Diplomacy & Crisis News

The UN’s Deputy Special Representative for Somalia, on Wednesday congratulated the newly-elected president of Puntland, Somalia’s semi-autonomous region in the country’s north east.

Major fighting in Myanmar’s troubled Rakhine state has so far been avoided following clashes between armed separatists and national security forces who are increasing troop numbers there, a top UN humanitarian official there said on Wednesday.

As it celebrates its centenary year, the International Labour Organization (ILO) must help to tackle inequality in the world of work through the efforts of its 180-plus members, said Director-General Guy Ryder on Wednesday.

America’s ongoing trade war with China has underscored the contentious business practices the Asian power has instituted over the years. Many of these have resulted from the United States’ over-reliance on external manufacturing, particularly for the technology sector. This over reliance has exposed the nation’s supply chain to vulnerabilities that have jeopardized the corporate and government sectors and that threaten economic prosperity and national security. To address this growing repertoire of technology supply chain-related threats, the US government and the American private sector need to forge a more strategic and collaborative partnership. This will ensure that American technology supply chains are comprehensively secured going forward and could also position the United States as a leader in the push for global technology supply chain security.

A July 2018 US
intelligence report found that supply chain attacks — attacks
which target software and hardware manufacturers and distributors, rather than
users —
are on the rise. To no surprise, these attacks have especially impacted the
American technology sector. An analysis of seven major US-based
technology companies — HP, IBM, Dell, Cisco, Unisys, Microsoft and Intel —  found that over half of the products the
companies and their suppliers used came from China. Microsoft’s reliance on
these products was particularly staggering, with the company sourcing 73% of
its products from China between 2012 and 2017.

Although a globalized supply chain is not in itself a bad concept (these supply
chains, for example, enable consumers to enjoy cheaper prices when buying
electronics), the consequences of vulnerabilities in the supply chain for the
private sector are significant. Such extensive supply chain vulnerabilities
open these tech giants up to major financial losses, often in the form of
intellectual property (IP) theft. China is the world’s primary IP infringer and
Chinese theft of American IP costs between $225 to $600 billion annually
through avenues such as espionage, forced
technology transfers and mandatory joint ventures for companies trying to
operate in China. This was most recently demonstrated in a Bloomberg
Businessweek report which found that a group
specializing in hardware attacks within China’s infamous People’s Liberation
Army (PLA) had implanted microchips into the motherboards of servers produced
by Taiwanese-American information technology company SuperMicro. These
compromised servers were then operationalized by major American technology
companies such as Apple and Amazon, enabling the PLA to spy on their internal
networks and steal valuable intellectual property. Both Apple and Amazon have rejected the claims in this report
as false, but many contend that the hack was one of the most deleterious
breaches of supply chain security in the American technology sector to date.

The growth of such attacks is particularly concerning considering that most American corporations seem unprepared to respond to and defend against them. Two-thirds of respondents in a survey commissioned by computer security firm CrowdStrike said their organizations had experienced a supply-chain attack in the past year, and 90% of these attacks resulted in financial losses. Despite this, only one-third of respondents said they vetted their suppliers and even fewer organizations expressed confidence in being able to effectively mitigate and defend against a supply chain attack or breach.

Supply chain vulnerabilities have also had a significant impact on US national security. Recent supply chain vulnerabilities that have targeted the US government have done so with the intention of jeopardizing the nation’s security. Many of the compromised SuperMicro servers were used by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense and even US Navy warships, demonstrating a significant breach of key intelligence agencies and their networks by Chinese agents. Similarly, Chinese telecom firms such as ZTE and Huawei have come under heavy fire for using their products to spy on US government employees and contractors on behalf of the Chinese government. This is a relatively common practice, one that is employed even by the United States. However, many were shocked to learn about the extent of ZTE and Huawei’s spying operations in the United States. In response, Congress recently enacteda ban that prohibits US government officials and contractors from using either company’s technologies. These companies have faced similar bans in countries such asIndia, Australia and the UnitedKingdom over national security concerns. In the US, however, this ban doesn’t prevent the companies from engaging with US infrastructure outside of the government sector and it will only come into effect gradually over the next two years.

As the United States invests heavily in developing 5G wireless networks that increasingly promote the use of interconnected devices, and in instituting many of the federal government’s IT modernization initiatives, the security of the technology supply chain is a serious concern. The consequences of the country’s over-reliance on external manufacturing are visible here too, as Chinese businesses are consistently able to underbid US companies on subcontracting opportunities, therefore positioning themselves as cost-effective partners, despite the national security risks posed.

The vulnerability of technology supply chains is an issue of economic and national security that will continue to grow in the US. The government has taken some strides toward addressing this issue. In early November 2018 the US Department of Justice (DOJ) establishedthe China Initiative which aims to combat the Chinese government’s national security threats, including supply chain related threats. However, in order for the American supply chain to be comprehensively secured against actors such as China as well as the growing range of supply chain vulnerabilities, there needs to be greater and more strategic collaboration between the public and private sectors. If such partnerships can effectively be formed, scaled and operated, this could position the United States as a leading figure in the push for global supply chain security. This is an important role the United States should seek to play, especially as China and other foreign adversaries ramp up their supply chain attacks on the United States and its allies.

—

Submitted by, Spandana Singh, the Cyber Security Fellow for the Young Professionals in Foreign Policy. She is currently serving as a Millennial Public Policy Fellow at New America’s Open Technology Institute where she works on issues of privacy, surveillance, cybersecurity and countering violent extremism. Spandana is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and has previously worked at organizations such as the East West Institute, Twitter, the World Bank Group and UNICEF.

The post Op-ed: America’s Addiction to Cheap Manufacturing Is Coming Back to Haunt It appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

Despite a precarious security environment and continuing pockets of mistrust on the part of affected populations, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported on Tuesday that all Ebola-affected areas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) North Kivu Province are now accessible to health workers.

Following a run-off election for the Presidency of Madagascar which saw former leader Andry Rajoelina declared the winner on Tuesday, the UN chief has commended all those who contributed to the “peaceful and orderly” voting process that began at the end of November.

UN peacekeepers in Mali have given what villagers in a remote part of the West African country have called a “real glimmer of hope.” 

At a time of year when many resolve to get fit, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, has launched a campaign to raise awareness of the huge distances many are forced to cover to escape persecution, in search of a better life far from home.

At the United Nations, there is a popular saying – all roads lead to the Fifth – the “Fifth” here is the General Assembly’s main Administrative and Budgetary Committee, where all financial and programme matters concerning the UN system, are discussed. In this feature series on the work of the General Assembly, the UN body made up of all 193 Member States, UN News gives you an inside look at the critical work of the Fifth Committee.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has “strongly rejected” the Guatemalan Government’s decision to unilaterally terminate the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), an independent body set up by the UN and Guatemala to investigate illegal security groups and high-level corruption in the country.

The recently intensifying memory conflict around the interpretation of some World War II events, between Ukraine and Poland, is distracting the two intertwined nations from their main international challenges and some critical tasks today. An increase of Ukrainian national security is in the core interests not only of Kyiv, but also of Warsaw.

An odd turn in Ukraine’s foreign affairs after the Euromaidan has been
its increasing estrangement from the country the relations with which should
have benefited most from Kyiv’s resolute turn westwards since 2014 – Poland.
Post-Soviet Ukrainian-Polish relations had been constantly deepening since the
break-up of the USSR in 1991. Especially after the Orange Revolution of 2004,
Poland became for many Ukrainians a prime model case the recent development of
which their own state should emulate with regard to both domestic affairs, such
as economic and public administration reform, and international relations, such
as accession to the EU and NATO. In addition, both nations harbor deep
grievances towards the currently revanchist Kremlin leadership in connection
with centuries-long Russian imperialism and the Tsarist as well as Soviet
regime’s repression of Polish as well as Ukrainian cultural life and political independence.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea and covert intervention in the Donets Basin, in
spring 2014, have further increased Ukrainian and Polish perceptions of their
nations’ community of fate. Last but not least, hundreds of thousands of
Ukrainian migrants – including refugees from Crimea and the Donets Basin – have
settled in Poland during the last years, in search for well-paid jobs, decent
education, and a better life.

Why Poles and Ukrainians are quarrelling

Given these as well as an array of other historic and contemporary determinants, the partnership between Kyiv and Warsaw should have significantly strengthened after Ukraine’s successful Revolution of Dignity three years ago. And indeed, public opinion polls in both Ukraine and Poland document a high degree of mutual sympathy among ordinary people. Nevertheless, in many fields of cooperation and in the political atmosphere between the two nations, the exact opposite has happened over the last years. Worse, not only governmental, but also some people-to-people relations have deteriorated since 2014, with increasingly frequent verbal and, sometimes, even physical clashes mostly caused by radicals of the two neighboring peoples.

The major – though not only – reason for this unfortunate development is
a public international quarrel between the two neighbors around the
interpretation and evaluation of the saddest episode in recent Polish-Ukrainian
affairs – the so-called Volhynia Massacre (Ukr.: Volyns’ka riznia) that may have led to, according to different estimates,
between approximately 50,000 to 90,000 unnatural deaths in today’s Western
Ukraine. This 1943-1944 Ukrainian ethnic cleansing of Poles, which Poland now
officially classifies as a “genocide,” extended also to Eastern Galicia, and
went in parallel with a OUN-UPA cleansing campaign against the few remaining
Jews who had survived the Holocaust. It was an attempt by radicalized war-time
Ukrainian ultra-nationalists to prepare Volhynia and, to some degree, Galicia
to become ethnically cleansed parts of a future Ukrainian state designed
primarily for ethnic Ukrainians.

To be sure, Ukraine has formally acknowledged that this mass killing did
happen, and official Kyiv has asked Poland for forgiveness numerous times. In
2015, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko kneeled down at the monument
commemorating the victims of the Volhynia Massacre. Polish and Ukrainian
institutions, organizations and groups have issued joined statements on this
difficult episode. Moreover, some of the documents acknowledged that, before
and after the massacre, there were also Polish killings of Ukrainian civilians (mainly in the Chelm area) – though on a
smaller scale. In a certain sense, there is thus actually little disagreement
between the two nations on the factualness, salience and tragedy of these
events.

The problem rather arises from the fact that, at the same time,
Ukrainian official memory policies have, on both the national and regional
levels, been officially heroizing, since 2006 and especially since 2014,
leading representatives of the two organizations – the OUN(B) and UPA – bearing
the brunt of responsibility for these mass-killings. Stepan Bandera’s
(1909-1959) radical wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)
dominated the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukraїns’ka Povstans’ka Armiia – UPA) – an armed mass
resistance movement that emerged in 1943. The so-called Banderites provided
Ukraine’s major anti-Soviet volunteer army with a fascist-like ideology that
motivated and justified the UPA’s soldiers’ bloody ethnic cleansing of Western
Ukraine. To be sure, even this connection between the OUN-UPA and the mass
killing of Poles of 1943-1944 is questioned by only a few particularly escapist
Ukrainian memory activists today.

What instead constitutes the main issue in contemporary Polish-Ukrainian
relations is that the leaders and members of the war-time OUN-UPA are today
promoted – by Ukrainian governmental institutions, major political commentators,
and certain civil organizations – as impeccable “fighters for liberation.” It
is true that the OUN-UPA was, during much of World War II and even after,
engaged in an epic battle for the Ukrainian nation’s independence from Moscow’s
ruthless and mass-murderous rule. In fact, most of the ordinary soldiers of the
UPA were not guilty of any war crimes during their largely heroic resistance
against Soviet as well as, occasionally, German troops.

Moreover, the vast majority of those nationalist partisans who did not
manage to emigrate to the West were killed, tortured, imprisoned, deported or/and
repressed in other ways by the USSR’s security organs, once the Red Army had
reconquered Western Ukraine. Some had already perished under the Nazis’ killing
machine, or been, at least, imprisoned by the Germans during World War II. Even
a few of those Ukrainian nationalists who, after the war, lived in the West –
most spectacularly the movement’s most prominent and radical leader Bandera – were
assassinated by Soviet agents.

The issue today is that most of Ukraine’s memory politicians remain in a
state of cognitive dissonance regarding certain difficult aspects of the
history of Ukrainian nationalism. They dissociate the OUN-UPA’s fight for independence
from the organizations’ crimes against humanity during World War II. This
concerns not only Ukraine’s today ultra-nationalists, like those of the infamous
Freedom (Svoboda) Party, but also numerous pro-Western and otherwise liberal Ukrainian
politicians and intellectuals. Typically, they make a deliberate distinction
between the, on the one side, heroic as well as tragic aspects, and, on the
other side, “dark side” of the OUN-UPA’s battle against foreign rule. In
support of this imagination, a large array of Ukrainian historical publicists
formulates various apologies, justifications and moderations for the Ukrainian
war-time ultra-nationalists’ crimes against civilians.

The many dimensions of current Ukrainian
nationalism

Recalling practices of selective national remembrance in other countries
around the world, many Ukrainians today tend to ignore, relativize or downplay Ukraine’s
war-time ultra-nationalists’ fascistoid ideas, as well as their partly genocidal
practices. Ukrainians who consider themselves “nationally aware” prefer instead
to focus on the exceptional and indeed real courage, patriotism and sad fate of
the majority of the UPA’s soldiers and their extraordinary anti-Moscow
insurgency. Recently, this way of commemoration has, moreover, become heavily
informed by Moscow’s ongoing war against Ukraine since 2014.

In 1959, above-mentioned Bandera was killed by a KGB agent, Bogdan
Stashinski, in Munich. Today a former KGB agent in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin,
is trying to destroy the Ukrainian state. During the current Russian-Ukrainian
war, Putin’s regime has killed, tortured, evicted etc. hundreds of thousands of
Ukrainians in the Donets Basin. During and after World War II, the Soviet
regime had killed, tortured, deported etc. hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian
patriots. That is the simple, but powerful connection that many Ukrainians make
between the historic OUN-UPA’s and their own current fight against Russian
imperialism.

To Warsaw, Tel Aviv as well as many Russophone Ukrainians, however, this
is an untenable state of affairs. As the number of Polish OUN-UPA victims
exceeds the number of Ukrainians killed by Poles, there is little willingness among
Poland’s politicians and intellectuals to respect Kyiv’s claim for historical
sovereignty. The tens of thousands of killed Polish civilians in Volhynia and
Galicia are not only a matter of Ukraine’s history, as some Ukrainian
politicians and intellectuals like to have it. Not only the OUN-UPA’s massacre
of the Poles itself, but also the ethnic cleansing’s Ukrainian ideologists,
instigators, perpetrators and justifiers are matters of Poland’s and not only
Ukraine’s national history. The same argument applies to Ukrainian
antisemitism, and its integral role for Jewish and not only Ukraine’s national history.

The Polish role in the radicalization of
Ukrainian nationalism

On the other side though, as historians of Eastern Europe know all too
well, the connection between Poland’s national history and the Ukrainian
ultra-nationalists’ massacre of Poles is deeper than some Polish politicians
and intellectuals might be keen to acknowledge. There happened a fundamental
transmutation of Ukraine’s originally emancipatory, inclusive and leftish nationalism
of the early 20th century into a more and more integral,
ethno-centrist and ultimately fascist-like ideology, during the inter-war
period. This transmutation happened not the least as a result of Polish anti-Ukrainian
policies in Eastern Galicia – from where most of the radical leaders of the OUN
came, among them Bandera himself.

To be sure, the Polish Second Republic’s repressive policies regarding
Ukrainians’ striving for autonomy, cultural life and political participation as
well as later Polish regressions against Ukrainians cannot serve as a
justification. They cannot diminish Ukrainian responsibility for the Volhynian
massacre, as some Ukrainian “patriotic” commentators argue. Still, the
inter-war Polish state’s manifold repressions of Ukrainians under its control,
between the two world wars, were among crucial historic preconditions for the
eventually genocidal turn of Ukrainian ethnic nationalism, in the early 1940s.

This means also that the origins of this Ukrainian radicalization, in
the inter-war period, were rather different from the sources and nature of the simultaneous
escalation of German nationalism. The latter became radicalized within the more
or less sovereign nation-states of Germany and Austria. In contrast, the parallel
emergence of an extremist form Ukrainian ethno-centrism was mainly determined
by a continuing lack of a state as well as Polish and Soviet political repression
of most forms of Ukrainian patriotism (as well as by historical learning from German
and Italian fascism). While the ideology of Bandera’s OUN eventually displayed certain
semblances with that of the Nazis, the historical conditions of the rises and the
eventual political aims of Ukrainian and German ultra-nationalism after World
War I remained more dissimilar than alike. In particular, Ukrainian
ultra-nationalist ideology still had as its main aim political independence. Though,
as turned out in 1943, it was also eventually mass-murderous, the OUN’s agenda lacked
the ruthless eliminationism, strident chauvinism and megalomaniac imperialism
of the Nazi doctrine.

In another way, Polish politicians and intellectuals may also take a
second look at their disagreements with Ukraine’s current memory policies. Poland’s
and many other countries’ view of their national histories is, as indicated, often
also selective. Without any doubt, for instance, the fight for independence of
the famous Polish “doomed soldiers” (Żołnierze
wyklęci) of 1944-1963
was a highly tragic and often heroic one. Curiously, it was partly reminiscent
of the UPA’s fighters’ battle, fate and suffering.

This Polish history of resistance has, however, also some “dark pages”
which are only reluctantly co-remembered by many nationally engaged
commentators in Poland. The heated Polish discussion around the Jedwabne
massacre of July 1941 should illustrate to Poles why it is so difficult for
Ukrainians today to modify their traditional view of themselves as exclusively
innocent victims of Stalinism as well as Nazism. Polish politicians should be
better than others able to understand why and how it is so difficult for Ukrainians
to acknowledge themselves as a nation that also included organized perpetrators
of mass crimes who were following a perverted idea of the Ukrainian national
good.

As Ukrainians are eager to point out, there were Polish crimes against
Ukrainian civilians too, before and after the Volhynian massacre. Such “whataboutism”
can, of course, not diminish the significance and responsibility of Ukrainians’
numerically larger killing of Polish civilians. Yet, the instances to which the
apologists of the Volhyhnian massacre refer are often real and numerous.

According to a leading Canadian expert on Ukrainian nationalism Myroslav
Shkandrij, “ethnic cleansing in one way or another was
practiced by the Poles throughout the interwar period, and the Polish
government in exile and underground was preparing to reclaim all of Western
Ukraine for post-war Poland. Moreover, ethnic cleansing of Ukrainians was
conducted on a massive scale by the Polish government at the end of the war and
in the postwar period.” Not only
Kyiv, but Warsaw too is insufficiently active in adapting its official memory
policies so as to adequately commemorate Polish anti-Ukrainian crimes and publicly
name their perpetrators. Warsaw too could be today, on a smaller scale, accused
of those omissions and commissions that many Poles detect in current Ukrainian
behavior.

Academic
history versus politicized remembrance

Finally, Poles may want to distinguish between, on the one hand,
dilettante memory activists, and, on the other hand, those Ukrainian academic
historians that are internationally published. The latter include, among
others, well-known older historians, like Yaroslav Hrytsak and Oleksandr
Zaitsev from Western Ukraine, or younger recognized experts, like Andriy
Portnov or Yuri Radchenko from Eastern Ukraine. Some of the most pertinent,
critical and original recent interpretations of war-time Ukrainian
ultra-nationalism and the pathologies of Kyiv’s post-Soviet memory policies
have come from Ukrainian female researchers at established Western universities
including Olesya Khromeychuk (Newton, England), Olena Petrenko (Bochum,
Germany), Yuliya Yurchuk (Stockholm) and Oksana Myshlovska (Geneva). Prominent
senior Ukrainian diaspora scholars in Canada – among them, John-Paul Himka (University
of Alberta) and Myroslav Shkandrij (University of Manitoba) – have over the
last years published a number of critical accounts of the OUN and its current
remembrance in Ukraine. Most of those serious Ukrainian scholarly researchers of
war-time Ukrainian ultra-nationalism, and its commemoration today who have
published in peer-reviewed high-impact journals and book series present interpretations
that are closer to the Polish academic mainstream’s opinion on the OUN(B)’s
responsibility for the Volhynia massacre than to recently whipped-up Ukrainian
historic patriotism.

In addition, there are publicly and academically prominent non-Ukrainian
scholars who have published or/and are continuing to publish influential
critical accounts of the OUN(B) and its leaders. To name only some examples from
two important Western countries, they include, in the United States, Omer
Bartov (Brown University), Jared McBride (UCLA) and Timothy D. Snyder (Yale
University), or, in Germany, Frank Golczewski (University of Hamburg), Grzegorz
Rossolinski-Liebe (Free University of Berlin) and Kai Struve (University of
Halle-Wittenberg). Against this background, the current aberrations in Ukrainian
memory policies may constitute temporary phenomena that should not be taken –
neither by Warsaw nor by Tel Aviv, Brussels, Berlin, Washington etc. – to
signify more than they actually do.

Towards a Polish-Ukrainian alliance

The current trends in official Ukrainian memory policies are unpleasant
for many Poles, and encounter sever criticism from the international –
including parts of the Ukrainian – scholarly community. Yet, they are not that
unusual for a young nation state with, moreover, gravely underdeveloped
academia, as demonstrated by the low places or plain absence of Ukrainian
universities, in international higher education rankings. One hopes that these
aberrations are temporary teething troubles in the building of an extremely troubled
nation which has only recently achieved proper independence within its own
state, for the first time in modern history.

Ukraine is under existential threat from Putin’s Kremlin which obviously
wants the Euromaidan project to fail as spectacularly as possible. In a
worst-case scenario, a collapse of the Ukrainian state – as a result of a
continuing Russian hybrid war or even further military advances into
rump-Ukraine – could destabilize the whole of Eastern Europe. A downfall of
Ukraine will have not only catastrophic consequences for the Ukrainian people.
The repercussions of such an apocalyptic, yet entirely possible development
would also touch upon the core national interests of Ukraine’s immediate
neighbors – above all, of Poland.

Against this background, Warsaw should abstract its assessment of Ukrainian
domestic affairs, and the formulation of its policies towards Kyiv from the apologetic
discourses of controversial Ukrainian memory activists. This concerns above all
the current staff of the Ukrainian Institute for National Remembrance which pursues
a foreign political line distinct from that of Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign
Affairs. Instead, Warsaw’s policies towards Kyiv should prioritize and follow long-term
Polish strategic interests.

Warsaw can apply various instruments at Polish disposal to help making
the current grey zone in Europe – i.e. the post-Soviet countries that are
neither in NATO nor in Moscow’s so-called Collective Security Treaty Organization
– more secure. There is an array of potential opportunities for supporting the
stability and development of the Ukrainian state. They range from lobbying Ukrainian
interests in the EU to support for Ukrainian energy independence and to the
design of specifically East European responses to the continuing Russian
threat.

The latter’s direction most prominent tool could be a revival of the Polish concept of an Intermarium coalition of the countries between the Baltic, Black and Adriatic seas. This abortive inter-war project can today be used as a reference point for closer East European political and military cooperation to better protect the former Tsarist and Soviet colonies from Putin’s irredentist Russia. Such a security alliance existed, for example, for a brief moment in 1920 when Poland’s and Ukraine’s leaders Józef Piłsudski and Symon Petlyura concluded a defense pact against the Red Army. One hopes that Polish politicians, diplomats and intellectuals will be able to see the bigger picture in these stormy times, and not miss their chance to help Ukraine passing through her currently complicated phase of state-building.

===============================================================

Dr. Łukasz Adamski (Centre for Polish-Russian Dialogue and Understanding, Warsaw), Prof. Yaroslav Hrytsak (Ukrainian Catholic University, L’viv), Prof. Myroslav Shkandrij (University of Manitoba) and Dr. Per Anders Rudling (Lund University) made useful comments on an earlier draft of this text. A shorter version of this article was printed, in spring 2018, in the “Harvard International Review” (vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 53-57). Unfortunately, that printed version contains a number of unauthorized editorial changes that partly changed its contents, and, in one case, led to a manifestly absurd sentence. Please, do thus not refer to this unapproved printed article, but to the above text when quoting from it.

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http://www.quiz-maker.com/Q7QKG00

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Photo: WikiCommons

The Democratic Republic of Congo has had its national election delayed again by President Joseph Kabila; on this occasion the election was delayed one week to December 30 and the announcement came three days before citizens were scheduled to head to the polls. On December 26, the electoral commission (CENI) announced elections in three regions – two in the east and one in the west – will be delayed until March due to Ebola and violence.

These delays come two years after the president initially delayed elections, violating the constitution, thus a new wave of questions have been raised about an attempt to retain his grasp of power or if elections will be free and fair, with Emmanuel Shadary representing the ruling coalition on the ballot. Twenty-one candidates will be running. Felix Tshisekedi, president of Congo’s largest opposition party the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS), is seen by some pundits as a strong challenger.

Mr. Kabila, 47, came to office in 2001 after his father, Laurent, who was part of the revolution that overthrew Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997, was assassinated and is constitutionally mandated for his terms to conclude. He won the first open, multiparty elections in 2006 in a run-off vote. Discussing the future at a regional meeting, he was quoted as saying “I’m not saying goodbye, just see you later.” There is also speculation he may attempt to return to office in 2023.

The extra uncertainty is piling another challenge to foster an environment for sustained investor confidence, especially for direly necessary energy and infrastructure projects, for the country plagued with poverty, energy shortages and high levels of unemployment in the formal economy.

Pervasive uncertainty has fomented in the nation of about 80 million inhabitants not only because of political instability, revolution, ongoing violence and the recent Ebola outbreak, but also chronic corruption, nonexistent or crumbling infrastructure and energy systems, lack of accountability, insufficient transparency, high-levels of inflation and difficulties gaining access to capital.

Facing these challenges, ninety-five percent of export revenues are derived from mining and extractive industries. Many of commodities, such as cobalt, lithium and copper, have become vitally necessary globally to produce high-tech products such as hand-held devices, renewable energy and batteries for electric vehicles.

Added together, years of war and institutions that are inadequate to stave of the enormity of external and internal forces has left the infrastructure network in disrepair, access to reliable electricity (non-diesel generator) at stunningly low levels and diversifying its economy a tall order to overcome. It is difficult for the government to implement effective reforms to reach sustained economic growth as the nation is exposed to volatile commodity market swings – demonstrated in 2016-2017. The prices of many goods, services and financial activities are indexed to the U.S. dollar.

On the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business index, DRC is ranked 184 out of 190 behind Haiti and ahead of South Sudan and on the UN’s Human Development Index it is ranked 176 out of 189. GDP per capita tallies about 460 USD, according to the World Bank.

Despite the barriers, DRC is often viewed with abundant socioeconomic growth potential from its burgeoning population, strategic location in central Africa and resource treasure trove and untapped energy potential to transition to be one of Africa’s most successful nations and even serve as a catalyst for African economic growth.

Extractive Industries Vast Impact

The DRC, which gained independence in 1960 from Belgium and is the second largest nation by land in Africa, is home to hundreds of minerals and metals. The need to attract foreign direct investment has left the nation prone to policy missteps or ineffectiveness at times. However, it has been able to implement a tax and customs duties regime applicable to mining rights. The terms of agreements signed by the parties involved, according to information from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), also must meet regulations of common law or fiscal policy. DRC began to implement the EITI in 2007 to attract foreign mining companies back to the nation, to overcome the increased national instability.

Chinese companies, similar it’s strategy in other nations, have been investing billions of dollars in pursuit of the DRC’s minerals. There is the expanding global, and especially on the African continent, dynamics of the West, with companies such as Glencore, and the Chinese state-owned enterprises for dominance of extractive minerals to support the expanding industries fostering new technologies for the future. For example, DRC Congo has close to half of the world’s cobalt reserves. There have been unsubstantiated estimates that DRC’s land could contain $24 trillion worth of raw minerals below its surface.

With such immense opportunity, mining companies have been constructing new power generation at their work sites for continued productive operations due to the lack of reliable energy.

The Persistent Energy Crisis

An overarching area that needs continued focus after elections, which can play a role in fostering socioeconomic growth in DRC in addition to economic diversification, is electricity access. Currently it is estimated that less than twenty percent of the country of 80 million has access (with some estimates well below that number), with less than 1 percent in rural areas. The access that is available is unreliable and there are frequent outages.

Unreliable or a lack of access to electricity has proven to be a drag on socioeconomic growth due to the inability to start a new enterprise or expand business to hire new employees, store vaccines, provide education, ensure security to vulnerable populations, charge communication technologies and continue productive activities once the sun goes down. Wider access to reliable electricity is a critical bridge to access to basic services.

Despite its mineral wealth, traditional biomass (such as wood and charcoal) represents more than 90 percent of total energy consumption – which is also having severe impacts on health and deforestation (70 percent of DRC’s land is forest). Like many of more than 2 billion people across the globe, inefficient biomass fuels are used for their basic energy needs such as cooking, heating and lighting.

National utility Societe Nationale d’Electricite (SNEL), the national utility, is mandated to oversee the transmission, distribution, generation and trading of electricity. SNEL has stated it has committed to partner with multilaterals, such as the World Bank and the African Development Bank (AfDB), regional neighbors and private actors. In 2014, a new electricity law was adopted, enabling the energy sector to be opened up to more independent producers of traditional and renewable energy.

Lack of investment, no cost reflective tariffs, management problems, a small base of skilled workers and no independent regulatory body in the energy sector has left the sector with challenging operational abilities. Many power plants, transformers and transmission and distribution networks are in severe need of being refurbished or replaced due to lack of maintenance and age, leaving the infrastructure dilapidated and operating far below designed capacity. Estimates range that about one third of the national electricity capacity is not operational.

The electricity mix is dominated by hydro accounting for 96 percent of the electric supply of the 2,677 MW national capacity, with a potential of 100,000 MW the equivalent of 13 percent of the world’s hydropower potential. The balance of the mix is mostly heavy fuel oils.

A perfect example is the Inga I and II dams that have an installed capacity of 1,775 MW, about 100 miles southwest of Kinshasa and these facilities operate at about 60 percent generation due to decades of overdue maintenance and neglect.

Along the Congo River, a saga over a potential “Grand Inga” project has played out for years. In theory a completed multi-stage project would have the potential to produce 39,000 MW and cost $80 billion and $10 billion for transmission, which could provide energy for potentially 500 million Africans without electricity. There has been a myriad of schemes but controversy and many other issues have kept the project on the drawing board with many other calls for it to be completed scrapped. The latest iteration of plans has stakeholders from China, Spain, the AfDB and the European Investment Bank involved.

There is also vast potential in renewable resources such as biomass, solar, geothermal and moderate wind potential that can be harnessed with proper policy and investment structures.

DRC Home to Oil and Gas Reserves

DRC’s oil industry, dating to the 1970s, is operated solely by Perenco, an independent European company. In DRC it operates eleven fields onshore and offshore with an average production of 25,000 barrels per day, according to the company. Oil started being produced in 1975 and peaked at 33,500 b/d in 1985; output has continued to decline. All oil has been exported as there is no refinery. However, discoveries in the east of the country give the country the second largest crude oil reserves in Central and Southern Africa after Angola. There has been discussion of opening Virunga park, a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the most biologically diverse areas on the planet home to about a quarter of the world’s remaining mountain gorillas, to exploration for oil and minerals.

DRC may hold as many as 30 billion cubic meters of methane and natural gas in the three major petroleum deposits. In addition, Lake Kivu which has a border with Rwanda and recently commissioned a 25 MW plant, has a significant reserve of methane from natural gas. There is inherit risk with methane but it can be tapped for productive use as well.

In February 2017, a revised hydrocarbon code was published in hopes of making the sector more structured and attractive for investors.

 

Expanding Energy Options

With such low rates of electricity access, there is potential for decentralized systems to play a significant role in the energy market. The sheer size of the country leaves many areas without transmission and distribution infrastructure available and presents a problem to construct. Standalone gensets, mini-grids and household level systems can be an integral approach to combating the energy crisis.

Furthermore, new smart policy from the next administration could be developed to promote renewable energy sources using solar, wind, geothermal and biomass to tap the energy potential and stave off further energy crises.

Solar irradiation models show solar energy is viable throughout the country, but installed capacity is next to nonexistent currently. There is increasing micro-hydro being investigated and in operation but these systems can lead to problems with inter-seasonal deviations. Whichever technology, education at the local level is necessary for optimal operation and long-term sustainability.

Most Congolese have been caught in a no-win situation with apparent waves of growth only to be halted and not extend across the nation. With a new administration, a renewed focus onto energy infrastructure can lend a hand to provide a stimulant for sustained, expanded growth and be one spoke on the road to a strong nation.

The post Continued Uncertainty in DRC Hindering Energy Growth appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

Hyperbolic warnings about allegedly disastrous consequences of a Tymoshenko presidency are demobilizing Western support for Ukrainian reforms and defense

My recent article “What Would a Tymoshenko Presidency Mean?” for the Ukraine Alert of Washington’s Atlantic Council has caused indignation among numerous Ukrainian experts and journalists – some of them hitherto close colleagues and professional friends. I was reacting, with this text and two longer outlines on VoxUkaine and New Eastern Europe, to a – since then continuing – series of harsh attacks on Tymoshenko in Western outlets, by the prominent commentator of post-Soviet affairs Taras Kuzio. Responding to Kuzio’s comparisons of Tymoshenko with Nicolas Maduro and Hugo Chavez as well as other, less controversial statements, I argued that Tymoshenko is leading in the polls for the presidential elections, with a wide margin. Her party too is currently ahead in the polls for the parliamentary elections, in autumn 2019. Kuzio has since rebutted my critique, in English, in the Kyiv Post, and, in Ukrainian, on VoxUkraine.

Ukrainian Reactions to a Presentation of Tymoshenko in the West

Obviously, there are a number of problems with Tymoshenko and her presidential bid such as her leftish populist slogans or the financial sources for her expensive electoral campaign. Yet, the fact remains that the real choice in Ukraine’s 2019 presidential elections may not be between a young reformer, on the one side, and a representative of the Kuchma-period elite, on the other, but, perhaps, between incumbent President Petro Poroshenko and opposition leader Tymoshenko. The latter is currently far more popular than the former. Volodymyr Zelenskii, a famous TV producer, actor and comedian with no political experience whatsoever, had by late 2018 become more likely to defeat Tymoshenko than Poroshenko.

Therefore, such was my argument, the West should start establishing a constructive relationship with Tymoshenko as the, so far, most likely future leader of Ukraine and with her team. As starting points for such a rapprochement, I listed some positive aspects of Tymoshenko’s possible rise in 2019 as her becoming the first female president in the Eastern Slavic world, having built a functioning nation-wide party, and having recently conducted several serious programmatic conferences with (arguably, too) many more or less original political as well as economic ideas.

“Shut up!”- was one of the more polite responses among the Ukrainian reactions, on various social networks, to the selective paraphrasing of my article on Ukrainian websites. The most common defamation, by dozens of commentators, was that my article had been paid for by Tymoshenko. These slanderers did not answer, however, the question why the presidential candidate would spend money on an article asking “where the enormous amounts of money that Tymoshenko is currently spending on her campaign come from.”

The libel concerning my alleged sell-out to Tymoshenko, and many less defamatory, but also dismissive comments misunderstood the purpose and context of my article in three ways. They saw it (a) as a contribution to Ukrainian rather than Western debates, (b) as an expression of a political position rather than of a policy prescription, or/and (c) as a propagation rather than introduction of Tymoshenko for Western audiences. Many unforgiving responders to my portrayal of Tymoshenko apparently either do not care much about, or do not comprehend well, the dynamics of Western discourse and policies regarding Ukraine. They do not appreciate possible after-effects that, in the Ukrainian context, well-received condemnations of Tymoshenko, such as Kuzio’s comparison of her with Nicolas Maduro and Hugo Chavez, have in Western capitals. Publicly warning Ukraine to not follow the path of Venezuela, in Ukrainian mass media would have been one thing. Painting such a picture in respected Western analytical outlets is a different story.

Why Tymoshenko Needs to Be Introduced to the West

The substantive motivation for my articles on her was less any particular traits of, or opinion on, Tymoshenko than the results of a large October-November 2018 poll in Ukraine, by the Razumkov Center, Kyiv International Institute for Sociology, and Rating Group. These three reputed think-tanks conducted jointly a comprehensive opinion survey interviewing circa 10,000 Ukrainians. They thus used data from far more respondents than most other polling agencies usually base their predictions on. This poll did not only put Tymoshenko and her party far ahead of all competitors in the 2019 presidential and parliamentary elections.

Apart from some other notable aspects, it also revealed an exceptionally high negative rating of incumbent President Petro Poroshenko who also heads an electoral bloc bearing his fore- and surname (“BPP”) and scheduled to participate in the parliamentary elections in autumn next year. Over 50% of the respondents said that they would not vote for Poroshenko, under any circumstances. The survey, moreover, predicted a clear victory of Tymoshenko in a hypothetical second round of the presidential elections where she would have beaten, according to that poll, all potential competitors. At least, as of mid-November 2018, the, by far, most likely new president of Ukraine and the probable winner of the 2019 parliamentary elections seemed to be Tymoshenko and her Fatherland party.

Articles like Kuzio’s imply that this would be nothing less than a disaster for Ukraine which could become a second Venezuela. Many experts and journalists in Ukraine are less alarmist, but of largely similar opinion. Worse, such comments – when publicized in English or other European languages – fall on fertile ground among Western diplomats, foreign entrepreneurs and international aid workers. These days, many external partners of Kyiv are, even without the bleak prospects that Kuzio offered, uncertain about Ukraine’s future.

European and North American officials, businesspeople, journalists and activists wonder about their continuing roles, impact and status within Ukraine, after the elections. Not only are apocalyptic warnings such as those by Kuzio & Co. as well other skeptical statements from within Ukraine on Tymoshenko fueling Western insecurity about the future of Ukraine’s foreign relations, developmental path, and internal stability. Many Kyiv elite members’ explicit rejection of Tymoshenko are, moreover, in stark contrast to her nation-wide relatively strong popular support, in almost all regions of Ukraine.

What Western Actors May Conclude from Ukrainian Hyperbole

There may be, among some public critics of Tymoshenko, hope that the harsher they attack the presidential candidate in English, the more the West will either try to prevent her victory, or attempt to neutralize the effects of Tymoshenko’s presumably calamitous presidency. Yet, this is not how the West’s international relations, in general, and interaction with Ukraine, in particular, work. Numerous Kyiv experts’ gloomy warnings concerning Tymoshenko’s rise to power may, instead, have the opposite effect in the West from what these critics might hope when voicing their apprehensions, in public or private, vis-à-vis European or American partners.

At best, the representatives of Western states and organizations may, as a result, conclude that Ukraine’s relatively anti-Tymoshenko elite and pro-Tymoshenko population need to sort out relations among themselves. At worst, they will believe fully or in part dark prognoses such as those by Kuzio as well as by similarly inclined Kyiv experts, and respectively react or prepare. Contrary to what some in Kyiv may anticipate, such preparation could, however, not result in higher interest in, or better engagement with, Ukrainian domestic affairs. It may have the opposite effect of causing temporary disengagement from, or contemplating containment of cross-border instability emerging from, a soon-to-be self-destroyed Ukraine.

If indeed Maduro Number Two (Tymoshenko) is about to start ruling Ukraine in spring 2019, as Kuzio and others insinuate, Western actors may not be asking themselves how to prevent or constrain such a disastrous turn of events. Instead, they may start calculating how to minimize the effects, on their own countries, of an East European Venezuela. Currently mobilized Western political, economic and non-governmental actors who take seriously Kuzio’s gloomy predictions, on reputed Western expert outlets, for a Ukraine under Tymoshenko may decide to put on hold their collaboration with, or to simply withdraw from, Ukraine.

Some actors are now, in any way, adopting a wait-and-see approach until it becomes clear how things develop after the elections. If Kuzio & Co. want to further postpone Western investments in, projects for, and cooperation with, Ukraine, they should continue their alarmist campaign against Tymoshenko, in Western outlets. They may succeed to trigger more freezing of activities of Western risk-averse partners in Ukraine. Continuing talk of imminent Kyiv chaos, Ukrainian decay, reform reversal etc. may result in more Western cautiousness and bewilderment. It can lead to reorientation towards more predictable other investment destinations, by economic or financial actors, or towards equally burning, yet less confusing challenges of current world politics, by political or diplomatic actors.

Something similar, by the way, goes with regard to the narrative of Petro Poroshenko as a Yanukovych Number Two – at least, if such a metaphor is pronounced vis-à-vis Western partners. There are today a number of Ukrainian civic activists and political oppositionists who have, over the last four years, become extremely disenchanted with Ukraine’s fifth president and his half-hearted reform-efforts. As a result, more and more reputed NGO representative and political journalists are starting to talk of his rule since 2014 as a repetition of Viktor Yanukovych’s reign from 2010 to 2014.

Such hyperbolic condemnation of Poroshenko via identification with Ukraine’s fourth president is being voiced in Ukrainian, but also in English at Western conferences and websites. It can be as frustrating for foreign actors and observers related to Ukraine, as Kuzio’s comparison of Tymoshenko with Maduro and Chavez. If things are or will become as bad as these allegories suggest, it would seem to make little sense for the West to cooperate, engage and integrate with Ukraine.

Repercussions of Portraying Tymoshenko as a State-Criminal

Even more subversive foreign after-effects are contained in the, among some Ukrainian critics of Tymoshenko, popular reference to the infamous 2009 gas contract signed between Naftohaz and Gazprom when Tymoshenko was Ukraine’s prime-minister. Rather than explaining this problematic treaty as a result of enormous foreign pressures on Kyiv, at the moment of the Russian-Ukrainian agreement’s signing, some opponents of Tymoshenko see her behavior in January 2009 as self-serving, or even as criminal, if not treacherous. If one takes this narrative seriously, Yanukovych’s imprisonment of Tymoshenko in 2011 was apparently a justified measure.

Moreover, the EU’s immediate demand of a release of Tymoshenko in 2011 and Brussels’s staunch insistence on her freeing until she was finally released in February 2014 was then, so it would seem, either mistaken or duplicitous. Worse, Yanukovych’s postponement of the signing of the EU’s Association Agreement was thus apparently justified. Ukraine’s fourth President was in no position to follow-up on Brussels’s condition that Tymoshenko should be released for the mammoth treaty to be signed, at the 2013 Eastern Partnership Summit in Vilnius.

In late 2013, Yanukovych, it would appear, was defending Ukraine’s rule of law while the EU was trying use its leverage to get the political felon Tymoshenko out of jail. Only Vladimir Putin was, it seems, seriously trying to help the embattled Ukrainian rule-of-law-defender Viktor Yanukovych. The Euromaidan uprising was apparently based on a spectacular misunderstanding: Yanukovych had been merely trying to preserve Ukrainian justice against the EU’s attempt to save Tymoshenko from responsibility for her deceitful actions. If that is indeed how the Ukrainian regime change of 2013-2014 came about, the EU may want to cancel its Association Agreement with Ukraine, reduce economic sanctions against Putin’s Russia, withdraw its financial help for Kyiv, make Yanukovych a candidate for its next Sakharov Prize etc.

Two Different Arenas, Two Different Audiences

The Western public continues to have relatively little factual knowledge about and deeper understanding of Ukrainian domestic and foreign affairs. Ukrainian-language internal political bickering within Kyiv, and English-language foreign political communication about Ukraine’s upcoming elections are, therefore, two different showgrounds. Had Kuzio published his attacks on Tymoshenko in Ukrainian language for a Ukrainian audience, I would not have bothered to write a rebuttal. I may have, instead, simply enjoyed reading his overarching critique and bold comparisons of Ukraine’s 5.3-foot female presidential candidate.

Yet, Kuzio had chosen influential Western analytical outlets such as Washington’s Atlantic Council website and Warsaw’s New Eastern Europe journal, as platforms for his strident attacks on Tymoshenko. He did so against the background of a dearth of other assessments of Tymoshenko as well as of analyses of her more and more likely (though, by no means, yet certain) electoral victory next year. I fear that, in the West, some may – as a result of Kuzio’s assessments – see a possible Tymoshenko triumph in the 2019 elections as the beginning of the end of Ukraine. A possible reduction of such uncertainty was the sole purpose of, and – alas – only gratification for my, articles “What Would a Tymoshenko Presidency Mean?” for the Atlantic Council, and “As Good as It Gets” for VoxUkraine.

The post How to Talk about Ukrainian Politics in the West? appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

A displaced Iraqi girl from the Yezidi community holds a piece of bread Aug. 11 near the Iraqi-Syrian border. (Photo: Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images/Newscom)

Various incidents that occurred a few doors down from the largest news team in Canada could be claimed to be the first spark of the MeToo era. A publicly funded radio star in Toronto was using his position to seduce women, and had a tendency to beat them up when alone with them. Despite many of the women also being members of staff and his union, and working in a government agency that has the added human rights protections under Canada’s Constitution, these incidences were known to have occurred for years. The women that accused him of these abuses actually lost in court and the accused, Ghomeshi, was declared innocent under Canadian law.

While there have been many convictions since the Ghomeshi era supposedly ended, it seems as if the perception of progress in protecting women has not evolved as much as was initially thought. Recently I have been made aware of a case where a man sought to attack a woman on her own in the same area of Toronto, Canada where people were targeted in a mass murder using a rental van last spring. The mass murderer who committed the crimes seemed to have issues with women, and in 2018 he killed many women and men. Despite the attack occurring a few short months ago, it seems as the woman who escaped her attacker in that area recently was given no effective assistance or help and that there is no safe area she can go to or security to depend on when she asked officials where she can go to be safe. She had also been told by many what her perception of what happened to her should be, interpreted by those who were not there and who did nothing to help her. With violence acts against women taking place for years in silence a few doors down from some of Canada’s top journalists because they didn’t listen to women who asked for help, it seems as if the Ghomeshi era perhaps never truly ended. With the mass murder in that same area targeting women, asking for help should not be subject to interpretation when her safety is involved. Let it be clear, attempted assault and harassment is a violation of Criminal Law in Canada, but despite a recent act of mass murder it seems as if there is no security in that area and no one wants to act to provide it in an appropriate manner.

We have failed women also on a massive scale in 2018. Recently the United States signed into law The Iraq and Syria Genocide Relief and Accountability Act 2018. For years, minority cultures have been put into a modern Holocaust, one where women from these cultures were actually taken as children, used as sex slaves multiple times a day and eventually executed in the most brutal of ways, many being burned alive. To even find information about the new act is difficult, and it flows from the severe lack of information on the Yazidi and minority genocides taking place in Iraq and Syria. For minorities from these regions, even when they have escaped, they are still harassed by the same men who raped, abused and killed their family in Iraq and Syria. Back in Canada itself, a Yazidi refugee was told to not speak up when her ISIS abuser found her and started harassing her in a small Canadian city. Almost no media reported on the events, and today there is no discussion or realisation that these abuses still occur. Yes, what he does to her in Canada is a crime. Despite varied official explanations on why those who fought for ISIS cannot be prosecuted in Canada, a long tradition coming from the Nuremberg trials, to the case of Klause Barbie to trials for war crimes that took place in Bosnia and Rwanda demonstrate that committing crimes against humanity is deeply illegal, in all countries and communities. Anyone who tries to justify the opposite have deeply failed women. There is no positive side to anything that has occurred in these examples above, and they take places all over the world. We have failed the most oppressed, and when public officials cannot simply keep their own small community safe by way of parsing the experience of a woman asking for help, the failure continues to grow in our own hands. This has been the legacy of 2018 and it is a reflection of our era.

The post How We Have Failed Survivors appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

Cette recension a été publiée dans le numéro d’hiver de Politique étrangère
(n° 4/2018). François Frison-Roche propose une analyse de l’ouvrage dirigé par Franck Mermier, Yémen : écrire la guerre (Classiques Garnier, 2018, 192 pages).

Ce livre arrive au bon moment et n’a pas d’équivalent. La guerre fait rage au Yémen depuis presque quatre ans maintenant, et il était temps de donner la parole à des Yéménites pour qu’ils nous expriment leur façon de voir, leur vue « de l’intérieur » en quelque sorte, le conflit étant complexe. Rien ne saurait valoir l’avis des premiers concernés. Tels ont été le choix et l’objectif de Franck Mermier, anthropologue au Centre national de la recherche scientifique, dans cet ouvrage qui paraît sous sa direction. Les huit auteurs, quatre hommes et quatre femmes, écrivains, enseignants, journalistes, chercheurs, ont en commun une connaissance précieuse des ressorts qui animent ce pays largement méconnu, riche de sa culture mais pauvre en hydrocarbures ; ceci expliquant peut-être cela.

En raison des enjeux et de la multiplicité des parties au conflit, à la fois à l’intérieur du Yémen et intervenants extérieurs, on ne sait plus à quelle guerre se vouer pour comprendre une situation rendue inextricable. Pour cette raison, il est d’autant plus difficile pour les médias occidentaux d’en rendre compte à leurs opinions publiques. Il est vrai que se sont rapidement greffées sur les conflits intérieurs yéménites les réactions des voisins, et des intérêts internationaux qui peinent à dire leur nom quand ils n’imposent pas le silence sur la réalité de la guerre. La catastrophe humanitaire annoncée par les plus grandes organisations internationales spécialisées – 18 millions de personnes sont concernées – oblige néanmoins la communauté internationale à se pencher régulièrement au chevet du Yémen.

Parfois, les récits de certains auteurs devront être décryptés pour intéresser le non-spécialiste et lui permettre de comprendre la situation et la portée de tel ou tel propos ; mais l’essentiel est là quand référence est faite à des événements vécus, et quand on nous fait prendre conscience de la réalité de situations dramatiques, cruelles. Le « journal » de Jamal Jubran, ou « les nuits de Sanaa » de Sara Jamal, par exemple, avec leur part d’humour décalé sur la prise de Sanaa par les Houthis ou les bombardements de la capitale par l’aviation de « la coalition » dirigée par l’Arabie Saoudite, sont poignants de vérité.

De ce livre on retiendra particulièrement l’étude d’Ali Al-Muqri, qui revient sur les 33 années de pouvoir de l’autocrate Ali Abdallah Saleh (1978-2011), mais aussi les analyses de Maysaa Shuja Al-Deen consacrées, pour la première à l’alliance surprenante entre forces Houthis et forces militaires fidèles à l’ancien dictateur et, pour la seconde, à la
« nouvelle donne politique » créée par le « Conseil de transition sudiste » appuyé par l’autre membre important de la « coalition », les Émirats arabes unis. À les lire, on comprend que l’unité du Yémen est sérieusement mise en cause.

On retiendra également le témoignage d’Arwa Abduh Othman, une des figures féminines du soulèvement de 2011. Elle nous dit que les femmes yéménites ont entamé une lutte contre les archaïsmes de la société yéménite et son machisme, sans vouloir départager les hommes de l’ancien régime des « forces d’opposition » (qui ont tout fait pour discréditer le mouvement en défendant le statut traditionnel de la femme), sur sa place dans une société où la religion semble définitivement tracer les contours et définir les usages et les règles.

François Frison-Roche

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Armed men in military fatigues block access to government buildings in eastern Ukraine’s rebel-held Lugansk on November 22, 2017.
The patrols began after an apparent standoff between the rebel region’s self-proclaimed leader Igor Plotnitsky and the interior minister, who’s been accused of seeking to destabilise the war-scarred city. / AFP PHOTO / Aleksey FILIPPOV (Photo credit should read ALEKSEY FILIPPOV/AFP/Getty Images)

Kyiv should foster Ukraine’s European integration, economic growth and national security by offering EU citizens instantaneous residence and work permission

Recent Eurostat data reveals that Ukrainians have been granted the most residency permits of any nationals in the EU last year. During 2017 alone, approximately 662,000 Ukrainians received such permission to live and work in the EU. Ukrainians are now integrating into Europe with an annual number roughly equivalent to the population of the official EU accession candidate country Montenegro.

More and more EU states – other than Poland and similar traditional destinations for immigrants from Ukraine – are starting to appreciate the quality of Ukrainians’ work and services as well as their adaptability and civility. Moreover, some countries are planning to open up further their labor markets for skilled migrants. For instance, Germany is discussing – not only, of course, out of altruistic reasons – a new immigration law. This trend is likely to continue during the next years. There is a chance that a post-Brexit UK could, in the future, accept Ukrainian labor under rules similar to those for other Europeans.

For hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians characteristically European liberties such as the freedom to work legally, live long-term and sell their services in the whole of the EU and European Economic Area are turning into reality. These rights are known as the freedoms of movement of labor and services of the European Single Market. They include the right of residence for persons with independent financial means.

However, this particular type of European integration of Ukraine is still largely a one-way street. There is very little movement of people in the opposite direction, i.e. from the EU into Ukraine. One reason for the minimal immigration of Westerners is that it requires a lot of paperwork for foreign citizens to acquire a Ukrainian residency and work permission. Ukrainian immigration policies are generally liberal towards applicants from Western states. Yet, the cumbersome Ukrainian procedures to receive a temporary (one-year) or long-term (ten-year) residency permit is today an effort that most EU citizens have become unaccustomed to, in view of the uncomplicated intra-European regulations for them. These problems are aggravated by some – to put it mildly – particulars of Ukraine’s post-Soviet central bureaucracy. As a result – of not only these, but also of other – circumstances, EU citizens settling in Ukraine, even for a limited period of time, are still few and far between.

Recently, Ukraine has started a process to change its constitution designed to make – even more explicitly than before – the country’s integration into the EU and NATO official objectives of the Ukrainian state. Ukrainian politicians, activists, intellectuals and diplomats continue to reiterate vis-à-vis their Western peers Ukraine’s deep desire for an as soon as and as full as possible inclusion into the West’s major organizations. Yet, Ukraine’s gradual incorporation into the West is not only dependent on larger geopolitical circumstances, and on Brussels’s assessments of how many EU and NATO standards Kyiv has implemented as a result of its domestic reform efforts. European integration is also a matter that Ukraine can foster itself, independently of Brussels, by modifying its foreign, immigration, labor, and demographic policies. It can, moreover, do so long before Ukraine’s negotiations for its accession to the EU and NATO even begin.

After the Orange Revolution, Ukraine took, in 2005, the unilateral decision to abolish visa requirements for short-term visits for citizens from the EU and some other countries. Twelve years later, in 2017, the EU responded in kind by allowing Ukrainian citizens, with a biometric passport, to freely travel to and move within the Schengen Area, for a short term without a visum. To be sure, the success of the EU’s Visa Liberalization Action Plan for Ukraine leading to this long-awaited result was not only dependent on Ukrainian visa regulations for foreign citizens. Yet, it helped a lot politically that Kyiv could point Brussels to the already liberalized travel for EU passport holders to and in Ukraine.

After this positive experience, it is time for Kyiv to take the next step for attracting Europeans to Ukraine, integrate the country more closely with the Union, and prepare Ukraine’s accession to the EU. This step could also concern citizens of other friendly Western countries like Switzerland, Norway, the US, Canada or Australia. Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Council), should make it easy to settle for those Westerners who would consider living, studying and/or working in Ukraine temporarily or permanently. For economic reasons and out of Ukraine’s own national interests, Kyiv should unilaterally grant all citizens of the EU and some other countries those freedoms of movement of labor and services foreseen within the European Single Market – which Ukraine aims to join anyway. This includes the right to live in Ukraine as person of independent financial means – a right that is one of the privileges of European citizenship within the EU.

These freedoms and rights for Western citizens should be granted by a new Ukrainian law. The liberties should be framed, in that law, in the same fashion as those that apply to people moving within the EU. That would mean that these freedoms can be enjoyed without any need to apply for residency and with no bureaucratic procedure beyond a simple registration of one’s living address in Ukraine. All that should be needed for an immigrant to register would be a passport of an EU member state or of a similarly friendly country. Such registration should be sufficient to start working as an employee in a Ukrainian company, to found a business, to study in a Ukrainian educational institution, to work as a freelancer and pay taxes, or to live in Ukraine as a pensioner.

Such a generous regulation would not only make life much easier for Western friends and enthusiasts of Ukraine willing to move for a time period or even for good to Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa or Kharkiv. Adopting such a policy would also benefit Ukraine as a state and nation. Most importantly, Ukraine currently loses hundreds of thousands of people every year due to a negative birth-death ratio, and large outmigration – mainly, but not only, to the West. Theoretically, Ukraine should thus welcome every immigrant who comes to the country, as such new residents soften the nation’s enormous yearly demographic decline.

When moving in and out becomes an uncomplicated matter, this will mean more economic exchange with the West. More foreign direct investment will come when it is easier for entrepreneurs, managers, specialists or even entire companies to relocate from the EU to Ukraine. It can also mean more capital inflow from the EU into Ukraine, as permissive residency and work practices will make using such capital in Ukraine less complicated. Western citizens living for longer or permanently in Ukraine will demand from Ukrainian governmental offices, commercial companies, medical hospitals, public or private schools, and many other institutions attention, accountability, reliability and transparency, at the same level and of the same quality as they are used to from their home countries, thus increasing pressure from below to raise service standards and apply best practices.

Moreover, Westerners moving for longer periods to Ukraine would contribute to a gradual improvement of the country’s foreign relations and image. EU citizens living in Ukraine will mean more positive and realistic stories about Ukrainian matters communicated back to these citizens’ home states. More people from the West will be coming to visit their relatives and friends who live in Ukraine. These visitors too will contribute to a clearer as well as better image of Ukraine abroad.

More Western citizens living in Ukraine will lead to more opportunities for Ukrainian citizens to practice and learn EU languages. It will demonstrate to many in the EU that Ukraine is a pro-European country that offers opportunities for EU citizens. More exchange between Ukraine and EU countries and more Western visitors will enable the Ukrainian perspective on vital political and economic interest to reach a larger international audience.

Last but not least, immigration from the West would also have a security dimension. If tens of thousands of EU citizens move to and start living in Ukraine over the next years for various reasons, this will substantially increase the interest of Western consulates in Kyiv, in the stability and development of the Ukrainian state. When freelancers, employees, students or pensioners from the EU settle in far larger numbers than today across the country, this will make their and thus Ukraine’s security a higher priority for Brussels and the Union’s member states.

It is odd that Ukraine has not already taken such an easy and budget-neutral step towards satisfying a range of its urgent national interests. To be sure, extended residency and labor freedoms will – like all liberalizations – also create problems. Western immigration could, for instance, increase competition for certain categories of jobs, or for rents in top residential areas. One could imagine debtors or criminals from the EU trying to hide in a large European non-Union country, with permissive residency policies.

Yet, even these primarily negative repercussions could have secondarily positive after-effects. For instance, Ukrainian and EU law enforcement agencies will have to cooperate closer than today, in order to jointly catch, extradite and prosecute Western fugitives, on Ukrainian soil. This will foster Ukraine’s European integration in the fields of internal security and police matters. While some Ukrainians will lose when more Western-born legal residents in Ukraine operate easily on various Ukrainian markets, such as labor, real estate or services, Ukraine’s economy as a whole will win from higher competition.

The positive results of an opening of Ukraine for Western citizens will far outweigh possible negative upshots. Ukraine is in an especially difficult situation today. The urgency and extraordinariness of her demographic, economic and geopolitical challenges demand especially swift solutions and resolute action. Letting citizens from EU and other friendly countries easily settle on its quickly depopulating territory is an obvious way for Ukraine to reduce some of its most challenging problems regarding her demography, security and economy. It is a measure that should be taken by the Ukrainian parliament earlier rather than later.

[An abridged version of this article was earlier published in the “Ukraine Alert” of the Atlantic Council of the US, in Washington, DC.]

ANDREJ NOVAK is an independent expert on Eastern and Southeastern Europe, foreign policy and security as well as European integration, with Berlin-based European Cosmopolitan Consulting.

ANDREAS UMLAND is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation in Kyiv, and General Editor of the ibidem­-Verlag book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” distributed by Columbia University Press.

The post Why and How Ukraine Should Open Up to the EU Now appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

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After a very tense and difficult year for Iraqi Kurdistan, the relationship between the Kurdistan Regional Government and the government in Baghdad is finally improving.  Iraqi Parliamentary Speaker Mohammed Al Halbousi recently visited the Kurdistan region, where he stressed the importance of working with the Kurdistan region in order to fill the remaining ministerial posts and to start a constructive political process in Iraq.  He stressed the importance of helping the displaced peoples to return to their homes, finding common ground with the Kurdistan Regional Government on Kirkuk and agreed that the Kurdistan region deserves to receive their fair share of the budget as envisioned in the Iraqi Constitution.

With his visit, it appears that finally there is light at the end of the dark tunnel.  After a year of suffering and despair following the Kurdistan Independence Referendum, it appears that Kurdistan’s Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani saved his people from the intense suffering and despair that they were enduring.

When the Central Government decided to cut the KRG budget right at the time when the ISIS threat was emerging, it was a great tragedy for all of Kurdistan.   1.8 million refugees and internally displaced persons fled to the Kurdistan region but the KRG did not have enough funds to take care of them. To make matters even worse, the price of oil dropped right around the same period of time and oil is one of the main financial resources for the KRG.

When Abadi, the Shia militias and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards attacked Kurdistan about one year ago, they caused the KRG to suffer a further setback.  The Kurdistan region lost not only 50% of their lands but also 50% of their revenue.  To make matters worse, ISIS re-emerged in the areas vacated by the Kurdish forces in Sinjar, Kirkuk and the other disputed areas.   Following the Kurdish forces withdrawal, there has been a spike in kidnappings, insurgency attacks and general unrest.   Offices that used to belong to peaceful Kurdish political parties were transformed into bases belonging to Shia militias loyal to the Iranian regime, thus helping to reinforce the Shia Crescent from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea, thus posing a strategic threat to Israel, Europe and the US.  To date, Kirkuk and Sinjar have undergone systematic Arabization.  The Kurds, Yezidis, Christians and other groups have been ethnically cleansed from these areas.

However, what was a bad situation could have been much worse.   Sadly, the international community did not support Kurdistan’s Independence Referendum.  The US did not support the Kurds due to the timing of the referendum and was not willing to take any action in order to help Kurdistan.  Many heavy American weapons that were given to the Iraqis were being utilized in order to attack the Kurdistan region, which lacked such advanced weaponry since the weapons they were supposed to get in order to fight against ISIS did not materialize. Turkey was set to impose an economic blockade upon the newly founded nation, thus closing down Kurdistan’s only window to the rest of the world.   International flights were no longer permitted to land in Kurdistan.  Even worse, Abadi, the Shia militias and the Iranian regime were set on taking over all of Kurdistan, thus destroying the area’s autonomy.

Fortunately, thanks to the diplomacy implemented by Kurdistan’s Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani, the full reign of horror that Abadi and his allies set to inflict upon Kurdistan did not materialize.  No other world leader could have masterfully utilized diplomacy under such adverse circumstances in order to convince the Turks to back off from blockading Kurdistan, thus leaving open a gate between the Kurdistan region and the rest of the world.  No other leader could have so skillfully empowered his forces to fight in order to keep every corner of Kurdistan, so that Abadi and his allies would fail to take over the whole area.  Indeed, it was only areas administered by non-KDP forces that surrendered in the end, even though they had inferior weapons to Abadi, Iran and their allies.  Indeed, KDP-administered areas stayed under KRG control.

After Kurdistan’s Independence Referendum, Mr. Nechirvan Barzani did everything in his power to reach out to other countries, both regionally and globally. His diplomacy to end the blockade resulted in a better financial situation and him receiving important support from the international community. As a result of his diplomacy, there are international flights to Kurdistan, there is no blockade on the area and the situation is getting better by the day.  And now, there is now an agreement to send Kirkuk oil through the Kurdistan pipeline in order to help Iraq increase its revenue because now Baghdad needs the funds in order to rebuild post-ISIS.  He also brokered other deals related to water, military and security cooperation.   During his governance as the KRG Prime Minister, he built a strong economic infrastructure in order to guarantee a brighter future for this region.

His background and what he has done in the past makes him the best candidate for KRG President. If he becomes the KRG president, he will strengthen relations with the neighboring countries and the world, which will guarantee a secure region with a stable economic situation.  His diplomatic efforts would result in more positive outcomes in the near future, both for Kurdistan and the rest of the world.  Therefore, everyone should support Kurdistan’s Prime Minister taking on the position of KRG President.

Sivan Gamliel is a freelance journalist based in Israel and is a political analyst working for the Dona Gracia Mendes Nasi Center for Human Rights in Middle East.  

The post Op-Ed: Nichervan Barzani saved Kurdistan! appeared first on Foreign Policy Blogs.

Cette recension a été publiée dans le numéro d’hiver de Politique étrangère
(n° 4/2018). Jérôme Marchand propose une analyse de l’ouvrage de Rory Cormac, Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 2018, 416 pages).

Cet ouvrage enrichit les études des opérations clandestines extérieures des autorités britanniques. Il suit la chronologie : la guerre froide (1945-fin des années 1950) ; la fin de l’Empire (1953-milieu des années 1960) ; l’âge des illusions (1965-présent). Chacun de ces blocs retrace les interventions les plus abouties (Iran/Oman) comme les montages avortés ou affadis. L’ensemble est ainsi remarquablement lisible sans tomber dans les platitudes anecdotiques.

Ce travail méticuleux, qui s’appuie sur un large ensemble de documents déclassifiés et de recherches historiques, met en lumière la complexité des rapports entre leaders politiques, coordinateurs administratifs de haut niveau, responsables du Trésor, diplomates de carrière, fonctionnaires du renseignement et chefs militaires. Chacun de ces groupes possède son propre agenda, ses propres biais cognitifs, ses propres manières d’envisager le ratio gains/coûts de ses décisions. Faire en sorte qu’émergent des alignements stables constitue de ce point de vue un défi permanent. À défaut d’atteindre un consensus de fond, il arrive donc que des facteurs a priori annexes prennent le dessus dans les processus décisionnels.

À plusieurs reprises, l’auteur mentionne l’état des relations avec la CIA et la Maison-Blanche comme le déterminant ultime. Les considérations de politique intérieure (frustrations des grands décideurs) ne sont pas non plus absentes. À la fin cependant, l’auteur relève des constantes telles que l’orientation défensive (préservation des positions acquises) des manœuvres de déstabilisation, ou encore la recherche de systèmes de légitimation et de détournement du blâme (déni plausible), permettant de limiter les complications en cas de publicité négative. Ces facteurs expliquent pourquoi les chefs d’état-major ont longtemps été marginalisés. En substance : trop-plein de pulsions bellicistes et ostentatoires cadrant mal avec les impératifs de discrétion élémentaires.

Plus concrètement, Disrupt and Deny montre l’évolution des répertoires opérationnels et leur adaptation plus ou moins pertinente aux contraintes du moment. Enclins à recycler les recettes ayant marché dans un passé mythique, les anciens du renseignement ont longtemps exercé une influence stérilisante. Une partie des blocages semble avoir sauté dans les années 1970-1980. L’Irlande du Nord a notamment servi de laboratoire d’essai pour redéfinir les modes d’intervention du Special Air Service (SAS) et de ses extensions semi-clandestines. Plus près de nous, la lutte anti-terroriste a donné lieu à l’émergence de nouvelles tactiques de contre-information et de disruption, mettant à contribution les ressources du Government Communications Headquarters. À relever, encore, les efforts de Rory Cormac pour réhabiliter le Foreign Office, souvent taxé de pusillanimité par les milieux du renseignement. Les diplomates britanniques n’hésitent pas à exprimer à leurs réticences. À de nombreuses occasions, ils attirent l’attention sur les retombées contre-productives de telle ou telle initiative. Par exemple : pourquoi renverser un gouvernement socialiste si cela revient à installer un régime islamiste générateur de problèmes bien pires ? Ces mises en garde raisonnées semblent peser d’un poids restreint. Sur le long terme, elles ont permis au Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) de ne pas tomber dans les dérives du renseignement américain, en phase haute de la guerre froide ou post-2001.

Jérôme Marchand

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