Geopolitical thread

[Rangudu]

Someone asked a question as to why China is relatively quiet regarding the potential passage of the Indo-US nuclear deal. Here are my ruminations on this.

1. The process of this deal made it impossible for China to openly oppose it. For one, they will have to do it publicly and risk provoking an otherwise docile Indian establishment. Secondly, China itself is extremely dependent on key NSG powers for its ambitious nuclear program. China cannot antagonize Russia, France, US, Australia and Canada, all of whom are key suppliers to current and planned Chinese n-plans.

2. China initially figured it could get TSP into any NSG clearance. Thus all the talk about 6 new plants to TSP. However, the Xerox Khan issue and the Chinese bomb design leak has made it impossible for China to even try to bring TSP in at this point.

3. Being a pragmatic power, Beijing therefore has probably decided to join the club. It could still potentially use pipsqueak NSG powers to delay the inevitable but not much more.

4. However, being the ruthless power it is, China is likely to get back at India in some other fashion. My bet is that China will give TSP SLBMs and a nuclear sub pretty soon, assuming it's not already in the works.

My 2 paise.

[ramana]

Also PRC was accomodated with a few sops.
The Tibetian protests were not allowed to get out of hand world wide.
Bush is attending the Beijing Olympics to give legitimacy.
PRC is now a big player in the economic summits
India is not gettng provoked despite numerous PRC attempts to raise the order tensions.
Indian downplayed the Tibet protestors.
PRC on its part has started secret talks with Tibetians.

A big thing to think about is PRC always played the indirect card via TSP and the million mutinies. Have they given up or will they create new cards.

My worry is if there is an iota of truth to the INC charge that revealing the list would expose the assets to terrorists threats. I know the charge is political but folks like me worry no matter.

[Rangudu]

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that pigLeTs have been planning a major strike in one of the major nuclear symbols. Security has so far been good but I think there is something to the Congress claim provided it was referring to the annex.

[RamaY]

X Post

Amit, I don't see that early release would have affected China any - surely the IAEA negotiators included reps of the PRC junta? In fact I don't see what is the PRC game is. The news reports say that China plans to support India's proposal at the NSG. Then why did the Comrades in India commit political hara kiri? The text off the agreement as I see it, seems eminently saleable to the Indian public, since there is no gimmick seen here, and in fact the only reference to the US-India agreement is to the JULY 18, not to "Hyde&Singh". The above excerpt posted by DD says it all about the NWS status, explicity recognizing the existence and halalitude of materials, equipment and facilities outside the IAEA agreement. There is no reference to the "t" word. The "Annex" seems to be just the list of facilities that India volunteeers.

This is as it should be - the agreement is to enable construction and sales of new reactors and other equipment, and the handling of imported fuel lifecycle. So it says clearly that as new facilities are added, the Annex will be updated and published. IOW, there is really no requirements to place existing reactors there at all - except that fuel may not be provided under this agreement to those reactors. This last point may bother, say, Russia-Kodamkulam if Russian fuel / heavy water was supposed to be used here. Or maybe it is "grandfathered" in. Probably, India wants to add Kodamkulam to the Annex - why not?

So, as CRamS says, there may be treachery involved, and I agree there is, if China and the Commies are involved. What is their game, and why did the Left go so far out on a limb for this if China is going to agree? is it timing?

China is playing the game well, so far:

1. Its first tool was NPAs and Pakistan - Asking == deal for Pakistan&C >> This didnt work
2. Second Step is commies >> They delayed the process by atleast 1 year. Nuke-deal apart, this put india's other plans (whatever techno-business deals, including MRCA contract) 1 year behind. If this impacted our GDP-growth (wholistically) by 1%, then we lost $100B productivity in real terms. We could have used this money to develop the all the easteren states (seven sisters) to China levels (if this is the yardstick)
3. Third Step is IAEA >> We will see the game in next 20-30 days.
4. The fourth Step is NSG >> In the meantime China can decide whether it want to vote it down or play along, for the time being.
5. The final step will be the UNSC expansion - IMHO, this is what China is trying to stop.

China doesn't want to come overt with its intentions, yet. It is currently playing the soft game using the above mentioned strategies to contain India. The hard option would be to see if it can do another 1962, which would put down India's aspirations for good.

Per my analysis, if India doesn't get its act right by 2025, it will have very slim chance to counter China's influence in political/economic/military spheres for the rest of the century. It will have to settle to defencive strategies to secure its borders only.

[ramana]

What if the IUCNA is the way for the US and PRC to get rid of their Cold War alliance with the ummah and bring back India into play?

First there was 911 that allowed uncle to ditch the frontlying all lie and now the IAEA for the PRC to shed their burden? Now its ummah for themsleves?

[vsudhir]

What if the IUCNA is the way for the US and PRC to get rid of their Cold War alliance with the ummah and bring back India into play?

First there was 911 that allowed uncle to ditch the frontlying all lie and now the IAEA for the PRC to shed their burden? Now its ummah for themsleves?

Tantalizing possibility. But unlikely, IMHO.

Would explain much of the frenzy, frothiness and fatalism of the desi Left's opposition to the N-deal. But why would PRC ditch the ummah? I dont see any gain for the PRC to bail on the ummah just yet.

I look at PBS and BBC grandly announces 'Iran desperately needs western technology and investment to tap its oil and gas reserves'. WHy onl;y western? Why not Chinese? Or Russian? Just wondering onlee.

[paramu]

Also PRC was accomodated with a few sops.
The Tibetian protests were not allowed to get out of hand world wide.
Bush is attending the Beijing Olympics to give legitimacy.
PRC is now a big player in the economic summits
India is not gettng provoked despite numerous PRC attempts to raise the order tensions.
Indian downplayed the Tibet protestors.
PRC on its part has started secret talks with Tibetians.

A big thing to think about is PRC always played the indirect card via TSP and the million mutinies. Have they given up or will they create new cards.

My worry is if there is an iota of truth to the INC charge that revealing the list would expose the assets to terrorists threats. I know the charge is political but folks like me worry no matter.

There are several things going on.
The relaationship of US-China-Pakistan will undergo major realignment with this deal and that is the main purpose of this deal.

[ramana]

What if the IUCNA is the way for the US and PRC to get rid of their Cold War alliance with the ummah and bring back India into play?

First there was 911 that allowed uncle to ditch the frontlying all lie and now the IAEA for the PRC to shed their burden? Now its ummah for themsleves?

Tantalizing possibility. But unlikely, IMHO.

Would explain much of the frenzy, frothiness and fatalism of the desi Left's opposition to the N-deal. But why would PRC ditch the ummah? I dont see any gain for the PRC to bail on the ummah just yet.

I look at PBS and BBC grandly announces 'Iran desperately needs western technology and investment to tap its oil and gas reserves'. WHy onl;y western? Why not Chinese? Or Russian? Just wondering onlee.

First question: The PRC made its ummah agreements as partof Cold War and its TSP agreement as a sub-set of that to contain India. There is blowback to PRC in Central Asia due to their old proteges. And it is in the strategic province of Sinkiang. IOW PRC cant afford to lose that province. Then there is the energy resources of CA that PRC needs which are getting radicalized by TSP Islam. The old Islamic people of CA were barbarians who were primarily motivated by loot. The new Islamists are inspired by the religion and this is a marked difference. So there are some motivations for PRC to ditch or atleast loosen their ties to ummah.

PRC wants to emerge from its old linkages. Doent mean all parts are pullin gin the same direction. PLA is still antediluvean. Their myopia led to India coming out of the cold.

Second question: Oil exploration and extraction are high technology itmes not available in those countries. For eg. the drill bits are very hard materials not obtained in nature. The drill pipes have to take a lot of load and pressure. All this is not djinn engineering. So they need help.

The purpose of a forum is to throw reasonable ideas and see what sticks. Paramu seem sot be getting it.

[RamaY]

First question: The PRC made its ummah agreements as partof Cold War and its TSP agreement as a sub-set of that to contain India. There is blowback to PRC in Central Asia due to their old proteges. And it is in the strategic province of Sinkiang. IOW PRC cant afford to lose that province. Then there is the energy resources of CA that PRC needs which are getting radicalized by TSP Islam. The old Islamic people of CA were barbarians who were primarily motivated by loot. The new Islamists are inspired by the religion and this is a marked difference. So there are some motivations for PRC to ditch or atleast loosen their ties to ummah.

PRC wants to emerge from its old linkages. Doent mean all parts are pullin gin the same direction. PLA is still antediluvean. Their myopia led to India coming out of the cold.

Second question: Oil exploration and extraction are high technology itmes not available in those countries. For eg. the drill bits are very hard materials not obtained in nature. The drill pipes have to take a lot of load and pressure. All this is not djinn engineering. So they need help.

The purpose of a forum is to throw reasonable ideas and see what sticks. Paramu seem sot be getting it.

If this happens...

Then India will be the frontline state (not that China and India will form an alliance against islam) between Islam and China, letting China focus on other priorities...

Taking India's aspirations into consideration.. this would make the following power blocks to shape 21st century?
1. US - North & South American continents
2. EU - European Union + Africa
3. Russia - Russia + Central Asian Block
4. China - China + Pacific Islands + ASEAN
5. India - Indian sub-continent (we should start using this word instead of south-asia) + Middle East...

Is this a good outcome for India? From an Idealogy+Demographic point of view?

[svinayak]

India and the new scramble for Africa
http://www.hindu.com/2008/07/14/stories ... 471100.htm
Jorge Heine

Africa’s enormous natural resources, many of them lying fallow because of economic mismanagement or outright civil wars, are precisely what India needs.

Gandhiji, who knew Africa well, once said, “commerce between India and Africa will be of ideas and services, not of manufactured goods against raw materials after the fashion of the western exploiter.” The Mahatma was prescient only to some extent: though services and ideas play a role in the burgeoning Indo-African links, raw materials and industrial products still predominate.

As Africa enters into its fifth consecutive year of growth, projected at 6.2 per cent in 2008 (up from 5.8 per cent in 2007), it has become, as the OECD’s Javier Santiso has put it, “the new frontier of emerging markets.” South Africa, Botswana, Ghana and Kenya are at the forefront of an “African Renaissance” that South African President Thabo Mbeki has been preaching about since 1998, but that is only now starting to materialise. The number of companies listed in stock exchanges in Sub-Saharan Africa has gone up from 66 in 2000 to 522 in 2007, and even hedge funds and private equity managers are moving in. The investment rate, at 20 per cent of GDP, is still too low, and foreign debt, at $250 billion, remains a burden, but by and large Africa’s economic outlook is much better than it was a few years ago.
India’s presence

India’s growing presence in Africa is best epitomised by events in the Zambian copper belt. Once a leading copper producer, Zambia nationalised its copper mines in the late 60s, shortly before Chile did in 1971. Yet, as opposed to Chile, whose state-owned CODELCO is today’s the world’s leading copper company, Zambia ran its mines into the ground. In despair, 30 years later the Zambian government invited the former owners, Anglo American PLC, the South African mining giant, to move in again, which it did, buying up their former properties for a song. Yet even fabled Anglo was unable to deal with the mess, and abandoned Konkola, the jewel in the crown of the Zambian mines, and other properties a few years later.

Enter Vedanta Resources, an FTSE 100 Indian metals and mining group, which, with impeccable timing, bought 51 per cent of Konkola Copper Mines in 2004 (recently upgraded to 79 per cent) and has them now up and running; a major expansion, to be ready by 2010, should bring up production to 500,000 tons of finished copper. An Indian company stepped in where neither Anglo nor CODELCO, which was also offered Konkola, dared to tread. With the price of copper at four dollars a pound, four times what it was four years ago, in a number of boardrooms of mining companies around the world the question of “who lost Zambia?” must be resonating. (Vedanta also recently bought ASARCO, the third largest copper producer in the United States for $2.6 billion in cash.)

Welcome to the brave new world of India in Africa, where the captains of Indian industry, like Anil Agarwal of Vedanta (who boasts he is now “26 per cent of Zambia’s GDP”) but also Ratan Tata of the Tata Group, Onkar Kanwar of Apollo Tyres and many others have moved in with a vengeance. Tata Steel has a $1.5 billion joint venture in an iron project in Cote d’Ivoire, and Tanzania has become a magnet for Indian companies, attracting some $825 million in investment since 1990. These companies are making up for time lost until the early 90s, when Africa’s economic difficulties and India’s inward-oriented development had kept them apart. Trade between India and Africa has gone from $961 million in 1991 to $30 billion in 2006-2007. The continent’s fastest growing region is East Africa, with the oldest links with India, and the largest Indian-origin communities.

As a recent, special issue of the South African Journal of International Affairs (vol. 14, # 2; full disclosure: I am on their Editorial Advisory Board) on the subject shows, both Africa and India have much to gain from all this. India’s high growth rate, averaging eight per cent for the past four years, in what is now a trillion-dollar economy, is gobbling up all the raw materials it can get, be they iron, copper, gold or oil. Africa’s enormous natural resources, many of them lying fallow because of economic mismanagement or outright civil wars, are precisely what India needs.

The current upsurge in commodity prices, driven by Chinese and Indian demand, has helped both Africa and Latin America — and to look at the per capita oil, copper and iron consumption in the two Asian giants and compare it to the one in Europe or North America is to realise for how long this can go on.

China, as elsewhere in the world, has gained advantage over India, securing oil rights in Nigeria, Angola, and , most controversially, in Sudan, among other countries. China’s trade with Africa in 2007 was $55 billion (up from $10 billion in 2000) and according to some, may have contributed as much as 20 per cent of Africa’s economic growth in 2007. The Chinese government would like it to reach $100 billion in 2010, thus becoming Africa’s main economic partner. In 2006, the China-Africa Summit in Beijing gathered 48 of the 53 African heads of state. India hosted a similar, albeit smaller, summit with African heads of state in New Delhi this past April.

These new links are not only about trade, but also about cooperation. And in both fields, the action is in the South. A measure of how much out of the loop Northern countries are in this can be gauged from the fact that whereas all of U.S. international cooperation for Latin America and the Caribbean in 2007 amounted to $1.6 billion (of which $600 million went to Colombia), this was a mere one fifth of the $8.8 billion budgeted by Venezuela in international aid for the region. China has committed to a $5 billion Africa Development Fund. To continue to haggle for the OECD countries to step up to the plate and come up with the 0.7 per cent of GDP in international cooperation to which they committed long ago but have failed to deliver is not just futile, but irrelevant.

New Delhi is not quite in Venezuela’s or China’s category in its Africa programmes, but it is moving in the right direction. In addition to its flagship, $200 million Nepad project to provide digital connectivity throughout the African continent by means of a Pan-African satellite and fibre-optics network, India is setting up cooperation programmes in Ethiopia and Botswana to improve agricultural productivity, in Ghana in poverty alleviation, in Benin, Senegal and elsewhere.

One of the most innovative approaches is coming out of the India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) initiative, whose Third Summit is to take place next October in New Delhi. IBSA has set up its own cooperation fund, with projects in Equatorial Guinea and in Haiti leading the way. India, a somewhat reluctant partner, has started to realise the enormous potential IBSA entails, as India, while taking on the new responsibilities its new regional and, indeed, global, role implies, can also build on its foreign policy trajectory as founding member and leader of the NAM, an entity originally based on Afro-Asian solidarity.
Advantage Africa

Yet, contrary to what some might surmise from this new version of the “scramble for Africa” among the two Asian giants, if African countries play their cards right, they have much to gain. Chinese and Indian companies are more willing to invest in infrastructure and in the “downstream” facilities needed to bring products to port than western ones.

South Africa, where Gandhi cut his political teeth from 1893 on, has been at the forefront of African ties with India, as was underscored by the recent visit to New Delhi of ANC chairman Jacob Zuma, whom many consider to be Thabo Mbeki’s most likely successor. South Africa’s exports to India have grown from a few hundred million dollars in the early 90s to $2.6 billion in 2006, much of it driven by gold, but also by other products.

As the demand for India increases from around the world, there is a great temptation for New Delhi to focus exclusively on the Big Powers and shed its old Third World commitments as unnecessary ballast. That would be a mistake. As the considerable growth in trade and investment flows not only with Africa but also with Latin America shows, India has enormous opportunities in both of those continents. They provide many of the commodities India needs, plus ready markets for Indian products. Ideas and services are key in the Knowledge Society into which the Third Industrial Revolution has propelled us, and of which India has made so much so far. Yet, they still need to be under-girded by the material base provided by natural resources and manufactured products.

(Jorge Heine is CIGI Professor of Global Governance at Wilfrid Laurier University and a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ontario. He serves currently as Vice-President of the International Political Science Association.).

[svinayak]

Indian Ocean Nexus
by Martin Walker
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?f ... _id=453921

The seas have traditionally been the highways of trade, enabling the prosperity that tends to follow. From ancient times, the Mediterranean Sea facilitated the exchanges that nurtured the precocious civilization of Greece and fed Rome, then carried the Crusaders abroad and enriched Venice and Genoa. Later the Atlantic became the great highway of trade that fed the explosive growth of North America, and more recently trade across the Pacific has become the most lucrative of all. Now there are signs that the Indian Ocean is taking its place in this maritime and commercial tradition, and also in the strategic rivalry that usually accompanies the generation of the wealth and resources that trade brings.

The Indian Ocean laps the coasts of Africa and India, of Southeast Asia and the Persian Gulf states, of Indonesia and Australia. It flows into two of the great choke­points of world commerce: the Red Sea, and thus the Suez Canal, and the Strait of Malacca, off Singapore, through which pass a thousand ships each week. Thanks to the thirst of China, Japan, and South Korea for the oil the tankers bring, the strait hosts close to a quarter of all world trade.

The Indian Ocean is not new to the trading game. There are potent and even somber historical memories along its shores, from the Arab slave trade down the East African coast to Zanzibar and beyond, to the celebrated 15th-century oceanic explorations of the Chinese admiral Zheng He during the Ming dynasty. He was far from the first to exploit the Indian Ocean’s potential. Some 1,500 years ago, Chinese pilgrims brought back Buddhist scriptures and sutras from India, and the Muslim explorer Sa’ad ibn Abi Waqqas, an uncle of Mohammed, reached China and established the first mosque there in the seventh century. China exported its porcelain and tea to the Arab world, and the small ports of what we now call the Persian Gulf sent pearls and gold to the markets of India and China.

But the trade that is now flourishing across the Indian Ocean is altogether different, in scale and in range of products, and in its economic and strategic implications. It is different above all in the flows of money and investment that are now binding the Indian Ocean nations and China into a potential new hub of the global economy. We might call it CHIMEA, for China, India, the Middle East, and Africa.

Like all of the great surges of trade in history, the explosion of Indian Ocean commerce is based on mutual needs. China and India need energy supplies from the Persian Gulf states and oil and raw materials from Africa, and Africa needs the financial resources that the gulf states are accumulating in unprecedented quantities. And now that India has become a net food importer once again, China and India and the Middle East all have an interest in developing African agriculture as perhaps the last great untapped food resource of a world whose population looks set to grow from today’s 6.5 billion to 9.1 billion by 2050.

More than half of the world’s population now lives in the CHIMEA countries, and if current demographic trends continue, the region will by 2050 account for two out of every three people on the planet. By then, according to Goldman Sachs projections, India could be the world’s largest economy and China the second largest. Certainly, the current 11 percent of global gross domestic product produced by the CHIMEA countries will have grown dramatically.

The combination of Middle Eastern energy and finance with African raw materials and untapped food potential and Indian and Chinese goods and services looks to be more than just a mutually rewarding three-way partnership. Wealth follows trade, and with wealth comes the means to purchase influence and power. Just as the great centers of Europe clustered first around the Mediterranean Sea until the greater trade across the Atlantic and then the Pacific produced new, richer, and more powerful states, so the prospects are strong that the Indian Ocean countries will develop greater influence and ambition in their turn. In the emergence of CHIMEA as a new factor in global commercial affairs, we may also be seeing the future contours of the world’s geo­political system.

Moreover, if one considers most of the projected growth rates for India and China, the CHIMEA connection appears likely to strengthen throughout this century. It could become the catalyst that finally hauls Africa from underdevelopment and poverty. Indeed, the surge of economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa, running more than five percent annually in the past several years, owes a great deal to Chinese, Arab, and Indian trade and investment. We are finally seeing that expansion of South-South commerce that has been the dream of developing-world economists and political leaders—wary of the implicit ex­ploitation they suspected would come from the North-South relationship—since the 1955 Asian-African summit at Bandung, Indonesia, in the early days of decolonization.

Each year, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) publishes World Investment Report, an au­thoritative study of the patterns of investment that flow through the global economy in much the same way—and as vitally—as blood flows through the human body. The UNCTAD conferences of the 1970s provided the most prominent forum for complaints about North-South capital flows and the need for more ­South-­South cooperation, so there was a discernible note of satisfaction in the most recent UNCTAD report. It found that ­South-­South foreign direct investment (FDI) “has expanded particularly fast over the past 15 years. Total outflows from developing and transition economies (excluding offshore financial centers) increased from about $4 billion in 1985 to $61 billion in 2004; most of these were destined for other developing or transition economies. In fact, FDI among these economies increased from $2 billion in 1985 to $60 billion in 2004 [flowing] primarily from Asia to Africa.”

Although the United States, Japan, Britain, France, and Germany are home to 73 of the world’s top 100 transnational corporations, those based in the developing world are also making their mark. In 1990, only 19 transnational corporations from developing countries were among the Fortune top 500 global firms, but 47 were in 2005.

This change has come with remarkable speed, fueled by the sudden collision of two separate but connected ­trends—­the acceleration of economic growth in China and India and the surge in energy prices that followed the onset of the Iraq war. The oil and gas export revenues of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) member states more than tripled in four years, from $210 billion in 2002 to a record $649 billion in 2006. And just over $505 billion of OPEC’s swollen 2006 revenues went to the organization’s Arab members. Saudi Arabia alone earned $194 billion from petroleum exports, according to OPEC’s Annual Statistical Bulletin. This was the period when China crept up on Japan as the world’s second-biggest oil importer, after the United States. The Chinese appetite more than doubled, while India’s imports of crude oil tripled. In four brisk years, China and India alone increased global oil demand by 150 million tons, or 1.1 billion barrels.

With that kind of extra demand, prices naturally soared, and Arab revenues grew in consequence. The result, according to the Hedge Fund Research Group, is that the potential Middle Eastern capital available for investment is more than $4 trillion—close to the total size of Japan’s annual economic output. Much of this money is under direct state control, rather than in private hands, although the boundaries between private family wealth and state holdings tend to be blurred in Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority is almost certainly the largest single investing entity; this sovereign fund is worth $875 billion, according to the investment bank Morgan Stanley.

Most of these Arab funds are invested in traditional Western vehicles such as Citibank and Airbus. Some, such as P&O Ports, have been bought outright. Vast sums are also invested at home. The current Saudi state budget, for example, calls for outlays of $665 billion over the next three years. Six new cities are under construction. The largest, King Abdullah Economic City, on the Red Sea coast near Jeddah, will have a new port equivalent in size to Rotterdam, 150,000 new dwellings, universities, industrial parks, and a financial center. Even if these ambitious projects are successful, they will barely make a dent in the explosive growth of the labor force, which, on the strength of births already registered, will more than double, to 15 million males of working age, by 2020.

But a careful analysis of recent Arab investment decisions reveals a new trend: a striking willingness to invest in Asia and, in particular, in other CHIMEA countries. Arab money is pouring into Asia, especially into predominantly Muslim countries, where Arab capital has been heavily committed to the development of banks that comply with Islamic law’s prohibitions against interest payments. Arab companies have also been prominent in the energy sector, property investments, and mobile telephony, three fields where they have considerable experience.

Trade and investment between India and the Arab countries has more than trebled, from $7.5 billion in 2001–02 to $24 billion in 2005–06, and is expected to reach $55 billion by 2010. This excludes the oil trade as well as the annual $20 billion sent home in remittances from the four million Indian workers in Saudi Arabia and the gulf states.

During a state visit to India last year by King Abdullah, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh opened the door to Saudi capital for Indian infrastructure projects. Now the fourth-largest recipient of Saudi oil, after Japan, the United States, and China, India secured a Saudi commitment to ­co­finance a refinery project with India’s ­state-­owned energy firm. India’s Reli­ance Group will, in turn, invest in a refinery and petrochemicals project in Saudi Arabia. The king signed an ambitious “Del­hi Declaration” that amounted to a broad stra­tegic partnership stressing energy and economic cooperation as well as joint efforts to fight terrorism.

The Saudi monarch flew to India directly from China, where he had signed an energy cooperation agreement providing for joint investment in oil, natural gas, and mineral deposits, and invited Chinese investors to take advantage of his country’s privatization program and invest in the growing Saudi private sector. Already building—with Kuwait and other OPEC members—an $8 billion refinery complex in Guangzhou, the Saudis have held regular political consultations with Beijing since 2004, when Sinopec, the Chinese state energy company, was given rights to explore for gas in Saudi Arabia’s vast Empty Quarter. Although nervous about separatist movements in its western provinces, China agreed that the Saudi Development Bank could fund a large urban development project in the traditionally Muslim city of Aksu.

The Arab investment in Asia is logical, given Asia’s stunning growth rates. The real surprise is elsewhere. The ­Asia-­Africa Business Forum meeting in ­Dar ­es Salaam early in 2006 symbolized a new investment interest in Africa. Dubai Ports World has spent $2 billion to buy Cape Town’s port and waterfront, and is investing another $1 billion in further developments. Deals announced in the past year included a $500 million investment by Mobile Telecommunications in the Republic of Congo and another $500 million property venture by Dubai Ports World in Kinshasa.

India, with a diaspora of 2.8 million ethnic Indians in Africa, is taking advantage of these historic connections and its British Commonwealth links to strengthen its ties and to negotiate new energy supplies. It helped establish Nigeria’s military academy, and almost all senior officers of Ghana’s military have attended Indian training courses. As they look increasingly outward, the big Indian corporations, such as the Tata Group, Reliance, and Ranbaxy Laboratories, have mostly focused on other countries that once knew British ­rule—­South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, and Kenya. These are also countries where the products of India’s Bollywood film industry, dubbed into English, are popular.

On the whole, India has a far better reputation in Africa than China, which has been criticized for using predominantly imported Chinese labor in its African projects and for a cavalier attitude toward the human rights records of the regimes it deals with. But despite admirable measures, such as a pledge to develop a project to link remote African schools and medical centers to Indian institutions via the Internet, India could easily lose its superior reputation by succumbing to temptations such as a potential mining deal in Zimbabwe, home to one of the continent’s least savory regimes.

After India brought 300 African delegates to New Delhi for an economic partnership conference in 2006, the Confederation of Indian Industry claimed that the event kicked off negotiations on $17 billion in new deals in fields ranging from oil exploration to hotel construction. “We want to learn from India’s experience,” Amadou Dioffo, managing director of Sonidep Petrol and Gas Company of Niger, told the closing press conference. “Like us, India also has a colonial past. We want to know how and why it is doing so much better now.”

India’s commitment to Africa, however, is dwarfed by that of China, whose trade with the continent has grown from $10 billion to $56 billion since 2000. In that period, China has invested $12 billion in Africa and built more than 100 food and raw material processing plants, 3,500 miles of highways, 1,600 miles of railways, eight power stations, and three ports. More than 800 Chinese companies are currently operating in Africa, which now provides 28 percent of China’s oil.

Last year, China hosted the annual meeting of the African Development Bank in Shanghai, where it announced new credit and investment funds of $3 billion and $5 billion, respectively, and wrote off $10 billion in bilateral debts. China will train thousands of African professionals and double the number of scholarships awarded to African students while sending more agriculture experts and youth volunteers to work on the continent.

The list of deals is long. ­Thirty-­one percent of China’s offshore contractor and engineering projects are based in Africa. That figure will soon rise if a deal to provide $2.3 billion to Mozambique for a new ­hydro­electric dam on the Zambezi River is completed. This is likely, not only because Chinese prices are low but, as President Hu Jintao has declared, “China’s aid comes without strings.” This policy has been appreciated in Sudan and Zimbabwe, to name but two of the most egregious human rights offenders. But there are signs of backlash against China’s investments, notably in Zambia, where the opposition Patriotic Front made inroads in the 2006 elections by campaigning on an ­anti-­Chinese platform. Its leader, Michael Sata, says the Chinese are “exploiting us, just like everyone who came before. They have simply come to take the place of the West as the new colonizers of Africa.”

Nonetheless, the infrastructure that China has already built will benefit Africa for years to come, and has played a major role in what is starting to look like Africa’s takeoff into ­self-­sustaining growth. For once, Africa seems to be generating wealth without digging for it in the ground. Ghana, which has an English-speaking population and lower wages than India, was one of the first African countries to capitalize on the offshoring trend in business. The American outsourcing company ACS set up shop in Accra in 2000, employing 60 people. The work force has since grown to 1,800. Among other things, Ghanaians now process parking tickets for New York City’s local government.

At current growth rates, poverty levels in Africa could halve by 2015, and if China and India are excluded, ­sub-­Saharan Africa is experiencing faster economic expansion than the rest of Asia. Investors have benefited dramatically. Between 1995 and 2005, African stock markets showed an average compound annual growth of 22 percent, and torrid growth continues.

Impressive results are not confined to the financial sector. Nollywood, Nigeria’s booming film industry, is the world’s third-largest producer of feature films, after Bollywood and Hollywood. In 13 years, it has grown from nothing into a $250 million-a-year industry building on Nigerian entrepreneurship and digital technology. The industry now boasts some 300 filmmakers, who produce their films on digital cameras, using common ­computer-­based systems for editing. In many cases, these auteurs peddle DVDs directly to customers in the marketplace. Nollywood films are popular across ­English-­speaking Africa, aired on African satellite television networks and even on stations in Britain.

Privatization has transformed the ­loss-­making ­state-­owned airline industries, crucial to a continent with poor roads and communications systems so locked into colonial patterns that phone calls and travelers between neighboring countries often had to be routed via Paris or London. All of this is changing fast. Kenya Airways, partially privatized in 1995 after years of troubles, is now the most profitable major airline in Africa. Upstarts Virgin Nigeria, South ­Africa–­based Kulula, and Kenya’s Flamingo Airways are opening new routes and catering to a newly empowered middle class. Nairobi airport is becoming a ­pan-­African hub and a magnet for growers and other export ­enterprises—­or was, until the recent outbreak of violence in the wake of the country’s disputed elections. Even if a lasting political settlement is secured, higher energy costs are a threat to Kenya’s exports, as well as those of other African countries.

An important factor in Africa’s new growth has been the mobile phone industry, now worth close to $10 billion a year. With subscriber growth across Africa running at 40 percent annually, prospects are so inviting that mergers and acquisitions have been commonplace. Kuwait’s Mobile Telecommunications paid $2.8 billion in 2005 to buy ­Dutch-­registered Celtel, which serves 15 African countries. In Kenya and Tanzania, mobile operators have swiftly become the biggest companies and largest taxpayers.

Mobile phones help small farmers, since access to ­real-­time market prices means that intermediaries can no longer charge different rates or manipulate local markets. The phones have cut the need for costly and time-consuming travel and allowed farmers and contractors to deal directly with customers. Africa is far ahead of the United States in implementing the use of cell phones for banking tasks such as making payments and managing microcredit accounts and remittances from family members abroad. Applications such as these lower costs and attract new users; for instance, local surveys suggest that 50 percent of all bank accounts in South Africa will be administered via cell phones by 2011.

China may yet come to reconsider the way its investments have helped create future competitors. In many African countries, factory productivity in ­low-­end manufacturing, particularly textiles, has risen close to Chinese levels. In Kenya, Tanzania, and Senegal, productivity in textile plants is running at 80 percent of Chinese levels, and 90 percent of Indian levels. And African wages are currently less than half of those in Guangdong. The “total factor productivity” (including purchasing, selling, and distribution) of African firms is still much lower than that of competitors in China and India, but given decent management, African companies could catch up ­fast.

In his 2007 book Africa’s Silk Road: China and India’s New Economic Frontier, World Bank economic adviser Harry Broadman noted that exports from Africa to Asia had tripled since 2002, turning Asia into Africa’s third-largest trading partner (27 percent), after the European Union (32 percent) and the United States (29 percent).

“China and India each have rapidly modernizing industries and burgeoning middle classes with rising incomes and purchasing power,” Broadman wrote. “These societies are demanding not only natural resource–extractive commodities, agricultural goods such as cotton, and other traditional African exports, but also diversified, nontraditional exports such as processed commodities, light manufactured products, household consumer goods, food, and tourism. Because of its labor-intensive capacity, Africa has the potential to export these nontraditional goods and services competitively to the average Chinese and Indian consumer and firm.”

There are still severe constraints on Africa’s growth potential, from the ravages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic to a legacy of poor governance, from the ominous threat of climate change and water shortages to a lack of education. UN figures suggest that 46 million African children—nearly half the school-age population—have never set foot in a classroom. But Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Ghana are among countries that recently abolished fees for children to attend school.

HIV still rages, but not as fiercely as it did. A decline in HIV prevalence among young women in Uganda has been under way since the mid-1990s. In Kenya, infection levels are dropping in urban centers in response to targeted intervention policies. Tanzania and Malawi have seen rates decline slightly or stabilize. Aid organizations have used the response to HIV as a way to rebuild a basic public-health system in much of Africa, reaping a variety of positive changes. With all of its challenges, Africa is in better shape to face the future.

What is building around the Indian Ocean is far larger than simply Africa’s future, and larger than Asian-African trade. The flowering of a commercial system is under way, a new form of that infamous triangular trade that helped finance Britain’s 18th-century industrial revolution, with cheap British beads and mirrors being sold in West Africa for slaves, who were shipped to the Americas, and the proceeds used to ship tobacco and sugar back to Britain. The new triangular trade of the Indian Ocean sees the Middle Eastern countries export oil to Asia, then use the proceeds to export capital to Asia and Africa. Asia sends cash, consumer goods, and remittance workers to the Middle East, and investment capital, skills, and aid to Africa, which in turn sells oil and agricultural products to Asia, investing some of the proceeds in new industries, from mobile phones to Nollywood films.

But the rivalry for resources is intense. The Indian Ocean is also witnessing the beginnings of an arms race, with China building ports that can also serve as naval bases at Gwador, Pakistan, which is near the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and at Sittwe in Myanmar, on the Bay of Bengal. Alarmed by China’s ambitions, India has been boosting its own forces with a new fleet of French­built Scorpene stealth submarines, a program to build three aircraft carriers, and development of the Agni-3 missile, which could, in theory, carry a nuclear warhead to Shanghai.

The economic promise of CHIMEA is dazzling, but the geopolitical and strategic implications are sobering. As the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Pacific proved in their own periods of surging trade growth, commercial highways can easily become battlegrounds in their turn. And with the CHIMEA nations poised in this century to become the globe’s center of gravity, the stakes in the Indian Ocean promise to become very high ­indeed.


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Martin Walker, a senior scholar at the Wilson Center, is director of A. T. Kearny’s Global Business Policy Council. His latest novel, Bruno, Chief of Police, will be published in January by Knopf.

You are here: Home / Emerging Threats / Commentary: CHIMEA no chimera
Emerging Threats

By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE, UPI Editor at Large
Published: Dec. 21, 2007 at 9:23 AMhttp://www.upi.com/Emerging_Threats/2007/12/21 ... 198247000/

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Dec. 21 (UPI) -- Below Washington's geopolitical radar screen, where Iraq and Iran tend to blur out the rest of the world, momentous events are in the making. Among the most significant:

CHIMEA is not a chemical formula, but the emergence of the new growth hub of China, India, Middle East and Africa. There are now large areas of what the developed nations of the North still call the developing South that now see themselves as the new fulcrum of something bigger and potentially richer.

At a recent "CEO Retreat" in Dubai organized by A.T. Kearney's Global Business Policy Council, CHIMEA was all the buzz. A reshuffling of the global deck of cards is under way. The Middle East and the wider Islamic world are no longer locked into the traditional (and for 300 years dependent) relationship with Europe and the West. In Dubai, the world's new Hong Kong, the big planetary players see the new hub of global economic growth as a crescent that stretches from the Red Sea and East Africa through the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean to the Straits of Malacca and China.

As the dollar is knocked off its pedestal, partly through the recent manifestations of short-sighted naked greed, better known as the subprime mortgage fiasco, at root a global criminal enterprise, CHIMEA emerges as a new engine with extraordinary potential. The ingredients of this explosive growth are Arab energy and hundreds of billions of dollars in "sovereign investment funds," Chinese manufacturing, India's information technology skills and services, and "a vast and young regional workforce with East Africa's agricultural potential."

CHIMEA also encompasses half the world's population, which will rise to two-thirds by 2050. Today, the new geopolitical construct produces 11 percent of global gross domestic product; by 2030, current projections show it at 50 percent. China's Industrial and Commercial Bank recently dropped $5.5 billion to acquire 20 percent of South Africa's Standard Bank -- the single largest amount ever invested in sub-Saharan Africa. Beijing is even helping bail out some of America's most prestigious financial institutions, guilty of subprime management skills in the subprime housing bubble.

All the pieces of CHIMEA are showing dramatic rates of growth -- e.g., North Africa at 7 percent; Egypt 8 percent; even sub-Saharan Africa above 5 percent for the past three years, due to Chinese and Indian trade and investment. South-South commerce is gradually displacing the North-South relationship born some 600 years ago when Portugal annexed Macau during the Ming Dynasty.

UNCTAD -- the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development -- was launched in Geneva in 1964 to address what was then called "The Scandal of the Century," the growing chasm between rich and poor nations. Che Guevara was the Cuban representative at the inaugural conference. Today, the gap is narrowing rapidly. The North's wealthy club no longer monopolizes the list of the world's billionaires. The Middle East, India, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia have produced scores of billionaires out of the world's total of more than 1,000 (up from 350 since the beginning of the decade).

Multinational corporations have morphed into TNCs -- genuinely transnational where flags are meaningless. Those nations that once held all the cards still have most of these behemoths. But Fortune's 500 now includes 52 from "developing" countries. India's Tata Steel giant recently took over Corus, the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker, in a $13.4 billion deal.

Oil and gas producers from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries are providing the fuel for the rapid emergence of CHIMEA. Revenues have tripled in four years -- from $210 billion to an all-time high of more than $700 billion this year, most of it to OPEC's Arab countries. Qatar, a small progressive country of half a million and one of the world's largest natural gas producers, is setting aside $100 billion a year for investments abroad.

Unquenchable oil thirsts in China and India drove up prices -- and propelled CHIMEA from chimera to reality. These two giants of more than 1 billion people each saw their oil needs doubling and trebling in the last four years. China is now a bigger oil importer than Japan.

In the January 2008 Wilson Quarterly, CHIMEA scholar (and UPI Editor Emeritus) Martin Walker quotes the Hedge Fund Research Group as estimating Middle Eastern oil and gas capital available for investment at $4.1 trillion -- almost the size of Japan's annual GDP. Saudi Arabia alone is building six new cities. Morgan Stanley (AMEX:BWN) estimates Abu Dhabi's Investment Authority's fund at $875 billion. By way of contrast, the final reckoning of U.S. bank losses in the subprime scandal will be close to $100 billion.

Unnoticed in the U.S. media are the comings and goings of heads of state and government from South to South, from the Gulf to India and China and vice versa.

CHIMEA is redrawing the global landscape for mergers and acquisitions.

Top U.S. law firms are opening offices in Dubai (where the slogan is "Do buy in Dubai"), the freest city in the Gulf, where there are no Islamic restrictions on liquor and where Russian hookers ply their trade.

[rsingh]

Strange set of hapenings.......smells fishy
-US making noise about 5-7 billion USD bhiksha to Baki....including 1 Bl USD "demcracy shabashi
-Sudden show of force by Bakis at Khaybar pass
-News about possible strike by US on Iran and Israeli war games that prompted Tehran to do tests. And then suddenly offereing candy to Iran. Europeanss are firmly in bed with Unkil.Typical American tectic of raising the stake and showing benifits of compliance.
-Increase in incidents on Afganistan- Baki border...........hint that something is going on.
-Talibani more vocal and proactive in Bakistan.
-Bush has nothing to loose. Unkil wants to show the results and at the same time afraid that if Democrates wins presidency......it will be too late. On other hand success could help republicans in election.
-India firmly behind after Kabul bombing and Iran sees the benifit of being on rightside.
Conclusion
-Israel agree to a unequal deal with Hamas.........calming down the Arabs.
Some big operation is on the way before onset of winter. It may involve free hand in NWFP and a change in Govt by Mush or somebody else. I predict coup /Martial law in Bakistan before 14 August.

[svinayak]

Strange set of hapenings.......smells fishy
-US making noise about 5-7 billion USD bhiksha to Baki....including 1 Bl USD "demcracy shabashi
-Sudden show of force by Bakis at Khaybar pass
-News about possible strike by US on Iran and Israeli war games that prompted Tehran to do tests. And then suddenly offereing candy to Iran. Europeanss are firmly in bed with Unkil.Typical American tectic of raising the stake and showing benifits of compliance.

Is this the oct surprise- some test

[rsingh]

well "some mizzzile tests" ........if that is good enough.

[svinayak]

Why not the jewel test

[Nayak]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1216428 ... pa_mostpop

The End of White Flight

For the First Time in Decades, Cities' Black Populations Lose Ground,
Stirring Clashes Over Class, Culture and Even Ice Cream
By CONOR DOUGHERTY
July 19, 2008; Page A1

Decades of white flight transformed America's cities. That era is drawing to a close.

In Washington, a historically black church is trying to attract white members to survive. Atlanta's next mayoral race is expected to feature the first competitive white candidate since the 1980s. San Francisco has lost so many African-Americans that Mayor Gavin Newsom created an "African-American Out-Migration Task Force and Advisory Committee" to help retain black residents.

"The city is experiencing growth, yet we're losing African-American families disproportionately," Mr. Newsom says. When that happens, "we lose part of our soul."
[Bens Chili Bowl]
From the Collection of the Ali family
Ben's Chili Bowl in Washington has become a melting pot as the area's racial mix changes.

For much of the 20th century, the proportion of whites shrank in most U.S. cities. In recent years the decline has slowed considerably -- and in some significant cases has reversed. Between 2000 and 2006, eight of the 50 largest cities, including Boston, Seattle and San Francisco, saw the proportion of whites increase, according to Census figures. The previous decade, only three cities saw increases.

The changing racial mix is stirring up quarrels over class and culture. Beloved institutions in traditionally black communities -- minority-owned restaurants, book stores -- are losing the customers who supported them for decades. As neighborhoods grow more multicultural, conflicts over home prices, taxes and education are opening a new chapter in American race relations.

Part of the demographic shift is simple math: So many whites had abandoned cities over the past half-century, there weren't as many left to lose. Whites make up 66% of the general U.S. population, but only about 40% of large cities. Sooner or later, the pendulum was bound to swing back, and that appears to be starting.
[Bens Chili Bowl]
From the Collection of the Ali family
Ben's exterior in 1958

The Census data "suggests that white flight from large cities may have bottomed out in the 1990s," says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

For instance, while most of the 50 largest cities continue to see declines in the share of whites, it is at much-reduced rates. In Los Angeles the share of the white population declined only about a half a percentage point between 2000 and 2006, compared to a 7.5-point decline the previous decade. Cities including New York, Fort Worth and Chicago show a similar pattern.

'Natural Decrease'

Demographic readjustments can take decades to play out. But if current trends continue, Washington and Atlanta (both with black majorities) will in the next decade see African-Americans fall below 50% for the first time in about a half-century.

Meantime, in San Francisco, African-American deaths now outnumber births. Once a "natural decrease" such as this begins, it's tough for the population to bounce back, since there are fewer residents left to produce the next generation. "The cycle tends to be self-perpetuating," says Kenneth M. Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire.

There are myriad factors driving the change. In recent years, minority middle-class families, particularly African-Americans, have been moving to the suburbs in greater numbers. At the same time, Hispanic immigrants (who poured into cities from the 1970s through the 1990s) are now increasingly bypassing cities for suburbs and rural areas, seeking jobs on farms and in meat-packing plants.

Cities have spent a decade tidying up parks and converting decaying factories into retail and living space. That has attracted young professionals and empty-nesters, many of them white.

The shift has put the future at odds with the past. New York City's borough of Brooklyn has seen its proportion of whites grow to 36.1% in 2006 from 35.9% in 2000 -- the first increase in white share in about a century.

Hoarding Computers

While the root of neighborhood conflicts is often money or class differences between white-collar and blue-collar workers, it often unfolds along racial lines. About two years ago Public School 84, in a largely Hispanic section of Brooklyn, meetings of the Parent Teacher Association started drawing a more professional, wealthier and whiter group of parents.

Soon, disagreements spilled into the open. Arguments concerned everything from how PTA money was spent, to accusations that some white parents were hoarding computers for their kids.

Even ice cream became a point of contention: In the past year, a group of mostly white parents took issue with a school tradition of selling ice cream to raise money. They felt the school shouldn't be serving sugary foods to kids, but the break with tradition angered many minority parents who felt the sales were an important source of money and that ice cream is a harmless treat.

"It was a gigantic fight," says Brooke Parker, who is white and whose daughter attended the school last year. "If the school is saying 'It's OK to give out ice cream' while at the same time they're holding workshops on how to deal with your kid's Type 2 diabetes, maybe we should rethink the message we're sending."

Relations got testy enough that about 20 kids, most of whom were white, transferred to private schools or other public schools. "I don't think the battleground against gentrification should take place in the schools," says Ms. Parker, who withdrew her own daughter from P.S. 84 as tensions built. "It seemed nothing could get accomplished," she said.


A few months later, a small group of families, most of them white, proposed establishing a new public school, to be located inside the existing P.S. 84. Hundreds of minority parents reacted by putting out a press release calling it de facto segregation. The proposal is "clearly discriminatory," the release said. "Children will suffer the effects of negative stigma as a result of this segregation which will send our City back 120 years!"

"I honestly felt like they didn't want to mix our children with their children," says Virginia Reyes, vice president of the PTA at P.S. 84 who has two foster children at the school. "It upset me a lot."

A spokeswoman for the New York City Department of Education says, "We obviously would not and could not open segregated schools." The department says the new school didn't get the go-ahead because it didn't have broad enough community support.

Backers of the new school couldn't be reached.
[Charts]

Elsewhere in Brooklyn, in a majority African-American section of the borough, Councilwoman Letitia James says a handful of predominantly white parents last year asked her if some of their local tax money could be steered to schools in a nearby neighborhood. The parents wanted their kids in schools with a more diverse racial mix, Ms. James says, rather than the majority-black schools in her district.

The parents felt "tax dollars should follow the children, and not the school," Ms. James says. She denied their request.

There's a century's worth of history behind the ebb and flow of whites and minorities in urban America. Rural blacks began flocking to cities more than a century ago, lured by factory jobs. After World War II, whites headed for the suburbs as the great postwar building boom got rolling, while African-American families stayed in the cities, partly because they were often denied access to home loans that whites could get. In the 1970s Hispanic immigrants surged into cities, chasing service jobs and further diluting the share of whites. By the 1980s, as cities hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs, blacks and whites both left -- but whites at a higher rate.

Cities Get a Makeover

Today, cities are refashioning themselves as trendy centers devoid of suburban ills like strip malls and long commutes. In Atlanta, which has among the longest commute times of any U.S. city, the white population rose by 26,000 between 2000 and 2006, while the black population decreased by 8,900. Overall the white proportion has increased to 35% in 2006 from 31% in 2000.

In other cities, whites are still leaving, but more blacks are moving out. Boston lost about 6,000 black residents between 2000 and 2006, but only about 3,000 whites. In 2006, whites accounted for 50.2% of the city's population, up from 49.5% in 2000. That's the first increase in roughly a century.

Tracking population shifts is an inexact science. Changes in how Census data are tallied makes for imprecise comparisons across decades. Hispanics, for instance, were mostly lumped in with whites until 1980, potentially overstating the white population in earlier decades. Also, losses of African-Americans from cities are often disproportionate to other minorities because unlike, say, Hispanics or Asians, the inflow of black immigrants into the U.S. isn't big enough to offset the loss of African-Americans to the suburbs.

Washington -- where African-Americans have been in the majority for a half-century -- has lost about 80,000 black residents between 1990 and 2006. Whites had been leaving, too, but recently they've started coming back. Between 2000 and 2006, Washington gained 24,000 whites and lost 21,000 blacks. Whites are now 32% of the population, up from 28% in 2000.

Churches Take a Hit

This is a problem for Washington's African-American churches. The past few years, numerous black churches have relocated to suburban Prince George's County, Md., to follow their parishioners. Later this year, Metropolitan Baptist Church (founded by freed slaves during the Lincoln administration) plans to leave town as well.

Some of the remaining black churches are now courting white members. On a recent Sunday, the Rev. John Blanchard, the 64-year-old pastor at Ebenezer United Methodist Church, preached to a thin crowd; several pews were empty. About half his parishioners now live in the suburbs and drive into the city for services. High gasoline prices aren't helping attendance.

So Mr. Blanchard says he's planning to add a white intern to preach with him, in hopes of filling more pews. "You've got to love the one you're with," he says, "but you also need to adjust to the environment you're in."

While his church flounders, the predominantly white Capitol Hill United Methodist Church just down the street is flourishing. There the average attendance on Sundays has doubled to about 120 people the past five years. "Demographics are in our favor. We're attracting the folks that are moving in," says the Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli, 38, who headed the church for five years before recently leaving for a position elsewhere.

In San Francisco, the African-American population has fallen by a third, or about 30,000 people, since 1990, largely due to surging housing costs and redevelopment that destroyed some public housing. Mayor Newsom's African-American Out-Migration Task Force, set up last year, has a two-pronged strategy: keep African-Americans from leaving, and promote affordable housing and cultural institutions like a jazz center to try to lure blacks back. "The greatness of our city and region is in its diversity," Mayor Newsom says.

So far, his efforts have focused on residents of public housing, about half of whom are black. The city is trying to prevent evictions by building new community centers where residents can get job training and help with the rent. The city is also giving residents displaced by redevelopment, many of whom are black, an inside track on affordable-housing units.

From Poor to Poorer

As middle-class African-Americans have left San Francisco, the remaining black population has gone from poor to poorer. In 1990, half of the city's African-American population was very low-income; by 2005, that number swelled to about two-thirds. The number of black-owned businesses fell 25% between 1997 and 2002.

As blacks migrated to San Francisco's suburbs, so too have many social activities centered on the community. The San Francisco Chapter of the National Black MBA Association has started hosting many of its events across the bay in Oakland.

The Western Addition, a historically black neighborhood in San Francisco once home to many jazz clubs, has lost much of that character. Powell's Place, an iconic soul-food restaurant that had been located in or around the neighborhood since the 1970s, has moved to Bayview-Hunters Point. Charles Spencer, who owns a barbershop catering to black men, says he has lost many of his customers and is trying to diversify. His Web site has a picture of a white client to go with three black faces.

'An Act of Faith'

The city has celebrated its traditional black culture by designating a stretch of Fillmore Street the "Fillmore Jazz Preservation District," yet the businesses that defined the era are now gone or dying. Raye Richardson, owner of Marcus Book Stores -- its motto is "Books by and about black people everywhere" -- has been in the Fillmore district since 1946. She remembers the clubs, the black tailor shops and the many black residents who supported her shop. Today, Ms. Richardson says her store is losing money; much of her business comes from mail-order traffic.

"San Francisco has so few blacks now, that it's just an act of faith to stay open," says Ms. Richardson, 88.

Sherri Young, executive director at the African-American Shakespeare Company in San Francisco, is one of the few blacks at her theater company who still lives in San Francisco. "I'm a single woman in my late 30s," Ms. Young says. "Culturally, it's difficult."

Recently, she says, her production of "The Comedy of Errors" drew a mostly white audience. It's the first time that's happened since she founded the company 14 years ago.

Write to Conor Dougherty at [email protected]

[Philip]

'If we have guns we will shoot back'Clancy Chassay reports from inside Burma on plans for a new uprising against the military regime, and hears some monks calling for more western intervention and an armed insurrection

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2 ... ary.regime

[Philip]

"Warming up for the Olympics"
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 370571.ece

Mystery bus blasts kill three in China ahead of OlympicsJane Macartney, Beijing

Three people have been killed in two explosions that ripped through two buses this morning in China’s southwestern city of Kunming. Police said the blasts were set deliberately but had yet to identify any suspects.

The attack comes just three weeks before the opening of the Beijing Olympics, which the authorities have warned could be a target for terrorist attacks. Such violence is rare in China, which has a reputation as one of the safest countries in the world – in part because of the powers wielded by the police.

The first explosion rocked a Number 54 bus just after 7am as it was plying its route through the town known as the City of Eternal Spring for its balmy climate. Two people were killed and nine wounded in that first blast.

Just about one hour later, another blast tore through another Number 54 bus on the same route, killing one person and wounding four.

Chinese blackout over Tibetan monk deaths

One resident of a nearby apartment block told The Times: “I just heard one explosion but it sounded huge – several times more powerful than the wound of a tyre exploding. A few minutes later I heard the sounds of police car sirens and ambulances and I saw the ambulances taking away injured people.”

The woman added: “At the time people didn’t panic. Everyone just seemed to be in shock.”

Television footage showed a gaping hole in the side of one of the buses and glass scattered in the street.

A spokesoman for the Yunnan province Public Security Bureau said: “According to preliminary investigations, the explosions were cases of man-made, deliberate sabotage."

Among the dead was Wang Depo, a 35-year-old woman from nearby Sichuan province who had been working at a sauna in the city. Her husband, Wei Xianming, was slightly hurt. The couple had taken the day off work to visit their five-year-old daughter on her birthday.

Police said they expected to give details later in the day. It was not clear what caused the blast.

China has occasionally witnessed bus explosions staged by disgruntled farmers or laid-off workers wanting to air grievances over poverty, demolitions or corruption.

The Kunming blasts came two days after Yunnan police opened fire and killed two rubber farmers in the province's Menglian county in a clash that also saw 41 police officers injured.

The clash was sparked when police tried to arrest five people in Menglian for allegedly attacking a local rubber company in a long-running dispute between farmers and the private firm, state media said.

Chinese authorities have directed officials to redress local residents' grievances and act on complaints to try to resolve disputes and ensure a "harmonious social atmosphere" in the Olympics period.

But the country has struggled to curb unrest. In June, 30,000 residents rioted in the streets of Weng'an, in Guizhou province, after allegations spread that police had covered up the rape and murder of a local teenage girl.

[Avinash R]

Russian N-bombers may return to Cuba: report

Moscow : Russian nuclear weapons-armed strategic bombers could return to Cuba in response to the United States plans to deploy its national missile defence shield (NMD) in Central and Eastern Europe, a media report said on Monday.

“While they are deploying the missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, our strategic bombers will be landing in Cuba,” a highly placed Russian Air Force source was quoted as saying by Izvestia daily.

After a lull of almost 15 years, Russian Air Force is back on regular patrolling missions of the remote seas and oceans since last year by its nuclear missiles carrier strategic bombers Tupolev Tu-160 (NATO codename Blackjack) and T-95 (Bear).

Earlier this month after the signing of the US-Czech deal on the deployment of missile tracking radar in the Czech Republic, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pledged to rebuff the US shield, which Moscow sees as a threat to its retaliatory second strike capability, in the event of pre-emptive US nuclear strike.

In a strong-worded statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry had declared that Moscow will take “military-technical” steps in response to the US missile shield, claimed to be aimed at protection from the missiles of “rouge” countries like Iran and North Korea.

President of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems, General (retd) Leonid Ivashov, the former head of the Russian Defence Ministry’s department for international cooperation, told Izvestia that Cuba could be used as a refuelling stopover for Russian strategic bombers rather than as a permanent base.

In October 1962, deployment of Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuba in response to the deployment of US nuclear weapons in Turkey, a NATO ally, had put the former Cold War rivals on the brink of a nuclear showdown.

In 2002, President Vladimir Putin had shutdown the Russian electronic warfare base in Cuba in an attempt to forge a closer partnership with the US and cut operating costs.

[svinayak]

http://www.theworldwithoutus.com/index.htm

This feature length documentary debates the implications and consequences of US military involvement in the world today.

From an isolationist nation at the end of World War One, the US today has bases in over ninety countries. No other nation has been able to project military power as the US does today. But is such an involvement sustainable? Despite its might, the US is shrinking in terms of population and economic power in relation to the rest of the world.

So, what would happen should the United States leave the international scene, and become again a "normal nation", a republic, and not an empire?

To find an answer to this question, director and producer Mitch Anderson embarked on an investigative trip on four continents. "The World Without US" is an in-depth investigation of how US foreign policy affects the lives of millions of people around the world.

Future scenarios in the absence of the US intervention are well debated and substantiated by experts and ordinary citizens whose lives have been affected by the American presence in different regions.

The film's main expert is Niall Ferguson PHD. Niall is very well reputed in the documentary world, he has co-authored many docs at BBC and Chanel4 in the UK and he's the author of several volumes on world history. He contributes on regular basis on a number of Current Events magazines in the US and Europe.

"The World Without US" is conclusive, politically charged and opinionated, making for good drama while staying true to the facts and journalistic integrity.

[Philip]

The Internation "criminal" court at the Hague has just received a new "guest" from the Balkans,who has made this sensational statement.Will we one day see Bush & Co. in similar circumstances for their Iraq and Afghan war crimes? Fat hope!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... e-him.html

Radovan Karadzic tells UN court the US tried to assasinate him
Radovan Karadzic has used his first appearance before an international war crimes court to accuse the United States of trying to assassinate him and to joke that he was taking legal advice from an unseen presence.

By Bruno Waterfield in The Hague
Last Updated: 6:29AM BST 01 Aug 2008

Appearing tired and gaunt, the former Bosnian Serb leader, now known to his jailers as prisoner number 38, wore a dark suit and tie during a one hour and ten minute hearing where he was charged by the United Nations with 11 counts of war crimes including genocide.

Initially calm and grave, Karadzic's composure appeared to crack after Alphons Orie, the Dutch judge presiding over the court, refused to allow him to read out a four-page document protesting at his arrest.

"There were numerous irregularities concerning my relation to this institution and my appearance here," he said.

The 63-year old former psychiatrist and faith healer went onto claim that Richard Holbrooke, the former United States Assistant Secretary of State, had granted him immunity as part of a wider Bosnia peace deal agreed in 1995.

"My commitment was to withdraw even from literary life and all sorts of public life," he said.

Karadzic then became animated and was repeatedly interrupted by the UN judge as he accused Mr Holbrooke and others of trying to "liquidate" him.

"It is a matter of life and death. If Mr Holbrooke still wants my death and regrets that there is no death sentence here," he said. "I wonder if his arm is long enough to reach here."

Karadzic's bizarre comments appeared to be a reference to an interview last weekend when Mr Holbrooke told Dnevni Avaz, a Sarajevo newspaper, that the former Bosnian Serb leader "deserved the death penalty".

"I hope he gets a life sentence, there is no death penalty at Tribunal but for sure he deserves it," he was reported as saying.

Karadzic, who has shaved off the beard, the long hair and faith healer persona that hid his identity during over a decade on the run, began by quietly answering "Da" to questions concerning his knowledge of his legal rights and his decision to conduct his own defence.

"I have an invisible adviser but I have decided to represent myself," he joked.

Stony faced and with the occasional sneer, Karadzic did not comment as the judge read out a chilling list of atrocities contained in a lengthy 25-page indictment.

He then broke his silence to accuse Serge Brammertz, the UN prosecutor, of trying to rush the case by pushing for his speedy conviction before the mandate of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) expires in 2011.

"Speed matters in a showdown between gunslingers but it is out of place in a court," said Karadzic. "I want to be put in a position of equity of arms with the prosecution."

Any extension of the 2011 deadline would have to be agreed by the UN Security Council and would probably be vetoed by Russia, a key ally of Belgrade which has expressed concern about Western bias in the tribunal.

Prosecutors are wary of a drawn-out trial after Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian President and ally of Karadzic, died after five years in custody, cheating the tribunal of a verdict.

Another hearing has been scheduled on Aug 29 after Karadzic refused to enter a plea on any charges.

UN prosecutors have indicted Karadzic on 11 counts of offences including: genocide, complicity in genocide, crimes against humanity, extermination, violation of the customs of war, murder and the taking of hostages.

The accusations of genocide will focus on Karadzic's key role in the Bosnian Serb leadership which orchestrated the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of up to 8,000 mainly Muslim Bosniaks and the "death or forced departure" of non-Serbs from over 40 Bosnian towns.

"The acts and omissions charged as genocide were intended to destroy in whole, or in part, the Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat groups," said Judge Orie.

"You knew or had reasons that Bosnian Serb forces under you committed these crimes."

There are also serious war crimes charges relating to the shelling of Sarajevo, where 12,000 civilians were killed during the 44-month siege and the taking of UN peacekeepers hostage.

"It is alleged that many thousands of civilians were killed including children and elderly," said Judge Orie.

Mothers of people killed in the Srebrenica massacre attacked the UN for giving Karadzic the legal rights that their husbands and sons were denied.

Kada Hotic, who lost her son and husband as Bosnian Serb troops overran the eastern Bosnia town, described the court appearance as "theatre".

"He stole the ground from under our feet and he took the sky from above our heads, he killed our sons," she said.

"What we get in return is a theatre performance. The world is looking at this as if it were a spectacle."

Munira Subasic, head of the Mothers of Srebrenica, watching The Hague proceedings on televisions, demanded that Karadzic be sent "somewhere where there is the death penalty and not be addressed as Mister".

But Elisabeth Evenson, a legal adviser on for Human Rights Watch, praised the UN hearing as a good day for international justice.

"The day when people could war crimes with immunity are coming to an end," she said.

[Philip]

Even more sensational news that alleged Bosnian "war criminal" Radovan Karadic was being protected by the CIA until he broke his promise to stay out of politics! There is no honour or morality with the US,just mere self interest and a lust for global domination.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 84247.html

Karadzic 'lived under protectionof CIA agents until he broke deal'

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade
Monday, 4 August 2008

The former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic lived under US protection after the Dayton peace accords until the CIA intercepted a phone call in which he broke the terms of a "secret deal" to stay out of politics, a Serbian newspaper claims.

"Karadzic, indicted for genocide and war crimes, was under US protection until 2000, when the CIA intercepted his telephone conversation that clearly proved he personally chaired a meeting of his old political party," the Belgrade daily Blic quoted a "well-informed US intelligence source" as saying.

"They went crazy realising Karadzic was making a fool of them," it said yesterday. "The US and CIA withdrew [his] informal protection."

Mr Karadzic has revived the allegations of a deal between himself and the chief US peace negotiator in Bosnia, Richard Holbrooke, since appearing before the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague last Thursday.

Mr Holbrooke has denied any deals with Mr Karadzic, telling CNN last Thursday that this was a "flat-out lie".

"He's been spreading it for 12 years through his friends, now he's making it personally. It would have been morally reprehensible and illegal to do such a thing ... We made no deal," Mr Holbrooke said.

However, statements by two top officials of the former warring sides seem to confirm the deal.

The former Bosnian Serb foreign minister Aleksa Buha told Belgrade Radio he witnessed the agreement. He said the deal was made "in the night between 18 and 19 July 1996".

The former Bosnian foreign minister Mohamed Sacirbey told the Mostar paper Dnevni that he learnt about the deal through the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe's head of mission, the US diplomat Robert Frowick, in the summer of 1996.

[Singha]

there has been a Uighur attack in Kashgar city of east turkestan.
kashgar (kashi) is where the karokoram highway to tsp sort of begins.

a couple of revolutionaries first attacked a group of jogging policemen with a truck.
later they threw home made explosives and then used machetes to hack at the
survivors.

16 kia and around 30 injured is the tally.

same org has claimed resposibility for the kunming and shanghai blasts.

[Raju]

Just look at the power of this axis powers if they can mess around with China like this .. and that too openly.

Do we stand a chance then ? Their antics need to be countered with a totally unconventional strategy as straightforward opposition will not work. As their control of the economic levers is almost complete.
China's bluff and bluster does not work with these dudes and they are not afraid of pissing of dragon lizard.

US-UK Intel Readies Turkestan Islamic Terror Gambit
For Beijing Olympics
By Webster G. Tarpley
8-2-8

Washington, August 1, 2008 ­ Reliable Australian intelligence sources have issued a warning that US-UK intelligence is attempting to mount a false flag terror operation against China, quite possibly featuring a gaggle of patsies calling themselves the "Turkestan Islamic Party," at the upcoming Beijing Olympics, where the eyes of the world will be concentrated next week. The goal of the operation will be to duplicate or surpass the bloodbaths the Mexico City 1968 and/or Munich 1972 summer games. Commandant Seyfullah of the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) claims in a video tirade displayed by a US company's website to represent the Turkish Moslems of Sinkiang province or Chinese Turkestan, where the Anglo-Americans have long sponsored an abortive separatist movement. Patsy leader Seyfullah and his Turkestan Islamic Party have been indirectly mentioned twice over the past two years by Ayman Zawahiri, the veteran British agent who functions as the real leader of "al Qaeda," in effect sheep- dipping the little known TIP in the vast pool of "al Qaeda" notoriety. If the planned operation actually takes place, the current Chinese leadership will ­ in the hopes of the plotters -- loose face and forfeit the mandate of heaven, the prerequisites for continued rule. This could then be the prelude to the installation of a new Chinese government far less committed to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and to cooperation with Russia. It might be a first step towards splitting the SCO and turning Beijing against Moscow, which is the current goal of Anglo-American grand strategy.

An article from the Sydney Morning Herald describing the general outlines of the danger is appended. The Turkestan Islamic Party claims to have already organized serious terror attacks in Shanghai, on the mainland coast opposite Taiwan, in Kunming in southwest China, and in Guangzhou (Canton in south China, near Hong Kong. Despite ample international attention to the Beijing Olympics by the controlled media, these considerable terror attacks have scarcely been reported, suggesting that some form of information management regime may be in place, as it was before 9/11.

The threatened Olympic terror event may have a second phase, designed to prevent a wave of world sympathy for the Chinese and other victims of whatever happens. An attempt to disrupt the world- wide operations of the internet may ensue, presented as the retaliation or riposte by the Chinese for what has been done to them by the foreign devils. Logic bombs or more sophisticated means could be used to disrupt the world-wide internet, shutting it down in whole or in part for days or weeks. International financial transactions might also become chaotic. Someone might begin dumping US Treasury paper, with the controlled western media blaming the Chinese government, even though the prospect of any direct or immediate Chinese government retaliation is remote. The massive hardships that can be inflicted by computer and cyber-based disruption would be used to whip up resentment and hatred in the west against the Chinese, changing the world strategic climate dramatically.

Some patsy group calling itself a Chinese secret society might announce that it had finally become fed up with the arrogance, the interference, and the aggression of the Anglo-Americans, and that it had decided to strike back on its own. This would allow the US and UK to demanded that the Chinese government hand over these malefactors in a humiliating gesture, leading to an escalating diplomatic and strategic crisis. These are but a few crude hypotheses drawn from the immense pool of possibilities. In many of these we see that the scope of terror could suddenly become much larger, due to the immense strategic potential on the Anglo- American and Chinese sides.

The direct terror attack may also be supplemented by large scale provocations, chaos and confusion operations, and mass demonstrations by Falun Gong fanatics, by Tibetans loyal to the feudal latifundist and US-UK intelligence asset who calls himself the Dalai Lama, and/or by democracy and human rights activists assembled by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and various NGOs in the orbit of US-UK and NATO intelligence. But the vigilance of the Chinese regime may be enough to defeat these plans.

A POSSIBLE PHASE CHANGE OF TERRORISM

If any such attack occurs, it would represent the beginning of a whole new phase of false flag terrorism on a world scale. From the mid-1990s until about 2005-2006, patsy organizations like "al Qaeda" in many cases received the blame for false flag terror attacks carried out by the US-UK invisible government networks against their own countries or their own national assets abroad, as in the case of the 9/11 attacks in the US and the 7/7/2005 attacks in London. The goal of these operations was to whip up hysteria in the western countries, and to provide pretexts for direct aggression under neocon auspices against Afghanistan and Iraq. There was also a parallel track of NATO-backed Chechen terrorist attacks against Russia. Henceforth, patsy groups like the TIP are to be used increasingly against "enemy states" like China and Russia, the two targets who have gone to the top of the list, displacing the earlier focus on the far less significant Iran and North Korea. Any attacks by the TIP on Chinese territory will of course represent acts of war by the US-UK against China, and could easily generate incalculable consequences over time. Under the Brzezinski Plan, the US-UK will be messing with the biggest country in the world, and one which comes equipped with ICBMs and H-bombs that can strike US territory.

Pentagon boss Robert Gates, a Brzezinski man going back to the Carter NSC in 1977-79, said this week that irregular warfare and soft power are the wave of the immediate future, and that may be exactly what we are about to get in spectacular form. This speech may well have been a signal that something big and very messy in the irregular warfare department is about to happen at the Olympics. "Al Qaeda," the CIA's Islamic Legion, traces its origins back to the Carter-Brzezinski years, just after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in response to Brzezinski's playing of the Islamic fundamentalism card against them.

A TOTALLY NEW HIT LIST FOR THE PRINCIPALS' COMMITTEE

The new target list is being dictated by the Principals' Committee, which currently rules in Washington. Among the Principals are Rice at State, Gates at Defense, Paulson at Treasury, and Admiral Mullen as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, plus some others. This group is now running the US government. Bush and Cheney are little better than figureheads, lame ducks who have virtually ceased to influence government affairs as they fade away. The top neocons are either in jail, like Lord Conrad Black, or running for cover. The playbook for the Principals is the Brzezinski Plan, with its focus on working towards a global showdown with Russia and China. A US-UK attack on Iran is now virtually excluded, but instead large-scale bombing and preparations for a land invasion of northwest Pakistan are proceeding apace. The pretext cited here is the search for Bin Laden and the need to combat the Taliban, but the real goal is to start the breakup of Pakistan into five or six petty states ­ because Pakistan is a Chinese ally, and all allies and trading partners of China are presently being targeted for regime change, destabilization, and Balkanization, from Sudan to Zimbabwe to Burma to Venezuela to Pakistan. It is time for opponents of false flag terrorism to ditch their maps of the Persian Gulf in favor of much larger world maps, with special attention for the geopolitical features of the Eurasian landmass discussed by Obama backer Brzezinski in his book, The Grand Chessboard.

The atmosphere in Washington today is eerily reminiscent of the final years of Iran-contra, when many personalities who had become too openly compromised in these picaresque operations were liquidated. The Iran-contra networks had to be cleaned up, and many heads rolled. The past weeks have brought word that bacteriological warfare expert Dr. Steven Hatfill, the FBI's former person interest in the October 2001 anthrax attacks, has been taken care of with a $6 million damages award. His former biowar colleague Bruce Ivins was found dead this morning near Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, in what has been ruled a suicide. The death of Ivins comes in the wake of another purported suicide, that of Deborah Palfrey, the so-called DC Madam. Are these inconvenient persons in fact being suicided to keep them quiet? Tonight there is word that Ayman Zawahiri, the MI-6 man at the top of "al Qaeda" may be either dead or seriously wounded. If Zawahiri is dead or knocked out, this event may be comparable to the execution of Timothy McVeigh on June 11, 2001, which officially closed the era of terrorism under right wing anarchist cover in the US, just before a new phase of false flag operations began three months later, on September 11, 2001.

August 8, 2008, the formal opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing summer games, emerges as a possible date for some attempted action in the context described. In a paper which should be read in conjunction with this article, Gillian Norman makes a case for the occult significance of 8-8-8 in the irrationalist numerology which may be considered meaningful by certain rogue network factions. But the events in question could occur at almost any time over the next several weeks.

Those who mobilized in the spring of 2007 to stop Operation Bite, the planned Good Friday US-UK attack on Iran, or who spread the word of the Kennebunkport Warning in late August 2007, are urged mobilize now on a much larger scale to inoculate world publics against which may now be in the offing. The US, Europe, and Japan need good relations with China, the world's largest country. Peaceful coexistence, not a new round of inter-imperialist rivalry, is required. No band of desperados can be allowed to initiate a Sino-American confrontation under cover of a new false flag provocation.
----

According to the Sydney Morning Herald of Australia,
Muslim group declares war on Olympics
July 27, 2008

A CHINESE terrorist organisation has warned it will create havoc at next month's Olympics and has claimed responsibility for a deadly Shanghai bus bombing in May. A group monitoring terrorism threats on the internet said Commander Seyfullah of the Turkestan Islamic Party claimed responsibility for several attacks in China less than a fortnight out from the Olympics. "Through this blessed jihad in Yunnan this time, the Turkestan Islamic Party warns China one more time," Seyfullah said in a video dated July 23, a transcript from a US-based intelligence centre shows. "Our aim is to target the most critical points related to the Olympics. We will try to attack Chinese central cities severely using the tactics that have never been employed," he said. The warnings come just a day after Chinese police claimed they cracked a terrorist cell planning to attack Shanghai Stadium where the Australian men's soccer team will open its Olympic campaign on August 7. Seyfullah claimed responsibility for the May 5 Shanghai bus bombing, which killed three; another Shanghai attack; an attack on police in Wenzhou on July 17 using an explosives-laden tractor; bombing of a Guangzhou plastics factory on July 17, and bombings of three buses in Yunnan province on July 21.
(http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/muslim ... 03337.html)

[Philip]

SAARC went through the rituals as expected,long on wind and short on content.Here is a piece by veteran Lankan journalist Gamini Weerakoon on SAARC.

South Asian bomb fest

By Gamini Weerakoon

WEEKS before the annual gettogether of South Asia leaders commenced for their séance on peace and anti-terrorism, bombs were exploding in and around the sub-continent.

Terrorism and bomb explosions are of course quite unconnected with the SAARC Summit but it happens all year round.

The irony is that this annual get- together has as its main objectives: peace and elimination of terrorism but yet the terrorist bombs go off even as the manthra is being chanted.

Kashmir

On Monday, the day when SAARC officials were getting together to work out the preliminaries, Indian and Pakistani troops clashed in a disputed Himalayan region and reports said that one Indian and three Pakistani soldiers were killed.

This could not be categorised as one involving terrorism. It was a clash of troops of the two countries armies at the Kupwara sector in the region.

Indians alleged it was a ‘brazen violation of the ceasefire’ that had been agreed on while in Islamabad, a Pakistani army spokesman had said he had no information of the clash, at the time the inquiry was made. Indo-Pakistan clashes in Kashmir has been happening since the emergence of the two nations as independent states 61 years ago and has continued unabated even after 23 years of the formation of SAARC.

India bombed

The week opened with a bloody Sunday in Ahmedabad, capital of Gujarat, when 16 bombs exploded in different parts of the city killing 45 civilians and injuring 160.

An organisation describing itself as the Indian Mujahideen had claimed responsibility but the reflex action of most Indians was to point the finger at Pakistan’s Intelligence Services (ISI). Foreign observers too had suspicions of the ISI but said that they could be Islamic groups of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin.

Two days before Ahmedabad two bombs rocked what Indians call their ‘high tech hub’— Bangalore — killing one person and injuring 15 others while in August this year in an amusement park in Hyderabad, bombs exploded killing 40 people. In May in the tourist resort of the Pink City of Jaipur 63 people were killed.

In July 7 a car bomb exploded at the entrance to the Indian Embassy in Kabul killing 41 people including some Indian diplomats. Afghan President Hamid Karzai who has not been seeing eye-toeye with his Pakistan Islamic brothers said it was the work of those who opposed the growing friendship between Afghanistan and India and later accused the Pakistani ISI directly.

Some observers suspected it was the work of the Taliban which ruled the country before the Americans drove them out and are opposed to the influx of large numbers of Indians into their country for industrial and construction purposes.

Bombing of Pakistan

The bombings in Pakistan are far too numerous to be recalled by name but are attributed to Islamic fundamentalist groups, the Taliban and al Qaeda. Earlier, bombings in the commercial city of Karachi were suspected by Pakistanis to be the work of the Indian intelligence organisation, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

Many analyses have been forwarded for this violence in the subcontinent including the Clash of Civilisations as spelled out by an American academic Samuel Huntington.

The Islamic Crescent — or the Muslim Geopolitical Tectonic Plate clashes with the similar Hindu Tectonic Plate in Pakistan and Kashmir. Is this the basic reason for the spewing out of violence periodically, for six decades, however hard the leaders of the two countries try?

In Sri Lanka bombs go off for different reasons, mainly because of the Big Brother complex of India while to a great extent this is the same in Nepal and even in Bangladesh in whose birth, India played the role of mid-wife.

Heretical thoughts

There is quite a lot of hope being generated for the 15th SAARC Summit about to commence but the chances are that it will be a repeat performance of the 14 other summits held before because there is no firm political will to forge a South Asian unity.

Although much is said about South Asian cooperation and unity it has to be admitted that ‘South Asianess’ is altogether a new concept formulated in the 1980s and at the inception did not stretch beyond economic cooperation.

Does South Asia have the cultural unity of Europe or ASEAN? Unity in Diversity sounds all very well but as this columnist has noted in earlier columns most South Asian countries do not seem to go along with the concept of cooperation: United We Stand Divided We Fall. Instead, in reality, the tendency has been to act in a way: Divided We Stand, United We Fall.

This heretical concept of SAARC we are aware will be rejected outright by SAARC enthusiasts, particularly those who see a gravy train in some aspects of regional cooperation. Let us await to analyse the final documents of the 15th SAARC Summit. Our bets are that it will be no different to the previous talkathons.

[Philip]

Russian response to Bush's Cold War 2 warmongering.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... hield.html

Russia to move rockets to EU border if Poland hosts US missile shield
Russia threatened to deploy bombers and short-range missiles on the Polish border if Warsaw agrees to host elements of a US missile defence shield on its territory.

By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow
Last Updated: 2:23AM BST 07 Aug 2008

With a range of up to 310 miles for its new generation of Iskander missiles, Russia would be able to strike at both the radar and the interceptors if it built a base in western Belarus Photo: AFP/GETTY
The warning marks a further escalation in the diplomatic crisis between Russia and the United States. Russian military hardware has not been stationed on the border of what is now the European Union since the Cold War.

Russia's ambassador to Minsk, Alexander Surikov, said that bombers and short-range quasiballistic missiles would be stationed in the west of Belarus, Moscow's most important ex-Soviet ally, once Poland and the United States agree terms.

"When Poland signs the agreement with the American side about hosting elements of the missile defence system, then we can discuss some additional aspects of military-technical cooperation with Belarus," he said.

"We could be talking about the possible basing of Iskander missiles." There was some relief that the ambassador ruled out stationing nuclear missiles in the country.

Even so, the ambassador's threat was a further signal that hopes for a diplomatic settlement to the crisis were fading.

The missile defence system, which the United States insists is necessary to protect Europe from a nuclear strike by Iran, has taken on increasing momentum after the Czech Republic agreed to host the shield's radar component.

Despite public opposition and internal divisions, Poland now appears close to allowing the United States to station 10 interceptor missiles on its territory.

Convinced that it is the shield's true target, Russia has threatened to retrain its nuclear arsenal on Europe and deploy military hardware in both Belarus and the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad.

With a range of up to 310 miles for its new generation of Iskander missiles, Russia would be able to strike at both the radar and the interceptors if it built a base in western Belarus, analysts said.

Military analysts said that a squadron of bombers is likely to be stationed at the Machulishchi air base, 50 miles west of Minsk.

[Singha]

looking back at history, georgia with usa backing let chechen terrorists operate
out of its territory when russia was weak. russia complained and georgia told
them to stfu and buzz off.

now it seems russia has arranged for moral support to two breakaway regions of
georgia....

CNN:

Georgia, located on the Black Sea coast between Russia and Turkey, has been split by Russian-backed separatist movements in South Ossetia and another region, Abkhzia. Neither region's government has international recognition.

On Thursday, Georgia's foreign ministry laid blame for the latest round of violence on Russia.

"The only way that separatists manage to maintain their grip on power is through military, human and technical resources provided to them by the Russian Federation," the ministry said in a written statement. "The military assistance rendered to the separatists' criminal regime by the Russian Federation, in violation of all agreements, cannot be assessed in any other way than as another act of aggression committed against Georgia."

[Rupesh]

War erupts in Georgia
Aug 8th 2008
From Economist.com

A war between Russia and Georgia appears to be under way

AFP
GEORGIAN soldiers, tanks and fighter-planes struck Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway (Russian-backed) region of South Ossetia, on Friday August 8th. Parts of the city were reported to be burning as Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, declared that his forces had “freed” much of the area from separatist control.

The immediate cause of the fighting is unclear as claim and counterclaim abound. But what is clear is that a conflict which has been simmering for years, has at last erupted. What happens next will depend almost entirely on Russia’s response: 150 Russian tanks were reported to be entering South Ossetia on Friday. Georgia's government says that Russian planes have dropped bombs outside of South Ossetia including on the edge of Tblisi, the Georgian capital. Alexander Lomaia, the secretary of Georgia's National Security Council, told The Economist on Friday that “this is an open military aggression and we are now at the state of undeclared war with Russia. What else could you call it?”. He also said that Georgia had announced a ceasefire in South Ossetia from 3pm on Friday.

On its own, South Ossetia is unlikely to last long. It is a tiny territory run by Russia’s security forces and a small and nasty clique of local thugs who live off smuggling goods and pocketing Russian aid money. According to a Georgian television channel, some 70% of Tskhinvali had been taken by government forces by the end of Friday morning.

It appears that Russia will get heavily involved—Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, says that he must protect Russian citizens there. The conflict could now quickly spiral into a war between Russian and Georgia, and engulf Abkhazia, a separatist region on the Black Sea coast in which Russia has much more strategic interest.

Russia says that Georgia fired first in South Ossetia and that several of its “peacekeepers” inside the territory have been killed. Last month Russia sent warplanes into Georgian airspace—to deter an attack, it said.

The row has given Russia a chance to step up pressure on Georgia, portrayed in the Russian media as a tiresome and aggressive Western stooge. The South Ossetian leader, Eduard Kokoity, said that he would force Georgian troops out of his self-declared republic (which is a patchwork of villages and small towns, some controlled by Georgian authorities and others by separatists).

The quarrel in South Ossetia follows an escalation of tension in Abkhazia. Russia has reinforced its military presence there, which is nominally part of a UN-monitored peacekeeping effort. In the past few months European governments got more involved in the peace process and Germany drafted a plan for the economic revival of Abkhazia, indefinite autonomy and the return of Georgian refugees. So far the plan has stalled. The Abkhaz authorities are uneasy about the Russian embrace, but fear the return of Georgian refugees, once the largest ethnic group in the region. Russia does not want to surrender its key role in Abkhazia.

As Russian gets involved in the war with Georgia, the disposition of political forces within the Kremlin itself may shift. Russia’s prime minister Vladimir Putin, who is in China, indicated that Russia would retaliate against Georgia’s aggression. Mr Medvedev may not be best pleased to start his presidency with a war in Georgia: it suggests that he may have to submit to the wishes of the hard-line military and security services. But Mr Putin has a fierce dislike of Mr Saakashvili, Georgia’s maverick president, and seems determined to replace his government.

Mr Putin may also want to deal with Georgia in good time before Russia hosts 2014 winter Olympic games in Sochi, a Black-sea resort town only few miles from the Abkhaz border. A military conflict in Georgia will also derail for a long time Georgia’s aspiration to join NATO—something that Russian finds deeply unpalatable.

Russia’s broader aim may be to try to roll back the advance of pro-Western forces in its “near abroad” by highlighting the West’s inability to help Georgia. The hotting up of Georgia’s conflicts coincided with Kosovo’s declaration of independence, recognised by much of the West, and American pressure for the expansion of NATO to Georgia and Ukraine. That move has been stymied, mainly by Germany; Georgia was promised eventual NATO membership but no firm plan. Though Georgia has become a vital corridor for oil and gas exports to Europe, this has not brought the support that its leaders had expected. A lame-duck American administration has been able to do little, though Georgians hope a presidential-election victory by John McCain, an ardent supporter, may change their fortunes. The country’s strong-willed and idiosyncratic president, Mr Saakashvili, is not seen by all European leaders as quite the paragon of legality, freedom and reform that he claims to be. Georgia’s image was severely dented in November last year by a crackdown against the opposition.

http://www.economist.com/world/europe/d ... s_box_main

[archan]

One more headache to Unkil. Are they (the Russians) trying to increase their global bargaining power?

[Igorr]

Russian heavy armored formations have entered the capital of South Ossetia:
http://www.zshare.net/download/16720808c2d5fe5c/

[Gerard]

Russian tanks enter South Ossetia

Mr Saakashvili, who has called on reservists to sign up for duty, said: "This is a clear intrusion on another country's territory." "We have Russian tanks on our territory, jets on our territory in broad daylight," Reuters new agency quoted him as saying.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said: "I must protect the life and dignity of Russian citizens wherever they are," Interfax quoted him as saying. "We will not allow their deaths to go unpunished. Those responsible will receive a deserved punishment."

[AshokS]

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said: "I must protect the life and dignity of Russian citizens wherever they are," Interfax quoted him as saying. "We will not allow their deaths to go unpunished. Those responsible will receive a deserved punishment."

Contrast that to the Indian bangle wearing Generals and spineless politicians remarks each week on intrusions, bombings, and border violations..... "We have exercised maximum restraint, we let the other guys kick us and we look the other way... If you are an enemy don't fear we will not hit back, if you are a patriotic and flag waving unarmed Indian citizen we reserve the right to shoot you dead"

[VinodTK]

Battle lines move from Kashmir to Kabul

[Gerard]

Russian Moves in the Americas

Russia's push into the region could force others into an arms race that no one wants or can afford

[Paul]

Contrast that to the Indian bangle wearing Generals and spineless politicians remarks each week on intrusions, bombings, and border violations..... "We have exercised maximum restraint, we let the other guys kick us and we look the other way... If you are an enemy don't fear we will not hit back, if you are a patriotic and flag waving unarmed Indian citizen we reserve the right to shoot you dead"

troll alert..

[Philip]

Thaksin flees...to London,where in the UK he can hopefully achieve his footbaling ambitions? He must surely be given an Olympic gold for the speed with which he allegedly attended the Olympics at beijing and ran off in style to Blighty!

Deposed Thai PM flees to Britain amid court case

By Sutin Wannabovorn, AP
Monday, 11 August 2008
***** KITTIWONGSAKUL/AFP/Getty Images

Thailand's deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his wife Pojaman outside a court in Bangkok last month

Deposed Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his family have fled to the United Kingdom, the former leader said today after he and his wife skipped a hearing on corruption charges in a Thai court.

A handwritten statement from Thaksin said he fled because he could not expect justice in Thai courts. It came amid newspaper reports that he would seek asylum in Britain.

"My wife and I have traveled to reside in England," Thaksin said in the statement. "If I still have luck, I would come back and die on Thai soil like every other Thai person."

Thaksin's statement, which did not mention asking for asylum, was read Monday afternoon on state-run television.

Thaksin, who was deposed in a 2006 military coup, faces a slew of court cases as well as investigations probing alleged corruption and abuse of power during his five years in office. In his statement, he again said he was innocent of all accusations against him.

"What happened to my family and me is like fruit from a poisonous tree — the fruit will also be poisoned," the statement said. "There is a continuation of dictatorship in managing Thai politics ... which is followed by interference in the justice system."

Thailand's stock market rose 3.2 percent amid hopes that Thaksin's removal would defuse political tension between his supporters and opponents.

Analysts, however, warned that his decision to reside in Britain did not mean the end of his influence.

"He is certainly going to use his foreign base to influence Thailand's domestic politics. It is going to be a very long story, and this is certainly not the end," said Charnvit Kasetsiri, a political scientist at Bangkok's Thammasat University.

Also, the key anti-Thaksin group, the People's Alliance for Democracy, said it would continue its street protests until the government of Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej was removed from office. The PAD regards Samak as a proxy for Thaksin.

"(Thaksin) still has influence over this government and is pulling the strings," said Piphop Thongchai, a key PAD leader.

Thaksin and his wife Pojaman failed to appear Monday morning before the Supreme Court's Criminal Division for Holders of Political Positions in a case involving an allegedly unlawful purchase of real estate.

The couple left Thailand last week after the court gave them permission to attend the Olympic Games in Beijing but ordered them to report Monday. News reports in Bangkok said Thaksin and Pojaman flew from China to England, where the former leader owns several properties and the Manchester City football club.

Thaksin lived in exile in Britain after his downfall. He returned to Thailand earlier this year to face corruption charges against him after his political allies won new elections and formed a coalition government.

"I thought I would be able to prove my innocence and receive justice, which is why I returned to Thailand on February 28. But the situation has deteriorated," Thaksin said.

He also said there had been threats against his life.

"I have also constantly received news that my life is not safe. Wherever I travel, I have to use bulletproof cars. This is the result I got from volunteering to serve the country, the king and the people," he said.

In Monday's court case, the couple had been charged with abuse of authority and corruption in Pojaman's 2003 purchase of a valuable plot of land in Bangkok from a state agency. The Supreme Court earlier said it would deliver a verdict Sept. 16.

In accordance with Thai legal procedure, the court normally grants defendants who skip a hearing a grace period of up to two weeks before issuing an arrest warrant.

Three political heavyweights have in recent times fled cases before the Supreme Court division dealing with Thaksin's case. They include a former minister of public health, the mayor of the resort city of Pattaya and a former deputy minister of the interior. One of the three was later arrested and jailed while the others, police say, are in hiding in Cambodia.

If this occurs in the Thaksin case, the former leader would the be declared a fugitive from justice which would probably have a bearing on his status in Britain as well as his ownership of Manchester City.

Thaksin is embroiled in three other court cases as well as a slew of investigations that may lead to trials. He has maintained his innocence against all allegations.

Thaksin was widely regarded as an authoritarian figure who eroded Thailand's still-fragile democratic institutions. Mass street protests led to his downfall.

But he was popular with the country's rural masses and urban poor with his populist policies.

[Singha]

another thief / criminal in the UK under the excuse not getting justice in a foreign court and
onl HMGs legal system is fair.

I think the UK is happy to keep these criminals onboard as their ill gotten billions would
probabl be invested in UK and boost the economy.

[NRao]

A-bomb didn't win the war Nuclear weapons: Good, bad and ugly

By Ward Wilson
August 10, 2008

Last week was the 63rd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. People argue a lot about Hiroshima, but often what they're really arguing about is whether America is good or bad.

The "America is bad" people say it was wrong to bomb Hiroshima. And they have a point. It was wrong for us to bomb Hiroshima, just as it was wrong for us to bomb Dresden, wrong for the British to bomb Hamburg, wrong for the Germans to bomb London and Coventry. City bombing is just wrong.

But the "America is good" people are right too. Even though we're not perfect, the U.S. is fundamentally a good country—like Harry S. Truman. Truman was a good guy who did the best he could when faced with a tough decision.



What gets lost in the shouting is the really important question: Did the atomic bomb work? We assume it did, because the Japanese decided to surrender three days after Hiroshima. But it makes sense to look more closely, because almost everything we think about nuclear weapons—how impressive they are, how useful they are, how necessary they are—depends on Hiroshima.

We don't hang onto nuclear weapons because they can kill a lot of people. Chemical and biological weapons can do that, but we've banned them. We hang onto them because we think they can win wars.

It turns out, though, that Hiroshima didn't win the war. As historians do more research, it becomes clear that what really shocked the Japanese government was the declaration of war by the Soviet Union early in the morning of the same day we bombed Nagasaki. That was the day the Japanese declared martial law. That was the day they decided to meet to discuss surrender. That was the day the military talked privately about overthrowing the emperor. Nagasaki occurred in the afternoon—after they were already meeting to discuss surrender—and they largely ignored it.

We imagine that the incredible destruction at Hiroshima shocked the Japanese. But in some ways, Hiroshima wasn't any worse than the conventional bombing we had been doing all summer. Of the 68 cities bombed in 1945, Hiroshima was second in terms of people killed, fourth in terms of square miles destroyed, and 17th in terms of percentage of the city destroyed, according to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. As Japanese Minister of War Korechika Anami said later: Hiroshima was no worse than the firebombing they had suffered all summer.

But the Japanese said they surrendered because of the bomb, you might say. It's true. But think about it. Japan's leaders had just led their country into a catastrophic war that devastated their economy, their military and most of their cities. Which would you rather say: "We fought poorly, we weren't brave enough, we made bad choices," or, "The enemy made an amazing scientific breakthrough that no one could have anticipated, and that's why we lost the war"?

The atomic bomb was an amazing accomplishment. Harnessing nuclear fission in just 2½ years is remarkable. As a scientific race against the clock, it has no parallel.

The problem is that what nuclear weapons do best—kill civilians—isn't that useful militarily. It's horrific. It's brutal. But it's not very effective for winning wars. The best way to win a war is to beat the other guy's army. (Remember, the South didn't surrender when Atlanta was burned or Richmond captured; it surrendered when Gen. Robert E. Lee's army was surrounded.) Hardly any wars have been won by killing civilians. Unless you count Hiroshima.

Without the victory associated with Hiroshima, nuclear weapons look a lot less impressive. More like chemical and biological weapons: dangerous, able to kill a lot of people, but not too useful.

Because of Hiroshima, people assume that (a) nuclear weapons are invaluable, (b) everyone wants them, and (c) it's impossible to ever get rid of them. But the facts are more complicated and more hopeful than that. The facts paint a picture of weapons that are terribly destructive, but not really that effective. Sort of like giving a bank security guard a stick of dynamite to protect the bank. It's powerful, sure. But what's he going to do? Blow up the bad guy with the note and the gun—along with the teller, the customers and the whole bank lobby?

Destructive and useful are two different things. Nuclear weapons are clearly destructive. The real question we should be asking on this 63rd anniversary of Hiroshima is: Are they really useful? And if they aren't, why are we keeping them?

Ward Wilson, a nuclear weapons scholar in Trenton, N.J., adapted this essay from an article published in Spring 2007 in the journal International Security.

[Paul]

Indira Gandhi's legacy on Soouth Asia

This article appeared in the world policy journal - by Barbara Crossette

[Gerard]

Turkey's abandonment of the West