a high stakes showdown.

But while the Israeli Prime Minister is beating Obama, Obama has smashed the political viability of the democracyrevitalizing Japan Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.

Hatoyama conceded on a key campaign promise to move Futenma Marine Air Station off of the heavily US-base covered island of Okinawa. Now, some minor functions of Futenma will be transferred off island, but the bulk of the facility will simply be moved to the northern end of Okinawa.

Barack Obama applied huge pressure on Hatoyama, asking him personally and sternly, “Can I trust you?” The U.S. President maintained an icy posture towards Hatoyama, hardly communicating with him or agreeing to meetings. Hatoyama wilted in the ice storm. Contrasting this with the warm invitation to former Prime Minister Taro Aso to be the first official head of government to visit the White House and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s decision to make Tokyo her first foreign destination, one can see that while America seems unable to muster pressure to achieve a “win” with Israel, it is more than able to dominate the leader of a rich nation of 127 million people.

Hatoyama did not survive this rebuke by the United States and this policy reversal that made him appear dithering and weak before Japan’s voters. But this isn’t over. Obama’s handling of the Futenma fiasco will have ongoing consequences — reminding Japan’s citizens that they are not really in control of their own circumstances, that they are to some degree still occupied by the US military and unable to tell America “no” in the matters that the US doesn’t want to accept.

Like Hatoyama, Obama made promises he had to renege on and couldn’t keep — but he didn’t lose his job over it. Obama promised to close Guantanamo Bay within one year of his presidency. This was a major commitment, and the administration failed to achieve it. But the US is not a parliamentary democracy where executive leadership can rise and fall over a single issue at any moment. Presidents get a time period to stack up their wins and their losses so that when re-election comes around, they are measured on a combination of issues.

Japan, despite all of its considerable strengths and what could have been exciting, visionary new leadership from Hatoyama and his Democratic Party colleagues, is still a vassal of the United States – whereas the United States appears more and more a vassal of Israel’s interests – and on China, we’ll just have to wait and see how history tilts.

Steve Clemons directs the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note This article was first published in the Majalla 14 June 2010

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• BEYOND OIL AND SECURITY

After some tensions during the 1990s, the SaudiUS bilateral relationship suffered an almost fatal blow with 9/11 and its aftermath. Yet, this relationship survived, changed and diversified, and today the formula “oil and security” that was used to characterize the Saudi-US rapport no longer makes it justice. Many regional variables will play into the future definition of Saudi-US ties, among them the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire and Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

All images © iStockphoto

Caryle Murphy

P

rince Turki Al Faisal holds no official position in the Saudi government. But as ex-intelligence chief, former ambassador to Washington and London, and the foreign minister's brother, he commands influence. When he speaks, people listen. Recently, Turki let go a cannon blast at US policies in the region before an audience of diplomats and high-powered Saudis. An “inept” US Administration is messing up in Afghanistan, he said. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's "confusing signals" on nuclear non-proliferation in the Middle East are "unacceptable." Washington should recognize a unilaterally-declared Palestinian state if current talks don't produce a breakthrough by the fall. And by the way, the prince scolded, the US has lost its moral authority because of "negligence, ignorance and arrogance."

The all-encompassing, public litany of complaints was not unusual for Turki, who has never been shy about criticizing US foreign policies. But some might wonder: Was he talking about a close ally that Riyadh has had a so-called “special relationship” with for years? Or was he talking about a country that Saudi Arabia views as a problem to be managed? The answer seems to be 'both.' And Turki's remarks attest to just how much US-Saudi bilateral relations have changed in the last two decades due to shifts in the stature of both countries amid a changing global environment.

Washington's financial woes and soaring debt have cratered its economic influence around the world. And its often ill-advised reactions to the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington—the occupation of Iraq, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the detention camp at Guantanamo, the use of torture, and the mishandling of Afghanistan—all have cost the United States dearly in diplomatic prestige.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia's position has been enhanced with its entry into the World Trade Organization and G-20 club of economically significant countries. The world's largest petroleum producer also rests on a solid economic base, thanks to several years of high oil prices and conservative fiscal policies.

And despite its own societal challenges, Riyadh has designed a rehabilitation program for jailed extremists that has drawn international praise.

The result is a more mature, independent Saudi Arabia that no longer is a quiet, compliant junior partner of Washington, making its points only in private and walking lock-step with the United States on controversial issues. President Barack Obama discovered this first-hand during his initial encounter with King

Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz a year ago, when the Saudi monarch rebuffed Obama's request for a Saudi 'gesture' of goodwill to Israel even before Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. The decades-old formula of oil-for-security no longer adequately describes US-Saudi bilateral ties. For sure, these remain important. But as the Saudi share of US oil imports has shrunk, and as Riyadh makes a concerted effort to both diversify its bilateral relationships and boost the independence of its defense forces, these foundations have weakened.

Once giant anchors at both ends of a bridge, oil and security now are more like cornerstones in a multi-layered edifice still under construction. The two nations are bound by a set of shared concerns and goals. But their partnership is often plagued by disagreements on how to reach those goals. Shall we put a parapet here? Or would a dormer window be just as good?

David Ottaway, author of The King’s Messenger: Prince Bandar bin Sultan and America’s Tangled Relationship with Saudi Arabia, has observed that the two countries “speak of a ‘strategic dialogue,’ a diplomatic term of art that obscures whether the two governments think of themselves as friends or foes.” Perhaps the “special relationship” is now more “normal” than “special.” It is worth recalling how this came about.

From the Gulf War to 9/11: a not so special relationship In the early 1990s, the Saudis were recovering from two big shocks. One was the betrayal of Saddam Hussein. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and subsequent menacing of the Saudi kingdom was regarded by Riyadh as an unfitting response to years of Saudi financial support to Iraq during its eight-year war with Iran in the 1980s. The second shock was having to rely

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Beyond Oil and Security on foreigners for military assistance. The Americans came to help do the job and demanded to be reimbursed for their costs.

In a difficult post-war financial environment, the Saudis struggled to pay the $16 billion they owed the Americans, much less their total war bill of about $60 billion.

Meanwhile, the common cause that had bound Riyadh and Washington for decades, drawing them into jihad in Afghanistan, had evaporated: The Soviet Union's implosion made the communist threat a memory. The bilateral warmth of the Desert Storm years under President George H.W. Bush was followed by drift during two-term President Bill Clinton.

“By the end of the 1990s, the relationship was sort of on autopilot. There wasn't that much going on,” said Tom Lippman, author of Inside the Mirage: America’s Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia. But signs of trouble were brewing.

In the second half of the 1900s, Crown Prince Abdullah, who assumed the country’s foreign files due to King Fahd’s long illness, was disturbed by US inaction on the Saudis' top regional priority, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Clinton's failure to address this issue until too late in his presidency, followed

by President George W. Bush's pro-Israeli stance, brought relations to a low point. But the lowest was still to come.

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The Saudi-US bilateral relationship in the new age

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• BEYOND OIL AND SECURITY

US Crude Oil Imports (Top 15 Countries) (Thousand Barrels per Day) Country

Apr-10

Mar-10

YTD 2010

Apr-09

YTD 2009

CANADA

1,883

2,020

1,921

1,854

1,889

SAUDI ARABIA

1,245

1,149

1,061

1,021

1,101

MEXICO

1,134

1,086

1,063

1,177

1,196

NIGERIA

1,092

939

982

673

623

VENEZUELA

851

984

894

803

973

ANGOLA

508

490

396

450

572

IRAQ

490

475

502

479

548

COLOMBIA

364

216

309

320

257

ALGERIA

292

276

295

398

281

BRAZIL

289

299

264

269

341

RUSSIA

288

248

221

390

227

KUWAIT

278

218

196

105

190

ECUADOR

179

183

181

236

240

UNITED KINGDOM

137

142

167

294

116

CONGO (BRAZZAVILLE)

116

124

90

35

42

Source: US Energy Information Administration

The discovery that 15 of the 19 terrorist hijackers on September 11, 2001 were Saudi nationals—and the Saudi public refusal to formally acknowledge this for almost a year—sent the bilateral relationship into a nosedive. Hostility to everything Saudi became rampant among Americans and the US media.

US visas that had been easy to get now required months-long, pain-staking procedures. Saudis were often mistreated by immigration officials at US airports. Saudi businessmen, students and tourists shifted to Europe and Asia.

“A lot of people thought Saudis had become the new terrorists on the block,” said Saleh Al Mani, who holds the King Faisal Chair for International Studies at King Saud University.

The attacks “turned out to be a real turning point in the relationship,” said Ottaway, “Americans had never really focused on Saudi Arabia except as our gas tank.”

The Saudis were equally shocked to find Americans turning against them. But it was not until they had their own 9/11, when terrorist bombings in Riyadh and Dammam killed scores of civilians in 2003 and 2004, that the Saudi society began a serious debate about domestic causes of radicalization. This was also accompanied by accelerated Saudi cooperation with US counterterrorism efforts and the bilateral relationship began to regain its balance. “We also became victimized by terrorism [and] somehow this realization sets in that there was a common enemy of the two countries,” said Al Mani. But another breech was forming.

From the kingdom's perspective, Washington's misguided and mangled occupation of Iraq, which Riyadh had strenuously opposed, and which King Abdullah once described as “illegal,” had disastrous consequences. Namely, a distracted United States failed to finish its job in Afghanistan, allowed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to fester, gave Iran a foothold in Iraq, and generated an historic shift in Sunni-Shiite political competition that has fueled sectarian conflict. The Bush ad-

ministration's post-invasion calls for democratic change in the Middle East increased Saudi discomfort.

Awadh al Badi, a scholar at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, recalled that the US occupation of Iraq undercut Saudi perceptions of the United States as “an ideal and principled country.” For many, it was no longer “necessarily [true] that all that comes from the United States is good … That everything the United States wants from you is with a warm and good heart.”

Recovering from 9/11 and its aftermath Today, the US-Saudi relationship is recovering from its post9/11 crash. One indication is the shorter lines outside the US Embassy in Riyadh because Washington has improved its visa delivery system. The long waits that Saudis used to have are mostly over, and US ambassador James B. Smith predicts that at current rates, a record number of Saudis will get US visas this year. Students are setting another record. Thanks to King Abdullah's scholarship program, about 25,000 Saudis are pursuing degrees in the United States. This is an all-time high, and well above the 3,000 during the years right after 9/11.

There also has been progress on counter-terrorism cooperation. Some minor parts of the Saudi population still express support for extremist ideas, and it took the kingdom's most senior religious body until May of this year to declare terror financing a violation of Islamic law. Nevertheless, intelligence officials on both sides now routinely share information. In addition, the Saudi government has put controls in place to stop the unfettered flow of financial support to extremist groups from Saudi individuals and charities.

On a recent visit here, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman told local reporters that Saudi Arabia has "worked tirelessly to fight terrorism and

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extremism on the international level” and has “very effective programs in this regard.”

“There’s no doubt the atmospherics are better under Obama than they were under Bush,” observed Lippman.

Despite the improvements, however, the bilateral relationship is decidedly different than in the past. For one, the United States now consistently buys more oil from Canada, Mexico and Venezuela than from Saudi Arabia, and in 2009, imports from the kingdom were about 989,000 barrels a day as opposed to 1.5 million barrels a day in 2008. This was due in large part to the economic downturn, but also to an important shift in Saudi sales: Increasingly, it sees China and India as its growth markets.

The second pillar of the former U.S.-Saudi relationship has also changed. The US military runs training programs for the Saudi National Guard, and the Ministry of Interior’s new 35,000-member force to protect oil installations. But their overall presence in the kingdom is greatly reduced and much less high-profile than in the past, partly to avoid appearances that the kingdom is dependent for security on the United States. It was noteworthy that there appeared to be little or no overt US assistance to Saudi defense forces during last year’s campaign to oust Yemeni rebels from Saudi territory. In addition, there are no announced major US military sales in the works. The Saudis are buying their newest fighter jets from the Europeans. There have been persistent reports of negotiations with the Russians to purchase tanks, helicopters and missile defense systems. And a multimillion dollar security fence on the Iraqi border is being built by a European firm.

Diversification is also the watchword in diplomatic and trade ties. King Abdullah “has always been concerned about putting all the eggs in the American basket,” said Rachel Bronson, author of Thicker than Oil: America's Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia, and a vice president at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “He found that very unhealthy and I think he was probably right about that.” As a result, Saudi Arabia is nurturing bilateral ties with such countries as Turkey, India, Russia and China. This has led to a more competitive business environment within the kingdom in which the United States has lost market share. Back in 2000, US exports to the kingdom made up 19.7 percent of total Saudi imports. By 2007, they were down to 13.5 percent.

Despite this slump, Saudi and American business communities remain bullish on each other judging from the recent, first-ever US-Saudi Business Opportunities Forum in Chicago, which drew more attendees than anticipated. And trade is only a part of the economic equation between the two countries.

The kingdom, a long-time moderate voice within OPEC, has put a large share of its revenue surplus into US Treasury bonds.

And it has shored up the US dollar in these difficult economic times by keeping the Saudi riyal pegged to the US currency.

As a result, the two countries more than ever have a common interest in seeing the US economy regain its footing.

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A brighter future based on shared interests?

Looking ahead, Professor Al Mani sees Saudi-US bilateral ties a decade from now resting on a much broader base. “The relationship of the past was based mainly on oil,” he said. “I think the relationship in the future will have to be based on knowledge, on investments, on trade, on human interaction.” His vision, however, raises the question of whether the two peoples want to have as close ties with each other as their governments do. It is a question that policy-makers need to explore.

Meanwhile, their major task will be to find common ground for cooperation in order to resolve some of the huge problems of the region. These include the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, creating stable regimes in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, as well as dealing with Iran's pursuit of a nuclear-weapons capability. On all these matters, Washington and Riyadh have similar, though not exactly the same views. The disagreements that ensue will require adroit management by both sides. For example, The Saudis would be happy to see tough economic sanctions on Iran but don't believe that will stop Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. That event is the Saudi top concern, for it would not only boost Tehran’s hegemonic ambitions in the Gulf, but also force Riyadh to make tough choices: Do we get our own matching bomb or not?

Likewise, a military strike by the US or Israel on Iran would mean the end of the Saudi peace initiative because it would surely provoke Iranian retaliation on the GCC countries and a likely war in Gulf. That also would frustrate the GCC countries’ attempts to reduce its dependence on the US security umbrella. Because of these dire possibilities, Washington and Riyadh should give priority to “forging a common policy on Iran,” said Lippman. “On the day that the Iranians announce they've tested [a weapon] then who does what? Who is responsible for what after that? Finding an answer to that question is the biggest challenge.”

Caryle Murphy – an independent journalist based in Riyadh and Pulitzer Prize Winner in Journalism in 1991. She is the author of “Passion for Islam.”

This article was first published in the Majalla 11 June 2010 29

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• THE WEALTH OF NATIONS

Return of the King?

The state of gold markets

Although historically, gold was seen as a safe asset for much of the post-Bretton Woods era, it had a rather lackluster performance compared with the growing stock markets, booming real estate prices and hard-charging new derivatives. However, over the past three years, gold has re-emerged as a safe haven for investors. The memories of the economic debacle, seared in the minds of investors, are very likely to preserve a place for gold-backed assets in the foreseeable future.

Dr Mark Duckenfield

I

t has now been almost 40 years since Richard Nixon dethroned gold and put the world on a dollar-based fiat currency. With the ongoing economic crisis and fear of further chaos in the world financial system, the traditional king of the monetary system is back. Historically, gold was seen as a safe asset compared to paper assets such as stocks, bonds and fiat money. The proliferation of exotic paper (and electronic) financial instruments in recent decades contrasted with the steady persistence of a stable quantity of physical gold in the world. For much of the post-Bretton Woods era, gold had lackluster performance compared with the growing stock markets, booming real estate prices and hard-charging new derivatives.

Private investors shunned gold and even staid central bankers, usually the epitome of long-term, conservative thinking began to off-load gold reserves in pursuit of the higher performance of interest-bearing assets. However, over the past three years, gold has re-emerged as a safe haven for investors. Its recent return to prominence has arrested three decades of declining gold prices, reversed central bank sell-offs and revitalized the investment niche of the gold market. The gold price, which had been pressing upwards since 2005, has surged and is currently over $1,200 per ounce.

Some major shifts in the sources of both gold demand and supply have underpinned these changing prospects. The real revolution has occurred on the demand side where jewelry’s traditional dominant role has eroded in the face of the economic crisis and gold as an investment has reappeared (Figure 1). Jewelry, typically near 80 percent of gold demand into the early 2000s, was down to just over 50 percent of gold demand in 2009. While the high price of gold has kept the value of the jewelry sector high— at around $54 billion it is the second highest annual total ever and up from $29 billion in 2000—the 1,747 tons of gold used for jewelry in 2009 is down nearly 50 percent from the 3,204 tons used for this purpose in the year 2000. In contrast, the demand for gold for investment purposes has soared in the wake of the creation of Exchange-Traded-Funds (ETFs) beginning in 2002.

Now, investment gold constitutes 38 percent of gold demand, up from a mere 4 percent in 2000.

These demand changes have had consequences on the supply side of the gold market (Figure 2). The supply of gold typically comes primarily from mining, recycling of existing gold and official sector sales. Mine production is an extremely capital-intensive process, often involving the removal of a ton of dirt from deep underground in order to obtain a single ounce of gold.

As the gold price has risen, mines have become more profitable and production has picked up modestly. Still, given the long lead times in bringing new mines on-line, total mine-supplied gold has only fluctuated around 2,000-2,200 tons per annum in the past several years. With a rising gold price, public sector gold sales have tapered off with net gold purchases over the past three quarters as opposed to typical annual sales of over 400 tons in previous years. With the retreat of official sector sales, the other big movement, and the one most visible on the street, is the growth in recycled gold. So-called scrap gold melted down from pre-existing jewelry and other sources has risen from 23 percent of gold supply in 2002 to 40 percent last year.

What do these trends bode for the future? On the demand side, the growth of the Indian and Chinese middle classes with their traditional attachment to gold continues to support both the jewelry and investment demand; this has compensated for a slackening of interest in ornamental gold in the developed economies. Gold as an investment though appears to have established itself as a major, and probably permanent, market. A return to a more placid international economic environment will surely lead to a re-balancing of portfolios and a decline in gold holdings. However, many investors who had never previously considered gold a viable hedging option will now have experience with gold as a counter-cyclical investment. That the gold investment market in 2009 had demand for $40 billion in gold-related investments is testament to both its desirability and success. In terms of supply, the situation is more limited.

Current gold mines are fairly stable and the current economic climate has reminded central bankers of the monetary advantages of holding gold. How much gold can be disgorged from people’s private holdings and from industrial scrap is uncertain, but it will be highly contingent on high gold prices and the general state of the world economy. Economic calamity brought gold back, and the memories of that catastrophe, seared in the minds of investors, will preserve a place for gold-backed assets in the future.

Dr Mark Duckenfield - professor of International Political Economy at the US Air War College, Maxwell Air Force Base.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the U.S. Air War College or the Department of Defense.

This article was first published in the Majalla 7 June 2010

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Gold To Go Thomas Geissler is the German entrepreneur who came up with the idea of the “gold to go” vending machines. Built to function similarly to ordinary vending machines, “gold to go” provides branded gold plates and small gold gifts in exchange for cash. The machine's computer software provides gold price updates every 10 minutes in order to cope with the international price fluctuations. Having been initially tested in Germany in addition to other European countries, “gold to go” has marked its Middle Eastern debut at the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi last May.

Image © iStockphoto

Geissler, who has become renowned for benefiting from the credit crunch through this new idea, has admitted that these machines have been created to provide refuge to people who are dissatisfied with the financial system. "People don't trust the banks and they don't believe the Government's experiment with its finances will be successful, they want to put some of their wealth into a safe haven," said Geissler upon the introduction of “gold to go” in 2009.

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• THE WEALTH OF NATIONS

The Crumbling of Global Solidarity Fixing global financial imbalances

If there was a clear signal sent by world leaders at the first G20 meeting in April 2009, it was that the global economic crisis could only be solved through a coordinated response from the major world capitals.

This “going it together,” however, was quickly to unravel and was replaced by the usual “going it alone” epitomized by increasingly uncoordinated moves in fiscal policymaking and financial regulatory proposals.

The failure of this common front is even more troublesome when one realizes that the very global imbalances that triggered the crisis were left broadly unaddressed. While these attitudes remain politically understandable, they are nonetheless disquieting for the future of the world economy.

Image © iStockphoto

Guy de Jonquières

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W

hen Group of 20 leaders met in London in April last year in the teeth of the global economic crisis, they displayed impressive common purpose, pledging rapid and concerted stimulus measures to combat the downturn. Their growth revival policies worked – for a while. But barely one year later, and with turmoil in the eurozone threatening to spread more widely, international solidarity is crumbling.

In June 2010, G20 finance ministers abruptly reversed their previous stance, calling for decisive action to trim budget deficits. But their joint declaration could not disguise deep differences between them, with the US insisting that keeping growth up mattered more than getting deficits down while the recovery remained fragile. Worse still, there was no agreement on which countries should cut by how much or when.

Since then, fear that credit markets will balk at rising levels of sovereign debt has spurred much of Europe and Japan to set about cutting spending and raising taxes in earnest. The markets’ behavior so far suggests that, for most countries, the threat remains more imagined than real. But their gadarene rush for the exit risks turning the economic turnaround into a double-dip recession – a danger of which the World Bank warned last month.

It is extremely unclear how far the recovery is underpinned by real private demand, as opposed to government pumppriming. Hasty, uncoordinated, fiscal retrenchment would be self-defeating if it ended up undermining growth. That would further depress tax revenues and increase pressures on spending, prompting demands for still deeper cuts that could usher in deflation and stagnation.

Far from placating the markets, that prospect could unnerve them further. Indeed, when Fitch, a credit rating agency, downgraded Spain’s sovereign rating recently, it gave as one reason concern that deteriorating growth would make harder the urgent task of reducing private and external debt.

G20 governments are not just divided over fiscal policy. They are also increasingly going it alone on financial market regulation. The US has ploughed ahead with its own legislation, while the European Union plans a levy on banks and tighter controls on hedge funds and Germany pursues a widely criticized unilateral ban on “naked” short-selling. It does not help that many of those measures appear designed with an eye more to impressing public opinion at home than to seriously reducing systemic risk.

But globally inconsistent macro-economic policies remain the biggest worry.

Economies such as China, Germany and Japan are looking to increased exports to offset the impact of policy tightening on demand at home. Pushed too far, that could trigger a protectionist backlash and beggar-my-neighbor policies elsewhere. It would also deepen the plight of weaker, debt-laden economies, for which exports offer the only hope of growth and especially of struggling eurozone members such as Greece, Spain and Ireland, for which a declining euro offers no help in competing against Germany’s hyper-efficient exporters.

That argues against hasty withdrawal of stimulus in larger and stronger economies. But sustained recovery depends on

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more than just better coordination of cyclical and regulatory policies. Without effective action to attack deep-seated structural distortions, economic and financial instability is likely to recur and become more acute.

Those distortions are rooted in differences in national savings rates that are mirrored in persistent current account surpluses and deficits. For most of the past 20 years, excess savings in surplus countries, notably China, Germany and Japan, have financed excess consumption in deficit economies such as the US and Britain. By flooding the world with abundant ultra-cheap capital, those savings contributed to the reckless western lending and financial market practices that detonated the current crisis.

True, since the crisis, savings rates have risen in deficit countries, while trade surpluses shrank in several big surplus nations. But the changes may prove only temporary: China’s trade surplus rebounded in May, while the US deficit has recently widened.

Tackling these global imbalances calls for action on both sides of the ledger: higher savings and productive investment in deficit countries; increased reliance on domestic demand, especially from consumption, in the surplus economies. That will be achieved, not by some magic bullet, but by often politically difficult measures that vary between countries.

Their gadarene rush for the exit risks turning the economic turnaround into a double-dip recession – a danger of which the World Bank warned last month In deficit economies, it will mean popular acceptance of lower living standards for some while, along with changes in incentives, regulation and tax policies. In surplus nations, the solutions include structural reforms that unlock new sources of domestic demand and, in China, greater currency flexibility, steady relaxation of capital controls, modernization of the financial system, improved social security and measures to cut corporate and government savings.

This is a vast agenda, which amounts to the basic re-engineering of established economic models. It is also one on which international consensus remains distinctly lacking. No American politician is prepared to call an end to the American dream of steadily rising consumption and living standards. Equally, Germany continues stoutly to defend both its vocation as an exporter and the virtues of fiscal stringency, while China flatly refuses to acknowledge that its policies might have helped sow the seeds of the crisis.

Such attitudes are politically understandable and enjoy popular support at home. But unless governments can rise above them and start facing up to their responsibilities, efforts at serious global policy coordination will remain severely handicapped. The whole world can only be the poorer for that.

Guy de Jonquières - Senior fellow at the European Centre for International Political Economy. He previously worked for The Financial Times This article was first pubished in The Majalla 27 June 2010 33

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• THE WEALTH OF NATIONS

The Quest for Talent

How can the GCC compete with the demand for global talent?

One of the main challenges for the Gulf region in the near future will be how to continue to attract skilled workers. The emergence of the BRICs economies has not only restricted the supply of skilled labour (as many potential migrants decide to stay home), but it has also increased the international competition for skilled labour. A clear solution to this conundrum lies in the restructuring of payment packages offered to expatriate workers in the region.

Julian Gardner

T

he Middle East has emerged from the recent global economic crisis in better shape than most other regions. It successfully maintained positive economic output throughout the crisis (driven mainly by oil exports), and is expected to sustain even higher growth in 2010.

Despite this relatively positive performance, the recession and the subsequent recovery have highlighted the region’s ongoing struggle to attract and retain global talent.

Historically, the region has focused on attracting two types of foreign employees: Western and Eastern expatriates. As a general rule, Western expatriates migrate from the US and Europe attracted by high salaries, low (or no) taxes and the payment of expenses such as schooling and flights. They typically arrive and depart on a three to five year cycle. Eastern expatriates from countries such as India, on the other hand, are typically drawn by a far more basic package, but one that is still substantially more advantageous than what they could earn at home.

Around 87 percent of employees in the UAE are foreigners, 69 percent in Kuwait and 51 percent in Bahrain This simple but hitherto efficient model has been put under growing pressure in recent years by the rapid emergence of the BRICs economies and the consequent rise in the competition for global talent. Traditional employee feeder countries, such as India, have seen their economies blossom, leading to an expansion of the domestic demand for skilled labour and higher salaries.

In this context, the appeal of the GCC model has in many cases faded relative to the option of remaining at home. Furthermore, the discovery of more oil in Brazil is also bound to increase the worldwide demand for oil industry skilled workers, a segment of the global labour market in which the GCC is heavily reliant.

But why is the loss of these expatriate employees a problem?

The numbers alone are staggering: around 87 percent of employees in the UAE are foreigners, 69 percent in Kuwait and 51 percent in Bahrain. Only in Oman and Saudi Arabia do local workers exceed the number of expatriates in the labour force. In this context, and in an economy looking to grow on a long-term basis, a reduction in the skilled workforce could be disastrous.

The solution to this issue can be broken down into two key elements: how the Gulf region can continue to attract talent, and, once this is achieved, how the region can retain it.

Even if traditional elements such as pay and allowances still play an important role in attracting talent, in an increasingly global labour market, the GCC can no longer expect to differentiate itself from its competitors by these sole means. One of the key strategies rapidly gaining acceptance in the region is the move from a short term to a longer term (or even permanent) employment plan, where the central factor of appeal to an employee is the prospect of a successful career path. In practice, this approach requires a number of changes to the structure of employment packages proposed by employers.

Firstly, companies should move from activity-specific allowances (such as school fees) towards a more “Western” flexible benefits model where employees select how and where pooled allowances are allocated. Secondly, RBC Corporate Employee & Executive Services (RBC cees) and other industry providers have seen a dramatic increase in the demand for longer term benefits such as retirement plans.

While according to the Mercer 2008 GCC Benefits Survey only 8 percent of UAE companies offered retirement plans to employees, the same survey in 2009 shows that not only did these figures reach 30 percent, but also that 65 percent of UAE companies were seriously considering the introduction of such plans. Until now, the typical nature of these plans has been what is called “Defined Contribution” plans, in which employees are given a range of investment options, and often the ability to make personal contributions.

Notwithstanding the clear strategic benefits that longer employment focus could bring to the region, this approach is not without problems. As highlighted by the recent economic crisis, longer term employment focus could significantly increase Endof-Service-Payments in case of mass redundancies. Recent crisisrelated lay-offs in the region have epitomized the cash flow issues that can arise when gratuity liabilities are left unfunded. As longer term employment is set to increase, turnover rates fall, and salaries rise, this type of liability is only bound to spiral. According to Towers Watson’s End of service benefit liabilities in the GCC 2009 survey, in Saudi Arabia alone such liabilities could jump from $7 billion today to $40 billion by 2020. Funding is therefore necessary if this strategy is to pay off in the long-run.

Given that the recruitment and training costs for an employee are a substantial investment, it is in every company’s best interest to retain a newly recruited talent. To achieve this there are two different approaches which are often used in tandem: the alignment of executive remuneration on performance,

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Saudi Arabia is positioning itself well in the global economy.

It opened its stock market to foreign investors in 2008 and thanks to strong macroeconomic fundamentals and highly positive demographics, it is becoming an increasingly attractive place to invest in.

The government’s $400 billion stimulus package, the largest as share of GDP among G-20 countries, and exceptional financial measures have led to a strong economic recovery. Banque Saudi Fransi, one of the country’s leading financial services providers, predicts a growth rate of 3.9%, up from 0.15% last year. It further predicts an inflation rate of 4.7% and a current account surplus of 77% for this year. Moreover, oil prices at over $70 a barrel enable the government to keep spending aggressively and still generate a significant fiscal surplus. Thanks to higher output and oil prices the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, the country’s central bank, was also able to bring its foreign asset holdings back to a pre crisis level. This strengthens the government’s commitment to a fixed exchange rate and keeps currency risk down. Yet, while these numbers draw a bright picture of the overall state of the Saudi economy the question remains what to invest in?

The kingdom’s fate is still strongly dependent on oil. The petroleum sector accounts for 45% of GDP and 90% of exports. Major investment projects like the Aramco-Dow Jubail petrochemical project or the Yanbu refinery show that Saudi Arabia has great potential to not merely export crude oil but to process it, adding substantial value to the economy. As petroleum is likely to remain the basis of many industrial products for years to come, this provides very promising prospects on long term economic growth. However, while the country’s main potential lies in the development of the petrochemical industry, the government is actively trying to diversify the economy.

This is an important measure if Saudi Arabia wants to become less vulnerable to shocks in the global demand for oil. These measures would also create employment opportunities for their rapidly growing population.

There are two factors besides the oil wealth that could make Saudi Arabia an interesting place for international investors. and the use of deferred compensation. The move towards performance-based compensation schemes is evident from the increased share of bonuses in total compensation packages.

In the American and European financial services industries, allocated bonuses are typically deferred as part of the initial contract. The bonus may either be invested for the employee in company shares, or the employee may be given investment control. Generally, bonuses are tied up for three years, with the employee forfeiting it if they leave within the period. After a few years bonuses will roll on an annual basis, but there will always be the incentive to the employee to stay for the next vesting, year on year. Such a scheme could considerably increase the ability of the region to retain skilled workers.

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One is the government’s intent to improve the infrastructure of the Arabian Peninsula’s largest state. Large infrastructure projects such as the Al Haramin high speed rail, a 444 km intercity rail system connecting Mecca and Medina, and investments in the Median Airport and King Abdul Aziz International Airport offer great opportunities for the infrastructure sector and boost employment.

The second argument to invest in Saudi Arabia— and at the same time the biggest economic challenge the government faces—is the country’s demographics. 38% of Saudi Arabia’s population are under the age of 15 compared to 30% in India and 18% in China. The strong population growth is great news for consumer facing companies as domestic consumption is bound to rise significantly.

As Saudi teenagers grow up they will want to have cars, phones and cosmetics, making Saudi Arabia a good place for companies that provide essential and discretionary consumption goods to invest in.

Domestic demand further decreases the country’s dependence on the global demand for oil.

On the other hand the Saudi government will have to make sure that this new generation entering the work force will be able to find employment. The strong, oil fuelled, welfare state made many Saudis reluctant to work in the private sectors. But as unemployment rises and many Saudis struggle to maintain their living standard, the government has to try hard to encourage private sector jobs. The other demographic challenge will be to further integrate women into the work force.

With the economic climate in Europe and the United States getting colder, investors are moving south to find new investment opportunities. As it opens up its markets, Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth and favourable demographics are likely to attract more and more international capital. To definitely put the country on the emerging markets map, the government needs to continue its path of economic reform. Encouraging private sector activities, modernizing the financial system and creating jobs will be essential if the Saudi lion wants to keep up with the dragons and tigers out there.

Joel Schoppig

Image © iStockphoto

Attracting Capital to Saudi Arabia

To conclude, although the points discussed here form the “human capital” planning basis to recruit and retain talent, another key element to increase the competitiveness of the Gulf region in world labour markets is the corporate governance practices of the companies themselves. To compete on the global stage the GCC must continue to adopt formal and transparent policies for remuneration as this will act as a beacon of credibility in a competitive market. But this is another story.

Julian Gardner - a Geneva based EMEA Director of the Royal Bank of Canada Corporate Employee & Executive Services This article was first published in The Majalla 17 June 2010 35

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• THE WEALTH OF NATIONS

Save Money as you Save the Planet Mitigating climate change

As politicians prepare for the next UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, they will soon learn that the investments they are pressed to commit to “green” their economies and mitigate climate change have been left largely unfunded by the latest global economic crisis. This, however, does not necessarily bode ill for the future of the planet. Cheaper and more efficient strategies are readily available to be implemented if governments stop bickering about details and are ready to take serious commitments to tackle global warming.

Valentin Zahrnt

1

percent of global GDP is the price tag that researcher Nicholas Stern famously put on the level of investment necessary to fight climate change. That was in 2006.

By 2008, he had doubled the figure. Whatever the true costs are, climate change mitigation is bound to be expensive.

And this is only part of the story, since additional money will be needed to cope with the consequences of climate change.

There is no need to watch science-fiction disaster movies to get a sense of the power of nature – just look at the disaster that Hurricane Katrina wrought on New Orleans. Maintaining biodiversity and limiting water and air pollution will also need further investments. The list is long, the price is steep.

As epitomized by the failed 2009 Copenhagen conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the difficulty of global climate change negotiations arises over the question of “who foots the bill”. Keeping these costs low is especially important in countries like China and India, which, albeit among the world's heaviest greenhouse gas emitters, face a tough trade-off between fighting climate change and alleviating poverty. The mitigation costs also have an important political twist: the higher the costs, the longer we seem to wait before taking decisive action. Such dynamics only lead to even greater costs further down the road. Top negotiators warn that disagreements in multilateral negotiations on climate change are unlikely to be bridged in time for the next Conference of the Parties, scheduled this December in Cancun, and that the hope for a legally binding agreement to renew the Kyoto Protocol now lie with the 2011 meeting in Cape Town.

Although the recent economic downturn has lowered the costs of achieving greenhouse gas reduction objectives, this relief is only short-term and concerns OECD countries more than global economic powerhouses such as China and India. Another effect of the economic crisis will be longer lasting, however: empty Treasury chests. As budget deficits and national debts spin out of control, the US, Europe and Japan cannot be relied upon to multiply their expenditures to “green” their economies. This leads to difficult challenges: How will the research and development for energy saving technologies and renewable energies be financed? How will enhanced infrastructure such as public transportation, charge stations for electric cars, efficient energy transmission grids and well-insulated buildings be paid for? Even more doubtful is whether rich countries will transfer the hundreds of billions of US dollars required to rein in emission growth in developing countries.

In the quest for the magic bullet, some have argued that weakening the protection of intellectual property rights would reduce the cost of spreading state-of-the-art technologies and therefore reduce the costs of fighting climate change. Such shortsighted views, however, ignore the fact that this would also serve to undermine incentives for future innovations, and, along with it, any chance to afford a decent standard of living for the nine billion people that will populate the world in 2050.

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Magic bullets are rare, but they do exist. More often than not, they are simpler than one might think. In a nutshell, governments should stop creating obstacles to the free flow of goods and services that help fight climate change. Trade liberalization would make these goods and services more readily available in every country and drive down prices. A better integrated world market for climate-friendly products and services would also spur innovation as successful companies would reap bigger rewards.

The 153 members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have been negotiating the removal of trade barriers on socalled “environmental products and services” for almost a decade. They seem to be caught in an inextricable definitional quagmire: is a product environmentally friendly if it has been produced with few resources and little pollution? Or if it has a clear environmental function, such as cleaning water and air?

Or is even an energy-efficient laundry machine an environmental product? The issue becomes still more intricate when

one looks at border practicalities. Goods do not only have one purpose. Combined heat and power plants, water treatment facilities or waste incinerators tend to be assembled at their final destination. How can custom officials ascertain that a stack of tubes is indeed destined for an environmental purpose?

A new approach is needed to refloat the negotiations. One important step would be to split the concept of “environmental goods and services” into more unified themes, aiming at separate agreements. One such theme could be renewable energy—or environmentally friendly energy production at large. Another could be centered on pollution, including water treatment, waste management and air pollution control. In this way, more attention would be paid to sorting out the technical complexities of each topic, and solutions to the specific problems of each product group could be found. Liberalization should also go beyond removing tariffs and tackle regulatory barriers, such as excessively burdensome testing and certification procedures or the non-recognition of foreign standards that guarantee equivalent levels of safety.

Another step could be to limit the agreement to a “coalition of the willing”. The agreement would enter into force once countries representing 80 percent or 90 percent of the related imports and exports have joined. The members to the agreement would then open their markets to all members of the WTO. The WTO has already had encouraging experiences with these so-called plurilateral agreements— for instance in civil aircrafts, pharmaceuticals and information technology. In short, aiming for less—fewer products, fewer members—may yield more rapid and more profound liberalization in areas crucial to reducing the costs of environmental protection. Climate mitigation technologies should be a priority.

Valentin Zahrnt is a Research Associate at the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) and Editor of www.reformthecap.eu.

This article was first published in The Majalla 14 June 2010

Image © iStockphoto

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• THE WEALTH OF NATIONS

News Behind the Graph Worldwide Securitisation issuance in 2008 & 2009 Securitisation is a financial process through which an illiquid asset is transformed into a security. Securitisation divides risk through aggregating assets in a pool, and then issuing new asset backed securities that are sold to investors. The investors accordingly share the risk and reward from those assets. This process aims at averting the risk of bankruptcy hence decreasing interest rates from lenders. Mortgage backed securities are a good example of securitisation. In these cases mortgages are combined into one pool and then divided based on each mortgage’s risk of default. These smaller divisions are then sold to investors.

Securitisation has developed from a being a minor funding contributor in the late 70s to one of the crucial sources of funding nowadays. The biggest share of global securitisation market has been taken over by the repurchase operations of central banks aimed at covering the exposures of banks during the crisis. Gross securitisation issuance has increased to $2860bn in 2009 from $2764bn in 2008 due the rise in liquidity as a result of central banks repurchases. Nevertheless, net securitisation issuance remains lower than in 2007 due to risk-intolerant investors, credit fluctuations and relative lack of liquidity.

curitisation, purchases by the Bank of Canada in 2008 have pushed gross Securitisation to $77bn in 2008 from $45bn in 2007. Securitisation has however fallen again in 2009 to an estimated $57bn.

Securitisation in Japan has also fallen to $50bn in 2009 from $58bn in 2008, while in Latin America estimates indicate that issuance fell from $18bn in 2008 to $14bn in 2009.

Issuance of mortgage-backed securities in the US

Source: IMF Balance of Payments Statistics Yearbook Securitisation in the US Since the securitisation crisis in late 2007, federal supported mortgage backed issuance has dominated the US issuance market activity. The US government has provided a constant supply of affordable mortgage finance while supporting the Federal Housing Finance agencies’ liabilities which were estimated at $5000bn. The Fed purchased $1.25 trillion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s (agencies in conservatorship) MBS in order to supply low cost finance to the housing market. This has in turn stabilised the agencies and decreased the risk to the mortgage finance system. MBS increased to $1957bn in 2009, from $1344bn in 2008 pushing MBS closer to its earlier values of 2007, which shows slight recovery from the 2007 crisis.

Securitisation in Europe The repurchase operations by the bank of England and the European Central Bank have strongly influenced Securitisation issuance in Europe in 2008 and 2009. These operations have however significantly decreased in 2009, where estimates show that Securitisation issuance has fallen from $1047bn in 2008 to $577bn in 2009. The decrease in the funding operations of the Bank of England is responsible for much of the issuance drop.

The Bank of England has scaled down funding from $123bn in 2008 to $400bn in 2009.

The UK comes first in Europe as the biggest issuer in Europe in 2009, followed by Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands.

Securitisation in the rest of the world Issuance in Australia has taken a downwards slope since mid2007, despite a few recovery signs in late 2009, where issuance gained some momentum reaching $21bn, as opposed to $18bn in 2008. In Canada, despite meagre investment in Se-

Securitisation issuance in Europe

Source: IMF Coordinated Portfolio Investment survey Securitisation in Emerging Markets

Source: BIS Quarterly Review of Banking & Financial Market Developments

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A Home Away From Home?

Image © Getty Images

• THE HUMAN CONDITION

The UK’s detrimental asylum policy

While processing claims of asylum seekers is undoubtedly a complicated process, and the UK should do its best to provide a thorough assessment of these claims, the way this process is currently being carried out merits intense critique. Instead of protecting their borders, the flaws in the process do more to undermine the cohesion of British society. Having recently elected a new government, the UK finds itself at an opportune moment to revaluate the way it approaches its commitment to the UN Refugee Convention, by putting the reform of asylum processing on the agenda.

Paula Mejia

X

iuxiu L. is a 27-year-old woman from China.

When she was 17, she was arrested because her father was accused of selling drugs. She was held in a police station for a week, and was then taken by a man she didn’t know. He took her to a bar and held her as a sex slave for five years. When she refused to comply she was severely beaten. One day, she befriended a customer who helped her escape, bringing her to the UK. Her journey lasted 16 months, and upon her arrival she claimed asylum.

Unfortunately, the story of Xiuxiu first reported by Human Rights Watch in Fast Track Unfairness is not unique. Thousands of men women and children come to the UK each year looking for safety.

Be they victims of political, religious, ethnic persecution or family violence, these individuals often risk their lives to seek asylum in what they consider a democratic country committed to protecting human rights. However, despite the trauma that forces them to undertake such hazardous journeys, their trouble rarely ends upon arrival to the UK. Rather, the current system in place for asylum seekers involves a deleterious process that often leads to detention, destitution and other traumatizing ordeals that do little to help individuals that have been victimized in the past.

Xiuxiu’s story exemplifies this ordeal. Having arrived in London speaking very little English she was placed in detention for having been unable to prove with documentation that she had been a sex slave. Considering the conditions of her arrival, and the circumstances that would accompany sexual slavery, it is not surprising that Xiuxiu could not provide documentation that confirmed she had been a victim of sex trafficking. Nonetheless, for asylum seekers in the UK, such obstacles in their claims are a norm rather than an exception. While processing

claims of asylum seekers is undoubtedly a complicated process, and the UK should do its best to provide a thorough assessment of these claims, the way this process is currently being carried out merits intense critique. Instead of protecting their borders, the flaws in the process do more to undermine the cohesion of British society. Having recently elected a new government, the UK finds itself at an opportune moment to revaluate the way it approaches its commitment to the UN Refugee Convention, by putting the reform of asylum processing on the agenda.

As a signatory to the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the UK is committed to protecting individuals who "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.” The UN’s definition of a refugee, however, requires that individuals who arrive to the UK seeking asylum undergo a legal process to prove they in fact qualify as refugees.

Unfortunately for many, the legal process they undertake is an uphill battle that often fails to accurately present the conditions that led them to seek asylum in the first place. Because the

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Asylum Policy in Numbers (Source: Home Office Statistical Bulletin) The number of asylum applications received in 2008 was 25,930, 11% higher than 2007 (23,430).

The proportion of applications made in-country was 90% in 2008 as opposed to 84% per cent in 2007.

40% of the applications in 2008 were from African nationals while 37% were nationals from Asia and Oceania, 19% were Middle Eastern nationals, 3% were European nationals and 2% were from the Americas In 2008, the number of grants of asylum increased from 2007 and combined with grants of HP and DL accounted for more than 30 per cent of total initial decisions compared with 26 per cent in 2007 and 21 per cent in 2006.

13,505 asylum cases were refused in 2008, while16,030 were refused in 2007.

One of the major complaints associated to the detention of asylum seekers is the psychological impact that detention can have on individuals danger that is involved in forcing asylum seekers who qualify for refugee status to return home can really mean the difference between life and death; this is not a process that should be taken lightly.

Nevertheless, one of the major complaints that asylum seekers have of the UK’s system for processing their claim is inadequate legal representation. Reports by NGOs, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, as well as local organizations such as the Refugee Council, note time and again that the legal resources available to asylum seekers are inadequate. In an interview with The Majalla, Natasha Walter of Women For Refugee Women noted that the greatest challenge for asylum seekers “is getting a fair hearing on their case. The barriers range from not having good legal representation or any representation because of changes to legal aid, to the problems in disclosing what happened to them because of the stigma associated to their experience or because they do not know it is relevant information.”

That the response to the disclosure of events that leads individuals to seek asylum is met with hostility or disbelief does little to encourage them to tell the story of what happened exactly, and this could have detrimental affects on their claim.

Many have also complained of inaccuracies in translation, and women in particular have a difficult time explaining their reason for seeking asylum if it is associated to sexual abuse or genderrelated persecution. Poor representation, however, is not the only Issue 1554 • July 2010

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challenge that the Home Office needs to overcome to improve the fairness with which it should process asylum claims.

A number of asylum seekers are also detained while their claims for refugee status are being processed. In a report by Amnesty International on this issue entitled, Seeking Asylum is not a Crime, the organization explains that the use of detention is being increasingly used at both the beginning and end stages of the asylum process, and claims that this trend undermines the UK’s obligation to the “ right of people to be treated with dignity and humanity under international refugee and human rights law standards.”

One of the major complaints associated to the detention of asylum seekers is the psychological impact that detention can have on individuals who are, presumably, already traumatized, and that it is this trauma that has brought them to seek asylum in the UK. This is especially true of torture survivors, whose experience in detention can bring back memories of their violation. According to Amnesty International “detention [can have negative] effects on their physical and mental health. Detainees who have survived torture or serious trauma in their country of origin may be more at risk of self-harm, including death, while in detention.” Their claims are supported by accounts of individuals who, after having been tortured and then detained in the UK after seeking asylum, tried to commit suicide or harm themselves in other ways. One detainee said of his experience, “It’s so terrible. I passed through many things 41

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15 and 15 year olds 16 and 17 year olds Unknown Under 14s

• THE HUMAN CONDITION

24 47 20 9

Applications for asylum in the United Kingdom, by location of application, 1999 to 2008 90,000 67,500 45,000 22,500 1999

2000

2001

Applied at port

0

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

Applied in-country

Initial decisions, 1999 to 2008 150,000

112,500

75,000

37,500

1999

2000

0 2001

2002

2003

Refused under backlog criteria (1) Refused Granted leave under backlog criteria (1) Granted ELR, HP or DL (2) Granted asylum

in my own country but nothing like this. I’ve been released but I’m still in prison. I am walking but my soul is dead.”

The conditions of those in detention, including the practice of detaining children, has brought the UK much negative attention in recent months. This was especially true after asylum seekers held at the Yarl’s Wood Detention Center undertook a three-week hunger strike in response to what they called “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” The hunger strike was followed by a legal challenge, which claims that the UK’s detention policy breaches articles 3, 5, and 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

Beyond detention, many asylum seekers in the UK will at some point find themselves living in destitution. Although asylum seekers are provided with aid while their claim is being processed and during appeals, once appeals are rejected they lose all financial assistance and they do not have the legal right to work. While this is seen as an incentive for asylum seekers to pursue voluntary return, many are unable or unwilling to return to their countries of origin and they’re often left homeless and begging for subsistence. Like detention, the effects of destitution on the well being of asylum seekers are grave. Moreover, their presence on the street does little to promote security and stability for British citizens. The UK government should recognize the inefficiency that this policy represents, and instead acknowledge that it does more harm than good, not only for asylum seekers but for the UK’s society in general.

Being aware of the negative aspects of the current asylum process, one must wonder what has stopped the UK’s government from pursuing reform in the past. According to Walter, three ma-

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children, applications received for asylum in the United Kingdom, by age at time of application, 2008 9%

24%

20%

15 and 15 year olds 16 and 17 year olds Unknown Under 14s

47% (Source for graphs: Home Office Statistical Bulletin)

jor constraints exist that undermine a process for reform. The first is that since the home office is not fit for purpose, it is difficult to reform, and the government lacks the political will to undertake this change. Secondly, there is a concern of how the right-wing press might interpret a government that appears “soft” on asylum.

Finally, there is “a genuine but misplaced fear that if you make the process easier for asylum seekers by giving them a right to work etc, then more people will seek asylum in the UK.” Given these obstacles, it is not surprising that the reforms that have been called for have not yet been made. However, they do not excuse the conditions that asylum seekers are forced to live through. There are serious and problematic implications of not dealing with asylum seekers in a fair manner. Inclusion is a bulwark of healthy societies, and the current asylum process is storing, and even creating, problems that the UK will have to deal with eventually.

This article was first published in The Majalla 4 June 2010

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Kuwait’s Development Fund

Image © iStockphoto

In the Lead

Aid flows from Arab countries to the developing world are minimal, although for several decades there has been a major exception to this: Kuwait. Like all government based development agencies, the Kuwait Fund both expands economic, political opportunities and influence for Kuwait through its development efforts while simultaneously improving welfare and capacity building of developing countries. The Kuwait Fund represents a model which other Gulf States can draw on. Its record as a pioneer in the Arab world should be acknowledged.

Noam Schimmel

I

n the world of international development aid the major players are the United States, the European Union, and Japan. The bulk of funds distributed and training programs implemented in developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America originate from there, with smaller though still significant contributions made by countries such as Canada and Australia.

Aid flows from Arab countries to the developing world are minimal, although for several decades there has been a major exception to this: Kuwait. The Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development was started in 1961. Robert McNamara, President of the World Bank from 1968 through 1981 described its exceptional mandate and origins: When first established in 1961, the Kuwait Fund was without precedent. Here was Kuwait, a tiny country, until recently among the poorest places on earth, establishing a development fund in the year of its political independence. While welcoming its new-found prosperity it was declaring a willingness to share its future wealth with its Arab neighbours.

In 1974 the Kuwait Fund expanded its role to include the entire developing world, not only the Arab world. The overwhelming majority of the Fund’s capital is dedicated to loans, some of which are used by developing countries to contract Kuwaiti companies in the planning and construction of major infrastructure initiatives such as the recent construction of Ethiopia’s modern Addis Ababa Bole International Airport. A far smaller percentage of the Fund’s resources have been devoted to grants and technical assistance.

This makes the Kuwait Fund’s mission and programs different from aid agencies such as US AID (The US Agency for International Development) and Britain’s DFID (Department for International Development) which devote large percentages of their aid flows to grants rather than loans. The Kuwait Fund rarely supports grassroots community development to combat poverty, human rights promotion and the cultivation of democratic values, and education provision which

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are major areas of emphases of American and European aid agencies. Its annual report explains its emphasis on largescale infrastructure, “such as transport, telecommunication, agriculture, energy, industry and water and sewage sectors.”

Its prioritization of such large scale infrastructure projects closely mirrors that of the World Bank.

Indeed it is unclear if the Kuwait Fund meets the criteria of offering ‘Official Development Assistance’ which is defined by the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development as conveying “a grant element of at least 25%.” Salil Shetty, the director of the UN’s Millennium Campaign to halve poverty and boost life expectancy by 2015, has urged wealthy Arab states to give more development aid. In an interview in Qatar in November of 2008 he stated, If Gulf States are serious, let’s have some cash down…

They’re doing more in terms of helping Islamic countries, which is a good starting point… I think they need to step up a lot more than they have and they need to become part of the global process because right now they’re kind of isolated. They’re not part of the mainstream discourse and they need to get there.

Shetty noted that it’s hard to know just how much Gulf States are contributing to development because they do not make this information public and they are not part of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee, which tracks statistics on aid flows. Shetty criticized Gulf States, stating, “We don’t get clear numbers, it’s very opaque. There needs to be more transparency.” In this regard the Kuwait Fund—though not without its own weaknesses because so little of its funds actually qualify as development assistance—seems to release more data about its exact aid flows than Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Its website includes detailed information available to the general public including project budgets.

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• THE HUMAN CONDITION

ously seeking to improve the welfare and promote the capacity building of developing countries. Its aims are both charitable and promote the nation’s interest. As Dr. Mohammed Sabah Al-Salim Al-Sabah, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs explains in his foreword to the 2008-2009 Kuwait Fund Annual Report, reflecting upon the previous year of Kuwait Fund programs, The Fund continued its cooperation with its partners in development, providing them with advice to help them achieve their developmental goals, while maintaining mutual respect and friendly relations with them. This, I believe, would serve our national objectives and promote the role of the State of Kuwait in the international community.

What makes the Kuwait unusual in the Middle East is that unlike other Arab countries which make occasional humanitarian aid donations in response to natural disasters—such as Haiti’s recent earthquake or the consequences of war on civilians and the support of refugee populations—the Kuwait Fund has worked in a systematic way to advance development rather than on an ad hoc basis in response to sudden catastrophes.

This makes it exemplary, a possible model for Arab countries with similar economic resources who have not created such government agencies devoted to development aid but who distribute funds for humanitarian relief periodically.

The diversity of peoples and issues receiving development aid from the Kuwait Fund is extensive: from expansion of electricity in the Afar region of Ethiopia to developing the agricultural sector in Lebanon and the poultry sector in Egypt, to irrigation projects in Vietnam, Honduras, Mali, and Nepal and environmental conservation in Ghana.

It has funded projects to expand clean drinking water in Istanbul and rebuild infrastructure destroyed by the earthquake of 1990 and subsequent earthquakes in Turkey and to improve the sewage system and consequently overall public health in Cairo. In the field of public health it has also contributed to programs working to counter the diseases of river-blindness and guinea worm which have had devastating impacts in SubSaharan Africa.

The diversity of peoples and issues receiving development aid from the Kuwait Fund is extensive: from expansion of electricity in the Afar region of Ethiopia to developing the agricultural sector in Lebanon The Kuwait Fund represents a model which other Gulf States can draw upon as they expand their development programs and integrate them within broader national foreign policies and priorities. Its record as a pioneer in the Arab world should be acknowledged and celebrated. The Kuwait Fund does have a younger counterpart, the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, which was established in 1971 and has disbursed over 5 billion dollars in grants and loans, like the Kuwait Fund, mostly for infrastructure development.

Development Aid Development aid dates back to the colonial era, where nations like Britain delivered aid to colonies in need. However the concept was first introduced in contemporary history after the end of WWII. During the the Cold War, the US introduced the Marshall Plan as global aid program aimed at strengthening bonds with European nations in order to counter the Soviet influence.

In time, the Marshall Plan paved the way to the formation of aid organizations like the World Bank, which extended the reach of aid beyond European countries.

As the Soviet threat receded, underdeveloped nations such as Iraq and Egypt, started receiving aid. In the period between, 1960 and 1985 varying amounts of aid were distributed across the globe through the newly established development banks with the purpose of strengthening the infrastructures of recipient nations.

This initiated a new phase in which aid was aimed at promoting the development of nations rather than using finance to (overtly) endorse political agendas.

While the Kuwait Fund has its own challenges to address, particularly its overemphasis on loans rather than grants, its lack of support for grassroots community development and outreach to the most vulnerable sectors such as women and children, and its preference for large-scale infrastructure projects rather than projects which are often of greater immediate need such as healthcare provision and basic education programming, in many areas it has prioritized human welfare appropriately and achieved significant successes.

In particular, its focus on provision of clean drinking water and improved sanitation through the construction of wells, reservoirs, and related infrastructure in countries like Mali and its irrigation projects in countries like Nepal to improve agricultural output and food security shows a commendable focus on transformative development aid; aid that has far-reaching positive impacts on impoverished populations, and an appropriate emphasis on supporting countries that are among the poorest in the world with low human development. More than one hundred countries have benefited from the Kuwait Fund’s loans and grants – no small achievement.

In the future, should the Kuwait Fund continue and expand upon these efforts and address some of the aforementioned concerns it will build upon an already strong and exceptional record that invites emulation. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and the emirates of the UAE besides Abu Dhabi can learn from the Kuwait Fund and make their own large scale investments in development aid. Should they do so, the potential of Arab countries to promote human development within the Middle East and globally will grow substantially, bringing tangible benefit, hope, and opportunity to hundreds of millions of disadvantaged individuals.

Noam Schimmel - London-based researcher and human rights practitioner with extensive development experience in the field.

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• A THOUSAND WORDS

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Image Š Getty Images

London, July 7 2005: The rear of the bus that was destroyed by an explosion at Tavistock Square during a series of explosions which ripped through London's underground tube and bus network

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• CANDID CONVERSATIONS

Saudi-US Relations in the Post-9/11 World

An interview with US Ambassador James B. Smith In this interview with The Majalla, US Ambassador to Riyadh James B. Smith speaks about what is one of the most important bilateral relations for the US. Ambassador Smith discusses several dimensions of the ties between the US and Saudi Arabia, namely how 9/11 impacted this relationship; the challenges to both sides concerning Iran’s nuclear program; how the bilateral ties extend beyond oil and security, and what they might look like in the future.

Caryle Murphy

Image © Getty Images

J

ames B. Smith is a retired US Air Force Brigadier GenSaudi field marshal Saleh al-Muhaya speaks with eral who has served as US ambassador to Riyadh since U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia James Smith (right) September 2009. Prior to his appointment, he held a variety of executive positions with Raytheon Company, a US defense contractor, where he was involved in corporate strategic planning and international business development. Smith was an early supporter of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Before retiring from the military in 2002, he had a distinguished 28-year career that included flying combat missions out of Dhahran during Operation Desert Storm. Trained as a fighter pilot, he logged over 4,000 hours of flight time in F15s and T-38s. In his final assignment, he was deputy commander at the Joint Warfighting Center of the US Joint Forces Command in Virginia. Prior to that, he commanded the 94th Fighter Squadron, the 325th Operations Group and the 18th Fighter Wing.

Smith is a 1974 graduate of the United States Air Force Academy. He holds a master’s degree in history from Indiana University, he is also a graduate of the Naval War College, the Air Command and Staff College, and the National War ColAnd on the business side we’re fully supporting His Majesty’s lege, where he also served as a professor of military strategy. He vision, best represented by [Commerce and Industry] Minister recently spoke to The Majalla in his Riyadh office.

Abdullah Zainal Alireza’s industrial strategy and a move to a knowledge-based economy. So we find ourselves in a relationRiyadh, 25 April 2010 The Majalla: How did 9/11 impact the US-Saudi bi- ship involved in a lot of different ways. lateral relationship, and do you think it has recovered The US-Saudi bilateral relationship, for a long time, since then? If so, what are the signs of that recovery?

We’ve had a very long and stable relationship with Saudi Ara- was characterized as one based on oil-for-security. bia that 9/11 impacted in a negative way. But I think to a large But the US is importing less Saudi oil now. How do degree we’re recovered from that...and I see that relationship you see that trend affecting the nature of the bilateral relationship in the future—I’m talking 10 years getting stronger.

After 9/11 we went down to about 3,000 Saudi students in or more? the United States. We’re back up to over 25,000, and I expect I agree that the relationship has been characterized as oil-forby the end of the year we will have upwards of 30,000. The security, but I would argue that it’s been different for a long, long visa process has matured. I suspect this year we will beat, by a time…[and now] is infinitely more nuanced and complicated wide margin, our record for the most visas in a single year. The than it’s ever been. And it's involved in many more things than economic relationship is maturing, and [There is] a long-stand- just oil and security. We will continue to have strong relationing educational relationship, which is providing inspiration and ships on the mil-to-mil [military-to-military] side, strong relasupport to a new generation of educators who are going to fill tionships on energy, not just oil. And in the business, education and medical fields, those ties are going to get even stronger. these new [Saudi] universities.

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There are no major US arms sales to Saudi Arabia on the docket, and Riyadh’s latest import of military planes will be the [Euro-made] Typhoon. The US is training a 35,000-man security force for key Saudi installations, but overall its military relationship with the Kingdom appears to be less all-encompassing than previously. How has this aspect of the bilateral relationship changed in the last decade?

It changed 25 years ago. And understand that the Typhoon is a replacement for the [Euro-made] Tornado. The Saudi Air Force has always had a mix of US and British airplanes...[as part of] a balanced portfolio. And on major acquisitions it does not appear that that is shifting fundamentally. We maintain a strong mil-to-mil partnership, not just in acquisition of equipment but in the training of Ministry of Defense and Aviation, and the Saudi National Guard, and now the Interior Ministry.

And as they move to upgrade [military] systems where we require interoperability, I'm confident that we will still have an American footprint there.

Iran’s ambition to become a nuclear weapons power is one issue on which the United States and Saudi Arabia share similar views, that is, neither wants to see Iran possess a nuclear weapon or acquire the capability to make one. And yet, there appears to be some disagreement on how to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Is this accurate, and if so, how do the two differ on this matter?

I don’t see any daylight between Saudi Arabia and the United States on the issue. We’re both concerned with Iran’s failure to come to terms with its international responsibility, its flagrant dismissals of IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] and Security Council responsibilities. I actually see that we’re very much in agreement on the challenge that Iran presents to the region and the Saudis are equally concerned about the possibility of proliferation.

If Tehran were to announce tomorrow that it had acquired the capability of manufacturing a nuclear weapon, what would that do to the US-Saudi bilateral relationship?

Nothing. We’re about as close on this, I think, as two partners can be. The challenge of course is how do you get the government of Iran to come to terms with its international responsibilities?

Many people think that if Iran announced it had a nuclear weapon then Saudi Arabia would be under a lot of internal pressure to acquire the same. But the United States doesn’t want to see an arms race in the Gulf.

We are not just singling out Iran on the nuclear issue. President Obama has made a commitment to pursue a nuclear-free world. So you see the new strategic arms limitation talks with the Russians, the world leaders' summit on nuclear material…

If your goal is nuclear disarmament then the proliferation of any number of countries runs against that objective. So not only do we see a nuclear weapons capability in Iran destabilizing to the region, [but also] the potential for other countries to acquire nuclear weapons runs counter to the objective of a nuclear-free world.

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The failure of the United States to take more seriously and effectively its role as honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been a major thorn in the Saudi-US relationship. But unlike previous US administrations, the Obama administration has made clear that it regards this conflict as a threat to US national security. Do you believe that this is a permanent shift in Washington and if so, how might it affect US-Saudi ties?

The short answer is that it’s very clear from [US Centcom Commander Gen. David] Petraeus' remarks and other comments that the President and the Secretary [of State Hillary Clinton] have made that the administration sees this as a strategic problem, not just an issue of being an intermediary. That in Gen. Petraeus' words, the absence of a settlement puts American soldiers at risk.

When you live over here, you come to terms with the commonly held belief that the absence of a settlement gives legitimacy to every extremist group around—even though they may or may not have ever done anything in support of the Palestinians. So it is clearly in the United States’ strategic interests to focus on a settlement. And the fact that the President made a commitment early in his administration, that this was going to be a centerpiece in terms of [his] international agenda, I think speaks for four or eight years that it certainly is a shift in our thinking.

There seems to be a consensus both in Israel and the United States and other places that it’s time [for Israelis and Palestinians to hold serious peace talks]. The fact that His Majesty put so much energy and political capital into an Arab peace initiative suggests that it’s time.

I agree that the relationship has been characterized as oil-forsecurity, but I would argue that it’s been different for a long, long time…[and now] is infinitely more nuanced and complicated than it’s ever been So I’m encouraged and hopeful. There is a window of opportunity I believe within the next few years where we can make a difference. The worry on all of our parts is if we miss this opportunity then we’re destined to another generation of conflict and missed opportunities.

In the US view, has Saudi Arabia done enough to halt financial support that was flowing from some individuals and groups to violent Islamic extremists abroad?

They’ve worked very, very hard at that...We have partnered with them and I can attest to the fact that they have been very serious about closing the funding for extremist activity, as well as cracking down on it here in the Kingdom...[Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey] Feltman when he was here...called the Saudis our strongest partner in counterterrorism...I would say the Saudis have shown a very strong commitment to closing the loop on terror financing...It’s in their interest. They were threatened as well as us.

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How would you characterize US-Saudi cooperation in the counter-terrorism sphere? Is the battle against Islamic extremism an important aspect of the USSaudi bilateral ties?

We have a very strong relationship on the counter-terrorism front, both countering extremism here in Saudi Arabia and working in partnership against Al-Qaeda in other places. I take issue with the term Islamic extremism because I do not believe that the extremist violent element has any root in Islam. It is violent, aberrant behavior, which is not Islam.

Under King Abdullah Saudi Arabia has been diversifying its basket of bilateral ties, forging closer strategic and business ties with India, Turkey and, in particular, China. How does the United States view this diversification and how will it affect the US-Saudi relationship?

We don’t view it negatively. I mean, as Saudi Arabia has matured on the international front it is natural for them to establish commercial and diplomatic ties [with other nations]. I do not believe that [this] signals on their part a weakness in our relationship.

Certainly when you look at the way that China and India have been growing they become the much more dominant economic partners for oil. Arguably the United States is showing a reduction, [and now] our largest oil provider is Canada.

So that relationship has changed but it hasn’t fundamentally changed our bilateral relationship.

Saudi Arabia also is seeking to modernize its economy, education system, court system and even some social traditions that restrict women’s participation in public life. Should the United States help Saudi Arabia advance this process and if so, how can it do that without being accused of interfering in the Kingdom’s internal affairs?

You ask ‘How can I help?’ It’s very simple. I’m actually not looking to interfere. I have made a conscious decision to take a positive approach and look for, what I would call, positive vectors, and support His Majesty’s modernization effort. So on the legislation for trafficking in persons, certainly we celebrated that and have offered our assistance for training in the judicial system. With the reorganization of the judiciary, we have brought in some legal training for contracts.

We certainly are involved in a positive way with the emergence of a magnificent generation of young women. Sixty percent of the college students this year are women. The first thing you can do is be a cheerleader for them. The next thing you can do is help female entrepreneurs be successful, and you do that by bringing in e-commerce so that their storefront is a website and you connect them with the global economy. And let them work the social agenda at their speed.

So we’re actually playing a supportive role in the success of their strategy [of moving toward a knowledge-based economy] as opposed to imposing a Western model.

Some things in Saudi society are counter to what the United States considers universal values when it comes to women and religious minorities. Are these practices a problem for the US-Saudi bilateral relationship?

They will always be a source of challenge as long as they exist.

If you go back to President Obama’s Cairo speech when he

laid out a new beginning with the Islamic world, at the end of the speech he said there are still three things that are important to us: freedom of religion, women’s rights, and democracy. He defined democracy in a different way: as those states where the voice of the people is heard as being more stable.

Certainly we want to encourage those initiatives here in Saudi Arabia that give a voice to the people. We are supportive of the Shura Council. We look for expanded participation in the Shura Council. We’ve seen widespread media coverage of the Chamber of Commerce elections in both Jeddah and the Eastern Province. We see some movement on human rights issues like trafficking in persons. On religious freedom, there has been a gradual acceptance of religious freedom in private. But we would still continue to support religious freedom.

So are there problem areas? These are the areas where our government will continue to support positive change.

Apart from government-to-government dealings, an important aspect of any bilateral relationship is people-to-people. But since 9/11 there has been a surge of Islamophobia and specifically Saudiphobia in the United States. Do anti-Saudi feelings among Americans limit how close the two countries can be?

That is a challenge for a couple of reasons. The first one is that the Saudis know so much more about our country than we know about theirs. I have great hopes for the [Saudi] Commission on Tourism and Antiquities and their ability to expand tourism, because we need to get Americans here to see what’s positive in this country.

The challenge we’ve got in the United States is we’re locked on this number of 15 out of the 19 extremists [on 9/11] being Saudis. I think it’s time to rethink if you’re an American who formed an opinion about Saudi Arabia based on that. And if you’re a Saudi who formed an opinion about the United States based on our reaction to 9/11 it’s time to reconsider.

There was a strategic objective by Osama bin Laden to drive a wedge between the United States and Saudi Arabia. And the way you do that is highlight Saudi Arabia as an extremist country. He succeeded.

I spend a lot of time encouraging businessmen and women in the US to come and do business, encouraging elected officials to come visit. But this will be a long-term challenge.

Finally, how do you see the bilateral relationship evolving over the next 10 years?

I don’t see it atrophying at all. I see it getting stronger. The military-to-military relationship is important but it doesn’t stand out as [the most] important. I look at business, commerce, the trade we’re doing, the social exchanges, the education, the involvement of Americans inside the technocracy of Saudi. All of that together is much more important to me than a militaryto-military relationship.

Interview conducted by Caryle Murphy – an independent journalist based in Riyadh and Pulitzer Prize Winner in Journalism in 1991. She is the author of “Passion for Islam.”

This article was first published in The Majalla 10 June 2010

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The Struggle Against a Manichaeist World View An Interview with Jeremy Ben-Ami

In this interview with The Majalla, Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder of J Street, speaks about the rise of the religious right in both Israel and the Jewish community in America, and the consequences of not acting aggressively to forge a peace deal while moderates in both camps still have a stake in Israel’s survival.

Stephen Glain

J

eremy Ben-Ami is the founder of J Street, a pro-peace, pro-Israel lobbying group that has positioned itself as a leader of liberal American Jews who have been denied a strong voice in a debate dominated by hardline agencies like the American-Israeli Political Affairs Committee. In a mere two years since it was launched, J Street has “created space,” as its members like to say, for those who oppose the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and its incarceration of Gaza.

Though outgunned by its larger rivals, according to Ben-Ami, J Street’s appeal for “passionate moderation” is beginning to resonate with the US Congress.

The liberal Ben-Ami is himself the product of an expansionist Zionist vision; his father, Yitzhak, was a member of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the underground group that employed terrorist tactics to drive the British from Mandate Palestine and sought a Jewish state stretching from modern day Israel to what is now Jordan. Today, the younger BenAmi is struggling to extricate Israel from an occupation that threatens to undermine its very identity as a Jewish state.

He spoke with The Majalla about the rise of the religious right in both Israel and the Jewish community in America, and the consequences of not acting aggressively to forge a peace deal while moderates in both camps still have a stake in Israel’s survival.

To what do you attribute J Street’s success: luck, timing, hard work, or a little of all three?

First and foremost, it’s being in the right place at the right time.

There was an enormous vacuum in the American Jewish community and J Street is filling it rapidly because it was such a deep and powerful vacuum. Plus, the times couldn’t have been more critical and that had a multiplier effect on the pace at which we’ve grown.

The awareness of many different parts of the world–whether that be American foreign policy and security establishment or the awareness of the leadership of the American Jewish community or other international actors–that the status quo is unsustainable is probably higher than ever. It is taken for granted by both our countries’ leadership but also by leaders around

the world and the leaders of nongovernmental organizations that something will have to give if we don’t take a positive direction in search of a solution. Otherwise it’s going to break in an unpleasant and unproductive manner and it’s going to hurt a lot of people’s interests in the process.

How much of this has to do with the arrival of the Obama administration and a hardline government in Israel?

I think the White House is reacting to the unsustainability of the situation, which is being enhanced by this government in Israel. The provocative conduct of what is going on in East Jerusalem, the manner in which the Gaza siege is being managed, the way in which Israel is conducting foreign policy are all exacerbating the tensions and bringing the pot to a boil.

Are you surprised by the pushback you’re getting from the more established members of the Jewish community?

I’m not at all surprised. One of the reasons we started J Street was because there has been for so long such a gap between the views in the broader community of America’s Jewish community and the voices of those who purport to speak for that community. We’re stepping forward and providing a different voice for that community, so it does not surprise me at all that there’s tough pushback. There are very fundamental arguments at stake.

One of the surprises is how fast we have been able to create a sense of a new and alternative voice being heard. It’s only two years since we launched this from scratch and in two years we’ve become an established institutional player and that’s what is so surprising. The challenges are not surprising because that is exactly why we started J Street. The political playbook as I call it, the handbook by which those who practice politics in the United States play the game by is very well known. There is an understood way in which you’re supposed to talk about Israel and an understood way in which you’re supposed to talk to the Jewish community and that is what we’re up against. We are trying to change the rulebook and that is a difficult challenge, but it was not unexpected.

Image © J Street Project

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You’re in the business of promoting nuance and in the game of politics in Washington it is always easier to play to extremes. What you’re saying is that people are actually more responsive to nuance than they are to those extremes.

I think the majority of people in both Washington and the leadership of various Jewish institutions really know this subject in more depth than people give them credit for and once you know this topic you know that nothing is black and white.

That’s the first thing you really learn. There is an appeal to those who are thoughtful, to an organization that appreciates the nuance and appreciates the shades of gray. The worldview of the prior administration and the worldview of many of the neocons who run think tanks or who help guide the traditional organizations is very much a good versus evil, a black and white view of the world. That’s why so much of the polling done by [conservative groups] like The Israel Project is “Do you like the Palestinians or do you like the Israelis?” you’re either with us or against us, that’s the simplistic approach. When you spend time to really know the subject matter, you know that is not the way to approach this. So to hear a group that supports Israel and cares about its survival and its character and its soul and its security, all those things, to hear a group that come at the question with a more nuanced and thoughtful approach is more refreshing to the political and policy leadership in this town.

A lot has been made of your background, your upbringing and your father’s experience in the Irgun. How do you think he would perceive or regard your work?

My hope is that he would be thrilled that I care. The real challenge for people who are my age or much younger is that they don’t care and that there isn’t the connection between Jewish Americans and the state of Israel that there used to be and I’d like to think he would appreciate the engagement and passion that I’m bringing to it, he’d be happy to know that I am trying to complete the work that he started, which is to have a safe, democratic and Jewish Israel. On the other hand I’m sure he would disagree violently [laughter] with the position I’ve taken and the avenue I am outlining for getting to that goal, so I’m hoping it would be a mixed reaction.

How significant is that demographic, about the younger generation not caring about these issues?

As a matter of generality, and it’s always dangerous to get into generalities, there are two camps emerging in the American Jewish community. One is much more religious and traditional and conservative in its view and more deeply tied to Israel, and the other is a reform or non-religious, cultural Jewish community that is both less connected to Israel and more liberal in its overall politics. The real challenge is how to bridge the gap between the two, not just over Israel but on a whole host of issues and how you maintain a cohesiveness to a community that has significant cultural, religious, political and identity differences.

The findings from the polling you’ve done are very interesting. Were you at all surprised by the conclusions?

One thing that I didn’t expect but which makes sense when I look at it is how, as the number of Orthodox Jews increase among the younger generation, you find a larger number of

younger Jews who are conservative on Israel. I did find that surprising and a lot of people say “Isn’t J Street a generational phenomenon and part of the Obama phenomenon and isn’t it led by, and speaks for younger people?” But you have to be careful to recognize that younger American Jews are more orthodox and more conservative than their older counterparts.

We have these two different camps within the American Jewish community and we as J Street are certainly speaking more for the box that is younger and less orthodox.

This is very much reflective of the changing demographics of Israel itself. The country seems to be drifting towards the right and religious parties are very influential. You could also say this is happening throughout the Middle East, this empowerment of the orthodoxy.

Yes. I like to think of J Street as passionate moderates, and this is the broader challenge for moderates everywhere, this whole ability to understand the narrative of the other, the ability to find the shades of gray between black and white, to say this isn’t us versus them on every issue. All of that is at stake. If the moderates who are still leading, in Jordan, for example, and among the Fatah leadership and the Tzipi Livni and Edward Omert world in Israel, if that generation of moderates doesn’t seize this moment, to resolve this conflict, then that moment of history will pass us by and whether the moderates can ever regain the initiative before things get out of hand is a real open question.

You have certainly made a difference, but if you look at things from the Palestinian perspective, talking about a settlement freeze and investing a great deal of political capital in it is unsatisfactory when Palestinian independence is predicated on settlement evacuation, and we’re obviously a long way from that point. How are we going to reconcile this and what will J Street’s role be in that process?

We are not under any illusion that the settlement “chill,” as I prefer to call it, in any way begins to treat the underlying disease here. At best, trying to stop the growth of settlements is treating the symptom of the underlying disease and that is the occupation. The only treatment that will prevent the patient from fatal consequences is treating the disease. You’ve got to deal with the fundamental issues and get to the final status questions that have been deferred for too long and start putting clear answers on the table so that people understand what the endgame is, not “we’re going to take one step along a hundred-step road.” What is the end of the road? You can’t navigate if you don’t know where you’re going and there’s no roadmap without a destination. This step-by-step confidencebuilding measures and interim agreements is a recipe for failure at this point because people have lost confidence that the ship has a destination.

Interview conducted by Stephen Glain – former correspondent for Newsweek and covered Asia and the Middle East for the Wall Street Journal for a decade. Now based in Washington as a freelance journalist and author he is currently working on his forthcoming book about the militarization of US foreign policy.

This article was first published in The Majalla 24 June 2010

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• COUNTRY BRIEF

Iran Iran Since the Revolution 1979 The Iranian Monarchy is overthrown with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fleeing to Egypt. Ayatollah Khomeini returns from exile in Iraq and establishes a new political system based on an Islamic model, creating The Islamic Republic of Iran.

1980 Abolhasan Bani-Sadr is elected the first President of the Islamic Republic.

1980 Iraq invades Iran. The conflict is devastating to both countries and causes extensive regional instability.

In 1988, with Iran economically crippled, Khomeini reluctantly agrees to a ceasefire.

1989 Ayatollah Khomeini dies and President Khamenei is appointed Supreme Leader.

1997 Reformist politician Mohammad Khatami is elected President after defeating 3 other candidates.

Many hope his victory signals the beginning of a more liberal period in Iranian politics, but these expectations are soon abandoned.

Image © iStockphoto

1979-1981 Islamic militants take 52 Americans hostage and demand the extradition of the Shah from the U.S to face trial in Iran.

2009 Tehran admits to pursuing a nuclear programme and says that it is building uranium enrichment plants.

The government insists that the programme is for peaceful purposes.

2010 Defiant opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi says the Green Movement will continue its struggle against Ahmedinejad’s regime.

2010 UN Security Council votes in favour of a fourth round of sanctions against Iran. Sanctions allow UN members to inspect vessels in Iranian waters suspected of transporting prohibited items to the country.

2002 US President George Bush accuses Iran of plans to develop long-range missiles. He equates Tehran to Baghdad and Pyongyang and labels them collectively as the "axis of evil."

2003 Iran announces that it has halted its uranium enrichment programme. IAEA concludes there is no evidence of a weapons programme.

2005 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wins the 9th presidential elections. He defeats cleric and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

2007 US announces sweeping new sanctions against Iran. They are the toughest since the first imposed sanctions almost 30 years earlier.

2009 The election result provokes the largest popular uprisings since 1979, in what is now known as the Green Revolution. Supporters of rival candidates took to the streets, Ahmadinejad’s regime responds with mass arrests and crack downs creating the worst scenes of state violence in 30 years.

Image © Getty Images

2009 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is declared victor in the June’s presidential election. His rivals challenge the result, and accuse the Iranian establishment of vote-rigging.

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A turbulent year in Tehran Iran’s controversial president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was reelected in June 2009 to serve a second four year term amidst widespread accusations of electoral fraud. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei announced the result of the elections, in which 40 Issue 1554 • July 2010

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Key Facts

Image © iStockphoto

T

hree decades after Ayatollah Khomeini realized his Islamic revolution, the Iranian street is still a lively arena of political contestation. However, unlike in 1979, popular sentiment now challenges rather than supports the revolution’s Islamic agenda. Last year’s Green Revolution has been described by many analysts as the end of the Islamic republic. At the very least, the outpouring of public anger following the 10th presidential elections has been deeply damaging to the legitimacy of Ayatollah Khamenei’s establishment.

The 1979 revolution in Iran constitutes the only popular revolution in the region. In the years leading up to the revolution the Shah’s unpopular and often brutal regime had fallen out of favour with a wide cross section of society. Students, religious conservatives and even the middle class were growing tired of the Shah’s policies.

The tradition of Shi’a quietism, where the clergy remained neutral in matters related to politics was broken. Ali Shariati and Ruholla Khomeini were amongst those who openly criticised the Shah’s regime and began touting Islamism as an alternative ideology. Khomeini’s sustained and virulent criticism saw him exiled from Iran for 14 years. Towards the end of the 70s grievances spilled into the streets, the Shah fled to Egypt and Khomeini returned from exile in Iraq to lead the disgruntled masses.

Khomeini and his supporters were quick to step in and fill the power vacuum caused by the Shah’s exodus. They denounced the standing government as illegitimate and proposed an alternative form of governance based on Islamic principles. This resulted in the adoption of a highly complex political system which combined elements of Islamic theocracy and democracy.

The system is comprised of two blocs; an unelected clerical government, and an elected popular government. Until the late 1990s both blocs were dominated by conservative forces. This state of affairs helped Khomeini and his supporters to realize their pre-revolution ambition that Islam play a more dominant role in Iranian society.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s however, Iranian politics became somewhat more competitive in nature. Reformists chipped away at conservative dominance in parliament and sometimes also succeeded in winning the Presidency.

This was the case in 1997 when the reformist Mohammad Khatami was elected President with 70% of the popular vote.

The overwhelming victory of reformists in the parliamentary elections raised popular expectations that Iran was entering a period of political and social transformation.

However, conservatives utilized unelected political and religious institutions to block more than 90% of the legislation adopted by the reformist-dominated parliament. The resulting political gridlock left many Iranians disappointed by the political process.

The illusion of a lively political environment was broken in 2004 when hardliners' regained control of parliament. And in 2005, the fate of the reformists was sealed with Ahmadinejad’s victory in the Presidential elections. For the last five years both the unelected and elected organs of government have been dominated by conservative forces.

Capital: Tehran Supreme leader: Ayatollah Ali Khomeini President: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Geography Area: 1.65 million sq km (636,313 sq miles) Border countries: Afghanistan 936 km, Armenia 35 km, Azerbaijan-proper 432 km, Azerbaijan-Naxcivan exclave 179 km, Iraq 1,458 km, Pakistan 909 km, Turkey 499 km, Turkmenistan 992 km PEOPLE Population: 67,037,517 Ethnic Groups: Persian 51%, Azeri 24%, Gilaki and Mazandarani 8%, Kurd 7%, Arab 3%, Lur 2%, Baloch 2%, Turkmen 2%, other 1% Religions: Muslim 98% (Shia 89%, Sunni 9%), other (includes Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian, and Baha'i) 2% Languages: Persian and Persian dialects 58%, Turkic and Turkic dialects 26%, Kurdish 9%, Luri 2%, Balochi 1%, Arabic 1%, Turkish 1%, other 2% Refugee Population: 1,070,488 ECONOMY GDP: (ppp) $876 billion GDP composition by sector: agriculture 10.9%, industry 45.2%, services 43.9% Inflation rate (consumer prices): 16.8% Unemployment rate: 11.8% Population below poverty line: 18% million votes were cast, just two hours after the polling stations closed. The incumbent, Ahmadinejad was awarded victory with a surprising 63% of the vote, in what had been a hotly contested election.

The opposition led by former Prime Minister Mir Hussein Mousavi and former speaker of parliament and senior cleric, Mehdi Karroubi quickly labelled the elections as unfair. They suggested that Ayatollah Khamenei had intervened in the election process to secure the victory of Ahmadinejad.

Khamenei responded saying that the Islamic Republic of Iran "would not cheat" and singled out western politicians and media - particularly Britain and the United States - to blame for fanning the flames of anti-government anger.

The Green Revolution In the aftermath of the election, the world's attention was focused on one of the largest mass protests Iran had ever witnessed.

The decisive victory claimed by Ahmadinejad was immediately challenged in Tehran’s streets. Mir-Hussein Mossavi and Mahdi Karroubi were cast as leaders of the nationwide opposition movement, otherwise known as the Green Revolution.

The state took a hardline stance against demonstrators with brutal crackdowns on opposition figures, journalists and or55

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Ahmadinejad was awarded victory with a surprising 63% of the vote, in what had been a hotly contested election

Iran's nuclear program.

With the spotlight off domestic politics, attention shifted towards Iran's controversial nuclear program. Tehran was lambasted by the West for its extensive plans to build uranium enrichment plants. The U.S. and other nations believed that the technology may be used to develop nuclear weapons. Officially, Iran denied such plans. However, Ahmadinejad’s hawkish foreign policy and his insistence on Iran’s right to develop a nuclear programme led to increasing tensions in the international community.

The most recent efforts to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions came in June when the United Nations Security Council passed new sanctions against Tehran. The sanctions called for UN members to inspect vessels suspected of transporting prohibited items to and from Iran. No stranger to sanctions Iran has been subjected to various economic and political sanctions since the 1979 hostage crisis. In January 1984 sanctions were imposed when Iran was implicated in the bombing of the U.S. Marine base in Beirut, Lebanon. In the 1990s deteriorating relations between Washington and Tehran prompted the United States to ban exports to Iran on a host of products, from airplane and helicopter parts to scuba gear.

However, in the year that has passed since the elections, the brute force of state power has overwhelmed the opposition and a semblance of calm has returned to Tehran’s streets. For the time being, the state has re-established its control. On June 12th 2010, the anniversary of the election, a massive security presence prevented large gatherings, and leaders of the opposition called off planned protests out of fear that more blood might be spilt. After a year long struggle, the Green Revolution appeared to have failed.

What next for Iran?

The last year has been particularly tempestuous for Tehran.

Ahmadinejad’s controversial re-election prompted a massive public backlash. Although Tehran has stymied the Green Revolution the regime is undeniably vulnerable. Its disproportionate use of violence has merely forced opposition underground.

Iranian judge and Nobel Prize winner, Dr Ebadi, has suggested that ‘there is fire beneath the ashes’ and it would take little to fan opposition flames again.

Image © Getty Images

dinary demonstrators. However, in spite of these efforts the Green Revolution maintained its early momentum. Tens of thousands of opposition supporters clashed with the security forces and members of pro-government militia on Quds Day in September of 2009, the 30th anniversary of the storming of the US embassy in Tehran in November, and on National Students Day at the start of December.

Acts of open repression and brutality undertaken by the government, particularly by the notorious basij militia were captured by "citizen journalists" armed with camera phones.

Video footage of the death of an young Iranian woman called Neda, was uploaded onto youtube and became the defining image of the uprising and its brutal suppression.

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• THE CRITICS

Forgive and Forget?

A review of Legal Institutions and Collective Memories by Susanne Karstedt Onati International Series 2009 In Karstedt’s latest book, Legal Institutions and Collective Memories, the author explores the importance of the past on the prospects for reconciliation and stability, especially after traumatizing periods in history. Given the complicated, and often bellicose nature of most of the world’s history, Karstedt’s book is a timely philosophical analysis of how the past can be adequately dealt with so that communities may coexist peacefully.

We are taught that history is important to study, because nations, like people, can learn from the past.

What is often left out of such advice is the possibility that history is not necessarily a fact. Although there is certainly a string of events that compose history, history is rarely remembered as an objective sequence of events. Rather, the history of communities, from nations to religious groups, is often remembered in a very specific way and it serves an important function to the group it pertains to. This normative history, or collective memory, defines not only a group’s past but also its values and aims.

The establishment of collective memory, the shared past and values of a group, is the subject of Susanne Karstedt’s latest edited volume Legal Institutions and Collective Memories.

This compilation of articles draws from international history to demonstrate how specific readings of the past can come to shape the identity of groups. Examples abound, from the Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide as well as the legacy of communism in Eastern Europe; this book addresses how these traumatic periods of history are dealt with by the communities that experienced them. More importantly, the book evaluates the relationship between how such events are remembered and the ability of communities to come to terms with the past.

The relationship between reconciliation, justice, remembering and forgetting are eloquently explored. Does forgiving imply forgetting? Can a community forget the injustices of the past? Can remembering be dangerous, could it encourage revenge? Practically, is it possible to obtain justice when entire communities are guilty of discriminating each other? Can a country transition from a phase of authoritarian oppression to one of democracy without dealing with the past?

Frustratingly, many of these questions have indefinite answers.

However, the book is more than a philosophical inquiry into the relationship between the past and the present. Legal Institutions and Collective Memories is able to distil important trends in reconciliatory process, and thus provides important lessons for those

interested or implicated in transitional phases of history. One founding principle of the book is the role that legal institutions— from courts to truth and reconciliation commissions—play in the creation of a dominant narrative of the past.

While legal institutions are usually interpreted as a source of justice, they are rarely understood as the framework on which history is grounded. However, Karstedt’s work is convincing in demonstrating that, in fact, legal institutions are fundamentally related to the collective memory of communities.

Legal institutions allow witnesses to bring to “the court room experiences and memories of terror and violence that were attached to cities, streets and houses but had been eradicated from the normal spaces in which memory is exercised and sedimented in society. They recreated a space for such memories for the first time, even within the restrictive boundaries of the law.”

Legal institutions are powerful because they not only give a voice to victims and perpetrators; they also determine how those accounts are remembered. In declaring guilt and innocence, legal institutions imbue the past with normative values, and thus express the values of the communities they represent.

“Simultaneously they set the stage for all types of forgetting, for individual denial of guilt and repression of memories, amounting to social amnesia of a terrible past, for amnesties as lawful amnesia… and equally for those kinder versions of forgetting like reconciliation and forgiveness.”

In terms of nation building, perhaps no other country’s collective memory is so linked to legal institutions as South Africa.

Following Apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was brought in to deal with the country’s troubled past, but also to create the foundations for a future nation that would be based on racial equality. How was the Truth Commission capable of creating the idea or the collective memory of a country that stands for equality if its past was founded on racial discrimination? In remembering past events as wrong, and acknowledging that the values of a “new” South Africa were based on equality, the Truth Commission created a national identity. Although such mechanisms are far from perfect, and other narratives of the country’s past have not been eradicated, South Africa’s example shows that institutionalized readings are by default the most dominant interpretation of the past.

As Krastedt explains, this is because law “…as it defines property rights or relations of domination and subordination within a society and between its different groups, leaves its visible stamp on social space and thus shapes the collective memory of groups and society as a whole.”

The depth and breadth with which collective memory is explored in the book is impressive. In highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of institutionalizing collective memories, Karstedt’s book stands to impact many of the ongoing conflicts that shape the world today. For example, the question of Afghanistan’s future relationship with the Taliban is inextricably related to the numerous issues that are raised in the book.

Those interested in seeing stability and peace in the country restored will inevitably have to deal with collective memory of past violence. Although, each conflicted past differs, and Karstedt makes no claim to offer solutions to such troubled histories. This book instead exposes how much memories of the past impact future relationships.

This article was first published in The Majalla 1 June 2010

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Inside the Green Revolution Death to the Dictator!: Witnessing Iran's Election and the Crippling of the Islamic Republic

by Afsaneh Moqadam Bodley Head, 2010 (Paperback £10.99) Death to the Dictator! is a brave and moving eye witness account of last summer’s “Green Revolution” in Iran. The author takes the reader down Iran’s crowded streets and behind its notorious prison bars in a shock tactic to raise awareness of the regime’s horrific human rights abuses.

Last June the world watched, transfixed, as thousands of demonstrators took to the streets across Iran in opposition to the contested election results. Afsaneh Moqadam’s book Death to the Dictator! allows the reader a peak behind the headlines into the foray of mass protests in Tehran, engaging in both the disillusionment but also inspiring resilience of Iran’s reformist movement.

The Green Revolution, as the movement became known was characterised by its non-violence and the disproportionate reaction of Ahmadinejad’s henchmen: the Revolutionary Guard and the despised paramilitary Basijis.

The story is based on real events, witnessed by the author, a demonstrator himself, and expressed through the eyes of the protagonist Mohsen Abbaspour. That both the author’s name and the names of the characters are pseudonyms attests to the fear instilled in a population living under a military dictatorship.

The scene opens on the emaciated, broken body of Mohsen, lying at the roadside, abused so horrifically he can barely move or speak. It gradually emerges that Mohsen, a keen supporter of the reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and active participant in the post-election demonstrations, was imprisoned and subjected to unspeakable torture by the incumbent’s militia. Mohsen has been continually raped and brutally beaten, his wounds are not only physical but psychological. He feels utterly humiliated, having caved in under torture and given away the names of his fellow protestors.

The mood is decidedly defeatist at the book’s conclusion as Mohsen is preparing to move abroad, when earlier in the story he “vows never to leave this country.” His mistreatment in prison leads him to abandon his hopes and dreams. The cruel irony is that, like the reformist leaders in the elections, Mohsen “had been defeated by Ahmadinejad.”

Despite the dark subject matter the story still manages to have an intimate, amateurish appeal with its anecdotal style and humorous cultural insights. In typical Iranian spirit the author makes light of some of the hardships Iranians face in everyday life. The stigma of holding an Iranian passport is described as eliciting “the same reaction as a warm, dead bird” when it lands on the desk of an immigration official. Mohsen’s character is portrayed as very ordinary. He is representative of many IraniIssue 1554 • July 2010

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ans: still living at home with his parents, searching for a job and a prospective wife. The author deliberately creates his character as an embodiment of the Iranian people with their reasonable demands for democracy and a life without fear and harassment.

The Green Revolution encompassed Iranians from all strata of society, “young and old, students and wasters, housewives, addicts, clerks…” the list goes on. The scale and popularity of the demonstrations had a striking resemblance to the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Moqadam draws parallels between the 1979 Revolution and the demonstrations that took place thirty years later. There are clear differences: unlike the earlier generation, those who took to the streets last June didn’t want a revolution, they wanted constitutional reform. This generation of demonstrators are better educated than their predecessors; they used brains not brawn in the fight for change. The author explores the irony and significance of the call “Allahu Akbar!” (God is Great). Originally chanted from the rooftops during the Islamic Revolution in 1979, it was again shouted in defiance of the contested election results in 2009: “No longer is it a call for religion. It has become a call for truth.”

Moqadam discredits Khamenei, Iran’s spiritual leader who has ultimate authority under Iran's constitution. Reverence of Khamenei is almost innate to Iranians, but following his reaction to the elections the author describes the Islamic Republic and its religious leaders as having taken on a “militarised, neo-fascist guise.” It is interesting to note that even the reformists wanted to believe in Khamenei, in his impartiality concerning the disputed election results. In the days following the election the people looked to Khamenei for answers, the reformists hoped he would call for a recount. Their hopes went unfulfilled; Moqadam asserts that Khamenei is nothing more than Ahmadinejad’s puppet. Mohsen, who initially had faith in Khamenei loses all respect for him. Khamenei is described as being “framed by a flimsy arch with prayers inscribed on it.”

The Green Revolution was also popularly known as the “Twitter Revolution.” Twitter and other online networking sites were used by demonstrators to communicate in secret to organise meetings and protests away from eagle-eyed state censorship.

Mohsen is constantly trying to outsmart the state’s internet filter to access Facebook, BBC Persian and the Voice of America.

The internet is where he finds freedom away from his oppressed reality. Boxed into his apartment, he sits glued to the screen to find out what is taking place on his very doorstep. The internet proved to be an invaluable tool in linking Iranians both to each other and the outside world. Without the internet Iranians’ astonishing mobilisation would have been kept firmly behind the Islamic Republic’s closed doors.

The sad truth is, that after the media frenzy died down, the world forgot about Iran’s brave protestors, whilst people like Mohsen continue to be abused under the military dictatorship everyday. Death to the Dictator! is a moving testimony to those who participated in Iran’s Green Revolution, a story that, despite the regime’s best efforts to conceal it, has now reached a Western audience through the pen of one of its victims. Moqadam’s book is necessary in giving a voice to those who strive for human rights and democracy under Iran’s despotic leadership. The reader cannot but wonder what the fates of the characters may be, real people, who continue to suffer long after the final chapter was written.

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• THE CRITICS

Victors’ Justice From Rome to Kampala: The U.S. Approach to the 2010 International Criminal Court Review Conference Council on Foreign Relations, April 2010 A recent report by the Council on Foreign Relations discusses the future of America’s relationship with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in ensuring immunity from prosecution for US nationals. Its suggestion, however, that the US refuses to play by the ICC’s rulebook, are questionable, particularly given the importance of the ICC’s universal jurisdiction to its ability to fairly account for injustice world wide.

When Churchill, Truman and Stalin sat around the negotiating table in 1945 discussing the fate of Nazi war criminals, they established the world’s first international war crimes tribunal.

The Nuremberg trials were heralded for bringing a country and its leaders to justice for committing crimes against humanity. Sadly, the trials also came under heavy criticism for their hypocrisy and self-serving restrictions, compromising the trial’s fairness. Allied crimes, often equally atrocious to the defendants, were exempt from prosecution, leading some observers to label the Nuremberg trials, show trials based on a ‘victor's justice.’

A recent report published by the Council of Foreign Relations reads as a classic case of victor’s justice. The report discusses the future of America’s relationship with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in ensuring immunity from prosecution for US nationals. This spring, nations from around the world will be discussing the international jurisdiction of the ICC at the ICC Review Conference to be held in Kampala, Uganda. The report broaches the uneasy relationship between the ICC and the US and makes recommendations for its approach at the conference to protect US interests.

More than 50 years after Nuremburg, in 2002, the International Criminal Court was established under the treaty of the Rome Statute. The ICC, with its seat in The Hague, The Netherlands, is responsible for prosecuting those who violate human rights and take part in international war crimes. Since its creation consecutive US administrations have been reluctant to ratify the Statute and become a formal member. The US objects to several aspects of the court’s authority and jurisdiction. The ICC operates independently of the United Nations, free to accuse suspects without the permission of the UN Security Council. This leaves the US more exposed to prosecution without the vetoing power it holds in the UN. In addition, Washington has concerns over the court’s authority to prosecute nationals of a non-member state if crimes occur in a member state’s territory. This stipulation exposes US military and peacekeeping personnel in military interventions abroad to prosecution.

The United States appears even less likely to join the ICC if certain changes are made to the Statute in Kampala. In particular, the ICC is hoping to agree on a definition of “aggression” and activate jurisdiction over crimes of aggression.

The report makes clear that the US administration regards this stipulation as a political issue and not solely a legal one. According to the report, the inclusion of the crime of aggression as an offence would delegitimize ICC jurisdiction. The author notes, “It places U.S. and allied leaders at risk of prosecution for what they view as necessary and legitimate security actions.”

Read: Iraq. This change could potentially put the US in a very uncompromising position concerning its military escapades abroad. If aggression is added to ICC jurisdiction the US will certainly not join. Yet isn’t that the way justice works, shouldn’t every nation be held equally accountable for their actions?

Demonstrators waving banners condemning the war in Iraq as illegal would welcome the inclusion of aggression under ICC jurisdiction. It is of considerable note that the author has mentioned the prosecution the US might face were it to wage war on Iran should tension over nuclear weapons escalate. It is precisely this concern that makes the ICC so important in regulating international justice. The ICC’s jurisdiction can inadvertently act as a deterrent to future US military intervention.

Before alarm bells start ringing in the Senate, US politicians should remember that the ICC is a court of last resort. Cases will only be referred to the ICC if national courts are unable or unwilling to prosecute.

This all amounts to a nation evidently unwilling to play by someone else’s rulebook. The United States has continually undermined the ICC, particularly during the Bush administration. Several Acts were passed through Congress to prohibit information sharing with the ICC and ensure exemption from ICC jurisdiction for US personnel. Since then, relations have thawed a little with the US strongly supporting the ICC cases for Sierra Leone and Sudan. The report offers the upcoming conference as an opportunity for the US to influence the ICC without committing or being held accountable to it.

The author presents a defensive strategy in its negotiations with the ICC at the Review Conference. The US will attend as an observer but hopes to make its voice heard by sending a cabinet level representative. The author recommends that the US push to prevent activation of the crime of aggression whilst providing constructive feedback on the Court’s performance. The Obama administration will find it hard to maneuver between advancing US interests amongst weary members without a peace offering of support. The author suggests that the US provide financial and practical support if its demands are met. He further recommends that representatives support initiatives, such as victim outreach, to ensure greater inclusion of victims’ accounts in court proceedings. Finally, he argues that the US should show commitment to maintaining the court by apprehending suspects and improving the capability of national courts to deal with cases, especially in Africa, so the ICC does not have to.

The US should not hope to get a free out of jail card; justice should apply equally to everyone without exemption. As the author notes, the ICC works on a principal of universality. How can he then suggest that it bends its principals to accommodate US security interests? When representatives from around the world gather in Kampala they should not make the same mistakes as their predecessors in 1945, but should allow the ICC to function as a neutral court, thereby avoiding accusations of a victor’s justice.

This article was first published in The Majalla 2 June 2010

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Rachid Kora誰chi Ecstatic Flow

11th June - 10th July 2010

Rachid Kora誰chi Ibn El Arabi, 2009 (detail). Lithograph, 61 x 40 cm, ed. 70 + 5AP

AN EXHIBITION OF NEW WORKS CELEBRATING THE LIVES AND TEACHINGS OF SUFI MASTERS Saturday 12th June at 3pm.

GALLERY TALK: Rachid Kora誰chi will talk about his art at October Gallery. Admission Free.

October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AL art@octobergallery.co.uk Tel: + 44 (0)20 7242 7367 Tues - Sat 12.30-5.30 or by appointment October Gallery Trust Registered Charity No. 327032

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• THE FINAL WORD

Fire Under the Ashes A Year After Iran’s Troubled Elections

While the neo-conservatives in Iran enjoy their victory over the internal opposition, Iran has become internationally isolated similar to the post-revolution years; the major countries passed a fourth package of sanctions with the concurrence of Iran's friends: Russia and China. Though the Iranian government appears negligent to these strategic losses, the country may face major economic challenges domestically.

Adel Al Toraifi

A

s some analysts expected, the anniversary of the Iranian elections passed with neither huge protests in the streets nor any prominent events taking place.

Except for some student arrests and an individual attack against the former presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi, the Iranian regime proved that it is the master of the situation. This reality was made clear when leaders of the opposing green movement backed down from organizing protests days before the anniversary and instead apologized out of fear of security measures taken by the Iranian regime. Perceived as a serious weakness by their supporters, members of the opposition have decreased in number.

Some attribute reasons for the green movement's retreat to the success of the Iranian authorities backed particularly by the revolutionary guard and the Basij militia in the forced reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Also, a series of trials, sentences and executions against supporters of the opposition under the noses of its leaders—Rafsanjani, Mousavi, Khatami, and Karroubi—proved that opposition to the existing regime is still weak and ineffective in changing the situation in the Iranian political arena. In this context, the political analyst Reza Esfandiari commented in the Telegraph (12 June), "Despite the claims of a rigged poll, all of the available evidence indicates to [the election] being authentic and that a majority of Iranians support the current government.” He went on to say that "The failure of the Green (reformist) movement one year on is largely down to the fact that it could not draw among ordinary Iranians outside of the political elite and cosmopolitan social base."

However, others see that the apparent calm conceals much anger and internal congestion, or as The New York Times called it in a 12 June report, “fire under the ashes." The report indicates that the Supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad may appear victorious at this stage, but many people in Iran today feel that—despite the apparent retreat of the green movement—underground opposition not directly associated with the movement is growing, and it is distinguishing itself from both the existing political regime and its opponents. If this is true, then the conservative and reformist parties have lost their chance to challenge the serious imbalance of power in the Iranian political system. In effect, the revolution that represented the people has become a regime that forcefully controls a youth nation that was born after the revolution.

While the neo-conservatives in Iran enjoy their victory over the internal opposition, Iran has become internationally isolated similar to the post-revolution years; the major countries passed a

fourth package of sanctions with the concurrence of Iran's friends: Russia and China. Though the Iranian government appears negligent to these strategic losses, the country—according to some observers—may face major economic challenges domestically.

During 2007 and 2008, Iran gained significant income from its oil returns, and the peak of the oil prices ($150) helped the central government cover its gross expenditures in projects supporting the poor who, in fact, form the public base of President Ahmadinejad. However, Iran is facing an economic blockade that may harm its foreign trade. In 2008, Tehran's trade with its five biggest Asian trading partners reached about one billion dollars.

The majority of Iran's exports go to countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Iraq and Afghanistan, but the value of this trade is likely to decrease to 2001 rates, less than $500 million, if these sanctions are implemented more strictly than before.

In his important book Forces of Fortune (2009), Vali Nasr argues, "The great battle for Iran's soul –and the future of the whole region – will be fought not over religion or sects, but over the freedom of trade and capitalism." Thus, the economic sanctions imposed on Iran will have significant consequences.

Iran's gross domestic product, now, is similar to that of Massachusetts. Experts argue that Iran’s economic status prevents Iran from being a major player regionally, let alone confronting countries such as the United States or the European Union.

The neo-conservatives in Iran argue that acquiring nuclear technology – not necessarily possessing a nuclear weapons arsenal – is essentially a response to the foreign threats they face, and that the western countries, especially those in the region, will have to correct their stances and acknowledge Iran's status as a major country. It is true that reaching a nuclear capability may change the balance of power in the region. Nevertheless, it will change nothing in the balance of the internal dispute.

Ray Takeyh (Guardians of the Revolution, 2009) points out that the extreme rightist policies of the Mullahs in coalition with the guards [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] may have ensured their success in the regional conflict with the international community, but the domestic challenges might be the greatest threat to their existence in power. Eventually, failing to solve domestic problems was the main reason behind the fall of countries such as the Soviet Union.

The neo-conservatives may have succeeded in this round, but as a Persian proverb states, "Forgiveness hides a pleasure not found in revenge." It is a lesson they don’t realize clearly; Iran will never be as it was before, as anger and revenge are still burning under the ashes.

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