Lustig's Letter

27 January 2012

2012-01-27T11:18:00.001Z

When I was at school, long, long ago, I studied a subject called English literature.

And when I was old enough to get my first passport, it was issued on behalf of a country called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The word England, or English, didn't appear anywhere.

How much simpler it would have been if I'd been born in France, or Germany: French literature, French passport; German literature, German passport.

As far as I know, there's no such thing as "British literature", and there's certainly no "United Kingdom literature".

(Of course, English is a language as well as a national and cultural identity -- which is why we can also study American literature, or African literature, written in the same language but from a very different cultural background.)

So do labels matter? I suspect they do, because they help us describe who we are, who we feel ourselves to be. And surely that's an important part of the newly-invigorated debate over Scottish independence.

I've yet to meet a Scot who doesn't bristle indignantly when some ignorant foreigner describes them as "English". To be Scottish, or indeed Welsh or Irish, is, in part, to be not-English -- and perhaps we not-Scots need to recognise that more than we sometimes do.

Incidentally, while we're on the subject of national identities, I'm reminded of how the author and Anglican priest William Inge, who served as dean of St Paul's a century ago, defined what constitutes a nation: it is, he said, "a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours."

Alex Salmond, Scotland's first minister, is going to great lengths these days to say that he's not an England-hater. Far from it, he says: he wants Scotland to be a good neighbour to England instead of a surly tenant -- and a confident, independent Scotland would help England to become equally confident, equally independent.

For now, all the opinion polls suggest that he has not yet convinced a majority of Scots that going it alone would be in their best interests. If he held an independence referendum tomorrow, he'd probably lose. Indeed, there seem to be more people in England than in Scotland who would be happy to see the two nations cut the ties that bind them.

If we look around the world, we can find other examples of countries that have split up, and we can choose which one to focus on, depending on what point we want to prove.

Czechoslovakia? The "velvet divorce" of 1993 -- Generally speaking, a success.

Ethiopia? The independence of Eritrea, also in 1993 -- Not a success at all, leading to continued conflict over borders and thousands of deaths.

Serbia/Kosovo? The unilateral declaration of Kosovan independence, 2008 -- a highly controversial example, of course, as it was done without the agreement, indeed, against the furious opposition, of Serbia. Not how it would happen if Scotland were to vote for independence.

But here's one aspect of the debate that perhaps hasn't yet received as much attention as it should. If the Scots want to feel more Scottish, and the English want to feel more English, where does that leave the people who insist that they really do feel British, rather than Scottish, English, Welsh, or Irish?

What about the child of immigrants from Cyprus, born here, English as first language, UK passport -- British, yes, but English?

Or the grand-child of immigrants from Jamaica, or India -- British, yes, but English?
(Declaration of interest: I am myself the child of refugees.)

National identity is tricky in a world of mass migration -- but it's going to be a fascinating debate.

20 January 2012

2012-01-20T10:20:00.001Z

Has the month-old Arab League mission to Syria been a dismal failure? Is it time to admit that it has done nothing to protect Syrian civilians, or to pressure President Assad to call a halt to his security forces' crackdown against anti-government protesters?

Facts are hard to come by in Syria, but the UN estimates that some 600 people have been killed in the four weeks since the Arab League observers turned up; the US reckons the rate of killing has actually increased rather than decreased since the mission got under way.

When I was in Cairo last week, I spoke to the Arab League's secretary-general, Nabil el-Araby. He readily admitted that President Assad has flagrantly ignored the agreement he signed with the Arab League -- and he left little doubt that he has made his deep displeasure known in private communications with Damascus.

But he does not accept the claim by some Syrian opposition groups that the mission has done more harm than good. (Nor does he accept that it has become, to use the word favoured by one of his monitors who quit in disgust, a "farce".)

Mr el-Araby says that at the very least, protesters have known that if they come out onto the streets to shout their anti-Assad slogans in the presence of Arab League observers, well, they won't be shot as long as the monitors are watching. What happens after they've gone, of course, may be an entirely different matter.

Think of the Arab League as a mini-EU. It's made up of 22 states (21 now that Syria has been suspended), and they're as different as Kuwait is from Sudan, or Qatar from Egypt. Not one of them enjoys what you might recognise as a truly democratic form of government. (Post-revolution Tunisia is getting close.)

So when it comes to deciding what to do about Syria, it's about as difficult as getting the EU to agree on what to do about the euro. Lebanon, Syria's nervous neighbour, and Iraq, which is close to Syria's main ally, Iran, are both deeply opposed to any firmer action against the country's current rulers. Qatar, at the other extreme, is arguing for Arab military action to end the conflict.

How about referring the whole thing to the UN security council? After all, that's what the Arab League did over Libya, with an urgent request for a no-fly zone to be set up. The request was granted -- and the rest is history.

Never again is the line from Moscow -- and remember, Moscow has a security council veto. In Cairo, Mr el-Araby is in close touch with senior Russian and Chinese diplomats, and he knows better than anyone where their red lines are. So tell him there are demands that he goes back to the security council now and he asks: What's the point, given the known positions of Russia and China?

As long ago as last April, with the Syria protests less than two months old, I wrote: "With no regional pressure for military intervention, and with no Western appetite for any more military adventures, the message for anti-government protesters in Syria seems inescapable: you're on your own."

It may seem remarkable that eight months and several thousand deaths later, the message hasn't changed. But political realities are what they are: and quite apart from anything else, the Russian navy values its warm-water Mediterranean port at Tartous, just as much as the US Fifth Fleet values its home in Bahrain.

In other words, to use an appropriately naval metaphor, neither major power wants to rock the boat where its own strategic interests are at stake.

The likelihood in Syria, then, is that the military stand-off on the ground will be matched by a diplomatic stand-off at the UN. My hunch is that the Arab League will issue a report that's harshly critical of Bashar al-Assad, but will nevertheless agree to extend its observer mission's mandate for another month.

Below the radar, and far from prying eyes, I suspect Western military trainers are hard at work coaching Syrian rebel defectors in camps across the border in Turkey. What the opposition need is to to be able to seize -- and hold -- some sizeable chunks of territory, and to form themselves into something resembling a cohesive political unit along the lines of the National Transitional Council in Libya.

If, over the coming months, the military balance swings the rebels' way on the ground, the diplomatic balance may well follow. But the initiative lies, as it has done all along, with the anti-Assad forces in Syria itself.

13 January 2012

2012-01-20T10:19:00.000Z

CAIRO -- A year is a very short time in revolutionary politics, so if anyone asks you, a year after the Egyptian revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, what the future holds in store for this country, you can confidently reply: “It’s much too soon to tell.”

Yes, the old dictatorship has gone, but the military are still in control, and democracy has not yet taken hold.

Yes, elections have taken place, but they were to choose members of a new parliament whose powers have yet to be defined.

And yes, there’s now a freedom of expression and a freedom to protest unlike anything that Egypt has seen in decades -- but dissidents are still being thrown in jail and thousands of civilians are being tried in military courts.

The big story from the elections is that the religious, Islamist parties have swept the board. As I write, the final results after a six-week election period have not yet been published -- but in broad terms it looks as if the Freedom and Justice party, representing the Muslim Brotherhood, have won about 40 per cent of the vote, and the al-Nour party, representing the ultra-conservative Salafis who practise an unusually strict form of Islam, have won between 20 and 25 per cent.

That’s enough to worry a lot of secular liberals who have nightmares about Egypt turning into another Iran. Stories have started circulating of Salafi-inspired “morality police” being issued with wooden batons with which to discipline citizens who are considered to be inappropriately dressed.

But until a new constitution has been drawn up, no one can be sure just how much power these new MPs will have. One leading presidential candidate, the former foreign minister Amre Moussa, told me he favours a “French-style” presidency; the Islamist parties, on the other hand, would rather have a more powerful parliament and a less powerful president. (You can hear the interview tonight, Friday, or online or as a podcast.)

As for the military, they’re keeping their counsel these days, after being roundly criticised for suggesting that they expected to play a major role in the drafting of a new constitution. The assumption is that whoever is elected president later this year will need to have at least the tacit support of the Muslim Brotherhood, without whom he probably couldn’t win, and of the military, without whom he couldn’t govern.

Here’s an anecdote from the streets of Cairo, a vignette to illustrate how different the new Egypt is from the old one. A few nights ago, we stumbled across a noisy demonstration, a few hundred students chanting slogans against the military council. We decided to record it; after all, you can never tell when these things might come in useful.

Within moments, having seen our microphone, an angry and smartly-dressed middle-aged man was berating us, in fluent English, about the idiocy of the protesters. Why didn’t they just go home and leave the military to get on with running the country?

Moments later, a second man joined in, again in fluent English, taking the opposite point of view. Tempers rose, and a crowd soon gathered. But there was no trouble, and as soon as we put the microphone away, the crowd drifted off.

Democracy in action? Not quite, perhaps. But in the Egypt that I used to know, a microphone in the street would have been regarded with deep suspicion. No one would have chanted opposition slogans, or voiced political opinions for all to hear.

Egypt is one of the most influential nations in the Arab world, even if it can’t afford to buy the sort of influence that countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar enjoy. The population of Cairo alone is greater than the combined populations of Libya, Lebanon and Jordan.

That means that what happens here will matter far beyond Egypt’s shores. A smooth transition to a genuine democracy would be a powerful example in one of the world’s least stable regions.

6 January 2012

2012-01-06T10:53:00.000Z

If you’re travelling abroad, and someone asks you where you’re from, what do you say? England? Scotland? Britain?

I usually say England (or even London – everyone has heard of London). What I never say is Europe.

Ask an Indian, or a Chinese, where they’re from, do they say Asia? Would a Kenyan, or a Nigerian, say Africa? I doubt it.

On the other hand, the Indians and the Chinese don’t share a common currency; nor is there an Asian Union. We Europeans are different, at least in theory, because there is a common currency, and there is a European Union. Whether we really feel European, though, is a moot point.

According to a provocative article in the latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine, “the European Union was built on the myth that we are one people with one common destiny.”

The Brussels-based journalist Gareth Harding writes: “The British view of the state's role is very different from the French view. The Greek or Italian concept of law is very different from that of Sweden or Denmark. Latvians have a very different view of Russia from Germans. What an Irishman is prepared to pay in taxes is very different from what a Dane or Belgian will allow.”

He quotes the Dutch writer Geert Mak: “There is no European people … There is not a single language, but dozens of them. The Italians feel very differently about the word ‘state’ than do the Swedes. There are still no truly European political parties, and pan-European newspapers and television stations still lead a marginal existence. And, above all: in Europe there is very little in the way of a shared historical experience.”

You may remember that in one of my newsletters last month, after the drama of the Cameron veto in Brussels, I asked whether the EU has perhaps become “too unwieldy, too stretched as a concept and too unbalanced as an economic entity, to survive the immense stresses to which it is now being subjected?”

Harding’s question is a broader one: he suggests that the current debt crisis, and the doubts about the future of the euro, “encapsulate a broader breakdown of Europe's dreams of a united future.

“Rather than bringing the European Union closer to its citizens, the currency has widened the gap between rulers and ruled. Instead of ushering in a new era of prosperity, the euro has condemned millions of Europeans to decades of penury. And far from bringing together the peoples of Europe, it is on the verge of tearing them apart.”

But there is, of course, another side to the story. Over the past 60 years, most of Europe has experienced an unprecedented era of peace: Germany has invaded none of its neighbours; and no fewer than nine nations that had been subsumed into the Soviet empire are now free of those shackles.

The EU should certainly be given at least some of the credit for that, as it should for the rapid democratisation of what used to be Eastern Europe, and for Serbia’s and Croatia’s achievements in opening up a new chapter after the horrors of the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. The prospect of being able to join the EU was a powerful incentive in both Belgrade and Zagreb as they emerged from those bloody conflicts.

But in times of economic hardship, people always look for someone to blame. There are growing signs of anti-foreigner sentiment in many northern EU countries (the “foreigners” include both migrants from north Africa as well as those from eastern Europe), while in Italy and Greece, for example, corrupt or ineffective political elites and bankers seem to bear the brunt of the anger.

Harding may well be over-stating it when he suggests that the current crisis is on the verge of tearing the peoples of Europe apart. But the strains are there for all to see –and they represent a huge challenge to the EU’s leaders as they try to navigate their way through 2012.

I’m going to be in Cairo next week, to take a closer look at the impact of the Arab uprisings. I hope you’ll listen out for our reports next Thursday and Friday.

16 December 2011

2011-12-23T10:35:00.001Z

My apologies if you loathe the expression “not fit for purpose”, but I’m beginning to wonder if we need to ask whether perhaps the European Union is, sorry, “not fit for purpose.”

(If you do loathe the expression, don’t blame me, blame John Reid, who introduced it into the political lexicon in 2006 when he took over at the Home Office and promptly declared the immigration department you-know-what. The Guardian style guide sniffs that it’s “a recent cliché that quickly proved itself unfit for the purpose of good writing”. To which I’m tempted to reply with another neologism: “wha’ever …”)

But I digress. It’s a week now since the bust-up in Brussels that resulted in all those headlines about the UK being left stranded in a minority of one on the question of how to devise a new framework to deal with potential financial melt-downs.

As so often with EU summits, in the cold light of day and when everyone has caught up on some sleep after an all-night negotiating session and too much coffee, the reality seems to be rather more complicated.

For one thing, the framework is so vague that no one seems quite sure what they’ve either signed up to, in the case of 23 EU governments, or refused to sign up to, in the case of David Cameron. Have a listen to our interview with the Swedish finance minister, Anders Borg, which was broadcast on Wednesday, to get a flavour of how opaque the whole thing is.

And to add confusion to the complexity, what are we to make of last night’s confirmation from Downing Street that the UK will have “observer” status at future negotiations and will take part in “technical discussions” about how to move forward.

If you were to conclude from all this that they’re making it up as they go along, I wouldn’t seek to change your mind.

I well remember during the 1990s traipsing from one EU capital to the next, as six-monthly summit followed six-monthly summit, watching in some bewilderment as Europe’s leaders went about designing the EU of their dreams.

The UK dream at the time (this was in the days of John Major at No. 10 and Douglas Hurd at the Foreign Office) was an EU that would gradually transmogrify into an entity that was, in the jargon of the time, “wider, not deeper”.

The Germans and the French, on the other hand, wanted an EU that was both deeper and wider. In other words, open up to new members (remember the Big Bang, when 10 new members joined in 2004?), which was what Britain favoured, and also build what in the words of the founding Treaty of Rome was called “an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe”, which Britain was a lot less keen on, even if Edward Heath had signed up to it when we joined in 1973.

So now we have a union of 27 member states, soon to be 28 when Croatia joins in two years’ time, and a currency union to which 17 of them belong and eight more are due to join at some unspecified time in the future.

Can it work? Can the lamb of Malta lie down with the lion of Germany? Can Portugal march hand in hand with Poland? Or has it all become too unwieldy, too stretched as a concept and too unbalanced as an economic entity, to survive the immense stresses to which it is now being subjected?

Perhaps the middle of a deep economic crisis is not the best time to try to tackle these issues. But you only have to listen to the sniping between London and Paris this week to understand that the bonds that bind this union (and I don’t mean bonds as in “sovereign bonds”) are beginning to fray quite seriously.

Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times wrote this week: “Markets and voters are increasingly refusing to obey the grand pronouncements issued by EU leaders at their ever more frequent crisis summits. Add to that the growing tensions between EU members, which go well beyond the isolation of Britain, and you have a formula for continuing confusion and disunity.” That’s the politics of it.

In The Times, Anatole Kaletsky wrote of last week’s “fiscal compact” plan: “It is arithmetically impossible for all the countries in the eurozone simultaneously to deflate their way out of a debt crisis ... By imposing permanent austerity on the whole eurozone, the fiscal compact would guarantee permanent depression. And that in turn guarantees that the treaty supposedly agreed last Friday will never see the light of day.” That’s the economics.

In our interview on Wednesday, the Swedish finance minister confidently predicted that 2012 will be even worse than 2011. And this is the man whom the Financial Times has named as the most successful finance minister in the EU.

23 December 2011

2011-12-23T10:34:00.001Z

Do you remember what President Obama said 10 days ago when he marked the formal departure of the last American troops from Iraq?

“We left behind us a sovereign Iraq, stable and self-sufficient, with a representative government elected by its people.”

Hmm. Stable? Self-sufficient? Representative government? Maybe, yet again, a US President is allowing wishful thinking to get the better of him. (“Mission accomplished”, anyone?)

Yesterday, multiple bomb attacks in Baghdad killed at least 67 people. Most of the attacks appear to have been aimed at Shia targets, just as they were in the worst days of the sectarian violence in 2006-7, when thousands of people died.

(By the way, I wouldn’t want you to think that the US no longer has a significant presence in Iraq. Its embassy in Baghdad is reported to have about 15,000 people on its staff, and I imagine more than a handful receive their monthly pay cheques from the Pentagon.)

Why has the violence flared now, after several months of relative calm? As always, it seems the context is regional power-plays more than religious tensions. After all, if the US army are no longer a visible presence, doesn’t someone have to fill the vacuum?

Look at it this way: which regional power most wants to be seen as the dominant influence in Iraq? Which regional power has a clear strategic interest in being able to portray itself as a victor in Iraq, while the US is perceived as a loser?

And – not coincidentally – which regional power has most to lose if its one Arab ally, Syria, becomes the latest country where popular protests and armed insurrection topple a brutal and autocratic regime?

The answer, obviously enough, is Iran, Iraq’s giant Shia neighbour to the east which is closely tied to prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. Maybe that helps explain why within days of the final US troop withdrawal, he has moved to ratchet up the pressure on the country’s leading Sunni politicians.

A warrant has been issued for the arrest of the Sunni vice-president, Tareq al-Hashemi, on terrorism charges, and the Sunni deputy prime minister Saleh al-Mutlaq, who’s now facing a no confidence vote in parliament, told me this week that he regards Mr Maliki as a worse dictator than Saddam Hussein.

So, if the Iranians are keen to bolster Shia power in Iraq, who is likely to be equally keen to stop them? Saudi Arabia, perhaps, which has long been Iran’s main rival for regional hegemony and which regards itself as the protector of Sunni Arabs wherever they are threatened?

Could that be why Sunni bombers are suddenly back in action? (To be fair, we don’t yet know who yesterday’s bombers were, but there’s a widespread assumption that they were tied to, or affiliated with, al Qaeda.)

It’s worth recalling that the coalition government headed by Mr Maliki was painfully and reluctantly stitched together only as a result of enormous diplomatic pressure after the parliamentary elections of December 2005. It took six months of haggling to get it together, after Mr Maliki’s Dawa party and its allies failed to win enough seats to form a majority without the support of other parliamentary blocs.

Take away the US glue that was holding the coalition together, and – judging by the events of the past week – it soon comes crumbling down. Mr Hashemi has fled to the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where the prime minister’s writ doesn’t run, and there’s every reason to suppose that other Sunni leaders will soon decide to have no more to do with Mr Maliki.

In other words, Iraq is once again teetering on the brink of the abyss. It’s not a reassuring sight as we end this year of tumult right across the Arab world.

Footnote: I realise we've brought you a lot more doom and gloom over the past 12 months than you would have liked – so let me suggest what you can hope for in the coming year: a clement winter with no gales, blizzards or floods; an unexpected economic upturn with lots of new jobs; a mysterious benefactor who pays off all the eurozone’s debts; a successful London Olympics with a lovely clutch of gold medals for Team GB; and an end to strife in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, and Iraq.

I didn’t say it’ll happen – I suggested you can hope for it. Meanwhile, as I say at this time every year: enjoy the company of your family and friends; admire the trees and the flowers in parks and gardens; count your blessings.

2 December 2011

2011-12-14T11:48:00.001Z

Don’t worry – I’m not going to write about the economy, the euro, or the banks this week; I have no wish to ruin your weekend before it’s even started.

Instead, I’ve been thinking some more about the Arab uprisings which surely will come to be seen as the defining events of 2011, just as the end of Communism in Europe came to define 1989. Soon we’ll be marking the first anniversary of the death by self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street-seller who sparked the uprisings, so perhaps it’s a good time to try to take stock.

(Incidentally, you may remember that when the Chinese Communist leader Zhou Enlai was asked his opinion of the French revolution, he replied: “It’s too soon to tell.” This was in the early 1970s, but unfortunately, it now turns out that he was referring to the events of 1968, not 1789, which rather ruins the story.)

The trouble with revolutions is that they tend to be processes, rather than events. In the words of Professor Stephen Walt, of Harvard university, writing in Foreign Policy this week: “If the history of revolutions tells us anything, it is that rebuilding new political orders is a protracted, difficult, and unpredictable process.”

He offers three examples. First, the French revolution: the Bastille was stormed in 1789; Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were executed four years later; Napoleon didn’t come to power until 1799. In other words, a full decade of turmoil and terror followed the initial uprising.

Or how about the Russian revolution? The Tsarist regime was overthrown in March 1917; the Bolsheviks came to power several months later, but then there was a grim civil war which didn’t end until 1923. And there was, of course, continued turmoil – pogroms, massacres, and purges -- for many years after that.

His third example is the Iranian revolution of 1978-9. The Shah was desposed in January 1979; Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in France a month later, but then there was a prolonged period of political unrest and uncertainty. The country’s first post-revolution president, Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr, was impeached in 1981 over his resistance to rule by the clerics – and you could argue that the debate over the role of the clerical establishment in Iran remains unresolved to this day.

All of which, I suppose, tends to lead to the conclusion that no, this is not yet a good time for a definitive assessment of the Arab uprisings. For one thing, in some countries the uncertainty is far from over: in Syria, most obviously, but also in Yemen, despite the transition of power agreement signed last week, and in Bahrain, where strains between the Sunni ruling family and the Shia majority continue to fester.

A sense of history may also be useful when outside governments consider how best they can shape events that are still in a state of flux. Professor Walt argues: “History … warns that outside powers have at best limited influence over the outcomes of a genuine revolutionary process. Even well-intentioned efforts to aid progressive forces can backfire, as can overt efforts to thwart them. Overall, a policy of "benevolent neglect" may be the more prudent course …”

I spoke a few days ago to the Syria analyst Peter Harling, of the conflict resolution think tank the International Crisis Group, who take a very similar view. He warned in his most recent report: “At a time when the international community is feeling a compulsion to do something, the overriding principle should remain to do no harm.”

Don’t rush to impose tighter economic sanctions, he argued, because they risk turning Syria into a pariah state and would enable the Assad regime to galvanise support against an “international conspiracy” – and don’t rush to legitimise the Syrian political “opposition”, who may have little, if any, support among the actual protesters on the streets of Syria’s towns and cities.

Politicians hate doing nothing. They are genetically programmed to act, to intervene, to initiate, because they are convinced that if they get it right, they can help to make the world a better place. After all, who’d vote for politicians who just sat on their hands all day, gazing out of the window at the mayhem all around them?

But sometimes, the wisest of them could be the ones who do least. So in my dreams, one day, when I ask a minister what s/he intends to do about the latest outbreak of violence somewhere, I’ll get the reply: “You know what? I think for now the best thing to do is nothing.”

9 December 2011

2011-12-14T11:45:00.001Z

Perhaps I should start with a statement of the blindingly obvious: Russia is not Egypt.

Yes, there were thousands of anti-government protesters out on the streets of the capital this week. And yes, the security forces responded with great brutality. And yes again, online social networks played an important role in galvanising the protests and giving a voice to the protesters.

But no, an autocrat is not about to be toppled. And no, Vladimir Putin is not Hosni Mubarak. So I suspect any references to a “Russian spring” (in December, for goodness sake?) should be taken with a very large pinch of salt.

Let’s rewind a few days. Last weekend, Russian voters went to the polls to choose a new parliament. This is not an event that normally excites much interest, because there is rarely any doubt about who is likely to win.

But this time was different. It was the first test of public opinion since Vladimir Putin (currently prime minister) and Dmitri Medvedev (currently president) announced that they intend to repeat their little trick of four years ago and swap jobs. (It’s not an exact repeat, in fact, because four years ago, Mr Medvedev was a mere deputy prime minister. But the principle remains the same.)

It seems that Russian voters – or at least some of them – object to being treated as irrelevant by-standers at election time. Last month, there was an embarrassing episode when Mr Putin was booed at a martial arts contest where he tried to make a speech. These things shouldn’t happen in what the Russians call their “managed democracy”.

Then, in the run-up to last weekend’s parliamentary elections, opposition groups started a campaign to persuade voters to vote for any party except Mr Putin’s United Russia.

When the results were declared, they showed a substantial drop in support for United Russia. What’s more, according to independent election monitoring groups and foreign observers, the party would have done far, far worse had there not been widespread vote-rigging and fraud.

That’s why the protesters took to the streets. It’s also why they intend to do the same thing this weekend, after an online campaign that is reported to have gained tens of thousands of supporters.

What does it all mean? Well, it’s easier to suggest what it doesn’t mean, because no Russian analyst to whom I have spoken this week believes that Mr Putin will not be re-elected as president next March. (Apologies for the double negatives: what I mean is that every Russian analyst to whom I have spoken believes that Mr Putin will be re-elected next March.)

Millions of Russians remember the chaotic days of the Yeltsin era, and the financial melt-down which left the vast majority struggling to make ends meet, while a handful of oligarchs snapped up State enterprises and turned themselves overnight into billionaires. There is very little appetite to return to that.

Vladimir Putin has meticulously cultivated an image as a strong leader (remember those pictures of him bare-chested?) while benefiting politically from high oil and gas prices, which have sent billions of dollars cascading into the Kremlin exchequer. It all goes down well in a country with a long tradition of strong leaders.

But something did shift this week. After too many years of cronyism, corruption and inefficiency, young, educated Russians seem to have decided they want something better. The chant of the protesters was “Russia without Putin”.

Did they take their cue from the Arab spring protesters in Tunisia and Egypt? Not consciously, perhaps, but 2011 has become the year of street protests – all the way from the capitals of the Arab world to the Occupy movements of New York, London and many other major cities.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, how in an increasingly virtual, digitised world, lived more and more on line and on screen, the most potent form of political action once again is the mass protest on the streets and in the squares of the world’s major cities.

For now, Vladimir Putin seems determined to blame Washington for his troubles. Hillary Clinton has been rude about the conduct of the elections; and in return, Mr Putin has accused the US of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence Russian politics.

So far, so predictable. Far less predictable is how the anti-Putin protesters will respond when the security forces try to put an end to their demonstrations.

On your list of things to watch out for in the coming year – the economy, the euro, the Olympics and the US presidential election – you can now add one more item: Russia.

25 November 2011

2011-11-25T10:46:00.000Z

I don’t suppose many people remember the thoughts of Chairman Mao any more. But there was, in my youth, one particular thought attributed to the Chinese Communist leader that was strangely popular among radical leftists who wanted to overthrow global capitalism.

It went like this: “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery.” (And yes, it was so long ago that I had to look it up to make sure I’d remembered it correctly.)

It’s been in my mind this week as I’ve followed the latest chapter in the Egyptian revolution, played out in Tahrir Square in central Cairo, and in many other towns and cities. Those who’ve been shot at, clubbed and tear gassed will not have needed reminding that they weren’t at a dinner party, or painting a picture.

Some of them may also have recalled another of Mao’s pensées: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” And they’ve proved him wrong on that, haven’t they?

Mao was right about one thing, though: revolutions are about seizing power. And when a group without power tries to seize it from a group with power, then resistance is usually inevitable. (Some of the anti-Communist revolutions in Europe in 1989 were an exception to the rule, in that the power of the elites had atrophied to such an extent that they sometimes crumbled away offering virtually no resistance at all.)

Back in February, on the day that President Hosni Mubarak was finally forced from office, I asked: “Was it a victory for a popular revolution, or a military coup d'état?” And I answered: “Almost certainly, a bit of both.”

Nine months on, I think the answer still stands. But to the tens of thousands of protesters out on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere this week, a bit of both is no longer good enough.

In February, they believed – or chose to believe – that they and the generals were on the same side. But now they are demanding that the military give up the power they inherited from Hosni Mubarak without any further delay.

Egypt is a test case on which a great deal depends. It’s true that so far, Tunisia, where this extraordinary year of Arab uprisings began, has set a pretty good example of how to manage a transition from autocracy to democracy. But Tunisia is a small and relatively insignificant Arab state. Egypt, on the other hand, is anything but.

So in Libya, and now in Yemen – and who knows, maybe one day soon in Syria as well – they are watching anxiously to see what happens next in Egypt. After all, removing a decades-old dictatorship does not automatically lead to the sunlit uplands of liberal democracy. (Somalia and Iraq are just two salutary examples of how it can all go horribly wrong.)

On Monday, barring any unexpected last-minute changes of mind, Egypt’s lengthy, multi-stage election process will get under way. More than 6,000 candidates are standing for election to a People’s Assembly, which is meant to act as a lower house of parliament and set in train a process to draw up a new constitution.

The elections are scheduled to roll on more or less non-stop until mid-January, and then – if the generals’ latest promise is to be believed – in the summer, presidential elections will be held to choose the country’s first elected post-Mubarak leader.

Do Egyptians have the patience to allow the process to proceed at this leisurely pace? Judging by the events of the past week, the answer would seem to be probably not.

But don’t forget: the crowds in Tahrir Square may have looked huge – and they were – but there are plenty of people in Egypt who desperately want the violence and the protests to end, and for whom a much more urgent priority is to get the economy moving again.

If it’s a choice between jobs and democracy, not everyone will necessarily choose democracy first.

18 November 2011

2011-11-25T10:45:00.000Z

ISTANBUL -- Do you think Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, having deposed their autocratic leaders, are about to join Iran as Islamist republics?

Do you think that after elections are held (the first have already taken place in Tunisia), Islamist parties will take power and install theocratic systems of government in which Western liberal ideas of freedom and tolerance have no place?

Well, I’ve been here in Turkey for the past few days to ask if Islam, democracy and prosperity are compatible. Next week, the Turkish president, Abdullah Gül, will be in London for a State visit – the first by a Turkish head of state for more than 20 years – and you can be sure that his answer (and, come to that, the answer of his hijab-wearing wife) will be a very definite Yes.

Consider: since 1992, Turkey has been ruled by the Justice and Development Party, known here as the AKP. Its roots, and those of its leaders, are in the Islamist tradition – a far cry from the principles of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish state, who enshrined secularism in the country’s constitution.

Consider also that over the past decade, the Turkish economy has trebled in size. Average incomes have doubled. When I spoke to workers at Istanbul’s main bus station a couple of days ago and asked them if it’s easy to find work here, they answered Yes. There aren’t many countries these days where that happens.

So is Turkey a success story, a good democratic model for post-autocratic Arab states to follow? It depends whom you ask.

No, says former star TV presenter Banu Guven, who lost her job after objecting to a ban at her TV station on interviews with leading Kurdish campaigners. She says there’s growing pressure on the media, even intimidation, leading to more and more self-censorship. Not a good democratic model.

No, says former general Haldun Solmazturk, who argues that the army, which has traditionally claimed to be a guarantor of Turkish secularism, has now been marginalised to such an extent that the AKP no longer has any institutional check on its power. (But perhaps it’s relevant that the army has been responsible for the overthrow of four civilian governments in little more than 50 years.)

Yes, says novelist and cultural commentator Kaya Genc, who argues that the army should play no political role in a modern democracy, and that the AKP represents the views of the majority of Turks far more accurately than did its secular predecessors in government.

But when I met the leading Egyptian actor, film-maker and activist, Khaled Abol Naga, who has come to Istanbul for an Arab activists’ conference this weekend, he dismissed the idea that Arabs need to look to Turkey for a model. The 2011 Arab uprisings are home-grown revolutions, he said, and they need to look to no one for inspiration.

As for the army, which currently rules post-Mubarak Egypt and which is angrily condemned by pro-democracy activists for seeming in no hurry to move to a genuinely democratic form of government, he fears the military – unlike Egypt’s democracy activists – are indeed looking to Turkey as a model.

After all, if the Turkish military could, for many decades, pull the strings both behind the scenes and up on the front of the stage, why shouldn’t the military in Egypt try something similar?

And there’s one, further complicating ingredient to add to this combustible mix. As I write these words, I am looking out of the window towards the elegant splendour of the Blue Mosque and the 6th century Ayia Sofia, once the greatest church in all of Christendom, two powerful reminders of the central place Turkey (and especially this city, in its previous guise as Constantinople) used to occupy in world affairs.

For hundreds of years, the Ottoman empire dominated much of Asia, Europe and north Africa. No one is suggesting that the rulers of modern Turkey harbour similar imperial ambitions – but few doubt that the charismatic, and populist, prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, enjoys his newly-won status as a global statesman.

So as the Queen welcomes President Gül to Buckingham Palace next week, she will know that he represents a nation that has earned its place as a global player. When I asked a leading AKP official if Turkey’s hour has come, he laughed and said: “I hope so.”

11 November 2011

2011-11-11T10:14:00.000Z

Thought for the day: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – Poet and philosopher George Santayana (The Life of Reason, 1905)

Past? What past? Well, how about 1923 for a start? That’s when Germany started printing banknotes in denominations of up to 100 trillion marks (that’s 100 followed by 12 zeroes), and there were 4.2 trillion marks to the US dollar.

Perhaps that helps explain why Germany is so set against allowing the European Central Bank to buy up shed-loads of government debt from other eurozone countries – printing money (or the modern equivalent: tapping in a few more zeroes onto a central bank balance sheet), which is what it could entail, and which is what the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have been doing, stirs up some very unpleasant memories.

In Germany, they remember the past.

Or how about 1948, when the US launched the $13 billion Marshall Plan to help rebuild a Europe shattered by war? Did Europe echo to the sound of its people’s undying gratitude for US generosity? Have Europeans thought well ever since of the US and remembered the help provided then? No, they have not.

Which may be one reason why the US, which is the main provider of cash to the International Monetary Fund, is so set against seeing it shovelling cash across the Atlantic to help Europe in its latest hour of need.

In the US, they remember the past.

Or what about 1946-49, when the people of Greece were engaged in a bitter civil war between pro-Western and pro-Communist fighters? Or 1967-74, when the country was ruled by a right-wing military junta, which had seized power in a coup? Perhaps those are two reasons why even today, it has been so difficult for left and right to come together in the face of the financial melt-down.

In Greece, too, they remember the past.

But here’s the point: if we remember the past too well, is there a risk that we allow our memories to cloud our judgement? After all, the world changes, especially economically – who in the 1920s, 30s or 40s could have imagined that one day we’d be fluttering our eyelashes at China in the hope of some lifebelt loans from Beijing and Shanghai?

Back in the days when the creation of a European union and a single market was an ideological project, the belief was that recurrent conflict in Europe would be replaced by mutual commercial interest. It started with coal and steel, France, Germany, Italy and the three Benelux countries – and now, 60 years later, it stretches all the way from Lisbon in the west to Sofia in the east and embraces half a billion people.

Was the creation of a single currency a step too far? Has the euro debt crisis exposed what the doubters always argued: that you can’t have a multitude of democratically elected governments all setting their own tax and spending policies while sharing the same currency?

Or perhaps the present crisis is simply a manifestation of global economic stresses that would have caused problems with or without a single currency. After all, it’s not so long since the US, with its single currency, was struggling through its own very messy debate about how to deal with an eye-watering amount of Federal government debt.

In both Greece and Italy, people are wondering if the markets have now taken over from the voters as the choosers of governments. Lucas Papademos, the new Greek prime minister, may be a splendid chap, but he certainly doesn’t owe his job to the voters. Nor will Mario Monti, the former EU Commissioner who’s now being tipped as Italy’s next prime minister.

On the other hand, if I run up humungous debts on my credit card, which I then can’t pay off, I can’t really complain if the bank starts laying down the law about how much I will have to pay back each month and by how much I’m going to have to cut back my spending on other things.

We’re back to poor old Polonius, in Hamlet: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.” It’s better as poetry than as economic policy, perhaps, but too much borrowing rarely ends happily.

And as for all those people who are urging Germany to “assume its responsibilities” (ie use more of German taxpayers’ money to bail out the Greeks, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese and Irish), well, perhaps they should remember one more bit of history: the last time Germany effectively took over the running of Europe – using military rather than financial muscle – it ended very unhappily indeed.

Germans remember only too well, even if others don’t.

4 November 2011

2011-11-04T12:30:00.000Z

I’ve been putting it off for as long as I can – but I can put it off no longer. I know it is my duty to write something about Greece, and the euro, and the global economic crisis which some normally sober commentators have now started describing as an impending catastrophe.

But first a word of warning: I am not an economist, and I have an inbuilt tendency to distrust economists who claim to be able to analyse with any degree of accuracy the mysterious workings of international financial markets.

I mean, seriously, how can we trust people who talk about “negative growth”, “taking a hair-cut”, and “quantitative easing”? As far as I’m concerned, the best definition of an economist is “someone who will explain to you tomorrow why what they predicted yesterday didn't happen today.”

So, to Greece. Let’s make it simple: they borrowed too much money, they can’t pay it back, and unless they can get their hands on more, they’ll be bankrupt.

If that’s what happens, a lot of banks who lent them billions of euros will have to kiss those loans goodbye. And that remains the case whether or not the high-stakes gambler George Papandreou is still prime minister.

You probably remember what happened the last time the banks found they’d lent rather a lot of cash to people who couldn’t pay it back. We ended up bailing them out, on the grounds that it’s not a good idea for banks to be allowed to crash.

That’s one reason (not the only one, I know) why the UK government has decided it has to cut back pretty sharply on its spending – because as for everyone else, in the current climate, spending money you don’t have is not regarded as the thing to do.

It’s worth remembering, though, that not everyone is sliding toward the abyss. According to figures from the International Monetary Fund, 20 countries last year registered economic growth rates above 8 per cent. (One of them is Ethiopia, from where Charlotte Ashton reported for us on Wednesday’s programme.)

Of the 20 highest achievers, 10 are in Asia (China and India obviously, but also Sri Lanka, Uzbekistan, and yes, even Afghanistan); four are in South America (Paraguay, Argentina, Peru and Uruguay); five are in Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Nigeria and Ethiopia). Just one – Turkey – is in Europe (sort of).

Yes, I know, these are, mainly, relatively small economies. With the exception of China and India, most of the main global economies – the US, Japan and Europe – are in the doldrums. And that’s why we’re all in so much trouble.

But according to a report presented to the G20 summiteers this week by Tidjane Thiam, chief executive of Britain’s largest insurer, Prudential, Western investors are sitting on trillions of dollars which could go into financing major infrastructure projects in some of the world’s poorest, but rapidly growing, economies.

The theory goes like this: invest in, say, road-building. More roads mean more trade, which means more business, which means more wealth. More wealth means more people with money to spend, which means bigger markets for clothes, and televisions, and fridges, and cars.

Result: growth. But of course, even if theory turns into practice, it all takes time. And with Greece on the brink, and Italy, Spain and Lord knows who else waiting nearby, time is in short supply.

As you know, I try to stay cheerful – but I fear it’s going to be a tough time ahead.

14 October 2011

2011-10-14T10:17:00.001Z

I have a proposition for you this week: I’ll give you one pound if you promise to give me £1,000 in return.

No? So why do you think Israel has agreed to release 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in return for the release by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas of just one captured Israeli soldier?

The 25-year-old soldier’s name is Gilad Shalit, and he’s probably one of the best known men in Israel. He was snatched by Hamas fighters more than five years ago close to the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip – and he’s been held, incommunicado, somewhere in Gaza ever since.

Within the coming days, he’ll be freed, and there’ll be mighty celebrations across the length and breadth of Israel.

His family, who have waged a relentless campaign to keep his name in the public eye and to put pressure on successive Israeli governments, will be ecstatic.

So will 1,000 Palestinian families, especially the relatives of the 315 Palestinians who were serving life terms in Israeli jails. (There are thought to be in total more than 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons.)

But why did Israel agree to the lop-sided deal? There are several reasons: first, because it is an Israeli tradition to bring every lost soldier home, dead or alive. In the past, similar deals have been done to win the return of slain soldiers’ bodies, or even of body parts.

Israel is a small country, with a conscript army. Israelis accept the reality of combat risk in the knowledge that the State will do anything, if the worst happens, to “bring the boys home”.

Second, because Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, needed a victory. He’s lost two important regional allies – Egypt’s President Mubarak and Turkey under its ever-more assertive prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan – and was unable to prevent the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas scoring a substantial propaganda coup at the United Nations last month with his appeal for Palestine to be recognised as a full State member of the UN.

So the deal for the release of Gilad Shalit is, in the words of Israeli political commentator Yossi Verter of Haaretz, “the most important deal of his [Netanyahu's] life … he will forever be remembered as the man who brought back Gilad Shalit.”

But the truth is that this deal has been on the table, more or less in its current form, for quite a while. What's changed is the regional political environment.

As Mr Netanyahu himself candidly put it: “With everything that is happening in Egypt and the region, I don't know if the future would have allowed us to get a better deal -- or any deal at all for that matter ... This is a window of opportunity that might have been missed.”

As for Hamas, it needed to do something to show, after Mr Abbas’s coup de théâtre at the UN, that it's still in the game. A thousand celebrating Palestinian families means thousands more Hamas supporters. The message is a simple one: Hamas’s armed struggle gets 1,000 prisoners released, whereas the endless non-negotiations of Mr Abbas’s Fatah get nothing.

Each side made some concessions to get this deal signed. Israel agreed that some, although not all, of the released Palestinian prisoners will be allowed to live in the West Bank or Gaza Strip (there was, apparently, endless haggling over individual names); Hamas agreed that some of the best-known prisoners, including the charismatic Marwan Barghouti, much touted as a potential future Palestinian leader, will stay behind bars.

As for what follows, who can tell? With both Netanyahu and Hamas strengthened, and with a shaky Gaza ceasefire in effect yet again, might they now be able to move forward on more substantive issues?

Optimists say it’s possible. But in my experience, when it comes to the Middle East, optimists are usually disappointed.

7 October 2011

2011-10-07T10:07:00.001Z

I’m going to assume, for the sake of argument, that you are deeply concerned about what’s happening in Syria.

I’m also going to assume, for the sake of the same argument, that when you mull over the options for international action to put pressure on the government of President Bashar al-Assad, you would much rather that such action was sanctioned by an appropriately worded UN security council resolution.

In other words, you thought – by and large – that the NATO-led military intervention in Libya was more acceptable than the US-led invasion of Iraq.

So here’s my question: now that Russia and China have cast their vetoes to block a Security Council resolution on Syria – a resolution that had been much watered down in the hope of winning their acquiescence, if not their approval – what would you do?

Your choices are these: do nothing, on the grounds that you tried and failed; try again, with a different form of wording in an attempt to win over the Russians and Chinese; or say to hell with the UN, we’ll go it alone, put together as broad a coalition as we can, and do what needs to be done to bring an end to the ghastly mess that Syria is becoming.

There is little doubt that the crisis is worsening. According to the UN, the death toll since the start of the anti-government uprising in March is now close to 3,000 – and many thousands more are believed to be in jail.

There are also growing indications that at least some of the anti-government protesters are now armed – in the cities of Hama and Homs there are now daily reports of clashes between security forces and armed opponents. From here to civil war is a short and slippery slope.

Why did the Russians and Chinese cast their vetoes? China did because Russia did – and because Chinese leaders are deeply suspicious of any foreign interference in what it regards as a country’s domestic affairs. (If I say Tibet, you’ll understand why.)

And Russia, according to the pro-government MP Sergei Markov whom I interviewed on Wednesday, won’t endorse any UN resolution that might be seen as a step along a path which leads to a Libya-style intervention.

Remember, Moscow abstained in the vote on Security Council resolution 1973, which authorised the use of “all necessary means” to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas in Libya, short of foreign troops on the ground.

It’s been regretting that abstention ever since. What’s more, now that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has made it clear that he expects soon to resume his former duties as President Vladimir Putin, there are already some signs that Moscow’s foreign policy stance is beginning to harden, perhaps in anticipation of his return to the presidency.

The European Union and the United States have already imposed a long list of sanctions on Syria – and its powerful neighbour Turkey is talking of doing likewise.

But if President Assad was worried that he might face the full wrath of a toughly-worded Security Council resolution, he can rest easy: the threat has passed.

And those governments – in Washington, London and Paris – who worry about the threat to regional stability if Syria spirals into all-out civil war are left with a dilemma: how can they exert real pressure, and remain on the right side of international law, without the agreement of Russia and China? (By the way, South Africa, India, Brazil and Lebanon all abstained on the Syria resolution this week, so there’s evidently still a lot of persuading to be done.)

Incidentally, a key factor in the Libya intervention was a request from the Arab League for a UN-approved no-fly zone. And there’s no sign – at least so far – of any similar request being made regarding Syria.

In other words, stand by for many more weeks of diplomacy and arm-twisting before the UN tries again to come up with an acceptable formula for action.

Oh, and by the way, changing the subject entirely, if you enjoy radio drama, you may like to make a point of listening to Radio 4’s Afternoon Play on Monday at 2.15pm. It’s called “A Time to Dance” and one of the characters in it … no, I really shouldn’t spoil it for you. Let’s just say you might recognise the voice.

30 September 2011

2011-09-30T11:55:00.000Z

I know you’ll have been glued to your TV to watch Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour party conference in Liverpool this week. Ah, you weren’t?

Well, you’ll have followed every word of Nick Clegg’s in Birmingham last week, won’t you? Oh, you didn’t.

David Cameron, in Manchester next week? Maybe you’ll have better things to do. Maybe speeches to party conferences don’t matter any more.

Or, there again, maybe they do.

Six years ago, after the Conservative party conference in Blackpool, just as the Tories were about to choose their new leader, I wrote: “A less-than-fiery speech from one Tory leadership contender – and an absolute humdinger of a speech from another one – has changed everything in the leadership stakes.”

The humdinger, you may remember (no notes, striding across the stage as if he owned it), was delivered by a chap called David Cameron. Mind you, I can’t remember a word of what he said … but what lives on is the memory of how he said it.

And if we peer back further into political history, how about these?

Nye Bevan, 1957: voting for unilateral nuclear disarmament “would send a British Foreign Secretary naked into the conference-chamber”.

Hugh Gaitskell, 1960, after losing a vote on the same issue, pledging to “fight, fight and fight again to save the party we love”.

Harold Wilson, 1963: talking of the need for “far-reaching changes in economic and social attitudes which permeate our whole system of society” in order to create a “Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution …”

Margaret Thatcher, 1980: “You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning.”

David Steel, 1981: “Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government.”

Neil Kinnock, 1985: attacking the Militant Tendency in Liverpool – “the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.”

Tony Blair, 1996: “Ask me my three main priorities for government, and I tell you: education, education, education.”

Iain Duncan Smith, 2002: “Do not under-estimate the determination of a quiet man.”

Iain Duncan Smith, 2003: “The quiet man is here to stay and he's turning up the volume.” (A month later, he was gone.)

I could go on, but I suspect you’d rather I didn’t. The point is simply this: every one of those quotes comes from a speech by a party leader to a party conference, and every one of them – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse – helped to define who they were, and what they were about.

Which brings us to Ed Miliband. According to The Economist, what he delivered on Tuesday was “a strange speech, a defensive speech, a timid speech, a speech that hinted – just for a moment – at all sorts of ambitious and radical ideas, only to turn tail and run away to the comfort of empty, unthreatening phrase-making until it said very little that ordinary voters are likely to notice at all.”

Or, if you prefer, it was, according to Peter Oborne in today’s Daily Telegraph, “an intellectually ambitious and admirable contribution to public debate” in which Mr Miliband “sought to reshape the terms of political argument and so redefine the territory on which the general election will ultimately be fought.”

You pays your money and you takes your choice. What I don’t think you can do is argue that none of it matters. For good or ill, this week’s speech will almost certainly help define Mr Miliband’s place in national political life.

23 September 2011

2011-09-23T10:44:00.000Z

I’d like you to meet Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin. They are, if American intelligence officials are to be believed, two of the most dangerous men in Afghanistan.

What’s more, they are – again, according to US officials – virtually run by Pakistani military intelligence. And they are at the centre of a blistering row between Washington and Islamabad which risks seriously derailing the US Afghan disengagement strategy.

The Haqqanis go back a long way. Jalaluddin first became an important figure during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. At that time, he was backed both by the US and by Pakistan – but he later made common cause with the Taliban and was appointed a minister in the Taliban government in the 1990s.

After the post-9/11 defeat of the Taliban by US-led forces, he took up arms against the Americans and has been fighting them ever since. He and his son are now thought to have anything between 4,000 and 10,000 fighters under their command, and they’ve been blamed for a series of audacious attacks against US targets. (Their network is also one of the suspects in the assassination this week of the former Afghan president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, by a suicide bomber.)

But here’s where it gets really tricky. According to the outgoing chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, speaking to a US Senate committee yesterday, the Haqqanis act as a “veritable arm” of the Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI.

Yes, that’s the same ISI that’s meant to be working hand-in-glove with the US to confront the continuing insurgency in Afghanistan. And yes, it’s the same ISI that was widely criticised for either not knowing where Osama bin Laden was while he lived quietly in his Pakistani villa, or, even worse, knowing but doing nothing – or, yet worse still, actively protecting him.

US officials have claimed for some time that there are close links between the ISI and the Haqqanis. But, in the words of the New York Times today, “Admiral Mullen went further than any other American official in blaming the ISI for undermining the American military effort in Afghanistan.”

Note those words: “undermining the American military effort.” That’s serious stuff – and President Obama’s top security advisors are due to meet on Monday to discuss what to do next.

The problem is this: the US accepts that the insurgency in Afghanistan will never be defeated unless the insurgents are denied their bases across the border in Pakistan. But the ISI insists that as long as the fighters operate only in Afghanistan, they’re not Islamabad’s problem.

When I spoke to a former head of the ISI, General Asad Durrani, on the programme last night, he went even further: Pakistan should be supporting the anti-US opposition in Afghanistan, he said. If the US insists on launching drone strikes against targets in Pakistan, sometimes killing innocent Pakistani civilians, then the US and Pakistan are in a state of what he called “low-intensity conflict”.

That’s not what Washington wants to hear after having pumped billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan over the past decade. So yesterday a US Senate committee voted to tie any further aid to greater cooperation in fighting the Haqqanis. And that’s not going down at all well in Islamabad.

It was only last week that the US embassy in Kabul came under attack – the assault lasted 20 hours and ended with about 25 people dead, including the attackers. Yesterday, Admiral Mullen blamed the Haqqanis.

Three days earlier, more than 75 US troops were injured and two Afghan civilians were killed by a suicide truck bomber at a military base south-west of Kabul. Yesterday, Admiral Mullen blamed the Haqqanis for that attack as well.

According to a report in today’s Guardian, US intelligence had got wind of the impending truck bomb attack, and the American commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, personally asked the Pakistani army chief of staff to intervene to stop it. The report quotes a Western official as saying that General Kayani promised “to make a phone call.”

We’ve known ever since the Americans killed Osama bin Laden last May without tipping off the Pakistanis that they don’t trust their supposed Pakistani allies. Now, courtesy of Admiral Mullen, we know that Washington suspects the ISI of actively backing – even controlling – the Americans’ most dangerous enemy in Afghanistan.

It doesn’t bode well for the future of the US’s counter-insurgency strategy.

16 September 2011

2011-09-16T09:33:00.001Z

If you were an Egyptian, or a Moroccan, or a Jordanian, what would you think of the role Turkey is now playing in the Middle East?

Compared with Iran, for example, would you regard it as a positive or a negative influence in the region?

It’s not an idle question, especially not in the week when the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been making a triumphant tour of the three Arab states where they’ve managed to overthrow their autocratic rulers: Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

Nor is it a question to which we have to guess the answer. According to an opinion poll commissioned by the Arab American Institute in Washington, and conducted in Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, favourable views of Turkey range from an astounding 98 per cent in Saudi Arabia to a “low” of 45 per cent in Jordan.

Iran’s ratings, by comparison, range from a high of 63 per cent in Lebanon, to 6 per cent in Saudi Arabia. And if you’re interested in trends, over the past five years Turkey has been vastly improving its regional reputation, while Iran’s has been plummeting.

Why is this interesting? Because Turkey is rapidly emerging as a key player in the region, and Mr Erdogan seems determined to increase his country’s influence wherever he can. His message on his visits this week has been an attractive one to Arab audiences – look at us: Muslim, democratic and prosperous. Do as we did, and you can have all this too.

No wonder Turkey’s reputation at the moment is sky high. (There are exceptions, of course: you won’t find many Kurds or Armenians who share the general Arab view that a resurgent Turkey is a Good Thing.)

Ah, did I mention, Mr Erdogan is also a vociferous critic of Israel, whose ambassador he has just sent packing in the continuing row over the killing last year by Israeli forces of nine Turkish citizens on an aid flotilla heading for the Gaza Strip.

In a speech last Tuesday to the Arab League in Cairo, he accused Israel of behaving like a spoilt child, and said: “Israel will break away from solitude only when it acts as a reasonable, responsible, serious and normal state.”

That word “solitude” was carefully chosen. Turkey used to be on good terms with Israel – the two countries’ military forces worked closely together, and Ankara acted with some success as a mediator between Israel and Syria.

Those days are long gone. As Mr Erdogan well knows, Israel now has no friends in the region, and is watching anxiously as Egypt’s new rulers suggest that the Camp David peace agreement signed by Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin in 1979 “is not a sacred thing and is always open to discussion.”

The Turkish prime minister enjoys playing to the crowd, both at home and abroad. He has good Muslim credentials, with a background in Islamist politics. He, like most Muslims, but unlike the Iranians, is a Sunni, which means that on a religious level he is much closer to the vast majority of Arabs than to the ayatollahs of Tehran.

Until quite recently, Turkey harboured real hopes of being allowed to start a negotiation process that would end up with it joining the European Union. But deep hostility in France, Germany and elsewhere seems to have put an end to those hopes, at least for the forseeable future. In many western European eyes, there are three big objections to Turkey joining the euro-club: it’s too big, it’s too poor – and it's too Muslim.

So now Mr Erdogan seems to be shifting from his former foreign policy stance of being friends with everyone and enemies with no one. He hasn’t abandoned his dream of joining the EU one day, but in the meantime he is fostering much closer links with the Arab world’s new leaders.

What he has in mind is very different from the days of the Ottoman empire, when for the best part of 600 years, from the Atlantic coast of north Africa to the eastern seaboard of the Arabian peninsula, the Turks dominated the Arab world as colonial masters.

But his new brand of muscular diplomacy, coupled with enticing offers of economic and technical assistance and populist anti-Israel rhetoric, make him a man who has to be taken seriously.

For now, Washington, and his other NATO allies, are prepared to watch and wait to see how far he intends to go. But there will be tensions and disagreements (the vote next week at the UN on whether to recognise Palestine as a state will be the next one) as Turkey gets used to its new status as the most influential kid on the block.

9 September 2011

2011-09-09T09:28:00.000Z

I can’t remember exactly when, on September 11, 2001, I first heard the words: “The world has changed for ever.” But it was very soon after the attacks in New York and Washington, and I remember feeling sceptical: I have a deeply engrained distrust of such sweeping generalisations.

On that occasion, though, I was probably wrong to be sceptical. For many millions of people – in the US, of course, but also in Europe, in the Middle East, and in Afghanistan – the world did change as a result of what happened that day.

So what have we learned over the past decade?

First, that we understand far less than we should about what is going on in faraway places – and that we ignore them at our peril. Before 9/11, had you heard of al-Qaeda, or Osama bin Laden? How much did you know of what was happening in Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia?

Second, that military might – even US military might – does not solve problems as easily as we might like to imagine. The Gulf War of 1991, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, was an anomaly: an easy victory that achieved its stated aim at relatively low cost.

Third, that “temporary” anti-terrorism measures have a funny habit of becoming permanent – as any air traveller has discovered.

Fourth, that we can learn to live with fear. Just as Londoners did during the IRA bombing campaigns of the 1970s, now New Yorkers, Madrileños, Parisians, residents of Mumbai and Delhi, Karachi and Islamabad, Kabul and Kandahar, have discovered that you can get on with your life even in the knowledge that a bomb may be about to explode at any moment.

It’s true that since 9/11 – with the exception of the attacks at the Fort Hood military base in Texas in 2009 when 13 people were shot dead, allegedly by a Muslim American serviceman – there have been no further attacks in the US. But there have been several unsuccessful attempts, including by the so-called “underpants bomber”, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who allegedly tried to blow up a plane on its way to Detroit in December 2009, and the attempted bomb attack on Times Square in New York in May last year.

(Last night, US officials said they had received “specific, credible but unconfirmed threat information” relating to the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks this weekend. It was reported that at least three people – one believed to be a U.S. citizen – had flown to the U.S. last month, apparently from Afghanistan, planning to set off a car bomb.)

Ever since 9/11, Muslims living in non-Muslim countries have found themselves being regarded with suspicion and incomprehension. Islamophobia is just one of the new, and unlovely, words we have learnt, along with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, waterboarding, control orders, and assymetric warfare.

But perhaps there are dangers if we focus too much on 9/11: that we try to relate everything that has happened over the past decade to what happened on that terrible day – and that we fail to acknowledge the other profound changes that have been under way while we’ve been concentrating on potential suicide bombers.

As the former Foreign Secretary David Miliband pointed out in an article this week, over the past 10 years, the combined GDP of Brazil, Russia, India, and China more than doubled, from 8.4 per cent of the global economy to 18.3 per cent.

It was also the decade when, in his words, internet access went global – from a third of a billion people in 2000 to more than two billion people today. And the US started to realise that it is no longer the undisputed global super-power that it once was.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if historians, when they look back on this first decade of the 21st century, devote at least as much space to those developments as to the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers.

Terrorism is sometimes described as the weapon of choice for those who have no other weapons. And perhaps the best news in this grim 10th anniversary year is that tens of thousands of young Arabs who a decade ago may well have felt they had no other weapons with which to press their demands have now discovered the power of mass street protest.

Over the past eight months, in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain (Libya, where they quickly took up arms, is in a slightly different category), angry and ignored young people have turned their backs on the nihilism of al-Qaeda ideology and have decided instead to confront their own leaders on their own streets. Their demands for democracy, freedom and choice couldn’t be further from the vision of Osama bin Laden.

It doesn’t mean that the threat of more terrorist attacks has gone away, and we still don’t know whether their protests will eventually succeed – after all, overthrowing a hated dictator is not the same as building a better future – but at least they’re not blowing up themselves, or us. For that, surely, we can be thankful.

2 September 2011

2011-09-02T11:35:00.000Z

You will have noticed, I hope, that there have been dramatic developments in Libya over the last couple of weeks. You may also have noticed that there have been continuing protests in Syria.

But how about Bahrain – and Yemen? Two more Arab nations which, earlier this year, were very much in the headlines as they too became engulfed in popular protests. Since then – well, what?

Bahrain first. Two days ago, according to a report by the Associated Press news agency, hundreds of protesters tried to reclaim control of a central square in the capital Manama, which had been the symbolic hub of the protest movement after it began in February. Riot police used buses to block roads and fired tear gas to disperse the demonstrators.

Yesterday, thousands of people – tens of thousands, according to one activist quoted in the New York Times – were out in the streets again, for the funeral of a 14-year-old boy who was said to have been killed during Wednesday’s protests.

Witnesses said he was hit in the head by a tear gas grenade fired at close range. (The interior ministry said a coroner’s report indicated that the boy’s injuries were not consistent with being hit with a tear gas canister or rubber bullet, and that there had been no clashes at the time he was said to have received his injuries.)

Also in Bahrain, a group of 14 doctors who are in jail awaiting trial on charges of having turned their hospital into a “terrorist base” when the protests first erupted last February have now gone on hunger strike in protest against their treatment. (There’ll be more about Bahrain on the programme tonight, Friday.)

So, what about Yemen? Two weeks ago, nearly 150 opposition leaders formed themselves into a “national council” to act as a sort of government-in-waiting, while the president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was seriously injured in an apparent assassination attack last June, remains in Saudi Arabia.

On Wednesday, government forces backed by fighter planes killed 17 people in the south of the country in what officials said was continuing action against al Qaeda-linked militants. In the poorest, and most volatile, country in the Arab world, the dangerous stalemate continues.

Why do we hear so much about Libya and Syria, and so little about Bahrain and Yemen? True, Bahrain is tiny by comparison with its much bigger neighbours – its population is barely half a million – but it happens to be home to the US Navy’s 5th Fleet, and its position as an island in the Gulf, linked to Saudi Arabia by a 16-mile long causeway, gives it a strategic importance that far outweighs its size.

As for Yemen, it too is of immense importance to the Saudis, with a long and ill-policed border and suspected jihadi bases which the Saudis regard as a permanent potential threat. For the past few years, President Saleh has been cooperating closely with the US in counter-terrorism operations, aimed principally against groups believed to be linked to al Qaeda.

Anwar al-Awlaki, an American jihadi of Yemeni origin and sometimes described as the world’s “number one terrorist”, is based in Yemen and is said to have been linked to a string of recent attempted terrorist attacks, including the so-called “underpants bomber”, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who allegedly tried to blow up a plane on its way to Detroit in December 2009; the attempted Times Square bombing in May last year; and the dispatch of explosives-filled toner cartridges from Yemen last October.

In other words, Western security agencies have a lot invested in Yemen, and although no one pretends that President Saleh is the world’s number one democrat, there’s no great appetite – in either Washington or Riyadh – to see him replaced.

And if you were wondering why King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain is never spoken of in the same breath as Muammar Gaddafi of Libya or Bashar al-Assad of Syria, despite continued reports of serious human rights violations, well, he was an invited guest in Paris yesterday at the Libya conference hosted by President Sarkozy and David Cameron, where he joined them in celebrating the overthrow of a hated tyrant.

I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

12 August 2011

2011-08-12T10:46:00.001Z

The first thing we have to do is decide what to call the events of the past few days. Disturbances? Riots? Orgy of looting?

My preferred description, I think – not entirely seriously – was offered by one of our contributors last night: “shopping with violence”. But not “protests”, because with the exception of the original protest in Tottenham last Saturday, after the shooting dead by police of Mark Duggan, there hasn’t been much sign of anyone out on the streets protesting overtly about anything.

So what were they doing, apart from the obvious? Like me, you’ve probably heard dozens of explanations, and I’m sure you have plenty of your own.

Last Tuesday, on The World Tonight blog, I asked a series of questions. Among them:

 Is it a mistake to look for reasons why? Is the answer simply that what we've seen has been gangs of hooligans and criminals doing what hooligans and criminals always do?
 Can we learn something by analysing the targets the rioters chose to attack? Electronic goods shops, sports goods shops, jewellers? All of which could be seen as "status" goods stockists?
 Is the violence related in part to feelings of power and powerlessness? When an American TV reporter asked one young rioter what he thought the violence achieved, he is said to have been told: "You wouldn't have been talking to me without it, would you?"
 Is inadequate parenting in part to blame? How many young rioters come from stable, loving, two-parent homes?
 After several months of reports of alleged law-breaking by politicians, police and press, have some youths now decided that taking what you’re not entitled to is something they can try as well?
 Has gang culture become so engrained in some communities that obeying gang rules (follow orders, look strong, be brave, own the streets) is more important than obeying society's rules?
 Why were the police apparently so slow to react when the violence spread from Tottenham on Saturday night? Are they under-staffed, under-resourced, or too demoralised by talk of deep cuts in police numbers?

We journalists have an annoying habit of asking sometimes: “Was it X or was it Y?” In this case, “Was it a reaction to prolonged economic stagnation and high levels of youth unemployment, or an anarchic outburst of greed and criminality, born from a culture of amorality in which there is no understanding or recognition of what is right and wrong?”

Perhaps the most useful answer is: All of the above – because as I listened to some of the young looters who’ve been interviewed this week, I was struck by how varied their responses have been.

“It was a bit of fun ... I wanted to get back at the police ... I wanted to show rich people we can do what we want ... It was a chance to get something I wanted without paying for it.”

I was also struck by something the pyschotherapist Nancy Secchi said on the programme on Tuesday: that in some cases, the looters behaved like toddlers, throwing a tantrum, smashing their toys, destroying the nursery. All with no thought whatsoever for the consequences, because they’ve never learned to consider consequences.

But of course there are consequences. As of last night, more than 1,000 people had been arrested. Some have already been processed through the courts and sent to jail. Yesterday, a 23-year-student was sentenced to six months in prison for stealing bottles of mineral water worth £3.50.

Over the coming days, we’ll learn much more about who the looters were – or at least we’ll learn more about those who were caught. So far, it seems they come from a wide spread of ethnic, social, and economic backgrounds.

And in a few months from now, what will we think as we look back? A terrifying warning of a society in deep trouble – or a moment, a spasm, of mid-summer madness, what Macbeth would have called “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"?

5 August 2011

2011-08-05T10:23:00.000Z

Democracy’s a funny old thing, isn’t it?

In the over-quoted words of the over-quoted Winston Churchill: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

So I wonder what you make of the government’s relaunched attempt to encourage more of us to play a direct part in the democratic process by signing online petitions which could – note that word “could” – lead to a debate in the House of Commons.

Here’s how it’s meant to work: first, create your petition (the relevant website is at www.direct.gov.uk/e-petitions). There are, of course, certain rules that have to be obeyed. Jokes, nonsense, anything libellous or offensive – not allowed.

So, presumably, no more petitions like the one three years ago, signed by nearly 50,000 people who wanted Jeremy Clarkson to be made prime minister. (He is a TV presenter, m’Lud, apparently well-known for his love of motor cars.)

Second, wait for 100,000 people to sign it. That’s about 0.2 per cent of the 46 million people who are entitled to vote in the UK. Everyone who signs has to provide an email address, but I’m not sure how they’ll stop people creating multiple addresses and signing up more than once.

Then, if you’ve got that far, and if you haven’t broken any rules, your petition will be considered by the Backbench Business Committee of the House of Commons. If they like it, they’ll schedule it for debate.

And then … ah, funny you should ask.

Because if you’ve ever tried to follow the progress of a parliamentary proposal, you’ll know that unless it has government support, it doesn’t get very far. In fact, it doesn’t get anywhere at all. In the words of the old saying: “You can have your say, but the government will have its way.”

As of midnight last night, incidentally, it was the anti-capital punishment petitions that were in the clear lead, with about 7,300 signatures, compared to around 4,500 signatures on the pro-capital punishment side.

Other popular demands were: keep Formula 1 racing on free-to-air TV (3,800); withdraw from the EU (3,500); and legalise cannabis (1,200).

At the other end of the scale, a proposal that the UK should switch from driving on the left to driving on the right had managed to acquire only 11 supporters.

But suppose, in a few weeks’ time, more than 100,000 people have signed up for the restoration of capital punishment – or for the UK to withdraw from the European Union. Suppose the Commons committee decides it’s a proper subject for debate. And suppose a handful of MPs turn up for the debate, and most of them argue in favour of the petition.

The Leader of the House of Commons, Sir George Young, wrote in the Daily Mail this week: “If politicians want to regain the trust of the public, then they need to trust the public. Giving people more power is the right place to start.”

But you could argue that a mechanism for triggering a parliamentary debate is not necessarily the same as “giving people more power.”

Because what happens if after the debate, the government does precisely nothing? The Conservative MP Louise Mensch wrote yesterday: “The death penalty is interesting in terms of representative democracy versus referendums. I would not vote for it if 100 per cent of the public were for it.”

So are the petitions going to usher in a bright new über-democratic dawn? Will MPs obediently follow the expressed wish of 0.2 per cent of the electorate? Or will they follow Ms Mensch’s example and use their own judgement when it comes to voting on tricky issues?

And if they do ignore the views of the petitioners, will trust in our political system have been enhanced – or reduced?

Perhaps the very act of organising or signing a petition will in itself represent a welcome advance.

On the other hand, if you think it’s all nonsense, you’ll be pleased to know there are already petitions up and running to demand the ending of petitions.

29 July 2011

2011-07-29T12:03:00.000Z

I probably don’t need to remind you that it’ll soon be 10 years since foreign forces invaded Afghanistan following the attacks of September 11, 2001.

It’s also now more than four months since foreign forces started taking military action in Libya, ostensibly “to protect civilians” as authorised by UN security council resolution 1973.

Why do I link Afghanistan and Libya? Because, simply put, both campaigns are going badly. Some analysts would put it even more starkly: both campaigns are failing.

Afghanistan first. After nearly 10 years, what has been achieved? Well, within weeks of the US-led invasion in late 2001, the Taliban had been overthrown and al Qaeda had been denied its Afghan sanctuary. That was the easy bit.

Scroll forward a decade, and what do we have? Taliban and allied insurgents apparently gaining in strength and bravado in many parts of the country; President Hamid Karzai, on the other hand, looking ever more precarious in Kabul and facing the prospect of an imminent thinning out of the foreign troops on whose security presence he depends.

Just over the past few months, in the key southern city of Kandahar, the former Taliban stronghold, four major figures have been assassinated. In April, the police chief. Then, two weeks ago, President Karzai’s powerful half brother. At his funeral, a suicide bomber killed the city’s top religious leader. And last Tuesday, the mayor was similarly killed by a suicide bomber who had hidden explosives inside his turban.

What they all had in common was that they were regarded as close to the president, and were backed by the foreign coalition. Whoever was responsible for their deaths (the Taliban label can disguise a wide variety of ethnic, clan or tribal groups), the message to the Afghan people was clear enough: “The foreigners can’t even protect their own people, nor can the president. There will be no peace until our demands are met.”

And the message for the rest of us? “We know you’re preparing to leave; and we know you no longer have the heart for this war. All we have to do is wait until you’ve gone.”

As for Libya, well, four months is a lot shorter than 10 years. And of course, unlike in Afghanistan, there are no foreign troops on the ground. (In fact, that’s probably not precisely true, unless we turn a blind eye to the advisers, spies and target-spotters who everyone believes are there, but who are careful to remain well out of sight.)

It was, to say the least, unfortunate timing that just a day after the British government announced that it was recognising the anti-Gaddafi National Transitional Council in Benghazi as the country’s “sole governing authority”, the rebels’ military commander was shot dead in the most obscure of circumstances.

On the battlefield, it is clear that neither side is capable of landing a knock-out blow. However many targets the NATO warplanes find to bomb, they have not destroyed Muammar Gaddafi’s forces, nor have they blitzed the way for a rebel victory.

No wonder there is frustration in foreign capitals, and growing signs of splits within the anti-Gaddafi camp.

The commander who was shot dead yesterday, General Abdel Fattah Younes, was a deeply controversial figure. He was a former interior minister, and until the start of the uprising in February, he was seen as one of Colonel Gaddafi’s most influential friends and allies. Even after he defected to the rebel cause, there were doubts about where his true loyalties lay.

Throughout yesterday, the city of Benghazi, the rebels’ headquarters, was swirling with rumours about his whereabouts. Some reports suggested he had been arrested by his own side to be questioned about alleged unauthorised contacts with Gaddafi forces. Officially, he was being brought to Benghazi to discuss the progress of the rebel campaign.

Then, reports began to circulate that he had been shot dead. Late last night, the reports were confirmed – the official story was that he had been ambushed and killed by pro-Gaddafi loyalists on the road to Benghazi.

Perhaps he was. Or perhaps he was killed by his own side. Perhaps by the time you read this, the picture will be clearer. But whoever killed him, it is hard to escape the conclusion that his death significantly strengthens the pro-Gaddafi cause and weakens the rebels.

That’s not the message they wanted to hear in London or in Paris.

22 July 2011

2011-07-29T12:02:00.000Z

Here’s a little exam question for you: list the following news items in order of importance …

1. Phone-hacking: allegations of a too-cozy relationship between the prime minister, the police, and one of the world’s biggest global media corporations, some of whose journalists illegally accessed private voicemail messages and paid police for information.

2. Eurozone crisis: growing fears that Greece, and perhaps other eurozone countries, will not be able to pay their debts, leading to renewed financial and economic turmoil. (At the same time, unless the Obama administration can do a deal with Congress on debt ceilings, there’s a chance of a US default as well.)

3. Famine in east Africa: the UN has declared an official famine in parts of Somalia … tens of thousands of people have already starved to death, and many more are suffering from acute malnutrition in a crisis described as the worst for several decades.

On Wednesday night, as it happens, those were the three main news stories of the evening. We had to choose how to structure the programme, something we do every night, but which sometimes poses tricky issues of news judgement.

I know, because a number of you have told me, that some of you feel we have devoted too much attention to the phone-hacking saga. In last week’s newsletter, I tried to explain why we think it’s important.

And on Wednesday’s programme, Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian said he believes the saga illustrates an important truth about how we are governed – in his words, it shows “a corporate titan with overwheening power over both the police and successive governments.”

So, on Wednesday, the first item on the programme was about phone hacking. Not necessarily because we thought it was clearly the most important story of the day, but because we thought we had some interesting material and some interesting contributors.

In addition, we knew that the following night – ie last night – we would almost certainly be leading the programme with the eurozone crisis, because yesterday EU leaders were meeting in Brussels to thrash out a new rescue plan for Greece.

On the Somali famine, we had a powerful interview with the former president of Ghana, John Kufuor, but we remembered that we had already covered the drought crisis in some depth over previous weeks, which is why it didn’t go at the top of the programme.

Last night, as we had expected, the top story was indeed the eurozone deal. It was announced at about 8pm, perfect timing for us, because we were able to report the terms of the deal, analyse its implications and garner some first reactions from Germany and Spain.

We hadn’t planned to do any more on phone hacking, but then, mid-evening, two important new developments forced the story back onto the agenda. We are, after all, a news programme; our task is to report the news as best we can in the time available, and if something significant happens a couple of hours before we go on air, we are duty bound to cover it.

Which is why we also had to make space for a tribute to Lucian Freud, the titan of contemporary British art whose death was announced shortly before 10pm.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, I think it might help you understand how we decide what goes into the programme each night. Every day we try to strike a balance, because there’s no point in us coming in to work each day unless we can persuade you to listen to the programme.

We want you to be informed, interested, surprised and – sometimes – entertained. We want to bring you up to date with the latest developments in long-running stories – and help you understand their significance and their context.

So, yes, we’ll keep an eye on both phone hacking and the eurozone – we’ll have a series of reports from around Europe over the next couple of weeks – and we’ll watch the fraught budget debate in Washington as well.

And if something unexpected happens – news, perhaps – yes, we’ll cover that as well.

15 July 2011

2011-07-16T05:53:00.001Z

What is it, do you think, about (some) bankers, (some) MPs, and (some) News of the World journalists?

What was going on inside their heads when they behaved so appallingly that – when the rest of us discovered what they were up to – the institutions for which they worked teetered and shuddered under almost unbearable strain? (In the case of the News of the World, of course, the strain really was unbearable.)

Did the bankers really think there was nothing wrong with investing billions they didn’t have in financial products they didn’t understand?

Did the MPs really think it was fine to claim money back from tax-payers for expenses they either hadn’t incurred or which clearly had nothing to do with their jobs?

Did the NoW journalists really not pause, even for a moment, to wonder if maybe hacking into people’s voicemail messages was not something they were perfectly entitled to do?

And while I’m at it, did Scotland Yard really think it was a good idea to hire a former senior NoW editorial executive as a PR adviser even while they were supposedly investigating allegations of illegal phone message hacking – by the News of the World?

We all have different ways of judging what we regard as ethical or moral behaviour. But I suspect there aren’t many people around who see nothing wrong with the way these various bankers, MPs, and journalists have behaved.

Me? I try to apply the Private Eye test: how would I feel if my actions were to be published in the next issue of that satirical organ of investigative reporting and lampoonery? If the very thought brings me out in a cold sweat, I quickly deem the proposed actions inappropriate.

If the bankers, MPs and journalists had done the same, we may well all have been spared a huge amount of trouble.

But of course it goes deeper than that. If bankers had been more open about how much they were lending to whom, and on what terms, maybe someone, somewhere would have sounded an alarm bell.

If MPs had been obliged to publish their expenses claims, as they are now, maybe some of them would have thought twice or even three times about the claims they submitted.

And if the News of the World had published at the bottom of each relevant article: “The information reported in this story was obtained by hacking into the voicemail messages of person X”, well, maybe, they wouldn’t have.

So, much as I hate the use of the word in this context, the secret seems to be more transparency – openness, if you prefer.

The more we know about why and how people in positions of power or influence take the decisions they do, the more able we are to let them know when we think they’re going off the rails.

And if you think we’ve been making a bit too much of all this phone-hacking stuff, consider this.

A democratic, capitalist society requires several sound and stable institutions to ensure that it serves the interests of the most people possible. It requires basic freedoms, including the freedom of an unfettered press which afflicts only the comfortable and comforts only the afflicted; it also needs a parliamentary system in which politicians govern with the fully informed consent of those whom they govern.

Plus, a system of finance which offers fair dealing, stability and prosperity; and a police service to deliver peace and harmony without fear or favour.

It’s beginning to look as if on each of those considerations, Britain has been falling well short of what its citizens are entitled to expect. And the reasons, perhaps, in just a few words: arrogance, secrecy, and greed. If we can chip away at the secrecy (as a journalist, I would say that, wouldn’t I?), we might be better able to discern whatever arrogance and greed remain.

Meanwhile, the financial storm clouds are gathering again. President Obama could be heading for a major budgetary crisis – and unless it is averted at the 11th hour, which it may well be, the global markets are likely to tumble headlong in panic.

Oh yes, and Italy is heading for trouble too. The markets have woken up to its shaky economic prospects and vast public debt, and the respected Italian finance minister Giulio Tremonti is embroiled in a major domestic political row.

He has warned his compatriots in stark terms of the likely consequences if he is forced from office. “If I fall, Italy falls. And if Italy falls, so does the euro.”

So I suspect we’re in for a long, hot summer. (And no, that’s not a weather forecast.) Next Tuesday, for sure, will be a scorcher: Scotland Yard commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson, Rupert and James Murdoch, and Rebekah Brooks, will all be giving evidence to parliamentary select committees on the same day. You can be sure the MPs on those committees will not want to miss the opportunity to show what they’re made of.

8 July 2011

2011-07-08T09:31:00.001Z

So will you be buying a last copy of the News of the World on Sunday? A souvenir, to show to your grand-children: “This is what we used to call a newspaper”?

Maybe not. Maybe you’ve never bought a copy in your life, and have no intention of starting now. Maybe you’re delighted that a tabloid rag (your words, not mine) has finally been forced out of business.

Well, I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’m a journalist, and I can never celebrate the death of a newspaper. Yes, of course, the News of the World is guilty of some appalling errors – it has behaved shockingly and it has paid the price.

But, as we pointed out on last night’s programme, its record is not all bad. Some of its investigations really were in the public interest, and not just of interest to the public. (A fine distinction, I know, but a crucial one when we start discussing what is and is not a legitimate investigation.)

I’m a former Fleet Street news editor. (Or perhaps, in the style of Alcoholics Anonymous, I should say: “My name is Robin and I am a recovering Fleet Street news editor.”)

I never worked for a mass circulation Sunday paper (the one I worked for sold a tiny fraction of the copies the News of the World sells every week) – but I do know a little bit about the pressure to get stories.

So over the past few days, several people have asked me why on earth journalists would even think about trying to hack into the voicemail messages of bereaved military families or missing schoolgirls.

It’s quite a simple question to answer. What matters more than anything to reporters is that they get good stories printed in the paper – preferably at the top of the page, even better on the front page.

That makes their editors happy, because it makes the proprietor happy, because it means the paper will sell more copies. As the former information commissioner Richard Thomas put it in his prescient report “What price privacy?”, published more than five years ago: “Journalists have a voracious demand for personal information, especially at the popular end of the market. The more information they reveal about celebrities or anyone remotely in the public eye, the more newspapers they can sell.”

Do newspaper readers want to read about tragedy and heartbreak? Do they lap up heartrending tales of grief and suffering? You know the answer as well as I do.

(And if you don’t believe me, just look at the numbers. Biggest selling newspaper in the UK? News of the World.)

I sometimes liken journalists to undertakers. They both perform an essential task, but the detail of how they do it does not always make pleasant reading. If journalists break the law (and hacking into people’s voicemail messages is illegal, just as paying a police officer to disclose information is), then they face prosecution. And a jury will decide whether what they did was in the public interest.

There will now be enormous pressure on the press to clean up their act and strengthen the monitoring of their behaviour. It would not in the least surprise me if the Press Complaints Commission, which two years ago concluded that there was nothing much to worry about in the phone-hacking allegations (“the Commission could not help but conclude that the Guardian's stories did not quite live up to the dramatic billing they were initially given”) is now quietly put out of its misery.

In a statement on Wednesday, it admitted that “it can no longer stand by its 2009 report on phone hacking and the assertions made in it.” But if it is replaced, you’d better be prepared for many months of anguished debate about the correct balance to be struck between press freedom and the right to privacy.

Ed Miliband is making a speech today in which he calls for the Commission to be replaced by something with much sharper teeth. Trouble is it’s a very slippery slope from a system of regulation that includes the power to impose sanctions to a system of government licensing of newspapers.

The former chairman of the PCC, Sir Christpher Meyer, commented this morning: “If Ed Miliband wants a press watchdog to be able to take evidence on oath, and have police powers of investigation, that's state not self-regulation.”

If it comes to a choice between entrusting our freedoms to government or to newspapers, I am sometimes reminded of Thomas Jefferson: “If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Let the debate begin.

17 June 2011

2011-06-17T08:53:00.000Z

The trumpets will sound; the drums will beat; the flags will flutter proudly. Remember those words? Of course you do: they’re the words with which I started my first newsletter of 2011 – and I was writing about Sudan.

I’m writing about Sudan again today – because with just over three weeks to go until the official birth of the new nation of South Sudan (trumpets, drums, etc.), there are ominous signs of a deal unravelling and a fragile peace giving way to renewed conflict. Just last night, President Obama expressed his “deep concern” about the growing violence.

Sudan is one of the most important countries on the African continent. It’s the biggest (two and a half million square kilometres, or nearly a million square miles); it has a population of around 40 million, and substantial oil reserves in which China has a major interest.

It’s also the only country in the world whose head of state is an indicted war criminal. A year ago, Omar al-Bashir was charged with genocide by the International Criminal Court in connection with offences allegedly committed during the war in the western region of Darfur, in which between 200,000 and 400,000 people are estimated to have died.

Osama bin Laden was based in Sudan in the early 1990s, after he left Saudi Arabia and before he set up shop in Afghanistan. In 1998, the US launched a cruise missile attack against a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory that it said was linked to al Qaeda and might have been used for the production of chemical weapons.

In other words, we ignore Sudan at our peril. The conflict in Darfur was, for a time, the focus of widespread global concern – and it’s by no means impossible that it could be reignited if current tensions boil over.

The birth of the independent nation of South Sudan next month is meant to mark the end of a grim 20-year chapter of civil war between the northern and southern parts of the country. A referendum held in January saw something like 99 per cent of southerners vote for separation – but even after the votes had been counted, and after President Bashir had said he would respect the result, tensions remained.

For one thing, the exact demarcation line between the two entities hadn’t been finalised. In one region, Abyei, there was meant to be a separate referendum in which its residents could decide whether they wanted to be part of the north or the south. The referendum still hasn’t been held.

In another region, South Kordofan, which is on the northern side of the notional border, most people feel a greater loyalty to the south. Two days ago, the United Nartions reported that an estimated 60,000 people had fled from the region after bombing raids by the Sudanese air force.

One southern group accused Khartoum of pursuing a “genocidal campaign’ in the region, and the UN was reported to have referred in a confidential document to what it called a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” by President Bashir.

So the omens aren’t looking good for South Sudan’s Independence Day on 9 July. At stake are vital reserves not only of oil, but also of water, on which the lives of millions of people depend. Perhaps paradoxically, it is the great misfortune of Abyei and South Kordofan to find themselves slap bang in the middle of some of the potentially most valuable Sudanese real estate.

President Bashir has shown himself over many years to be a master of saying one thing and doing another. There was a huge international sigh of relief when the independence referendum was held in January and the president responded with magnanimity.

But now, in the last few weeks before his country is formally split in two, the question is whether his actions will match his words, or whether he will seek to prevent the south seceding by returning to war.

By the way, if you’ve discovered the joys of Facebook and/or Twitter, you may like to know that The World Tonight now has its own presence on both. On Facebook, we have formed a World Tonight group – you’ll find us by searching for The World Tonight, BBC Radio 4 – and on Twitter we’re @bbcworldtonight. Happy hunting …

10 June 2011

2011-06-10T11:49:00.001Z

I wonder how you confident you feel that you know what’s going on in Syria. Me? I don’t feel at all confident.

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I always feel much happier when there are journalists whom I trust on the ground, out there with their notebooks, recorders, and cameras – reporting back to me what they can see and what they can hear.

I’m even happier if I’m there myself – but in Syria, there are no independent journalists operating because none has been allowed in. Local reporters can’t work freely, because there are no free media.

And that’s why we rely on social network sites likes Facebook and Twitter. Throughout my working day, my computer screen flashes constantly with a never-ending stream of updates from people in Syria and elsewhere, telling me what’s going on where they are, now, this minute. It’s mesmerising – but it can also be deeply misleading.

If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you may remember that six weeks ago I posted a link to a Syrian blogger who called herself “A Gay Girl in Damascus”. She wrote unusually vividly and movingly, especially about the day when armed men came to her home late at night to arrest her.

She described how her father stood up to the men, talked to them, lectured them, and shamed them until eventually they left without her. “As soon as the gate shut, I heard clapping; everyone in the house was awake now and had been watching from balconies and doorways and windows all around the courtyard ... and everyone was cheering ... my Dad had just defeated them! Not with weapons but with words ... and they had left ... I hugged him and kissed him. I literally owe him my life.”

Then, last Monday, a woman describing herself as the blogger’s cousin, wrote that Amina (the “gay girl in Damascus”) had been abducted while walking in the streets of the Syrian capital. A huge internet campaign swung into action, mobilising friends and supporters to press for her release.

But here’s the point. It quickly emerged that no one actually knew the blogger. No one in Damascus had actually met her, or knew anyone who had. Even her supposed girl-friend in Canada, whom we interviewed in all good faith on the programme on Monday, later admitted that she had neither met nor even spoken to her – their entire relationship had been conducted online, via email.

So who is Amina? Is she someone who is hiding behind a false identity, perhaps for her own security, or is she a work of fiction? Does she even exist? (The pictures of herself that she posted online turned out to be of someone else entirely.)

Does it matter if one blog among millions turns out to be a fake? Unfortunately, it does, especially in an environment where independent reporting is impossible, so that blogs and other online media become the only available substitute.

If Amina does not exist – if she isn’t who she says she is, or if the events she writes about didn’t happen – then we have learned an important lesson: that we must be doubly cautious when we use the information provided by bloggers and Tweeters as a basis for our reporting.

According to human rights groups in Syria, well over 1,000 people have been killed since the current wave of unrest exploded two months ago, and more than 10,000 people are believed to have been arrested.

Yesterday, more than 2,500 people were reported to have fled across the border into Turkey to escape an expected army onslaught on the town of Jisr al-Shughour, where, according to official media, 120 people were killed last weekend in what seems to have been a partial army mutiny.

I wrote eight weeks ago: “If you want to know what's really worrying Washington as officials anxiously survey the anger sweeping through the Arab world, it's not Libya you should be focusing on. Try Syria.” It was true then, and it’s even truer now.

More than ever, we need accurate information about what is happening there – and more than ever, accurate information is in scarce supply.

20 May 2011

2011-05-27T10:33:00.001Z

How should America respond to what’s been happening in the Arab world? Or, to use President Obama’s words in his major Middle East policy speech last night, how should it respond “in a way that advances our values and strengthens our security”?

Well, let’s take “advancing values” first. Support people demanding self-determination? Yes. Demand that tyrants stand down? Yes again. Press for freedom of expression, and of religion? Ditto. Oppose violence and repression? Of course.

So, how about “strengthening security”? This is where it gets a bit trickier. “We must acknowledge,” said Mr Obama, “that a strategy based solely upon the narrow pursuit of [US security] interests will not fill an empty stomach or allow someone to speak their mind.”

And he repeated what he said in his Cairo speech two years ago: “We have a stake not just in the stability of nations, but in the self-determination of individuals.”

Which may be an admirable sentiment in theory, but can be rather more difficult to put into practice. (Is it, for example, why there was not a single reference to Saudi Arabia in the entire speech? How much public support is expressed in Washington for Saudi citizens, men and women alike, to be granted the right of self-determination?)

According to Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who used to be an adviser to President Bush’s first secretary of state, Colin Powell: “The battle between realists and idealists is the fundamental fault line of the American foreign-policy debate.”

Realists will tell you that sometimes a hard-headed assessment of national interests has to take precedence over advancing values. Idealists will insist that you can do both – safeguard national interests while remaining true to your core values.

So which is President Obama? Some analysts argue that while he often uses the words that make him sound like an idealist, his actions tend to be those of a realist.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, who was President Carter’s national security adviser in the 1970s, and who more recently helped advise Obama during his campaign for the presidency, says: “I greatly admire his insights and understanding. (But) I don’t think he really has a policy that’s implementing those insights and understandings … He doesn’t strategise. He sermonises.”

Barack Obama is now more than half way through his Presidential term. (Whether he is granted a second term will be decided by American voters in November next year.) And the experts are still searching for a definition of what his foreign policy vision really is.

“We must proceed with a sense of humility,” he said last night. “There will be times when our short term interests do not align perfectly with our long term vision …” Are those the words of a realist, or an idealist?

One of the biggest questions facing US foreign policy-makers now is how to adapt their thinking to take account of the emergence of new, and increasingly assertive, regional powers. India and China, of course, but also countries like Brazil and Turkey, both of which have begun to demonstrate their own foreign policy interests.

Should the US sit back and let them take centre stage? Is “leading from behind”, the new buzz phrase in Washington, becoming the new foreign policy strategy? It seems to be the strategy of choice in Libya, but can it be applied elsewhere?

Hillary Clinton said something that intrigued me as she introduced President Obama ahead of his speech: “We have seen that in a changing world, America’s leadership is more essential than ever, but that we often must lead in new and innovative ways.”

I’d love to know more about these “new and innovative ways” -- and perhaps I’ll find out next Tuesday, when I’ll be in Washington to present a special edition of the programme in which we’ll be discussing exactly how the US sees its role in this rapidly changing world.

Is it still a world leader, or does the “humility” that President Obama referred to last night imply that under his leadership at least, the US will tend more often to let others move out in front, just as it did over Libya?

27 May 2011

2011-05-27T10:32:00.001Z

First, Osama bin Laden. Then, the former Bosnian Serb general, Ratko Mladic. And let’s not forget – because these things often seem to come in threes -- Bernard Munyagishari, a former Hutu militia leader in Rwanda, wanted on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

One of them is dead, the other two are now in custody. All three of them are alleged to have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in some of the worst atrocities of modern times.

What strikes me as remarkable about all three of these cases is how long after the events the alleged perpetrators were hunted down. Perhaps we should be less cynical when politicians and prosecutors tell us they will not rest until alleged mass murderers are brought to justice.

Bin Laden was killed nearly a decade after 9/11; Mladic was arrested yesterday morning, 16 years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995; Munyagishari was apprehended 17 years after the Rwanda genocide, during which he is alleged to have recruited, trained and led Interahamwe Hutu militiamen in mass killings and rapes of Tutsi women.

My guess is that the trial of General Mladic, if and when it happens, will receive a great deal more publicity than the trial of Bernard Munyagishari. Yet if media coverage were to depend on the scale of the alleged atrocity, it should by rights be the other way round.

Remember what happened in Rwanda. In just three months, an estimated 800,000 people were killed, in an organised pogrom allegedly designed to wipe out the country’s minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

The indictment issued by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in Tanzania, lists five charges against Munyagishari: conspiracy to commit genocide, genocide, complicity in genocide, murder as a crime against humanity, and rape as a crime against humanity.

That’s quite a charge sheet. But of course if the prosecutors are to succeed, they’ll have to prove that Munyagishari himself was both involved in, and had “command responsibility” for, the appalling atrocities of 1994.

As for General Mladic, the same applies. We know well enough what happened at Srebrenica, but again the court will have to be satisified that the man in the dock was responsible in law for those thousands of deaths. The erstwhile political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, is already on trial in The Hague – I suspect the two men will not be given the opportunity to spend much time together.

I visited Srebrenica in 1996, just a year after the mass killings. It was empty and virtually silent, the sort of place where the sound of absent footsteps is louder than on any city street. I also visited Potoçari, the grim industrial complex outside the town, which had been the UN base – the supposed “safe haven” – where so many of the Bosnian Muslims met their deaths.

But let me be clear: nightmare memories of a 16-year-old atrocity do not mean that General Mladic is guilty of the crimes with which he is charged. Only the court can decide that.

As for Osama bin Laden, of course, there’ll be no trial, and no opportunity to test the strength of the case against him. You may well take the view that he convicted himself out of his own mouth, with the audio and video messages he released after September 11, 2001. It’s not my place to offer a judgment on that.

If, as President Obama insists, “justice was done” when bin Laden was killed in his Pakistani hideout, well, one day, perhaps justice will also be done in the cases of Ratko Mladic and Bernard Munyagishari.

A different kind of justice, maybe, but justice nonetheless.

13 May 2011

2011-05-15T16:26:00.001Z

It’s more than four months now since the start of the Arab Spring, so maybe it’s time to take stock.

Number of Arab leaders toppled: 2 (Ben Ali in Tunisia; Mubarak in Egypt).

Number of Arab leaders under heavy pressure but hanging on: 4 (Gaddafi in Libya; Assad in Syria; Saleh in Yemen; King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa in Bahrain).

Number of Arab leaders more or less untroubled: 15.

In other words, the so-called wave of Arab uprisings has pretty much by-passed something like 70 per cent of the members of the League of Arab States. (In Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Sudan and the UAE, there have been some protests, but in general, they’ve been relatively small-scale.)

So if you’re wondering who’ll be the next despot to depart, I suggest you look beyond the Arab world and focus for a moment on Iran.

Not because I’m expecting a repeat of the street protests that followed the contested presidential election of two years ago (suppressed, you’ll remember, in much the same way as President Assad of Syria, Iran’s close ally, is now suppressing protests in his own back yard.)

No, in Iran the threat to the survival of the President comes from inside, not outside, the political structure. It seems Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has fallen out – big time – with Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

This is not a good career move, and many Iran analysts are now openly speculating that Ahmadinejad may soon be either gone, or rendered effectively powerless (one Iranian cartoonist this week depicted him as a bee buzzing around the ear of Khamenei, only to have his sting removed).

Here’s the background. The Iranian political system is like no other: the president is not the most senior figure in the administration of the State, who ever since the revolution of 1979 has been a religious figure known as the Supreme Leader.

So when President Ahmadinejad decided to sack his intelligence minister (who had allegedly been spying on him and his chief of staff), he did not take kindly to the Supreme Leader promptly reinstating the dismissed minister.

The president went on strike, and for 10 days refused to turn up for cabinet meetings. He found himself being accused by high-ranking clerics of associating with religious “deviants” who believe in djinns, or spirits.

According to Farhang Jahanpour of the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University, the accusation stems from a series of recently-released documentary films that has enraged the clerical establishment by suggesting that Ahmadinejad is the embodiment of a mythical religious figure who will accompany the “Hidden Imam”, who Shia Muslims believe will return on the Day of Judgement to establish an Islamic kingdom. This would give the president a religious status far above that of the ruling clerics. Not a suggestion to which they take kindly.

But the real target of the clerics’ wrath seems to be Ahmadinejad’s close confidant and chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Masha’i, who is the father of his daughter-in-law. His crime is to have claimed that he doesn’t need the clergy to intepret religious texts for him – and to have attended an event in Turkey at which there was a performance by women dancers.

Ahmadinejad is said to be grooming Masha’i as his eventual successor, something the clerical establishment are determined to prevent. More than 20 of his allies have been arrested in the past week.

At stake in all this is the role of religion in a future Iran. Ahmadinejad owes much of his power to the Revolutionary Guards rather than to the clergy, although there are now suggestions that the Guards may be shifting their allegience. So if he is ousted, the religious establishment, not for the first time, will have re-established itself as the country’s pre-eminent political force.

And that, perhaps paradoxically, could be the best outcome for the rest of us. Because, according to the Iran analyst Geneive Abdo, writing in Foreign Policy: “The alternative – a highly militarised state run by the Revolutionary Guards – would be much worse.”

In many ways, the future shape of Iran probably matters much more to the outside world in the long term than the future shape of Libya. I suspect that if it hadn’t been for Libya – and Syria, and Osama bin Laden, and the Royal wedding – the Iran crisis would have received far more attention than it has.

6 May 2011

2011-05-06T10:57:00.000Z

I’ve had another one of my peculiar dreams. This time, I dreamt I was working as an Agony Uncle, and I received the following letter:

“Dear Uncle Robin

“I’ve been in a relationship now for just a year, and it already seems to be going horribly wrong. My partner, Dave, started out insisting that he was sure we were going to be good together – we seemed to enjoy the same things, we had a lot of interests in common, some people even said we looked alike!

“But now everything’s changed. He doesn’t take any notice any more of what I want from the relationship, and some of his friends have been saying really nasty things about me. I’m beginning to wonder if I made a big mistake and should walk away. Many of my friends are telling me to get out – last night, I got a real hammering because they seem to think everything’s that going wrong is my fault.

“But I’m worried that I’d be even more unhappy on my own, because many of my former friends disapproved of Dave all along and now won’t have anything to do with me.

“Sometimes I think Dave wants me to leave and will make things so horrible for me that I’ll just pack my bags and go. But part of me still thinks we could do great things together, if only he and his friends would pay more attention to what I want.

“What should I do?

The letter was signed simply “NC”.

This is what (in my dream) I replied:

“Dear NC

“I think you first need to consider what you want from this relationship. You say that at the beginning your partner insisted that the two of you would be good together. Was he right? Has it been good – for you, I mean? Do you think – even if he and his friends aren’t being very nice to you at the moment – that it could be good again?

“Or do you agree with the friend (Paddy someone?) who’s accusing Dave of a breach of faith? If you do agree, then clearly you have to ask yourself if you really do want to carry on.

“All relationships go through rough patches, and that’s as true in politics as it is in love. (Am I right in thinking that you and Dave are both politicians?) But you need to listen to your friends as well, and if they’re saying you might have made a big mistake, well, you need to ask yourself if perhaps they’re right.

“I know how hurtful it is when people say horrible things about you, especially when it’s all reported in the newspapers. But what’s important now is what you think. Can you and Dave rebuild what you had before? Is there still enough trust between you for you to be able to carry on together, perhaps recognising that the happiness you felt in those wonderful early days could never last for very long?

“I do wonder from what you say in your letter if perhaps you were always keener on this relationship than your partner was. You may have felt you had little choice at the time, that you were being swept along by forces so powerful that you couldn’t control them – but now, a year later, you do have more of a chance to reassert control of your own life.

“You need to think carefully about what your friends are telling you. Are all of them really friends? Are they thinking of what’s best for you, or what might be best for them?

“ You’re understandably feeling pretty miserable at the moment, and the next few days aren’t going to make things any easier. There may well be news that makes you feel even more depressed, and you have to accept that Dave will probably be thrilled to bits and not even notice how upset you are.

“But I think he’s going to try to make things up to you. I think he’ll tell you that he wants to put the last few weeks behind you and re-start your relationship on a stronger footing. (By the way, if it makes you feel any better, Alastair Campbell now says he’s beginning to feel sorry for you …)

“Anyway, here’s my advice: don’t do anything rash; and don’t take too much notice of what Dave’s friends – or your friends, for that matter – are saying. But be careful not to lose all your friends, because, as you suggest in your letter, you may need them to come out and support you again if you and Dave do decide to go your separate ways.”

As I say, it was a most peculiar dream.

22 April 2011

2011-04-29T14:04:00.002Z

MUSCAT-DOHA: As I hope you’ll have noticed, if you’ve been listening to the programme over the past couple of evenings, I’ve been in the Gulf this week to report on how the recent upheavals in the region have affected two very different Gulf states: Oman and Qatar.

Oman is one of the poorest countries in the region – it has only modest reserves of oil, which are fast running out. Unemployment is high and opportunities are few.

It’s a very different picture in Qatar, which is now classified as the richest country in the world, if you calculate these things as total economic output per head of population. (Huge amounts of oil and gas; very few people. The sums aren’t hard to do.)

But what the two countries have in common is that they are both ruled by hereditary rulers who came to power by gentling pushing aside their fathers. Sultan Qaboos of Oman took over 40 years ago and set about modernising his nation; the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, has been in office only since 1995 but has already made a substantial impact.

Most of the countries of the Gulf have remained relatively peaceful during the recent turmoil in the Arab world. The big exception is Bahrain, which has no oil reserves, and where there are deep sectarian divisions between the people, most of whom are Shia, and the ruling royal family, who are Sunni.

In Oman, there were protests in February and March – at least two people were killed, and for a time it looked as if the country, usually a by-word for stability, might be heading for trouble.

But the sultan took rapid action – he sacked 12 of his cabinet ministers, announced an immediate increase in the minimum wage, and set up a committee to look at constitutional reform. And Omanis say they have already noticed that the local media are taking a more robust look at the record of some government ministers.

Is it enough to keep the protesters quiet? It’s enough for some of them, but there’s still a permanent encampment of job-seekers outside the majlis al-shura, the consultative assembly, and pro-democracy activists are reserving judgement until they see more detail about exactly what constitutional reforms the sultan has in mind.

In Qatar, there have been no protests. Why would there be, in the land of plenty? (In fact, most of the people living in Qatar are foreign workers, and they don’t necessarily share much of the wealth. But nor are they in a position to complain, so you hear nothing from them.)

This may be the home of Al-Jazeera, the TV network that did so much to spread news of the early uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt – but there’s no home-grown pro-democracy movement.

After all, as one young Qatari student openly admitted: “If you already have everything you want, why would you want democracy?”

Despite the glitz of its shiny high-rise hotels and office blocks, Qatar is still a pretty conservative place. Its people mainly belong to the ultra-strict Wahhabi sect of Islam – although unlike in Saudi Arabia, in Qatar, women are allowed to drive.

But alcohol is banned more or less everywhere, and most women still cover themselves entirely in black abbayas when they appear outside their home.

So if there is pressure on Qatar’s rulers, it’s not for more change, more quickly, as it is elsewhere in the Arab world. It’s the exact opposite – and the emir knows that there could be trouble ahead if he tries to move too quickly.

Just a reminder that The World Tonight can now be downloaded free of charge as a podcast, which means that if you’ve missed any of my reports from here, you can catch up while you’re sitting in the garden over the long weekend. Just go to www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/wtonight.

29 April 2011

2011-04-29T14:03:00.001Z

Six weeks ago, I wrote a piece on The World Tonight blog called “What’s so special about Libya?”

Then, the question arose because of the killing of civilians in Yemen and Bahrain. I asked why there was a UN resolution authorising the use of military force to protect citizens in Libya, but not elsewhere.

Now, fast forward to this week. The question arises again because of events in Syria. Tanks have rolled in to several towns and cities to prevent more anti-government protests, and human rights groups estimate that more than 400 Syrian civilians have died since the wave of Arab unrest reached Syrian shores.

On Wednesday’s programme, I discussed the difference between the UN’s response to the Libya and Syria crises with Professor Ed Luck, who’s a special adviser to the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon.

His explanation, in a nutshell, was that in the case of Libya, important regional groupings like the Arab League and the African Union had asked for robust UN action. In the case of Syria, there has been no such demand.

Here are some possible reasons why. First, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria is respected by other Arab leaders in a way that the eccentric and mercurial Muammar Gaddafi of Libya is not. Second, Syria has a relatively well-trained and well-equipped army, which Libya does not. That makes a big difference when weighing up the pros and cons of international military action.

Third, there is a widespread belief among Western governments that President Assad could still be persuaded to turn back from his current policy of trying to suppress opposition protests by force.

And fourth, Syria’s geographic position – neighbouring Iraq, Lebanon and Israel, makes it highly sensitive strategically. Instability in Syria could easily spill across its borders.

The United Nations doctrine known as “responsibility to protect” – or R2P in the jargon – was drawn up for use in cases when governments are either unable to protect their own civilians or are themselves a threat to them. Just like Syria, then?

Not necessarily. Before the doctrine can be invoked, it’s considered essential that six criteria need to be fulfilled. The cause needs to be just (no problem there, you might think); the intention must be right (in other words, to protect civilians, not to advance national self-interest); military action should be used only as a final resort; there must be legitimate authority (ie a Security Council resolution); the means used must be proportionate to the threat; and there must be a “reasonable prospect” that the action taken is successful.

It’s that final criterion – a reasonable prospect of success – which could well be the biggest stumbling block in Syria, even if all the other five criteria were met. (And that’s a moot point, in fact, given that Russia, a close ally of Syria going back many decades, is unlikely merely to abstain on a proposed Security Council resolution, as it did on Libya.)

After all, given the Libya experience so far, who would like to bet on a Syria intervention being any more successful? So with no regional pressure for military intervention, and with no Western appetite for any more military adventures, the message for anti-government protesters in Syria seems inescapable: you’re on your own.

15 April 2011

2011-04-15T14:45:00.000Z

If you want to know what’s really worrying Washington as officials anxiously survey the anger sweeping through the Arab world, it’s not Libya you should be focusing on.

Try Syria.

And if you need a reason, as so often in the Middle East, all you have to do is look at a map.

To the west, Lebanon, a country that Syria has always regarded as part of its own back yard and where its support for the Shia Hizbollah movement is a vital component in Lebanon’s political jigsaw.

To the south, Israel, a country with which Syria is still officially at war, and which has annexed a sizeable chunk of Syrian territory, the strategically sensitive Golan Heights. (Syria is also a key supporter of the Palestinian Hamas movement, which controls the Gaza Strip and which Israel regards as among its most implacable enemies.)

To the east, Iraq, still far from stable after the 2003 US-led invasion which toppled Saddam Hussein, and where Syria’s long-term ally, Iran, is a major political player.

In other words, Syria is a major influence in the most sensitive region of the always sensitive Middle East. And President Bashar al-Assad, who with his late father Hafez al-Assad before him, has ruled the country for more than 40 years, is no friend of Washington.

Last night, the US State Department said there is evidence that Iran is helping Syrian authorities crack down on the wave of protests that have swept through the country for the past month. It is, said officials, a troubling example of Iranian meddling in the region.

Nonsense, said Syria, and totally untrue. What’s more, some analysts have suggested that there are signs of Western-backed groups supplying arms to anti-Assad protesters. Some reports claim that it’s these armed protesters who were responsible for shooting and killing Syrian security forces last weekend.

With very little independent reporting from inside Syria (no visas are being issued to foreign journalists), rumours are everywhere and facts are thin on the ground. Today, tens of thousands of protesters were out again on the streets of several towns and cities – human rights groups say more than 200 have been killed over the past four weeks, nearly 40 of them last Friday alone. (I write this before the full scale of today’s protests is known.)

When President Assad delivered a long-awaited speech on television two weeks ago, he was seen by critics, both in Syria and outside, to have missed an opportunity to announce meaningful reforms that might have gone some way to satisfying at least some of the protesters.

His government is considered to be one of the most repressive and brutal in the Arab world – no one in Syria is unaware that back in 1982, when his father was in charge, tens of thousands of people were killed in the city of Hama when an Islamist-inspired uprising was mercilessly crushed.

It’s impossible to predict how the crisis in Syria will end – it certainly looks like the most serious challenge to the rule of the Assads since 1982. And now, with allegations from both sides of external meddling, there is a growing risk that Syria could become a proxy battleground for regional super-powers hoping to maximise their influence.

If Bashar al-Assad manages to survive, it’ll be seen as good news for Iran. If he is toppled (depending, of course, on what – or who – follows him), it could be good news for anti-Assad forces backed by the West and Saudi Arabia, which itself has been accused of meddling in Syria, as well as intervening on the side of repression in its neighbour, Bahrain.

But it’s as well to remember that even if there are regional forces involved, there is also genuine popular anger at a government which is seen to have failed to deliver on its promises of more freedom and less corruption.

8 April 2011

2011-04-08T23:03:00.000Z

Apologies for the late delivery of this week’s newsletter – I’m just back from a quick flit to Rio, where I was invited to attend a conference on the subject of “Brazil and the World: opportunities, ambitions, and choices.”

You may think this was an odd thing to do while Libya, Yemen and Syria continue to dominate the foreign news agenda – but the fact is that significant change is not limited to the Arab world, and we need to keep an eye on what is going on elsewhere as well.

So, how’s Brazil doing? Brazil is doing fine, thank you – but there was a discernible under-current at the conference suggesting that some Brazilian policy-makers and analysts do wonder how much longer they can keep this up.

True, economic growth looks good, and Brazil escaped relatively unscathed from the financial turmoil of the past two years. The charismatic and larger-than-life President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has made way after eight years in office for the much less charismatic Dilma Rousseff, who is a close ally and protegée, but without, it seems, his global ambitions.

It has consolidated its position as an influential member of the four-nation group of emerging economic giants known as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), but here you begin to sense a kernel of unease.

Of course it’s nice to be taken seriously as an economic super-power of the future – but are there certain expectations of how a major player of the 21st century is meant to behave at a global level?

All four BRIC nations abstained in the UN Security Council vote on the use of military force to protect civilians in Libya. No one was surprised that Russia and China didn’t vote Yes – they have long opposed any suggestion that the UN should authorise the use of force in member states against the wishes of their governments.

But why did Brazil abstain? At lunch yesterday, a retired Brazilian ambassador told me: “You know, we quite like being invisible on the world stage. It suits us very well.” And there, for now, you have your answer. Brazil likes having its cake and eating it – it has seen how China, for example, has begun to use its economic muscle as a diplomatic tool on the world stage, and it has seen how much flak China has run into as result.

But none of this means that Brazil is not engaging on the world scene. It commands the UN peace-keeping force in Haiti; it contributes to many others, and is about to expand its naval role in the UN peace-keeping force in southern Lebanon.

So I asked the combative defence minister Nelson Jobim: “Why does Brazil not support UN action in Libya, but commands it in Haiti?” Simple, he said. We believe in peace-keeping, but not peace-making – and we remain to be convinced that the use of military force, even in Libya, can help resolve conflicts.

I’m not sure that Brazil’s long-term ambition is to remain invisible. It is, for example, a significant aid and development donor in many African countries, specialising in know-how and what it calls capacity development. In other words, because Brazil has emerged from developing nation to mature economy, it has lessons it’s happy to pass on to others.

There’s much talk of an almost mystical “Brazilian way” on the world stage. We are, say Brazilians, a mult-ethnic, multi-cultural society, with a passionate belief in moderation, and we know how to inter-act with each other and with others of different ethnicities and different cultures.

(No one said so in terms, but it was pretty clear what the sub-text was. China is another economic super-power now extremely active in Africa, but it is often criticised for its alleged lack of sensitivity to different cultural traditions.)

Ambitions? Yes, Brazil has ambitions – it wants to continue to invest in infrastructure and poverty alleviation, and it wants to cement its good neighbour relations with the rest of Latin America. And of course, it wants to protect and make good use of its abundant natural resources, both on land and at sea, including the vast under-water oil reserves that are yet to come on stream.

Choices? Yes, it knows it’ll have to make some, but maybe not just yet. As one, non-Brazilian speaker at the conference asked: “Is abstaining in a key security council vote the best way to press your case to be considered as a permanent member of the council?”

And opportunities? Maybe it's already missed a few; after all, it’s India and China that are now the undoubted emerging power stars, thanks in part to education systems that can deliver substantially better results than Brazil’s. And as new opportunities come along, more choices will have to be made. Invisibility may not be a long-term option.

But here’s one statistic that tells you a lot about how the world is changing. Brazil now has more embassies in Africa than Britain does. And you don’t open embassies unless you see opportunities.

1 April 2011

2011-04-01T09:38:00.001Z

The anti-Gaddafi fighters racing backwards and forwards along Libya’s coastal highway are not going to win their war. That’s not exactly a prediction; let’s call it a working hypothesis.

And if we’re going to work with it, we’d better see where it takes us. Suppose they just keep advancing and retreating, day after day, week after week. One day, Brega and Ras Lanouf – places you’d never heard of a month ago – are in anti-Gaddafi hands; 24 hours later, they’re back in pro-Gaddafi hands.

Benghazi is the anti-Gaddafi capital; Tripoli is the pro-Gaddafi capital. Libya’s third largest city, Misrata, 200 kilometres east of Tripoli, is slowly being pulverised into the ground. I fear that when we finally see the pictures from there, it will not be pretty.

So, if the soldiers can’t produce a result, what about the politicians? The national transitional council in Benghazi would like to be regarded as the country’s post-Gaddafi government-in-waiting. But no one voted for them, we don’t even know who all the members are, and they haven’t yet been able to hold a meeting at which they were all present.

In Tripoli, the Gaddafi camp, or what’s left of it, continues to breathe defiance. Foreign minister Mousa Koussa is undoubtedly a high-level defection, but let’s not forget that the interior and justice ministers both switched sides early in the uprising, and they didn’t exactly bring Muammar Gaddafi to his knees.

(Thank you, by the way, to the listener who emailed last night, suggesting that we should ask one of my predecessors to interview the former foreign minister. That way, I could announce: “Now, John Tusa talks to Mousa Koussa.”)

Defections are always great propaganda coups; they give the impression of a regime unravelling. But they don’t necessarily bring down a regime. Rudolf Hess landed in Scotland in 1941, apparently in the hope that he could negotiate a peace agreement between Britain and Nazi Germany. Not exactly a defector, maybe, but he ended up in prison (he died there 46 years later, in 1987) and Hitler carried on regardless.

Mr Koussa is now said by British officials to be “in a fragile state” after his defection. According to a US embassy cable written two years ago, he was “the rare Libyan official who embodies a combination of intellectual acumen, operational ability and political weight.” He was a former head of intelligence, a former mentor to two of Colonel Gaddafi’s sons, and may well know the truth about exactly who ordered and carried out the Lockerbie bombing in 1988.

In other words, he’s a Big Cheese. If he’s prepared to talk to British officials, he doubtless has plenty of tales to tell. Most importantly for now, he could tell which other Gaddafi intimates are ready to switch; what Gaddafi’s own state of mind is; and what his sons are up to.

According to one Arab newspaper report this week, Saif al-Islam – the son who established such a close working relationship with the LSE – is now touting himself about as the possible leader of a transitional government to pave the way to democracy, once his father has been removed from power. He is said to have held “a number of secret meetings with officials in the French and British governments, discussing the idea of his replacing his father for a transitional period of between two to three years, in return for a comprehensive ceasefire and negotiating with the anti-Gaddafi rebels.”

There’s no sign at this stage that anyone is much interested in his proposal. But today there are reports that one of Saif’s senior aides has been in London recently to talk to British officials, amid what The Guardian calls “signs that the regime may be looking for an exit strategy.” Several other officials are also said to be ready to switch sides.

If they are, it may be that this uprising will be won not by force of arms, but by the gradual implosion of the State structure. There may come a point when there are more Gaddafi people leaving him than staying – it’s at that point that the game will be up.

But it’s as well to remember that in times of war, what we’re told is not always the unvarnished truth. Sowing doubts is as useful as dropping bombs if you want to weaken an army’s fighting spirit. The black arts of “pys ops” (pyschological operations) are, I’m sure, alive and well.

Perhaps, within the next few days, Muammar Gaddafi’s forces will collapse as more of his senior aides defect. On the other hand, as I wrote last week, we may be in for a long haul. The only thing we can say with any certainty is that no one at this stage can predict how – or when – it will end.

One last thing: I thought you’d like to know that The World Tonight has been shortlisted in the 2011 Sony Radio Awards in the Best News and Current Affairs programme category. In our quiet and under-stated way, we’re rather pleased.

25 March 2011

2011-03-25T09:44:00.001Z

Can the way you define a word make the difference between war and peace? If the word being defined is in a UN Security Council resolution, well, the answer is Yes.

You probably remember the famous passage in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

“The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be the master – that’s all.”

So here are two words that we need to try to define before we can pass judgement on the current military operations over Libya.

First word: “necessary”, as in Security Council resolution 1973, which “authorises member states … to take all necessary measures … to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack.”

Dictionary definition: “Necessary -- essential, indispensable, requisite, something vital for the fulfillment of a need.” So who decides what is essential, or indispensable, or vital to protect civilians? Is it essential to kill Muammar Gaddafi? Vital to destroy his every last artillery piece or tank?

Second word: “threat”, as in “civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack.”

Dictionary definition: “Threat -- something that is regarded as dangerous or likely to inflict pain or misery.” So, again, how do we decide when the likelihood of pain being inflicted has been lifted? It’s not as if a likelihood is something you can photograph from a spotter plane: one day it’s there; the next day it’s gone.

But of course, it isn’t about dictionary definitions at all, is it? I don’t envy the poor lawyers going through the military target lists, deciding line by line, yes, this target is covered by the UN resolution, and no, this target isn’t.

As always, it’s about political will. So the real decisions will be taken in Cairo (headquarters of the Arab League), Brussels (headquarters of NATO), London, Paris and Washington.

There’s really only one big decision they need to make: when to stop. Is Gaddafi’s defeat, overthrow, or death deemed to be “essential, indispensable, vital” to the protection of civilians from the threat of attack? Or would a negotiated ceasefire do?

If civilians are killed by allied military action (and it should be noted that so far, there’s been no credible, verifiable evidence that any have been), are the terms of the UN resolution still being adhered to? Can you claim to be protecting some civilians while killing others?

Those who argue in favour of the current military action say that the cost of doing nothing would have been far higher than the cost of enforcing Security Council resolution 1973.

The Middle East academic Professor Juan Cole wrote yesterday: “Pundits who want this whole thing to be over with in seven days are being frankly silly. Those who worry about it going on forever are being unrealistic. Those who forget or cannot see the humanitarian achievements already accomplished are being willfully blind.”

Those who take the opposite view argue that it is always a mistake to embark on military action without knowing how to get out of it; and that pledging to protect civilians in one country will inevitably lead to demands that you do the same in other countries as well (Yemen? Bahrain? Syria? Ivory Coast?)

Last night, NATO finally came up with a formula that will enable the alliance to take over control of at least part of Operation Odyssey Dawn within the next few days. But Turkey is clearly still deeply unhappy about it, and the Arab League is jumpy.

Unless something dramatic changes on the ground, we could well be in for a long haul. And it’s not going to be easy keeping this hastily-constructed coalition together.

18 March 2011

2011-03-18T12:11:00.001Z

Same date, different prime ministers, different Arab dictators.

18 March 2003, T Blair: “This is not the time to falter. This is the time for this house … to show that we will stand up for what we know to be right, to show that we will confront the tyrannies and dictatorships and terrorists who put our way of life at risk, to show at the moment of decision that we have the courage to do the right thing.”

18 March 2011, D Cameron: “We should not intervene in other countries save in quite exceptional circumstances … (but) we cannot have a failed pariah state festering on Europe’s southern borders.”

So have we embarked on another war without end? More than nine years after British forces joined the US-led intervention in Afghanistan, and eight years to the day since Tony Blair delivered his passionate defence in the House of Commons of his decision to commit UK forces in Iraq, are we once again going into battle with too many questions unanswered?

It has become a cliché to observe that all wars are easier to start than to end. UN security council resolution 1973, approved last night by 10 votes in favour with five abstentions (Russia, China, Germany, Brazil and India) states the objective of the Libya intervention clearly enough: to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas under threat of attack.

It authorises member states to use “all necessary measures” with the exception of a foreign occupation force – which is universally understood to mean Yes to air attacks, but No to troops on the ground.

Over the coming hours, we – and especially the people of Libya – will wait anxiously to see what happens next. Maybe some of those around Muammar Gaddafi will turn against him – but the key remaining figures in his regime are members of his own family, so it seems unlikely.

Maybe his forces will halt their advance towards Benghazi, at least for the time being. A siege is just as much an option as an assault.

Maybe US, British and French warplanes will start bombing his tanks and artillery pieces along the coast road. Maybe by mistake they’ll hit civilians as well as military targets.

Maybe, maybe.

But I was struck listening to David Cameron’s statement in the House of Commons this morning (apart from the fact that, this being a Friday, the place was virtually deserted) by how careful he was to spell out that this is a very different kind of operation, under a very different kind of prime minister, from the one we embarked upon eight years ago.

He emphasised the degree of regional support for military intervention – both the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council have backed the idea of a no-fly zone. Not like 2003.

And he spoke of the “clear legal basis” for the action – an unambiguous Security Council resolution, with clear advice for the British cabinet from the attorney-general, which he said had been “read and discussed” by ministers this morning. He didn’t need to spell out to MPs the differences from eight years ago.

So how will this end? No one knows. How long will it take? Same answer. If Gaddafi is defeated, overthrown, or killed, what or who will take his place? Answer as above.

Last Friday, during the discussion on the Arab uprisings that we recorded at Chatham House, I asked Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who had been the UK ambassador at the United Nations in the period leading up to the Iraq invasion: “As you watch events unfolding, do you say to yourself: ‘Here we go again’?”

We didn’t know then that within a week a strongly-worded Security Council resolution would have been approved – but Sir Jeremy replied without a moment’s hesitation in the affirmative.

4 March 2011

2011-03-04T11:34:00.001Z

I want you to avert your gaze for a moment from Libya – and try to focus on two much smaller countries further east.

Unlike Libya, they are not blessed with vast oil reserves. Unlike Libya, their leaders have names that ring few familiar bells in Western living rooms. But like Libya – and like many other Arab nations – they are now aflame with popular protests.

These two little countries are Bahrain (you’ll need a magnifying glass to find it on a map), and Yemen. And when you’ve found them, you’ll notice that they share a giant neighbour.

That neighbour is Saudi Arabia, which of course just happens to be the world’s biggest producer of oil and is therefore of crucial importance to anyone who owns a car. That’s why what’s happening in Bahrain and Yemen is important – because what matters to the Saudis should matter to us.

So, what’s happening in Bahrain? It’s a tiny island off Saudi Arabia’s eastern coast, linked to the mainland by a 25-kilometre causeway that enables thousands of Saudis to stream across every weekend to enjoy Bahrain’s much freer atmosphere.

For the men there is alcohol, for the women there are shopping malls galore, and for the children there are cinemas. But Bahrain has a problem: its royal family, which holds virtually all the power (about half the members of the Cabinet are royals), are Sunni, whereas most of its people are Shia.

President Bush used to talk of Bahrain as a model Arab democracy: after all, it has a parliament, with an elected lower house, and a government which – at least in theory – is answerable to MPs. Women are allowed to vote and run for office.

But when I was there five years ago, I discovered that behind the gleaming glass and steel Gulf office blocks and the wide boulevards, there are ramshackle, fly-blown Shia villages, with pot-holed roads and rubbish piled on street corners. Young men hang around with nothing to do – because, as throughout the Arab world, youth unemployment is a major problem.

For the past month, thousands of protesters have been gathering in the streets to demand political reform. Some opposition groups are pressing for the resignation of the cabinet and a new constitution – others want to go much further and get rid of the monarchy all together. The government has offered talks; so far, no progress has been made – and there are more protests planned for later today.

In an ominous development, last night there were, for the first time, sectarian clashes between groups of Sunni and Shia youths.

As for Yemen, where do we start? Yemen is where Osama bin Laden comes from and where al Qaeda was born. It’s where Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the alleged would-be bomber of a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit in December 2009, was apparently recruited and trained.

President Ali Abdullah Saleh has been in power for more than 30 years, and, according to one recent analyst, presides over a government that is so corrupt that it would make the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, blush.

Opposition protests have swept the country – the most recent development is that opposition groups are proposing a negotiated transition to a new government that would see President Saleh standing down before the end of this year.

Here’s the point: if either Bahrain or Yemen descend into anything like what has happened in Libya – or if a Shia uprising in Bahrain, or a tribal revolt in Yemen, succeed in toppling the current leaderships – the Saudis will be terrified.

Today, Friday, is another key day. If there is serious trouble in either of Saudi Arabia’s neighbours, watch out for a crackdown in Saudi itself.

I’m not saying you should ignore what’s happening in Libya – but you should also be keeping an eye on what’s happening elsewhere. In a special extended edition of the programme next Friday, we’ll be trying to pull together some of the threads and attempting a preliminary assessment of this unprecedented wave of popular protest sweeping through the Arab world.

25 February 2011

2011-02-25T16:00:00.001Z

Two weeks ago today, Hosni Mubarak resigned as Egypt’s president. I wrote then: “The message being echoed right across the Arab world is simply this: No matter how long a leader has been in power, no matter how pervasive his security apparatus, no matter how terrifying his dungeons, if enough people take to the streets, he can be toppled.”

That’s certainly what a lot of people in Libya believed. But as I write these words, mid-afternoon on Friday, it seems that forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi are determined to prove them wrong.

Here’s a taste of some of the messages I’ve been reading on Twitter over just the past few minutes (I should make it clear that I have no way of corroborating them, or vouching for their accuracy, but Twitter has now become a major source of information from Libya while foreign journalists are prevented from accessing areas under the control of the government).

“ohhhhh my god 2 pepole where hoted (holed?) in the head god help us.”
“progaddafi preventing protesters to reach the green square, they are everywhere.”
“progaddafi are shooting the protesters on the spot in many areas in tripoli: fashloum, soug aljoumaa.”
“there is a massacre happening right now in soug aljoumaa NOW.”
“bomb guys i heard bomb alot of gun shot please help.”
“a friend died now, his father answered me crying. i'm trying to control myself.”

By the time you read this, the picture may be clearer. We may also know more about what's been happening today in Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Even in Saudi Arabia, there seem to be the first stirrings of what may, or may not, build into another protest movement.

It’s still far too early to assess what this unprecedented wave of popular revolts in the Arab world will mean in the long term. (We’ll make a first attempt in a special 60-minute edition of The World Tonight to be broadcast on 11 March.) But for now the question that intrigues me is this: if a prerequisite of revolution is the absence of fear, when did that fear vanish – and, just as importantly, why?

Well, how about this for an explanation: observing the courage of others encourages others to have more courage. A crowd in one city today leads to more crowds in more cities tomorrow. In other words, if the disaffected, unemployed young in one Arab country see what their counterparts elsewhere can achieve, they’re more likely to be able to shrug off their own fears.

From Tunisia to Egypt. From Egypt to Yemen, and Bahrain, Algeria – and Libya. And surely it’s undeniable that the overcoming of all that fear has been helped immeasurably by social network sites like Facebook and Twitter.
A protester with a mobile phone can send out words, pictures and videos in real time. TV news bulletins, radio news programmes, newspapers and bloggers all pick them up, sift them, retransmit them.

Of course, there were popular uprisings, revolts and revolutions long before the first Tweeter ever tweeted. In 1989, it was in part the power of TV pictures that blew the flames of anti-Communism across central and eastern Europe. But in 2011, the TV pictures are as likely to have come from a protester’s mobile phone as through the lens of a professional camera operator.

A word of caution, however: what follows a popular uprising isn’t always better than what went before. Decades of political repression can’t be transmogrified overnight into a model of liberal democracy. If that is true in Tunisia or Egypt, it is a hundred times more true in Libya. Yes, in Latin America, and east Asia, they successfully made the transition from dictatorship to democracy. In Somalia, on the other hand … well, I don’t need to spell it out.

Just a quick word about Twitter: as you’ll have gathered, I’ve signed up. If you’re there too, do come and find me.

18 February 2011

2011-02-23T12:28:00.001Z

TURIN -- As you may have heard on the programme, I’ve been travelling in Italy this week, gauging the mood of the nation as the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, prepares to face charges of paying for sex with an underage prostitute and abuse of office, and as Italians mark the 150th anniversary of the country’s unification.

I’ll be on air tonight from Turin with the third of my reports, and I’ve also written a piece for From Our Own Correspondent, to be broadcast tomorrow at 11.30am on BBC Radio 4.

I thought you might like a taster of what I’ll be saying:

When I lived in Italy more than 30 years ago, the words that most people associated with the country were mafia, spaghetti, Fiat and Michelangelo, not necessarily in that order. Now, I’ve been back, and I found the country confused, depressed and uncertain.

I’ve been travelling from the faded, crime-ridden city of Naples in the south to the industrial and commercial hubs of Milan and Turin in the north, and at each stop I asked the people I met: “If I say Italy to you, what do you think of?”

“Cheats,” said a young jazz musician in the historic university city of Padua, where once Galileo was a student. “Complicated”, said a social worker as we looked out over the Bay of Naples towards Mount Vesuvius.

A few days ago, I was in the pretty port city of Gaeta, just over half way between Rome and Naples. It was where the last, great pre-unification battle was fought, where the Bourbon royal family took refuge after Naples fell to the armies of the North. Gaeta suffered a terrible siege, tens of thousands of people died. To mark the anniversary, the townspeople paraded through the streets, many of them dressed in period costume. It wasn’t so much a celebration of unity as a demonstration that even after 150 years, a distinctly, and defiantly, southern identity still survives.

Still, despite its history, Italy is now one nation, and I’m not sure it’s really any less united than, say, Spain, with its Basques and Catalans; France, with its Bretons and Corsicans; even the United Kingdom, with its Scots, its Welsh and its northern Irish.

These days, Italians all watch the same TV programmes – most of them on networks owned or controlled by Mr Berlusconi – and at least in part because of the influence of television, they do now speak the same language. That wasn’t the case even 50 or 60 years ago, when most Italians spoke regional dialects rather than the Italian of the literary giants like Dante or Mazzini.

The young musician I met in Padua told me that he feels he’s visiting a foreign country when he goes south to Naples. And this is a man who spent many years living in New York. Naples is crumbling, it’s dirty, the people drive like maniacs – so to a northern Italian, who’d feel perfectly comfortable in Berlin or Vienna, going south is a bit like ending up in Cairo or Beirut.

As for Mr Berlusconi, he’s as defiant as ever. He insists he won’t be resigning ahead of his trial in April – and in a strange way, he is himself now a unifying influence. He’s originally from Milan, which is where his business empire is based, and where his bunga bunga parties were held, but he has as much political support in the south as in the north.

And when hundreds of thousands of Italians took to the streets last weekend to demonstrate their opposition to him, they filled the piazzas in dozens of towns and cities the length and breadth of the country.

The word on their placards was “Basta” – enough. The fate of their prime minister – and perhaps even the fate of their country – now lies in the hands of the judges.

By the way, The World Tonight can now be downloaded free of charge as a podcast, which means that if you happen to miss a programme, you can now catch up on you way to work the next morning. Just go to www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/wtonight.

11 February 2011

2011-02-11T22:37:00.000Z

You’ll understand, I hope, why this week’s newsletter is later than usual – it seemed to me it would be better to wait until we knew what happened today in Cairo. And it was.

No, I’m not psychic. I couldn’t be sure that President Mubarak would finally choose to resign today – but when I went home after last night’s programme, it was clear that today would bring fresh drama.

Did I say Mubarak “chose to resign”? I wonder. We will learn more over the coming days about exactly what happened behind the scenes in Cairo over the past 48 hours – but it’s already possible to look at the available evidence and draw some tentative conclusions.

Question 1: Was it a victory for a popular revolution, or a military coup d’etat? Answer: almost certainly, a bit of both.

Question 2: Is Egypt now set on a path towards genuine democracy and free and fair elections? Answer: it’s far too soon to say, but personally, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Question 3: Will today’s events have an impact elsewhere in the Arab world? Answer: categorically yes, a massive impact. Tunisia could perhaps be written off as a small and relatively insignificant country. But Egypt? The most populous nation in the Arab world? The acknowledged Arab super-power?

So what might have happened yesterday and today? I have no inside knowledge, but here’s my best guess. Yesterday, when the army high command issued their “Communique No. 1”, they thought they had secured Mubarak’s agreement to resign and hand over power to them.

That’s why they told the hundreds of thousands of protesters in Tahrir Square: “All your demands will be met.”

But Vice-President Omar Suleiman, perhaps with the support of the presidential guard and other elements of the security apparatus, faced the military chiefs down. There were even rumours that Mubarak had already recorded a resignation announcement but that the vice-president ordered that it should not be broadcast.

Instead, in what everyone seems to agree was a disastrous miscalculation, Mubarak went on TV and said he was not resigning after all but would hand over powers to – guess who? – vice-president Suleiman.

In other words, what happened yesterday was in effect an attempted coup d’etat by the military – and it failed.

Today, on the other hand, it seems to have succeeded. Mubarak has gone, and now the military are in charge. Where that leaves the vice-president isn’t clear. Not best pleased, is my guess.

But do today’s events mark, in the words of the Nobel peace prize winner and leading opposition figure Mohammed el Baradei: “the liberation of the Egyptian people”?

Is military rule compatible with liberation? It depends, doesn’t it, on what happens next.

For now, though, the message being echoed right across the Arab world is simply this: No matter how long a leader has been in power, no matter how pervasive his security apparatus, no matter how terrifying his dungeons, if enough people take to the streets, he can be toppled.

The coming weeks will give us some idea of whether there are likely to be more Tunisias, more Egypts. They will also begin to clarify whether the Egyptian people really are about to be given a genuine opportunity to choose how, and by whom, they wish to be ruled.

I know that the parallels with Europe in 1989 can be overdone and that they are far from exact. But I have a strong suspicion that the over-riding emotion in Cairo tonight is very similar to what people felt in Berlin, Prague, Bucharest and the other capitals of eastern and central Europe as the Moscow-backed Communist regimes crumbled one after another.

Live for the moment. Celebrate the achievement. We’ll worry about the future tomorrow. There may be trouble ahead; some of them may even live to regret what happened today. But I don’t think many of the protesters are bothering with that now.

4 February 2011

2011-02-04T10:19:00.000Z

Question: what links the Wizard of Oz, the 9/11 attacks, and events this week in Egypt?

Bear with me; I haven’t gone mad. But I have been trying to make sense of the unprecedented scenes on the streets of Cairo – and I think I may be seeing the beginnings of an intelligible picture.

First, the Wizard of Oz. If you’ve seen the film – of course, you’ve seen the film – you’ll remember the scene near the end when Dorothy and her companions finally get to see the fearsome Wizard. He’s just an ordinary little fella, with a much-amplified voice. Not so scary – or powerful – after all.

As for 9/11, to many millions of people around the world, especially those in countries whose governments were in thrall to, or beholden to, the mighty superpower that is (was?) the United States, what the attacks demonstrated was that Uncle Sam was unexpectedly vulnerable. What’s more, he was smitten by a group of Arabs.

Then came Afghanistan, and Iraq. Again, Uncle Sam – or, if you prefer, the Wizard of Oz – was revealed to be a great deal less mighty than he seemed.

Remember 1989, the year when the Soviet empire in Eastern and central Europe collapsed domino-like, in country after country? Once the power of Moscow was seen to be crumbling, suddenly fear gave way to courage, and the rest is history.

Which brings us to Egypt, via Tunisia. I’m not suggesting that the uprisings against long-established pro-Western governments were due solely to a perception that their Washington backers were no longer as powerful as they once were – but it is more than possible that this could be an important factor.

A government that owes its strength at least in part to the fact that it is backed by the Wizard of Oz is not as invulnerable as it may once have seemed – which may be why in Tunis and Cairo it’s been the people out on the streets who look as if they have the upper hand.

As I noted in this newsletter just three weeks ago, Arab leaders have a habit of sticking around. I cited Muammar Gaddafi in Libya (41 years in power); President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen (33 years); and yes, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt (30 years). Now, under pressure from the streets, Saleh and Mubarak have both pledged to stand down at the next election, and of course President Ben Ali of Tunisia is now ex-President Ben Ali and is settling into exile in Saudi Arabia.

So is democracy on the march through the Arab world? After Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, east Asia, all of which have embraced various forms of democracy over the past 30 years, is it now, at last, the Arabs’ turn?

It’s still too soon to tell. I’m keeping a close eye on the Egyptian army and the newly-appointed vice-president Omar Suleiman, formerly the country’s hugely powerful head of intelligence, long regarded as the US’s point man in Cairo – and chillingly described by one US commentator this week as “a charitable man, friendly … he tortures only people that he doesn't know."

I’m also intrigued by the reaction from Turkey, a country that knows full well what it’s like having an army playing a major political role behind the scenes. This was the message from the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to President Mubarak this week: “I say that you must listen, and we must listen, to the people’s outcry, to their extremely humanitarian demands. Meet the people’s desire for change with no hesitation. I am saying this clearly: You must be the first to take a step for Egypt’s peace, security, and stability … Take steps that will satisfy the people.”

So could a post-Mubarak Egypt become an Arab Turkey – mildly Islamist, but broadly pluralist? Or will strongman autocrat Mubarak make way for strongman autocrat Suleiman?

I think I know which of the alternatives the US and Israel would prefer – but how about those thousands of people out on the streets? After all, the 1989 revolutions in Europe didn’t lead overnight to a new generation of non-Communist leaders – so it may be a while before a clearer picture of Egypt’s future begins to emerge.

For now, the demands from the streets are clear enough: Mubarak must go, his regime must fall, the corrupt must be punished and jobs must be found for the unemployed. But there are still plenty of people whose physical and financial security depend on the regime’s survival: you don’t run an autocracy for 30 years without building up a pretty impressive client base. Besides, many people fear the uncertainty, confusion and potential dangers that could follow a precipitate presidential resignation.

So don’t assume that a massive change is on the way. Just because the Wizard of Oz says there must be change, doesn’t mean that change will follow. After all, when Dorothy’s dog Toto pulled back that curtain revealing the wizard’s powerlessness, we saw him pulling at all sorts of levers to no great effect.

Yes, the people of Cairo are still out on the streets, but it’s not over yet.

28 January 2011

2011-02-03T12:14:00.001Z

Here, hold my hand. I want to take you to meet some of the world’s richest and most powerful men. (And yes, sorry, they are nearly all men.)

We’re off to Davos in Switzerland, for the annual jamboree of global movers and shakers known as the World Economic Forum. So you’ll need your passport, of course, some nice smart clothes for all those evening parties – oh yes, and some cash.

You won’t want to go as a mere journalist, I know, because that won’t get you anywhere near the inner sanctums (sancta?) where the real money is. So let’s enrol you as a fully paid-up participant.

Did I say fully paid-up? Hang on to your credit card, because here come the numbers. Basic membership fee, entitling you to one invitation: 50,000 Swiss francs (£33,000, or $53,000). Cost of one ticket, 18,000 Swiss francs, plus tax: so total cost of membership plus ticket: £44,000, or $71,000.

Mind you, I should warn you: if you want to get in to the really interesting sessions, the ones where the really important people are, you’ll need to enrol as an “Industry Associate”. That’ll cost £86,000, or $137,000. And yes, you’ll still need to buy a ticket as well.

Ah, you want to bring a friend. Sorry, mere Industry Associates aren’t allowed any friends. You’ll need to be an Industry Partner, which costs a bit more: £164,000, or $263,000. Yes, you guessed: you’ll both need to buy tickets as well.

I could go on, but you’ll have got the idea by now. How do I know all this? Not, needless to say, because I’ve become a member of the Global Club of Movers and Shakers, but because the New York Times very kindly spelt it all out this week in a fascinating article.

So here’s the question: what on earth do they do with all that cash? Well, I did what any self-respecting hack would do: I had a look at their latest annual report. In 2009/10, total revenue: 143 million Swiss francs (£95 million, or $150 million). Total expenditure: about the same, of which about one-fifth went on office costs, 40 per cent on staff, and the rest on “activity-related” costs.

Perhaps none of this matters very much. The people who go to Davos are very rich people who represent very rich corporations. (I assume the politicians get a special rate …) What they do with their cash is their business.

Incidentally, Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times had some useful Davos tips the other day if you do decide to go: they include wear sensible shoes, because of all the trudging through the slush; and end the evening at a party with loud music, because by the end of the day, you’ll have had enough of earnest discussions.

Me? No, I’m not there – not my thing, I’m afraid. But you get a flavour of it from Rachman’s note about a session he went to on global security, just as anti-government protesters were out in their thousands on the streets of Cairo.

“One of the participants was Amre Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League and a former foreign minister of Egypt. The bad news is that I am not allowed to report what Moussa said. The good news is that he actually said nothing worth reporting, so it’s no great loss.”

21 January 2011

2011-02-03T12:13:00.003Z

I imagine you would agree that no government takes a decision that’s more important than going to war.

In which case, presumably, it follows that understanding how and why such a decision is taken is pretty important as well.

That’s why – for those of us interested in the machinery of government – the Iraq war inquiry being conducted by Sir John Chilcot and his colleagues provides such a fascinating insight.

This morning, Tony Blair was back, almost exactly a year after his first appearance at the inquiry. There were no fireworks, but there was a significant – and an uncharacteristic – admission.

Yes, said Mr Blair, in retrospect, it might have been better if the then Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, had been more closely involved in the process of negotiating the UN security council resolution which either did (according to Tony Blair and, eventually, Lord Goldsmith) provide legal cover for the Iraq invasion, or (according to critics of the war and many international lawyers) did not.

The point is a simple one: Tony Blair knew that all his commitments to President Bush in the months leading up to the invasion would be worthless if the Attorney General formally advised the Cabinet that military action would be illegal. He also knew that, almost up till the last moment, that was the Attorney General’s view.

It would have been much easier, Mr Blair suggested, if Lord Goldsmith had been present at discussions about the language of Resolution 1441, because that way he would have seen how deliberately it was chosen in order to offer legal cover for military action as a last resort. (Whether that is indeed what the Attorney General would have concluded, we shall never know.)

We already know from innumerable accounts of the Blair years that he favoured an informal style of government. It didn’t go down too well with civil servants, nor does it, it seems, with members of the Chilcot inquiry. They want to see minutes of meetings, and records of conversations.

In a nutshell, Tony Blair’s approach can be summed up like this: I know what needs to be done, so my task is simply to persuade everyone else – and then do it.

He was not, as prime minister, nor is he now, the sort of man who says: We seem to have a problem, so I’m going to sit down with all my Cabinet colleagues and see if we can work out what to do about it.

I remember interviewing him in Downing Street in December 2002, three months before the Iraq invasion. I asked him if it bothered him that his critics were calling him “Bush’s poodle.”

“Oh, it’s much worse than that,” he said. “I agree with him.”

His problem was that many of his Cabinet colleagues, many Labour MPs, and many British voters, were much less sure. So throughout the pre-invasion period, the question he was asking himself was not: What is the right thing to do? It was: How can I persuade everyone else that what I’m doing is the right thing to do?

You may think that certainty in a political leader is no bad thing. Or you may think that in a Cabinet-system of government, with a civil service offering professional advice, certainty can sometimes risk leading to bad decisions.

When the Chilcot inquiry report is published, it won’t pass judgement on whether the Iraq war was legal. (Just as well, perhaps, given that not a single member of the inquiry team is even a lawyer, let alone a judge.)

But it may well have a great deal to say about the way decisions were made. It won’t provide the sort of headlines that critics of the war are hoping for – it won’t result in Mr Blair being dragged off to The Hague in handcuffs – but I’m pretty confident that it’ll make riveting reading for anyone who’s interested in how we are governed.

14 January 2011

2011-02-03T12:13:00.001Z

How much do you know about Tunisia? Small country, North Africa, nice tourist beaches? Oh yes, and Carthage, of course, three millennia old and definitely worth a visit if you’re in the area.

Or, alternatively, “a police state, with little freedom of expression or association, and serious human rights problems ... Corruption in the inner circle is growing. Even average Tunisians are now keenly aware of it, and the chorus of complaints is rising ... Anger is growing at Tunisia’s high unemployment and regional inequities. As a consequence, the risks to the regime’s long-term stability are increasing.”

Take a bow, former US ambassador Robert Godec, who got it pretty much dead right in a cable to Washington 18 months ago, now released by WikiLeaks.

Last night (Thursday), President Zine al-Abidene Ben Ali tried to put a stop to a month of street protests against his 23-year rule. Food prices reduced, security forces ordered not to use live ammunition, a pledge to stand down in three years’ time.

Will it be enough? The next few days will be critical, and it’s not only the people of Tunisia who are watching anxiously.

Arab leaders have a habit of sticking around. As Blake Hounshell pointed out in Foreign Policy this week, Muammar Gaddafi has been in charge in Libya for 41 years; President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen for 33 years; Hosni Mubarak in Egypt for 30 years. You could add the Assads, father and son, in Syria, 40 years.

Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, east Asia – all of them, over the past 30 years, have seen a flowering of democracy. But not the Arab world, where, with the partial exceptions of Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon, democracy is conspicuous only by its absence.

Just yesterday, the US secretary of state Hillary Clinton was in Qatar, delivering some home truths to Arab leaders: “Across the region, one in five young people is unemployed. And in some places, the percentage is far more. While some countries have made great strides in governance, in many others people have grown tired of corrupt institutions and a stagnant political order. They are demanding reform to make their governments more effective, more responsive, and more open.”

She didn’t mention anyone by name – she didn’t need to – but the message could hardly have been clearer: “Those who cling to the status quo may be able to hold back the full impact of their countries’ problems for a little while, but not forever. If leaders don’t offer a positive vision and give young people meaningful ways to contribute, others will fill the vacuum. Extremist elements, terrorist groups, and others who would prey on desperation and poverty are already out there, appealing for allegiance and competing for influence.”

To which some in the Arab world will reply: Huh! Who’s been propping up these sclerotic regimes all these years? Who’s been backing Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the al-Sauds in Saudi Arabia – and yes, Zine al-Abidene Ben Ali in Tunisia? As ambassador Robert Godec reported in his WikiLeaks cable, there’s been substantially increased US military assistance to Tunisia in recent years, as well as joint counter-terrorism programmes and strengthened commercial ties.

So Arab leaders are nervously watching events in Tunisia, just as they’re watching the slide towards a new political crisis in Lebanon, a country that all too often can act as a touch-paper throughout the Arab world.

The government in Beirut has collapsed, and tensions are rising rapidly ahead of the expected publication of a report by a UN-backed special tribunal which has been investigating the murder of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri. Hizbollah thinks the tribunal will name some of its members as likely culprits, and is gearing up for a major row.

It all adds up to a worryingly combustible mix. Stir together high unemployment, especially among the young, corrupt government, repression, jihadi ideology, oil wealth – no wonder Hillary Clinton is concerned. And she’s not alone.

7 January 2011

2011-01-07T10:43:00.000Z

The trumpets will sound; the drums will beat; the flags will flutter proudly. After a referendum to be held on Sunday, a new nation will be born on the continent of Africa – and great will be the rejoicing.

Well, I’m sorry, but maybe not so fast. For the people of southern Sudan, yes, after decades of war and hardship, it will indeed seem that there is much to celebrate. They have fought long and hard for their independence, and they will be sure that they have earned the right to celebrate.

But my task this weekend is to draw your attention to a few other recent occasions when people celebrated the birth of new nations – and to ask whether perhaps some of their celebrations were just a tad premature.

You may be surprised to learn that over the past 20 years, more than 30 new nations have appeared on the face of the globe. Nearly half of them emerged from the wreckage that used to be the Soviet Union (all the way, alphabetically if not geographically, from Armenia to Uzbekistan).

Seven have emerged from the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia).

There’s also Namibia, which broke away from South Africa in 1990; the Czech Republic and Slovakia which went their separate ways in 1993; and Eritrea, which split from Ethiopia, also in 1993. More recently, East Timor (Timor-Leste) won its independence in 2002, after 27 years of Indonesian occupation – and of course Kosovo declared itself independent of Serbia in 2008.

Some of these countries are doing well enough: Namibia, Slovenia, the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. But others – Eritrea, East Timor, Kosovo – are not (yet?) great success stories.

So the people of Southern Sudan would be wise to be cautious. There is, admittedly, no good reason why the lines drawn on a map by 19th century British colonialists should be set in stone – yet the landlocked south will need more than its fair share of good luck to become a viable independent state.

Its substantial oil reserves could turn out to be a curse as much as a blessing. There are likely to be months of bitter arguments over how to divide up the revenues from oil sales; and the north will want generous terms in return for allowing the oil to travel through its territory in the already existing pipelines.

But the people of the north (mainly Muslim) and the people of the south (mainly Christian) have never had much in common – and what unites them now is a shared wish not to return to war. That, at least, is a positive sign.

Until very recently, there were real doubts whether this referendum would be held on schedule. President Omar el-Bashir was thought to be deeply reluctant to authorise a poll that he knew would result in secession. And when he was indicted by the International Criminal Court in connection with war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in Darfur, it seemed he had little incentive to bow to the will of the West.

But US diplomats have been heavily engaged in Sudan for several months now; and if the referendum goes well – and if the secession of the South takes place without major problems – Washington will have good reason to be pleased.

Some commentators have taken to referrring to Sudan as “Obama’s Rwanda”, a reference to Bill Clinton’s known regret that he didn’t do more to prevent the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

Remember, Sudan is the biggest country in Africa. It’s of major strategic importance and is a key trading partner for China. Its president is the only serving head of state ever to have been indicted as a war criminal.

The stakes on Sunday are high. The omens are a lot better than they looked just a matter of months ago. But there are still many hurdles to be surmounted before the new nation of Southern Sudan can confidently take its place as the newest kid on the United Nations block.

23 December 2010

2010-12-23T10:01:00.001Z

If I were Time magazine, I wouldn’t have named Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook as 2010’s Man of the Year. I’d have named Mother Nature.

Well, not Man of the Year, obviously. Maybe Force of the Year. And there are at least five reasons why.

The Haiti earthquake (January). The Icelandic volcano (April). The Pakistan floods (July). The Chile mine disaster (August). The snow in northern Europe (December).

Even as I write these words, there are reports of violent storms lashing California, Arizona, Nevada and Utah. Los Angeles has received half its annual rainfall in the past six days. So maybe make that six reasons.

Sorry, but if we’re looking for who – or what – has had the biggest impact on our world over the past year, I think Mother Nature beats Facebook by a mile.

And, since this is nearly the end of the year, and traditionally the time when we look back and try to make some sense of the past 12 months, well, my suggestion for Word of the Year is humility.

Humility in the sense that we have been reminded time and again that, much as we might like to think otherwise, we are not Lords of the Universe. We can blog, and tweet, and Facebook to our hearts’ content, but we cannot stop the earth quaking, nor the volcanoes erupting.

I am, by nature, an optimist. I think that, by and large, the world is a better place than it was. Fewer women die in childbirth, fewer children die before the age of five, more people live in relative comfort.

But I also like to think that I’m a realist. I understand that there is still much about this planet we live on that we do not understand. I concede that we have only limited powers to change the course of events. And I acknowledge that every day brings with it the potential to change everything.

I think of the people of Haiti, and of Pakistan, and the miners’ families in Chile. And I marvel at how obsessed we sometimes become by the tittle-tattle of the Westminster village, or the diplo-babble of the latest international summit.

So my cracked and highly unreliable crystal ball stays in the back of the cupboard this year. The predictions I made a year ago were largely rubbish; I was wrong on nearly everything. Humility starts at home.

Instead of predictions, here are some reasons to be hopeful about the future. The American economist Charles Kenny calls the first decade of the 21st century “humanity's finest, a time when more people lived better, longer, more peaceful, and more prosperous lives than ever before. “

Consider these facts, he says: in 1990, roughly half the global population lived on less than a dollar a day; by 2007, the proportion had shrunk to 28 percent -- and it will be lower still by the close of 2010.

Some 1.3 billion people now live on more than $10 a day, suggesting the continued expansion of the global middle class. Even better news is that growth has been faster in poor places like sub-Saharan Africa than across the world as a whole.

We're also winning the global battle against infectious diseases. Between 1999 and 2005, thanks to the spread of vaccinations, the number of children who died annually from measles dropped 60 percent. The proportion of the world's infants vaccinated against diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus has climbed from less than half to 82 percent between 1985 and 2008.

I have no doubt that during 2011 we’ll be bringing you plenty more stories of death, mayhem and destruction. But I just wanted to remind you that there’s more to life than headlines. (Incidentally, on New Year’s Eve, we’ll be broadcasting a special programme about the revolution in African farming, and asking whether Africa is now on the brink of not only being able to feed its own people, but maybe the rest of us as well.)

As I say at this time every year: enjoy the company of your family and friends; admire the trees and the flowers in parks and gardens; count your blessings.

I’ll be taking a few days off now, so no blogging until 7 January.

Have a happy and peaceful Christmas, and a healthy and fulfilling New Year.

10 December 2010

2010-12-10T11:31:00.001Z

A thought occurred to me as I was watching the pictures yesterday of the student demonstrations in central London. Might this kind of mass street protest soon be regarded as, well, so last century?

After all, look at the internet activists who call themselves simply Anonymous, and who have been creating all kinds of online mayhem this week for some of the world’s biggest internet payment operations (Visa, Mastercard, PayPal). Aren’t they somehow more in tune with this new webby age we live in?

What we saw on the streets of London yesterday was pretty much exactly the same as what students were doing when I was at university in the protest-heaven days of the late 1960s.

What the internet activists are up to, on the other hand – organising mass computer attacks on carefully chosen targets – well, that’s something genuinely new.

There are, of course, endless ways of protesting against things you object to. Until the dawning of the internet age, the best way to show how many people opposed a particular policy or a particular course of action was to bring them out on to the streets.

Now, you simply connect up all their computers and jam your target’s web operations. Not so effective as a way of getting coverage on the TV news, perhaps, but every bit as effective as a way of making your objections known to your target.

I’m not in the business of telling protesters how to go about their business, but it is possible to imagine, isn’t it, a student movement of the future organising a mass web attack on, say, a university website, or a government website.

It is also possible to imagine that the action taken against WikiLeaks this week is likely to become the revenge attack of choice for targetted authorities. Deny your attackers server space; pressure their bankers, their payments operators; disable their social network sites so that they can no longer be used to pass messages between their supporters.

I wonder if perhaps the whole WikiLeaks episode does mark the beginning of a new era of online activism. Some people are already calling it the first cyber-war. Maybe that’s overdoing it, but I think some new battle lines are being drawn.

WikiLeaks fired the first shots by publishing their leaked material online. There was nothing all that revolutionary about what they did – it was simply an internet-age version of what the New York Times did back in 1971 when it published the Pentagon Papers (a secret US government history of US involvement in Vietnam which showed that successive administrations had been less than candid about what they were up to in south-east Asia).

Or you may remember Spycatcher, the colourful insider account of alleged MI5 skullduggery by Peter Wright, published in the mid-1980s despite the strenuous objections of the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.

Leaking government secrets is a time-honoured form of journalism. (In fact, one definition of news is: “Something that someone, somewhere, doesn’t want you to print. Everything else is advertising.”)

What’s new about WikiLeaks is, first, the sheer volume of the material they’ve got their hands on; and, two, the way governments have responded and supporters have retaliated.

It’s openly acknowledged that Washington has been encouraging companies that do business with WikiLeaks to suspend all cooperation. Server space has been withdrawn; payments companies have frozen accounts. And the pro-WikiLeak internet activists have gone into battle in response.

You could, if you wished, think of the US government – any government, in fact – as an elephant, under attack by a fearsome swarm of thousands of stinging insects. The elephant is, of course, much bigger and stronger than the insects, but if there are enough of the insects, and if their sting is painful enough, then the elephant will be in real trouble. The internet activists are the insects.

So perhaps what we’re witnessing is the beginning of a new battle for control of the dissemination of information. Internet enthusiasts like to claim that the web is beyond any authority’s control, that it is a genuinely open space, available to every stinging insect on earth.

But someone, somewhere, provides the infrastructure that enables the internet to function. And it’s that infrastructure which seems still to be vulnerable to government pressure.

So, notwithstanding the hacktivists, as the internet warriors like to call themselves, perhaps there is still a future for mass street protests. After all, as we saw yesterday, the police can’t control all the streets all the time.

By the way, you may remember that a couple of weeks ago, when I was in China, I asked on this blog if China is now “throwing its weight around, becoming more assertive, even more aggressive as its economic power increases?”

Well, here’s an answer (an answer, not the answer) from the US assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Johnnie Carson, as quoted in a WikiLeaks cable dated February of this year from the US consul-general in Lagos: “China is a very aggressive and pernicious economic competitor with no morals.”

3 December 2010

2010-12-03T14:12:00.000Z

I’ve been doing some heavy duty eavesdropping this week, eavesdropping on what were meant to be private conversations between American diplomats.

In other words, I’ve been reading the Wikileaks files, hundreds and hundreds of supposedly secret missives, sent to Washington from US embassies around the world in order to inform the policy-makers back home.

And, perhaps oddly, I’ve been thinking of Robert Burns. You may be familiar with the lines: “O, wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see us!”

(They come from a poem called “To A Louse”, which may be appropriate given how some US officials have been talking of the Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange.)

But why Burns? Well, if you’re Kim Jong Il of North Korea, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, or President Sarkozy of France, or Silvio Berlusconi, or Vladimir Putin – yes, even if you’re David Cameron or Gordon Brown – you can now, thanks to Wikileaks, see yourself as others see you. Or at least, as US diplomats see you.

It won’t come as a great surprise to Kim Jong Il that the Chinese are not all that enamoured of him. Nor will President Ahmadinejad be deeply shocked to discover that he’s not flavour of the month in Riyadh.

But to see it written down, to read in black and white what’s being said about you behind your back – well, that must be a bit of a blow.

Still, I think we need to retain a sense of scepticism. Just because something is said in a document marked “Secret” doesn’t always mean it’s the Gospel truth. (And remember, these particular documents were so secret that they were available to something like three million US government employees.)

Take, for example, one of the more interesting disclosures – that China is apparently prepared to countenance the idea of a reunified Korea under South Korean rule.

Says who, you may ask. And it turns out that the source for this little nugget is a senior South Korean official, talking to a US ambassador, about what he believes Chinese officials “would be comfortable with.” I know plenty of journalists who would think long and hard about going into print with that kind of flimsy sourcing.

So what about the description of the Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu as “exceptionally dangerous”? The quote comes, in fact, from an unnamed “high-ranking [Turkish] government adviser” – and we all know about the perils of relying on unnamed advisers as sources.

I’m not suggesting that this vast document dump is uninteresting. Far from it. It shines an unprecedented bright light into corners where normally very little light shines at all. The sensation you get reading the documents is rather like what a child feels, ear pressed to the key-hole, listening to the adults talking on the other side of the door. It’s not so much what they’re saying that’s exciting, it’s that they have no idea we’re listening.

Much of what I’ve read so far confirms what was already pretty well known. The Gulf states are deeply distrustful of Iran; corruption and organised crime are a major problem in Russia; Gordon Brown wasn’t much good at being prime minister.

Embarrassing for some of the diplomats who wrote these missives? Of course. Unwelcome to the sources quoted in them? Undoubtedly.

But deeply damaging to US interests? Here’s the verdict from the US defence secretary Robert Gates, who as a former director of central intelligence presumably knows plenty of real secrets:

“Every other government in the world knows that the US government leaks like a sieve … Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for US foreign policy? I think fairly modest.”

26 November 2010

2010-11-26T03:28:00.001Z

BEIJING -- There’s a saying – I think – that you should sometimes try standing in another man’s shoes, so that you can experience what it feels like to be someone else.

For the past several days, I’ve been here in Beijing, standing (metaphorically) in Chinese shoes, trying to look at the world through China’s eyes. (You can hear a fascinating discussion about this on tonight’s – Friday’s – programme, or via the website.)

Think of China as a 17-year-old, said one Chinese academic on our panel. Nearly adult, but not quite ready yet to shoulder all of an adult’s responsibilities. Whenever things go wrong (climate change, for example), the first reaction is along the lines of “Why should I clear up the mess? It’s not my fault.”

Just about everyone I spoke to made the same point: Yes, China understands that with its ever-growing prosperity come ever-growing responsibilites -- but its over-riding responsibilities are to its own people, and it’s not going to bow to foreign pressure just to keep Washington or London happy.

Take the exchange rate, for example. The renminbi is far too cheap against the dollar, says Washington. It gives China’s exporters an unfair advantage, and contributes to a dangerous imbalance in global trade. (In a nut-shell, China exports too much, and imports too little.)

OK, says China. What would happen if we revalued the currency? We’d lose valuable export orders, and tens of millions of Chinese workers would lose their jobs. Not a good idea. True, China could do more to encourage domestic demand to take up at least some of the slack -- but seen from here, that’s already being done.

Standing in China’s shoes – or seeing the world through China’s eyes – you begin to understand why its leaders are so single-minded in their pursuit of economic growth and domestic stability. This is a country which less than 100 years ago was weak, divided and at war with itself – which helps to explain why it prizes stability almost above all else.

But our panellists acknowledged that sometimes it perhaps fails to appreciate quite how intimidating it can look, especially to its neighbours. We’re like an elephant, they said, but perhaps we should try harder to look like a friendly elephant.

You probably won’t need reminding of the numbers: the biggest population of any country on earth – 1.3 billion and growing; the second biggest economy, having overtaken Japan and now catching up with the United States. Plus, it’s now the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

So what does China want from the rest of the world? More patience, perhaps, and more understanding of its own domestic needs. A realisation that yes, it’s now a massive global economic presence, yet it’s still in many ways a developing nation which needs to invest huge amounts in basic infrastructure.

Is it throwing its weight around, becoming more assertive, even more aggressive as its economic power increases? More assertive, yes, because it sees its own interests threatened by the demands being made on it from outside. More aggressive, no – this is not a country that goes to war against its neighbours (we’ll leave the Tibet discussion for another day.)

When we came to discuss this week’s sharp rise in tensions on the Korean peninsula, after the two Koreas exchanged artillery barrages and four South Koreans were killed, the expert view was that Beijing’s influence over its North Korean ally is probably less than many Western governments believe. The priority for China, they said, is to keep the lid on things – the last thing they want here is a military conflagration on their doorstep or the total collapse of North Korea.

For much of the past 30 years, China has opted for a quiet life in international affairs whenever possible. Its leaders understand now that they need to engage more than they used to – but I have the impression that they’d much rather be left alone.

After all, they have more than enough challenges of their own to deal with, and even though they don’t face the prospect of being voted out of office, they still know that they need to respond to public pressure. And you only have to look at some of the online chat-rooms (not an entirely free debating forum, of course) to see that much of the pressure is for a tougher foreign policy, not a more emollient one.

You may be wondering why I haven’t touched on human rights, or democracy, or the fate of the jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. They are all important issues, but our task this week was to focus on China’s foreign policy and its relationship with the rest of the world. We’ll look at domestic policy on other occasions.

17 November 2010

2010-11-19T10:09:00.001Z

Just about everyone else has had their say about The Wedding – so I don’t see why I shouldn’t as well.

What interests me, though, is not really what kind of dress The Bride will wear – or even where they choose to go on their honeymoon. No, what interests me is why it interests us.

Here are some suggestions.

First, in a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural nation, the royal family remain something that unites us. Love them or loathe them, they provide us with (i) a head of state, and (ii) endless fascination.

Second, if we are, biologically speaking, pack animals – in other words, if in our natural habitat we are programmed to form close-knit groups around a single leader – then the identity of that leader is of obvious significance. (And, given that Prince Wills is the next Annointed Pack Leader but one, it follows that whom he chooses as his mate is important, since they will together, all being well, in time produce another future Annointed Pack Leader.)

And third, we live in an age that celebrates celebrity. And thanks to Prince Diana, the royal family are now A List celebs, guaranteed to sell magazines every time they feature on the cover. Which applies not just in the UK, but from what I can gather by trawling global media websites, just about everywhere else as well.

The US media, for example, in a nation that was founded largely in order to rid itself of royalty, were far more interested in Prince William’s engagement than in the fact, announced the same day, that the UK government has agreed to pay millions of pounds in compensation to British citizens who were detained at Guantanamo. Strange, you might think, but true.

It is impossible to resist the temptation to refer back to the last fairy-tale royal wedding – of William’s parents, Charles and Diana, in St Paul’s Cathedral in 1981. Impossible, if for no other reason, because he chose to present his fiancée with his late mother’s engagement ring. And, being the size it was, you couldn’t exactly fail to notice.

Then, in their first TV interview together, he came out with what I thought was a tellingly poignant answer when he was asked why he had waited so long to pop the question -- “I wanted to give her a chance to back out if she needed to before it all got too much. I'm trying to learn from the lessons of the past.”

From which, surely, we must deduce that he believes that if his mother had been given a similar chance, she would have backed out. That must be a hard lesson for a son to learn. (Remember, Diana was just 19 when she got engaged; Kate Middleton is 28.)

Soap opera? Of course. But maybe that’s part of their job. For as long as there have been newspapers, the doings of the royals have been staple fare. For better or for worse, we feast on them, just as we do on Susan Boyle, David Beckham, or any other celebrity.

I don’t say it necessarily matters very much – but I do think it’s interesting. Don’t you?

A word about next week: I’m going to be in China to report on how it sees its role as an emerging global power. So do try to tune in on Thursday, and again on Friday for a special programme that we’re recording in Beijing with a panel of Chinese foreign policy experts and an invited audience at Tsinghua University.

12 November 2010

2010-11-12T10:06:00.001Z

What do you think is the real reason why David Cameron was in China this week?

I’ll give you a clue: he took nearly 50 British business people with him. So yes, just like President Obama a year ago, President Sarkozy in April, and Chancellor Merkel in July, he was knocking on Beijing’s door and asking: “Scuse me, would you like to buy anything?”

World leaders sometimes give the impression that they see only two things when they stare at China on a map: lots and lots of people, and lots and lots of money.

Some critics find this unedifying. Shouldn’t world leaders have better things to do than hop on a plane to China and plead for a bit of business? Well, it may be unedifying, but let’s just look at some numbers.

When Angela Merkel was in Beijing, Germany signed 10 commercial agreements worth more than $4 billion. The biggest slice of the action went to Siemens, which came away with a research and development deal worth $3.5 billion to provide steam and gas turbines.

Which helps to explain why Germany is still by far China’s biggest trading partner in Europe. After all, they’re both major exporting nations, so it’s little wonder that they sell plenty of goodies to each other.

It also provides some useful context for this week’s announcement that Rolls Royce have secured a deal worth $1.2 billion to provide engines for China Eastern Airlines’ fleet of Airbus A330s. Not to be sniffed at, by any means, but not yet on a par with Germany.

Selling stuff to China means jobs back home. It’s as simple as that, isn’t it? And in these days of sluggish economies and high unemployment, aren’t jobs back home something we want our political leaders to concentrate on?

Perhaps there’s even a link between Mr Cameron’s trip to China and the overhaul of the welfare system that the government announced yesterday. If hundreds of thousands of people are to come off benefits and find real jobs in the real economy, well, those jobs will have to come from somewhere. And if some of them, directly or indirectly, are the result of deals struck in Beijing, I suspect there’ll be few complaints.

So what are we to make of the prime minister’s almost ritualistic remarks about China’s iffy human rights record? He knew, as do all visiting Western leaders, that he had to say something; but he also knew that if he wanted Chinese signatures on those contracts, he couldn’t overdo it.

The words may change from visitor to visitor, but the basic message is always the same: “We really think it would be a good idea if you loosened up a bit, allowed a bit more criticism, perhaps even permitted someone to challenge the Communist party.”

Or, as David Cameron put it: “The best guarantor of prosperity and stability is for economic and political progress to go in step together.”

I wonder how that sounds if you’re a successful Chinese businessman. Lessons in how to create prosperity, from a Europe struggling to emerge from recession? Talk of stability from the Europe of mass French pensions protests and British tuition fees demos?

One Chinese official was quoted this morning as asking, in the context of the G20 talks on global trade imbalances: “Why do you say we should take the medicine if you’re the ones who are sick?”

China is well aware of its economic strength these days. And it’s increasingly prepared to use that strength to bolster its security objectives. Just ask some of its neighbours, like Japan or South Korea, how they feel about China’s growing international confidence. You’ll get some very nervous looks.

I’ll have more to say about China in a couple of weeks’ time, for reasons that will soon become clear.

5 November 2010

2010-11-04T23:50:00.000Z

If you’ve ever been the parent of a small child, you will probably remember those moments when, in a fury of disappointment, it puckered up its little face and screamed: “But you promised!”

You probably explained that people can’t always have everything they want, and that sometimes they have to learn to wait. And then you waited for the response.

“I HATE you.”

I mean no disrespect to American voters when I say that I have been thinking back to my days as the parent of toddlers in the aftermath of the mid-term elections this week. I’m not saying that American voters behaved like children, but after all those uplifting campaign promises of just two years ago – remember Yes, We Can, and Change You Can Believe In – well, is it surprising that millions of them are angry?

One of America’s great strengths, it has always seemed to me, is that its people are eternal optimists. They are convinced that one day, with luck and hard work, they will be rich; that the rest of the world will learn to love the American way of life; and that yes, there is no greater good fortune than to be able to say “I am an American.”

The flip-side of this is that they are impatient. Two years ago, a persuasive Barack Obama promised them better times ahead – and many of them believed him. Instead, they see unemployment levels still high and government spending growing.

President Obama now seems to recognise that he should have been clearer about the time scales he had in mind. A few days ago, he told the TV host Jon Stewart: “When we promised during the campaign change you can believe in, it wasn't change you can believe in in 18 months.”

So now he’s lost control of the House of Representatives and has only a wafer-thin majority in the Senate. The next two years on Capitol Hill will not be a pretty sight.

But we have been here before. Mid-term drubbings – or “shellackings” to use the Obama term – are standard fare, a bit like bye-election defeats in the UK. They tell us next to nothing about what will happen in the next Presidential election, when Mr Obama will be up against, well, who? Are the Republicans really ready to nominate Sarah Palin as their candidate for the White House, with opinion polls suggesting that Obama would easily beat her?

(He’d have a much tougher time against other potential Republican contenders like Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney, according to one poll this week – but as I say, I wouldn’t want to pay much attention to what the polls say now. Two years is a long time …)

A word about the Tea Party movement, which has attracted so much attention. For non-Americans, it may seem difficult to comprehend the level of antipathy which its supporters feel towards President Obama and the Democrats. But again, it does fit neatly into a long American political tradition: suspicion of Washington, suspicion of Federal government spending, hatred of taxes, a deep-seated belief that Americans do best when the government is off their backs.

Some of you may remember Ronald Reagan: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I'm from the government and I'm here to help.’”

But Obama does believe that the government can, and should, help – help those millions of Americans who had no health insurance, and the millions more who have no jobs. He says government spending can do it; but his now much-strengthened opponents say government spending is the problem, not the solution.

They will battle it out between now and the next election – mark it in your diary: 6 November 2012.

15 October 2010

2010-10-15T09:09:00.000Z

You probably thought I was going to write about the rescue of the Chilean miners this week – and I admit I was tempted.

Like millions of people around the world, I was deeply moved by the scenes of jubilation at the San José mine as all 33 of the trapped miners were winched to the surface after their two-month ordeal.

But I think everything that there is to be said has already been said – so instead I want to alert you to a looming story which could be making headlines very soon.

It’s Sudan. A referendum is due to be held there in January, to allow the people of the south of the country to decide whether they want to remain part of Sudan, ruled from Khartoum, or split away to form a separate, independent nation of their own.

If the referendum goes ahead (and for reasons which will become clear, I hope, that is a very big “if”), the general expectation is that the South will vote Yes to independence, and a new nation will be born, the first in Africa since Eritrea emerged from Ethiopia as an independent state in its own right in 1993.

But there are problems. Big problems. Sudan is rich in oil reserves, and much of its oil is to be found -- most inconveniently -- right on the border between north and south. As a result, drawing the line between the two parts of the country becomes a hugely significant exercise, with immense economic implications for both sides.

Remember, Sudan has been riven by civil war for decades. The mainly Arab and Muslim north is deeply distrusted by the Christian and animist south. Only in 2005 did they sign a comprehensive peace agreement as part of which January’s referendum is to be held.

In fact, the plan is to hold not just one referendum, but two. One will be for the south to decide if it wants to secede; the second will be for the people of a small region called Abyei, to allow them to decide whether they want to be considered part of the north, or the south.

And yes, as you’ll have guessed, Abyei is awash in oil fields worth millions of dollars.

Earlier this week, talks aimed at resolving a dispute over the Abyei poll broke up with no agreement. Yesterday, the north said the scheduled referendum can’t now go ahead because there’s no agreement over who can vote.

Does it matter? Fraid so. No less a figure than film star George Clooney has just been there, and on his return immediately dropped in at the White House to exchange notes with President Obama. That’s how much it matters.

Sudan is now increasingly a nation of major strategic and economic importance. China has invested heavily, and the US is deeply involved diplomatically. And if war does resume between north and south, you can be sure that it will also resume in Darfur, to the west.

That’s why a high-powered UN security council mission has just been in Sudan. The US ambassador at the UN, Susan Rice, told security council members yesterday that the president of southern Sudan, Salva Kiir, had warned her that the north is already preparing for war and may have started moving troops southward.

The talk now is of perhaps boosting the UN military presence along the dividing line between north and south, in the hope of deterring fresh violence. But who would provide the troops – and who would pay for them – remains unclear, and it’s by no means certain that the government in Khartoum would go along with the idea anyway.

Did I mention that the Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, has been indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court? He’s the first serving head of state to face such grave charges (they relate to the war in Darfur), and he is probably not too likely to heed calls for restraint from an international community that he regards as deeply biased against him.

But if you want to know what’s keeping the lights burning late at UN headquarters in New York, the answer is Sudan. There are more talks scheduled for later this month – but time is running out and rhetorical temperatures are rising dangerously.

I’m going to be taking a break now for a couple of weeks, so the next newsletter will be on 5 November.

8 October 2010

2010-10-08T15:18:00.002Z

MEDELLIN, COLOMBIA -- If you were listening to the programme last night, you’ll know that I’m in Colombia to report on the country’s continuing war against insurgents and drugs traffickers.

(My piece last night is still available via Listen Again, of course, and there’ll be another report on air tonight. Plus some fabulous pictures by our producer Beth McLeod which you can see via links from the website or from my Facebook page.)

Colombia has been a country at war for several decades. What began as a left-wing guerrilla movement slowly transformed into a drugs-fuelled insurgency, during which right-wing para-military groups and the army both contributed to a death toll over the past 20 years alone of more than 70,000.

Colombia is still one of the world’s largest producers of cocaine. Just this week, the police announced that they had seized 29 million US dollars and 17 million euros in banknotes from a house in the capital, Bogota. The money is thought to have been paid by Mexican drugs cartels for cocaine from Colombia to be shipped on to the US and Europe – it gives you some idea of the scale of the trade.

The authorities here say they are now winning the war. A decade ago, people would have said I was mad to come to Medellin, former stronghold of the notorious drugs king Pablo Escobar, and reputed at that time to be one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

Today, it’s very different. You can stroll along the streets perfectly safely, although there are still some poorer neighbourhoods where you’re advised not to venture – and last year, the murder rate here did rise rapidly again.

So, what changed? First came Plan Colombia, a US initiative that pumped billions of dollars into strengthening the Colombian army and police and tried – mostly in vain – to eradicate the coca plantations.

Then, in 1993, Pablo Escobar was shot dead by police, and slowly, the authorities regained control in areas where for years they had been absent.

When I met Brigadier General Alberto José Mejía Ferrero, commander of the 4th Brigade of the Colombian army, he told me security is paramount in any counter-insurgency strategy.

Without security, he says, nothing makes sense. Without security, you can’t deal with poverty, or build roads or schools, or do any of the other things that make a State worth living in. It’s a lesson that he says governments elsewhere would do well to learn – in countries like Mexico, spiralling ever deeper into Colombia-style drugs-related violence, and even in Afghanistan, where classic counter-insurgency strategy bears a close resemblance to what has been tried here in Colombia.

So much so that Afghan army officers are now being trained in Colombia so that they can learn from this country’s experience. The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said on a recent visit: “There’s a great deal to be learned from the success that has been seen here in Colombia.”

But there is a darker picture too. The cultivation of coca, which is used as the basis for cocaine, has barely diminished at all. New, smaller trafficking networks have been established to take the place of the once powerful cartels.

As for the army’s “successes”, well, Gloria Arboleda has a very different story to tell. Her husband disappeared one day in 2007 after going out to work as a day-labourer with a friend. He never returned, and eventually Gloria learned that he had been shot by the army as an alleged “guerrilla”. Her eyes filled with tears as she told me: “They took away the father of my children. I think of what happened every single day.”

There are more than 1,300 cases of so-called “extra-judicial killings” being investigated in Colombia, and human rights groups complain that little action is ever taken against military abuses. General Mejía of the 4th Brigade says on the contrary – there are hundreds of cases of army personnel serving jail terms after being convicted of unjustified killings.

But of course there’s more to winning a war against drugs cartels, guerrillas and para-militaries than just sending in the army. A former mayor of Medellin, Sergio Fajardo, took me to Santo Domingo, one of Medellin’s poorest neighbourhoods – it used to be regarded as one of the most dangerous parts of the city – to show me what he did to start rebuilding a functioning community.

He showed me a modernistic school he built for local children – and an architectural award-winning library and cultural centre to be used by local people.

“It’s no good just killing the men with the guns if they are immediately replaced with others,” he says. “You have to ask yourself why young people choose to go through a door that leads only to violence and death – and you have to provide them with another door, one that leads to education and opportunity. It’s the only way to weaken the gangs and strengthen the State.”

Security, a strengthened State, and a rebuilt civil infrastructure. A useful lesson for Mexico – or Afghanistan? Colombian officials say Yes, without a doubt. But others are not so sure. The critics say there is still a culture of impunity in which too many crimes go unpunished; there is still widespread corruption; and coca is still being grown in huge quantities.

Colombia today is certainly a much better place than it was a decade ago. But its war has not yet been won.

1 October 2010

2010-10-01T10:18:00.001Z

I’m beginning to ask myself if perhaps Ed Miliband isn’t a very nice man.

I confess he’s always been perfectly charming when I’ve interviewed him – and he does have a reputation among his colleagues of being a lot easier to get on with than his brother David. (“A real human being” is what some of them call him.)

But, m’lud, the prosecution case is as follows:

Political fratricide: he stood for the party leadership knowing that if he won, he would destroy his older brother’s political ambitions. (Declaration of interest: I am an older brother.)

Ruthlessness: he disavowed large chunks of his colleagues’ work in government, including that of Gordon Brown, the man in whose orbit he circled for so many years. (Naïve about the markets? Wrong to claim he could end boom and bust? Over-influenced by focus groups? Ouch, and ouch again.)

More ruthlessness: he was rude about the Blair/Mandelson love of wealthy men (Silvio Berlusconi, Cliff Richard, Oleg Deripaska) – I quote from his speech on Tuesday: “We came to look like a new establishment in the company we kept …” Oh yes, and he has already summarily sacked the Labour chief whip, Nick Brown.

The case for the defence, m’lud, is this:

Ed Miliband knows that to most voters, he was, until last weekend, almost completely unknown. He also knows that to many of his own party members, he’s the wrong Miliband.

So he needs to demonstrate who he is, what he believes, and that he has the political courage to be a party leader.

Anyway, all this stuff about “fratricide”: would David have faced the same charge if he’d won? If not, why not? What law of politics says older brothers always have to have what they want? Does primogeniture feature in the Labour party constitution?

And members of the jury, I ask you to look at the findings of the latest YouGov opinion poll for The Sun: after less than a week since he was elected, half of the people asked said they already thought Ed Miliband would do well as Labour leader.

Seventy-one per cent said he was right to say that Labour had made mistakes in government; 56 per cent agreed with him on Iraq; 65 per cent agreed with what he said about not supporting “irresponsible strikes”; and clear majorities backed him on a higher bank levy, higher taxes for the well-off, and a higher minimum wage.

But Mr Miliband has already made himself plenty of enemies at the top of his own party. Many of his former ministerial colleagues must have been inwardly seething as he ripped in to their legacy. What did Alan Johnson or Jack Straw think, for example, when he spoke of how Labour had sometimes “seemed casual” about civil liberties?

And what did Gordon Brown think when he claimed to lead a new generation “not bound by the fear or the ghosts of the past”? (Unlike whom, do you think? The Blairs and the Browns, maybe, who entered parliament in the 1980s and lived through a decade of opposition?)

I’ve been to a great many Labour party conferences over the years – and this week’s was definitely one of the strangest. It took a while for me to realise why: for the first time in more than 15 years, it wasn’t dominated by the TB/GBs. (TB = Tony Blair; GB = Gordon Brown)

That war is over. And David Miliband’s withdrawal from the front line means it won’t be continued by proxy. But Ed Miliband will now have to persuade his party that he can win elections (watch out for the local polls next May), and then the country that he has what it takes to be prime minister.

I’m going to be taking a break from domestic politics next week – Ritula will be in Birmingham with the Conservatives, while I’ll be overseas to report on … well, tune in next week to find out.

24 September 2010

2010-09-24T09:29:00.001Z

Imagine you’re in a small boat, heading towards what you know will be a fearsome storm. Your young captain assures you that it’ll all be fine, and that on the other side of the storm, the seas are calm, the sky is blue and the sun shines brightly.

Out in front is a much bigger boat – you’re following it because your captain is determined that it knows where it’s going as it ploughs through the heavy seas. “I’ve discussed it with their captain,” he tells you. “We’ve agreed on the course we’ve set and I’m committed to it.”

Now you know what it feels like to be a Liberal Democrat. Captain Clegg tells you to hold your nerve as the clouds gather – but how brave are you? When I spoke to Lib Dem delegates at their party conference in Liverpool this week, it wasn’t fear that I saw in their eyes, but I’m not sure it was bravery either.

For now, most of them are prepared to trust Captain Clegg. He’s convinced them, for now, that he knows what he’s doing. But how fierce will the storm be when the public spending cuts begin to bite? And will their supporters on the quayside still be there, waving their flags and cheering, when the good ship Lib Dem limps into port?

(I’m not sure how much longer I can keep this metaphor going, but bear with me for one more paragraph.) And what about the big Labour ship, which hasn’t left port for months? Once one of the Captains Miliband takes control, will it head off in an entirely different direction – or at least at a much slower speed – avoiding the storm and making it back home long before you do, and in much better shape?

End of metaphor. In fact, I found the Lib Dems in Liverpool to be in pretty good heart. They like being in government at a national level, even though many of them already have experience of being in office either at a local level or in Scotland. Lib Dem ministers making policy announcements from the conference platform are an exciting novelty in a party that hasn’t had a taste of national power for 65 years.

And yet. They look at the opinion polls and they fear what’s coming. In local elections (and Scottish and Welsh elections) next May, perhaps in the midst of strikes by public sector workers furious about job cuts, will the Lib Dems lose hundreds of council seats? Will they even lose the referendum on a new voting system, that glittering prize which Nick Clegg won in return for signing up with the Tories?

And will they then ask themselves what they’re getting out of this coalition deal? Yes, they can tell voters that they have played a part in government at a national level, but what if that government becomes deeply unpopular, and Labour basks in the sunshine of opposition under a new and energetic leader?

Here’s what top Lib Dems say in response. First, we can already show that we have done good things in government (tax concessions for the low paid; an end to ID cards and DNA data base records; a bank levy; a Freedom Bill); second, remember that the spending cuts will be phased in over five years, so it won’t be as if a mammoth sword of Damocles comes smashing down immediately after George Osborne’s spending announcement next month.

And third, in the handful of local council by-elections they have contested since they entered the coalition, they haven’t been slaughtered.

But are they at risk of losing their identity? Could Nick Clegg’s speech to the party conference on Monday have been delivered by David Cameron, as some delegates grumbled? A lot of it probably could have been, although not the line when he said that he still thinks that the war in Iraq was illegal.

So what do the Lib Dems want? Nick Clegg is telling them that in government they can make a real difference. (“I still believe in our commitments to the developing world. The difference is I get to make those commitments at a UN summit and make them happen. I still campaign for political reform. The difference is I’m now legislating for it as well.”)

That’s the nice bit. The nasty bit is what voters might think if the Osborne Plan for reviving the UK economy doesn’t work. Before the election, Nick Clegg said he didn’t believe that the spending cuts the Conservatives were planning would be justified. “Do I think that these big, big cuts are merited or justified at a time when the economy is struggling to get to its feet? Clearly not.”

The big question over the coming months is whether voters decide he was right then – or is right now.

17 September 2010

2010-09-17T09:30:00.000Z

If you’re a typical Brit, you’re probably not much bothered about the visit to our shores this weekend of the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, aka Pope Benedict XVI.

About two-thirds of Britons are neither for his visit nor against it, according to a recent opinion poll, which, given the history of these islands, you may find somewhat surprising.

But there again, maybe not. We are, by and large, a secular nation these days – fewer than half of us go to church and our national leaders are careful to keep religion out of day-to-day politics. (Tony Blair’s former consigliere, Alastair Campbell, who once famously remarked “We don’t do God”, wrote interestingly yesterday of being a “pro-faith atheist”.)

And yet. Even if you remember only a few scraps from your school history lessons, you’ll recall that the role of Rome in our national life has often been the major issue of the day. You could even argue that Britain’s post-Reformation identity is built overwhelmingly on the notion that we are not subject to religious diktats from Rome.

On the other hand, there are about a billion Catholics in the world. About five million live in the UK, although only about one million go to church regularly. (That’s about the same number as in the Church of England.)

Back in the days when I was a reporter based in Rome, I had to cover Papal pronouncements on a regular basis. Sometimes it wasn’t easy to decide whether they were genuinely news-worthy. The rough rule of thumb, I was advised, was this: if the Pope had said the opposite, would the world have been surprised? If the answer was Yes, then probably the latest pronouncement wasn’t earth-shattering.

For example, suppose the Pope says it’s important to abide by Church teaching. Would we have been surprised if he’d said it wasn’t important? Yes, we would, which means that what he actually said probably wasn’t all that interesting.

Yesterday, in Edinburgh, Pope Benedict spoke out against what he called “aggressive forms of secularism”. In his homily during the open-air Mass that he celebrated later in Glasgow, he talked of the “dictatorship of relativism”, a favourite theme of his.

It’s not for me to pass judgment on what he said –– but I can say, I think, that these remarks needn’t necessarily be taken as shocking or provocative. After all, if you believe that you have been chosen by God to lead his flock and spread the Christian message, you are bound to be concerned by the secularism you see all around you.

All Popes have their critics, both within and outside the Catholic church. This pope in particular had no shortage of them even before he was elected to the pontificate. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he was known in some circles as “God’s rottweiler”, because of his previous job as the Vatican’s guardian of doctrinal orthodoxy. His reputation, you could say, preceded him.

And then came the terrible deluge of sex abuse allegations made against paedophile priests in many different countries. The Vatican’s response was less than sure-footed, and I suspect that a substantial part of the anger that’s being directed by some critics at the Pope during this visit stems directly from the horror of the stories that have emerged.

Take Richard Dawkins, for example (and if anyone qualifies for the title of aggressive atheist, then surely he does). He described the Pope as “a leering old villain in a frock” and the church he leads as a “profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution.”

Would he have chosen to write in similar terms about the Chief Rabbi and Judaism? Or the imam of al-Azhar mosque in Cairo and Islam? The Guardian columnist Michael White quoted a friend the other day as having once remarked that “anti-Catholicism is the anti-semitism of the Left". That may be stretching things a bit, but there does seem to be a visceral hatred of Catholicism in some quarters that you don’t find aimed at other religions.

Perhaps part of the explanation is that we live in a sceptical age, and Catholicism, more than most, is a religion of certainties. Non-Catholics – and especially non-believers – tend to find religious certainty difficult to deal with.

That’s not to say that there aren’t different theological strands in Catholicism, just as there are in all other major religions. But perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised when a Pope – especially this Pope – preaches a traditional Catholic message.

10 September 2010

2010-09-10T09:31:00.000Z

I think this might be a good moment to remind you of the words of the First Amendment to the US constitution:

“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble …”

From which it follows: one, that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has a constitutional right to build his Islamic cultural centre close to the site of the September 11th attacks in New York; and two, that Pastor Terry Jones of the 50-strong Dove World Outreach Center church in Gainsville, Florida, has an identical constitutional right to express his opposition to what he calls “extreme Islam” by burning copies of the Koran.

By the time you read this, it may have become clearer what these two men’s precise intentions now are. (At the time of writing, Mr Jones has “suspended” his Koran-burning plans; Imam Rauf is denying that he’s agreed to move the site of his proposed cultural centre.)

You will remember, I suspect, the furore five years ago when a Danish newspaper published a series of cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Mohammed. Many Muslims were deeply offended by what they took to be a gratuitous insult aimed at a religion which forbids the creation of images of the Prophet. Violent protests in many Muslim countries led to scores of deaths.

Those of you with longer memories may remember an earlier furore, in February 1989, when angry Muslims in Bradford burned copies of the novel The Satanic Verses. The author, Salman Rushdie, became the subject of a fatwa issued by the then supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and had to spend several years living undercover.

I was a newspaper reporter at the time, and wrote that the Satanic Verses row “encompassed a myriad of complexities: Two great religions, Islam and Christianity; secularism versus religious orthodoxy; artistic freedom versus state power; pluralism and tolerance versus doctrinal certainty.”

The issues today are much the same, but this, I would remind you, was more than a decade before the attacks of 9/11; it is as well to remember that these tensions long pre-date that fateful September day in 2001.

According to an opinion poll published yesterday in the Washington Post, two-thirds of Americans object to the proposed Islamic cultural centre close to where the twin towers of the World Trade Center used to stand. And 49 percent say they have a generally unfavourable opinion of Islam – that’s the highest number since immediately after the 9/11 attacks.

Many Americans fear Islam. Nearly one in five wrongly believe that their President and commander-in-chief, Barack Obama, is a Muslim. Terry Jones’s church in Florida says its mission is “to expose Islam for what it is … a violent and oppressive religion that is trying to masquerade as a religion of peace, seeking to deceive our society.”

His plans to burn the Koran succeeded in uniting an extraordinarily disparate range of critics, ranging from the Pope to President Obama, General David Petraeus, and the US defence secretary Robert Gates, who phoned him personally last night to ask him to call off his protest.

Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential candidate, wrote on her Facebook page: “Book burning is antithetical to American ideals. People have a constitutional right to burn a Koran if they want to, but doing so is insensitive and an unnecessary provocation – much like building a mosque at Ground Zero.”

Which brings us back neatly to the issue of rights and responsibilities. I remember that at the time of the Danish cartoons controversy, a number of people said Yes, of course the newspaper had the right to publish them, but surely it also had a responsibility not to.

And now, some people are saying the same about building an Islamic cultural centre close to Ground Zero -- or organising a Koran-burning protest.

So what do you think? Do we sometimes have a responsibility not to insist on our rights, if there is a risk of causing deep offence or provoking a violent response? Or is it an essential part of living in a free society that we do have a right to say and do things, even if they cause offence?

3 September 2010

2010-09-03T10:26:00.000Z

I’ve got an idea – let’s ignore the Middle East diplomatic gavotte that wheezed back into life in Washington yesterday (don’t worry, I’ll tell you if anything interesting emerges), and let’s concentrate instead on what might be going on in North Korea.

Here’s why: some time next week, the biggest meeting of the ruling North Korean Workers Party in more than 40 years is likely to take place – thousands of party representatives will gather in Pyongyang and, just maybe, approve the naming of the country’s next leader.

The expectation is that the name to emerge will be Kim Jong Un, the 30-ish son of the current leader Kim Jong Il, who is said to be in frail health after reportedly suffering a stroke two years ago.

At about the same time, the South Korean leader, Lee Myung-bak, will be on an official visit to Russia to meet President Medvedev. And you can guess what will be high on their agenda: the suspected torpedoing of a South Korean naval vessel, the Cheonan, last March, and the killing of 46 of its crew (you may remember that I wrote about it here last May).

The Korean peninsula remains one of the most dangerous potential flash-points on the planet. North Korea, to the horror of its neighbours, now has a rudimentary nuclear weapons programme; and its rigidly authoritarian and secretive regime has kept its people in poverty and isolation for more than half a century. A change of leadership is bound to add to regional nervousness.

And there are still serious questions to be asked about the mysterious explosion that sank the Cheonan. An international investigation team, made up mainly of South Koreans, but including experts from the US, Britain, Australia and Sweden, concluded that the corvette had been holed “as the result of an external underwater explosion caused by a torpedo made in North Korea.

“The evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the torpedo was fired by a North Korean submarine,” its report says. “There is no other plausible explanation.”

Pretty unambiguous, you might think. But another investigation was carried out by a Russian team – and although its findings haven’t been made public, a detailed report of its conclusions published in a South Korean newspaper leaves no doubt that the Russians came to a very different conclusion.

Their report suggests that the Cheonan had run aground while sailing in shallow water and that its propeller got caught up in a fishing net and triggered an underwater mine. According to the South Korean newspaper Hankyoreh, it says: “Prior to the sinking, the Cheonan came into contact with the ocean floor on the right side, and there is a very strong likelihood that the propeller wings were damaged as a net became entangled with the right propeller and shaft.”

The international investigation team reported that they’d also found a torpedo fragment on the seabed with what they took to be North Korean markings. But there is disagreement about how conclusive that evidence is – some analysts suggest the torpedo fragment could have been lying in the water for quite some time.

And then, last week, into this combustible mix stepped former US president Jimmy Carter, on what turned out to be a successful mission to obtain the release of a US citizen, Aijalon Mahli Gomes, who was serving an eight-year prison sentence in North Korea for having entered the country illegally.

It followed a similar mission a year ago by former President Bill Clinton to obtain the release of two imprisoned US journalists – and led to an elegantly-barbed Twitter post from the US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley: “Americans should heed our travel warning and avoid North Korea. We only have a handful of former Presidents.”

Talks about North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme are stalemated again. After the sinking of the Cheonan, a new, tougher sanctions package was imposed on Pyongyang. But was the Carter mission a sign that both Washington and the North Koreans are putting out feelers? The former US ambassador Donald Gregg suggested last week that there may be “an emerging realisation within the Obama administration that its current stance toward the North, featuring sanctions and hostility, is having little positive impact, and that a return to some form of dialogue with Pyongyang needs to be considered.”

You may think the Korean peninsula is a long way away and needn’t much concern us. But at least when you see next week’s headlines, you’ll know a bit more of the background.

13 August 2010

2010-08-13T10:14:00.000Z

Did you see that someone has apparently just paid £140 million for a flat in London? The identity of the buyer isn’t known, but somehow I suspect it isn’t one of the 40 American billionaires who promised the other day to give away at last half of their fortunes.

Mind you, if you’re a multi-billionaire, £140 million isn’t such a huge amount to pay for a nice penthouse apartment with a decent view.

The problem with these numbers is that the words “million” and “billion” are so similar. They disguise the fact that for, say, Bill Gates (total wealth estimated at $53 billion), buying that London pied-à-terre would represent an outlay of less than half of one per cent of his total fortune.

(Someone in the BBC newsroom wrote in a headline a couple of days ago that a Whitehall department was planning to cut two billion pounds from its nine million pound budget. It’s an easy mistake to make …)

So let’s talk numbers. How does someone amass so much money that they can afford to give away tens of billions and still have more than the rest of us can even dream of?

I’ve done a rough analysis of those 40 “philanthro-capitalists”. Sixteen of them are bankers, investors or financiers – in other words, they have made their money from money. Five of them (including Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft, Irwin Jacobs of the wireless technology company Qualcomm, and Jeff Skoll of eBay) got rich from computing and information technology. There’s a sprinkling of property tycoons and a handful of media barons (Michael Bloomberg and Ted Turner, for example).

In most cases, their wealth stems largely from the value of the shares they own – or owned – in the companies they have created. They haven’t stolen it from anyone; you could argue that they have created the wealth by their own ingenuity and acumen – and our pensions probably depend at least in part on the aggregate value of the shares in their companies.

Even so, some commentators feel uneasy about the fact that it is possible for these billionaires to become so unimaginably wealthy. Writing in the New Yorker, James Surowiecki wrote: “Between 2002 and 2007 … the bottom ninety-nine per cent of incomes grew 1.3 per cent a year in real terms -- while the incomes of the top one per cent grew ten per cent a year. That one per cent accounted for two-thirds of all income growth in those years.”

And Peter Wilby in The Guardian expressed concern that very rich people could now be having a hugely disproportionate impact on which good causes are adequately funded and which are not. “If the rich really wish to create a better world, they can sign another pledge: to pay their taxes on time and in full; to stop lobbying against taxation and regulation; to avoid creating monopolies; to give their employees better wages, pensions, job protection and working conditions …”

I suspect most people would argue that billionaires who are generous are far better than ungenerous ones. The instinct to share one’s good fortune is surely preferable to miserliness. (After all, all the major religions emphasise the importance of charitable giving.)

The American dream tradition depends on a belief that anyone, no matter how humble or disadvantaged their origins, can aspire to wealth and happiness. The question that’s being asked – and I take no position on this – is whether at some point too much wealth becomes somehow undesirable rather than desirable.

Is the distribution of wealth as important to the well-being of a society as its accumulation? What’s preferable: to allow a handful of very rich people to decide what should be done with that wealth, or for them to pay more in taxes to government, so that governments can make the decisions about redistribution, poverty alleviation, medical research and so on?

As always, I’d be interested in your thoughts.

6 August 2010

2010-08-06T09:26:00.001Z

Once upon a time, not such a long time ago, Asif Ali Zardari was known to his fellow-countrymen as Mr 10 per cent.

He was in jail, facing corruption charges, relating to allegations that he had skimmed huge commission payments off government contracts while his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was prime minister.

Then, in December 2007, she was assassinated. Within a year, he had been elected President. Last night, as Pakistan faced what the UN is now calling a “major catastrophe” – the devastating floods that are laying waste to huge swathes of the country – he was dining at Chequers with David Cameron.

Over the past three years, I have written on this blog more often about Pakistan than almost any other country.

After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, I wrote: “Pakistan now becomes the most dangerous of all current global flash-points. It is a nuclear power; and it harbours jihadists who in the past have played a major role in the disintegration of neighbouring Afghanistan and have offered finance, training and organisational infrastructure to bombers in the UK and elsewhere in Europe.”

Less than two years later, after another spate of violence, I wrote: “Pakistan is in a permanent state of crisis. It is used to weak government, rampant corruption and insecurity. I've lost count of the number of times I've read - or even written - that Pakistan is teetering on the brink of collapse.”

This week, The Economist writes: “Pakistan is lurching from crisis to crisis, with an anaemic economy, religious extremism and an uncertain political dispensation.”

How’s this for a litany of disaster? Pakistan’s worst ever air crash, 152 people killed. The worst floods for 80 years, at least 1,600 people killed, four million people affected. Three days of violence in Karachi, the country’s business centre and largest city, at least 80 dead.

That’s just in the past nine days. Oh, and did I mention the Taliban insurgency along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan? The 12,000-plus people who were killed in political or sectarian violence last year alone?

And as if all that wasn’t enough, along comes David Cameron and chooses – in India, Pakistan’s giant neighbour and rival – to accuse it of “looking two ways” on terrorism.

Regional analysts have been arguing for quite a while now that Pakistan may well turn out to be a much bigger international security threat than Afghanistan. (We hear so much more about Afghanistan becuse that’s where US and British soldiers are dying. This week New Zealand suffered its first fatality there.)

When suspected jihadi terrorists are arrested in the UK, they’re far more likely to have links to Pakistan than to Afghanistan. Even Osama bin Laden, if he’s still alive, is more likely to be in Pakistan than in Afghanistan. At our counter-terrorism conference at Chatham House last month, Pakistan was the word on nearly everyone’s lips.

But bear this in mind: to the Pashtuns who live along the Afghan-Pakistani border, there is no border. The Durand Line, drawn up by the British colonial diplomat Henry Mortimer Durand in the 1890s, slices through the Pashtun tribal area – and it exists more in the imagination of cartographers than on the ground.

On the Afghan side, the Afghan Taliban fight to remove foreign troops from their land and avoid domination by Tajiks (who make up more than half of the Afghan National Army) and other non-Pashtuns. On the Pakistani side, the Pakistani Taliban fight to preserve their rule over the border areas and keep the central government weak.

When President Zardari insists that Pakistan is fighting terrorism with all its might, he’s thinking of the Pakistani, not the Afghan, Taliban. And when David Cameron says he’s not doing enough, he’s thinking of the other lot.

It’s a mess – and it’s dangerous.

30 July 2010

2010-07-30T12:57:00.001Z

Do you think David Cameron might be a secret revolutionary? I know he calls himself a Conservative (albeit a “liberal Conservative”), but I’m beginning to wonder whether beneath that fresh-scrubbed exterior, there beats a truly revolutionary heart.

Consider the following evidence: he’s put together a government coalition unlike anything Britain has seen for more than half a century. He’s proposing the biggest cuts in government spending in modern British political history. He’s proposing major changes to the way English schools are run; an overhaul of the way the National Health Service is organised in England; reform of the way the police are organised; and changes to the way we elect members of the Westminster parliament that would almost certainly change the shape of UK politics for generations to come.

Overseas, he’s told President Obama he wants a different kind of relationship with Washington; he’s started wooing Turkey and India – and upset Israel and Pakistan in the process.

There’s more, but that’s probably enough for now. (This morning, there’s news that Iain Duncan Smith wants to tear up the benefits system and start again.) My mind starts spinning just thinking about it all. Is this what voters expected when they went to the polls last May?

And one more question: how much of it will actually happen? Because, let us not forget, he needs parliamentary approval for each and every one of his proposals – and there are already rumblings of discontent.

The Labour opposition are planning to vote against his idea of a referendum next May on voting reform. (Which is deliciously paradoxical, you might think, given that before the election, Labour were the only party to come out in favour of the system that Mr Cameron and his Lib Dem colleagues are now proposing.) A few dozen of his own MPs are threatening to join them.

Tory backbenchers aren’t wildly enthusiastic about his NHS reforms, nor about his scrapping of the schools building programme if it means that school improvements in their own constituencies now won’t happen. And there’s a nasty row brewing over defence cuts as well. Stand by for a scaled-back Trident nuclear weapons programme and squeals of anger from the defence lobby.

The Lib Dems are finding it hard to swallow the proposed increase in value added tax rates, nor do they like all Mr Cameron’s talk of capping immigration from outside the EU. (Business leaders don’t seem to like it much either – they’re worrying about where they’re going to get all their IT people from.) Conservative backbenchers are equally dubious about increasing capital gains tax, which would hit owners of second homes, most of whom probably vote Tory.

So how many MPs actually share the Cameroonian revolutionary vision? Is he leading his troops bravely into battle, shaking up a country that needs an injection of new vigour after 13 years of Labour rule? Or as he turns around and looks behind him, will he find sullen foot soldiers, reluctant to budge, unconvinced that these are battles they want to fight?

I have to admit that there are times when I feel I need a mirror to make sense of it all, because everything is beginning to look back-to-front.

Is Labour really accusing the Tories of being soft on immigration as they loosen the restrictions on foreign students? Soft on terrorism because they’ve scrapped the stop-and-search provisions of the Terrorism Act? Soft on crime because Ken Clarke is wondering whether short prison sentences are a good idea and Theresa May is about to get rid of ASBOs?

So is there a danger than Mr Cameron is trying to do too much too quickly? We know that he doesn’t want his government to acquire a reputation as a slasher of government spending and little else. We also know that he believes governments need to act quickly if they hope to make real changes.

But here’s the thing. Has he bothered to explain to his own party what he’s doing? Has he considered that they may not be as impressed with his ambitious agenda as his Lib Dem deputy, Nick Clegg? And what does he intend to do when one or more of his reform proposals gets bogged down in the House of Commons?

History teaches us that revolutions often turn in on themselves. Sometimes they devour themselves with ugly consequences. If over the next few months there’s growing unrest among public sector workers as thousands of jobs are cut – and if the economy splutters to a stand-still, or tips back into recession – how much appetite for revolution will Mr Cameron’s followers still have?

He has set himself a mighty task – and if he does pull it off, it’s just possible that he may earn himself a place in the history books as a more radical prime minister even than Margaret Thatcher. But there’s still a long way to go …

23 July 2010

2010-07-23T12:09:00.000Z

I can’t help feeling that sometimes international lawyers are their own worst enemies. (Unless, of course, you wish to follow the perhaps apocryphal example of the Labour party politician Ernest Bevin, who on being told that Herbert Morrison was his own worst enemy, is said to have retorted: “Not while I'm alive, he ain't.”)

The judges who sit on the International Court of Justice in The Hague have just given us the benefit of their opinion on the legality or otherwise of Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia in February 2008.

You need to read those words very carefully. They have given their opinion on the legality of the declaration. Not the legality of the secession, or the legality of the self-declared independent state of Kosovo. What the judges were concerned with was the declaration, not the act.

You may wonder how useful that is. Not our problem, say the judges. We were asked for our opinion on a declaration – which is true, since the UN General Assembly, at Serbia’s request, did ask specifically for just that – so that is what we have given.

Is Kosovo a legally constituted state? No answer. Was its secession from a legally constituted UN member state (ie Serbia) in accordance with international law? Again, no answer.

There are two fundamental principles in international law: one is that all legally constituted states are entitled in law to have their territorial integrity protected, in other words, no one can come along and bite a chunk out of the country without its consent.

The second is that all peoples have the right to self-determination, to decide of their own free will how, and by whom, they wish to be governed.

Sometimes, as in Serbia/Kosovo, these principles come into conflict. On the one hand, Serbia is entitled to its territorial integrity; on the other, the people of Kosovo are entitled to self-determination.

But if you were hoping that the International Court of Justice might help find a formula to reconcile these two principles, you will have been sorely disappointed.

First, it ducked on territorial integrity. Yes, it says, “this principle … is an important part of the international legal order and is enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations.” But what the Charter says (Article 2, paragraph 4) is that “all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State.”

Therefore, says the Court, “the scope of the principle of territorial integrity is confined to the sphere of relations between States.”

Now, I’m no lawyer – never have been, never will be – but what I understand this to mean is that if, for example, Albania had annexed Kosovo by force, that would have infringed Serbia’s territorial integrity. But a unilateral secession does not come into the same category.

(What the Court thinks about NATO’s intervention, without UN approval, in 1999 remains unclear – I imagine it wouldn’t be too difficult to argue that it was the “use of force against the territorial integrity” of Serbia, although admittedly it was never overt NATO policy to dismember Serbia.)

So what about self-determination? Again, the Court ducked. According to the helpful press release in which it summarises its findings: “Turning to the arguments put forward … concerning the right of self-determination … the Court considers that the debates on these points ‘concern the right to separate from a State … That issue is beyond the scope of the question posed by the General Assembly …’ The Court concludes that ‘general international law contains no applicable prohibition of declarations of independence.’”

So, let’s put all the legal niceties to one side. What does it add up to in the real world? First, whatever the legalese small print might say, this is a big political win for Kosovo, and a big defeat for Serbia, who, after all, asked the Court for its opinion in the first place. It will encourage other secessionist movements – in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Somaliland, even northern Cyprus – and it will probably encourage more countries to recognise Kosovo as an independent state. (So far, only 69 countries do, including the United States and 22 of the 27 members of the European Union.)

It will complicate Serbia’s attempts to join the EU; it will encourage those Serbs who believe the world is irredeemably prejudiced against them; and, at least in the short term, it will probably increase local tensions, especially in the north of Kosovo, where Serbs are still the majority.

And it will do nothing to bring an agreement on Kosovo’s status any closer. But when all’s said and done, you may think that’s a job for politicians, not judges.

That’s certainly the view from Washington – a US official was quoted yesterday as saying: “We do not believe that declarations of independence are legal acts whose legality is affirmed or denied by this international court. They are political facts that have to be established through political realities.”

What do you think?

16 July 2010

2010-07-16T22:29:00.000Z

You may have seen the survey this week that suggested that more than three-quarters of British Jews support a two-state solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

They’re in good company. So too, if we take them at their word, do the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, US president Barack Obama, and just about every other major world leader you care to name.

And let’s not forget the 52 per cent of Jewish Israelis who are also in favour, according to one recent poll, and the 49 per cent of Palestinians.

In which case, you may ask, what’s the problem? Well, where do I start? There may be new sweet mood music drifting out from the recent chin-wag in Washington between Mr Netanyahu and Mr Obama; there may be the ritual expressions of willingness to negotiate, but the truth, I fear, is that it all adds up to very little.

If I sound pessimistic, I’m in good company too. According to the same poll quoted above, carried out jointly by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah and the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, two-thirds of Israelis and Palestinians say the chances for an independent Palestinian state within the next five years are low, if not non-existent.

A recent article in the Jerusalem Post suggested, not entirely seriously, that a more promising idea would be to press for a five-state solution. You could have Hamastan in Gaza, which is already ruled by Hamas; Fatahland in the West Bank, where the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority is in charge; Palestine in those parts of Israel where Arab Israelis are in the majority (and don’t forget that they make up one-fifth of Israel’s total population); Haredia for Israel’s ultra-orthodox Jews (known in Hebrew as Haredim); and Israel for secular or non-Orthodox Jews and any Palestinians who would rather live in Israel.

It’s an absurd notion, of course. But in the absurdity, perhaps there may be a grain of truth; because by exaggerating, it may help to illustrate the true scale of the problem. Definitions? Borders? Viable economies? Maybe that’s why there are increasing numbers of people, on both sides of the divide, who are beginning to question whether the notion of a two-state solution may not be almost as absurd.

According to a recent report from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, Israel now controls more than 42 per cent of the occupied West Bank. That includes not only the 200 or so settlements, regarded as illegal under international law, but also the roads that run between them, the army check-points, and the land sealed off by the Israeli military as vital to Israel’s security needs.

And when a year ago, Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed, for the first time, the notion of an independent Palestinian state, he added such a long list of caveats – it would have to be demilitarised; it would have to cede control of its air space to Israel; and it would have to recognise Israel as an explicitly Jewish state – that the Palestinians lost no time in dismissing his remarks as meaningless.

Here’s something else for you to consider – according to the veteran Israeli journalist and commentator Danny Rubinstein: “One can sense a great change among Palestinians – a new lack of trust in the possibility of a Palestinian state. In Ramallah, Nablus, and Hebron, people are talking and writing about this. It is interesting that the shift is taking place at the very time when the whole world is united in pressing Israel to help the Palestinians create a state of their own.”

This is what he wrote in the left-wing American journal Dissent: “In international diplomacy there is a pervasive idea that it is possible and necessary to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza that will exist side by side with Israel. Many Israelis and Palestinians want this and believe in it. But the forces working against this possibility are many and powerful ... On the Palestinian side … a new situation has emerged. National unity has dissolved, the national movement has atrophied and declined, and the idea has become acceptable that if there won’t be two states for two peoples, it is better that there be one state.”

Fine, you may say, let there be one state. But there’s just one problem. That state could no longer be explicitly Jewish – and for the vast majority of Jewish Israelis, whether secular or religious, that will always be a step too far.

9 July 2010

2010-07-09T09:17:00.002Z

Do you remember the chilling message issued by the IRA back in 1984, after they’d narrowly failed to blow up the entire British cabinet in the Grand Hotel in Brighton?

This is what they said: “Today we were unlucky -- but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”

I was reminded of it this week, as I chaired a conference at the London think-tank Chatham House to consider counter-terrorism strategy five years after the London suicide bombings which killed 52 people. The conference was organised jointly by The World Tonight, the journal International Affairs, and the Economic and Social Research Council.

Luck, said one of the participants, is not a good counter-terrorism strategy. (Under the rules of a Chatham House conference, participants may not be publicly identified – but what they say can be reported without attribution.)

Luck? Well, consider this: in the five years since 7 July, 2005, there has been no successful terrorist attack on British soil. Indeed, since 11 September, 2001, there has been no successful terrorist attack on US soil. (Unless you count the killing of 13 people on the US army base at Fort Hood, Texas, last November, allegedly by an army pyschiatrist, Major Nidal Malik Hasan.)

But it’s not for want of trying. Remember Faisal Shahzad, who tried to detonate a bomb in Times Square, New York, in May? Remember Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is alleged to have tried to blow himself up on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit last Christmas Day? And on the same day as our conference in London, US prosecutors in Brooklyn charged an alleged senior al-Qaeda operative, Adnan el-Shukrijumah, in connection with an alleged plot to bomb three New York subway lines.

In this country, there was the failed attack on Glasgow airport and two London targets almost exactly three years ago; and just yesterday, three men were convicted in connection with the “airline bomb plot” of four years ago, when they are alleged to have planned multiple suicide bomb attacks on trans-Atlantic flights.

In Norway and Germany, also yesterday, three men were arrested, accused of being al-Qaeda members and of plotting more bomb attacks. One was of Uighur origin, one from Uzbekistan, and the third from Iraq.

So perhaps we should assume that the threat of more terrorist attacks is still with us. The question is whether the various counter-terrorism services involved in combatting the threat have learned from the atrocities of the past decade.

Yes, they have, was the verdict of the officials, analysts and academics who spoke at our conference. But probably they didn’t learn quickly enough, and they still have a tendency to learn only from their own experiences rather than looking at other people’s as well.

But how do you know if your counter-terrorism strategy is working? You don’t, is the simple answer. Absence of evidence (in other words, you can’t see anything dangerous going on) is not the same as evidence of absence (in other words, it’s not proof that nothing is going on.) Just because there have been no successful terrorist attacks in the UK for five years doesn’t mean that there might not be one tomorrow morning.

We spoke at the conference – of course – about the causes of terrorism. There was talk of alienation, a sense of grievance, anger at injustice, whether real or perceived, and a sense of exclusion from the mainstream. All of them can sometimes be factors, it was agreed, but none of them on their own is sufficient to explain why someone would turn to mass murder.

We considered whether you can counter the terrorist threat without breaking international human rights laws. Does there have to be a trade-off between security and freedom? No, said most of our participants, because without security, there can be no freedom. But no one was very keen on the use of “control orders” which can be tantamount to a particularly severe form of unending house arrest. “The least worst option”, one of our speakers called them.

As for “engaging” with communities from which a terrorist threat might emerge, when does “engaging” slip into “monitoring”? Can you tell local community leaders that you want their help, while at the same time you’re erecting secret cameras and recruiting informants?

Inevitably, we had a lot more questions than answers. And then, yesterday the Home Secretary, Theresa May, announced that she’s removing the right of police to stop and search people on the street under anti-terrorism legislation, unless they can show that there is a “reasonable suspicion” that someone may be a terrorist.

And the European Court of Human Rights halted the extradition to the US of the controversial Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri on terrorism charges, while it considers whether the lengthy jail sentence he would face there if convicted would contravene international human rights law. (He is currently in jail in the UK for soliciting to murder and racial hatred.)

If only there were easy answers. And if only I could think of something better to end with than the line often attributed, or mis-attributed, to Thomas Jefferson: “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

2 July 2010

2010-07-02T10:03:00.001Z

Repeat after me: “Nothing is as it seems.”

Why? Well, because whenever the air waves crackle with stories about spy rings and espionage plots, alarm bells start ringing in my head. Nothing is as it seems. Ever.

After all, spies – and those who recruit and run them – are meant to be experts at deception. They want you to believe things about them that aren’t true. In other words, they lie, not only about what they do, but also about what the other lot do.

I have no way of knowing whether the FBI’s allegations against the “Russian spy ring” that they claim to have wrapped up this week are true or false. The defendants will eventually have their day in court and we will, perhaps, learn a bit more. There again, we may not.

I understand that “retro” is often regarded as the height of cool. But the stories I’ve been reading this week make James Bond look like cutting-edge contemporary. Do 21st century spies really still swap identical bags as they brush past each other?

Listen to this account, courtesy of FBI agent Maria Ricci. The date: May 2004. The place: Forest Hills station, Pennsylvania. “[They] converged on a staircase, carrying all-but identical orange bags. Toward the middle of the stairs, as they passed one another, Metsos quickly handed Russian government offical his orange bag and the Russian government official quickly handed Metsos his orange bag … Metsos then continued ascending the stairs and Russian Government official continued descending the stairs.”

And if you were writing a spy thriller, would you dare come up with dialogue as clunky as this? FBI undercover agent to alleged Russian spy: “Excuse me, but haven’t we met in California last summer?” Alleged Russian spy to FBI agent: “No, I think it was the Hamptons.”

Yes, of course, it’s easy to mock. But please, let’s keep a sense of perspective here. For 10 years, so we’re told, the FBI tailed, tapped and monitored this cell of cunning sleeper agents. Did they, even once in all that time, catch them passing on valuable secrets that were vital to US national security? No, apparently, they didn’t.

So did they at least catch them trying to steal any secrets? Again, it seems, negative. Did they observe them trying to bribe or blackmail any US officials – or anyone else for that matter – in the hope of obtaining any secrets? Yet again, so it would seem, no, they didn’t.

After a decade-long surveillance operation, the FBI charge sheet amounts to no more than that these singularly ineffective alleged spies conspired to act as agents of a foreign government, and were guilty of money-laundering. If I were a Russian tax-payer, I’d be asking for my money back.

OK, now here’s the serious stuff. Yes, of course the Russians are spying on the US. And the US is spying on Russia. And each of them has spies trying to catch spies. That’s what they do.

But here’s what I want to know. Why did the FBI really decide to wrap up this operation now? The official explanation is that one of the alleged spies was about to leave the country. But why would that have been such a major disaster, given that – as far as we know – they had acquired no information more valuable than the mind-numbingly dull minutiae of suburban US life?

Why not, if the FBI were getting bored, just tap these alleged “illegals” on the shoulder, and whisper: “Hey, we know what you’re up to – get out, and don't come back.”

Maybe there’s something we’re not being told. Maybe this really is much more serious than it seems. On the other hand, maybe it really is no more than a 10-year farce.

I do know this, though -- there’d be a lot less about it in the papers if one of the alleged spies wasn’t an unusually good-looking young woman with a penchant for publishing pouting pictures of herself on the internet. After all, how could you possibly have a decent spy story without a flame-haired temptress?

So did you laugh out loud when you read about their capers? Or does it worry you that somewhere in the “wilderness of mirrors” that is the world of espionage, there still seem to be people who yearn for the days of the Cold War?

25 June 2010

2010-06-25T10:06:00.000Z

Just suppose President Obama hadn’t fired General Stanley McChrystal this week as his top commander in Afghanistan. What would have been the headlines from the warzone?

Perhaps that this month has seen the highest number of fatalities among foreign troops in Afghanistan since the invasion in 2001?

Or that a report from the UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said that nine years on, “the overall security situation has not improved”?

(Just one line from the report: “The rise in incidents involving improvised explosive devices constitutes an alarming trend, with the first four months of 2010 recording a 94 per cent increase compared to the same period in 2009.”)

Or, as the New York Times reported, that criticism of the Afghanistan strategy is mounting on Capitol Hill, even among President Obama’s allies, and that public support for the war is crumbling?

The respected military analyst Anthony Cordesman wrote in a sobering critique this week: “Two critical questions dominate any realistic discussion of the conflict. The first is whether the war is worth fighting. The second is whether it can be won. The answers to both questions are uncertain.”

How many times have we been told that the key to success in Afghanistan is not military but political? Over and over again, we’ve read that bolstering the authority of the Afghan government is every bit as important as defeating the Taliban militarily.

As Fred Kaplan wrote on Slate.com: “Counter-insurgency wars, as has been said countless times, are fought by, with, through, and on behalf of the host country's national government. The idea is to provide security, so the government can bring its people basic services. If the government is incompetent, corrupt, or widely viewed by the people as illegitimate, then a counterinsurgency campaign — no matter how brilliantly planned or valiantly fought — is futile.”

Which means, I assume, that President Hamid Karzai holds the key. And who was the one senior US official who seemed to be able to get on with Mr Karzai? None other than the now departed General McChrystal.

So here’s where we are. General McChrystal has been fired, despite President Karzai’s public entreaties that he should be allowed to stay on. The US special envoy Richard Holbrooke stays on, despite President Karzai’s refusal to have any more dealings with him.

And President Karzai stays on too, despite the widespread belief that he rigged his election victory last year, and despite Washington’s impatience with his apparent inability to get a grip.

What’s more, the clock is ticking. In December, President Obama will be given a “strategic review” assessment of where things stand in Afghanistan. And, according to the current plan, in exactly 12 months from now, US troops will begin to withdraw.

The Canadians and the Dutch have already announced that their troops will be going home next year. The British prime minister David Cameron and his defence secretary Liam Fox have both been sounding less than convinced recently that Britain’s military contribution should continue for much longer.

After the death of the 300th British serviceman in Afghanistan earlier this week, Mr Cameron said: “We are paying a high price for keeping our country safe, for making our world a safer place, and we should keep asking why we are there and how long we must be there.”

That doesn’t mean that British troops are about to pull out. But it may be relevant that the new coalition UK government seems to feel much less of a need to cosy up to Washington than did its Labour predecessors (and, to be fair, I think the same could be said in the opposite direction of President Obama when compared to President Bush).

It may also be relevant that Pakistan is reported to view the enforced departure of General McChrystal as an opportunity to step into the gap he leaves behind. One report suggests that Islamabad is now presenting itself as a new “viable partner” for President Karzai, with its army chief General Kayani “personally offering to broker a deal with the Taliban leadership.”

The new US commander in Afghanistan is General David Petraeus, a man much admired for his perceived achievements in Iraq, and who virtually single-handed wrote the US military manual on how to conduct counter-insurgency operations.

So if anyone can win the war, it’s probably General Petraeus. Except, of course, that as his own doctrine acknowledges, counter-insurgency operations can’t be won militarily.

And that, I’m afraid, is where we came in.

18 June 2010

2010-06-18T10:09:00.003Z

How about taking a break from the World Cup for a moment and considering these three little words?

Truth. Justice. Peace.

I imagine you’re in favour of all three. But are they sometimes incompatible? The question arises in the wake of the Saville report into Bloody Sunday. (Quick update for those of you who’ve been on Mars this week: 30 January 1972, 13 people killed by British troops during a civil rights march in Londonderry – the worst incident of British security forces killing British citizens since the Peterloo massacre of 1819.)

The report was the result of an inquiry that lasted an astonishing 12 years, at an equally astonishing cost of £190 million. But did it arrive at the truth about what happened on that terrible day?

For the families of those who died, this was the key paragraph in the report: “None of the casualties shot by soldiers ... was armed with a firearm or (with the probable exception of one victim) a bomb of any description. None was posing any threat of causing death or serious injury. In no case was any warning given before soldiers opened fire.”

Why is that paragraph so important? Well, compare it with what the Widgery report said, in the immediate aftermath of the killings: “When the vehicles and soldiers … appeared in Rossville Street they came under fire … There is no reason to suppose that the soldiers would have opened fire if they had not been fired upon first … There is a strong suspicion that some [of those killed and wounded] had been firing weapons or handling bombs in the course of the afternoon …”

None of that, says Saville, is true. And 38 years later, the relatives of those who died were able to shout one word in triumph and vindication after his report was published: “Innocent.”

So let’s accept that, at last, we know the truth about what happened. What about justice? Is it justice that so much effort should go into investigating these particular deaths, when thousands of others have gone uninvestigated?

The journalist and military historian Sir Max Hastings wrote in the Daily Mail: “The long catalogue of Republican atrocities against the British and Irish peoples goes unexplored. Of all those who perished in the Troubles, just 10 per cent were killed by the security forces; 30 per cent by Protestant militants; 60 per cent by the IRA.”

And Lord Tebbit, who with his wife was a victim of the IRA bomb attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984, wrote: “The victims of Brighton are no less important than those of Londonderry. They should not be treated as second-class victims.”

Many former IRA bombers are now free men. Indeed, the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness, was a senior IRA commander in Londonderry at the time of Bloody Sunday, and, according to the Saville report, “was probably armed with a Thompson sub-machine gun, and though it is possible that he fired this weapon, there is insufficient evidence to make any finding on this …”

So no, there will probably be no justice for the families of the other 3,600 people who were killed during the 30 years of Northern Ireland’s “Troubles”.

How about peace? The political commentator Danny Finkelstein wrote in The Times this week: “To stop the killing (in Northern Ireland), we sacrificed principles that should stand above everything. We sacrificed the rule of law and the principle of one law for everybody. We sacrificed justice and accountability to the courts. We bought peace but there is a bill to pay. And today we must pay it.”

So is this the lesson of Saville? That to get at the truth, and to bring peace, you sometimes need to sacrifice justice? Was that also the lesson of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, another country where decades of political injustice and oppression were finally brought to an end?

What are the lessons for other countries – Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia, Brazil, Chile – countries where thousands more people long for both peace and justice after suffering the most appalling atrocities?

And what are the lessons for the International Criminal Court, investigating allegations of terrible crimes in Sudan and Kenya, but where bringing the guilty to trial may make peace less likely?

Guilt is rarely to be found only on one side, yet there is often a tendency at the end of bitter conflicts to prosecute only the losers. In the case of Northern Ireland, the Financial Times commentator John Lloyd reached this verdict: “There is no question that the IRA initiated most of the bloodshed; that the Unionist community had allowed discrimination to flourish for the half-century of Northern Ireland's existence; that the British government had, until the troubles flared in 1968, simply ignored the issue. There is no question, finally, that trained killers in British uniform ran amok.”

So, if you’ve arrived at the truth, and peace has returned, is justice sometimes an unaffordable luxury?

11 June 2010

2010-06-11T11:14:00.001Z

The words at the top of our programme blog say we “try to make sense of the world”. For me, though, the question today – given what is happening in South Africa – is can I make sense of the World Cup?

It comes round, regular as clockwork, every four years. So I ought, by now, to have been able to work out what it’s all about. But in the same way as some people just don’t get poetry, I don’t get sport.

Here’s what I wrote at the start of the World Cup tournament four years ago: “I admit I’m not the most devoted sports fan in the world: personally, my life would be none the poorer if no one kicked, threw or batted a ball ever again. But I’m not immune to what goes on all around me, so I do watch the big events, and yes, I’ll be watching if and when England get close to the final.

“Sport does something to people. It re-ignites tribal loyalties, hence the war paint on fans’ faces and the deafening honking of car horns after a win … So does sport bring people together? Or does it drive them apart? … If war is a continuation of politics by other means, as Clausewitz famously said, then perhaps sport really is a continuation of war by other means.”

Earlier this week, we held a small party to mark The World Tonight’s 40th anniversary, which we celebrated a couple of months ago. The controller of Radio 4, Mark Damazer, said some nice things about us (thank you, Mark, they were much appreciated) – and mused aloud about what would be The World Tonight approach to an England victory in the final of the World Cup.

Fortunately, it’s not a problem that I need to worry about. If we do have to come up with something interesting to say, I know our production team will rise to the occasion. And, of course, I will, being the obedient professional that I am, do what is required of me.

There’s a lot, needless to say, that I don’t know about football – although for some reason, I think I do understand the offside rule. And I do understand, of course, why South Africa, which was football mad anyway, is now even football madder as it becomes the first nation in Africa to host the tournament.

But I didn’t know, until I read it in the New York Times, that “the first documented soccer games played on the African continent were staged in … Cape Town and Port Elizabeth in 1862. That was one year before the rules of association football were codified in England …”

I can’t help wondering, though: will everyone be obsessed in India? Or China? The world’s two most populous nations seem rather less smitten with the delights of soccer than just about everyone else.

But I do admit that when I travel, I’m often taken aback when people immediately start talking about football as soon as they discover where I’m from. Just the other day, in Arizona of all places, someone asked me out of the blue: “Will you be OK when we beat you?” It took me a few moments to work out that they were talking about the England-USA World Cup match this weekend.

So perhaps you can help me out here. Are you World Cup obsessed? If so, why? What exactly does it do for you? And if (sorry, when) England do win, how do you think we should deal with the story?

4 June 2010

2010-06-04T20:03:00.000Z

There’s probably been more than enough written about Israel’s actions on the high seas last Monday morning, when it intercepted a flotilla carrying aid supplies on its way to Gaza. Nine people were killed in the operation, several of them from Turkey – and it is Turkey’s role that I think it may be worth focusing on.

Consider: a Muslim nation, a member of NATO, and a close US ally. Also, until recently, a close ally of Israel as well, with extensive military and diplomatic ties.

The words “until recently” are the key. Not so long ago, there were real hopes that, with behind-the-scenes help from Turkey, Israel and Syria were inching towards a peace deal that would have a profound impact on hopes for a broader Middle East settlement.

Not any more. The ruling AK party of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has its roots in Islamist tradition, and Turkey is now playing a much more assertive role in international affairs. (As an example, it got together just a couple of weeks ago with Brazil, another emerging global player, to broker a deal with Iran over uranium enrichment.)

There have been furious anti-Israel demonstrations in Turkey since the Gaza flotilla attack. The prime minister has attacked what he called Israel’s “irresponsible, heedless, unlawful attitude that defies any human virtue.”

And yet. The Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, has been quoted as saying that Turkey is still ready to “normalise” its relations with Israel, if it lifts its blockade of Gaza. And an unnamed government official is quoted as saying that “roughly 40 people on board [one of the ships] were jihadis who came for violence … They were preparing to attack, to kill and to be killed.”

Washington seems keen to encourage Turkey not to slam the door on Israel – and it could be that in the coming months, the US and Turkey will begin to work together to try to find a way out of the current Middle East impasse.

There’s going to have to be some serious fence-repairing. Eighteen months ago, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, clashed furiously with Mr Erdogan – and more recently, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, had to issue a formal apology to Turkey after humiliating Ankara’s ambassador in an Israeli television interview.

For now, Gaza is the key. Israel maintains the blockade because it regards Hamas, which controls the territory, as a terrorist group seeking to destroy the Jewish state. Opening up the borders, it says, would allow arms to flood in and pose a serious risk to Israeli security. (Egypt keeps its border closed most of the time as well, because Cairo regards Hamas as closely tied to the semi-outlawed opposition group the Muslim Brotherhood.)

As for the Obama administration, it has some very tricky footwork ahead of it. It desperately wants support at the UN security council for a new package of sanctions against Iran. Turkey is a current member of the security council – but Washington was not impressed by its joint Iran initiative with Brazil.

So on the one hand, the US wants to reassure Turkey that it still values its ties to Ankara. On the other, despite the current frigid state of relations between President Obama and the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Washington cannot be seen to siding with those whom Israel regards as its enemies.

Western policy in recent years has tended to concentrate on building a path towards a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, with most attention on the future of the West Bank. The 1.5 million people living in Gaza often seem to have been ignored.

But the former British ambassador Sir Jeremy Greenstock wrote a couple of days ago:
“We are coming close to losing the chance of a two-state solution. US policy, based on a West-Bank-only approach, is locked in a cul-de-sac if Gaza is left out of the equation.”

It’s worth noting that some of the harshest criticisms of Israel’s policies have come from within Israel itself. The left-wing novelist David Grossman wrote: “The closure of Gaza has failed. It has failed for four years now. What this means is that it is not merely immoral, but also impractical … This insane operation shows how far Israel has declined. There is no need to overstate this claim. Anyone with eyes to see understands and feels it.”

By the way: I’ve been in Arizona for the past few days, talking to people about the deeply divisive political row over immigration laws. It’s a debate that has many parallels with our own debate at home, so I hope you’ll listen out for my report, to be broadcast on The World Tonight on Monday.

28 May 2010

2010-05-28T14:46:00.000Z

NEW YORK -- I’m here for the closing hours of the somewhat inelegantly named Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference. (In UN jargon, it’s simply RevCon, and you can see why.)

They have these things every five years – the general idea is to take stock of how adherence to the non-proliferation treaty is going and do whatever tweaking is necessary.

Now, if you’re old enough to remember the 1960s and 70s, you will remember when the debate over nuclear disarmament was a very big deal. Ban the Bomb was as potent a marchers’ slogan then as Troops Out Of Iraq was in the first decade of the 21st century.

We lived with the threat of nuclear Armageddon. We knew that the US and Soviet Union could blow us all to bits many times over – and at the height of the Cold War, we were taught how to shelter under tables and cover our windows with brown paper if nuclear war looked imminent.

So what happened? Why has this conference passed virtually unnoticed? India and Pakistan have both acquired a nuclear weapons capability since the non-proliferation treaty was signed; so has North Korea, and Israel has had one for decades, even if to this day it refuses to say so.

In theory, what they’ve been talking about here over the past month or so is how to strengthen the mechanisms which are meant to prevent more nations going nuclear – and, in parallel, hasten the process by which those nations that already are nuclear move towards being un-nuclear.

The conference is due to end today. If the delegates representing 189 governments fail to agree on a final statement, many will interpret that failure as a sign that the non-proliferation treaty is on its last legs. Five years ago, at the last review conference, they did fail – so a failure again today would mean that for a full decade, no discernible progress has been made.

You may think that UN conferences come and go, end in failure, yet somehow the world seems to survive. (Does anyone remember the Copenhagen climate change conference?)

But many senior diplomats think this is a crucial moment. In the Middle East, there are countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, all of which might begin to wonder if the time has come to dip a toe into the nuclear weapons water. Tensions on the Korean peninsula could lead to some serious re-thinking in east Asia as well.

If you heard the programme last night, you’ll have heard my interview with Henry Kissinger, national security adviser and secretary of state to both Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford in the 1960s and 70s. He’s one of several eminent elder statesmen who have signed a declaration calling for progress towards a world free of all nuclear weapons.

But he takes a chillingly “real politik” view of the likelihood of that happening. And he more than half accepts the principle that a nuclear balance of terror can, paradoxically, help keep the peace. Ask yourself this: are India and Pakistan more or less likely to go to war – as they have done so often in the past – now that both are nuclear powers?

“There is a substantial element of truth in the balance of terror argument,” said Dr Kissinger. “But only when the balance was bi-polar.” In other words, when it was just the US and the Soviet Union eye-balling each other, the risk of nuclear Armageddon was manageable. Now, he says, it is much more difficult to keep that risk properly balanced.

I asked him if the reality is that, over the coming years, the world is likely to see more nuclear-armed powers, not fewer. Yes, he said, that is the reality -- unless someone actually uses a nuclear bomb. If that were to happen, it would give an immediate boost to the non-proliferation cause.

We left the rest of that terrible thought unspoken. But as you enter the United Nations headquarters building these days, you see huge photographs of what Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked like after the US atom bomb attacks in 1945. Some thoughts don’t need to be spoken.

By the time I’m back on air tonight, we may even know whether RevCon 2010 has come up with something worthwhile. At the very least, they’re hoping to be able to agree to hold another conference in two years’ time to discuss specifically a nuclear-free Middle East. Israel says it can’t even begin to talk about that until after a comprehensive regional peace settlement has been agreed.

My guess is it’ll take many more conferences.

21 May 2010

2010-05-21T09:48:00.000Z

There was a time when if you sank another country’s warship, it was universally regarded as a pretty unambiguous act of war.

So what did North Korea think it was doing when, according to a report by a team of international investigators, it fired off a torpedo at a South Korean corvette and sank it with the loss of 46 lives?

Trying to delve into the minds of North Korea’s leaders is a task that has beaten much better brains than mine. But I can at least come up with a few questions that need to be asked, even if I’m woefully short of answers.

First of all, was it a deliberate attack, or a mistake, an accident, or an act of insubordination by an ill-disciplined submariner? If it was the latter, it would be deeply worrying: North Korea is not the sort of place where you want the military running out of control.

Second, if we assume that someone in authority did give the order to fire the torpedo, why?

Third, who was that someone in authority? If it wasn’t the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, who is said to be in poor health after reportedly suffering a stroke two years ago, who else could it have been? And, again, why?

And fourth, what will South Korea do about it? After all, no government can sit idly by after 46 of its citizens have perished in an unprovoked military attack.

As I say, I have no good answers, but here are a few salient facts to bear in mind.

First, yes, the attack on the corvette Cheonan last March was an act of war, but, in theory at least, North and South Korea are still at war. An armistice agreement was signed at the end of the Korean war in July 1953, but although it was signed by the UN, the US, North Korea and China, it was never signed by the South Koreans. The two sides did sign a non-aggression pact in 1991.

Second, the most recent naval clash between the two countries, last November in disputed waters of the Yellow Sea, was reported to have resulted in the deaths of one or more North Korean seamen. The March torpedo attack could have been ordered in retaliation.

Third, North Korea has a long history of provocative acts when it wants to attract attention in the hope of persuading others (in this case, presumably, South Korea) to engage directly in negotiations. The current government in Seoul is far less amenable to such contacts than were its predecessors.

And fourth, yet again, all eyes are on China. It is North Korea’s most important ally, but is reported to have been less than impressed by the way Pyongyang has handled the nuclear weapons issue. Kim Jong Il was in Beijing earlier this month, but little is known of what transpired.

All of which will make for a difficult encounter when US secretary of state Hillary Clinton turns up in Beijing this weekend. She’ll want to know what the Chinese know about the Cheonan incident; but it’s doubtful that she’ll learn much. As the New York Times reported yesterday, the report blaming the attack on North Korea “injects a potentially combustible element into [Clinton’s] talks.

Even nearly 60 years after the end of the Korean war, the divided peninsula remains one of the word’s most dangerous potential flash-points. No one knows what will happen after Kim Jong Il departs from the scene, but there have been recent reports of renewed famine in parts of the country and a UN humanitarian aid team is due to visit later this month.

As for the South Korean response, no one seems to be expecting retaliatory military action, although there may well be some noisy sabre-rattling in the form of joint US-South Korean naval exercises, just to remind the North that its neighbours to the south still have some powerful friends.

14 May 2010

2010-05-14T09:00:00.001Z

Regular readers may recall that from time to time I pick up odd bits of paper that I find on the bus. I’m never sure if they actually exist, or whether I’m simply imagining them – but this is one I picked up yesterday.

It was headed “Note to Nick – for your eyes only”, and it was unsigned. This is what it said:

“Nick: first of all, congratulations. You did it. One day soon, when you have a moment, you’ll have to explain to me how – having won fewer seats than you had last time – you’ve ended up as deputy Prime Minister. Not bad going, I reckon. Not bad at all.

“Second, you asked for my thoughts on what you should do next. Here are some early ideas.

“ -- You need to move fast to end this “gay wedding in the Downing Street garden” stuff. Yesterday’s papers were full of it after your lovey-dovey press conference with Cameron, and it’s got to stop. It’s not helpful – remember what Spitting Image did to David Steel by portraying him as David Owen’s puppet? These things can do real damage.

“ -- If you were thinking of changing your name to Cameron, don’t. (Ask Miriam about it if you’re not sure.) I’ve already heard Robin Lustig on The World Tonight call you “David Clegg” during one of the TV debates – he insists it was a slip of the tongue, but you can never tell with these people.

“ -- You need to start thinking right now about the party conference in the autumn. Osborne’s emergency budget will be horrible, as you know (by the way, you will make sure, won’t you, that Vince Cable isn’t rude about him in public – what he says in private is one thing, but you must keep Vince busy … I know he’s fuming that he’s not Chancellor, but let him take out his frustration on the bankers). I suggest you urgently get something meaty done on political reform – the AV referendum bill, House of Lords, whatever – to throw to party members. You may be able to keep them quiet for another year – but five years? No chance … Well done, by the way, for keeping the TV cameras out of the party conference this weekend – you can’t be too careful at this stage of the game.

“ -- Keep going with the happy-clappy stuff. You don’t have to worry about Sarah Palin, so “changy feely” works well here. Callers to the phone-in shows have been overwhelmingly positive so far … we need to keep talking about the “new politics” for as long as we can.

“ -- Try not to do Cameron better than he does. He doesn’t like it, and he’ll turn on you if he sees your ratings going up while his go down. It’s going to be tricky, but you need to remember that he is the boss. (Maybe stick a note on your fridge door? “Tories: 306 seats. Lib Dems: 57”.)

“ -- Finally, you may not like this, but grow a beard. Obviously, you’ll need to discuss with Miriam, but it will help voters tell you and Dave apart. (It might also win you the support of Keith Flett of the Beard Liberation Front who, as far as I know, has never voted Lib Dem in his life.)”

As I say, I may have imagined the whole thing …

And now a quick note about a special programme we’re doing next week. As part of our 40th anniversary celebrations, I’ll be chairing a special World Tonight debate at the leading foreign policy think tank Chatham House. The subject is “Britain in the world: the future of British foreign policy.” We’ll have a panel of speakers from the UK, the US, Germany and India, and if you have a question you’d like me to put to them, please send it in, either by email or as a comment on the blog, before Tuesday lunch-time.

The programme will be broadcast next Wednesday, 19 May, at 8pm on BBC Radio 4.

7 May 2010

2010-05-07T11:57:00.001Z

What do you mean, you still don’t know who won? It’s easy: no one did. They all lost.

The Tories didn’t get the majority they needed; Labour lost shed-loads of seats, and won only a slightly higher share of the national vote than in their disastrous election showing in 1983.

And the Lib Dems? Well, it seems Clegg-mania lasts barely longer than 24-hour flu. It looks as if they won pretty much exactly the same share of the vote as they did in 2005.

Thousands of voters lost as well – lost their opportunity to vote as long lines outside polling stations swamped the system. There were ugly scenes in some places, and there’ll be some ugly recriminations as everyone tries to shift the blame to someone else.

I’ve just got home after my all-night stint at the BBC World Service. And I don’t mind admitting that I am mightily perplexed. It was Ed Miliband who came up with that politicians’ favourite, when I spoke to him in the small hours of the morning: “The people have spoken. But we don’t know what they said.”

Here’s what I think they said. Despite all the focus on the national TV debates and the main party leaders, voters seem to have made up their minds based on their assessment of their local constituency candidates and local issues.

Except, of course, in the places where they didn’t. (I’m sorry, but it’s been that sort of night.) There’s no national picture – or at least none that I can discern – in its place, we have 649 local elections. (There was no voting in the North Yorkshire constituency of Thirsk and Malton because of the death of one of the candidates.)

All of which makes trying to predict what lies in store hugely unpredictable. This isn’t how UK elections are meant to be, is it? We’re not like other countries, with their confusing, messy, complex political systems. We like our politics neat and tidy – if we don’t like this lot, we vote for the other lot. And the removal men are in Downing Street before lunch-time.

Well, not any more, they’re not. This is politics as the rest of the world does it – and it looks as if we may have to get used to it. Or will we revert to type? If, for whatever reason, there’s another election in a matter of months, will we then scurry back to the safety of our two-and-a-bit party system?

One of my studio guests during the night was Jim Wallace, former leader of the Liberal Democrats in Scotland and former deputy first minister. He knows what it’s like to work in a coalition with Labour – and he says coalition politics aren’t easy, but nor do they spell the end of the world as we know it.

So, do I believe that even though the Conservatives won more votes and more seats than Labour, Gordon Brown will somehow manage to stay on in Downing Street?

Frankly, I find it hard to. On the other hand, a week ago I was still predicting an overall Conservative majority. That’s how much I know.

If you were Nick Clegg, and Gordon Brown phoned to ask for a chat, what would you say? “Sorry, Prime Minister, no deal, you’re yesterday’s man”? Or “Yes, of course, let’s talk, but just wait a moment while I answer the call on the other line”?

“Hello, David. Just hang on a moment. I’m just talking to Gordon …”

Perhaps it’ll all make more sense after I’ve had some sleep. But somehow, I doubt it.

30 April 2010

2010-04-30T10:43:00.001Z

I imagine you’ve had better things to do over the past few days than keep a beady eye on what Russsia has been up to. After all, that’s what I’m here for.

(And if you promise to read to the end, I’ll tell you what I think is going to happen in the UK general election next Thursday.)

But first Russia – which may be but a shadow of its former self, but is still a major power, one of the world’s biggest energy suppliers, nuclear-armed, and with a clear determination not to be taken for granted.

So here are three recent developments which I think are worth bearing in mind.

First, Kyrgyzstan. You’ll remember I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago. Small, poor, but strategically important ex-Soviet republic in central Asia, where the autocratic president was overthrown and driven into exile by an uprising/revolution/coup d’etat (delete according to taste).

I suggested two weeks ago that super-power rivalry may have played a part in events there. Certainly, both the US and Russia have a close interest in what happens – and it is now becoming increasingly clear that the new regime in Bishkek is much more to Moscow’s liking than its ousted predecessor. Some analysts in Washington believe Russia has scored a significant diplomatic coup, leaving US influence in the region markedly weaker.

Second, Ukraine. You may have seen some extraordinary scenes on TV earlier in the week, when members of the Ukrainian parliament came to blows. According to The Economist: “Eggs flew at the speaker, who sheltered under umbrellas. Flares filled the chamber with stinking smoke. Fisticuffs broke out beside a giant national flag stretched over the seats.”

What had upset some opposition MPs was a deal negotiated with Moscow by the newly elected president, Viktor Yanukovich, under which Ukraine agreed to allow the Russian navy to retain its Black Sea fleet base in the Crimea until 2042, in return for a 30 per cent discount on Russian gas prices.

It means, of course, that Russia retains its military presence in Ukraine. It also means, by extension, that Ukraine will not be joining NATO any time soon. So, you could argue, another success for Moscow in its continuing power game with Washington.

Alternatively, you could say Ukraine is simply buying itself a bit more time to learn to live with less Russian gas. Either way, the Russian navy stays in its Black Sea base, which matters to Moscow.

The third development to which I would draw your attention arises out of the death in a plane crash on 10 April of the Polish president Lech Kaczynski on his way to mark the 70th anniversary of the murders of 22,000 Polish officers by the Soviets in Katyn in 1940.

For decades, Moscow denied that the massacre had anything to do with them. More recently it has owned up, and two days ago, it posted official documents about the murders on a government website. One Polish historian was quoted as saying the decision was a “breakthough” in relations between the two countries.

So, what does this all add up to? Three countries, all of them of substantial interest to Washington and its allies, all now on the receiving end of what could be seen as a Russian charm offensive. Nothing wrong with charm, of course, which is certainly preferable to the deployment of columns of tanks, which used to be Moscow’s favoured way of exerting influence on its neighbours.

Nor would I suggest that we’re witnessing a return to the bad old days of the Cold War. What we may be witnessing, however, is evidence that Moscow has learned how to make friends and influence people by using carrots rather than sticks. And that it is perfectly prepared to distribute those carrots wherever it seems to be in the Russian national interest.

It’s not the only country that does this, of course. China, for example, is using trade and investment as a way of winning new friends – and Western nations have been doing much the same for aeons.

Does it matter? I think it does – remember how we saw at the climate change conference in Copenhagen last December that newly-emerging power blocs can play a major role in international diplomacy. That’s why I thought it was worth bringing to your attention.

Ah yes, the election. After last night’s final leaders’ debate, my forecast is that the Conservatives will win next week with a small overall majority. Which just happens to be exactly what I forecast in my New Year predictions on 1 January: “The UK general election will be on 6 May; Gordon Brown will still be Prime Minister; the entire campaign will be dominated by discussion and dissection of the TV leaders' debates, which in the end will make little difference to the outcome: a Conservative victory with a slim Commons majority of 15-30.”

If I was wrong then, I’m wrong again now. By this time next week, we should know.

23 April 2010

2010-04-23T10:25:00.001Z

A friend of mine complained a couple of days ago that the only news she'd heard all week was either about the election or volcanic ash. "What I want to know," she said, "is what's been happening in the rest of the world."

So I shall keep my promise to steer clear of election news on this blog (you have no idea how hard it is) - and this week I'll try to bring you up to date with developments in Thailand.

Perhaps you've been there on holiday or on business. You may have wandered through the vast shopping malls of Bangkok, or marvelled at the seediness of the Patpong red-light district. But if you'd been there this week, you would have found yourself in the middle of what could be a revolution-in-the-making.

Last night, at least one person was reported killed and dozens were injured when grenades were thrown in the centre of Bangkok's business district. It was the latest incident during six weeks of protests by thousands of anti-government protesters who are demanding immediate elections.

Who are these protesters? Allow me to introduce the "red shirts", largely poor and from the country's rural areas, supporters of the former prime minister, billionaire and one-time owner of Manchester City football club, Thaksin Shinawatra.

He was ousted in a military coup in 2006, has since been convicted of corruption, and is now living in exile in London and Dubai. Earlier this month, 25 people were killed on the streets of Bangkok when the security forces tried unsuccessfully to clear the streets of protesters.

Perhaps you remember the "yellow shirts". They too were anti-government protesters, but they were protesting two years ago against the previous government, which was closely allied to Thaksin. They were mainly royalists, businesspeople and members of the urban middle class - and they won their battle by occupying Bangkok's main international airport and threatening to throttle Thailand's economic lifeline, tourism.

So now the tables are turned and the crisis has escalated dangerously. Yesterday it was reported that the protesters had seized a military supply train in the north-east of the country and captured hundreds of troops.

Meanwhile, what of the king, Bhumibol Adulyadej, now 82 years old and in frail health? He's been on the throne since 1946 and is the world's longest-serving head of state. Traditionally, at times of crisis, he has acted behind the scenes to defuse tensions.

But not this time. Thailand's draconian laws prevent open discussion of the king or his role in public affairs, but just last week, speaking in Washington, the Thai foreign minister broke the taboo.

Kasit Piromya said: "I think we have to talk about the institution of the monarchy, how it would have to reform itself to the modern globalised world. Everything is now becoming in the open. Let's have a discussion: what type of democratic society would we like to be?"

The country is on the brink. It is deeply split between the privileged urban elite and the rural poor, and now the army is warning of a crack-down unless the protesters disperse. But the protesters are reported to be fortifying their encampment in the centre of Bangkok with barricades made out of bamboo poles and car tyres.

The current prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva (pronounced Apisit Wetchacheewa), was born in Newcastle and educated at Eton and Oxford. He has declared a state of emergency and ordered the army to shut down TV and radio stations.

But now, after last night's grenade attacks, which the authorities blame on the "red shirts", there are fears that the violence could escalate sharply. Thailand is one of south-east Asia's most pivotal nations - and the next few days could be decisive.

16 April 2010

2010-04-16T10:15:00.000Z

I promised last week that I would steer clear of the UK election in these newsletters for the duration of the campaign and help you to keep abreast of developments elsewhere on our planet.

I intend to keep that promise, even though I am sorely tempted to break it after last night’s historic TV election debate. (Yes, since you ask, I really did find it fascinating.)

So on the off-chance that you haven’t been devouring all the latest snippets of news from Kyrgyzstan, allow me to bring you up to date – and explain why I think it matters.

(I’ll leave the Icelandic ash cloud for another day, although I’m pretty confident we’ll be talking about it on tonight’s programme. It can’t be true, can it, that after Iceland’s bank melt-down, Gordon Brown said he wanted them to send over some cash, but they misheard?)

Anyway, Kyrgyzstan. I mentioned it briefly in last week’s newsletter, but things have moved on since then. The most important development is that yesterday President Bakiyev – he’s the one who was deposed last week – fled the country and has gone into exile in Kazakhstan.

Sighs of relief all round, you might think. President Bakiyev wasn’t exactly a great advertisement for the virtues of liberal democracy – he himself originally came to power after a coup-cum-uprising-cum-revolution five years ago, and had become increasingly authoritarian in office. His brothers, sons, and brothers’ sons all got jobs in his administration, and were all rumoured to have made substantial amounts of money as a result.

But the key reason why this matters to those of us who don’t live in Kyrgyzstan – or even anywhere near it – is that it is hugely sensitive strategically. For one thing, it used to be part of the Soviet Union, which means Moscow still regards it as within its own sphere of influence.

For another thing, it has a long border with China. The two countries are linked by trade, and there is a significant Kyrgyz minority in China. So China too has a clear interest in who’s in charge in the capital, Bishkek.

As does Washington. The huge US air base at Manas is a crucially important way station for flying troops and supplies into Afghanistan. When Moscow tried to persuade President Bakiyev to shut the base down, Washington had to offer a substantial increase in rental payments to keep it open.

President Bakiyev decided to accept Washington’s kind offer, much to Moscow’s fury. In the words of former US ambassador John O’Keefe, speaking on the programme on Wednesday, it looked as if he had sold the same carpet twice, once to Moscow and once to Washington.

You can see where this is leading. As in Ukraine and Georgia, two other former Soviet republics, Moscow and Washington are jockeying for influence. The Kremlin remains deeply suspicious of what it sees as US attempts to buy off its neighbours.

Washington insists it’s doing no such thing. And true, the two governments have just signed a new nuclear arms reduction treaty – and they’re cooperating over the drafting of a new UN sanctions resolution against Iran.

So it’s not Washington and Moscow, eyeball to eyeball. But Kyrgyztan, a small, impoverished country with a total population of barely five million, could be on the way to becoming another former Soviet flashpoint. Its people want a better life and a better government – the world’s major powers want political stability in a region where instability can lead to big trouble.

Remember the Great Game, played for most of the 19th century by Russia and Britain, rivals for power in central Asia? Think what happened to Afghanistan and you can see where the dangers lie.

That’s why, UK election debates notwithstanding, I thought you might like to know a bit more about the country with the unspellable name. But if you’re interested in the debates as well, you may like to know that I’ll be presenting next week’s Radio 4 election debate special, at 7.45pm on Thursday.

9 April 2010

2010-04-09T17:28:00.000Z

I see it as my duty on this blog over the coming weeks to help you remember that there’s still a big wide world out there, UK election or no UK election. I somehow doubt that you’re feeling under-provided with election news or analysis.

(Having said which, there will be some election news at the end of this post, so do read to the bottom …)

In fact, there’s been no shortage of non-election news over the past few days: an uprising-cum-revolution in Kyrgyzstan – of which more in a moment; a major nuclear arms control deal signed by Presidents Obama and Medvedev; and some most peculiar goings-on in Afghanistan.

Let’s start in Kabul, where President Karzai has been sounding off about Western powers having been responsible for a “vast fraud” in last year’s presidential election. (The Western powers, you’ll recall, are of the view that the fraud was perpetrated by Mr Karzai’s lot – and President Obama has not been backward in saying so publicly.)

Mr Karzai is also reported to have said that if he comes under any more pressure, he might think of joining the Taliban himself. The former UN diplomat Peter Galbraith calls him “unhinged” and suggests he may be on drugs.

It is not pretty, and it is potentially a serious problem. After all, how can the US, Britain and many other governments send their armed forces to Afghanistan to fight on behalf of a political leader whom they regard as seriously flaky?

On the other hand, Mr Karzai is presumably calculating that his supposed allies are so deeply committed to their current strategy that they can’t cut loose. He may be right – but I was struck by a suggestion the other day from a former US assistant defence secretary, Bing West, who served under President Reagan.

He wrote in the New York Times: “Mr. Karzai should be treated as a symbolic president and given the organizational ‘mushroom treatment’ … [Mushroom treatment: kept in the dark and covered in … you get the idea.]

“President Ronald Reagan did something similar with another erratic ally, President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. In February 1986, Reagan warned Marcos that if government troops attacked opposition forces holed up on the outskirts of Manila, it would cause “untold damage” to his relations with the United States — meaning the aid spigot would be turned off. When his countrymen saw that he was stripped of prestige and support, they forced Marcos into exile.”

Afghanistan is not the Philippines, but the signs are that President Obama is seriously displeased about Mr Karzai’s antics. So I suspect Washington may well now be looking for ways to isolate him and starve him of cash, much as Bing West suggested.

A quick word about Kyrgyzstan. Look at a map if you can and see where it is. Just to the west of China, south of Kazakhstan, and separated from Afghanistan only by Tajikistan. (Yes, I know, too many “…stans”. Sorry.) It’s a sensitive part of the world, with lots of strategic interests at stake.

The US has a substantial air base there, which it uses as a supply point for its troops in Afghanistan. Moscow isn’t thrilled, and there are some suggestions that the uprising/revolution/coup this week may have received a nod and a wink from Moscow on the understanding that the new government in Bishkek might once again put the squeeze on Washington.

Watch for some heavy-duty envoy-sending in the coming days, as both Washington and Moscow try to make their mark with the new government. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn of generous offers of aid coming from both capitals.

And so back to the UK election. Next Thursday, we’ll be mounting the first of three special programmes on Radio 4 to bring you live coverage of the Prime Ministerial debates. We’ll be on air from 8pm with commentary and analysis from experts and politicians – we’ll broadcast the debate in its entirety, and then once it’s over, Ritula will get live reaction from a panel of voters in a marginal constituency, and I’ll chew over who said what and why with our studio guests. The debates, of course, are the first such encounters ever to be staged in the UK, so they will be history in the making.

I can’t wait …

2 April 2010

2010-04-02T12:33:00.001Z

A 40th birthday is always worth celebrating, and next week, The World Tonight will be 40.

By one of those weird mathematical coincidences, I was 40 when I started presenting the programme, so I do feel an especially close arithmetical bond to the occasion.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been playing little snippets from the programme archives, spanning four decades during which the world has changed almost beyond recognition. No more Cold War, no more Soviet Union, a globalised economy, a capitalist-communist China, the internet, mobile phones … the list is endless.

(By the way, if you’ve missed any of the archive clips, or if you want to hear again some of the key voices from the programme’s past, they’re all available on the website.)

We also asked some of the people who have been associated with the programme over the years for their memories, and I thought it might be fun to share them with you.

First, Douglas Stuart, the programme’s first presenter back in 1970 and still going strong. He told us: “We agreed that The World Tonight should concentrate on reflecting the interviewee so I made my questions very short. This made the interviewee the centre of the listener's attention, which is why I signed off as ‘Douglas Stuart reporting’. Nothing could ever have been achieved without the producers and engineers, who were first class.

“Almost at the beginning, when The World Tonight was first broadcast, the President of Egypt, Nasser, died. We dedicated almost an entire programme to it. I interviewed the foreign secretary George Brown, who agreed to contribute from a distant studio. Unfortunately he had had too much to drink, and my first question was answered by a gigantic sneeze, and then silence.

“My favourite headline on the programme was when the Romanian communist dictator, Ceausescu, came to Britain on a state visit. He and his entourage stayed at Buckingham Palace, so I said: 'In tonight's programme, there are reds in the beds at Buckingham Palace'.”

There’ll be a wonderful interview with Douglas on our special birthday programme on Monday.

Christiane Amanpour, who went on to become a star correspondent on CNN and has now been given her own show on the US ABC network, told us: “In the summer of 1980, home from university in the USA and on holiday in London, (then editor) Alastair Osborne walked into my life -- or rather I barged into his! Somehow I had managed to squeeze my toe into the door at the BBC and landed on his watch at The World Tonight.

“On my first day, he stunned me by saying he was going to pay me for the work I did. I think it was about £100 a week, which was a fortune for me. It was especially welcome since I was (gladly) doing it for love as I assumed interns were not paid. Then, when I asked him whether he was absolutely sure he wanted to pay me, he earned my undying gratitude, affection and admiration by uttering the following words: “Look, Christiane, it’s just a summer internship. If you’re no good, when it’s over we never have to see you again. And if you are any good, I can always take the credit.”

“I loved him for that, and I can safely say I owe it all to him. It actually makes me quite emotional as I write this brief note, remembering all the experience and opportunities that internship gave me: during the Brixton riots I was sent out to do my first vox pops. In the studio I worked for brilliant editors, producers, presenters -- and fellow interns (the chess-mad Dominic Lawson for instance).

“Then one day, as my time on the programme was coming to an end, the editor in charge let me be control-room producer for the night: I was beside myself with excitement and anxiety. Charles Wheeler was the presenter. I managed not to completely mess things up and he remained my friend, my example and my fellow traveller throughout his illustrious life.

“Most importantly, that night, my proud parents and siblings sat around the radio on the kitchen table and heard my name being credited on the BBC. It was the first time … it was the best time!”

Former presenter Sir John Tusa, who went on to run the BBC World Service and then the Barbican, wrote: “What remains, 30 years after presenting The World Tonight? A different world, of course, journalistically, politically and above all technically. What made the programme special? An atmosphere of deep trust between the long-serving editor, Alastair Osborne, and his presenters, reporters and producers. This was not just an editorial style; I believe it generated a wide range of ideas for the programme to cover, far wider and more searching than the conventional news agenda of the day.

“The World Tonight was about ideas and, above all, analysis. To deliver this analysis it needed the highest level of contributor -- Alan Budd and Terry Burns, later Treasury knights; Alan Greenspan, later Chairman of the US Federal Reserve; Giscard d’Estaing, later French President. Dan Rather was a contributor; so was the great Sinologist, Roderick MacFarquhar; and CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, who began her journalism on the programme. And scores more of this calibre. It was a programme of its time. But its values have stood the test of broadcasting time.”

Henry Kelly was a reporter on the programme in the early days, before he became a TV game show host and presenter on Classic FM. He wrote: “I loved working on The World Tonight. For me it was made by the then editor, the late Alastair Osborne, and the team of producers and reporters he had with him. He recruited me from Ireland for an initial six months. I stayed five years. In 40 years in broadcasting I have rarely, if ever, been happier. What made Alastair simply the best was that he recruited those he wanted, and trusted them, gave them every opportunity - but also expected good work in return. It was the happiest of times.

“The World Tonight in my time was like having a big blank page on which we were encouraged to write, covering international and domestic stories in equal measure. I look back on those years with great pleasure and deep affection for everyone I worked with. Every generation of journalists believes their “old days” were the best. Thing is, I know ours were!

The distinguished journalist and broadcaster Isabel Hilton was my co-presenter during the 1990s. She told us: “I have many memories of The World Tonight: the comical moments when things went wrong and were only rescued by the quick thinking of the team – like the night the studio developed a technical fault just after we went on air and we all had to sprint to a new studio, papers flapping, while a pre-recorded interview was playing. We picked up right on cue.

“And the tragic moment when the news became personal. In August 1995, we heard that our colleague John Schofield had been fatally shot in Croatia while reporting for the programme. He was just 29 years old, a good colleague and a fine journalist.”

And so to the present day. Ritula will be presenting our birthday programme -- she says: “My memories of listening to the World Tonight are rather longer than of presenting it. Even now, as the red light goes on and I hear myself say the words “It's ten o'clock, you're listening to The World Tonight ...”, there is a moment when I imagine what everyone is doing as they listen – making a cup of tea, doing the ironing, getting ready for bed – all of which I might be doing if I were at home.

“My personal highlights include a trip to India last year for the elections. We travelled to a village on election day, where the birds were flitting in and out of the polling station with its electronic voting machine. The scene was deceptively beautiful, masking the poverty that inevitably lay behind it. But the villagers were positive and determined to improve their lives, and I couldn't help thinking there was a lot to be learned to from them.”

And a couple of memories from listeners as well. Trevor Parsons wrote: “I first became a listener to The World Tonight in 1975 at the age of 10, when I made myself a radio, following instructions in the Ladybird book 'Making a Transistor Radio.'

“I never saw the point of moving on from the first project, a simple crystal set which needed no batteries and yet let me hear Radio 4 loud and clear on a pair of bakelite WWII RAF headphones. I was supposed to be long asleep by 10 o'clock, so hearing Douglas Stuart read the headlines was a bit of a thrill, as well as an education.

“There being no off switch on my radio, and no battery to run out, I just hung the headphones up on the corner of the headboard, and drifted off to whispers of the fall of Saigon, the murder of Ross McWhirter, and the launch of Viking 1.”

And finally, Arnold Root wrote: “I would like to hear again Douglas Stuart recounting his family’s favourite saying -- 'You keep your eyes on the road; I’ll look out for the monster' -- said to him by his wife as he scanned Loch Lomond looking for the
monster as he drove beside the loch. Am pretty sure it was him, and that that was the saying, though it was a long time ago!”

So thanks from all of us, past and present, to all of you. Without you, our listeners, we wouldn’t be able to do what we love doing. Our editor, Alistair Burnett, will be writing about our anniversary on the BBC Editors blog on Monday – you’ll find it at bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors. And don’t forget our special programme on Monday evening.

26 March 2010

2010-03-27T16:21:00.001Z

I suppose I should only whisper this – but I have the distinct impression that the words “regime change” are in the air again.

No, not Iraq this time. Not Iran either. Israel.

In both Washington and London, there seems to be a growing feeling that the current Israeli government, led by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is not one they can do business with.

In Washington, President Obama’s people are furious about Mr Netanyahu’s insistence on Israel’s right to continue building in parts of Jerusalem that the rest of the world regard as illegally occupied.

In London, there’s real anger about the forging of the British passports that were used in the assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in January. (You may have noticed that after the UK expelled an Israeli diplomat in protest on Tuesday, there was no retaliatory move by Israel. In the world of diplomacy, inactions sometimes speak louder than actions.)

So let’s scroll back the calendar to 1991. The US had just led a successful military operation to defeat Saddam Hussein after he invaded Kuwait. It wanted to make progress in resolving the Israel-Palestinian issue, and under the first President Bush was putting pressure on Israel to agree to freeze its settlement-building programme in the West Bank.

Sound familiar? The then Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, refused. President Bush threatened to withhold $10 billion worth of Israeli loan guarantees. He forced Israel to the Madrid peace conference – and in mid-1992, Israeli voters defeated Mr Shamir’s Likud party and elected Yitzhak Rabin instead.

See what I mean about regime change? And if you think I’m exaggerating, look at these words: “The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbours present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests … The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favouritism for Israel.

“Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships … and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilise support.”

The words come from written evidence given to the US Senate armed services committee 10 days ago by General David Petraeus. He’s the man who’s in charge of fighting the US wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and you can be sure they will be heeded in Washington.

As for Mr Netanyahu, well, both Washington and London have had their difficulties with him in the past. In 1998, the then British foreign secretary Robin Cook insisted on visiting the site of a proposed new Israeli settlement in the West Bank, Har Homa. It created such a row that Mr Netanyahu cancelled dinner with him. (In the world of diplomacy, who has dinner with whom matters a lot.)

A word about Jerusalem: Israel insists that settlements like Har Homa – and the area for which the new building permits were announced just as US vice-president Joe Biden was in town last week (bad timing, as all now admit) – are in Jerusalem, not the West Bank, and therefore part of a city that it regards as its eternal and undivided capital.

As Mr Netanyahu put it in a speech in Washington last Monday: “The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It's our capital."

But we need to be careful with definitions here: after the 1967 war, when Israel gained control of all of Jerusalem, it extended the city boundaries by some 64 square kilometres, nearly doubling the area it regarded as sovereign Israeli territory. (And remember, under the terms of the 1947 UN resolution that established the State of Israel, Jerusalem was meant to be “a corpus separatum under a special international regime, administered by the United Nations”.)

Be all that as it may, you could well argue that Mr Netanyahu is the democratically-elected prime minister of Israel, and if Washington and London don’t like it, well, that’s just too bad. Which, up to a point, is perfectly true. (Pedants might point out that in fact, Mr Netanyahu’s Likud party won about 30,000 fewer votes than the centrist Kadima party in last year’s elections, but as all Israeli governments are coalitions, that’s mainly a theoretical debating point.)

Israel needs friends. It’s a small country, surrounded by neighbours who have no great love for it. It receives some $3 billion a year in aid from Washington. And for that reason, if for no other, Mr Netanyahu and his coalition partners may well be wondering this weekend how to start mending a few fences again.

19 March 2010

2010-03-27T16:20:00.001Z

RIO DE JANEIRO -- So, it’s a week now since I arrived here in Brazil, and you’ll want to know what I think of the place.

First, as I said on the programme on Wednesday, it’s a country oozing with self-confidence. The economy is in great shape; the country is acknowledged as one of the most important of the emerging nations – and its president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, known everywhere simply as Lula, is reckoned to be the world’s most successful democratic politician.

Why? Well, how many presidents can you think of who are more popular at the end of their eight years in office than they were at the beginning?

But here comes the but. Millions of Brazilians still live in miserable poverty. (Yes, fewer than before, but still too many.) The country’s roads, railways and airports wouldn’t look out of place in a war-torn African country. Nor would the appalling levels of political corruption.

As for the favelas, the teeming slums that cling to the mountainsides outside Rio, they are not a pretty sight.

I met Lana just outside one of them. She’s 19 and told me what it was like growing up in a favela very similar to the one we were about to visit.

“Of course I was scared,” she said, as we talked about the drugs gangs and the gun-fights that characterise the widespread image of life in the favelas. “Every day, life was stressful.”

I asked her if any of her friends had been killed. “Yes,” she said, and her eyes filled with tears. “He was 14, and he was my best friend. But he got close to the wrong people …”

The government says it intends to “pacify” Rio’s favelas in time for the Olympic Games that Rio will host in 2016. What ministers mean is that they will put specially-trained police into the favelas, and keep them there. You might think that the millions of people who live there would be delighted – but it’s not that simple.

As we wound our way up the mountain-side, along narrow alley-ways lined with roughly-built houses, the community workers who were with us (they said we would be immediately targeted as strangers if we had tried to go in alone), said violence in the favelas comes in many guises.

We stopped at a tiny bar. The bar-owner told us she had had no electricity for the past five days; no water for the past two months. “You ask about violence?” said one community worker. “That’s the real violence, that’s the violence that has an every-day impact on people’s lives. Not the shooting that happens only when the police come in and make trouble.”

I asked how many people had been killed over the past month. They said they had no idea – the only people who would know were the people who did the killing. “But why does no one ask how many people were killed by disease?” asked one man. “Why is no one interested in how many die because of poor sanitation? Poverty is the real violence here.”

It’s all very different in Tavares Bastos. Tavares is also a favela, but much smaller, and with a jaw-droppingly beautiful view over Rio’s Guanabara Bay and the Sugarloaf mountain.

Tavares was “pacified” nearly 10 years ago, and now the people there live a peaceful and relatively untroubled life. There’s even a small guest-house and jazz club that entices people up from the city for good music and cheap beer.

Would the people of Tavares recommend “pacification” to Rio’s other favelas? They would.

But my lasting memory is of the two young schoolboys who grinned at us as we were leaving the Complexo do Alemão, the unpacified favela in the impoverished north of the city.

They were sitting on a doorstep in the sunshine. How was school? I asked. School was good, they said. And if they could change one thing about life in the favela, what would they change?

There was a quick glance between them, and then, almost in unison, they said: “Stop the shooting. That’s what we would change: stop the shooting.”

I’ll be on air live from Rio tonight, and there’s more – including some of my pictures – on my blog at bbc.co.uk/blogs/worldtonight.

12 March 2010

2010-03-12T21:17:00.000Z

How remarkable is this? I’ve just read the following sentence in a news report from Baghdad: “The (Iraqi) poll’s outcome is still unclear.”

Remarkable? How so? Well, consider this: in no Arab country other than Lebanon are you likely to read those words after an election. Not in Egypt, or Syria, or Morocco, or Saudi Arabia. If you regard Palestine as a country, then yes, admittedly, there too they have elections whose results are not pre-determined.

It’s an odd thing, isn’t it? Throughout Latin America, and east Asia, and in many parts of Africa, a democratic wind has blown over the past 20-30 years. Yet much of the Arab world seems to have remained immune, for reasons which you may like to discuss.

Now, whenever the words “election” and “democracy” crop up in the same sentence, I am reminded of what a Ugandan MP once told me as we sat on the green leather benches of the parliament building in Kampala. “An election is no more democracy than a wedding is a marriage.”

In other words, yes, of course, you need the one before you can have the other – but on its own, it’s not enough.

So elections in Iraq with no predetermined outcome do not necessarily mean that democracy has come to Iraq. Is there a free and impartial judicial system? Do all citizens have equal recourse to the courts? Is there guaranteed freedom of expression and assembly? The questions answer themselves.

You may think that the people of Iraq have paid a terrible price in order to be able to vote (semi-) freely in parliamentary elections. Or you may think that freedom from tyranny is rarely won without bloodshed.

If you were to ask an Iraqi: “Has democracy come to your country?”, I suspect as many would answer No as Yes. But as someone who visited Iraq while Saddam Hussein was in power, I well remember the all-pervasive, and paralysing, atmosphere of fear.

It is not for me to say whether the US-led invasion was justified or not. My point is simply to draw your attention to how rare it still is in the Arab world to find elections in which a genuine choice is on offer. (Not that the choice was a perfect one in Iraq by any means – but it was more of a choice than what went before.)

And by the way, to speak of the Arab world is not the same as to speak of the Muslim world. In Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, in Pakistan, even in Iran, there have been elections that could well be judged free-er than many in the Arab world.

So Iraq joins Lebanon – and perhaps Palestine – on a rare roll of honour. As in Lebanon, the political process is largely dominated by sectarian considerations. In neither country will you find many Sunni Muslims voting for a Shia party, or vice versa. In Lebanon, to find a Maronite Christian voting for a Muslim party is about as rare as to find a Kurd in northern Iraq voting for a non-Kurdish party.

Think politics in northern Ireland and you’ll get the general idea. Sectarian politics is not confined to the Middle East.

As for Iraq, the strong likelihood is that prime minister Nouri al-Maliki will be able to put together a new government coalition able to command a majority in parliament. What he does with it we’ll have to wait to see.

I’ve just arrived in Brazil, from where I’ll be reporting next week on a country emerging ever more strongly onto the world stage. I hope you’ll listen out for my reports.

5 March 2010

2010-03-05T23:58:00.001Z

I’ve just finished watching Gordon Brown give evidence to the Chilcot committee on Iraq. In summary, he said this:

 We did the right thing for the right reasons.
 I regret all the lives that were lost, both military and civilian
 I gave the military all the money they asked for.

If you’re bored by the Iraq inquiry, you can stop reading now. If, like me, you think it’s a remarkable political exercise – watching a prime minister in office being questioned on live television by members of an inquiry team that he himself set up – then I hope you’ll read on.

Let’s remember, though, that if Mr Brown had had his way, we wouldn’t have seen any of this, because his original idea was that it wouldn’t be held in public.

To me, the key moments today were when he insisted, again and again, that he never turned down a request for extra cash from the military. That’s not what former MoD officials and military chiefs have said – they certainly remember being told they couldn’t have all the cash they wanted. (We’re going to try to reconcile these two versions of history in tonight’s programme.)

But I was also fascinated to compare Gordon Brown’s approach to the committee with Tony Blair’s in January. From Mr Blair, we got passion and conviction; from Mr Brown, a calculated defence of a position that he only rarely defended publicly at the time.

For a man who is said not to be the most subtle political operator on the planet, I thought he turned in an unexpectedly subtle performance. He didn’t try to distance himself from Mr Blair overtly – but there were moments when, if you were listening carefully, you could hear him tip-toeing away from the Blair position.

“I never subscribed to what you might call the neo-conservative proposition that somehow, at the barrel of a gun, overnight liberty or democracy could be conjured up,” he said. Unlike whom, would you say?

“We have learned the lessons of informality in government,” he said. Although to be fair, he did say that Tony Blair learned those lessons too.

As for that contentious legal advice from the attorney-general, who at the last moment assured the Cabinet that going to war in Iraq would be legal, despite his earlier reservations, No, he hadn’t known about all the detailed discussions that had preceded it – but it didn’t matter, because the final “unequivocal” advice was that the war would be legal.

When the Chilcot inquiry report comes to be written, it won’t deal with stylistic or thespian differences between Britain’s two leading political figures. Judging by the way the questioning has been going, it’ll deal mainly with how decisions were made, and how the way the government works should be improved.

Not really surprising, because that’s what it has been asked to do. But after today’s evidence from Mr Brown, I wonder whether it’ll have anything to say about how closely a Chancellor of the Exchequer should be involved in the detailed political discussions that precede a decision to go to war.

Gordon Brown portrayed himself as a man who viewed his role very largely as being confined to finding a way to pay for it all. And who, by and large, was perfectly happy for that to be the case.

By the way, you may have seen that the interview we broadcast with William Hague about Lord Ashcroft on Wednesday’s programme created a bit of a stir. If you missed it, it’s still available via Listen Again on the website, or via my Facebook page.

26 February 2010

2010-02-26T15:01:00.000Z

I’ve been thinking a bit this week about different styles of political leadership. (No, there are no prizes for guessing why.)

Let’s take three examples: leadership by bullying; leadership by persuasion; and leadership by populism.

The bully believes that pushing people hard, shouting at them from time to time, making them fear his anger, is the only way to get things done. If challenged, he’ll tell you that he’s not pushing his colleagues or his staff any harder than he pushes himself. Inertia is the enemy of progress, he’ll tell you. And as any political leader knows, bureaucracies do inertia better than they do anything else.

If his most senior civil servant feels obliged to discuss his behaviour with him, he’ll deliver his warning in the form of a gentle lesson in the art of “how to get the best out of your staff”. And if, for example, his name is Gordon Brown, he’ll insist that he and his colleagues and staff always get along just fine, with barely an angry word ever crossing their lips.

The persuader will say that he’s a firm believer in the need to listen and to find common areas of agreement. He’ll tell you there’s always a way to bridge differences, and that a nation will always be better off when its political leaders look for consensus whenever possible.

If there’s a policy he’s committed to, he’ll perhaps summon his political opponents to an all-day televised debate, during which he will be seen listening politely, disagreeing gently, and cajoling whenever he can. But when his opponents refuse to budge, the persuader will find that he has no alternative but to face them down.

Maybe, as he lies in bed at night, he’ll wonder how you reach a consensus with people who don’t want to reach a consensus. And he may reflect on the uncomfortable political reality that most politicians tend to look for political advantage at every opportunity, especially in an election year.

If, for example, his name is Barack Obama, he may ask himself how he can persuade his Republican opponents that it’s in their interests to make him look good. And maybe he’ll conclude that it’s too big a challenge, even for him.

So what about the populist? He pleases the crowds by showing them that he’s one of them. He makes crude jokes, just like they do. He ogles pretty young women, even at the cost of his marriage. He knows that his supporters think there are too many immigrants, so he tells his much poorer neighbours that they’re not welcome (except for pretty young women, of course, because – remember? – his wife has walked out on him, and he may be 73 years old, but he’s single, and available).

He’s very rich, and very tanned, and is alleged by his opponents to keep dubious company and not always stay on the right side of the law. He attacks the judges as politically motivated, and openly uses his allies in parliament to try to ensure that he’s not charged with any criminal offence while he’s busy running the country.

If his name is Silvio Berlusconi (you’d guessed, hadn’t you?), his opinion poll ratings will remain pretty high (in fact, they are down a bit, but a 48 per cent approval rating is not exactly crashing through the floor), and he’ll give the impression that he has an unbreakable compact with his country’s voters.

So, there we are: three men, three very different styles of leadership. Each has been elected in a stable, developed democracy, yet the political cultures in which they operate are vastly different. (Yes, I know Gordon Brown wasn’t elected as Prime Minister, but nor were any of his predecessors. He, like they, was elected as an MP, and is Prime Minister only by virtue of being leader of the largest party in the House of Commons.)

My question for you is this: which leadership style do you prefer, and which do you think works best?