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Old Sunday, February 03, 2008
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Fighting terrorists
A strike against al-Qaeda


Feb 1st 2008
From Economist.com

The killing of Abu Laith al-Libi


AFP


HE WAS not Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri, the most famous of al-Qaeda’s leaders. But to the devotees of global jihad on the internet, Abu Laith al-Libi, was an increasingly well-known figure. His death was important enough for one of the main jihadist websites to post a black banner announcing the “good news” of his martyrdom even before America had a chance to rejoice.

The details of his death are still uncertain. The Pentagon, for one, denies any involvement. But it seems likely that he was killed in Pakistan’s border region of North Waziristan earlier this week by a missile fired from across the border in Afghanistan by an unmanned CIA drone. The CIA has been pressing to be allowed to operate on the ground in the lawless tribal belt, but Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf has rejected any such encroachment. The long shot from the air may have been a compromise deal, or at least a deniable means for America to strike at its foes.


Mr Libi, as his nom-de-guerre implies, was a veteran of Libya’s jihadist movement. He is believed to have fought with the mujahideen against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan, returning to Libya in 1994 in the hopes of stoking revolution against the rule of Muammar Qaddafi, and then fleeing to Saudi Arabia when the rising failed. He spent time in jail in Saudi Arabia and then moved back to Afghanistan where he became a high-ranking leader in the second tier of al-Qaeda bosses.

Last year he became more prominent on the internet, where his white-turbaned features have been the subject of two video homilies—one calling for Westerners to be kidnapped and another declaring that jihadist groups were preparing for an assault on Israel and then to impose Islam on the world. In his last appearance, in November, he announced the long-rumoured formal merger of his Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) with al-Qaeda.

This follows a similar union in 2006 between al-Qaeda and Algeria’s Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, better known by its French abbreviation, the GSPC. Since then Algeria has been struck by a series of spectacular suicide bombings. LIFG’s merger may have presaged an extension of attacks farther across the Maghreb. All this generates great nervousness among Europe’s anti-terrorism officials who fear that al-Qaeda’s attacks will cross the Mediterranean, through a network of North African migrants, in the same way as al-Qaeda has exploited the Pakistani diaspora in Britain.

Until now, however, Mr Libi’s activities seemed to be concentrated closer to his base in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. He was believed to be one of al-Qaeda’s more important operatives in Afghanistan. He was linked, for instance, to the suicide bombing in February on the outer edge of Bagram airbase, the American nerve centre in Afghanistan, at a time when Vice-President Dick Cheney was visiting.

Pleasing as it may be to Western officials, Mr Libi’s death is unlikely to have much of an impact on the insurgency in Afghanistan, which is being waged mainly by Pashtun tribesmen who have had ample experience of irregular warfare. Foreign fighters may help to stiffen the Taliban’s ideological commitment, and may bring some technical expertise. It is likely, for instance, that the Taliban’s resort to Iraq-style suicide bombings was an innovation facilitated by al-Qaeda, perhaps involving Mr Libi himself. But it will go on without him.

Al-Qaeda’s global activities, particularly in the Maghreb, may have been checked, for a while at least until it establishes how Mr Libi was tracked. But al-Qaeda has lost important figures in the past and has impressed intelligence agencies with its ability to regenerate its leaders.

The real significance is that al-Qaeda’s sanctuary in Pakistan’s tribal belt is not completely secure; terrorism may have a long arm, but so do the West’s intelligence agencies. As Mr Zawahiri himself has said, half the battle is “in the media”. Mr Libi’s death was, if nothing else, a propaganda victory for Western security agencies. But al-Qaeda’s campaign of violence will go on.

http://www.economist.com/daily/news/...ry_id=10632193
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The Gaza Strip

Hamas won't go away

Jan 31st 2008
From The Economist print edition


Palestine's Islamists can't be defeated or ignored, but embracing them won't be easy
EPA


AT FIRST it looked possible that the break-out by tens of thousands of Palestinians bottled up in the Gaza Strip would be a joyful but brief blip. Once Egypt had resealed the border, the inmates' misery would resume, along with the bloody stalemate that has prevailed since the Islamists of Hamas took control last June. But that has not happened. Instead, the balance of power has shifted—in Hamas's favour (see article).

Israel's policy of punishing the Gazans in the hope that they would get rid of Hamas, which they had elected two years ago, was not only morally wrong, but has also failed. Hamas has probably recouped its strength and increased its popularity. Moreover, it seems unlikely that Israel will be able to foist responsibility for Gaza onto Egypt, in the hope that the Palestinians' fledgling two-part state would remain politically as well as territorially divided, with the bigger West Bank bit amiably engaged in the peace talks with Israel that were relaunched two months ago at Annapolis. In sum, Israel has failed to squeeze Hamas out of the equation—and will almost certainly, in the end, somehow have to accommodate it.


Easily said but very hard to do. On paper, Hamas's policy is both grotesque and delusional: the destruction of the Jewish state. But Hamas is also pragmatic. In the past few years, it has agreed to take part in a Palestinian political system that assumes co-operation with Israel. It joined a (short-lived) coalition government with its secular rivals, Fatah, the party of the late Yasser Arafat which has long dominated the Palestine Liberation Organisation and which recognised Israel 20 years ago. Several of Hamas's leaders have hinted that if a majority of Palestinians agreed to a two-state solution in a referendum, the Islamists would abide by the verdict. They still, however, insist, as Fatah does on paper, that all Palestinians have a right of return to their old homes in what is now Israel and that Israel's borders must be those that existed before the war of 1967. The hope among the majority of Palestinians and Israelis who want two states living in peace side by side is that, over time, Hamas will disavow its determination to destroy the Jewish state and enter talks on a lasting peace.

Since last June Hamas has been at war not just with Israel but with Fatah too. The representatives of both Fatah and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, a Fatah man, have been chased out of Gaza or oppressed within the strip. Hamas has treated its Palestinian opponents brutally, as has Fatah in its own West Bank domain. Hamas's relations with Egypt are barely better: the Egyptian government on its own patch hates and fears the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot. Israel's agreement to start negotiating a peace treaty with Fatah, underwritten by the American administration at Annapolis, seemed to rest on an assumption that both sides would keep the incorrigibles of Hamas—and Gaza—out of any deal. That now seems much harder to achieve.

Try to domesticate it

But how to lure Hamas into peaceful politics? The first need is a ceasefire, which requires Hamas and other fighters to stop firing the rockets that rain down on Israelis living near Gaza (though it is worth noting that these rarely kill people—some 13 in seven years—whereas Israeli attacks have killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians as well as fighters in Gaza over the same period: at least 70, including 30-odd civilians, this January alone). The second is for Israel, Egypt and Fatah to accept Hamas as a partner in managing Gaza's borders. The third is for a wider prisoner exchange, to include an Israeli corporal held by Hamas for more than a year, along with the 40-plus Hamas members of parliament behind bars in the West Bank and some thousands of the 12,000-odd Palestinian militants in Israel's prisons. The fourth, and hardest to achieve, would be to get Hamas back into a Palestinian unity government under a clarified version of the deal made in Mecca a year ago.

The key requirement is that Hamas be judged by its deeds rather than its declaratory words. Some within Hamas think only of Israel's destruction; for more, it remains their long-term ambition. But opinion polls say that most Palestinians, including a good half of the 44% who voted for Hamas at the last election, accept a two-state solution. The way to bring Hamas on board is not to isolate it, which may make it stronger and more intransigent, but to entice it with measures of at least temporary respite that have a better chance, over time, of making it embrace the reality of a predominantly Jewish state next to a Palestinian one.

Hamas cannot expect a free pass to respectability. Its leaders cannot prevaricate over diplomacy for ever; ditching their anti-Semitic charter would help too. But insisting that Hamas recognises Israel outright before it can be deemed worthy of any kind of co-operation is pointless. It simply won't happen. Leaving an angry group of Islamists outside any deal that Israel makes with other Palestinians is bound, in the end, to undermine Israel's own long-term security. That is at least one lesson to come out of the Gaza fiasco.

http://www.economist.com/opinion/Pri...ry_id=10608398

Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
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Iran's nuclear programme

As the enrichment machines spin on
Jan 31st 2008
From The Economist print edition

AP
How America's own intelligence services have brought international policy on Iran to the edge of collapse

IF YOU are locked eyeball to eyeball with an adversary as wily as Iran, it does not make much sense to do something that emboldens your opponent and sows defeatism among your friends. But that, it is now clear, is precisely what America's spies achieved when they said in December that, contrary to their own previous assessments, Iran stopped its secret nuclear-weapons programme in 2003.

Iran's jubilant president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, immediately called the American National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) a “great victory” for his country. Subsequent events suggest that he was right. Western diplomats are despondent and international efforts to get Iran to stop enriching uranium and working on plutonium have been thrown into confusion.

Already difficult diplomacy has got harder. The steadily pumped up pressure that led to two United Nations sanctions-bearing resolutions, in December 2006 and March 2007, calling on Iran to suspend the offending work, suddenly deflated. Unprecedented, if grudging, co-operation from Russia and China at the UN Security Council had been about to lead to a third, tougher resolution. But the NIE produced an abrupt softening in the positions of the Russians and Chinese. The draft America, Britain, France and Germany had to settle for when all six foreign ministers met last week in Berlin is a feebler one, designed to shore up their fraying unity rather than set Iran quaking in its boots.

In his final state-of-the-union speech this week, George Bush called on Iran to suspend uranium enrichment “so negotiations can begin”—a far cry from the fiery “axis of evil” speech he unleashed against Iran, Iraq and North Korea six years ago. This will add to Iran's belief that the NIE has made it harder for Mr Bush to brandish the military option that he has insisted remains “on the table”. The threat of force had put some steel into the six-power diplomacy. Presuming Mr Bush's guns to be now truly spiked, his critics at home are cheering along with the Iranians.

Israel, which had been counting on America to put the frighteners on Mr Ahmadinejad and his ilk, is left mulling its own dwindling options in a fissile neighbourhood. Yuval Steinitz, a former chairman of its parliament's foreign-affairs and defence committee, calls the NIE “the most bizarre and flawed intelligence report I've ever read”. For Holocaust remembrance day this week, just before Mr Bush's speech, Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, sent a not very coded message to Iran and America, promising not to be complacent about “voices calling for the obliteration of Israel”, and recalling the allies' failure to destroy the Nazi death camps during the second world war.

The small print

If America's spies have concluded that Iran is out of the nuclear-weapons business, why the gloom and doom? Iran, after all, has always insisted that its nuclear programme is peaceful. Indeed, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, its supreme leader (shown above in conversation with Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency or IAEA), says that building or using nuclear weapons is against Islamic law.

If only judging Iran's nuclear intentions were that simple. Contrary to the impression left by the NIE's published conclusions (the bulk of its analysis remains classified), a nuclear-weapons programme has three main elements: the design work and engineering to produce a workable weapon; the production of sufficient quantities of fissile material—very highly enriched uranium or plutonium—for its explosive core; and work on missiles or some other means of delivery. Although the NIE talks of a halt to Iran's “weapons programme”, its conclusions relate only to the design and engineering effort and past hidden uranium experiments . But the weaponisation work the NIE thinks was halted is easy to restart and easy to hide.

Hence the fury of even some of America' s closest European allies at the NIE's selective and then mangled message. Iran boasts of its skill in building ever farther-flying (and potentially nuclear-capable) missiles. And by far the hardest skill in bomb-making is the one Iran now pursues in plain sight, in defiance of those UN resolutions: producing uranium or plutonium. Israel claims to have evidence that the warhead work continues too—but this fails to pass muster in Washington under rules designed to avoid another debacle like that over the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Britain's intelligence analysts, studying the same information as America's, have not yet decided whether the American conclusion is right.







The damage done by what the NIE did and did not say cannot easily be undone. To some, the report changes little; if anything Iran has an even harder case to answer, because the weapons programme the NIE says Iran was working on until 2003 is a breach of Iran's anti-nuclear promises under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Meanwhile, it is Iran's open nuclear work that is the target of UN sanctions. Yet it might be truer to say that the NIE changes both nothing and everything—and in all the wrong ways.

Unchanged is the suspicion hanging over Iran's nuclear intentions. Mr Ahmadinejad has never been able to explain convincingly why Iran is the first country to have built a uranium-enrichment plant without having a single civilian nuclear-power reactor that could burn its output (the ones Russia has all but completed at Bushehr will operate only on Russian-made fuel). He says he wants to build lots more power plants. But learning to enrich uranium—a hugely costly venture—still makes questionable economic sense for Iran, since it lacks sufficient natural uranium to keep them going and would have to import the stuff. And although the 3,000 fast-spinning centrifuge machines it has up and running at Natanz are enriching only to the low levels used in civilian reactors, running the material through a few more times, or reconfiguring the centrifuge cascades, could soon produce uranium of weapons grade.

Some other countries—Iran likes to point to Japan—have civilian uranium and plutonium-making technology and no one creates a fuss. What they don't have, however, is Iran's murky nuclear past. It took a tip-off from an Iranian opposition group to alert IAEA inspectors to the construction of a secret uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz and a heavy-water reactor that produces plutonium at Arak. Since 2003, the IAEA has found multiple other breaches of Iran's nuclear safeguards.

Caught radioactive-handed, Iran could have chosen to come clean. Instead it stonewalled, refusing to answer questions about some of its alleged activities, including those that the NIE is confident were clear evidence of weapons intent. Under intense scrutiny, and fearful that it could be next on Mr Bush's target list after Afghanistan and Iraq, in 2003 Iran called a temporary halt at Natanz and put out feelers to America for talks. But America ignored those approaches, and since 2006 Iran has resumed uranium enrichment. If its intentions were peaceful as claimed, this behaviour is “incomprehensible”, says Pierre Goldschmidt, a former deputy head of the IAEA.

Mr ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA, seems less certain of this. Fortified by a Nobel peace prize, he has been working assiduously to prevent a military confrontation between Iran and America. This outspoken effort to confound what he has called the “crazies” in Washington has angered Western diplomats. They complain that he has tripped up diplomacy (he suggested that Iran be allowed to keep some enrichment work going, even though the Security Council and the IAEA itself had demanded a halt) and cares more about getting Iran “out of the doghouse” than doing his job by holding it fully to account.

Iran itself certainly appears to see the IAEA as the way out of its remaining difficulties rather than a thorn in its side. On a charm offensive at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 26th, its foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, told world leaders that it made no sense for the Security Council to consider new sanctions at a time when American spies had confirmed that Iran was not building a bomb and Iran was on the verge of completing the “work plan” it signed with the IAEA last August.

Under that plan Iran promised to answer the agency's outstanding questions by last December. Now it says it will divulge all by mid-February. The Iranians have already come up with some more answers about past illicit plutonium experiments. They have shown that some of the unexplained traces of enriched uranium came from contaminated imports supplied by the black-market operation run by the now disgraced head of one of Pakistan's nuclear laboratories, Abdul Qadeer Khan. (Iran says it bought kit from Mr Khan because nobody else would supply needed “civil” equipment.) And they have told inspectors more about the faster-spinning centrifuge machines supplied by the Khan network that Mr Ahmadinejad had already boasted were undergoing tests.

But inspectors have more questions. They are still probing, among other things, alleged activities that the NIE report is confident show clear weapons intent: design work on a potential warhead and a test shaft, and high-explosive testing to develop triggers for nuclear bombs. Come mid-February, Mr ElBaradei and his inspectors may have got no more than another Persian raspberry on some of this. They will report to the IAEA's 35-nation board in March.

In any case, accounting for Iran's past does not lessen the danger of its accumulation of enriched uranium for the future. A stock of low-enriched uranium could give it a break-out capacity to build a weapon in a matter of a few months, depending on how far Iran had got with its earlier weaponisation work. Thanks to Natanz, Iran could have enough highly-enriched uranium for a bomb by 2009, says the NIE report, though more probably by 2010-15. So being more truthful about the past would not get Iran entirely off the hook.

Conditional offers

But might it open a path to negotiations with America? In a change of policy last year, Condoleezza Rice, America's secretary of state, said she would be willing to talk directly to Iran about all their differences (they are already talking on and off about Iraq) once it had suspended uranium enrichment. The Americans and Europeans, supported by Russia and China, promised that a halt to enrichment would win Iran improved political and economic ties, talks on regional security and help with advanced, but less suspect, nuclear technology. Russia even offered to enrich uranium on Iran's behalf, to get talks going. Many of America's presidential candidates have added to the mood music by picking up ideas for a “grand bargain” with Iran across a range of issues.

Yet it is far from clear that Iran is interested in a deal with America, especially while Mr Bush remains president. Ayatollah Khamenei recently allowed that the bar on talks with America might not last for ever. But, for the moment, “Not having relations with America is one of our main policies”, he said. In the meantime, Iran continues to deride the actions of the Security Council as “illegal”. Its atomic energy chief says he expects a clean bill of health from the IAEA in March, and at that point “Iran's nuclear case will be closed.”

Mr Khamenei and Mr Ahmadinejad have long counted on the hesitation of sanctions-shy Russia and China, and the support of friends in the non-aligned movement, to give Iran sufficient cover to enrich on regardless. America, Mr Khamenei reportedly told Mr ElBaradei, “will not be able to bring the Iranian nation to its knees by raising this or other issues”. Mr Bush, to be fair, has stressed that he has no intention of depriving Iran of the properly peaceful benefits of nuclear power—to the point of supporting Russia over the start of its fuel supplies for Bushehr.

One reason for Iran's defiance is that Mr Bush is looking increasingly weak. On his tour of the Middle East last month, the president talked up the Iranian threat and America's determination to deal with it diplomatically. But his public efforts to rally Arab governments to confront Iran fell flat. Damagingly, the NIE is being read in the Gulf as a signal that Mr Bush is no longer serious about facing down Iran.

An uneasy home front

As Iran approaches parliamentary elections in March, the regime's bigger headaches may be on the home front. Officialdom can brush off protests, such as a petition from several hundred activists, journalists and academics calling for a uranium freeze, and a letter from more than 500 women criticising some in the regime for playing into America's hands with their defiance and risking war.

Mr Ahmadinejad may claim the NIE as a victory. But before its publication and since, he has been under attack from fellow conservatives for the parlous state of Iran's economy. Even Mr Khamenei has chipped in with mild criticism, and recently overrode the president to order increased spending on gas supplies for Iran's remoter regions that have been suffering shortages in a bitterly cold winter.EPA



Ahmadinejad is less than loved


Oil may be hovering around $90-100 a barrel, but Mr Ahmadinejad has squandered much of the windfall on wasteful subsidies. In a country where two-thirds are under 30, unemployment is rising fast. Inflation now runs at an official 19%, according to central-bank figures, compared with 12% in 2006, and may well be higher.

Iran's international isolation adds to the distress. The UN'S sanctions have been closely targeted on companies and individuals involved in nuclear and missile work, but American-inspired financial sanctions bite harder. Most European and Japanese banks, with too much to lose to fall foul of America's sanctions laws, have backed away from business in or with Iran, especially in dollars, but in other currencies too. In recent months some banks in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain—where Iran has transferred a lot of its business—have reportedly followed suit. Trade continues, but governments have pruned export credits. Although India has hitherto been one of Iran's main suppliers of refined gasoline and diesel, the difficulty in getting letters of credit recently forced Iran to find supplies through Singapore. China has picked up contracts to exploit Iran's oil and gas fields where European and Japanese companies have hesitated, but Iran needs Western technology to prevent energy production slipping further.

Disgruntlement at the cost of economic isolation grows. The hope behind Western strategy has been that ordinary Iranians who take pride in their country's nuclear prowess will come to question the price they are being asked to pay for persisting with expensive technologies that other nuclear-powered countries have done without. All the more so, since their government denies any weapons intent.

The trouble is that Mr Ahmadinejad's conservative critics within the regime and in parliament tend to be hardliners over Iran's nuclear “rights”. The president's men may fare badly in the March elections. Mr Ahmadinejad could be turfed out of office in presidential elections next year. But it is the supreme leader who makes nuclear policy, and this may not change. Having persisted with enrichment in defiance of sanctions, why should Iran alter course just when the combined efforts of America's spies and the IAEA look likely to bring about a reduction of pressure and an escape from isolation? Hedging their bets, American allies such as Egypt and the Gulf Arabs have lately been showing a friendlier face to Iran.

In theory, one possibility Iran still needs to worry about is a pre-emptive attack by Israel. Israel has no doubt that Iran is bent on getting the capability for a bomb, something that Mr Olmert says Israel will “not tolerate”. Content to pipe down while pressure on Iran was building, Israel has nonetheless deliberately narrowed the ambiguity over its own nuclear arsenal, once a taboo subject in public. A missile Israel recently tested was able to carry an “unconventional” payload, said Israel Radio. Israel has also just launched a sophisticated spy satellite, making no secret of the fact that its target is Iran.

What Israel may or may not do

Israel says that even if America's spies are right (and it does not think they are) about Iran having given up its efforts to build a nuclear warhead in 2003, Iran's enrichment activities at Natanz are a clear and present danger. But whether Israel would dare to go it alone in an attack on Iran is uncertain. Doing so without American approval or help would be fraught with danger, and the NIE has made it very much harder for Israel to justify such an attack in the court of public opinion.

What if neither sanctions nor force stops the centrifuges? Once Iran produces sufficient nuclear material, it could eventually get to not much more than a screwdriver's turn from a bomb—as Pakistan showed before it decided to echo India's nuclear tests in 1998. In 1981 Israeli airstrikes crippled an uncompleted Iraqi nuclear reactor to nip Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions in the bud (Iran, just as concerned at Iraq's intentions, had earlier struck the reactor with missiles). The attack may have delayed Iraq's nuclear programme, but also drove it underground. After the first Gulf war ten years later, astonished weapons inspectors found Iraq had been working secretly on three different ways to a bomb.

Paradoxically, America's NIE raises the alarm about just this sort of eventuality. The 16 intelligence services that signed the report concluded that Iran has the scientific and industrial capacity to build a nuclear weapon if it chooses, and that “at a minimum” it is keeping the option to do so open. But, whether by accident or design, the report was written in a way that allowed the finding about weaponisation to suck attention away from the uranium work, which diplomats had spent years trying to stop by means of painstaking diplomacy. Iran may not yet be home free, but the international campaign to stop it getting the bomb that many countries think it wants is on the point of failure.



Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.



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UN law
Coming up trumps


Jan 31st 2008
From The Economist print edition

The UN's little-known terrorist watchlist is alarmingly arbitrary and seductive. It faces a legal challenge in Europe


GUANTÁNAMO has become a byword for the sacrifice of civil liberties in America's “war on terror”. But there is another, rarely talked-about way in which potentially innocent people are severely punished, while being deprived of any right to hear or challenge the allegations against them. Worse, they stand even less chance of escaping this fate than they do of being released from Guantánamo Bay. The legal oubliette in question is the United Nations' terrorist watchlist.

Set up by the Security Council in 1999 at the behest of the United States, but greatly expanded after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, the so-called “consolidated list” includes 370 individuals and 112 outfits suspected of having links with the Taliban or al-Qaeda. All are subject to a world-wide freeze on their assets, save for basic living expenses, along with a total travel ban outside their country of residence.



Getting onto the list is relatively easy, requiring a unanimous vote by the Security Council's sanctions committee (identical in membership to the Council itself). Any UN member state can submit a name.

Getting off is a lot more difficult. Requests for delisting have to be made either directly to the sanctions committee or through the affected person's country of birth or residence, and the burden of proof lies with the petitioner. The petitioner has to convince the same people who previously held him to be guilty that he is innocent—a particularly onerous task when he has no access to the information that led to his inclusion on the list in the first place. In the list's eight-year history, only 11 people and 24 organisations have been removed.

Two cases now before the European Court of Justice could change this. One was brought by Sheikh Yassin Abdullah Kadi, a prominent Saudi businessman; the other by the al Barakaat International Foundation (based in Sweden, it is part of a big Somali organisation dealing with cross-border money transfers). Both have been on the UN's terrorist blacklist (and had all their assets frozen) for the past six years, even though no one has ever succeeded in bringing criminal charges against either of them.

Under Article 103 of the UN Charter, Security Council resolutions generally take precedence over all other laws, domestic and international. Only in cases involving jus cogens—the most fundamental principles of international law, such as the ban on torture or slavery—does this rule not apply. The Security Council could not, for example, order genocide.

This supremacy of UN law was recently reaffirmed by the House of Lords, Britain's highest court, in a human-rights case brought by Hilal al-Jedda, a man of joint Iraqi-British nationality held by British forces in Iraq. He claimed that his detention violated his right to liberty under the European Convention on Human Rights. Britain countered that, as part of a multinational force authorised by the UN, its troops were entitled to take such action. In a unanimous ruling in December, the law lords agreed, declaring that Security Council resolutions trumped the convention.

But in a potentially ground-breaking “opinion” to the European Court of Justice in the al Barakaat case on January 23rd, Poiares Maduro, one of the court's eight independent “advocates-general” (with a rank equivalent to that of a judge), argued that the court cannot “turn its back on the fundamental values that lie at the basis of the [EU's] legal order and which it has the duty to protect.” Where those values were at stake, the court might have to annul Security Council measures, he said.

Mr Maduro also says that even when such measures were intended to suppress terrorism, this “should not inhibit the court from fulfilling its duty to preserve the rule of law”. In doing so, it would not, as a lower EU court had argued, be “trespassing into the domain of politics”, but “reaffirming the limits that the law imposes on certain political decisions”.

Although the prevention of international terrorism might sometimes justify restrictions on an individual's right to property, it did not remove the need to demonstrate why those measures were being applied to that particular person or entity. Delivering a similar opinion in Mr Kadi's case, he said that imposing sanctions with such “potentially devastating” consequences on someone who might be totally innocent was “anathema in a society that respects the rule of law”.

The Security Council's terrorist watchlist has already come under fire. The UN's own watchdog on human rights argues that if good reasons exist for imposing sanctions on someone, he should be prosecuted. The UN replies that it is not always possible to gain the necessary evidence to gain a conviction in court. The sanctions, it says, are intended to be “preventative” rather than punitive, aimed at stopping any potential future support for terrorism. It is the right to do that, without due process, that Mr Maduro is now challenging.

The EU has its own watchlist for suspected terrorists unrelated to the Taliban or al-Qaeda; it imposes an asset freeze (though not a travel ban) on 54 individuals and 48 groups. Anyone on the list must be approved by a unanimous vote by all 27 members of the EU's Council of Ministers. Unlike most of those on the UN's list, however, all must either have been convicted of a terror-related offence or be subject to prosecution. And all have a right to challenge their inclusion on the list—at national level, to the council or to the European Court of Justice.

Mr Maduro's opinion to the court marks the first substantive legal challenge to the fundamental assumption on which the UN's watchlist is based—namely that where world peace and security are at stake, virtually anything goes so long as it has the blessing of the world's great powers. An advocate-general's opinion is not, of course, the same as a ruling. The court still has to decide whether to accept Mr Maduro's advice. In the past, it has followed such opinions in about 80% of cases. But in potentially precedent-setting cases, such as those of Mr Kadi and al Barakaat, its reaction, expected by the summer, is much harder to predict. At the UN's headquarters in New York, the securocrats are increasingly twitchy.

http://www.economist.com/world/inter...ry_id=10608577
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Central Africa

War without borders


Feb 5th 2008
From Economist.com


A spreading conflict in central Africa

BODIES lay in ditches and on the streets; the injured nursed their gunshot wounds at home, too terrified to venture to hospital. Abandoned cars and burned-out tanks were scatted on the roadways. Phone lines were cut. Hundreds of thousands of refugees were said to be pouring from the city, many seeking sanctuary in camps and across the border in Cameroon. Several hundred expatriates, fleeing as bullets rang out, were whisked away by French soldiers. The chaotic and bloody scenes in Ndjamena, Chad’s capital, in the past few days are sadly familiar. The conflict which brought rebels to the capital, in an effort to overthrow the government of Idriss Déby, is an extension of long-running violence in neighbouring Sudan.

By Tuesday February 5th the rebels and government soldiers had, apparently, called a halt to the fighting, with only scattered gunfire reported in the city. Over 1,000 rebels had arrived on the edge of the capital a few days earlier, and then all but overran it, before being forced back by government troops possibly—though the French deny it—with air-support from the former colonial power. The rebels may threaten another attack, but are said to have withdrawn from the capital for now. It is unclear how many died in the past few days.

It is not the first time that rebels in Chad have launched an assault on Mr Déby's government, but it is the closest they have come to toppling it. A similar attack in 2006 petered out when disorganised rebels in the capital fled—this time it appears that the fighters were better prepared and more expertly led. That may be the result of guidance from the rebels' patrons in Khartoum, the capital of neighbouring Sudan. Sudan's government, despite denials, is said to want Chad's government overthrown because of Mr Déby's support for rebel fighters in Darfur, in the west of Sudan. Chad is home to at least 200,000 refugees from Darfur, and to some bases used by Darfuri rebels.

The violence this weekend in Chad's capital on the western edge of the country—and also in smaller towns farther east—is really a symptom of a conflict spreading from Darfur which has already caused instability in neighbouring Central African Republic and in the east of Chad. The timing of this particular outbreak of hostilities may be explained by efforts to install a European Union peacekeeping force in Chad in an effort to contain the conflict in Darfur. The force of 3,700 soldiers EU troops, plus a few hundred UN policemen, was ready to deploy but has been prevented from doing so by the latest fighting. Rebels—and their backers in Sudan—may have decided to act before the Europeans at last got their boots on the ground.

It is possible that the latest violence may actually encourage the active deployment, sooner rather than later, of European soldiers in Chad. France's government now says it is willing to intervene with soldiers to tackle any new rebel attack on the capital. On Monday the UN Security Council agreed that France, which anyway has some 1,100 soldiers in the country (usually kept in barracks) and some aircraft, should be allowed to intervene. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, said on Tuesday that “If France must do its duty, it will do so.” It may be that by threatening to intervene forcefully, Mr Sarkozy has made it less necessary to do so.

Ideally, however, a diplomatic solution is needed. African diplomats are beginning to shuttle between neighbouring countries in an effort to mediate between rebels and the Chadian forces. The price of conflict is evidently high: a $300m aid programme in Chad risks being disrupted; humanitarian efforts for Darfur are largely conducted through Chad.

The plight of those displaced by fighting in Darfur is likely to worsen as food-aid deliveries are suspended. But the temptations for the rebels, and Sudan, are high too. Chad is oil rich and potentially a serious threat to the dominance of Sudan's government in Darfur. The rebels argue, too, that Mr Déby's government is corrupt and dictatorial, far from a model of benign rule for Africa. Nobody believes that the rebels are fighting for better government, but nor is peace and wise rule on offer from the government of the day.



http://www.economist.com/world/afric...ry_id=10637194
Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
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Afghanistan and NATO

Where the sniping has to stop

Feb 7th 2008
From The Economist print edition


Infighting is not helping Afghanistan

MIGHT Afghanistan’s “forgotten war” yet defeat the most successful military alliance in history? Last year saw NATO-led troops engage in their deadliest fighting yet in support of the government of Hamid Karzai. The winter snows that blanket Afghanistan’s mountains have for now quietened the frontlines. But roadside bombings and suicide attacks—tactics the Taliban have picked up with increasingly lethal effect from al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq—still take their toll among Western forces and ordinary Afghans.

Yet it is not the spectre of military defeat that haunts NATO. It is a failure of political will. This week, as alliance defence ministers gathered in Vilnius, and Condoleezza Rice, America’s secretary of state, and David Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, dropped by unannounced in Afghanistan, all could agree that the job of stabilising the country needs more troops and a better co-ordinated reconstruction effort. But the political sniping over who should be doing what has reached an intensity that only the Taliban can celebrate.

More soldiers will turn up before the snows melt and before NATO leaders gather for a summit in Bucharest in April. America is sending an extra 3,200 marines; a report by two prominent former officials, Thomas Pickering and General James Jones, recommends deploying still more as troop levels drop in Iraq. Poland hints it may add to the more than 1,000 soldiers it deployed last year. France has just sent more aircraft, may soon send a few extra troops to help train and fight alongside Afghan army units, and is thinking of other ways it might help. The fresh troops Britain is shortly to rotate in will have more armoured vehicles and helicopters.

The trouble is that “there are certain allies that are in much more dangerous parts of the country,” as Miss Rice put it not-so-diplomatically this week—and some who just won’t go. Canada, Britain and the Netherlands, the NATO members, along with America, bearing the brunt of the fighting in the volatile south and east of the country, would welcome some relief. A report commissioned by Canada’s government recommended last month that the hard-pressed Canadian contingent in Kandahar province stay on beyond 2009 only if another 1,000 soldiers can be found from somewhere to help out. No volunteers so far, though Canada’s withdrawal would be a serious blow.






Germany is under greatest pressure to help: its soldiers are confined by parliamentary edict to the safer north. Some German commentators fret that this is badly straining NATO and putting the country’s loyalty to the alliance in doubt. But few politicians are ready to make the public case for deploying forces to the more dangerous south.

America’s defence secretary, Robert Gates, also gets a medal for damaging alliance solidarity. He infuriated both Britain and the Netherlands by suggesting that European troops operating in the south were not much good at counter-insurgency tactics. Yet even he knows that one thing worse than fighting a war by coalition is having to fight without one.

Another blow was President Karzai’s decision to veto the appointment of Britain’s Paddy Ashdown as the UN’s much-needed co-ordinator of the disparate international reconstruction effort. Mr Karzai was reportedly miffed at British plans to entice some Taliban to camps, offering them basic military equipment if they would join the fight against extremists—rather as America has been doing with Sunni groups in Iraq.

But Afghanistan’s problems—desperate poverty, fragile and corrupt government, and a drug-financed insurgency—can’t wait for prickly politicians to sort out their differences. It is those politicians, rather than the troops battling the Taliban, who are courting defeat.
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Islam and the law

What role for sharia in the West?


Feb 9th 2008
From Economist.com


A row in Britain after an Archbishop says that Muslims might live, in part, by separate legal rules

STEEPED in a culture of emollience, gentility and the avoidance of hard arguments, England’s established Church has little knowledge of how to handle public opinion when it suddenly finds itself in the eye of a gigantic storm. And, for better or worse, the country’s politically-active Muslims are capable of showing much greater deftness and sophistication.

That is one conclusion from the furore that has followed a series of controversial statements about Islam and the law by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. In a lecture, he suggested that the British authorities would inevitably have to make some accommodation with sharia, the Muslim legal system; he also noted, in a radio interview, that certain provisions of sharia are already recognised in British society and under British law.

“What a burkha” declared the Sun newspaper, alongside a picture of a head-covered figure making a rude gesture. To judge by the tone of the British press (and not only the tabloid press), the Archbishop—who is also the leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, numbering 80m people—might have been advocating the mandatory covering of every female British head, plus the instant introduction of amputation, whipping and stoning for the most trivial misdemeanours.

In fact, of course, he said nothing of the kind. But what he did advocate was not uncontroversial: he suggested there could be a “plural jurisdiction” in which Muslims could freely decide whether disputes (in which only co-religionists were involved) were resolved in secular courts or by Islamic institutions which offer an alternative forum for arbitration.

As long as the decision to seek, and abide by, a form of arbitration is freely made, it is hard to see how any secular legal system could actually ban people from using it. But the extent to which state law can recognise and “use” decisions made by such private arbitration services is a difficult grey area. And perhaps—to interpret the Archbishop charitably—he was merely pointing out that such difficulties are bound to grow.

In any case, for those who are already making political capital by playing on people’s fears of multi-culturalism, the speech by the Archbishop was a gift And for some of the people who are concerned to defend the cultural rights of Muslims, both the speech and the reaction it prompted were an embarrassment, to put it mildly.

A spokesman for Gordon Brown, the prime minister, declared firmly that “British law should apply and...should be based on British values” and that in no circumstances could Muslim legal principles be used to let people violate the law of the land.

But the Muslim Council of Britain, an umbrella organisation which is often criticised for the stridency of its cultural demands, made a better fist of defending what it called the Archbishop’s “thoughtful intervention” than any Anglican did. The Anglican prelate had not been calling for a parallel penal code, or for the existence of two different legal systems, the MCB noted. All the Archbishop was implying was that Muslims should enjoy parity with other religious comunities, like the Jews, who have set up their own institutions to arbitrate disputes and interpret religious rules.

In any case, the reality to which the Archbishop was referring is palpable enough: there are already plenty of sub-cultures in Britain where people choose to regulate their behaviour, in matters like diet, marital status and inheritance, by a set of self-imposed norms which may differ quite sharply from the remainder of society.

The big question, for any secularist advocate of the rule of law, is whether people who participate in these sub-cultures really have a right to opt out, or to indeed to move from one cultural world to another.

The entitlement of sub-cultures to exist can easily become inimical to freedom if vulnerable individuals (such as women and children) are in effect trapped inside them because of massive pressure not to “betray” the community. The Archbishop would have drawn a much less hostile reaction if he had remembered to make that point more firmly.
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A big oil discovery

Feb 12th 2008
From The Economist Intelligence Unit ViewsWire

Brazil could become a sizeable energy producer

Brazil's role as a global energy producer is likely to increase dramatically over the next ten years. The country is already a relatively important oil producer, and following recent announcements of major offshore deep-water discoveries, the largest Latin American country will move from being self-sufficient to becoming a net exporter. If the government’s early estimates are confirmed—that the broader area where the recent discoveries were made might hold as much as 70bn-100bn barrels—Brazil will be able to boast of holding among the world's ten-largest oil reserves in the medium to the long term.

Given the early stage of exploration, these initial calculations sounded too optimistic and were seen as politically driven, coming amid concerns about potential energy shortages. However, most industry analysts seem to agree that Brazil's place in the geography of oil is set to change. The Tupi oil field, whose discovery was announced in November 2007, has potential recoverable reserves of 5bn-7bn barrels, according to Petróleo Brasileiro (Petrobras, Brazil's state-controlled oil company). This is equivalent to between 35% and 55% of Brazil's current existing reserves, estimated at around 14bn barrels.

The euphoria sparked by Tupi's discovery is explained by indications that this field may be just a large piece of the major pre-salt layer (oil reservoir found under an extensive layer of salt deep below the sea level) in the Santos basin, which extends from Rio de Janeiro (in the south-east of Brazil) to Santa Catarina (in the south). Although drilling in deep water is expensive and risky, Petrobras—which is the operator of the field and holds a 65% working interest in partnership with the UK’s BG Group (25%) and Portugal’s Galp Energia (10%)—has developed the know-how and technology to carry out this kind of exploration.

Development of Tupi will be costly: oil analysts estimate investments of between US$70bn and US$120bn. This will require Petrobras (which will have to spend 65% of the total amount) to substantially increase its planned investments of US$112bn for 2008-12. But the payoff would be particularly big, since Brazil's oil mix, which is currently dominated by the production of heavy oil, is likely to change substantially as pre-salt accumulations are believed to have light, good-quality oil.

While Petrobras is set to hugely benefit, there are also risks involved, not least that oil prices currently at historically high levels could decline substantially by the time commercial production starts, probably around 2012-13. However, currently this risk seems to be only moderate. The Economist Intelligence Unit forecasts that tight global oil supply and strong demand from emerging markets will keep Brent oil prices at very high levels of US$73 per barrel in 2012. (We reckon that the price will come down a bit in 2009-10, with a lot more Saudi oil capacity coming on stream, but we expect prices to edge up again from 2011 onwards because of doubts about further increases in supply.)

Another major risk is that the field’s potential falls much short of current expectations. But, although Petrobras's early estimates of new recoverable reserves of 70bn-100bn barrels may prove exaggerated, there seems to be scope for optimism. There have been several signs that the government's calculation of huge estimates were not exclusively politically motivated. First, the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced the removal of 41 oil-exploration blocks in the same area of the Santos Basin from an upcoming auction immediately after Tupi's discovery.

Furthermore, on February 7th both BG and Galp suggested in their annual reports that their calculations of Tupi's possible reserves are larger than even Petrobras's estimates. Also, the announcement in early January 2008 of the discovery of the Jupiter gas field in the Santos basin, which, according to Petrobras, may have the same size as Tupi, has contributed to further cautious optimism among oil analysts.

Gas dependence

Currently Brazil is almost self-sufficient in oil. After reaching self-sufficiency in 2006, the country's oil-trade balance slipped into a deficit estimated at US$400m in 2007 owing to a surge in domestic demand amid strong economic growth. As for gas, which has become a more widely used source of energy in Brazil, most of the country's needs are met by importing from Bolivia and, on a smaller scale, from Argentina.

This has made Brazil vulnerable to regional developments, such as the nationalisation of the natural-gas sector by the Morales government in Bolivia in 2006 and recent production bottlenecks faced by that country, which are likely to affect its supply to Brazil. Domestically, there is growing concern about the possibility of energy shortages in 2008-09 if a scenario of below-average rainfall materialises, although the Lula government has played down this risk.

In this context, Petrobras will be under increased pressure to advance as quickly as possible with ongoing exploration works in the Santos basin. There are high expectations that new announcements concerning the reserves' potential in the pre-salt layer will be made in the first half of 2008. At the very least, Tupi will almost certainly bolster Brazil's self-sufficiency in oil production and may also transform the country into a net exporter. Jupiter, according to the government, is likely to lead to self-sufficiency in gas in the medium term as well.

Further, if the huge potential of Tupi and its sister fields is eventually confirmed, Brazil's importance as an oil producer will increase even more. This could change the regional, and even the global, balance of energy power. The Lula government would certainly try to capitalise on this in the run-up to the 2010 presidential election, whoever from his party runs for the presidency. Preparations for those elections will begin after the October 2008 municipal elections are concluded.

http://www.economist.com/daily/news/...ry_id=10677726

Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
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Ethnic cleansing in Luoland

From The Economist print edition

Peace talks get nowhere as western Kenya becomes ungovernable

AS THE road approaches Kisumu, Kenya's third-biggest city and capital of the Luos, the country's third-biggest but angriest ethnic group, it becomes littered with rubble and burnt vehicles. A man beats at a smouldering ambulance's number-plate with his machete. “See,” he explains, “this belongs to the government of Kenya.” Mobs cry out for their fellow Luo, Raila Odinga, to be made president of Kenya. They plead for guns. An earnest man pushes to the front of one mob. “What we are saying is give violence a second chance.”

On a bridge outside Oyugis, a small town a couple of hours' drive south of Kisumu, angry Luos have overturned a lorry, pulled down a telegraph pole and are waiting. When your (white) correspondent happens along, they take aim with stones, machetes and poles. But what they wanted was a Kikuyu to kill—any Kikuyu. All the main roads in the area are punctuated with road blocks. Some travellers do not get through. At least 25 have been hacked to death or killed with poisoned arrows in Nyanza in the past few days.

Across Luoland, from the unlettered to the university-educated, they tell the same tale of woe: that they have been politically and economically maltreated since independence. Provision of electricity and roads is far worse than in Kikuyuland. Many government projects in Nyanza, including cotton- and rice-growing, have failed. It irks Luos that the fish they catch in Lake Victoria are processed by Kikuyus in distant Central Province. A brain drain of able Luos into Kenya's civil service has dried up. Luos say that a Luo name is sometimes a handicap in getting a job in business. Poverty among Luos has risen, even as Kenya's economy has grown.

In the past few weeks, Kisumu has been ethnically cleansed. The Luos have driven out 20,000 or so Kikuyus from a population of 380,000; few will return. Every Kikuyu business and home has been looted and burned. The UN recently chose Kisumu as a “millennium city”, with plans to turn it into a kind of hub. Now many of its streets are gutted and charred. Thousands of jobs have been lost; nearly three-quarters of Kisumu's people are out of work.

Luo bitterness has deep roots. Most Luos still believe that Mr Odinga's populist father, Oginga Odinga, Kenya's first vice-president, was cheated and abused by Kenya's ruling Kikuyu elite after independence in 1963. Many still hark back to the unexplained assassination in 1969 of Tom Mboya, another Luo they believe was destined for the presidency. In 1990 another Luo hero, Robert Ouko, then Kenya's foreign minister, was also murdered.

A sense of economic desolation as well as political turmoil pervades the Luo fishing villages edging Lake Victoria. Since the election, insecurity has driven fish buyers away. Even if they come, the price is low. As there is no electricity and no refrigeration, the buyers drive hard bargains. Prices for basic foodstuffs have risen steeply, with sugar and maize meal costing double since the election.

In the past decade or so, Luoland has been particularly hard hit by AIDS; malaria has long been endemic. George Onyango, a 40-year-old fisherman in the village of Bao, west of Kisumu, reckons that a quarter of his childhood friends are already dead. The village nurse has no antibiotics, let alone good transport. Villagers rail against Kikuyus, though no one remembers a Kikuyu ever living there. “If we could be our own country it would be different,” says a wistful elder.

The longer-term effects of the ethnic cleansing are beginning to register. Professor Allan Ogot, a distinguished Luo historian who is chancellor of Moi University in Eldoret, says that Kenya's research institutes have been ruined and that its universities may well follow suit. He has been confined to his house in Kisumu. A woman and child were shot dead outside his front gate. No amount of security, he says, will lure back the Kikuyu and Kamba students who made up half of Nyanza's Maseno University. “Our universities will be worse than primary schools,” he says. “My question now is, is there a Kenya left to save?”

Nobody has been angelic

Kenya's 4m or so Luos, most of them in Nyanza, voted overwhelmingly for Mr Odinga in the disputed election on December 27th. The Kikuyu-led party backing his rival, the incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, was most blatant in ensuring that his tally of votes in the Kikuyu heartland north of the capital, Nairobi, was inflated. But Mr Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement was not spotless; some ballot boxes in Nyanza were reportedly stuffed on his behalf. In any event, nearly all Luos still want Mr Kibaki forced from office. If he stays, they say, it will mean civil war. There is a risk that Luoland might peel off—and a further risk that Mr Kibaki may feel forced to send in troops to stop that happening. For the time being, the Luo areas look ungovernable by Mr Kibaki or by any Kikuyu-led administration.

In other parts of Kenya, not just in Luoland, the mood is so febrile that it is hard to see how the social fabric can be restored. Atrocities have been widespread. Most of the Luhya (the country's second-biggest group, unrelated to the Luo), most of the ten or so Kalenjin-speaking peoples of the Rift Valley, most of Kenya's Muslims and most of Kenya's poor in the vast slums that ring Nairobi backed Mr Odinga. Many of them are angry. Some have vented their spleen against Kikuyus living among them, often chasing them away, burning their houses and shops and sometimes killing them.

The violence has been especially bad in parts of the Rift Valley where different groups had intermingled as a result of the redistribution of former white-owned land since independence. In other parts of the country, especially in the Kikuyu heartlands, Mr Kibaki's backers have treated Luos with similar harshness.

But it is wrong to paint a picture simply of Kikuyus and the closely related Embu and Meru, who together make up about 28% of Kenyans, pitted against the rest. Many groups have mixed allegiances. Most of the Kamba, Kenya's fifth group, which has been traditionally well-represented in the army, backed a 54-year-old former foreign minister, Kalonzo Musyoka, who won about 9% of the presidential poll and was promptly appointed vice-president by Mr Kibaki. As a result, many Kamba may rally to his cause—and perhaps even join a pro-Kibaki coalition in the (so far unlikely) event of a fresh election. Other tribes, such as the Kisii (6% of the total) have been divided, though most of them voted against Mr Kibaki.

Amid this messy ethnic mayhem, peace talks in Nairobi look unlikely to restore calm any time soon. A former UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, has managed to bring representatives of Mr Kibaki's government and Mr Odinga's movement to the negotiating table, which is progress of a kind. But the president has so far shown no sign of making serious concessions. Mr Annan has also gathered some of the country's leading businessmen to stress the damage being done to the economy. Tourism and agriculture have been badly hit (see article). Meanwhile, the human toll is rising. The local Red Cross says that more than 1,000 people have been killed in the past five weeks or so, and more than 300,000 displaced.

Mr Odinga has made no call for secession; he says he is still committed to a united Kenya. There is little evidence so far that he is organising an armed insurrection, though many Kikuyus believe he has been complicit in the attacks against them in Kisumu and elsewhere.

An immediate fear, across the country, is that criminal gangs may take advantage of the mayhem. The government has given orders to police to shoot to kill if chaos on the street begins to spread; many innocents have already been gunned down. So far the armed forces have generally stayed out of the proceedings. If Mr Kibaki were to call them in, the danger of national disintegration might increase.

http://www.economist.com/world/afric...ry_id=10653938
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Kenya and China

The sound of silence



From The Economist print edition

The murky role of one of President Mwai Kibaki's closest new allies

IN THE six weeks since Kenya's disputed election, an array of bigwigs, from the UN secretary-general to the chairman of the African Union, have flown into Nairobi to urge Kenya's warring parties to negotiate. But this frenetic diplomacy serves only to amplify the silence coming out of China, which may soon be the only big country left that has omitted to send an envoy, special or otherwise, to see Mwai Kibaki, Kenya's unyielding president.

This is not for lack of interest. In Kenya, as elsewhere in Africa, the Chinese have a large and growing economic stake, which the Kenyan government is keen to emphasise. The Chinese defence minister visited just before the elections to agree to modernise Kenya's armed forces. Hu Jintao, China's president, honoured Kenya with three days of his attention on a whistle-stop tour of Africa in 2006. It is ideology, not indifference, that is keeping the Chinese away from the diplomacy.

China's stance is consistent with its policy of non-interference in other countries' internal affairs. An editorial in Beijing's People's Daily on January 14th upset Kenya's opposition by saying that “Western-style democratic theory simply isn't suited to African conditions but rather it carries with it the root of disaster. The elections crisis in Kenya is just one example.”

This sort of non-interference has consequences. With China to fall back on, Mr Kibaki may feel better able to cling on to power and withstand any Western threats to impose sanctions or suspend aid. According to the IMF, China's trade with Kenya was $706m in 2006, a startling 36% up on the year before. Kenya's trade with America, its largest Western partner, was $919m, but down on the previous year; with Britain it was $864m. The Chinese have invested in mining and offshore oil exploration, plus some big infrastructure projects, such as new bypasses around Nairobi.

http://www.economist.com/world/afric...ry_id=10653924
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