Having heard from people who were at this conference, I’m now convinced that the UK speaker’s remarks are misrepresented (or taken completely out of context) in the Yale News article reproduced below, and he did not endorse the Sudanese position on the ICC. One of the risks of blogging is that you see an interesting but uncorroborated story and write about it without pausing to check if it is, er, true. Which happened here…

I’ve warned a number of times of a split over international justice, and specifically the International Criminal Court, between the West (which tends to behave like judge and jury) and African leaders (who feel that they are always the defendants). So it’s good to see the UK and a prominent African government agreeing on ICC issues – or is it?

The chief attorney of the International Criminal Court on Friday called for the indictment of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir at a Yale Law School conference on Darfur, sparking heated debate within panels stocked with international law heavyweights. “The timing could not be better,” Luis Moreno-Ocampo said of the conference. “The time to do something in Darfur is now.”

International officials involved in the Darfur peace process have skirmished over what role — if any — international criminal prosecution should play in curbing Darfur violence since Moreno-Ocampo charged al-Bashir with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in July 2008.

Moreno-Ocampo, elected in April 2003 to a nine-year term as ICC prosecutor, focused his address on the question of whether al-Bashir’s indictment would expedite the peace-making process in Darfur. Moren0-Ocampo argued that an ICC indictment would clearly show all parties in Darfur the repercussions of violating the law. “Peace and justice have to work hand in hand,” he said. “Mr. Al-Bashir will face justice.”

Akec Achiew Khoc, the Sudanese Ambassador to the U.S., disagreed with Moreno-Ocampo’s assertion that al-Bashir’s indictment would lead to peace. Addressing the conference as a guest after the first panel discussion, Khoc argued the move would exacerbate conflict.

Michael O’Neill, the United Kingdom’s Special Representative for Sudan, agreed. He said al-Bashir’s indictment could destroy Sudanese unity and derail the peace process in Darfur.

The UK would certainly like to find a way to avoid the ICC indictment breeding new instability in Darfur and Central Africa and the Horn – it’s not clear that other EU members, and especially France, agree. Michael O’Neill has been working these issues from a number of angles for quite a while, and is well-respected for his efforts. His statement (which may not have been intended for the record?) suggests that the “peace versus justice” debate at the UN – and over African affairs more generally – may be about to heat up a few more degrees…

In January, I reproduced a fine picture of Nicolas Sarkozy atop a French tank in Lebanon. Today, the NYT opens a profile of new U.S. Afghanistan-Pakistan envoy Richard Holbrooke thus:

Stashed in a drawer in his Manhattan apartment between snapshots of family vacations, a photograph shows Richard C. Holbrooke on a private visit to Afghanistan in 2006. He is mugging atop an abandoned Russian tank, flashing a sardonic V-for-victory sign and his best Nixon-style grin. The pose is a little like Mr. Holbrooke himself: looming, theatrical, passionate, indignant.

Three years later, he has inherited responsibility for the terrain he surveyed from that tank.

Now, it is fair to say that neither M. Sarkozy nor Mr. Holbrooke are scared of having their image scrutinized in the public domain. So we offer the readers the chance to compare and contrast their tank-top appearances:

Holbrooke has the edge here: (i) he has made sure that he is seen from below, accentuating his height; (ii) he is dressed for action, whereas President Sarkozy is just a little too dapper; (iii) he is surrounded by people who look like the better-dressed postgrads in a philosophy seminar, but we assume are fearless warriors.

Still, both our subjects do way better than an earlier generation of tank-top politicians.

I give you Thatcher…

…and, of course, Dukakis (whose presidential defeat is often traced to this shot):

Facing such evidence, can anyone suggest politics is not growing more sophisticated?

At the end of last year the UK Parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee created a sub-committee to look at CONTEST , the Government’s counter-terrorism strategy which is based on four strands of work: Prevent, Pursue, Protect and Prepare. For some reason (I’ll try and find out) the sub-committee will only look at the last three Ps. Prevent, the most difficult of the Ps is left out. I’ve been sifting through the transcript of the sub-committee’s first oral evidence session – much of what is said won’t be a suprise to most people – though some may be intrigued as to what the three or four questions were at the end of the session which meant the committee could no longer be held in public.

The most interesting exchange is towards the end of the session. Patrick Mercer (who is the Chairman of this sub-committee) asks Tim O’Toole,  the Managing Director of the London Underground, how many carry sheets/ stretchers are on each train and if the public knows that they exist:

Chairman: I am specifically referring to the trains because again, talking to the victims, many of them, as you know, had to get out and walk on to the tracks carrying casualties and they had nothing with which to carry them, yet it would appear that there were carry sheets which were available, yet nobody was told where they were, in what quantities, how to get them or how to use them. The first question: do these things exist or not?
Mr O’Toole: They do exist. They do not exist in a number that would have been able to address that situation because there just is not room for them, and the intention is that the real purpose is to deal with the one-off and the idea is that the driver or a member of station staff who responds to a situation would access it.
Chairman: Where are they kept?
Mr O’Toole: They are kept under the seat compartments.
Chairman: How many of them?
Mr O’Toole: Two on every train, I am informed.
Chairman: Two on every train rather than every carriage?
Mr O’Toole: Yes.
Chairman: Why are the public not told where they are?
Mr O’Toole: Because the public does not have access to them, the driver has to access them.
Chairman: Have you considered putting such devices in each carriage?
Mr O’Toole: Well, we consider all of these ideas as they come along, but again our emergency team had a review of how exactly would this work, would it be effective, how would people deal with that, and determined that it would be of marginal utility.

So, just to be clear, the Transport of London (TfL) emergency team decided that it would be of only marginal utility for members of the public travelling on the tube to know where emergency equipment is kept. It’s a shame that institutions/ organisations feel it necessary to wrestle responsibility away from the public – as a result society is becoming increasingly brittle – as individuals are left feeling less empowered and unable to do anything in an emergency. A Resilient Nation needs to reverse this trend sooner rather than later.

“A congressional trip to Iraq this weekend was supposed to be a secret,” reports Congressional Quarterly. “But the cat’s out of the bag now, thanks to a member of the House Intelligence Committee who broke an embargo via Twitter.”

The leak came from Peter Hoekstra, “a former chairman of the Intelligence panel and now the ranking member, who is routinely entrusted to keep some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets.”

Best twitter reaction: “Me in Baghdad. That’s Rep. Hoekstraover my shoulder, head-down cause he’s tweeting our location.”

You have to admire his chutzpah, but former Global Dashboard Hack of the Year, Grover Norquist has concluded (okay, okay – is pretending he believes) that the financial crash was caused by the US’s Democrats:

The economy began to collapse when the Democrats captured the House and Senate and we then knew that the lower tax rates on individuals, capital gains, and dividends would end after 2010.

We are in the early stages of the Reid/Obama/Pelosi recession and nothing they are even talking about doing will help.

George Bush? Never heard of him.

While the UK struggles with snow, spare a thought for Kentucky, which is suffering from an ice storm:

The storm has been blamed for 27 deaths in Kentucky, mostly from carbon monoxide poisoning from generators. More than 175,000 homes and businesses served by 55 water systems remained under orders to boil water, emergency officials said.

But there’s good news for my GD colleagues who major on community resilience:

The chairwoman of an Ohio County school board converted a middle school into a shelter. And in Murray, Murray State University’s student-run radio station was the only source of communication.

An unexpected problem has emerged, however: a peanut panic.

Making matters worse, because of a recent salmonella outbreak, federal officials on Thursday recalled all “ready to eat” meal kits that included packets of peanut butter. The packets had been distributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

In a news conference on Thursday, Gov. Steve Beshear tried to send a reassuring message to residents who had received the food packages. He said there had been no reports of food-related illnesses, even though more than 100,000 emergency packages had been given out in storm recovery efforts.

Mr. Beshear said he had eaten one of the peanut butter products and suffered no ill effects. As an alternative, emergency officials were trying to hire a private food vendor to secure hundreds of thousands of prepared meals, the governor said.

Yum yum.

With AQ Khan – the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb – released from house arrest, what better day to savour some highlights from the scientist’s own website?

By their deeds and actions such persons, though not prophets, demonstrate that they are an extension of the will of the transcendental. These are the people, who are destined to make history in the elevation of nations. Such is the personality of Dr. Abdul Quadeer Khan…

It is entirely due to his efforts that the process of enrichment of Uranium was successfully completed in Pakistan… The list of his contribution and achievement is far too long to be mentioned in this short citation. He is a person imbued with the spirit of serving the cause of Pakistan and Muslim Ummah through his able researches, high acumen, intellectual robustness and unwavering devotion.

So numerous are his activities that every segment of society has praised him in different forms. He has been awarded 42 gold medals by various national institutions and organizations. He was also presented with 3 gold crowns 

He has contributed immensely to the establishment of educational and research institutes in Pakistan. These include several colleges, schools, Institutes and academies. So wide are the applications of his activities that his contributions extend to the construction of 11 mosques, 1 tomb, a number of dispensaries and community health centers…

It is rare that a person in single life time accomplishes so much. This is done only by men who are endowed with special abilities by God and who prepare themselves through hard work and devotion to fulfill the mission of serving mankind.

Never before have greatness and modesty mingled to such effect, say I.

The Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat has interviewed Ban Ki-moon, and the English transcript of the Secretary-General’s comments is powerful stuff:

When was the last time you got really angry?

There were a few moments.

Like? I want to get to know you. People don’t know you well—Ban Ki-Moon the Secretary General or Ban Ki-Moon the man.

There were a few moments when I was so angry… First of all when things were not moving as I expected and as I have urged in the situation in Gaza. The humanitarian sufferings, the UN humanitarian assistance were not delivering properly… people were suffering from lack of water, electricity. They were not able to move and I was very angry and I expressed this emotion when I talked to Israeli authorities.

Sometimes I was angry if my reform agenda was not moving as quickly as possible. There was some bureaucracy within– inherently embedded through some resistance in the agencies among the staff. Then, you know, I exploded, myself.

What do you do when you get angry?

Oh, I express my anger.

Do you shout?

Yes, I shout it. (Turning to his spokeswoman Michel Montas) As you have witnessed many times.

On a personal level, have you been angry recently? You know we all get angry with our children, our family, our brothers or sisters…

I don’t have any such occasions when I was angry with my own family members. It’s just, you know, I am disciplined. And my family members are also very disciplined and show respect for all these rules. There are some rules and some relationships you have to keep. With others, I get, of course, angry.

Learning this, the interviewer goes out of his way to piss off the SG… (more…)

Thanks to Flickr user g-hat

Apartheid – described by Nelson Mandela as an ‘evil system’ – is thought by many to have ended in 1994 when twenty million South Africans voted in the country’s first free and fair elections.

Not so, according to the Institute of Directors  - which has just released a report exploring pensions apartheid, a system which sees some British public sector workers get higher retirement benefits than their private sector equivalents. This, the business lobby group believes, is analogous to decades of black African racial segregation, discrimination and abuse.

Some ideas for future IOD publications:

• Shoah - gassing small business with regulation
• Gang Raped by Government - changes to the tax code for non-domiciled high net worth individuals, and
• 9/11 – terrorized by the European Working Time Directive

After all, when surrounded by evil, you have a duty to speak out.

A few hours ago, Daniel Korski suggested on Global Dashboard that the United Nations lied about the shelling of one of its schools – with the UN Secretary General, Ban-Ki Moon, playing a part in disseminating the falsehood in a statement in which he condemned this and two similar attacks as ‘unacceptable’.

Like Daniel, I don’t fully understand what happened, or why – but have been trying to track how the story developed. It appears that re-investigation of the attack was conducted by Patrick Martin, from the Canadian Globe and Mail. His story was headlined “account of the Israeli story doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.”

Martin interviewed eyewitnesses who told him that while “a few people were injured from shrapnel landing inside the white-and-blue-walled UNRWA compound, no one in the compound was killed.”  No shell landed in the schoolyard itself, he writes, but 43 people were killed by three shells in the street outside.

Martin’s report continues:

The teacher who was in the compound at the time of the shelling says he heard three loud blasts, one after the other, then a lot of screaming. “I ran in the direction of the screaming [inside the compound],” he said. “I could see some of the people had been injured, cut. I picked up one girl who was bleeding by her eye, and ran out on the street to get help. But when I got outside, it was crazy hell. There were bodies everywhere, people dead, injured, flesh everywhere.”

The teacher, who refused to give his name because he said UNRWA had told the staff not to talk to the news media, was adamant: “Inside [the compound] there were 12 injured, but there were no dead.”

“Three of my students were killed,” he said. “But they were all outside.”

Hazem Balousha, who runs an auto-body shop across the road from the UNRWA school, was down the street, just out of range of the shrapnel, when the three shells hit. He showed a reporter where they landed: one to the right of his shop, one to the left, and one right in front.

“There were only three,” he said. “They were all out here on the road.”

This account seems broadly consistent with the UN News Centre report that Daniel links to (and which contains Ban’s condemnation). In it John Ging is reported as saying that “some 30 people were killed and 55 others injured, five of them critically, when three artillery shells landed at the perimeter of a school, which usually serves as a girls’ preparatory school, in the Jabaliya refugee camp.”

Martin argues that the United Nations’ description of the attack was ambiguous and that UN agencies failed to correct “widespread news reports of the deaths in the school.” Israeli reports also seem to have been confused, however, with Mark Regev, the Israeli PM’s spokesman telling the media that (i) there was hostile fire from the school; (ii) the explosion that resulted was “out of proportion to the ordnance we used.” (e.g. that the school had been booby trapped).

(more…)

One of the most disturbing stories to emerge during Israel’s recent incursion in Gaza was Israeli shelling of a UN school. This is how Reuters described it:

Israeli shelling killed more than 40 Palestinians on Tuesday at a U.N. school where civilians had taken shelter, medical officials said.

The BBC reported that

. . .at least 40 people were killed and 55 injured when Israeli artillery shells landed outside a United Nations-run school in Gaza, UN officials have said.

But though the BBC story placed the shell outside the school, UN officials have now set the record straight. As Haaretz reports, Maxwell Gaylord, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Jerusalem, clarified that the IDF mortar shells fell in the street near the compound, and not on the compound itself.

UNRWA said that the source of the mistaken story had originated “with a separate branch of the United Nations.” Unfortunately, this branch seems to have pretty good access to the UN Secretary-General’s office, because on 6 January 2009 Ban Ki-Moon himself spoke out against Israel’s “totally unacceptable” attacks against what the UN’s own News Centre called “three clearly-marked United Nations schools, where civilians were seeking refuge from the ongoing conflict in Gaza”.

Who knows what actually happened. The fog of war was deliberately made thicker by both the IDF and Hamas. It is clear many people, including civilians, died in Gaza. But the UN school story is beginning to look like the Jenin “massacre” story from 2002. Then the Palestinian news agency Wafa was reporting that Israel had committed the “massacre of the 21st century” in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin. “Medical sources” informed Wafa of “hundreds of martyrs.” Reports of the supposed Israeli atrocities in Jenin were spread by Palestinian sources on CNN and elsewhere.

But this turned out to be a lie. There was a battle in Jenin. But the “hundreds” of martyrs were an invention. The death toll was 56 Palestinians, the majority of them combatants, and 23 Israeli soldiers. By then, however, the story had served its purpose, much the same as the UN school story did.

In war, information is a weapon. But not one usually used by the UN.

Something odd is happening. Though the Tories are cruising for electoral success, many sympathisers are worried that the party has neither the policies nor personalities to make a success of government.

In the City, many bankers and businessmen are unimpressed by George Osborne. People in the defence establishment think Liam Fox is a lightweight. And foreign policy-watchers like William Hague, but worries that he is only working part-time.

When David Milliband offered a duff analysis of international terrorism in The Guardian and managed to insult the Indian government, there was hardly a peep from the Tory frontbench, through the strategic and electoral reasons to speak up are obvious.

This may not prevent the Tories from wining an election, but it could make their time in government look a lot like Labour’s 1997-2001 term – full of intentions and spin, but short on delivery.

It will take more than an “Implementation Unit” to change this. However, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown may have shown the way out of this predicament. They have all brought outsiders or retired officials back into government. Bush brought back General Pete Schoomaker as Army chief and, famously, made Roberts Gates Defence Secretary. Obama has appointed retired admiral Denis Blair as the U.S spy chief and made the Nobel Prize winner Steven Chu Energy Secretary. Brown, meanwhile, has packed the Lords with outsiders, Peter Mandelson just being the most famous (and powerful).

Forgetting for a moment the constitutional problems presented by having too many peers in government as well as the problems arising from having apolitical ministers (like Shriti “Green Shoots” Vadera) what would a line-up of Tory GOATS look like? Readers will have their own views, but to kick-start the discussion here is my list:

1. Arcadia’s Phillip Green as Business Secretary
2. Olympian Sebastian Coe as Sports and Culture Secretary
3. Environmentalist Zac Goldsmith to head the Climate & Energy Department
4. The Times Foreign Affairs Editor Bronwen Maddox as National Security Adviser
5. Former General Rupert Smith as Chief of Defence
6. Ex-AVIVA boss Richard Harvey as International Development Secretary
7. Joel I Klein as Education Secretary (why not a Yank?)
8. Para-Olympian Chris Holmes as Veteran Affairs Secretary

It may also be wise to appoint a number of junior ministers from outside Westminster (though I confess to believing each department ought to have only one “Deputy Secretary of State”, not scores of Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries).  In the Ministry of Defence, for example, I’d make someone like NATO’s Jamie Shea a junior minister or Ronnie Flanagan a Deputy Home Secretary.

What do you think?

As David just noted, this morning’s Lex column in the FT is relatively upbeat about the dangers of protectionism, arguing that “the disaggregation of global supply chains, the source of the huge efficiencies that companies pass on to consumers, will not be easily undone.”

Whether or not that’s right (and like Willem Buiter, Martin Wolf is also a good deal more downcast than the Lex team), it’s interesting to compare today’s Lex column with what they had to say about capital flows to emerging markets just a couple of days ago.  Here’s the bit that made me sit up:

Take Brazil and India, the globe’s ninth and 12th biggest economies, according to the International Monetary Fund’s latest estimates. While the developed world is expected to shrink by 2 per cent this year, the IMF reckons Brazil will grow by 2 per cent, and India by 5 per cent. Why? One answer is that they have stable banks, relatively closed economies, and large internal markets. This has insulated them from much of the global turmoil.

The contrast with East Asia is stark. Singapore’s economy shrank at an annualised 17 per cent rate at the end of last year, South Korea by some 20 per cent. Yet this is not for lack of capital. Asian economies, after all, are global creditors. Their economies have shrunk instead because they are heavily oriented towards collapsing international trade. Meanwhile, their local markets are undeveloped and weak. Asia’s challenge is how to best deploy its accumulated surpluses to boost domestic demand.

(more…)

The EU may be planning to sue over the US’s Buy American nonsense, but in the FT, Lex is confident that globalization cannot easily be put into reverse:

Economic nationalism, it is argued, will tip the world into a Great Depression, just as America’s Smoot-Hawley Act did 79 years ago. This is a horrifying but, frankly, also a distant prospect. The disaggregation of global supply chains, the source of the huge efficiencies that companies pass on to consumers, will not be easily undone.

Maybe so… But Willem Buiter is much less sanguine:

We can go down in history as the generation that created the Great Depression of the Noughties.  Just keep on beating the protectionist drums.  Keep on the footdragging that prevents effective qualitative and quantitative monetary policy easing in the Eurozone and the UK.  And go ahead with unsustainable fiscal stimuli in the US, the UK and elsewhere that will spook markets, push up long-term interest rates and raise the spectre of sovereign default by countries not belonging to the group of usual suspects.  Yes we can!  I hope we won’t.