by Richard Gowan | Sep 30, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia
Readers will know that I have an unhealthy interest in the supply of helicopters for peace operations. There aren’t enough of them, and those that do exist aren’t always reliable – one crashed in Darfur yesterday, with four fatalities. So you might have imagined that I’d welcome the news that the EU is about to get four Russian transport helicopters, complete with ground crews, for operations in Chad:
The EU force commander, General Patrick Nash, says talks about the Russian helicopters are “very advanced”. The operation – called Eufor Chad/CAR – has been hampered by a shortage of helicopters, needed to reach refugees scattered over a vast area of desert.
The Russian helicopters – expected to arrive in November – will boost by one-third the number available to the EU forces in Chad, Gen Nash said. “With 3,500 troops in an area of operations the size of France, you cannot have enough air assets,” he told a news conference on Monday.
That’s true, but there’s obviously a bigger question at stake here: should the EU be accepting Russian support in one peace operation just when it is deploying monitors for another in Georgia? As I’ve pointed out before, there’s a risk that the EU guys watching South Ossetia and Abkhazia will be seen as stooges for the Russians. Today’s IHT reports that the Russians are setting new limits on the EU observers even as they arrive. This news from Chad may not help improve that picture.
Of course, it’s arguable that working with Russia in conflict areas outside its self-declared sphere of interest may be one way to stop it detaching from the international community altogether. Before the Georgian war, French officials were musing on how involving Russia more closely in Western-led operations – including Afghanistan – might improve ties with the Kremlin. Now European and American diplomats are on the look-out for signs that Russia wants to heal scars left by Georgia. The agreement of a pretty anodyne resolution on Iran at the UN last week was duly welcomed as proof that Moscow doesn’t want to lose touch.
I don’t want to be a miserable bugger, but I’m not convinced that we have the optics right here. Getting Russia to provide limited help in Chad, or say the right things without serious consequences on Iran, is smooth diplomacy. But does it compensate for Russia’s behavior in Georgia? And is the fact that Moscow has four helicopters out in the desert going to alter its geopolitical priorities? The answer to those questions is, in essence, “ha ha no”. Our excitement about getting Russian choppers to sustain our – still fumbling – mission in Chad makes us look weak.
I’m not saying that the international community should refuse all Russian help. I believe that the UN, meant to promote collective security efforts among countries that don’t necessarily share common viewpoints, does have a significant interest in keeping Russia in the peacekeeping game. But the EU is not just the UN for White Guys (as I’ve just shown for ECFR, the EU is gradually losing its power to shape the UN’s agenda). It’s an alliance that will be taken seriously if it projects some power in its own interests. If it’s going to mount serious military operations, it needs to show that it’s self-sufficient, and not reliant on potential and/or actual competitors.
I hope the Russian helicopters are helpful in Chad, but they shouldn’t be there.
by Mark Weston | Sep 30, 2008 | Global system, Off topic
The BBC, which seems to be relishing the current financial crisis, reports on its website, under the headline ‘US failure hits Europe shares‘, that “European share indexes have been volatile in Tuesday trading” after the US Congress rejected its government’s rescue plan yesterday. Other headlines on the site tell us that ‘Shares slump after rescue bid fails’, and that ‘Asia stocks fall after US failure’.
Now I’m no expert on this, and clearly there is potential for great volatility over the next few days, but it seems to me from the articles appended to the scary headlines that many markets in the rest of the world outside the US have so far been quite robust in the wake of yesterday’s news. The UK’s FTSE, for example, was up 0.18% by midday today, France’s Cac was down just 0.2%, and Germany’s Dax by 0.9%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rose by 0.8%, with just Japan’s Nikkei really struggling, down 4%. Even some banks, including Lloyds TSB and HSBC, have seen increases in their share prices. And all this despite Wall Street’s biggest ever one-day points fall yesterday.
That doesn’t look like meltdown, or even volatility, to my untrained eye, and it would be nice to see the BBC’s headlines and commentary matching the facts it presents in its own articles. On last night’s Ten O’Clock News the Beeb criticised George’s Bush’s alarmist comments about panic in the markets. Would that the organisation practised what it preached…
Update at 14:49: The offending headline, though not the text, has now been removed from the BBC website and replaced with George’s Bush’s latest warning of the dire consequences that will follow rejection of his plan. Why he or the BBC think any sane person would listen to his advice in all this remains a mystery, but at least the latter has toned down its own scaremongering slightly.
by Mark Weston | Sep 30, 2008 | Africa, Economics and development
Some rare good news in difficult times, as South Africa’s Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is sacked. She it was who promoted beetroot, garlic and lemon as cures for AIDS, describing the antiretroviral drugs that have saved millions of lives as dangerous and harmful. South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign reckons 300,000 deaths would have been averted if Tshabalala-Msimang and her equally dangerous former boss Thabo Mbeki had never been allowed near the health ministry. The probable next president, Jacob Zuma, believes having a shower after sex can stop you getting infected, but the country’s AIDS activists are thankful for any good news they can get, and have been throwing parties to celebrate.
by Leo Horn Phathanothai | Sep 30, 2008 | East Asia and Pacific, Economics and development
As a long-time resident of Beijing, concern about food and product-safety is almost a chronic neurosis. Over the past year alone, health scares have ranged from carcinogenic textiles and toothpastes, to the sale of rancid pork from dug up pig carcasses, to hormone and pesticide-laden fruits and veggies and most recently, melamine-laced milk.
This latest episode of the tainted milk has caused particular outrage because of the life-threatening impact on a large number of toddlers (53,000 affected on the latest count). What appeared at first to be a company-specific incident quickly spread to engulf the entire industry, implicating an ever wider web of co-conspirators including the very people whose job it was to police the corporate malefactors.
The story that is unfolding tells of unbridled greed, political wrangling and high-level cover-up. It has thrown up searching questions about China’s own brand of über-capitalism, characterised by weak regulatory oversight, compromised public institutions and entrenched collusion between businesses, the media and government officials in the brazen pursuit of profit.
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