Observers from the Arab League are now in Syria to check whether the Assad regime fulfills its promise to pull the army out of urban areas.  Fifty observers have arrived, and there may eventually be up to 200.  This is not the first time the League has deployed a peace operation (it sent troops into Lebanon in the 1970s, as I noted in a piece for the National earlier this year) but it’s still a pretty unusual initiative.  The exact make-up of the observer mission is a bit of a mystery: it’s being led by a Sudanese general, but it’s been reported that it will include human rights experts and members of NGOs as well as security personnel.  The Syrians will take care of the observers’ security, or so they say.

Can this type of mission, which is only able to observe and report rather than directly protect civilians, make a difference?  Just before Christmas, the U.S. Institute of Peace published a paper by me entitled Political Missions and Preventive Diplomacy, which looks at what international missions can do to avert potential conflicts in periods of latent and escalating tension.  In Syria, the situation has shifted from “escalation” to the verge of civil war.  What can observers achieve at a moment like this?  In the paper, I highlight one precedent: the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM), deployed by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1998. The mission observed but could not stop the violence that led to NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign:

In October 1998, the OSCE was mandated to deploy the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) to oversee a cease-fire and supervise elections in the then Yugoslav province after a year of mounting violence. The request followed negotiations between Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic and U.S. negotiator Richard Holbrooke, but American-led talks were still ongoing. Both the Yugoslav security forces and Kosovo Albanian guerrillas continued to operate, and Yugoslav atrocities eventually made it impossible to continue talks. In these unpromising circumstances, the KVM was expected to deploy “2,000 unarmed verifiers.”

The operation stumbled along unhappily…

The KVM initially had a high level of access to Yugoslav military facilities, but its presence proved insufficient to halt continuing violence. The head of mission, U.S. diplomat William Walker, tried to involve the mission in human rights and political affairs. But its personnel tended to focus more narrowly on military matters, and less than a tenth of the verifiers were assigned to human rights duties. This is unsurprising given the instability of the situation. Concerns for the mission’s safety also resulted in the deployment of a NATO extraction force in neighboring FYROM. The mission’s detachment from the faltering diplomatic process meant that it never developed a clear sense of purpose [and it was] withdrawn from Kosovo in January 1999 prior to NATO’s air campaign against Yugoslavia. The KVM did, however, continue to assist refugees from Kosovo in FYROM for some months, both advising humanitarian agencies and compiling a record of human rights abuses that had taken place during the crisis. The KVM experience suggests that once a crisis has reached its peak, the presence of external monitors alone is unlikely to affect decision makers’ choices.

This precedent doesn’t exactly suggest that the Arab League observers can make a great impact on Syria – not least because they will have far fewer personnel to cover a significantly greater area, and there is no extraction force to help in a crisis.  Looking at the lessons from the KVM and other missions in my USIP report, I’d have three bits of advice to the League:

(1) Ensure that observers’ reports are full, clear and detailed – and get to the top levels of the League fast.  It’s all too easy to let reporting standards drop under pressure or for officials in the field to succumb to “happy reporting” (emphasizing positive aspects of cooperating with the authorities in an effort to sustain access).

(2) Maintain political pressure while the observers are at work.  It’s important that the Syrian authorities don’t exploit the presence of observers on their territory to slow down negotiations towards a lasting political settlement.  It would be very easy for Damascus to drag out negotiations by arguing over details of the observers’ mandate (by repeatedly blocking access to sensitive sites for example).  Arab diplomats must keep up political pressure for a lasting deal between the government and opposition, rather than hoping that the presence of the observers will restore calm.

(3) Have a credible exit strategy.  League officials must make it clear to Damascus that they will withdraw the observers if their freedom of movement is curtailed or their ability to report objectively is compromised.  The Syrian leaders should be aware that there will be strong penalties for failing to meet their commitments, and that the observers are only a temporary mechanism for confirming that they do so.   Having the observers in Syria is not an end in itself, and should never become one.

The radical Islamist group Boko Haram obviously does not like Christmas:

Five bombs exploded on Christmas Day at churches in Nigeria, one killing at least 27 people, raising fears that Islamist militant group Boko Haram – which claimed responsibility – is trying to ignite sectarian civil war.

Gun battles between security forces and the sect also killed at least 68 people in the last few days in northern Nigeria. Earlier this year, the Islamists struck the capital, Abuja, twice, including a suicide car bomb attack against the United Nations headquarters that killed 26 people.

Nigeria has stark ethnic and religious divisions and a history of Muslim-Christian violence. Such attacks are unlikely to improve matters.

Unfortunately, the country’s weak institutions make it ill-prepared to deal with threats like this. It is unlikely to have the capacity to meet the challenge. Expect more attacks in the coming months.

And it’s tidings of comfort and joy… but not for the Security Council.  On Thursday, Russia proposed an investigation into the casualties of NATO’s Libyan campaign:

Russia’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin said a council-mandated investigation was essential “given the fact that initially we were led to believe by Nato leaders there are zero civilian casualties of their bombing campaign”.

US ambassador Susan Rice, who stepped to the microphone after Mr Churkin, responded: “Oh, the bombast and bogus claims. Is everyone sufficiently distracted from Syria now and the killing that is happening before our very eyes?  I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that this is something of a cheap stunt to divert attention from other issues and to obscure the success of Nato and its partners – and indeed the security council – in protecting the people of Libya.”

And just in case anyone had missed that episode, Russia enlivened matters on Friday by tabling the latest draft of a cunning resolution on Syria that expresses concern about the situation without imposing any penalties on Damascus.

Russian U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said Moscow had limits on how much it would accommodate the demands of the European and U.S. delegations, which would like the 15-nation council to threaten sanctions on Damascus over its nine-month-old crackdown on protesters.

“If the requirement is that we drop all reference to violence coming from extreme opposition, that’s not going to happen,” Churkin told reporters.  “If they expect us to have arms embargo, that’s not going to happen.  We know what arms embargo means these days. It means that – we saw it in Libya – that you cannot supply weapons to the government but everybody else can supply weapons to various opposition groups.”

This is like a family Christmas from hell.  If you want to understand why it’s so nasty, turn to a short paper I published with the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung this week entitled The Security Council’s Credibility Problem.  It explains how the Libyan and Syrian crises left the Council divided, with everyone having something to be cross about:

(1) Western officials believe that China and Russia’s refusal to countenance serious Council action against Syria has made the Council look impotent. They also complain that Brazil, South Africa and India have avoided tough decisions at the UN, abstaining in important votes on Libya and Syria. They conclude that these five BRICS countries are more concerned with constraining the West than resolving crises through the Council, and that giving them more power in the UN would be risky.

(2) Non-Western officials counter that the U.S. and its NATO allies did greater damage this year by converting the Council’s mandate for a humanitarian intervention in Libya as a pretext for regime change. They claim that their refusal to support even mild UN sanctions against Syria stems from the Libyan experience, and that the West cannot be trusted to implement UN mandates faithfully.

(3) For those who value the Council as a mechanism for ensuring international peace and security, the last year has been depressing for more fundamental reasons. Its limitations as a crisis management tool have been obvious. In recent years, there has been much talk in Council debates of shifting from “reaction” to “prevention”. Yet in the Libya case, its efforts to prevent the conflict escalating failed miserably and the Council’s only option was to mandate an ad hoc military campaign. It is unclear that the Council would have performed any better over Syria, even if there had been a consensus on how to act. The crises of 2011 have revealed major gaps in the Council’s capabilities.

This soap opera will, I suspect, continue to throw up surprises in 2012.

William Hague’s (alleged) advice to David Cameron ahead of the euro summit:

If it’s a choice between keeping the euro together or keeping the Conservative Party together. It’s in the national interest to keep the Conservative Party together.

Key point:

Over the last few decades the religious Right has dominated the mainstream discussion around “morals and values” in the United States. Claiming to be the moral compass for the country, they have defined a radically conservative platform for issues including abortion, welfare, LGBTQ rights and more. The Left, for the most part, has let this happen. Rather than leading with our values and vision, progressives have focused on making rational arguments for what is “right.” No matter how skilled our analysis, we have been unable to speak to the complex and holistic experiences of everyday people, to resonate with their need to be a part of something deep in their hearts and spirits. While the Right has organized people around  fear, they have been even more powerful when they tapped into and met people’s desire for belonging. The Left has largely ignored these needs, contributing to our ineffectiveness in broad social change.

From Out of the Spiritual Closet: organizers transforming the practice of social justice.

Herman Van Rompuy is thinking positive. He is staring into his mirror each morning, and repeating to himself: ‘I am a strong, confident, powerful currency. I am A TIGER!’ He’s so positive, he’s sent out a hefty tome called The World Book of Happiness to 200 world leaders, with this extraordinary letter. I’m quoting from the letter he sent to Barack Obama:

Dear Mr President Barack

I am very happy to present you with this copy of The World Book of Happiness…with my best wishes for a ‘Happy New Year’ but also with my request to you as world leaders to make people’s happiness and well-being our political priority for 2012 [um...what about preventing the catastrophic collapse of the euro? No?]

Positive thinking is no longer something for drifters, dreamers and the perpetually naive. Positive Psychology concerns itself in a scientific way with the quality of life. At stake are not only the happiness and well-being of individuals, but also those of groups, organisations and countries. And above all, in today’s global world we can all learn from one another. It is time to make this knowledge available to the man and woman in the street….

People who think positive see more opportunities, perform better, possess greater resilience, take more often correct and sound decisions [sic], negotiate better, have more self-confidence, maintain better relations, take greater responsibility, have more trust placed in them and so on. In short, they give more hope to others because they can experience it themselves. In order to release this positive energy, people need oxygen. Society can offer this oxygen. Positive education, positive parenting, positive journalism and positive politics play a crucial role here. This oxygen we can also create ourselves by a balanced existence or a religious or philosophical rooting.

[I love this paragraph. My favourite line is 'to release this positive energy, people need oxygen', though I also like the idea of 'a religious or philosophical rooting' - 'rooting' is a slang Australian word for shagging].

Why not address women and men from all angles of their multiple intelligence? [Why not indeed!]...By addressing men and women who are on a growth path, we all become better and happier people. We then do not turn every incident into a trend and every anecdote into a general truth. [You've lost me Herman]. As a consequence our governing will stimulate self-knowledge, reflection, sense of responsibility and commitment.

Positively inclined people see everything in its right proportions. [etc etc for a few more sentences.]

Happy New Year!

Herman Van Rompuy

Chairman of the European Council

Woohoo! I love his cheery upbeatness in the face of chaos. And quite a plug for the book itself. The author, another Belgian called Leo Bormans, blogs excitedly: ‘Will Barack Obama and Angela Merkel in the near future read in the World Book of Happiness before going to sleep?’ You betcha Leo!

Now, a cynic might suggest Herman is reminiscent of the conquistador hero of Werner Herzog’s movie Aguirre Wrath of God, who dreams of ruling over new empires while monkeys swarm over his sinking raft. But that’s a cynical thought. Think positive. Think Belgian. Find a happy place!

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This account of tactical innovation at Occupy Portland is pretty funny:

We occupied the park and set up a few tents and facilities to serve food and coffee. The police soon declared an emergency closure of the park and came out in force, with full riot gear and all the weaponry. The line of riot cops soon forced us out of the park, so someone decided that we ought to march to City Hall. It was about 9 pm on a Saturday night, so City Hall was closed, but we marched there anyway, 800 of us blocking traffic the whole way. Once there, the riot cops once again lined up to disperse the crowd. However, since City Hall was closed and there was no point in staying there anyway, someone had the idea to march down to the area of town where all the clubs were, so we took off marching again. The riot cops were trailing behind us…

After marching for 3-4 hours, we eventually found ourselves a block away from the park that we’d been forced out of, so we took it again. The riot police lined up and prepared to take the park again, but the attempt was called off and the police just left. They realized that they would have to go through the standard military procedure of clearing the park inch by inch, only to have us go back out into the streets and march again while they, one more time, trailed along helplessly- their entourage functioning as a part of the march, creating an even larger disruption to traffic (the marchers covered a city block, the trailing police took up another city block, effectively doubling the size of the obstruction to traffic)…

H/t John Robb.

The Economist’s World in 2012 publication captures one of the big uncertainties for next year – and this one’s a straight either / or, they say:

Somebody is going to be proved wrong in 2012 and will lose a lot of money. Either the bullion market or the Treasury bond market is mistaken about the long-term inflationary outlook.

By early September 2011, gold was trading at around $1,900 an ounce, an indication that investors felt inflation was set to soar. Such an outlook would normally be bad news for government-bond markets. But the ten-year Treasury bond was simultaneously yielding less than 2%, an indication that the “bond vigilantes” were far more concerned about deflation than inflation. Although the gold price fell and bond yields rose in October, the underlying contradiction didn’t disappear.

Gold’s been falling since World in 2012 went to press, especially this week, and is currently below $1,600 an ounce – in large part, market watchers say, because of perceptions that the Fed won’t be turning on the QE printing presses (and hence driving inflation up) any time soon. The deflationary side of the argument will presumably get added momentum from the apparent slowdown in emerging economies: Brazil had zero growth in Q3, Indian growth is falling too, and it’s the same story in China - where as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard observes,

“As the Declaration of Independence laid the groundwork for the [US] Constitution, so the commission’s report lays the foundation for the constitution of a space-based civilisation.”

“The commission believes it is reasonable to expect to have a human outpost on the moon in 2005 and an outpost on Mars in 2015. To fund the program, the commission suggests establishing the space budget at a constant percentage of GDP.”

The conclusion of a Star Trek fans’ convention? Nope: this is 25 years ago, and the commission in question is the US National Commission on Space, launched by the House of Representatives, and with a membership appointed by the President – including a former head of NASA, legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager (immortalised in Tom Wolfe’s book and film The Right Stuff), and Neil Armstrong. The quotes are from a rather wonderful book published shortly after its report came out, entitled The Overview Effect, which was written by Frank White – a senior associate at Princeton University’s Space Studies Institute, who was heavily involved in the commission’s work.

It’s kind of striking how much more introspective our public discourse has become over the intervening quarter-century. You just couldn’t write stuff like that today and expect to be taken seriously. Now, the shuttle program has been killed off; manned space missions haven’t been outside Earth orbit since the 1970s; and I’d probably be rash to predict that Mars will be settled within my lifetime.

All of which is kind of a shame. For as White chronicles in his book, the real point about space exploration is less the technological wizardry involved than how it changes our perspective and sense of identity. That’s especially true of the astronauts themselves – here for instance is Russell Schweickart, who flew on Apollo 9:

“You identify with Houston and then you identify with Los Angeles and Phoenix and New Orleans. And the next thing you recognize in yourself is that you’re identifying with North Africa – you look forward to that, you anticipate it, and there it is.

“And that whole process of what it is you identify with begins to shift. When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. That makes a change. You look down there and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross, again and again and again, and you don’t even see them. There you are – hundreds of people in the Mideast killing each other over some imaginary line that you’re not even aware of and that you can’t see.

“From where you see it, the thing is a whole, and it’s so beautiful. You wish you could take one in each hand, one from each side of the various conflicts, and say, ‘Look. Look at it from this perspective. Look at that. What’s important?”

But it’s also true of the rest of us. After all, the images of Earth from space that came back from the Apollo missions probably did more to shape modern attitudes to the environment than any other factor since the second world war. And at a point when we’re failing to get to grips with so many global risks - above all climate change – anything that makes us think of ourselves in more planetary terms is undeniably a Good Thing. Maybe it’s time to get excited about the Final Frontier again.

Me, I favour holding multilateral summits in space. That would really change the G Zero dynamic we’ve seen so much of lately…

Update: there’s a recent interview with Frank White here.

From Reuters, this little gem:

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev caused shock and jeers on Wednesday after an obscene insult directed at political opponents appeared on his official Twitter feed.

The Kremlin chief and his more powerful mentor Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have been facing growing opposition to their rule by protesters who say parliamentary elections on Sunday were not fair.

The offensive post appeared to have been retweeted on the MedvedevRussia feed at 33 minutes past midnight, according to cached copies of the feed and a notification of the post received by a Reuters reporter.

“It has become clear that if a person writes the expression ‘party of swindlers and thieves’ in their blog then they are a stupid sheep getting f****d in the mouth ” the post read.

Here’s a piece I wrote for the Wall Street Journal Europe about six months ago, about the effect of the internet on Russia’s stagnant politics:

In November 2010, Leonid Parfyenov, a well-known Russian journalist, took to the stage at a black-tie Russian television awards dinner. Visibly nervous, he embarked on a 10 minute critique of everything that was wrong with Russian media. The bravest print journalists are targeted with impunity, he said, while reporters on state-owned television are “no longer journalists, but rather state employees who worship submission and service”. No state television channel transmitted his remarks.

State control of television news is a core pillar of the so-called managed democracy that Vladimir Putin has built since he became president in 2000. As Mr. Parfyenov said in his speech: “News and life in general are categorized as [either] suitable or unsuitable news for television.” The state directly controls most of the national channels, and is suspected indirectly to control many others.

However, while television remains the main source of news for 80% of Russians, the internet is rapidly catching up. Internet penetration is soaring in Russia and it is a median that the state has little or no influence over. Social networking is on the rise and websites like Facebook and Twitter are becoming hugely influential forms of communication for more and more Russians. (more…)

Inequality has got much more on the radar of policy wonks over the last year (see for example the usual inequality interest at UNICEF and UNDP but also the World Economic Forum and the International Monetary Fund).

This week’s OECD report on ‘Divided we stand: Why inequality keeps rising’ is only likely to added to this.

So, one seminar next week, ‘Growth first, equality later: Is it time to redress the balance?’, (see here) has plenty to discuss.

Part of the story is government can reduce inequality and isn’t so hard as some countries in Latin America have shown (see here).

Another part of the story is the top 10 countries where 80% the world’s extreme poor live, inequality has been rising in almost all. The data on inequality (see here) shows that inequality is rising in Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Tanzania. Only in Ethiopia and Nigeria is there a reduction in the gini measure. And trends show a middle class squeeze in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the share of GNI of the poorest 40% is falling in all countries other than Ethiopia (DRC has no data).

So what’s the policy narrative here? What’s the ‘inequality’ problem exactly and what to do about it?

(more…)